Today you’ll learn where 1 + 2 + 3 = 24, where the iPhone 8 Plus is the best-selling smartphone, and where you can get the software to turn many common or home-built PCs into Macs:
- An unfixed iOS 11 calculator bug means that for at least now, 1 + 2 + 3 equals 24…unless you are a slow calculator user
- Taiwanese consumers are snapping up the iPhone 8 Plus, and Apple’s the top-selling smartphone manufacturer
- Want to build a Hackintosh? You can now run macOS High Sierra on it thanks to the latest version of the popular utility UniBeast
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 Tuesday, October 24th, 2017.
You might not want to use the iOS 11 calculator app to do any important calculations, since there’s a known and as-yet-unfixed bug in the app that causes a simple addition problem like 1 + 2 + 3 to give 24 as the answer instead of the correct 6. What’s going on? Unless you tap each button very slowly, the animation that lights up each button when you tap it blocks other touch events until the animation completes. A developer on Reddit described the issue as follows: “Any iOS developers will see what is wrong here: the bug is that the animation that lights up the button is blocking touch events until the animation completes. This is the default behavior for animations, but to make an app feel responsive it’s best to find a way around that (it can be a one line fix, but sometimes it is complicated).” The problem has been known since iOS 11 first went into beta, but as of the more recent updates and betas it still hasn’t been fixed. Long-time Apple employee Chris Espinoza says that more than 70 people have filed Radar reports on the bug, so it will hopefully be fixed in a new update. In the meantime, you can use Siri as a calculator or use good old reliable PCalc.
Not everybody in the world is waiting for an iPhone X. In Taiwan, the iPhone 8 Plus was the country’s best-selling smartphone last month with Apple being the number 1 brand. That’s bucking the trend in other countries where iPhone 8 sales are lagging as people await the iPhone X, which goes on pre-sale this Friday morning. In fact, three models of the iPhone 8 (the Plus 64GB, Plus 256GB and standard 64GB) were in the number 1, 2 and 4 positions on the top-selling smartphone list in Taiwan last month. The new Samsung Galaxy Note 8 sneaked into the #3 spot, but that didn’t help the company’s overall market share. Apple had 26.1 percent market share in Taiwan in terms of sales volume and accounted for 52.7 percent of device sales value. Samsung was number two in terms of sales volume, with 21.1 percent of sales volume but only 21.7 percent of device sales value.
There are a number of people who enjoy building Hackintoshes, basically PCs that run a tweaked version of macOS. Building a Hackintosh can get you a much more powerful desktop “Mac” than you can buy from Apple at a lower price, since you’re using off-the-shelf components to build it. Well, one of the most popular tools for tweaking macOS to work on Hackintoshes has just been updated to work with macOS High Sierra. That’s UniBeast 8.0, and if you go to the home of Hackintoshing — the tonymacx86.com website — you can download the app. UniBeast creates a bootable USB drive from your Mac App Store purchased version of macOS, which can then be used to make a clean install on any supported Intel-based PC. This news unfortunately had a bad effect on me, because I’m now trying to configure a Hackintosh…and I really don’t need another Mac.
That’s all for today; I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon with another edition of the AWT News Update.
