MacRumors

Samsung is still on track to unveil its first foldable smartphone later in 2018, Samsung Mobile CEO DJ Koh told CNBC.

According to Koh, it is "time to deliver" on a foldable device after Samsung research revealed that there is consumer interest in such a device.

Samsung first announced its plans for a smartphone with a bendable display in September 2017, and at the time, Koh said that the device would be positioned as a Galaxy Note. Given that Samsung has already announced this year's Galaxy Note 9, it's likely the new foldable smartphone will feature its own branding and will be sold alongside the Galaxy Note and S lines.

Koh declined to share details on how a folding screen might work, but at IFA last week, he said that Samsung is trying to work out the details on differentiating it from a tablet design.

"You can use most of the uses ... on foldable status. But when you need to browse or see something, then you may need to unfold it. But even unfolded, what kind of benefit does that give compared to the tablet? If the unfolded experience is the same as the tablet, why would they (consumers) buy it?"

"So every device, every feature, every innovation should have a meaningful message to our end customer. So when the end customer uses it, (they think) 'wow, this is the reason Samsung made it'."

Rumors suggest that the device Samsung is working on does not include a hinge and will instead be one single screen that is able to fold in half.

The device is said to be about seven inches diagonally, roughly the size of a small tablet, but it can be folded in half like a wallet. When folded, the exterior of the phone is said to offer a small display bar on the front and cameras in the back, with an all-screen design when opened up.

Koh told CNBC that details on the device could be unveiled at this year's Samsung Developer Conference, set to be held in November in San Francisco, but he did not offer up details on when it might go on sale. He did, however, say that while the development process was "complicated," Samsung has "nearly concluded" it.

Previous information has suggested Samsung is actually aiming to launch the device early in 2019, targeting specific markets like gamers. If initial interest is strong, Samsung is said to be planning for a broader commercial debut during the second half of 2019.

Samsung is aiming to be the first company to come out with a foldable screen, beating other companies like Apple to the new design. Rumors have suggested that Apple is perhaps experimenting with an iPhone with a foldable display.

A 2017 rumor, for example, suggested Apple is working on an iPhone with a foldable display alongside LG Display, and a Merrill Lynch analyst recently predicted Apple will introduce a foldable iPhone in 2020.

There continues to be no concrete evidence that Apple is pursuing a foldable iPhone, but the company has filed for several patents related to foldable iPhone displays.

Apple's iOS 11 operating system is now installed on 85 percent of devices as of September 3, according to updated statistics Apple shared today on its App Store support page for developers.

Apple hasn't updated its adoption statistics since May 31, when iOS 11 was installed on 81 percent of devices, marking a four percent adoption increase over the course of the last several months.

iOS 11 adoption has likely slowed as Apple's focus has shifted to iOS 12, which is set to be released in the near future. Apple's last iOS 11 update was iOS 11.4.1, released in July with bug fixes and support for USB Restricted Mode, not quite features that entice people to upgrade.

With iOS 11 installed on 85 percent of iOS devices, 10 percent continue to use iOS 10 and five percent continue to use an earlier version of iOS, such as iOS 8 or iOS 9.

Over its lifespan, iOS 11 adoption has been slower than iOS 10 adoption, perhaps due to the multiple high-profile bugs affecting iOS 11. The HomeKit bug, the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, and the iPhone slowdown controversy that saw Apple throttling the performance of older iPhones all likely impacted iOS 11 adoption.

The issues with iOS 11 led Apple to delay some planned iOS 12 features to focus on improving iOS performance and stability. One major focus was bolstering performance on older devices, and iOS 12 is designed outperform iOS 11, introducing faster app launch times, faster load times, and an overall quicker feel to the operating system.

Given the under-the-hood improvements that iOS 12 brings, it's likely we will see faster adoption of the new update than we did with iOS 11. We're expecting Apple to release a golden master version of iOS 12 on September 12, its iPhone event day, which will mark the final version of iOS 12 that will be released to the public.

After that, Apple is likely to debut iOS 12 on Wednesday, September 19, two days ahead of when iPhones are expected to be released on Friday, September 21.

