Earlier today, MacRumors reported that it is possible to run any iOS app you have purchased on an M1-based Mac, provided you can get access to the right file. Sure enough, if you’ve purchased or downloaded an app for your iPhone or iPad, it is possible to get it running on an M1-based Mac — I am currently looking at the iOS versions of Dark Sky, Spotify, Slack, Netflix, and Gmail on this MacBook Air.
Running some of these apps, it’s fairly clear in some cases why these developers haven’t immediately made them available for the Mac in the Mac App Store. Netflix, for example, is bounded inside a window and can’t be resized or go full screen (but it works, and you can even download videos for offline viewing). Instagram is relatively small on the screen, but it also runs fine, you can post, and it seems to hook into the right photo library and camera permissions. Many of these apps require Apple’s “Touch Alternatives” system to work.
Spotify’s iPad app, running on an M1 MacBook Air. It is resizable and seems to work just fine.
To get these apps running, you just need to get the app files, which are simply packages with the .IPA file extension. And these files need to be associated with your Apple ID, so you can’t just share them around to other people.
A long time ago, IPA files were easy to find in an unencrypted iTunes backup, but that’s no longer the case. Instead, you can use a long-standing Mac app called iMazing to directly download legitimately purchased IPA files to your Mac. Simply double click them and they install into your applications folder like any other app so long as your Mac and iPhone are on the same Apple ID.
We’re far for the first to discover this. MacRumors reported it and the first place I can find confirmation is this post by redditor probablyamy, who also explained the step by step process.
1. Plug-in device to Mac with iMazing running 2. Select “Apps” for the iPhone plugged in to your Mac 3. Select “Manage Apps” in the tabs at the bottom 4. Select “Library” in the manage apps screen 5. Download the apps you want 6. Right click on the downloaded app in the list -> Export ipa 7. Double-click the .ipa file on an M1 Mac to run install it.
Having run into some bugs myself with earlier versions of iOS apps ahead of the review, I will tell you that there are quite likely to be even more bugs with this method — both inside some of these apps and possibly even with your macOS system. This is more something to play around with than it is something you should consider for any important apps that you use.
Apple’s policy is that the only approved way to install iOS apps is to get them from the Mac App Store and the only way for developers to distribute iOS apps to Mac users is via that same store. Which means this method may or may not continue to work down the line.
In March 2017, I drove down to the Instagram offices in Menlo Park to meet with founder Kevin Systrom. The subject of the meeting had not been disclosed to me in advance, and when we sat down in a conference room, Systrom had a surprise for me: his team had cloned Snapchat’s popular stories feature and planned to more or less import the design wholesale into Instagram.
It was a brazen move, particularly by the standards of American business, but it was undeniably effective: Instagram usage surged dramatically, and Snapchat plateaued. Soon stories started popping up everywhere: Tinder, Google Photos, LinkedIn, and Medium, to name a few. (A recurring joke holds that Excel will someday add stories; at this point, I wouldn’t bet against it.)
One place stories never showed up was an app where their inclusion felt obvious, at least to me: Twitter. CEO Jack Dorsey first envisioned the service as a way to share status messages, like the ones once found on AOL Instant Messenger, and statuses were the original ephemeral stories. Then in March, ephemeral tweets finally appeared on Twitter. The company called them Fleets, and after testing the feature in Brazil and India, it rolled them out globally yesterday.
Here’s Kurt Wagner in Bloomberg:
Company executives said research has shown that many users are too intimidated to post or engage with others on the service, which has led to an effort to find new ways to spark interaction.
“Tweeting, retweeting, engaging in conversation can honestly be incredibly terrifying,” said Nikkia Reveillac, Twitter’s head of research. “We do not know how others will react to us, we do not know if anyone will reply, and we do not know if anybody will even care.”
This is a version of what Systrom told me when introducing Instagram Stories. The central Instagram feed had become a place where users expected to find only the most highly polished, manicured photos of a person’s life; stories offered them a lower-pressure way to post. Fleets are designed to work the same way, and I suspect they will.
Twitter enters the ephemeral posting game with some real advantages on its side. One, the format is familiar — if you’ve posted an Instagram story, you already know how to post a fleet. Two, the real-time nature of Twitter lends itself to documenting photos and videos in the moment — something fleets excel at. (Twitter never really cracked photo or video sharing; I suspect Fleets will help it make inroads there.)
And three, tweets have always been best thought of as a mostly ephemeral format anyway. The old joke about Twitter is that it was where you would go to discuss what you had for breakfast. Now fleets are here, and there’s never been a better place to post your bowl of Cheerios.
Of course, Twitter has some disadvantages to contend with, too. The reason the format is familiar is because it’s already everywhere; fleets have a lot of competition, and many of those competitors already have rich and compelling feature sets. (Compared to what you can do with video on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat, fleets are barely at the starting line.) Secondly, Twitter’s historically glacial pace of iteration means it could take Fleets a long time to catch up — and competitors will be inventing new creative tools all the while.
And third, it’s worth asking whether Twitter could have gotten a lot of the benefits of a story-like feature simply by giving users the option to make tweets ephemeral. Fleets look like a smart, if belated, way to fight the last war. Wasn’t the real leapfrog move here to take the Twitter graph and build the first “story-first” social app?
II.
One of the things Fleets copied from Instagram is the idea of one-tap story reactions: a heart, a fire emoji, a crying emoji, and so on. It’s interesting to think about this move in the context of Twitter’s long-stated desire to spur more “healthy conversations” on the platform.
That initiative, which dates back more than two years now, is a broad and somewhat amorphous effort to solve Twitter’s longstanding issues with harassment and abuse on the platform. One way you can do that is by structuring conversations at the product level — and encouraging users to reply to one another with heart and other sympathetic emoji can be an effective way of doing so.
Stories can also promote healthier conversations by making replies private. Much abuse goes down in the DMs, true, but there can be less incentive to harass someone if your reply is not visible right underneath the original post, racking up likes and retweets as more people see it.
Another way to structure conversations is to set boundaries around who can participate. That’s why I was struck by how Twitter is approaching the rollout of Clubhouse-style new audio chat rooms inside the app, called “Spaces,” which are due to begin testing later this year. The company is basically hand-picking the users it will allow to participate as it tests audio chat. Here’s Nick Statt at The Verge:
The company plans to start testing the feature this year, but notably, Twitter will be giving first access to some of the people who are most affected by abuse and harassment on the platform: women and people from marginalized backgrounds, the company says.
In one of these conversation spaces, you’ll be able to see who is a part of the room and who is talking at any given time. The person who makes the space will have moderation controls and can determine who can actually participate, too. Twitter says it will experiment with how these spaces are discovered on the platform, including ways to invite participants via direct messages or right from a public tweet.
Clubhouse has struggled with moderation issues since it launched earlier this year. Twitter’s move to start with women and other underrepresented users represents an intriguing effort to learn from Clubhouse’s mistake. And at least before it opens the floodgates to all users, that seems like a way to bring more good conversation onto the platform.
During a call with reporters yesterday, I asked Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s head of product, what he saw in audio. Notably, he led with its ability to generate empathy in conversations. Here’s what he told me:
“Our mechanics incentivize very short-form, high-brevity conversation, which is amazing and powerful and has led to all the impact that Twitter has had in the world. But it’s a very specific type of discourse, right? It’s very difficult to have long, deep, thoughtful conversations.
Audio is interesting for us because the format lends itself to a different kind of behavior. When you can hear someone’s voice, you can empathize with them in a way that is just more difficult to do when a you’re in an asynchronous environment. … We think audio is powerful, because that empathy is is real and raw in a way that you can’t achieve over text in the same way.”
