keyword: iPhone 11

iPhone 12’s Ceramic Shield costs the same $279 to replace as iPhone 11 Pro’s glass

Apple’s new ‘Ceramic Shield’ front glass on the iPhone 12 series is heralded as being 4 times harder to break than the glass on the iPhone 11. But should you break it, Apple will charge you the same $279 to replace it as it did the iPhone 11 Pro’s glass.

The iPhone 12’s new OLED display also costs $279, which is $80 more expensive to replace than last year’s iPhone 11’s LCD panel.

Apple has listed the repair cost of the new 6.1-inch iPhone 12 and 12 Pro and will detail the same for the 5.4-inch iPhone 12 mini and 6.7-inch iPhone 12 Pro Max when those go on pre-order next month.

Typically the largest iPhone commands a higher cost of repair, $329 for the iPhone XS Max and last year’s 11 Pro Max, so we expect the 12 Pro Max to cost the same to fix. Whether Apple charges less for the 12 mini remains to be seen.

The cost to repair other damage (such as liquid damage) has remained $549 from the iPhone 11 Pro to the 12 Pro, but has grown from $399 on the iPhone 11 to $449 on the

Kuo: iPhone 12 and 12 Pro pre-orders total 7-9 million, with 2 million ordered on the first day

Pre-orders for the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro went live this Friday and famed analyst Ming-Chi Kuo from TF Securities estimates that the two models saw between 7 and 9 million pre-orders in total before the weekend was over.

To put that in perspective, Apple’s estimates show that the entire iPhone 11 line-up brought in 10-12 million pre-orders during launch week last year. The 2019 models moved 500,000 to 800,000 units in the first 24 hours while just the two iPhone 12 models hit an estimated 1.7 to 2 million units in the same time frame.

Kuo notes that the pre-orders for the iPhone 12 Pro beat analysts’ expectations as Apple’s core user base prefers high-end models, but also because there’s strong demand in China, the US and Europe.

The analyst expects the iPhone 12 Pro Max and 12 mini to sell in more moderate quantities, but still the four models combined will make for a stellar year for Apple.

Kuo’s forecast suggests that the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro will each account for 30-35% of the total 12-series shipments. Of the other two, the Pro Max will be slightly more popular (15-20%) than the mini (10-15%). Early expectations were for the mini to play a bigger role in shipments, but low dem

Apple should switch the iPhone to USB-C if it really wants to help the environment

If you buy an iPhone in the future, you’re not getting an included charging brick or earbuds. Apple says the reasons are environmental. Giving out fewer “free” accessories with every phone means using less materials, the company claims, and also makes for smaller boxes that can be shipped more efficiently. So going forward, those boxes will just come with a phone and a Lightning to USB-C cable.

I think Apple’s approach is generally a good thing, but it should have gone further by switching away from its proprietary Lightning port entirely and fully embracing USB-C. Right away, that Lightning to USB-C cable would turn into a much more useful USB-C to USB-C cable that could charge basically all of your electronics. Or better still, Apple could remove the cable entirely and just ship the phone by itself, eliminating even more duplicitous waste.

It’s a relatively small change for each person buying an iPhone, but it’s massive when you consider the fact that Apple shipped almost 200 million iPhones over the past year, according to IDC. Chargers might make up a relatively small proportion of total e-waste, as Wired notes, but on a global basis, that’s still tens of thousands of metric tons annually. And as the lack of headphone jacks on 2020’s flagship smartphones shows, Apple’s decisions also have a huge influence on the rest of the industry.

Apple argues no charging brick makes for smaller, more efficient, packaging.
Image: Apple

USB-C is already becoming the standard

I’ll be the first to admit that USB-C isn’t a perfect standard. Its naming scheme has been a mess (the current USB standard is called USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 for chrissake), and there are so many bad USB-C cables in the wild that some people have made it their mission to root out the worst of them. To borrow a famous turn of phrase, USB-C is the worst connection standard… except for all the others. But it’s also the best one yet created.

