A Microsoft executive has admitted that the company doesn’t earn any profit on sales of Xbox consoles alone. The admission came as part of the Epic v. Apple trial yesterday, confirming what we’ve known for years: Microsoft sells Xbox consoles at a loss. Asked how much margin Microsoft makes on Xbox consoles, the company’s head of Xbox business development, Lori Wright, said, “We don’t; we sell the consoles at a loss.”
An Epic Games lawyer asked a follow-up question: “Does Microsoft ever earn a profit on the sale of an Xbox console?” Wright replied, “No.” That doesn’t mean Xbox doesn’t make money, though. Microsoft was keen to point this out in a statement to The Verge just hours after Wright’s testimony yesterday.
“The gaming business is a profitable and high-growth business for Microsoft,” says a Microsoft spokesperson. “The console gaming business is traditionally a hardware subsidy model. Game companies sell consoles at a loss to attract new customers. Profits are generated in game sales and online service subscriptions.“
The Xbox Series S.Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
I asked Microsoft whether it never truly makes any margins on hardware alone, but the company didn’t respond in time for publication. Typically, Microsoft and Sony subsidize hardware at the beginning of a console’s lifecycle, but those early component costs tend to decrease over time. Those lower costs also translate to lower retail prices for consoles over time, though.
A teardown analysis of the Xbox One S, for example, revealed an estimated bill of materials of $324, which is $75 less than the $399 launch price for the 2TB version of the console, back in 2016. Microsoft also launched a disc-less version of the Xbox One S two years ago, which was presumably also sold at a loss.
Sony and Microsoft have similar business models for PlayStation and Xbox consoles, but Nintendo is the exception. In court documents, Microsoft estimates that hardware is generating a loss for Sony, but a profit for Nintendo. That’s backed up by Nintendo’s impressive 84.59 million Switch sales this year, up to March 31st.
Why all these costs are being discussed right now is a big part of the ongoing Epic v. Apple trial. Epic isn’t happy about Apple’s 30 percent revenue cut on in-app purchases for Fortnite, but Apple is arguing that Epic should also take issue with Microsoft or Sony’s identical 30 percent cut. It has resulted in hours of testimony about whether the iPhone is more like a PC or an Xbox, and a debate around open platforms versus locked-down ones. Microsoft clearly sees a difference between Xbox and PC, and has only cut the amount it takes on the Windows side to 12 percent, while the Xbox remains at 30 percent.
Microsoft obviously wants to maintain its business model for Xbox, and has attempted to push the industry toward digital games for years. Microsoft has very much sided with Epic Games in the case against Apple, and Epic has admitted it has never even questioned Microsoft’s digital sales cut. But how long this harmony will exist between the pair will very much depend on the future of digital game sales and cloud gaming. Microsoft is increasingly focused on its Xbox Game Pass subscription, which spans across devices that aren’t even Xbox consoles.
Game Pass also includes xCloud, Microsoft’s cloud gaming technology. Fortnite isn’t part of xCloud, because Epic Games won’t allow it. That highlights the emerging battles that are starting to take place in the game industry over shares of revenue. It looks like Microsoft has been preparing for some of them, but Epic v. Apple feels like the beginning of a greater war over the digital future of game stores.
YouTuber Unbox Therapy has got hold of an iPhone 13 Pro Max dummy unit, which seems to have been put together based on leaked schematics. The unofficial (but well-made) model shows how the biggest iPhone 13 could look with a smaller notch and new camera module.
The video, which has racked up 1.4m views since it was posted on 4th May, compares the iPhone 13 Pro Max to the current iPhone 12 Pro Max. The two flagship phones look similar but the 13 Pro Max is thought to be 3mm thicker to accommodate its rumoured 120Hz display.
As for the cameras, the iPhone 13 is expected to sport Apple’s best-ever telephoto zoom lenses, which is why the dummy unit sports a larger camera module. Larger lenses should theoretically capture more light, meaning better-quality photos.
On the front, the iPhone 13’s notch is set to shrink, although it’s not expected to disappear until the launch of the iPhone 14 in 2022. As you can see from the dummy model in the video, the notch could be much less intrusive, freeing up extra space for the status bar.
The notch is almost certain to hold FaceID but there’s also talk of Apple adding a TouchID sensor under the iPhone 13 display. We could even see LiDAR depth-sensing tech rollout to the whole iPhone 13 range (it’s currently only available on the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max).
The iPhone 13 is expected to launch in September 2021, but we wouldn’t count on a foldable iPhone making an appearance. Apple is said to be working on several prototypes, but these are only due out in 2023 according to renowned Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.