Apple today seeded the tenth beta of an upcoming macOS Mojave update to developers for testing purposes, one week after releasing the ninth beta and more than two months after introducing the software at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

macOS Mojave introduces a new method of installing software updates, so after the initial beta has been installed using the appropriate profile from the Developer Center, additional betas can be downloaded through opening up System Preferences and choosing the "Software Update" option.

Apple's macOS Mojave update introduces a systemwide Dark Mode, with Mojave users able to choose between a light theme or the new dark theme, which changes the color of the dock, menu bar, apps, and other elements. Dark Mode is accompanied by Dynamic Desktops, aka wallpapers that subtly change throughout the day. Additional wallpapers were introduced in the fourth and fifth betas.

Stacks, a new desktop organization system, keeps all of your desktop files neat and organized, while Finder has been enhanced with a Gallery View, a Sidebar, a revamped Quick Look option and Quick Actions, so you can do more in the Finder window than ever before.

Screenshots can now be edited using Markup tools and a new management options that also allow for easy screen recording, while Continuity camera, a new feature, allows you to import photos and document scans directly from an iPhone or iPad to the Mac.

The Apple News, Stocks, Home, and Voice Memos apps have been ported from iOS to macOS as part of a multiyear project Apple is working on to make it easier to bring iOS apps to Macs, and Apple has introduced several new privacy protections to keep your data safer than ever.

Apple is also making it harder for websites to track you with a range of new Safari tools, and it's also easier to make and store secure, hard-to-guess passwords for each and every website.

Apple has added an entirely revamped Mac App Store to macOS Mojave that makes it easier to discover apps with a featured section and specific categories for games, creative apps, productivity apps, apps for developers, and more.

macOS Mojave was initially supposed to include a Group FaceTime feature that includes support for chatting with up to 32 people at one time, but it was removed in macOS Mojave beta 7 and the feature won't be available until later in the year.

macOS Mojave is available to developers and public beta testers to work out bugs and other issues ahead of an upcoming fall public release.

Update: Apple has also seeded a new beta of macOS Mojave to public beta testers.

Apple doesn't plan to return to fingerprint recognition for biometric authentication features with its 2019 iPhone lineup, according to a new note to investors shared this morning by Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Kuo does not expect Apple's 2019 iPhones to support fingerprint on display technology, which would allow the iPhone to read a fingerprint through its display, doing away with the need for a physical Home button.

Instead, Apple is likely to continue to use the TrueDepth Camera System for Face ID as a biometric authentication method in the iPhone and other devices.

According to Kuo, Android manufacturers are keen to adopt fingerprint on display technology as a way to differentiate their devices from the iPhone.

All main Android brands currently treat FOD as the important function to differentiate themselves from iPhone (we expect 2H19 iPhone models will not support FOD). The reasons are as follows: (1) The user feedback on the iPhone is lower than expected. (2) The user feedback on the first FOD smartphone, Vivo's X21 FOD version, is higher than expected, and (3) FOD is the best fingerprint recognition solution for the full-screen design which is necessary for a high-end smartphone.

Kuo last year said that Android manufacturers were several years away from matching the iPhone's advanced Face ID technology. Companies like Samsung have adopted facial recognition, but not a secure 3D version like Apple has implemented, which is likely another reason Android manufacturers are focusing on fingerprint on display technology.

Over the course of the next year, Kuo expects an increasing number of Android manufacturers to adopt fingerprint on display functionality, encouraged by Vivo's implementation and advances in technology that will cut down on component pricing and experience.

By the first half of 2019, Kuo is counting on an uptick in fingerprint on display manufacturers, with "marked improvements for user experience" coming due to an upgrade to a larger aperture lens and ultrasonic fingerprint on display mass production.

Samsung, one of Apple's main competitors, is expected to adopt fingerprint on display technology for its Galaxy S10 during the first quarter of 2019.

Amazon has officially become the world's second trillion dollar publicly traded U.S. company, in terms of market cap, which is simply the company's number of outstanding shares multiplied by its stock price.

