Table of contents for 118 in iPad & iPhone User

Apple has overtaken Samsung in smartphone sales for the first time in two years, but don’t count on it staying ahead for long. The Korean firm sold 76.8 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, giving it a market share of 17.8 percent, but it was just beaten by Apple, which sold 77 million iPhones for a 17.9 percent share, according to figures from Gartner. The fourth quarter is usually a strong one for Apple, boosted by holiday sales of the new generation of iPhones it releases each September, said Anshul Gupta, a research director at Gartner. For Samsung, though, 2016 ended particularly badly, dominated by the fiasco around the recall of its incendiary Galaxy Note7. Handsets such as the Note7 could have accounted for 10- to 15 percent of Samsung’s…

Apple announced its smart home control system, HomeKit, in 2014 at its annual developers conference. It started enabling it in iOS in mid-2015 and had a more complete rollout later that year. With iOS 10, HomeKit finally got its own app and better integration. But it remains an immature technology with few choices even for diehard Apple equipment owners. This was emphasized at this year’s CES, a trade show at which Apple never exhibits, but where products from third parties aimed at the ecosystem often get their debut. For HomeKit, it was mostly crickets. Amazon’s Alexa ruled the roost, with a large number of integrations with third parties, extending its voice-controlled system. This is certainly part of a larger sense of malaise across all smart home systems. While the promise…

It’s never too early to start speculating about the next iPhone, even if it’s not due out for more than six months. We’ve got the usual ‘edge-to-edge display’ and ‘virtual Home button’ rumours that seem to circulate about every iPhone, but we’ve also noticed reports congregating in another area lately: biometric security. The iPhone has, of course, offered biometric security in the form of Touch ID since the iPhone 5s was released in 2013. That technology expanded to the iPad and, more recently, to the MacBook Pro. But in recent weeks we’ve seen a few suggestions that new technologies might supplement – or replace – Touch ID in the upcoming iPhone. Is that likely, or wishful thinking? Iris scanning It’s a staple of science fiction: you put your eye up…

A recent Wall Street Journal report reinforced rumours that there’s a very new iPhone coming this autumn, with a flexible OLED screen. But along with that expected bit of information came an unexpected one: “Apple [will] introduce other updates including a›USB-C port for the power cord and other peripheral devices, instead of the company’s original Lightning connector. The models would also do away with a physical home button.” As John Gruber noted at Daring Fireball, “this is a terribly written paragraph.” It adds a layer of parsing that is utterly unnecessary if the writer was clear on what was actually being planned, though it might be a bit more understandable if the information available to the Journal reporter was spotty and unclear and therefore required similarly unclear language. (We would…

On the desktop, GarageBand is more or less ‘Logic Not Pro’, a consumer-oriented take on music-making. Although it shares certain features with expensive cousin Logic Pro X, GarageBand is a freebie intended as an approachable entry-level tool for newcomers and a sketch pad for pros. Even so, many musicians find GarageBand’s usability and feature-set good enough for working up entire albums. On iOS, things are different. There’s no Logic for iPad and iPhone, and so GarageBand bears the responsibility of catering for all. Initially a fairly ambitious digital audio workstation for mobile, GarageBand subsequently expanded in scope, adding features such as configurable guitar amps and a beginner-friendly loop grid player. For songwriters, there’s a capable multi-track recorder and MIDI editing. Those who play live are catered for by on-screen instruments…

The future of iOS is bright. While I love my Mac and expect to be using the Mac for a long time yet, iOS is the Apple operating system for the next 30 years. As I described on page 74, there are many different directions iOS can go in, taking the platform beyond the size and shape of today’s iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch. I believe that iOS’s future is big – and I mean that literally. The 12.9in iPad Pro I’m using to write this article is currently the largest iOS device in existence, but it seems inevitable that Apple will want to size up iOS even more, whether it’s in a 15- or 17in mega-tablet, or an even larger desktop iOS device similar to the style…

In 2011, Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed the Cupertino City Council plans for his company’s new campus. Six years later, Apple Park is set to open. Employees will begin the process of moving to the new campus in April, and in six months more than 12,000 people will work in Apple Park. Jobs conceived of the 2.8 million square ft building, which evokes a flying saucer with panels of curved glass, and Apple will honor its late founder’s memory with a 1,000-seat auditorium named Steve Jobs Theater. Apple Park sits on 175 acres of land designed to be part nature refuge, part centre for collaboration and creativity. The campus replaces Hewlett-Packard’s concrete jungle with 9,000 trees, two miles of trails for employees to walk and run on, plus an orchard,…

The internet has been a part of our lives for a few decades now, but for the most part, not a lot of things have changed. Apart from the rise of apps and social media, the internet has mainly been a product made accessible by devices such as laptops, tablets and smartphones. But that’s set to change. Whether or not you’re a keen techie, you’ll have heard of the Internet of Things. While it sounds nothing more than a confusing tech term, it actually has big consequences for us all. Essentially, it refers to a whole manner of products being connected to the internet, from fridges to cars. And pundits believe that over the next few years, we’ll see even more internet-connected objects come to fruition. What is HomeKit? Our…

