Things are a bit quiet this week, thanks to the anticipation of next week’s Tuesday Apple event. But we still have enough unpublished news items to give you one of our patented News Updates!
- Yesterday’s hacker attack wasn’t, and today there was an iCloud Mail outage that was never reported
- More code has been found showing that there will be a fifth-generation Apple TV and that it will support High Dynamic Range content
- Amazon has Apple Park envy and wants to spend $5 billion on a new “second headquarters” somewhere
The text version of the podcast can be read below. To listen to the podcast here, click the play button on the player below. Apple News readers need to visit Apple World Today in order to listen to the podcast.
Text Version
This is Steve Sande for Apple World Today, and you’re listening to the AWT News Update podcast for September 7, 2017.
Yesterday there was a hacker attack on developer.apple.com that was apparently resolved quickly. This afternoon, a lot of iCloud Mail users found that they couldn’t access their accounts. Signing in to iCloud.com to check mail, the users would see a “Can’t load Mail” message and sent and received emails were missing. In the macOS Mail app, users saw a message that said “There may be a problem with the mail server or network. Verify the settings for the account “iCloud” or try again. The server returned the error: The IMAP command LOGIN failed with the server error: Service temporarily unavailable.” What’s odd is that the Apple system status webpage never showed an outage message for iCloud or Mail. By the way, Apple says that it was NOT a hacker attack that occurred yesterday. Instead, it was a bug that incorrectly showed a Russian address for all developers.
More code was discovered today by Brazilian developer Guilherme Rambo that backs the theory that yes, there will be a fifth-generation Apple TV and yes, it will support High Dynamic Range content from the iTunes Store. Rambo found that an Apple system daemon “itunesstored” has the term “hasHDR” in a number of lines of code. It’s expected that a new Apple TV will support both the Dolby Vision and 10-bit HDR standards, which will make it compatible with a wide variety of UHDTV sets.
We’ve got a feeling that Amazon is feeling Apple Park envy right now. The company has announced that it’s going to spend more than $5 billion — about the same as the price tag for Apple Park — on a new facility that will be a second base of operations to supplement the existing Seattle, Washington headquarters. Smartly, Amazon is not ruling out any locations, just saying that the location should be a “stable and business-friendly environment” and have “communities that thing big and creatively when considering locations and real estate options.” The company wants local and state governments to contact Amazon with proposals, and I’m sure that they’ll get a bunch. Since 2010, Amazon has boosted Seattle’s economy to the tune of $38 billion. The company will also supply up to 50,000 high-paying jobs to the new location.
That’s all for today; I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon with another edition of the AWT News Update.