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iPhone 14 to boast 8K video, 5.4-inch model to get the chop
If you get annoyed with the number of apps that crowd your iPhone’s home screen, you probably welcomed a feature that came with iOS 14: the App Library, which gathers all of your apps into various categories and displays them on a separate page to the right of your home pages.
The App Library doesn’t only add some automatic organization to your iPhone’s home pages, but allows you to clean up your home screen by hiding as many apps as you want. You can keep your favorites front and center, and get the more utilitarian or less-used apps out of the way. (In fact, one way to keep a clean screen is to have all your newly-installed apps appear in your App Library only — we offer directions on how to do that here.)
If you want to organize your current apps by hiding some of them, there are several ways to do it. You can remove individual apps from the home screen, you can hide an entire screen of apps, or you can organize several apps by putting them into a folder.
Here’s how.
Hide a single app
To hide individual apps:
Press on your selected app until a menu appears. The menu will include a number of options, depending on the app’s features (for example, if I press on an app for Microsoft Teams, the menu will let me make a new call or start a chat). But you will always get an option (in red) to remove the app. Tap on that.
You will now have the choice of deleting the app from the phone or removing it from the home screen. Select the latter. You’ll still find the app in the App Library.
If the app is not already in the App Library, then after you tap “Remove App,” you will instead be given the choice of either deleting the app or moving it to the App Library.
Hide a page of apps
You can also hide an entire page of apps — and get rid of that page — at one blow if you want. And since it’s really easy to also restore that same page, it’s a great way to hide groups of apps that you only use occasionally.
Tap and hold on an empty part of your screen until the apps begin to jiggle
Tap on the dots at the bottom of the screen
You’ll now be able to see small versions of all your screens (except the App Library and Today View). Beneath each visible screen is a checkmark; uncheck any screen you want to hide and tap “Done” in the upper right corner.
To “unhide” any of the screens, follow these same directions and replace the checkmark of the screen that you want to see again.
Use folders to organize apps
You can use folders on the home screen to gather similar apps together and save space. You won’t be completely hiding the apps — they’ll be there. But they’ll be consolidated in a single space.
It’s very simple to create a folder:
Long-press on an app in the home screen until the icons jiggle
Move the app onto one of the other apps you want to group it with
You’ll now have a gray icon that contains the icons for the apps in the folder. Tap on the icon to open the folder and access the apps in it.
iOS will assign a name to the folder depending on what apps you’ve put in it. To change the name, long-press on the folder, and select “Rename” from the pop-up menu. Then type in the new name.
To remove an app from a folder, simply open the folder, long-press the app until it jiggles, and move it out of the folder and to another space on your home screen. If you remove all the apps from a folder, the folder will disappear.
If you want to get rid of a folder, you can also long-press on it and select “Remove Folder.” Any apps that were in the folder can then be found in the App Library.
Safari just doesn’t support key features — and Safari’s the only option
Something keeps coming up at the Epic v. Apple trial as a potential alternative for getting Fortnite on the iPhone: web apps. It’s an intriguing idea, as web apps are able to do surprisingly complex things: just look at a Chromebook or even game streaming services on the iPhone. But potential is far from reality, because the ability for web apps to look, feel, and perform as well as native apps on iOS is severely limited.
These web apps aren’t the preferred way for consumers or developers to use or create apps on the iPhone, either. But Apple has forced companies like Microsoft and Nvidia to use web apps, instead of native ones available in the App Store.
Though the term itself hasn’t really come up explicitly, what’s being discussed are Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs. If you’re unfamiliar, think of them as slightly more advanced web apps that you can “install” directly from your web browser on to your home screen. Google has been pushing the idea (though support for PWAs on its own platforms is a little mixed), and some companies like Microsoft and Twitter have wholeheartedly embraced PWAs.
Not Apple, though. There are a variety of reasons for that — ranging from genuine concern about giving web pages too much access to device hardware to the simple fact that even Apple can’t do everything. There’s also the suspicion that Apple is deliberately dragging its feet on support for features that make PWAs better as a way to drive developers to its App Store instead.
Fortnite running on an iPhone before its removal.Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge
But the App Store has restrictions that aren’t tenable for some developers. That’s the whole crux of this trial for Epic, after all. On the stand, a Microsoft executive detailed the company’s struggles to get its xCloud game streaming service onto iOS. Lori Wright, VP of Xbox business development at Microsoft, revealed the company spent around four months talking to Apple to try and get xCloud launched as a native app. Apple seemed, initially open to the idea of letting Microsoft use the same model as Netflix or Audible. But Apple changed its mind and forced Microsoft, Nvidia, and others to list cloud games as separate apps.