With another quarter of falling iPad sales, there’s a lot of talk these days about what’s up with the device. While Apple still sells more than twice as many iPads per quarter as it does Macs, the Mac business generates more revenue and is more stable than the iPad, which has shown year-over-year sales declines for 14 of Apple’s latest 15 financial quarters. Despite a larger installed base than the Mac, customer-satisfaction scores that are “through the roof” (to use Tim Cook’s phrase), dominance in the high-end tablet market, and increasing sales to first-time iPad buyers, its lack of sales momentum leads to a lot of scepticism about its future. We do, however, feel that the iPad, or something very much like it, will be a huge part of the…

What is now known as iOS first debuted as iPhone Software 1.0 almost 10 years ago. Given how huge the iPhone has become over the past decade, it’s pretty fun to go back to the way Apple explained the software that drove the iPhone way back then. “It runs Mac OS X,” our colleagues at Macworld wrote. Apple was showing that the iPhone was a real computer at its core, with the same underpinnings that ran the Mac. Of course, we know now that Apple’s two primary operating systems are pretty different, though they share a common core. In the intervening years, iOS – as it was renamed when it became clear that this platform was going to extend beyond the iPhone – has grown and expanded. If we define…

Apple’s iPhone 5s and later, and the iPad Air 2 and later, all have a Touch ID fingerprint sensor, which allows you to ditch your passcode in favour of your fingerprint. However, as with most technology, sometimes things can go wrong. Here, we take you through the troubleshooting steps so you know what to do if your Touch ID fingerprint sensor isn’t working. If you set it up some while ago and it had worked fine previously, chances are that we can fix whatever has gone wrong now. If Touch ID doesn’t work from the first moment you get your iPhone or iPad out of the box, you may want to book a Genius appointment at the Apple Store to get them to take a look at it. It’s possible…

In a departure from the norm, Apple just announced the dates and location of its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. This year, the event will be at San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center instead of San Francisco’s Moscone Center, though Apple is keeping its usual June time slot. The company typically holds off on revealing WWDC details until much closer to the event, but Apple executives wanted to give developers plenty of time to make travel arrangements, according to The Loop. The convention centre in San Jose is comparable in size to Moscone and will still be able to fit about 5,000 developers and 1,000 engineers, who flock to WWDC every year to learn about Apple’s latest updates to iOS, macOS, and now watchOS and tvOS, along with efforts like HealthKit, CareKit,…

Spring is just around the corner, which means we’re likely getting close to another Apple event – and the rumour mill is starting to churn. As first spotted by MacRumors, Japanese site Mac Otakara recently claimed that Apple will host an event in March with its new iPad Pro line-up in the starring role. From now until then, rumours about that line-up will swirl. What’s the latest? The rumour: Previously, we’ve heard that Apple will expand the iPad Pro to four sizes, including a 7.9in version (the same size as the iPad mini), the current 9.7- and 12.9in options, and a new 10.5in size. Plausible? Since 10.5in iPad Pro is rumoured to have pretty major design changes, a later ship date could be a necessary evil. As MacRumors points out,…

There are a few pretty good MFi-approved game controllers for iOS, but most of them seem more ideally designed for iPad than iPhone. It makes sense to prop up your iPad and use a gamepad from a few feet away, but would you do the same with an iPhone and squint at the smaller screen? Some controllers offer iPhoneholding clips, which is a fair solution, although it can be awkward depending on the size of the phone and/or controller. Thankfully, the Gamevice is a better solution for bringing physical controls to your iPhone. The newly-released second-gen version supports the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus (as well as 6/6s and 6/6s Plus), and as the name suggests, it clamps around the top and bottom of your phone to surround the screen…

A Twitter user recounted a familiar story of a lost iPhone that resonated with a lot of people recently. The person behind @afronomics_ said she found another woman’s phone in the bathroom. She noted: “I asked Siri what’s my name. It pulled up her info. Cool. I asked Siri who do I call most. Pulled up›her recent calls. Cool.” The thread is good reading (tinyurl.com/z7Lokps). (The account owner uses colourful language and may be inappropriate to peruse at a workplace.) We tested the list of things she noted, and we had slightly different results, but no less concerning. Siri required that we unlock our phone when we asked, “Where do I live?” but when we said, “Directions to my home,” iOS provided those without a beat. When we asked our…

You don’t have to settle for itty-bitty text on your iPhone screen, nor must you deal with buttons that don’t look anything like buttons. Once you know which settings to change, you can boost the size of on-screen text on your iPhone or iPad, make words a bit more bold, zoom in with a virtual magnifying glass, warm up – or cool off – Night Shift, and more. 1. Change text size You don’t have to squint if the text on your iPhone or iPad is a little too small. There are a couple of ways to boost the size of text on an iOS device. First, you can use the Text Size setting to boost the font size of on-screen text – or, if you really want, you can…