Amazon shares briefly crossed the $2,050.27 mark in intraday trading today, giving the online retail giant a market cap of slightly over $1,000,000,000,000, based on its latest total of 487,741,189 outstanding shares. The milestone was fueled by a roughly one percent increase in Amazon's stock price today.

Apple beat Amazon in the race to a trillion dollar valuation when its stock price crossed $207.05 on August 2. After those two companies, tech rivals Microsoft and Google are closest in line, with market caps around $850 billion and $840 billion respectively as of mid-day trading on Tuesday.

Amazon shares have more than tripled in the past three years, as the company expands upon its dominant position in online and physical retail.

Amazon competes with Apple in a number of areas, with its digital assistant Alexa rivaling Siri and its Prime Music service rivaling Apple Music. Apple is also expected to launch a Netflix-like streaming video service next year, with dozens of original series, that competes with Amazon Prime Video.

Apple again held the top spot in the wearables market during the second quarter of 2018, shipping 4.7 million Apple Watch units and holding a 17 percent share of the overall wearable market. The new data comes from IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker, which states that the market as a whole was up 5.5 percent due to "gains in emerging markets."

Markets such as Asia Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America grew 14 percent year-over-year because "basic wristbands" remain in high demand due to their low prices. On the other hand, more mature markets like North America, Japan, and Western Europe declined 6.3 percent year-over-year.

Still, IDC research analyst Jitesh Ubrani says this decline "is by no means worrisome" because the wearables market is transitioning to become "more sophisticated." Instead of tracking basic data points like steps, calories, and workout minutes, future wearables "are well on track to become prescriptive and diagnostic tools." Rumors related to Apple Watch fall in line with this idea, with reports describing future Apple Watch models that could include an EKG heart monitor and track blood glucose levels.

"The decline in mature markets is by no means worrisome as these markets are in the midst of transitioning to more sophisticated wearables," said Jitesh Ubrani senior research analyst for IDC Mobile Device Trackers.

"While the previous generation of wearables was focused on providing descriptive feedback like step counts, the current and upcoming generations are far more capable and are well on track to becoming prescriptive and diagonistic tools. Surrounding these smarter wearables is a constellation of technologies and service providers that includes app developers, telcos, component makers, healthcare insitutuions and more – each poised for growth in the coming years."

Overall, IDC says that "two key forces" were at work in Q2 2018: "stronger demand for smart wearables" and "slower decline in the basic wearables market." IDC's data describes a smart watch as a product like Apple Watch or Fitbit Versa, while a basic wearable is something like the Fitbit Charge or Garmin Vivosport.

With this in mind, the researchers state that Apple saw continued demand for its LTE-enabled Apple Watch Series 3 in the quarter, which came as a "welcome addition to many telco channels worldwide." In total, Apple saw a 38.4 year-over-year growth in its Apple Watch shipments from 2017 to 2018. It should be noted that Apple itself does not report Apple Watch sales figures, so IDC's numbers today are just estimates.

Behind Apple's 17 percent share and 4.7 million Apple Watch shipments was Xiaomi, which owned 15.1 percent of the market and shipped 4.2 million devices in the second quarter, a growth of 19.8 percent from 2017. While Fitbit sat at third place with a 9.5 percent share and 2.7 million units shipped, this was the biggest decline tracked by IDC, dropping 21.7 percent year-over-year.

Rounding out the last two spots were Huawei at a 6.5 percent share and 1.8 million units shipped (growing 118.1 percent from the year-ago quarter) and Garmin at a 5.3 percent share and 1.5 million units shipped (up 4.1 percent). IDC says that Garmin "extended its lead over Samsung," knocking the company out of the top five spots as Garmin's shipment volume of smart watches eclipsed its basic wearables volume.

As smart watches continue to grow in popularity, we're about one week away from the official unveiling of the Apple Watch Series 4, which leaked last week. The wearable will have smaller bezels with more visible screen space, and at least one new watch face that includes more complications than ever before on Apple Watch.

Former Apple software engineer Ken Kocienda is releasing a new book entitled Creative Selection today, presenting a look inside Apple's design process through his involvement with a few key features across a variety of platforms and devices. I've had an opportunity to read through the book ahead of its debut, and it offers an interesting perspective on how Apple develops and refines features through an iterative process Kocienda terms "creative selection."

