The AWT News Update is on hiatus while my compadre, Steve, takes a road trip. In its place, I’ll offer a text-only (no podcast) summary of breaking stories with a tip o’ my hat to my former website, Apple Daily Report.
According to Reuters, Apple supplier Foxconn is in preliminary stages to build assembly plants as President-elect Donald Trump pushes to bring manufacturing and jobs back home.
Apple has published its annual Best of 2016 charts for the App Store, iTunes Store, and iBooks Store, naming photo editing app “Prisma” as the iPhone App of the Year and “Clash Royale” as the iPhone game of the year.
As noted by MacRumors, Apple has made a “quiet” update to its Apple Support site, introducing a new feature that allows customers to find and schedule repairs for iPhones, Macs, and iPads from Apple Authorized Service Providers.
As noted by AppleInsider, users delving into the latest macOS 10.12.2 beta have discovered strings aligning with potential support for a trio of new GPU families in future hardware —a refreshed Polaris 10, the unknown Polaris 12, and the Vega 10 series.
Following reports of iPhone 6 fires in China, Apple has responded saying that tests showed that the fires were caused by “external factors” rather than any issue with the phones themselves. The BBC reports that Apple had carried out an investigation into each fire.
Apple will release updated versions of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus next year, aptly called the “iPhone 7s” and “iPhone 7s Plus,” according to Japanese blog Mac Otakara.
Sony will release as many as six smartphone games in the financial year starting April in the hope of replicating with its own gaming franchises the success of console rival Nintendo Co’s Pokemon GO.
A variety of graphics issues have been reported from some buyers of the new MacBook Pros. Some folks think it’s a hardware issue. However, a MacRumors forum member allegedly got a reply from Craig Federighi suggesting this was not the case. Federighi says that all of these graphics glitches have been fixed in the macOS 10.12.2 beta seeds.
Apple is moving forward with plans to open a retail store in the historic Carnegie Library in Mount Vernon Square, according to the Washington Business Journal.
On Dec. 6, at an invitation-only lunch at an industry AI conference, the company’s new head of machine learning, Russ Salakhutdinov, and other Apple employees gave a wide-ranging talk detailing the problems the company is using AI to tackle, according to nine slides from the presentation obtained by Quartz.
