MacRumors

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.

Apple is testing its self-driving vehicles in a number of Lexus SUVs out on the roads of Cupertino, and on August 24, one of those vehicles was involved in an accident.

Apple is required to disclose autonomous vehicle collisions to the California DMV, and the information on the accident was published on the DMV’s website.

According to the accident details, the vehicle in question was in autonomous mode at the time, and sustained moderate damage in the crash, but it does not appear that Apple was at fault for the collision. From the accident report:

On August 24th at 2:58 p.m., an Apple vehicle in autonomous mode was rear-ended while preparing to merge onto Lawrence Expressway South from Kifer Road. The Apple test vehicle was traveling less than 1 mph waiting for a safe gap to complete the merge when a 2016 Nissan Leaf contacted the Apple test vehicle at approximately 15 mph. Both vehicles sustained damage and no injuries were reported by either party.

Apple has been testing its self-driving software in Lexus RX450h SUVs in Cupertino, California and surrounding areas since early 2017, but this is the first time an Apple vehicle has been involved in a crash.

Apple’s test vehicles are outfitted with a host of sensors and cameras, and while they are autonomous, each one has a pair of drivers inside. At the current time, Apple is testing its software in more than 60 vehicles.

It’s not yet clear what Apple plans to do with its self-driving software, but it could be added to existing cars and there are still rumors suggesting Apple is working on its own Apple-branded vehicle that could come out by 2025.

Apple is also working on a self-driving shuttle service called “PAIL,” an acronym for “Palo Alto to Infinite Loop.” The shuttle program will transport employees between Apple’s offices in Silicon Valley.

Apple today announced the launch of a new logic board repair program, which will see the company offering free repairs for iPhone 8 models that are affected by an issue that can cause restarts, freezing, and unresponsive devices.

According to Apple, a "very small percentage" of iPhone 8 devices have logic boards with a manufacturing defect that are eligible for a free repair.

To check if you have an iPhone 8 that can be repaired under this new repair program, Apple has created a website where your serial number can be entered.

Apple says that affected units were sold between September 2017 and March 2018 in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Macau, New Zealand, and the U.S.

The problem does not affect the iPhone 8 Plus or other iPhone models, so it's just select iPhone 8 models that are eligible for a free fix.

Customers who do have an eligible device can make an appointment at an Apple retail store, contact an Apple Authorized Service Provider, or arrange for mail-in service through Apple Support.

Apple says that repairs may be restricted to the original country or region of purchase, and customers who are affected are recommended to back up their iPhone to iTunes or iCloud before seeking a repair.

An iPhone 8 that has damage that impairs the ability to complete the logic board repair, such as a cracked screen, will need to be fixed prior to Apple providing service.

The new iPhone 8 Logic Board Repair Program covers affected iPhone 8 devices for three years after the first retail sale of the unit.

Apple today seeded the twelfth beta of an upcoming iOS 12 update to developers for testing purposes, just four days after seeding the eleventh beta and more than two months after introducing the new software at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Registered developers can download the new iOS 12 beta from Apple's Developer Center or over-the-air after installing the proper certificate, while public beta members should also be seeing the update as their tenth beta version of iOS 12.

Based on the short interval and the odd time of day of the release, the update is almost certainly an emergency bug fix for the update alert bug that began popping up in earnest yesterday. Users were being prompted to update to a "new iOS update" every time they unlocked their phone or dismissed Notification Center.

iOS 12 brings several major new features, with Apple revamping the operating system from top to bottom to make iPhones and iPads, especially the older models, faster and more responsive.

On the iPhone X, there are new Animoji characters along with "Memoji," which are customizable, personalized, humanoid Animoji that can be used both in Messages and in FaceTime, and there are new camera effects in both of those apps.

Apple originally planned to introduce Group FaceTime support in iOS 12, but the feature was removed in iOS 12 beta 7 and will not be reintroduced until later this fall in a future update to iOS 12.

Siri is smarter in iOS 12 with a new Shortcuts feature that lets you create multi-step customized automations using first and third-party apps that can be activated with Siri voice commands. Shortcuts can be created through the Shortcuts app, available as a beta from Apple's Developer Center.

Apple built comprehensive time management and monitoring tools into iOS 12 with Screen Time, allowing you to keep track of how much time you're spending in apps on your iPhone and iPad. App limits can help you cut back on iOS device usage, and robust parental controls are included for families.

Updated Do Not Disturb options make activating Do Not Disturb more intuitive and simple, and a new Do Not Disturb at Bedtime feature cuts down on nighttime distractions and sleep interruptions.

Grouped Notifications make incoming notifications easier to view and manage, while a new Instant Tuning feature lets you tweak your notification settings right on the Lock screen on a notification-by-notification basis.

Apple News has a new Browse feature, the Stocks app has been redesigned and brought to the iPad, iBooks has been overhauled with a new look and a new name -- Apple Books -- and Voice Memos has been revamped with iCloud support and an iPad app.

ARKit 2.0 introduces new capabilities like shared experiences that let two people see the same AR environment on separate devices, and persistence, which allows AR experiences to be saved across multiple sessions. There's also a new Apple-built Measure app for measuring objects using AR capabilities.

iOS 12 includes a revamped and rebuilt Maps app that uses a new Apple-designed Maps engine that will display foliage, pools, buildings, pedestrian pathways, and other map elements more accurately. The new Maps also includes significant improvements to traffic, real-time road conditions, construction, and more, plus it will enable Apple to push out changes and fixes more quickly.

The updated Maps app is available in the Northern California area during beta testing. After iOS 12 launches, Apple will continue rolling out the new maps to additional U.S. locations

New betas of upcoming operating system updates always introduce tweaked features and new functionality, and we'll be outlining what's new in the seventh beta below. We also rounded up all of the changes that were introduced in the previous betas: beta 2 and beta 3, beta 4, beta 5, beta 6, and beta 7.

Later betas have had fewer changes because we're approaching the end of the beta testing period, with a public launch for iOS 12 planned for September alongside new iPhones.