It’s a rather slow news day in the world of Apple, but we have a real estate story, some info about a new app that does something pretty amazing, and a rumor about the next-generation iPhone SE:
- Apple VP Eddy Cue is putting his vacation home near Lake Tahoe up for sale. Anyone with $11.9 million can get a nice home, and it’s only three years old
- Lost the prescription for your eyeglasses? If you have a pretty simple prescription, you can use a new app that will determine that prescription and help you buy new glasses online
- More rumors are coming out about the iPhone SE 2, with an iPhone case maker saying it will resemble a small iPhone X complete with a notch at the top
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 Thursday, May 10th, 2018.
It’s kind of a slow news day in the Apple world, despite the company’s stock closing at an all-time high of 190.04 today. So what happens on slow news days? We cover stories like this one. Apple’s senior VP of internet software and services, Eddy Cue, has put his vacation home in Truckee, California — about 30 minutes from Lake Tahoe — up for sale for the bargain price of $11.9 million. The home is fairly new, having been completed in 2015 and sitting on land that Cue bought in 2010 for $1.2 million. The house covers 7,900 square feet and is constructed of stone, wood and large glass panes. Nobody knows why Cue’s selling his property. Perhaps he’s too busy building services revenue at Apple and can’t spend time in his little vacation cottage.
I’m constantly amazed at the ingenuity of app developers in creating apps that can do things that you wouldn’t expect. Today’s example comes from GlassesUSA.com, which has an app called Prescription Scanner that can find the prescription of your current eyeglasses so that you can purchase new glasses online. To get your prescription for free, you simply need the app, a computer (Mac or Windows) that is synced to the app, a standard sized credit card with a magnetic stripe that’s used for a size comparison, and your glasses. The app is FDA listed, and after you run it, you get your prescription in about 5 minutes. Now there’s one problem — if you have a progressive, multifocal or bifocal prescription, have a prescription that includes a prism measurement, or have single-vision or astigmatism powers outside a supported range, you can’t use the app. Still, for folks who just need a single vision prescription and are happy with their existing eyeglasses, this is a great way to get the prescription that you may have lost.
There are more and more rumors coming out that the next generation of iPhone SE — the iPhone SE 2, probably — will be released in the near future. Eleven new iPhone model numbers were listed in the Eurasian regulatory database two weeks ago, and a source said that they had seen CAD renderings of a 5-inch screen device with a screen notch like that on the iPhone X. Now iPhone case maker Olixar shared some info with rumor website 9to5Mac, stating that the new iPhone SE 2 will look like an iPhone X with very slim bezels and a notch cutout at the top of the screen. Olixar sent schematics of the alleged phone’s chassis, which will supposedly have the same straight aluminum sides as the existing iPhone SE. There’s only one problem with this rumor — the notch is quite a bit smaller than that on the iPhone X, which indicates that Face ID probably isn’t built into the area. Since the device doesn’t have a Home button and it doesn’t look like Face ID is available, unlocking the iPhone SE 2 could require a back-mounted Touch ID spot or entering a passcode after doing a tap and swipe on the screen. Still, if a new iPhone SE is on the horizon, WWDC 2018 would be a good time to release it. That’s only a few short weeks away, starting with the keynote on June 4, 2018.
That’s all the news for today – join me tomorrow afternoon for another edition of the AWT News Update.
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