Often when we are talking about how to build better social platforms, we discuss them in terms of what or who they should ban. What I like about Twitter’s moves this week is that they show another way platforms can move forward: by designing spaces for conversation with intention, announcing those intentions at launch, and then encouraging us all to hold them accountable to it as they go. The success of fleets or audio spaces is far from guaranteed. But in some important ways, they strike me as a true step forward.
This column was co-published with Platformer, a daily newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.
Apple’s new in-house M1 chip is officially on the market. The first reviews and benchmarks are starting to pop up, so we’re gathering everything we know about it into one handy place, which we’ll update as we learn more.
Apple M1 Cheat Sheet: Key details at a glance
Release Date:
Ships Week of 11/16
Found in:
MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini
Architecture:
Arm-based
CPU Cores:
8-core CPU
Nm Process:
5nm
Graphics:
Integrated 8-core GPU with 2.6 teraflops of throughput
Memory:
8GB or 16GB of LPDDR4X-4266 MHz SDRAM
Apple M1 Release Date
The first computers with Apple’s M1 chip are
already up for purchase
. To try it, you’re going to have to choose between one of the three new products that feature the chip: the new
MacBook Air
, the
13-inch MacBook Pro
or the
Mac Mini
. Each comes with two configurations using the M1. The MacBook Pro also still has two Intel configurations on offer, and the Mac Mini has one Intel processor offering.
Apple started shipping out M1 device purchases this week.
Apple M1 Price
The M1 is a mobile chip, so you have to get it built into one of Apple’s machines.
The Mac Mini starts at $699 with 256GB of storage, making it the cheapest way to get an M1 processor. The price range stretches all the way to $2,099, which will net you the 13-inch MacBook Pro with 2TB of storage.
Pricing is largely down to the specifics of your purchase. But so far, it doesn’t seem like M1 Macs will be significantly more expensive than Intel-based Intel counterparts. The M1 MacBook Air configuration that is most similar to the Intel MacBook Air we reviewed earlier this year is $1,249, for instance, which is $50 cheaper than last year’s version. The $999 starting price remains unchanged.
Apple M1 Specs
Here’s the M1’s bread-and-butter. What does Apple’s new Arm-based chip have that Intel’s x86 architecture doesn’t? Well, it uses a
5nm process
, for one. By comparison, even
Intel’s 7nm process
isn’t expected to start hitting its products until at least 2022. Apple’s CPU has 8 cores, which you would typically need to step up to Intel’s H-series product stack to get on mobile chips.
Four of the M1’s cores are dedicated to high-power performance, while the other 4 are for low-power efficiency. That evens out to a 10W thermal envelope overall, with the low power cores supposedly taking up a tenth of the power needed for the high-power cores. The chip also has a total of 16 billion transistors.
The M1 is also a system on a chip (SOC) with integrated graphics and onboard memory. The included GPU has 8 cores as well, with 128 total compute units and 2.6 teraflops of throughput (there is one exception here: the entry level MacBook Air uses a version of the M1 with a 7-core GPU). The “unified memory” replaces the need for separate RAM, meaning that the chip comes with either 8GB or 16GB of LPDDR4X-4266 MHz SDRAM, depending on your device.
The M1 also has a separate 16-core neural engine for machine learning tasks.
(Image credit: Apple)
Apple M1 Native Performance
The core drawback to the M1 chip right now is that, because it uses a different architecture and instruction set from Intel or AMD parts, it won’t be able to run x86 apps without emulating them. Developers are already on the case, with Microsoft saying it’s working on a version of Microsoft Office that will run natively on M1 machines and Adobe saying that it’s working on an M1-native creative suite. But early adopters might have to wait a bit to get the most performance they can out of their new chips.
When the M1 does get to run natively, though, it seems to pack some serious power.
Engadget
reports that the M1 MacBook Air had Geekbench 5 results of 1,619/6,292. That’s well above their results for the
2020 i7 MacBook Air
, which were 1,130/3,053. Meanwhile, the Tiger Lake
Dell XPS 13 9310
scored in 1,496/5,254 on our own Geekbench 5.0 benchmarks, while the
ThinkPad X1 Carbon Extreme Gen 3
with an Intel Core i7-10850H chip scored 1,221/6,116.
The M1’s single-core score also beats the 27-inch 2020 Core i9 iMac’s single-core score, which only hit 1,246. It loses out to the iMac’s 9,046 multi-core score, but that officially gives the M1 higher single-core test results out of any Intel Macs, even desktops.
Outlets like The Verge also tested the M1, but under different conditions. Using a MacBook Pro and testing with Geekbench 5.3, The Verge found its review unit scored 1,730/7,510 points.
We’re curious to see how the M1 stacks against a potential 8-core Tiger Lake chip down the line, as well as AMD’s new Ryzen 5000 processors, which are also looking to take Intel’s CPU crown. For now, though, the M1 is looking to be the fastest mobile chip you can buy.
Apple M1 Emulated Performance
Finally, we reach the biggest potential drawback for the M1: Since the Apple M1 uses a completely new architecture (at least new for Macs), it can’t natively run apps designed for x86 chips. Instead, it has to emulate them. Apple’s built a tool to let users easily do this, called Rosetta 2, but running apps through Rosetta 2 means they’re going to take a performance hit.
Official reviews are reporting on emulation more anecdotally rather than with official numbers, but user
Geekbench results
show that, even when emulating apps, the M1 chip is still faster than Intel counterparts. On November 14th, a user posted test results for an M1-equipped MacBook Air running the x86 version of Geekbench. The machine earned a single-core score of 1,313 and a multi-core score of 5,888. That’s about 79% as powerful as the native scores for the same machine, which were 1,687 on single-core and 7,433 on multi-core. Still, even the emulated scores are higher than any other Intel Mac on single-core, including the 2020 27-inch iMac with a Core i9 processor. As for the multi-core score, it’s still much higher than the 3,067 score of the Core i7 2020 MacBook Air.
Keep in mind that performance varies from program to program, however. When The Verge tested the x86 version of Adobe Creative Cloud on its MacBook Pro review unit, the publication came across a bug that consistently halved its export bitrate. The publication said that export times stayed flat even when running multiple 4K exports in a row, suggesting strong performance, but it’s a good reminder that emulation still has drawbacks even if benchmark results look strong.
Again, this is a place where we’re looking forward to seeing how the M1 fares against the newest Intel and AMD chips. Because the M1 isn’t going to be running at its best here, other chipmakers might be able to make up the current performance gap more easily in upcoming mobile chip releases.
(Image credit: Annapurna Interactive)
Apple M1 Graphics Performance
With Apple M1-equipped machines already starting to hit the public, preliminary benchmark results are starting to show up on the GFXBench browser. And while the 8-core, 128 CU, 2.6-teraflop chip’s obviously not going to compete with recent behemoths like the RTX 3000 series or even with older yet higher-end discrete GPUs like the GTX 1080, it does beat old standards like the Radeon RX 560 and the GTX 1050 Ti.
For instance, on high-level GFXBench tests like 1440p Manhattan 3.1.1, the Apple M1 hit 130.9 frames per second, while the 1050 Ti only hit 127.4 fps and the Radeon RX 560 was capped out at 101.4 fps. Meanwhile, on the more intensive Aztec Ruins High Tier test, the M1 hit 77.4 fps while the GTX 1050 Ti maxed out at 61.4 fps. The Radeon RX 560 did perform best in this test, with a score of 82.5 fps, but generally has lower frame rates across most tests.
Meanwhile, Ars Technica found that the M1 scored 11,476 points in 3DMark’s Slingshot Extreme Unlimited GPU test, as compared to the iPad Pro 2020’s score of 9,978 and the iPhone 12 Pro’s score of 6,226.
While it’s tricky to try to judge overall chip performance off of a few online and mobile benchmarks, these tests are the best official benchmark results we have right now. Still, reviews are making strong anecdotal claims as well. Engadget said that The Pathless runs at a solid 60 fps on its review MacBook Air, as does Fortnite at 1,400 x 900.
