Table of contents for 154 in iPad & iPhone User

Momentous news from the US, where Apple has reportedly agreed to pay between $310m and $500m to millions of customers affected by the so-called Batterygate iPhone problem. Class-action lawsuits in the US accused Apple of deliberately slowing down older models of iPhone with iOS updates, in order to encourage them to upgrade to newer versions; Apple countered by saying that it was throttling processor performance to preserve battery life, although it did not originally disclose that it was doing so. (In fairness, the company is far more transparent about this now, and allows you to turn off the euphemistically named ‘performance management’ feature.) How will this affect you? If you’re from the US and have an affected iPhone, you stand to gain a small amount of money, even if you…

March is often the time that Apple will make its first big announcements of the year, but they tend to be less cookie-cutter than WWDC or Apple’s annual September shindig. In 2019, we got a Services-focused event that introduced Apple Arcade, Apple Card, Apple News+ and Apple TV+. The year before that there was a 9.7in iPad at an education-focused event. As March is here, rumours have started to coalesce around one Apple product line that seems poised for a refresh: the iPad Pro. Already speculation has begun over what might be due for Apple’s high-end tablet. While the main iPad was updated last September, the iPad Pro’s most recent revamp was in October of 2018, making it ripe for some new features. Here’s what might be in store. Camera…

With three months to go before the fireworks of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference, the dribs and drabs of the company’s plans for this year’s big announcements are shaping up inside of Cupertino, and inevitably, word of one or two of those make their way out into the public – albeit, filtered through the tea leaves of speculation. Most recently, there have been some indications of things that Apple might be working on for this year’s release of iOS which – assuming the long-running pattern continues on course – will be iOS 14. While there’s sure to be plenty to talk about when the software is officially announced, let’s take a look at the latest hints about what might be in store for the next version of Apple’s mobile platform.…

Some people think iPhones never get viruses; in fact they do – but it’s very rare. Rather than an a virus, it’s more likely that you’re seeing a misbehaving advert in an app you use regularly, triggering behaviour that is intended to convince you that iOS is infected and you need to download an app to fix it, or redirecting you to a dodgy URL or a page on the App Store. However, if you’re convinced that your iPhone or iPad has a virus, worm or other form of malware, read on to find out how to remove it, as well as how to avoid these problems in the first place. How to find out if your iPhone has got a virus Technically speaking, a virus is a piece of…

Buckle up, because we’re poised for another battle on digital security. The FBI has reputedly asked for Apple’s help unlocking phones belonging of the alleged shooter from the Pensacola air base incident last year. Apple, for its part, claims it has already turned over to law enforcement all the information it has access to. If you feel like we’ve been here before, it’s because we have. Back in 2016, the FBI wanted Apple to unlock a phone belonging to the San Bernardino shooter; Apple declined to help, as doing so would have potentially compromised the security of all of its devices. Eventually, the bureau sought help from an Israeli-based cybersecurity firm who was able to hack into phone in question. Leaving aside the dangers inherent in the creation of back…

Apple’s big push into services this year was doomed for disaster – at least if you considered Apple News+ representative of what was to come back in March 2019. Many of the problems I hated back then remain central to the experience: the mishmash of PDFs with digital content, the hassle of searching for publications, and the lack of real reasons to give up many direct subscriptions to notable magazines. One year on, the best thing about it is that it’s a relatively cheap way to read The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker. With services, Apple News+ suggested last spring, Apple was biting off more than the famous hardware maker could chew. Today, Apple’s trouble with its paid news service looks like an anomaly. Apple TV+ may not…

While last year’s annual spring Apple event was entirely devoted to services, this year’s show appears to be shaping up to bring a torrent of new hardware. We already knew about the new budget successor to the iPhone SE (which may be called the iPhone 9) and an iPad Pro refresh, but there have been a flurry of rumours that suggest Apple has much more hiding up its sleeve. There’s no denying that the AirPods and AirPods Pro are runaway hits, so it only makes sense that Apple would want to build on their success. We’ve heard rumours for a while that Apple is working on a pair of noise-cancelling over-ear headphones, but a cryptic Target listing spotted by Target employees suggests they might be on the way sooner than…

With iPadOS 13, Apple made it easier to take the iPad seriously as a laptop replacement. Suddenly, that ‘What’s a computer’ ad didn’t sound quite as wacky as it did the year before. But Apple could do a little better. iPadOS 13 revealed an Apple that’s willing to include features like mouse support that would have seemed unthinkable in iPads only a couple of years before. Apple should keep the ball rolling now that it’s set it in motion. Here are a few suggestions for how Apple could go about that. I don’t want Apple to sacrifice the iPad’s identity as a device with more versatility than, say, a Microsoft Surface, so you won’t catch me saying that Apple should just let us boot macOS on its tablet. If Apple…

If there’s one Android feature iPhone users have universally longed to have, it’s the ability to pick new default apps. On iOS, it’s Apple’s way or the highway when it comes to apps like Safari and Mail, but a new report from Bloomberg offers hope that Apple might be softening its stance. According to well-connected leakster Mark Gurman, Apple is ‘considering’ whether to let users change the default apps on iOS devices. That’s hardly a sure thing, but even the possibility is a huge change of heart. Since the earliest days of the iPhone, links and email addresses have opened in Safari and the default Mail app, respectively. Even if you delete Mail, it merely asks you to redownload it when you tap an email address, without providing an option…