In 2020, USB-C is about as universal as wired connection standards come. It’s used by over-ear headphones, true wireless earbuds, VR headsets, tablets (including some of Apple’s), laptops (including all of Apple’s) and laptop accessories. It’s used by game consoles like the Nintendo Switch, and it’ll be used with both the PS5 and the Xbox Series X’s controllers when those consoles ship next month. USB-C batteries are becoming commonplace and chargers are getting tiny and extremely capable — with up to 100 watts, a powerful battery or a charger the size of a deck of playing cards can sometimes power a laptop, tablet, and phone all at once.

Not only is USB-C used almost everywhere, it’s also hard to name something that Lightning actually does better. Longtime Apple blogger John Gruber has argued in the past that it’s a more elegant and slightly thinner port which… sure, maybe? But is that enough reason to maintain the status quo if Apple cares as much about the environment as it claims?

You probably already have a USB-C charger

Apple’s core argument for taking the charger out of the box is that it avoids piling on accessories that a lot of people already own. During its presentation, Apple estimated that there are 2 billion of its power adapters out in the world, and “billions” of third-party chargers.

But let’s put that into perspective. According to IDC, Apple commanded just 13.9 percent of the global smartphone market in 2019, shipping close to 200 million phones last year. Meanwhile, the rest of the industry combined shipped over a billion phones over the course of just a single year, and most of those devices used USB-C. That’s a lot of people who already have everything they need to charge a hypothetical USB-C iPhone, including both charging bricks and USB-C cables. And it doesn’t include all the people who bought other USB-C devices like headphones, laptops, and tablets, including recent MacBook and iPad Pro devices.

All of that means that if you really want to, you can absolutely sell a USB-C smartphone without any charging accessories at all. That’s what ethical smartphone manufacturer Fairphone does. Inside the box for its most recent phone, the Fairphone 3 Plus, you’ll find no headphones, no USB-C charging cable, and no USB-C charging brick. Instead there’s a small screwdriver, so that when the time comes, you’ll be theoretically able to repair the phone for yourself rather than having to throw it out.

A slightly weird halfway house

There are serious questions to be asked about how positive an environmental impact Apple’s existing plan is actually going to have. A big part of Apple’s pitch is that there are already billions of power adapters out there, but it’s likely that a significant portion of them use the USB-A standard, which is incompatible with the Lightning to USB-C cable Apple now packs into the box for faster charging speeds. Apple only started putting USB-C power adapters in the box last year, and even then it was limited to the Pro models, meaning the vast majority of iPhones sold came with a USB-A brick bundled in.

USB-C charging bricks only started getting bundled with last year’s iPhone 11 Pro.
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

I’m not saying there’ll be no environmental impact. With the iPhone 12, a lot of people will still be able to reuse their existing USB-A to Lightning charging cables and USB-A power bricks, regardless of the new cable they get in the box. But then what’s the point of that Lightning to USB-C cable, particularly if you wind up switching to Apple’s MagSafe wireless chargers instead? If it were a USB-C to USB-C cable, at least you could use it with other gadgets. Apple could have a much bigger environmental impact in the long run by eliminating its proprietary Lightning port entirely.

Apple’s argument

We already know what Apple thinks about potentially switching to USB-C connectors, because it put out a statement on this very topic earlier this year. The statement came in response to EU efforts to mandate a common charger for all smartphones, and Apple argued that a switch to USB-C would actually be worse for the environment overall, by rendering hundreds of millions of Lightning accessories obsolete. Here’s the relevant part of the statement it issued in January (emphasis added):

“More than 1 billion Apple devices have shipped using a Lightning connector in addition to an entire ecosystem of accessory and device manufacturers who use Lightning to serve our collective customers. Legislation would have a direct negative impact by disrupting the hundreds of millions of active devices and accessories used by our European customers and even more Apple customers worldwide, creating an unprecedented volume of electronic waste and greatly inconveniencing users.”

There absolutely are a lot of Lightning accessories out there. But the argument rings hollow given Apple’s own history of obviating all those 30-pin iPod docks and early iPhone peripherals when it switched to Lightning in 2012. Instead of sending them straight to the dump, Apple and others sold 30-pin to Lightning adapters to extend the usefulness of those legacy accessories for years. Apple and its partners can surely now do the same in order to preserve all those Lightning devices. Yes, it would create a one-time glut of adapters that would eventually end up in landfills, but it’s the short-term price to pay for the long-term benefits of convergence.