Apple M1 Battery Life
Despite packing more processing power overall, the M1 chip comes with 4 low-power cores that help it conserve battery life. Apple’s saying that this gives M1-equipped machines “the best battery life ever on a Mac,” which it tested by wirelessly browsing the web with brightness set to “8 clicks from the bottom” and by playing FHD videos under the same brightness settings. These tests are far from comprehensive, but reviews generally tend to place M1 Macs either around or above current Intel counterparts.
According to Engadget’s battery benchmarks, which “involved looping an HD video,” the M1 MacBook Air can stay powered on for up to 16 hours and 20 minutes, which is about 5 hours more than the publication’s numbers for the latest Intel MacBook Air. That’s also about 7 hours more than we got on our own battery benchmark for the the latest Intel MacBook Air.
The Verge found that the M1 MacBook Pro’s numbers are a little less impressive, which is to be expected with more power. The publication claimed to “easily get 10 hours on a charge” and said it had to resort to running 4K YouTube videos on Chrome in the background to drop that down to 8 hours.
The Verge is less optimistic on MacBook Air, though, saying it’s getting “between 8 and 10 hours of real, sustained work.”
macOS Big Sur, iPhone and iPad Apps
One of the coolest new features of the M1 chip is that, because it uses the same processor architecture as the iPhone and iPad, it can now run apps designed for those devices natively. However, reviewers are skeptical of this feature’s current implementation.
First, you’ll have to download these programs through the Mac app store using a filter, since developers still aren’t allowed to directly distribute iOS apps even on more traditional systems. Second, you’ll find that many of your favorites won’t be available, like Gmail, Slack and Instagram. That’s because developers are allowed to opt out of making their apps available on Mac, which plenty seem to be opting for. Third, apps that require touch input direct you to a series of unintuitive “touch alternatives,” like pressing space to tap in the center of a window or using the arrow keys to swipe.
The Verge called using iOS apps on Mac a “messy, weird experience,” in part because the apps that are available are “from developers that haven’t been updated to be aware of newer devices.” While Overcast, a podcast app, worked great for The Verge, HBO Max was stuck to a small window that couldn’t be resized and couldn’t play fullscreen videos.
Playing iOS games also proved to be a chore for some reviewers, as
TechCrunch
noted. The publication tried the iOS version of Among Us on an M1 MacBook Air and found that, while it ran smoothly, using the trackpad to emulate a touchscreen was a chore. There’s also an option to operate a virtual touchscreen with your mouse, but as the reviewer also ran across a fixed window size with no full screen functionality, it’s clear that gaming on M1 still has a way to go.
The elephant in the room here across all experiences seems to be the lack of a touchscreen. We were hoping Apple would announce touchscreen Macs during its ‘One More Thing’ event earlier this month. But with no word on those yet, it’s hard for iOS apps on M1 to feel like more than an afterthought. There’s also the lack of support from big developers, who are probably waiting for these kinks, like no touchscreen support, to work themselves out.
SoundCloud is trying to make sure people can tell who’s an authentic artist by rolling out verified badges, the company announced today.
Badges will be given to top artists on the platform, but there’s a list of criteria that has to be met in order to get one. Artists must be “a well-known and/or highly searched-for artist, collective, DJ, label, curator or podcaster,” according to a blog post announcing the news. They must also have a unique profile, no misleading information, and each account must have a bio, profile photo, and one track uploaded. Current artists who have received the verification badge include Billie Eilish, Wiz Khalifa, and Trippie Redd.
Prior to SoundCloud rolling out the verified badge, the site had Pro star badges. They were part of SoundCloud’s subscription plan that costs $12 a month and can help boost artist profiles. The issue is that people assumed the orange Pro star badge was being used for verification when it wasn’t supposed to. Those badges were created to let people know that artists were “taking their craft to the next level.” People who are a part of SoundCloud’s Pro program can apply for verification review.
SoundCloud is the latest company to follow in the footsteps of platforms that rely on user-generated content and attract big-name talents; Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube also use verification systems. To apply for a verification review on SoundCloud, people can log in to their account settings and click on “Request verification.” The process can take up to 30 days for SoundCloud’s team to review.
Twitter on Tuesday announced a global launch of “Fleets,” the ephemeral tweeting feature it first announced earlier this year and tested in various markets around the globe.
Now, any mobile Twitter user, regardless of where they live or what platform they’re on, will have access to the disappearing messaging feature, which will sit right at the top of the timeline in a row of Stories-like bubbles. Twitter hopes the new feature will help reduce the pressure around tweeting by letting users express more casual thoughts and feelings while also concerning themselves less with saying something profound or racking up likes and retweets. Fleets starts rolling out today on Android and iOS and should be available for everyone in the coming days, the company says.
“Through our tests in Brazil, Italy, India, and South Korea, we learned Fleets helped people feel more comfortable joining the conversation — we saw people with Fleets talk more on Twitter,” explain design director Joshua Harris and product manager Sam Haveson in a blog post. “Those new to Twitter found Fleets to be an easier way to share what’s on their mind. Because they disappear from view after a day, Fleets helped people feel more comfortable sharing personal and casual thoughts, opinions, and feelings.”
At its most basic level, Fleets is a Stories clone, borrowing all of the best ideas implemented by Instagram and Snapchat. You can share text, respond to others’ tweets, or post videos with the same background color and overlaid text options you get on other messaging apps with ephemeral features, with every message disappearing after 24 hours. You can also respond to others’ fleets by tapping on one and sending a direct message or emoji to the creator, which will start a DM conversation similar to how the story reply process works on Instagram. Twitter says it will also be introducing stickers and live broadcasting at some point in the future.
Right now, the company says there will be no indicator if someone screenshots one of your fleets, and anyone who follows you will be able to see what you fleet by visiting your profile if they don’t immediately see your bubble at the top of the timeline. So it’s not exactly right to think of Fleets as a fix-all remedy to social media outrage culture or the platform’s propensity to direct large numbers of individual actions toward a single target — what we colloquially call “getting ratioed” or piled on or canceled or whatever name or phrase you’d like to attach to briefly becoming an internet punching bag.
Image: Twitter
But what Fleets seem likely to help with is dividing the sheer volume of opinions that get trafficked on Twitter every minute of every day into more digestible formats. That may spark changes in how we communicate on the platform. Undoubtedly, some users will try to push the limits of what can be said or shown on a fleet versus a tweet. Twitter is sure to face fresh moderation challenges when deciding whether to write new rules or modify for combating, say, harassment or misinformation as it pops up in Fleets.
But most of us can just use Fleets to send out the one-off reaction or hot take and let it expire in the void like most dumb opinions do anyway, just as Instagram Stories lets you share unpolished and (dare I say) fleeting snippets of our daily lives that don’t have to be framed or filtered to perfection.
That’s, of course, assuming people on Twitter actually want to use this feature and actually follow through in any meaningful capacity. Part of the great stories takeover of social media that Snapchat inadvertently kicked off more than a half-decade ago meant products and services that never needed ephemeral messaging got it anyway — from Facebook’s main app to YouTube to even LinkedIn. Those Stories clones may stick around, but they inevitably become ghost towns.
It’s not immediately clear that Twitter needs a Stories take of its own. But if any platform can benefit from disappearing messages that lower the stakes and promote perhaps healthier and more stress-free communication, it’s the social media platform the sitting president of the US is actively using to undermine election results. If we can’t or won’t log off in 2020, then we all need to chill out a bit — and maybe fleeting is one way to do that and make the internet more bearable in the process.
