As we start the week of Black Friday and Thanksgiving, we have some fascinating news bits for you:
- An anonymous Apple blogger says the iMac Pro has some sort of “Find My iMac Pro theft protection” that can’t be switched off, possibly including a built-in SIM card for calling home
- The iMac Pro is also set to have an A10 Fusion chip built in for “Hey, Siri” support
- The Apple TV app is set to gain live streaming ESPN sports when it’s introduced on December 4 in iOS 11.2 and tvOS 11.2
- Google likes Apple’s location for its second Danish data center so much it bought land next door
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 Monday, November 20th, 2017.
What with Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming up, there are very few stories coming through the Apple pipeline, but we’ll try to get you some news that’s not all about some great deal coming up over the weekend.
To start, I thought this was an interesting little note. The blog “Pike’s Universum” at pikeralpha.wordpress.com often has some interesting little tidbits that the writer digs out of firmware on different devices. This person, who apparently works for Apple, left a note today that he’s found some “interesting data, used for some form of mobile connectivity, in the firmware for the iMac Pro.” Now an iMac Pro isn’t going to be the most portable computer out there, but with the cheapest model going for $4999, it’s definitely something that will be attractive to thieves. And as he notes, “that may be why Apple is going to introduce a new kind of ‘Find my iMac Pro’ type of theft protection. One that phones home to report the exact GPS location. And there’s no way of switching it off…” Pike goes on to speculate that “it’s either this, or the iMac Pro will introduce a new feature that will use a SIM card to make phone calls. Or perhaps the data that I found has to be a leftover from iOS for the iPhone.” Nobody will probably know what that code is for until the first iMac Pro arrives at the home or office of one of the early adopters.
The iMac Pro is also set to include an A10 Fusion chip with 512MB of RAM on it. Why would Apple include this chip in an iMac? It’s probably to make enable a function that’s been on iOS devices for years — Hey, Siri support. If this is the case, you’ll be able to just get Siri’s attention with the voice command, then have it do your bidding. Hopefully this feature is planned for the entire Mac line in the future.
It appears that the Apple TV app will gain live streaming sports from ESPN next month. Apparently 9to5Mac heard from a source at a “major sports network” that confirmed that the feature will arrive as part of iOS 11.2 on or around December 4, and will also be enabled on tvOS 11.2 at the same time. Live scores and game clocks will appear in a single interface, with the app including the ability to receive live alerts for close games so that users can easily flip to a game to watch all the action. This feature isn’t in any of the iOS 11.2 or tvOS 11.2 betas at this time.
In July, Apple announced plans to build a second data center in Denmark. Now Google announced that it has purchased land right next to the site of the Apple data center. Although the company hasn’t yet said it will build a new data center next door to Apple’s facility, it said it wanted future expansion options for its European data centers. The Danish government welcomed the news, with Danish Energy Minister Lars Christian Lilleholt telling Reuters that “It signals that Google has plans in Denmark, and I think it’s because we have some of Europe’s lowest power prices for companies, some of the greenest energy, and a high security of supply.” Apple’s first data center in Denmark was announced by the government as the “largest foreign investment in the country’s history.”
That’s all for today; I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon with another edition of the AWT News Update.
