MacRumors

T-Mobile today announced the launch of its new T-Mobile eSIM app (via VentureBeat), designed to allow iPhone XR, XS, and XS Max users to sign up for T-Mobile as a second carrier via the eSIM feature in the newest iPhones.

U.S. customers who want to try T-Mobile, existing customers that want separate lines, and people traveling to the United States can add T-Mobile as a secondary prepaid line to any iPhone XS, XS Max, or XR using the new T-Mobile app.

T-Mobile is offering three different prepaid eSIM plans:

• T-Mobile ONE Prepaid with unlimited voice, text, and data for $70; 30 day expiry
• Simply Prepaid with unlimited voice, text, and 10GB of LTE data for $40; 30 day expiry
• Tourist Plan with 1000 minutes, unlimited text, and 2GB of LTE data for $30; 21 day expiry

Adding T-Mobile as a secondary carrier on a device is as simple as downloading the T-Mobile eSIM app, entering an email address, and following the activation steps within the app.

At the current time, T-Mobile is only offering prepaid eSIM plans, but the carrier says it will also offer postpaid ongoing eSIM plans in the future. For those looking for an immediate postpaid solution to add an ongoing T-Mobile service plan as a secondary eSIM option to an iPhone, our forum members have outlined a possible solution that some users have been able to get working.

The eSIM, or digital SIM, is designed to let new iPhone users activate a cellular plan from a carrier without the need to use a physical SIM card.

With eSIM support, dual-SIM functionality is available on the iPhone XR, XS, and XS Max, enabled through the existing physical SIM slot and the eSIM in all countries with the exception of China. In China, the new iPhones have two SIM card slots.

T-Mobile is the third U.S. carrier to implement support for the eSIM, following Apple's activation of the feature in iOS 12.1. Verizon and AT&T both added eSIM support to their services last week.

The T-Mobile eSIM app can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]

One year ago, Apple awarded the meditation app "Calm" as the iPhone app of the year, and since then the company has dethroned the previous #1 meditation app on the iOS App Store, "Headspace." In a new report by The Wall Street Journal out today, the two companies talk about how they are in a "mindful competition" with one another, and about the merits of Apple's best of the year awards system.

Headspace predates Calm (founded in 2010 and 2012, respectively), and dominated the iOS App Store's meditation space throughout its life, until 2018. According to Calm chief product and growth officer Dun Wang, "Since winning App of the Year, we seem to have a much higher growth rate than they do, and we'll surpass them from now on."

Since December 2017, Calm has topped the meditation category in both downloads and mobile revenue, earning $50.7 million in revenue through October 2018, compared to $34.3 million for Headspace, according to Sensor Tower data. One Headspace spokeswoman pointed out that Sensor Tower's data didn't account for subscriptions paid for through its website and corporate partnerships. Both Calm and Headspace cost $12.99/month, but differ when you upgrade to a yearly subscription: Calm is priced at $69.99/year and Headspace is priced at $94.99/year.

Apple's award is said to be "a touchy subject" at Headspace.

“I think people are blowing App-of-the-Year way out of proportion,” says Ben Spero, a managing director at Spectrum Equity, a Headspace investor. “It’s good P.R., but it’s not determinative. It’s not that Apple was saying that Calm is a better app—they’re big fans of Headspace, too,” he says, pointing out that the App Store often features Headspace on its landing page.

Calm co-CEO and co-founder Michael Acton Smith on the competition with Headspace:

“We’re both growing the sector. This is such a huge market, there’s going to be room for a few different winners,” Mr. Acton Smith says. “We want Calm to be the number one, of course—and we wish the others the best for second place.”

Calm and Headspace offer largely the same experiences, with slightly different variations on meditation. A Calm subscription grants you access to a new "Daily Calm" meditation every day, new featured Sleep Stories narrated by celebrities like Matthew McConaughey, mindful music, and a central meditation tab with dozens of classes that offer 7 to 21 days of focusing on anxiety, stress, happiness, self-esteem, and more.