More copyright takedown requests might be coming to Facebook and Instagram. The company announced today that it’s going to allow all page admins around the world to submit images and videos for rights protection, expanding the reach of the feature outside of the limited group of partners who piloted the image copyright launch.
This means more creators and brands will be able to issue takedown requests over re-uploaded videos and images they own across both Facebook and Instagram. These creators will also have the option of making money off matches if their re-uploaded content is monetized with in-stream ads.
Facebook only launched support for claiming copyrighted images in September. Although anyone can claim rights for an image, disputes among potential rights holders typically come down to who filed the claim first. If creators want to appeal Facebook’s decisions, they can use Facebook’s IP reporting forms.
The fact that people can now track and protect their own images on Facebook is a major change for the platform, especially as access rolls out more widely. Instagram is especially tricky territory for image takedowns. Accounts often reshare images they don’t own, usually defaulting to tagging the account where the image seemingly originated. As more pages start claiming ownership, takedowns might happen more frequently, altering how people use Instagram and the number of re-shares that happen on the platform.
(Pocket-lint) – The Apple Watch has been kicking around for several years now and the apps available for it are plentiful to say the least – especially now it has its own App Store. Of course, not all the apps are great, useful or even suited to the Apple Watch but there are a few that are simply brilliant.
These are the best Apple Watch apps we’ve come across – the ones that hold their own on the smaller screen and deliver the information you need without you having to get your iPhone out.
There’s everything from games to productivity apps, all of which make the Apple Watch useful, rather than just another gadget.
Which Apple Watch is right for you?
Pocket-lint
Best travel Apple Watch apps
British Airways
If you fly a lot with British Airways, having your flight details on your wrist when at the airport is very handy. The BA Apple Watch app will provide you with gate details, whether the plane is on time and what the status of the flight is. It even goes as far as telling you the weather at your destination.
Citymapper
Citymapper’s approach to its Apple Watch app is to let you quickly see the status of nearby public transport at the press of a few buttons. It will also give you directions to your work address, or any saved addresses that you have preset using your iPhone using available public transport from your location and you can see real-time departures too. Quick and simple.
Uber
The Uber Apple Watch app is simple but effective. It doesn’t offer as many features as your phone, such as fare estimates, but it will allow you to request and Uber from your wrist without touching your phone. It will tell you how long the wait is for an Uber, switching between the various car choices.
Apple Maps
Apple Maps doesn’t have the best reputation but this app works well on the Apple Watch. You can ask Siri to direct you to a location using your Watch and the Apple Maps app will open, find the location and give you the option to press start. It will then give you step-by-step instructions on your wrist, vibrating to alert you when the next turn is coming up. No iPhone necessary.
XE Currency
XE Currency is a handy little app for those that travel and want to know how much something is in a different currency. Australian Dollars, British Pounds, Canadian Dollars, Chinese Yuan, Euro, Japanese Yen and US Dollars are all available currencies, among others. Type in an amount into any of them on your wrist and it will convert it into all the others instantly.
Elk
Elk is another good currency converter app. It knows where you are and will automatically pick the right currency for you, along with a starting value. You can then swipe left to increase the values, swipe right to decrease them, or tap on a value for more accuracy. There is a free version, as well as a paid for version with access to all currencies.
iTranslate
Another for those that travel, or even for those just going on holiday. The iTranslate app will translate the words spoken into it when the microphone is pressed into the language you request at the bottom. There are numerous languages available and the translations are pretty accurate from our experience. It will allow you to order a beer or find out where the toilet is at least.
Pocket-lint
Best productivity Apple Watch apps
PCalc
If you remember and loved Casio’s calculator watch, PCalc is a must-have app for the Apple Watch. As you might guess, it is a calculator on your wrist. It’s nice and simple, allowing you to add, subtract, divide and multiply, as well as calculate percentages directly from your wrist. There is a Lite version that is free, but the paid version includes a paper tape, engineering and scientific notation, making it more useful than Apple’s own calculator for Apple Watch.
Evernote
The Evernote Apple Watch app allows you to record voice notes on your Apple Watch, which are then translated into text and synced to your Evernote account to make sure you don’t forget any lightbulb moments. You can also see your previous notes but you can’t edit them or the voice note translation text. This app is purely for barking instructions rather than editing that novel you are writing, and rightly so.
Noted
Noted is an audio recording and note taking app that allows you to record directly from your Apple Watch. You can start recording with one tap, pause recording and add a Time Tag. The Time Tag feature is brilliant for pin pointing the more exciting parts of a recording so you can access it quickly later on your iPhone.
Things 3
Things 3 is a paid-for organiser and reminder app with a lovely design. You can add new To-Dos directly from your wrist and tick off the ones you’ve done. The app follows the Apple Ring look, showing you how close you are to completing your To-Dos for that day. It’s a great one for those that love to be organised.
Pacemaker
Pacemaker is a very basic DJ app that creates music mixes automatically from your iPhone and then allows you to add effects via four preset options on your watch. Effects include distorting the music, making it sound like it is under water, and smashing up the music. It’s simple but fun and paired with a Bluetooth speaker makes things even more interesting.
Pocket-lint
Best information Apple Watch apps
Weather
There are numerous apps you can download for the Apple Watch when it comes to weather but we found the native Apple weather app was perfectly adequate at providing quick and easy information on our wrist. For each place you have set up on the iPhone, the Apple Watch weather app will show you the hourly expected outlook. It’s easy to read and understand and it’s quick to access.
Carrot Weather
If you fancy a more exciting take on the weather, the Carrot Weather Apple Watch app is fabulous. It offers access to current, hourly and daily forecasts but it delivers them with dialogue and characters, making things much more interesting. You can also disable the personality if it becomes too much.
Dark Sky
Another weather app, but this one is like magic. Dark Sky creates forecasts for your precise location, offering minute-by-minute predictions for the next hour and hour-by-hour forecasts for the next day and week. It will literally tell you to the minute if you’re about to get rained on.
Find Near Me
The Find Near Me app allows you to find various amenities nearby where you are from your wrist. The list is pretty comprehensive with everything from ATMs and cafes to beauty salons and book stores. Tap on what you need to find and a list of results will appear on your arm, each of which you can then tap on for more information and even directions.
Shazam
If you’ve used Shazam you’ll know how it works. You hear a track, fumble for your phone, and try to tap listen before the song finishes. With the Shazam Apple Watch app, you can simply slide up from a Glance, press the listen button and you’re capturing the tune before you know it. The Apple Watch app then gives you the option to buy the track on iTunes using Apple’s Handoff feature.
Night Sky
Night Sky is a great app for identifying stars, planets, constellations and satellites in the night sky. Ever wondered which one Orion’s Belt is? Just point your Apple Watch at the sky and it will direct you to it, after which you can explore the object in AR on your iPhone.
Onefootball
An essential app for the football fans out there. Onefootball allows you to follow thousands of teams and hundreds of leagues and competitions worldwide. You can select your favourite players, clubs, national teams and leagues to get instant content and scores that matter to you when they happen.
ESPN
Another great app for the sports fan, the ESPN Apple Watch app gives you quick access to scores across football, cricket, F1, NBA, NFL, tennis, golf, MLB and more. Like Onefootball, you can personalise the app to get alerts for your favourite teams and leagues.
Yelp
Yelp is a local guide to helps you find restaurants, bars, salons, coffee shops and plenty more near by. You’ll be able to see reviews, price range, opening hours and the address directly from your wrist. Perfect for when you’re in a new area.
Pocket-lint
Best health and fitness Apple Watch apps
FiiT
FiiT lets you stream hundreds of workouts, with options including HIIT, strength training, kettlebell, dumbbell, yoga, postnatal recovery and more. Signing up to a membership (£20/month) gives you unlimited access to 10, 25 and 40 minutes classes with personal trainers, whenever you want. Start a workout on your iPhone and you’ll see your heart rate come up on your Apple Watch, along with a leaderboard on the next screen.