Millions of users have their online accounts compromised every day. Password lists are traded on the dark web, and bad actors use automated processes to try them against lots of accounts and services. Sophisticated phishing attacks attempt to trick you into giving away your password (or the info necessary to reset it) by posing as legitimate services or customer support. Obviously, the best defence against this sort of thing is to have a different, strong, hard-to-guess password for every single account you own. A good password manager like 1Password, LastPass or Dashlane is a key component in managing that (see page 61 for our round-up of the best password managers). But good passwords are not enough. Not a month goes by without another report of millions of passwords potentially compromised,…

Facebook, Microsoft and Google have now cancelled major conferences in the face of the spread of the coronavirus. Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC, usually takes place in early June – and all eyes will now turn to Apple to see how the company will respond. Apple has announced WWDC as late as mid-April in past years, so the company has some time to watch the spread of the virus and reach a final decision. But it’s becoming clear that we’re entering a period where international travel and large groups of people in small spaces is not advisable. The worldwide spread of a new virus isn’t generally something that burns out in a couple of months, which is why it’s likely that Apple is going to have to find an alternative…

I‘ve spent the past week wearing Apple’s new AirPods Pro. Not a week straight, I mean, but pretty consistently in all the places where I would usually use one of my other myriad sets of headphones. In looking at the AirPods Pro as a product, I think there are important things to be gleaned from the choices Apple made in their design – the kind of design choices that may lend insight into the way Apple is thinking about the wearables market. Wearables, of course, was the market that was sharply up in the company’s most recent quarterly results, and thus is clearly a place that Apple is likely to be focusing some attention in the future. And with rumours of Apple’s AR goggles/glasses starting to coalesce around later this…

Apple has announced that it miss its forecasted revenue guidance for the second fiscal quarter of 2020 due to the coronavirus epidemic. The company had projected revenue for the quarter between $63 and $67 billion, and gross margin between 38 and 39 percent. Apple did not provide revised Q2 earnings estimates. In a released statement, Apple stated that it is, “experiencing a slower return to normal conditions than we had anticipated. As a result, we do not expect to meet the revenue guidance we provided for the March quarter due to two main factors.” In a statement, Apple said it expected the iPhone supply constraint to be temporary. Demand for Apple products in China has been affected as well, with Apple stores closed for a duration, and then reopening at…

Once upon a time, and not very long ago at that, you could use a Magic Mouse 2 with an iPad so long as you were running iPadOS 13. It worked well enough – for a while, anyway. But lately readers have been telling me that their Magic Mouse 2 no longer works on Apple’s tablet, and some of them have singled out January’s iPadOS 13.3 as the culprit. The most frustrated users are those who never had a chance to see the mouse work at all, so they’re convinced they’re doing it wrong. Surely, they think, Apple wouldn’t pull support for one of its own products – and who could blame them? Well, it seems that it did. I’ve confirmed this with my own iPad Pro that’s running iPadOS…

While Apple’s iOS system is pretty secure, there are ways to make sure your iPhone is as safe from hackers as it can be. If you have concerns about the safety of your private data, sensitive information including website logins, email addresses, text messages and even photos and videos, then we have tips to help. 1. Keep iOS up to date Make sure you’re always running the most recent iteration of iOS, including smaller ‘dot’ or point updates. This is wise because hackers occasionally find flaws in Apple’s coding which they can exploit, potentially giving them access to your personal data. iOS updates are Apple’s way of combating the exploits by patching holes and implementing better stability enhancements. For example, back in January 2019 Apple issued a security update…

A password manager can make life a great deal easier. Rather than having to remember increasingly complex login details for a myriad of apps and sites, you simply use one solitary password to access the manager app itself, which then takes care of the rest. They can also create new, complex passwords for your accounts; ones that will be far more secure than the current combination of birthdays, pets and children’s names that you might be using. We’ve gathered together a selection of the current offerings for iPhone, any of which will take your security up several levels. What is a password manager? As the name suggests, these apps are a way to manage the account details for any app or service you use online. They act as a secure…

Qualcomm’s latest 5G modem isn’t the leap that the X55 was last year, but it might be more important. While the Snapdragon X60 5G Modem-RF System touts a slew of technical and practical enhancements to take full advantage of the next-generation networks’ tremendous speeds, Qualcomm’s new modem isn’t built for phones like the Samsung Galaxy S20 that are already on board with 5G, it’s made for the one that isn’t: the iPhone. Let’s get the technical stuff out of the way first. The X60 is the first ‘to support spectrum aggregation across all key 5G bands and combinations’. That means X60 phones will be more future-proof than today’s X55 ones, supporting mmWave and sub-6 using frequency division duplex (FDD) and time division duplex (TDD) at a wider range of deployment.…

When I first read the report in The Information last month fave.co/2VXgwpl that Apple was developing a Smart Keyboard Folio with a trackpad, I was intrigued. It’s been a while since there was an iPad rumour of any substance, and with a refresh supposedly a few weeks away, such a dramatic change to the iPad’s mission statement would turn a humdrum announcement into a riveting one. But then I pulled out my 12.9in iPad Pro and tried to imagine how it would go. The lack of a trackpad or a mouse is the least of the iPad’s problems. Selling a Smart Keyboard with a trackpad might make a few iPad diehards happy, but for the majority of users, it wouldn’t change much about their day-to-day tablet. A trackpad wouldn’t magically…