Headspace offers classes for focus, exercise, and sleep; an "Everyday Headspace" with new meditation topics each day; mini-meditations; sleep sounds; and more. Both apps have coaches that guide you through everything so that you can follow the exact steps for each meditation.

Recently, Headspace has signed deals with more than 300 companies to integrate the app into employee health and wellness benefits, but according to a Calm investor these are just vanity partnerships: "Calm has managed to overtake Headspace because they've been laser-focused without getting distracted by the types of vanity partnerships, like with sports teams, that look good in the press but don't move the needle."

Still, Dun Wang at Calm says that sometimes companies approached by Headspace will then contact Calm and ask if they want to put in an offer as well. "It's working out great for us. We don't need to be the ones making the cold calls to win these projects."

Next, Headspace plans to make waves by becoming the first prescription meditation app for certain chronic illnesses, by seeking Food and Drug Administration approval. If granted, Headspace could be covered by health insurance.

As of writing, Calm is #1 on the Health & Fitness iOS App Store chart for top free apps, while Headspace is #5. You can download Calm [Direct Link] and Headspace [Direct Link] for free from the iOS App Store.

Apple is rolling out a new promotion that offers customers a 10 percent bonus when adding funds directly to their Apple ID account in the United States between December 17-20. The bonus applies once on up to $200 and was first highlighted by Japanese blog Mac Otakara.

The funds can be used towards purchases on the iTunes Store and App Store, an iCloud storage subscription, and so forth.

To add funds directly to an Apple ID, go to Settings > Your Name > iTunes & App Store and tap your Apple ID > View Apple ID. Sign in if necessary, tap "Add Funds to Apple ID," tap the amount that you want to add, and confirm your selection. There's also a shortcut available at the bottom of the App Store.

Adding funds to an Apple ID requires having a valid payment method on file and is particularly useful for prepaid credit cards.

In May of 2018, Apple acknowledged a microphone issue affecting some iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus models running iOS 11.3 or later in an internal document made available to Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers. MacRumors obtained the document from a reliable source earlier this year.

An excerpt from Apple's document:

Some customers might report that after they've updated to iOS 11.3, the microphone on their iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus doesn't work and the speaker button is grayed out when they make or receive a call.

Symptoms:
- The speaker button is grayed out during calls
- Other people are unable to hear the customer on cellular or FaceTime calls
- If a customer plays back a video or voice memo that they've made after installing iOS 11.3, there is no sound

Apple's document then provided troubleshooting steps for its service providers to follow, including disconnecting any Bluetooth headsets or accessories connected to the iPhone. If the issue persisted, and the iPhone was out-of-warranty, Apple advised service providers to "request a warranty exception" with the company.

For a short time, Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers were able to proceed with repairs at no cost to the customer.

"I just had my wife's iPhone 7 replaced this morning," wrote one MacRumors forum member on July 30, 2018, in a discussion topic about the issue. "Out of warranty and Apple took care of the bill. The mic on the device had failed."

The exemptions abruptly ended in July of 2018, though, when Apple deleted its internal document related to the microphone issue and prevented free repairs from being processed through its service portal. Since then, many Apple retail and support employees have refused to acknowledge the policy ever existed.

MacRumors has received several emails from affected customers since we published our article in July, but there has been little we can do to help. Apple did not respond to our original request for comment, so we've followed up today.

The microphone issue appears to remain a problem as of iOS 12.1.1, but Apple's document never identified a cause. Based on the number of users affected, it is almost certainly a hardware defect, so it's unclear why Apple is no longer offering free repairs and forcing customers to pay out of pocket for a fix.

Apple's out-of-warranty repair fee for this issue is over $300 in the United States, according to affected customers on the MacRumors forums and Twitter. iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus devices still within Apple's limited one-year warranty period or covered by AppleCare+ remain eligible for a free repair.