Runkeeper
If you are wearing the Apple Watch for fitness, Runkeeper is a good one to download. It allows you to start the app straight from your wrist, without even looking at your iPhone. Open the app, press “start running” and off you go. Once you’ve started running you can check a number of stats, including overall time, distance covered and pace.
Strava
Strava is an excellent app and the Apple Watch version is great. Like others, Strava allows you to start an activity from your wrist, such as an outdoor ride or run, or indoor run. It will then offer time, splits, distance and heart rate on your wrist during the workout. All data is transferred to the iPhone app following a workout so you can see more detail.
Streaks Workout
Streaks Workout app is excellent, offering 30 equipment-free exercises to choose from and four different workout lengths comprising six minutes, 12 minutes, 18 minutes or 30 minutes. The Apple Watch will display your heart rate on the display, alongside the exercise, time and your progress. Super simple to use, but expect some serious pain.
Gymaholic
The Gymaholic Workout Tracker uses AR to create an avatar, which you can then change to represent your gender, height and body fat percentage. After a workout, the avatar will show all the muscles you trained and it will also show which muscles are ready for training too. During a workout, you’ll see various stats, including reps, weight, heart rate and calories, alongside your avatar. It’s great.
MapMyRun
MapMyRun is another good Apple Watch app for those into fitness. It allows you to start a running, cycling or walking workout without touching your iPhone. During the workout, you will be able to see duration, distance and calories burned, as well as pause, finish, save or discard the workout. The information is then visible in the MapMyRun iPhone app.
Runtastic
Runtastic allows you to track various activities from running to biking, see a brief history of your previous workouts and monitor your stats from your wrist. The app will track workouts in real time with built-in GPS and during a workout, it will display time, distance, pace and heart rate. It is also possible to manage tracking settings directly from your Apple Watch.
Withings Health Mate
For those that use the Withings ecosystem, the Withings Apple Watch app is good for providing quick stats in a simple format. If you have a Withings activity and sleep tracker, as well as one of its smart scales, the Apple Watch app will show you steps and distance, sleep recorded and weight recorded. You can also see your activity and weight history without opening the app on your phone.
Seven
Seven is another workout app and the Apple Watch version is lovely and simple. You can pretty much do everything on your wrist as you can on your phone. The Apple Watch app allows you to select which seven-minute workout you want to do, whether that’s full body, upper body, core, lower body or random, depending on which workouts you’ve bought or unlocked, and then you can just hit start. A picture of the exercise you need to perform appears on the watch face, surrounded by a countdown circle.
Hole19
Hole19 is the Apple Watch app for golfers. You’ll need to start a round on your iPhone after which the Watch will take the information and deliver it to you when you need it, such as distances and the par of the hole. The app also allows you to enter strokes and putts via your wrist, which it then puts into a score card so you can see how you’re doing nice and easily.
Autosleep
Autosleep does exactly what it says on the tin – it automatically tracks your sleep if you wear your Apple Watch to bed. You don’t need to press a single button. Wear your Apple Watch to sleep and you’ll get a notification in the morning detailing how well you’ve slept, including quality, average heart rate and deep sleep. The app will also show your seven-day average.
One Drop
One Drop is a great app for those with diabetes. It enables you to log glucose, meds, food and activity directly from your wrist, as well as view daily goals progress and glucose in range. You can also schedule medication reminders and there is automatic carb counting too.
Pocket-lint
Best Apple Watch games
Trivia Crack
No list of apps would be complete without a couple of games and Trivia Crack is one of our favourites. It’s a very basic version of Trivial Pursuit but if you’re any good at general knowledge, it’s a great app to try. You compete with an online opponent and choose from six categories of questions. Answers are multiple choice, which you select on your wrist and you don’t even need to get your iPhone out to start a game.
Brainess
Brainess is all about stimulating your brain and it offers seven brain training games that you can play on your Apple Watch. The games include memorising and tapping dice, choosing the correct number to complete a maths equation and matching pairs of identical cards. The seven games are said to improve and exercise your memory, vision and compute skills. Whether they will or not is a different story altogether but worth a try right.
Rules
Rules is a puzzle game with super cute little animations. There are different levels, comprising beginner, expert or timeless and the game includes a daily brain workout mini-game for the Apple Watch.
Lifeline 2
Lifeline 2 is the successor to the original Lifeline, offering a new story of a young woman called Arika who is on a deadly quest to avenge her parents and rescue her long-lost brother. You will have to make choices to keep her alive and help her succeed.
Pocket-lint
Best finance Apple Watch apps
Wallet
Wallet is one of Apple’s own apps so you’d expect it to be good on the Apple Watch and it is. Like the iPhone version, it provides easy access to boarding passes, tickets and cards you’ve registered to Apple Pay. Having your boarding pass and tickets on your wrist means you don’t have to mess about getting your phone out, which is always good when travelling and you can also pay using your wrist.
Pennies
There are plenty of apps trying to help you stay on top of your finances but we’ve taken a liking to the Pennies Apple Watch app, which lets you quickly tap in how much you’ve spent of a given budget target straight on your wrist. It means you can then track how much you’ve got left, whether that’s keeping an eye on your weekly food bill, or as we would like to imagine, your champagne bar bill.
Pocket-lint
Best smart home Apple Watch apps
Philips Hue
The Philips Hue app is a simple remote control that lets you have a number of lighting presets that you can then control directly from your watch. You don’t even need to pick up your iPhone to turn the lights on now, let alone move from the sofa.
IFTTT
IFTTT (If This Then That) is compatible with over 600 apps from Twitter and Instagram to Nest and Hive. The Apple Watch app doesn’t allow you to create new Applets, such as turn the lights on at sunset, but download various Widgets through the main IFTTT iPhone app and you can activate any of them through the Apple Watch app.
Neato
Got a Neato robot vacuum cleaner? The Neato Apple Watch app allows you to start and stop and clean. You can’t get the Neato robot to return to the dock or anything from your wrist so it’s basic functionality, but it’s still a useful app to start that quick clean.
Hive
The Hive Apple Watch app not only allows you to control your Hive thermostat, but you can also control any Hive lights or plugs than you have.
Pocket-lint
Best social media Apple Watch apps
Facebook Messenger
Facebook might not be available for Apple Watch but Messenger is so you can get access to all your Facebook Messenger chats. You’ll be able to reply with stickers, or a voice recording or a pre-written message so you can stay in touch without having to get your phone out at all.
Chirp for Twitter
Chirp for Twitter is pretty much the only way you’ll be using Twitter on your Apple Watch. The app allows you to browse your timeline, lists, like and retweet things. You can also see quotes, pictures, hashtags and mentions directly from your wrist.
Writing by Britta O’Boyle. Editing by Max Freeman-Mills.
Netflix’s The Liberator almost didn’t get made. The four-episode miniseries, now streaming, was initially envisioned as an eight-episode drama for the History Channel. The story — both in that version and the one that exists now — was based on the true story of the “Thunderbirds” battalion, a group of US forces that spent 500 straight days in combat in 1943. Unfortunately, the production costs of staging a grand war epic proved prohibitive for the History Channel, which led to its eventual rebirth on Netflix as an animated series quite unlike anything you’ve seen before.
The Liberator is disorienting to watch. Its animation — initially a cost-saving measure, created by the animation house Trioscope — combines live-action performances with computer animation, and it feels like a 21st-century take on rotoscoping (where animators illustrate over live-action footage). Through this process, the Thunderbirds’ struggle through the final years of the war takes on an uncanny quality, as the soldiers look both extremely real and extremely animated, like the entire miniseries is shot through a very expensive Instagram filter. And the animation is quite good at overcoming The Liberator’s flat and clichéd story. (A group of very different young men find brotherhood in combat.)
