Table of contents for 153 in iPad & iPhone User

What a difference a year makes. Just 12 months after Apple surprisingly revised down its quarterly earnings and reported lagging iPhone sales, the grass is much greener on this side of the calendar. You might say Midnight Greener. For Apple’s first fiscal quarter of 2020 (which includes the final three months of 2019), it posted record revenue of $91.8 billion, topping its own estimates and besting last year’s holiday quarter by nearly 10 percent. iPhone sales alone were up more than 7 percent, as the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro proved to be strong holiday sellers. That’s not quite a record – Apple sold $61bn worth of iPhones in the 2018 holiday quarter – but it’s the strongest results in two years. Of course, the iPhone wasn’t the only performer.…

Apple buys a lot of companies throughout the course of a year, with only a couple of them rising to the level of intriguing news. Last year’s purchase of Intel’s smartphone modem business certainly qualifies, as does the 2018 acquisition of Shazam, but for the most part, Apple scopes out companies that we’ve never heard of for reasons we’ll never know. Its most recent acquisition might be different. The company, Xnor.ai, might not be one you’ve ever heard of, but they’re hardly unknown. Since last summer, the Seattle-based start-up’s tech has been the brains behind the popular Wyze cam’s marquee feature: people detection. Simply put, it allows the $20 camera to distinguish between faces, pets and dust, and vastly improved its abilities, putting it a somewhat level playing field with…

We aren’t likely to hear anything about Apple’s new phone processor until September when the company unveils the iPhone 12. But it takes years to design these chips and months to get production ramped up, so the A14 is likely already set in stone and has probably begun test production. Year after year, Apple’s phone chips have held the crown for overall performance, and despite some big promises from the likes of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, we expect Apple to hold the crown when the new iPhones are released this year. One can never tell exactly what features or performance an unannounced A-series processor will deliver, but we can make some informed guesses. Here’s what we think we might see from Apple’s A14 SoC later this year. A jump to…

The Shortcuts app is a great way to automate tasks that requires several steps on iOS. You can create your own shortcuts, or you can sift through the Shortcuts Gallery to find and install shortcuts that others have created. You can also find Shortcuts on the Internet, but if you try to install them, you might run into a problem that prevents the Shortcut from installing. You could see the message displayed opposite. When you see this, you might think, “Okay, I’ll just go in the Shortcuts settings and allow untrusted shortcuts.” But if you’ve never run a shortcut before and you go into Settings > Shortcuts in iOS, you won’t find any security settings to adjust. Despite the missing setting, you can change it. You have to and can…

As our iPhones and iPads increasingly become the primary way we interact with others online, really good text management features have become more important. The old ‘shake to undo’ gesture just isn’t going to cut it anymore. With iOS 13 (and iPadOS 13), Apple’s addressing text input in a big way with the new QuickPath swiping keyboard and several new three-finger gestures. Once you get used to them, you’ll find it easier to work with text on your iOS device than ever before. Undo and Redo The old ‘shake to undo’ gesture remains in iOS, but you’re not going to want to use it once you get used to these three-finger swipes. Swipe left with three fingers to Undo, and swipe right with three fingers to Redo. You can also…

You’ve got YouTube or your favourite music app open and are ready to kick back, when you realize your favourite Bluetooth headphones aren’t connected to your iPhone anymore. So you have to leave your app, find and open the Settings app, go into the Bluetooth menu, connect to your headphones, then close it all and go back into your app. What a pain. In iOS 13, you can connect to paired Bluetooth devices right from Control Centre, so you don’t have to leave your app! Here’s how: 1. Open Control Centre (Swipe down from the upper-right corner on an iPhone with no Home button. Swipe up from the bottom on an iPhone with a Home button.) 2. Tap and hold, or 3D touch, on the wireless connections block in the…

As battery cases go, Apple’s Smart Battery Case is one of the best around, with a slim fit, excellent monitoring and, of course, great battery life. But if yours isn’t working as it should, Apple might replace it for free, even if it’s out of warranty. And if it is working, you just got a free extra year of warranty. Apple has launched the Smart Battery Case Replacement Programme for iPhone XS, XS Max and XR, which covers all cases made through October of 2019. That’s basically every model ever produced, since the case only launched on 13 January 2019. There are two issues that Apple has identified: • The battery case will not charge or charges intermittently when plugged into power. • The battery case does not charge the…

The seventh generation entry-level iPad is a weird little beast. The screen is a little larger than 2018’s model and you can now use a full-sized Smart Keyboard, but the processor remains the same and the overall design has only slightly changed. The changes are so few between the previous model and this one, in fact, that we basically covered them all in our announcement post. Instead, let’s compare the new kid on the block to 2019’s refreshed iPad Air, which has a 10.5in Retina display that’s now very close in size to what you’d get on the 10.2in iPad. The bodies of both models now measure exactly 250.6x174.1mm, although the Air has a tiny advantage in thinness – 6.1mm compared to the 10.2in iPad’s 7.5mm. The Air costs more,…