Same pain, more gain

As someone who has a whole drawer filled with spare power adapters I never use, I’m sympathetic to what Apple is trying to achieve with the iPhone 12. Giving out duplicate accessories with every new phone really isn’t sustainable if we want to try and cut down on the estimated 53.6 million metric tons of

Immune: could the coronavirus application become mandatory for everyone?

The dpcm issued yesterday evening provides local health authorities with the obligation to upload the key code in the Immuni app in case of positive patient and therefore user. However, the idea is also to make it mandatory to download the application to be able to have a truly effective tracking.

by Bruno Mucciarelli published , at 13: 06 in the Telephony channel

Yesterday evening the Government released a new Dpcm ready to contain the spread of Coronavirus which in recent weeks has seen infections among Italians grow exponentially, with a trend in growth also for all of Europe. During the press conference of the Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte, it was not directly mentioned but in fact in the text the Immuni app is mentioned which will see a couple of important news since it was introduced.

Immune: what change for the future?

The first thing that comes to light when reading the Dpcm of 19 October 2020 is the fact that the Immune application , which we know as a national app for searching for contact tracing, to make it more effective will oblige the health worker of the Department of Prevention of local health company , by accessing the central system of Immuni, to upload the key code in the presence of a positive case. This means that the decree imposes the functioning of the Immuni system until it becomes operational with the reporting of the positivity in the ASL database and therefore of the ‘ ‘centralone’ ‘by Immuni.

The dpcm therefore requires the code generated by the application to be loaded into the system of those who report their positivity to COVID – previous days. In this case, according to the legislation, the code generated by the application must be taken over by the health worker of the Prevention Department of the Asl, Ats and Usl according to the Regions.

Immune: will download become mandatory?

According to La Stampa, the Premier Conte would have an idea of ​​ make Immuni mandatory to download for all Italian citizens. The idea would have come from the political leader Crimi of the 5 Star Movement, who would have thought in this way to remove the voluntariness for downloading the app thus allowing in this way (with the obligation) to actually have the possibility to accurately track the positivity of users given the large number of patients, both asymptomatic and not, of the last few weeks.

A proposal that is probably just an idea to be able to plug the wings of the Coronavirus which in recent months has seen its spread dramatically grow. In fact, however, not everyone may have a smartphone available to download the Immuni app. Here in that case, if it became mandatory , it is clear that the government should take charge of those citizens, perhaps by encouraging the purchase of a low-end device that still supports the Immune application. Recall that in Singapore the government has released some smartphones to users on loan to allow the tracking of Coronavirus positives.

We have seen that the Immuni application has been downloaded to date by nearly 9 million users. An important number but still definitely below the estimates for a good tracking of infections. In fact, in recent weeks the number has seen an exponential increase right after the news of the increase in positives in recent times, a sign that citizens are understanding the need to download a technological system such as Immuni that allows for more effective tracking and immediate compared to a manual with the ASL.

At the same time Immuni will allow you to exchange your data tracking with applications from Germany and Ireland for important international cooperation in the case of travel of citizens of the respective European countries. Immuni, in fact, has already been connected to the European Commission system which therefore allows tracing even in countries outside the country of residence. In this case, the application update is imminent, which will make it possible to formalize everything.

The application can be downloaded on both Android and iOS smartphones. For next generation devices of HUAWEI (and therefore also HONOR) the app is coming and will allow, as happens for the other two operating systems, to track the positives through the so-called HMS or HUAWEI services. The application, whether Android, iOS and in the future also HUAWEI, must be downloaded directly from the official website of immuni or from the Google and Apple store, being careful in this second case to download the right application.

  • IMMUNI Official SITE —-> HERE
  • IMMUNI application on ANDROID —> HERE
  • IMMUNI application on iOS —> HERE

We saw in the explanation of the technical details of the Immuni application that on some older smartphones they would not be suitable for installing the application. Specifically, the ‘application can be downloaded and installed on these devices:

  • iOS: iPhone with iOS version 13. 5 or higher. IPhone models that support iOS 13. 5 are iPhone 11, 11 Pro, 11 Pro Max, Xr, Xs, Xs Max, X, SE (second generation), 8, 8 Plus, 7, 7