In this regard, The Liberator is in good company. American entertainment about war — particularly both World Wars — is now often discussed in terms of scale, scope, and technical mastery, while their subject matter doesn’t demonstrate much interest in grappling with history beyond very straightforward narratives about young valorous men standing nobly against fascism. It’s a machine in service of building a better war movie by forgetting the reason we made them in the first place.
Last year, Sam Mendes’ 1917 won Academy Awards for its cinematography and special effects, as the way it was filmed — carefully and thrillingly crafted to appear as two continuous takes with only one break in the middle — became its calling card. (The story was almost beside the point: in this one, a soldier faces impossible odds to deliver a letter.) Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk chronicles one of the most dramatic moments in the European theater of World War II, but it is also seemingly more important to audiences and critics as a Film From The Maker Of The Dark Knight with a clockwork plot and parallel narratives. 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge — which was disgraced director Mel Gibson’s comeback film — is a heavy-handed work lionizing a conscientious objector’s refusal to arm himself as a Christ-like figure. It’s also one of the most harrowing depictions of conflict in the last few years, gory and uncompromising in its spectacle. (Gibson, The New York Times noted, is a “gourmand” of violence.)
There are a number of possible reasons for why war films are the way they are — a thirst for realism in a Hollywood landscape where the only other kind of big-screen spectacle is CG-heavy superhero franchises, maybe, or perhaps because of a latent jingoism in theater audiences. Or it could be even simpler: studios want to make films that are both commercially and critically successful, and war films are the rare genre that has a frequent shot at the trinity of blockbuster appeal, critical acclaim, and awards prestige.
The Liberator isn’t as gripping or memorable as the other works in its category, but it’s playing with a lot of the same emotions and leaning on its technical innovations to captivate jaded audiences. While its blockbuster contemporaries are better crafted and less shopworn narratively speaking, The Liberator seems more interested in recalling its predecessors, like Band of Brothers, than saying anything of note. Like many other shows and movies, it wants to adhere to a pattern set by Saving Private Ryan: a fictional account so indelible it is treated as authentic, simply because of how it looked. For The Liberator, the result feels cheap.
It doesn’t have to, though. One of the most striking war films I saw recently was They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson’s 2018 documentary that painstakingly transformed rarely seen archival footage from World War I — hundred-year-old film in danger of decaying forever — with modern special effects. Impossibly old film is colorized, remastered, retouched, and, in some cases, animated. And then the whole thing is set to excerpts from hours of interviews with veterans.
The result is a work that immerses the viewer in the texture of history, transposing it to a modern scale. It helps you imagine the terrible power of weapons that could kill en masse wielded for the first time; as artillery blasts crater the battlefield and men stand atop the entrails of horses. They Shall Not Grow Old also details propaganda that convinced boys to sign up, and the miserable conditions that awaited them in the theaters of war. It’s a film about men’s worst memories, rendered in high definition for the first time.
“When you see a dead body in full color, you grieve it all the more” wrote columnist Drew Magary in a GQ article about the film, the military-industrial complex, and the American cheapening of war. They Shall Not Grow Old, Magary argues, is a technical feat that serves as a corrective to other popular depictions of war, which are heavy on “pageantry” and light on the horror. We have such dazzling tools at our disposal and a concurrent obligation to use them responsibly — a duty to render the why of war as vividly as the how. To erect monuments and not empty spectacles. To really contemplate what calling something The Liberator might mean.
Today, Amazon filed suit against an influencer and a range of online businesses over an alleged counterfeiting scheme conducted across Instagram and Amazon’s Marketplace platform. According to the complaint filed in federal court in Washington state earlier today, the influencers advertised counterfeit luxury items on their Instagram page to be sold under dummy listings to Amazon Marketplace.
In its complaint, Amazon describes the scheme as “a sophisticated campaign of false advertising for the purpose of evading Amazon’s counterfeit detection tools.”
A @styleeandgrace Instagram post advertising a dummy Marketplace post, as seen in the complaint.
The complaint centers on a Long Island woman named Kelly Fitzpatrick who operated the now-defunct @styleeandgrace Instagram account exploring what she called the “world of dupes.” Investigators say they purchased 12 different counterfeit items through Fitzpatrick (eight Gucci, four Dior), who typically advertised items on Instagram and directed followers to an Amazon link for the final purchase.
Crucially, the Amazon listing typically displayed a different item from the one advertised on Fitzpatrick’s Instagram account. This allowed Fitzpatrick to sell counterfeit goods through apparently legitimate listings, so long as buyers trusted they would receive the item from her Instagram page rather than the one on Amazon. While Amazon scans its own platform for images of counterfeits, it was often unaware of the Instagram posts offering counterfeits, and thus had no reason to flag the listing.
Fitzpatrick didn’t make or ship the counterfeits herself; that fell to a range of Chinese companies, many of which are named as co-defendants. Fitzpatrick would receive payment through Amazon’s affiliate program, which gives influencers and websites (including this one) a small percentage of purchases that they refer. Fitzpatrick was eventually banned from the program after being linked to counterfeit listings. She launched multiple other accounts attempting to evade the ban but was unsuccessful.
The case is being brought by Amazon without the assistance of prosecutors, and there are no criminal charges associated with the claim. As a result, the defendants are only faced with monetary damages and a permanent ban from Amazon’s various platforms. It is the result of work by the company’s internal Counterfeit Crimes Unit, launched in June 2020.
The director of the unit, Cristina Posa, described the scheme as a sign of the dangers of unmonitored platforms. “These defendants were brazen about promoting counterfeits on social media and undermined the work of legitimate influencers,” she said in a statement. “This case demonstrates the need for cross-industry collaboration in order to drive counterfeiters out of business.”
Facebook’s latest take on a signature Snapchat feature is arriving today, and it’s called Vanish Mode. First announced as part of its big September redesign of Messenger, Vanish Mode is an ephemeral messaging mode for both Facebook Messenger and Instagram that will you let you send texts, photos, voice messages, emoji, and stickers that disappear immediately once they’re viewed by other parties and the chat window is closed.
Some users may have already noticed Vanish Mode in the chat settings on Messenger, as Facebook has been rolling out it slowly to some users since the redesign was announced two months ago. And on Instagram, some elements of Vanish Mode are already part of the core direct messaging feature set, including disappearing photos and videos once a piece of media has been viewed. Vanish Mode is similar in ways to Messenger’s existing secret conversation mode that lets you enter an end-to-end encrypted chat that’s saved only on your device, although the new mode is designed to delete anything sent forever once it’s been viewed.
Image: Facebook
For Facebook, ephemeral messaging still represents a way to attract younger smartphone users who have flocked to chat apps and platforms where they don’t have to post publicly and risk being haunted by social media posts later on in life. While Snapchat popularized ephemeral messaging among US teens with Stories and its DM design, Facebook has since adopted many of its rival’s features and implemented them throughout Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp for users of all age groups around the world.
Vanish Mode is just the latest of Facebook’s takes on the trend and a notable addition considering CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced last year his company would strategically shift away from the News Feed and public posts and more toward private messaging and groups.
Vanish Mode will appear in both apps as a distinct option you can turn on and off in the settings of any particular chat message or group thread. You can also enter the mode by swiping up on a chat window. The mode will then enable disappearing messages and other chat interactions, with the option to turn it off located at the top of the chat window or by swiping down again.
Facebook says the mode will be opt-in only, meaning you have to agree to enter Vanish Mode once another user in the chat or group has enabled it. Messenger and Instagram will also notify you when a screenshot of a chat is taken while the mode is enabled. Facebook says you can report individuals over Vanish Mode chat conduct, although it’s unclear how much of the conversation Facebook will be able to review for violations.