Kocienda, who joined Apple in 2001 and spent 15 years with the company, identifies seven "elements" he deems essential to Apple's success in software development, including inspiration, collaboration, craft, diligence, decisiveness, taste, and empathy. He delves a bit into how each of these elements contributes toward Apple's relentless pursuit of innovative ideas and solutions that end up being intuitive and useful to Apple's customers.

The process of creative selection is the overarching strategy for Apple's engineers, with small teams highly focused on rapid-fire demos of their work that allow the engineers to quickly iterate on their ideas and designs, saving the best elements of each iteration to rapidly reach levels of refinement required for Apple's final product releases.

Back in 2001, Kocienda was part of a team from former Apple engineer Andy Hertzfeld's software company Eazel that went defunct. Following Eazel's shutdown, Kocienda and Don Melton were hired on at Apple to develop Safari for Mac, and a number of other Eazel engineers ultimately joined them on the project. But in the first days of Apple's web browser project, it was Kocienda and Melton who got the ball rolling by trying to figure out how to port Mozilla to Mac OS X.

In Creative Selection, Kocienda spends several chapters walking through those difficult first steps, the inspiration of Richard Williamson to build Safari based on the lean and nimble Konqueror browser rather than Mozilla, and the Safari team's relentless effort toward building out a working web browser with an obsessive focus on speed.

As we introduced new features like clicking the back button to return you to your previously viewed web page, we found we couldn't perform the bookkeeping to manage the previous page at quick readiness without impeding the load of all pages. The PLT [Page Load Test] showed the slowdown. When we deemed such features too important to skip but couldn't figure out how to add them without causing such slowdowns, we instituted a trading scheme, where we found speedups in unrelated parts of our existing source code to "pay for" the performance cost of the new features.

[...]

None of this optimization was easy, and it wasn't always fun, but Don [Melton] always held the line. And in the year following the Black Slab Encounter [the first time the browser was able to load a real "web page" from Yahoo.com], we succeeded in making our code faster and faster.

Once Safari launched, Kocienda shifted to a project to bring WebKit-based rich email editing to Apple's Mail app, and he details the lengths he went to in order to make insertion point cursor placement behave properly, a feature that's more complicated than one might think.

Following a brief stint as a manager of Apple's Sync Services team for cloud data synchronization in which he found the job wasn't for him, Kocienda in mid-2005 boldly threatened to quit and perhaps move to Google if he couldn't be switched to a new role on the "new super-secret project" that was rumored within the company. He soon found himself interviewing with Scott Forstall, who invited him to join Project Purple, the effort to build the iPhone.

Kocienda's key contribution to Project Purple was the development of the autocorrect keyboard, and he walks through Apple's early efforts to figure out how a keyboard could work on the small screen of the iPhone. As the keyboard quickly became a roadblock for the iPhone's software design, the entire fifteen-person team was tasked with developing concepts. In demos for Forstall, Kocienda's early idea of large keys preserving the QWERTY layout but with multiple letters per key and a dictionary used to predict which word the user was trying to type won out and he was placed in charge of keyboard development.

That was of course just the start of the keyboard project for Kocienda, and he walks through the evolution of the design, the trials and tribulations of building a comprehensive dictionary to drive the autocorrect functionality, and the decision to ultimately go back to single-letter keys with algorithms for key prediction and autocorrect.

Through all of this, Kocienda had never seen the design of the actual iPhone, as hardware design was completely separate from software and his team had been using "Wallaby" prototype devices tethered to Macs as their software development and testing platforms. It wasn't until late 2006 that Kocienda got his first look at the actual iPhone Steve Jobs would show off just a few weeks later at Macworld Expo.

When Kim [Vorrath] passed the prototype to me, she asked me to handle it gingerly. I took it from her. The glass display was striking—far brighter and sharper than the Wallaby screen we'd been staring at for more than a year. I turned the device over in my hand. It felt solid, like it was filled to the brim with the latest technology, and it was. In fact, at that moment, it was overflowing a bit.