Last year, al put together a list of features I hoped to see in iOS 13. And Apple listened. Okay, it’s not likely that anybody at Apple read my article and altered a single plan based on it, but the company did give several of the things I’ve been asking for. There’s still a lot left on the table, though. So many more features and significant changes that seem easy to identify (if not easy to develop) that would make iPhones more useful. I want about a million things for iOS 14 (multiple timers, for example), but many are small tweaks not worth getting worked up about. Here’s a list of the ten biggest and most far-reaching features I hope to see in iOS 14. Note: now that iOS and…

With iOS 13.2 (13.2.1 for HomePod), it’s easier than ever to hand off music or a phone call from your iPhone to your HomePod. Such handoffs were possible before iOS 13.2.1, but they were a bit of a hassle (as we’ll see below). Now, though, Apple provides a ‘quick way’ and a ‘long way’ of making these handoffs. Here’s how to do both. The quick way If your phone is playing any kind of AirPlay-compatible media – such as a song on Apple Music or Spotify, a podcast, a YouTube video, a Netflix show or even a phone call – you simply need to hold your iPhone around an inch away from your HomePod. After a one-second delay, the audio track will jump from your phone and start playing on…

Quick – open up Safari on your iPhone and hit the View Tabs button in the bottom right. If your phone is like mine, you’ve got a stack with dozens of tabs... leftover pages opened from social media posts, movie times from the film I saw weeks ago, search results, you name it. I don’t need any of that stuff anymore, but it’s kind of a pain to go swiping through all my open tabs every few weeks to clean out the cruft. Fortunately, iOS 13 adds a new feature to Safari that can automatically close tabs after a period of time. It’s easy to set, if you know where to look. 1. First, open the Settings app. 2. Then scroll down to Safari settings and tap on that. 3.…

Joining a new Wi-Fi network is a task we do surprisingly often. At coffee shops or restaurants, at friends or neighbour’s houses, on flights... given how common it is, it’s sort of surprising that Apple waited until iOS 13 to make the task easier. Instead of opening the Settings app and Wi-Fi menu, you can now join Wi-Fi networks right from the control panel, which means you don’t even have to leave the app you’re in. It’s really simple, here’s how it works. 1. Open Control Centre (Swipe down from the upper-right corner on an iPhone with no Home button. Swipe up from the bottom on an iPhone with a Home button.) 2. Tap and hold, or 3D touch, on the wireless connections block in the upper right. 3. When…

Well, here we are again. Apple once again announced its biggest financial quarter of all-time in January. During the three months that ended calendar 2019, Apple generated a staggering $91.8 billion in revenue, up from the previous record of $88.3 billion generated at the end of calendar-year 2017. The company also generated a record $22.2bn in profit. Sometime this decade, Apple’s going to drop a $100bn holiday quarter on us, and I’m not sure my brain can count that high. In any event, after dunking on us all via press release, it was time for Apple’s executives to do their quarterly ritual of spending an hour on the phone with a handful of questioning financial-industry analysts and a bunch of silent journalists. There’s always something interesting to glean from that…

It’s hard to believe that 27 January marked the tenth anniversary of the announcement of the iPad. As impressive as that first iPad was in terms of hardware, a decade later it’s clear that the iPad succeeded because of Apple’s focus on native iPad apps from the very first day. Sit down and lean back If you go back and watch Steve Jobs’s keynote introducing the iPad, you’ll see the brilliance of Apple’s roll-out strategy fave.co/2tbLM7Y. To start it all off, there’s a big comfy chair on stage, something you never see at Apple keynotes. That chair allowed Jobs and other presenters to illustrate that the iPad was a comfortable device meant to be used casually. After revealing of the iPad itself, Jobs sat down and spent a very long…

Apple spends a lot of time talking up its secret sauce: that combination of hardware, software and services that allow it to make what it believes are the best technology products on the planet. And, as users of Apple products, most of us probably agree that this is generally the case. But even as good as the integration between these three legs of the company’s stool is, there are still some places that it falls weirdly short. Hardware and software that don’t work together, services that don’t provide the necessary glue. Maybe they’re use cases that Apple doesn’t consider particularly necessary, or maybe the company just hasn’t gotten around to them yet. Whatever the case, they stick out like a sore thumb. Here are just a few examples of integration…

Apple’s Reminders app used to be a joke, and if you found yourself using it, it was probably because you’d asked Siri to remind you about something or, well, you didn’t know any better. It was good for casual use, but in a professional setting you’d have been better off sticking with a third-party app such as Things 3. With iOS 13, though, Reminders should rank among the operating system’s standout features. The changes are breathtaking. You can make groups with multiple lists, you can set morning notifications that give you a rundown of what you have to do for the day, and you can add checklists to reminders. It doesn’t even take that long to make a reminder anymore because Apple lets you enter them with natural language commands…

If you have several-years-old iPhone, or know someone who does, you’re probably aware of the fact that the battery life is a lot shorter than when it was new. The rechargeable batteries in today’s electronics degrade over time and become less capable of holding a charge or delivering the same peak power. This caused Apple to limit the performance of older phones in order to prevent unexpected shutdowns, which led to class-action lawsuits, and ultimately a rather good battery replacement program. In iOS 13, Apple’s introducing a new feature called Optimized Battery Charging that should help slow the rate at which the battery in your phone wears out. It’s not going to help your battery last longer on a single charge, but it’s going to help your battery hold the…