Vanish Mode should be available for Messenger in the US as well as some other countries starting today, Facebook says. And it will go live on Instagram in the US and other countries at a later date.
Facebook has released version 9 of the Graph API and the Marketing API. The release brings innovations that require action on the part of the developer. The company is also updating some API guidelines with the aim of better protecting users and their private data.
Since 10. November 2020, consumer and gaming apps that are submitted for reviewing the application or that switch from development to live mode must have a data deletion callback or a Provide a URL with explicit instructions for users on how to request deletion of their data. Apps that have not gone through this process by the specified date will receive reminder notifications with additional instructions.
Action required by developer Facebook’s goal is to better protect user data. As a result, the company has ordered an annual data usage review for app administrators. This procedure is intended to ensure that API access and data usage comply with the guidelines of the Facebook platform. This requirement apparently ensures that applications that connect advertisers’ CRM systems (Customer Relationship Management) to the Facebook API lose the ability to retrieve and pass on data from Lead Ads campaigns.
Developers who use the current version of the Graph API and want to continue to retrieve Lead Ads form data must complete the app review. This means that business apps must request extended access for permission to get leads before upgrading. Non-business applications must go live and request leads_retrieval permission before upgrading. Developers who do not want to upgrade to Graph API 9 yet have until February 9th 2021 to submit an app review request for leads_retrieval permission.
Change of some API-Policies Facebook had on 22. October changed its Facebook Live policy to protect users from fraudulent and deliberately harmful content posted on Facebook Live. Accordingly, live videos may no longer be prerecorded or looped – both are forbidden by both the Live API and Core Live. Broadcasts via the Live API or Core Live must not contain looping content (videos, static images or video-only for surveys) and all pre-recorded content must be clearly labeled.
The company uses crawlers to ensure that URLs are live and accessible to users using third-party applications. These crawlers are intended to protect privacy. Facebook is also changing its guidelines here: Developers should grant the Facebook crawler access to URLs that are specified in the app’s settings. This includes all developer-controlled URLs, including the Policy URL, Connect URL and other product-specific URLs.
The Instant Games guidelines also receive a Update. According to this, instant Games is prohibited from independently requesting personal or sensitive data from people in an instant game. In addition, by updating the bot policy, developers are instructed to inform users of an automated chat experience, for example with a chat bot, about communication with an automated system. According to the announcement, this change is particularly relevant for the German market.
For information – no action required Facebook informed Instagram users via adjustments to the metrics of the Instagram Insights API, which can lead to a decrease in the number of followers displayed via the API. In addition, the Insights data for the Follower_count metric should only be displayed for the last 30 days. The company also announces that it has also worked on the Instagram Ads API. Accordingly, it is possible for users to take over existing organic Instagram posts and advertise them as advertisements. Facebook also plans to return the Instagram Graph API user ID on the Instagram Ads API and some other endpoints to provide a more consistent developer experience between the Ads and Graph API platforms.
See more Information on the current version of Facebook’s Graph API and Marketing API can be found in the announcement post on the Facebook for Developers blog.
In future, Zendesk users will be able to use the CRM software of the same name to communicate with their customers via Facebook. Specifically, messages can be sent via Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. Furthermore, both providers work together in a partnership to provide new functions of these applications in Zendesk as quickly as possible.
While customers prefer the ones they prefer If you use channels, all messages for the support employee come together in a central application. Bots can also be integrated, which on the one hand process standard inquiries and automatically escalate other issues to the team. These bots can be created with self-service tools without having to resort to developers.
Customer information always available Also stores Zendesk has all the data of the customer concerned in one place, so the support does not have to request information multiple times – the course and context of the conversation should always be available. If necessary, several employees can also be included in the conversation, as with a delivery service, which means that inquiries can be answered in real time.
Upon request Connect Zendesk and WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger from Facebook with internal applications and those from third-party developers. All information on the new functions and the partnership between the two providers can be found at zendesk.de. In addition, Zendesk has been offering an integration of Apple’s Business Chat since July 2020.
One of the great advantages of the new ARM Macs, which Apple will probably introduce on Tuesday evening, is the fact that they can also run iOS and iPadOS applications without changes. Apple has specially integrated routines into macOS 11 aka Big Sur, which make touchscreen programs usable on the Mac. The code itself does not have to be changed, after all, the iPhone and iPad also run on Apple’s ARM chips. However, Apple has built in a barrier: not every iOS or iPadOS app will run automatically. Instead, the group offers its developers to prevent execution on the Mac.
A common app store for all programs You can recognize in Apple’s new App Store, which is now merged with Apple Silicon on Macs. As 9to5Mac reports, various well-known developers have decided not to release their iOS or iPadOS apps for the Mac at first .
By default, programs always appear in the “Unified App Store”. But there is an opt-out option that developers can easily choose. This applies to the official Facebook app as well as to its daughters Instagram and WhatsApp. The iOS version of Messenger doesn’t run on the Mac either.
Facebook and Google don’t want Google doesn’t always go along with it either: Google Maps, Google Drive and Gmail are annoyingly missing. Well-known games such as “Real Racing 3”, “Candy Crush” or “Among Us” also remain outside. Among others, “Subway Surfers” and “Temple Run” are available. Netflix is probably participating in streaming services, but Amazon Prime Video and Disney + are missing. Apparently, Snapchat will also not be available.
If an app is available for iPhone and iPad, but not for Mac, the download is of course only possible on these devices. Otherwise, Apple states that the app was designed for iPhone or iPad, but runs on macOS, although it is “not verified”. It remains to be seen what problems iOS and iPadOS applications will actually cause on an ARM Mac. Apple promises at least broad compatibility. However, certain features are simply missing – in addition to the missing touchscreen, a Mac, for example, has no cell phone chip, at least according to the current status.
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.
If you asked me which of the four different models of the new iPhone 12 you should buy without providing any further context on your needs or desires, I would tell you to buy the regular iPhone 12 without question. It has the best balance of screen size, storage, cameras, battery life, and value. It is, in my opinion, the best iPhone 12 for most people.
But the iPhone 12 mini is my favorite.
For the first time in many years, Apple is making an intentionally small phone. The key, though, is that unlike other small phones, Apple isn’t putting worse parts in it. The iPhone 12 mini has all the same features as the larger iPhone 12. It has the same cameras, same processor, same everything save for two things: screen size and battery life.
The iPhone 12 mini starts at $729 for a 64GB model in the US, but $50 more gets the 128GB model and that’s a much better option. It’s a small phone, but it’s not a cheap phone.
Read more: iPhone 12 Pro Max review.
The iPhone 12 mini
iPhone 12 mini hardware
It’s traditional to refer to phones by their screen size and for the iPhone 12 mini, that number is 5.4 inches diagonally. But that number doesn’t tell the story at all. The phone is smaller than the traditional 4.7-inch-home-button iPhone design we saw from the iPhone 6 on through the 6S, 7, 8, and 2020 SE models, even though the screen itself is larger.
That’s because the 12 mini, just like the rest of the iPhone 12 line, has switched over to Apple’s more modern OLED screens and Face ID notch for unlocking. Those two features allow Apple to design the phone with minimal bezels and maximal screen.
Despite the smaller screen size, you don’t miss out on as much as you might expect. Compared to the regular iPhone 12 with a 6.1-inch screen, there are maybe one or two lines of text that are cut off. What you actually miss out on is that sense of immersion you can get from a bigger screen when you’re playing a game or watching a movie. Those were the only times this screen felt cramped.
If there is a knock on the screen, it’s that it doesn’t offer a high refresh rate like many Android phones — including the Pixel 5, which isn’t too far off from the iPhone 12 mini’s size. I’m more annoyed that the Pro iPhones don’t have it, though — here on the mini, I think battery life is more important.