"I had this issue a month ago and paid $349 for a replacement," said one MacRumors reader in an email. "Two weeks ago my brother in law started having the same issue with his iPhone 7 Plus and today my wife's iPhone 7 started doing the same thing. It's a new phone and barely 15 months old."

"Unfortunately, I like hundreds have been told by Apple that 'we don't know what you're talking about,' and Apple wants $319 to send me a refurbished phone that they can't tell me won't have the same problem," another reader emailed.

Twitter is home to similar complaints:

It's worth noting that a few customers have managed to argue their way to a free repair, but this is not the common result.

Apple has a track record of great customer service, and it offers several different public repair programs for hardware issues on various products, but it appears to be leaving customers in the dust here for reasons unclear. We'd love to hear Apple's side of the situation if the company chooses to respond.

In the meantime, repairs can be initiated by booking an appointment at a Genius Bar or at an Apple Authorized Service Provider via the Contact Apple Support page: iPhone → Repairs & Physical Damage → Unable to Hear Through Receiver or Speakers → Built-in Speaker → Bring In For Repair.

Chinese smartphone maker Huawei today introduced the Nova 4, featuring what has become known as a "hole-punch" display.

The "hole-punch" design refers to the tiny hole for the 25-megapixel front camera, rather than the controversial notch, allowing for a nearly edge to edge display. Of course, this means the Nova 4 lacks the necessary sensors for 3D facial recognition and instead relies on a fingerprint scanner for authentication.

The display still has a thicker bottom bezel, known as a "chin," so this still isn't a completely full-screen design.

As noted by The Verge, the Nova 4 follows in the footsteps of Huawei's View 20 and Samsung's new Galaxy A8s as the latest smartphone with a "hole-punch" display. The Nova 4 also has a triple-lens rear camera setup, including a main 48-megapixel lens, a trend that some 2019 iPhones are expected to follow.

There's a slim chance that Apple ever adopts the "hole-punch" design for iPhones due to the TrueDepth system for Face ID, unless it invents new ways to integrate all of the various sensors under the display. The more likely possibility is that the notch is here to stay for now, but gets slimmed down over time.

The Nova 4 is currently limited to China, priced around the equivalent of $490. Huawei will likely expand availability to select other regions soon, although its devices aren't available through any major carriers in the United States.

It appears that the App Store on iOS devices has been experiencing an issue causing missing ratings and reviews over the past day or so.

The problem was alerted to us by MacRumors reader Robin van Doorn, who noticed that his apps Centraal Beheer and Run Trainer suddenly have around 1,000 fewer ratings displayed in the App Store. Other developers have acknowledged the glitch on Twitter, although not every developer is affected.

While some developers have seen their ratings count return to normal, others have tweeted about the issue within the past few hours:

The unexplained drop in App Store ratings, first reported by the blog The Apple Post, is visible in the App Store Connect dashboard for some developers. A few users have shared screenshots of a discrepancy between the number of ratings displayed in App Store search results and specific app listings as well.

It's not entirely clear if the issue is limited to certain regions or other parameters, but hopefully Apple resolves the issue for everyone soon.

The New York Times today printed an interesting article exploring how Apple co-founder Steve Jobs set up a Macintosh manufacturing plant in Fremont, California in the 1980s that failed early on into its tenure.

Titled "When Apple Was Homegrown," the piece by John Markoff offers an insight into Jobs' fascination with Henry Ford's mass automobile manufacturing in Detroit and the high-quality manufacturing capabilities of Japanese companies like Sony, and how Jobs aimed to synthesize the two cultures in a "highly automated" Mac factory.

"Steve had deep convictions about Japanese manufacturing processes," recalled Randy Battat, who joined Apple as a young electrical engineer and oversaw the introduction of some of the company's early portable computers. "The Japanese were heralded as wizards of manufacturing. The idea was to create a factory with just-in-time delivery of zero-defect parts. It wasn't great for business."