I paced back and forth a few times to feel the freedom of movement that came with untethering from a Mac. The Wallaby experience had been about feeling tied down to a computer on a desk with cabling spidering out everywhere. Now, for the first time, as I put the phone in my pocket, I got an idea of what it would be like to use a Purple phone.

Naturally, I was most interested in the keyboard. I typed out a few words in the Notes app. The keyboard worked without a hitch. My autocorrection code stepped in to fix all the mistakes I made. I could have spent all day with the device, trying out everything I could think of, but other people were waiting for their turn. As I handed the device over, I had no question in mind.

I wanted one.

Kocienda never had the opportunity to demo any of his iPhone work directly to Steve Jobs, but he did get that chance several times during his subsequent work on the iPad's software keyboard. Kocienda shares the experience of that demo in the very first chapter of his book, describing how he was initially planning to offer users the ability to choose between a Mac-like keyboard layout with smaller keys and a scaled-up iPhone-like keyboard with larger keys more similar in size to physical keys.

He turned to look straight at me.

"We only need one of these, right?"

Not what I was expecting. I think I may have swallowed hard. Steve was still looking at me, and so, with a half shrug, I said, "Yeah . . . uh . . . I guess so."

Steve sized me up a little and then asked, "Which one do you think we should use?"

A simple question, clearly directed at me and only me. Steve didn't shift in his chair or motion toward anyone else in the room. It was my demo, and he wanted me to answer.

And then something happened. Standing there, with Steve Jobs staring at me, waiting for me to respond to his question, I realized that I knew what to say, that I had an opinion.

"Well, I've been using these demos for the past few days, and I've started to like the keyboard layout with the bigger keys. I think I could learn to touch type on it, and I think other people could too. Autocorrection has been a big help."

Steve continued looking at me as he thought about my answer. He never moved his eyes to anyone or anything else. He was completely present. There he was, seriously considering my idea about the next big Apple product. It was thrilling. He thought for a few seconds about what I had just said and what he had seen on the iPad. Then he announced the demo verdict.

"OK. We'll go with the bigger keys."

Overall, Creative Selection is a worthy read, focusing on a few detailed anecdotes that provide a terrific inside look at Apple's design process. Given Apple's size and the way the company compartmentalizes its projects, Kocienda doesn't necessarily have a high-level view of things, but he does a good job drawing on his experiences to discuss his individual philosophy and that of the teams he worked with, extrapolating that to the unspoken criteria used across the company to drive the creative selection process that has yielded the products and features we've all come to know.

Creative Selection is available now from Amazon, the iBooks Store, and other retailers.

Serial mobile leaker Steve Hemmerstoffer shared high-resolution renders today, courtesy of tech blog MySmartPrice, that are based on supposed leaked CAD images of Apple's upcoming redesigned iPad Pro.

Reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has said Apple is working on two new iPad Pro models that take design cues from the iPhone X, measuring in at 11 and 12.9-inches.

In addition to the thinner bezels, no Home button, and edge-to-edge display of the expected iPad Pro design, the mocked-up renders depict a device with an angular chassis boasting iPhone 4-style chamfered edges, rather than the rounded chassis of the current-generation tablet.

In another seeming nod to Apple's evolving iPhone handset design, the device is shown with separate antenna strips along the top and bottom edges of the chassis, instead of the single continuous antenna lines on either side of the existing cellular models.

Elsewhere, a closer look reveals a distinct lack of headphone jack, two rows of speaker vents on either side of the Lightning port – similar to the alleged CAD images leaked last month – and two microphone ports located above the TrueDepth camera embedded in the bezel.

Also like the CAD image before it, a Smart Connector is positioned on the back of the device directly above the Lightning port, instead of the landscape orientation on current iPad Pro models.

MySmartPrice claims the positioning is related to the limitations of Face ID in landscape orientation, however well-connected Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman has said horizontal Face ID support is a feature in the upcoming iPad Pro models, which are expected to be announced this month.

The legitimacy of the additional details in the renders – and the alleged leaked CAD images they are supposedly based on – have yet to be confirmed, but Apple's scheduled media event on September 12 should reveal all.