To me, the iPhone 12 mini is most reminiscent of the iPhone 5. Yes, it is bigger and has a glass rear panel instead of aluminum, but it shares the squared-off aluminum sides and general feeling of being an object that was designed to be proportional to your hand. This is a phone that you can get a grip on, literally.
The phone feels well built, with tight tolerances and subtle touches like carefully beveled edges. The rear glass is glossy and the rails are matte — on our black review unit the rails have a kind of slate finish instead of being true black. The camera bump on the back and the Face ID notch on the front are proportionally big compared to the smaller size of the phone, but not annoyingly so.
Because it’s a bit narrower, it’s easier to reach the opposite side of the screen with your thumb. Because it’s a bit shorter, a lot of people will be able to reach the top for the swipe-down gestures without contorting their hands into awkward claws or risking dropping the phone.
It has a much, much better chance of fitting into small pockets — the kind that are all too common on pants designed for women.
As a man with big pockets and big hands, I do not have the strongest feelings about why it’s been so frustrating not to have a small iPhone option. But I sympathize with those who do and agree with the sentiment 100 percent — I’m glad Apple recognized it and I hope other phone companies do what they often do and follow Apple’s lead.
iPhone 12 mini (left) and iPhone 12 (right)
iPhone 12 mini battery and performance
Apple chose to make the iPhone 12 mini hew closely to the features and specs of the regular iPhone 12. It’s a laudable goal, but as I used it I found myself second-guessing that decision a little bit.
It’s corny to say I’m impressed by how much Apple packed into such a small space — but I am. The iPhone 12 mini has the fastest processor on any phone, it has the same dual-camera system as the iPhone 12, and most remarkably it has all the components and antennas necessary for both sub-6 and (in the US) mmWave 5G. It is fast, multitasks well, and doesn’t feel like a compromise when you use it. It really is an amazing feat of technology.
It’s amazing until the battery dies, anyway.
I don’t want to sugarcoat it nor be overly dire about it, but the battery life on the iPhone 12 mini is noticeably worse than on the iPhone 12, which itself was a step down from the battery-champ iPhone 11. For me, it’s good enough, but it does mean I’m already using it differently than I use bigger phones.
Without making any effort at it, I have consistently drained the iPhone 12 mini’s battery by early evening. I’d say it’s fair to expect the 12 mini to clock up something near four hours of screentime with stuff like web browsing, Facebook, and taking photos. Intense games give you a chance to watch the battery percent tick down minute by minute.
So it’s not bad, but it’s definitely not great. My feeling after a little less than a week is that getting through a day requires a little bit of battery management. Holding yourself back from putting an hour into an Apple Arcade game, knowing where your next opportunity to charge might be, and above all being more willing to turn on the low power mode.
Of course it works with Apple’s new magnet-based MagSafe system for cases and wireless charging. Using MagSafe, the iPhone 12 mini maxes out at 12W wireless charging instead of the 15W you get on the larger iPhones, but since the battery is smaller, the overall charge time ends up being about the same.
Exactly how small is small? Apple never provides exact battery size specs — and I get the reasoning even though I disagree with it. Lots of factors affect battery life, and the iPhone 12 mini has the benefit of a smaller OLED screen. But it also has 5G.
The reality of 5G in the US continues to be very different from the hype. It’s radically dependent on which network you’re on and what part of the country or city you’re in. Often the speeds are equivalent to LTE. If you stand out on the right street corner and get mmWave, you can indeed get speeds that are astonishing — until you walk down the street and they drop back to the same LTE we’ve used for years.
I often have to remind people that phone design isn’t inevitable. Apple chose to keep this iPhone 12 mini the same thickness as the iPhone 12 and it chose to keep the extra parts necessary for mmWave 5G. I would rather lose both of those things in exchange for a bigger battery.
The iPhone 12 mini has a regular wide and an ultrawide camera.
iPhone 12 mini cameras
The iPhone 12 mini has the exact same camera setup as the regular iPhone 12. There’s the 12-megapixel main wide-angle camera with a f/1.6 aperture for letting in more light paired with a somewhat worse 12-megapixel ultrawide camera. Unlike the Pro models, there’s no telephoto lens nor a LIDAR sensor.
I am happy to report that the results are just like the specs: the same. The iPhone 12 mini reverts to Night mode less often than even the iPhone 11 Pro and the Pixel 5. Apple has made some improvements in image processing this year with its A14 Bionic processor that results in more detail in more lighting conditions (aka the Deep Fusion “Sweater Mode”).
It’s a very good camera system, and that’s not usually something I get to say when I’m talking about a smaller phone. Usually smaller means cut corners and the camera is often the place where those corners get cut. Not so here: video is excellent at handling different lighting conditions, portrait mode is usually more than good enough for Instagram, and you can trust the camera to take the photos you expect when you tap the shutter. And you can expect them to get saved quickly.
Next year, though, I hope Apple pays a little more attention to the secondary camera sensors. The selfie camera is fine, but it’s increasingly disappointing compared to the advances on the main camera.
I can take some dramatic shots with the ultrawide — the tree you see above is objectively boring but looks dope with this lens. Still, if you zoom in even a little, you can see that on a technical level the ultrawide is also far behind the main sensor.
The iPhone 12 mini
As I said above, I don’t have ergonomic reasons to need a smaller phone. My advice for most people is to get the regular iPhone 12 for its better battery and bigger screen.
And yet, I love the iPhone 12 mini. It is my favorite of the new iPhone 12 models. Despite real concerns with the battery, it’s the one I have decided to get for myself.
For me, the reason to prefer the iPhone 12 mini is hard to state in words, but I’ll give it a shot. With every phone, you can tell what it was designed around. There’s some key feature that everything else has to contend with, that sets the hardware narrative. For many years now, that feature was the screen. Making it big, bright, beautiful, and bezel-less was the big thing driving phone design, and all other considerations were secondary.
The iPhone 12 mini feels like the first iPhone in a long time with a different goal. It was designed around the human hand and real pockets. It is an object that doesn’t aim to be judged against other smartphones (which are mostly big now), but to be judged simply as an object you need to hold. You judge a spatula or can opener or whatever by whether it’s easy to grip, by whether it fits in your hand. It’s about time we got back to judging smartphones that way, too.
That design decision means that other things — like battery life — are secondary. But it’s nevertheless a strange kind of relief to hold it. You know the feeling when a buzzing noise you’d grown accustomed to suddenly stops and you realize you’ve been annoyed all day but couldn’t say why? It’s like that.
Whether we admit it or not (and whether we hate it or not), we’ve subtly been adapting ourselves to ever-growing phone sizes. The iPhone 12 mini is adapted to us.
In November 2020 the course for the future will be set. Almost as important for gamers as the almost simultaneous decision about the highly competitive job in the White House is the release of the new Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X consoles.
While the first Playstation still fought with Nintendo, Sega and many other manufacturers, only the Xbox has been technically on par with the second generation. For two decades now, Microsoft and Sony have been wrestling for the crown in the field of high-end gaming consoles.
Today’s quiz not only requires knowledge of games or technology – also some historical milestones and You need some anecdotal knowledge to be well prepared for the quiz before the weekend! The latest articles on Playstation vs. Xbox and also a look at the current coverage of the Xbox Series X / S and the Playstation.
So upgrade the last information via Friday Day One patch and then start quizzing!
The clock is relentless in the fight for the right answers, but as always rewards quick decisions with more points. Overall, you can earn 300 points in 15 questions! Please keep the correct answers to yourself so that the others can also enjoy the puzzle. However, you are welcome to share your score, praise or criticism as usual in the forum, on Twitter and on Facebook under #tgiqf. It is also always worth visiting us on Instagram.
Thanks for all the quiz tips from the community so far! As always, the quiz master is happy to receive an email if you have an idea for a great quiz. (mawi)
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