Construction of the plant, located just across San Francisco Bay from Apple's headquarters, began in 1983. The first reporters to tour it were told that factory labor would account for 2 percent of the cost of making a Macintosh, thanks to its state-of-the-art production line. Expectations were therefore high, but the practical realities of working at the plant were markedly different.

Mr. Gassée, a French specialist in office automation, had just been promoted to president of Apple’s product division by John Sculley, then Apple's chief executive, and was responsible for the company's engineering and manufacturing work. When he first started, Mr. Gassée decided to spend two days learning how the company actually built its products by working on a factory production line.

[...]

"I embarrassed myself attaching a display to the computer bezel with a screwdriver," Mr. Gassée recalled in a recent interview. At the end of his shift, Mr. Gassée grabbed a broom and swept up the parts that had fallen off the production line. "It was really shameful," he said of the noticeably slipshod process.

Lacking the requisite schooling and subcontractors, Apple's Macintosh manufacturing in California was unable to reach the production volume that Jobs had envisioned. Eight years later, the plant was shuttered.

Jobs made a second attempt to establish a manufacturing culture in Silicon Valley shortly after leaving Apple. In 1990 he oversaw another $10 million plant to build his Next personal workstation. The facility featured robotic devices, but it too was unable to produce in quantities that would support a long-term assembly operation, and it failed just like its Apple predecessor.

Jobs' thinking on manufacturing had changed by the time he returned to Apple in 1997, and the next year he hired veteran supply chain overseer Tim Cook as Apple's senior VP for worldwide operations. Apple's manufacturing outsourcing quickly expanded to form a sprawling ecosystem of global suppliers.

"When I started my career, all my flights were to Japan," said Tony Fadell, one of the hardware designers of the iPod and iPhone at Apple. "Then all my flights went Korea, then Taiwan, then China."

Aside from specialist operations like the Mac Pro facility in Austin, Texas, the vast majority of Apple's manufacturing takes place outside of the U.S. Indeed, in recent years under Cook's watch as CEO, Apple's complex web of global suppliers has boomed in response to the demand of making products like the iPhone for mass markets. "You can't bring manufacturing back because of those webs," said Andrew Hargadon, a former Apple product designer who worked on the Macintosh Powerbook Duo in the early 1990s. "You would have to bring the entire community back," he told Markoff.

Recently, Apple announced plans to build a new $1 billion campus in Austin, Texas, as well as plans for a general expansion of operations over the next three years in cities across the United States. The plans are expected to create thousands more jobs, although the large majority of them aren't thought to be in manufacturing. Apple says it is on track to create 20,000 jobs in the U.S. by 2023.

Interested readers can find John Markoff's full New York Times article online but with the alternative headline, "Apple Computers Used to Be Built in the U.S. It Was a Mess."

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Forbes recently challenged a variety of smartphone face-recognition systems with a 3d printed head modeled after the author's head.

The head was printed at Backface in Birmingham, U.K., where I was ushered into a dome-like studio containing 50 cameras. Together, they combine to take a single shot that makes up a full 3D image.

The final model took a few days to generate at the cost of just over £300. With it, the author tested it out against four Android smartphones and the iPhone X. All Android phones tested were able to be unlocked with the fake 3d printed head.

If you're an Android customer, though, look away from your screen now. We tested four of the hottest handsets running Google's operating systems and Apple's iPhone to see how easy it'd be to break into them. We did it with a 3D-printed head. All of the Androids opened with the fake. Apple's phone, however, was impenetrable.

The Android phones tested included the LG G7 ThinQ, Samsung S9, Samsung Note 8 and OnePlus 6.

It's been long known that many implementations of facial recognition amongst Android phones have been less secure than Apple's Face ID system. Some of those face recognition systems have been fooled with simple photographs. Apple's Face ID, however, also includes IR depth mapping and attention awareness technology. The attention awareness alone may be enough to explain the inability for a static 3d printed head to unlock the iPhone X. That said, the iPhone X's Face ID has been fooled in the past with more sophisticated printed 3d heads.