Submitting Xbox games one-by-one was simply a nonstarter for Microsoft, so it resorted to making a web app. In addition to the technical hurdles a web app involves, it also introduces a discoverability issue. Users simply aren’t used to installing apps from the web on their iPhones. Apple has effectively trained everybody that if they want an app, they go to the App Store.
Wright essentially admitted that the only reason Microsoft is releasing Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) as a web app is because Apple’s terms on the App Store are too onerous. “People don’t play games through the browser on iPhone,” said Wright, but “it was our only outcome in order to reach mobile users on iOS.”
Even the judge in the case seemed confused by Apple’s rule, which says that services that stream movies can offer them all in a single app but services that stream games have to separate each game for individual listing and review. “I can use Netflix with a native app and I can see lots of different movies or TV shows or whatever. Is it that you didn’t want to use a subscription model?” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers asked at one point.
Apple has forced Microsoft and others to head to the web for gaming streaming.Photo by Nick Statt / The Verge
But back to those technical hurdles: they’re tall, numerous, and can be blamed both on the nature of web apps and Apple’s own decisions. Safari on the iPhone only recently became capable of supporting a service like Xbox Cloud Gaming via specific controller support. Until then, that sort of thing was on the list of features Apple was reticent to include in Safari. There are legitimate reasons to block things like Bluetooth access from web apps, including fingerprinting for tracking, but it was getting harder to justify and Apple needed some kind of escape valve as pressure mounted to support cloud gaming services.
Google software engineer Alex Russell recently published a very comprehensive list of all the features that Safari on iOS doesn’t support yet — and it’s a long list. For PWAs to truly be a viable alternative to App Store apps, there are at least a few of these features that need to be enabled. The inability to send push notifications via a web app, for example, is particularly galling as it’s already possible on Safari on macOS. An app that can’t send notifications is simply not competitive with an app that can.
Grant is touching on some more of the benefits to native versus web apps; push notifications and ARKit both come up. The former is another example of Apple letting native apps reduce friction points — Epic needs to convince the judge these smaller features are meaningful.
— Adi Robertson (@thedextriarchy) May 5, 2021
As Russell notes, his “interests and biases are plain” as a Google engineer. But it doesn’t change the fact that there are many things that a PWA cannot do on the iPhone that a developer like Epic would need to support Fortnite as a web app.
“Native [iPhone] apps would have access to a far wider range of APIs than web apps,” explained Andrew Grant, engineering fellow at Epic Games, during the trial. “Access to things like push notifications, to Siri, to health data, and augmented reality features” are also limited to native apps, said Grant. Web apps also have to be far smaller than native apps, and are capped at about 50MB in size.
Plus, from a simple performance perspective, web apps have more overhead than native apps — and lack access to Apple APIs that can speed up games like Fortnite.
In fact, this was a sticking point for a lot of the questioning of an Nvidia employee. Nvidia, like Microsoft, has been trying to get its GeForce Now cloud gaming service into the App Store, but has faced the same restrictions that Microsoft is struggling with. Nvidia director of product management Aashish Patel spent a lot of time answering questions around latency in a browser and the benefits of using native apps.
“There are less controls over the streaming, so you could argue in some ways it’s worse,” than a native app, said Patel. Developers are also locked into using the video codecs provided in Safari on iOS, whereas they could use alternatives that might be better at handling latency inside a native iOS app.
All iOS browsers run the same WebKit engine underneath.Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
All of this is compounded by yet another Apple policy: no third party browser engines. You can install apps like Chrome, Firefox, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and others on the iPhone — but fundamentally they’re all just skins on top of Apple’s Webkit engine. That means that Apple’s decisions on what web features to support on Safari are final. If Apple were to find a way to be comfortable letting competing web browsers run their own browser engines, a lot of this tension would dissipate.
As it relates to Epic v. Apple, a lot of this PWA discussion isn’t germane to the fundamental arguments in the case. Fortnite as a PWA would necessarily be a streaming app instead of a native game and that introduces an entirely different set of compromises. Which is why it’s so fascinating to see Apple’s lawyers float web apps as a potential solution — because web apps on the iPhone are famously more limited than they are on other platforms, including even Apple’s macOS.
The human-readable versus machine-readable code bit is back now — Grant is talking about how web apps don’t go through the same kind of compilation process that increases processing efficiency, yet another reason they’re not as good as native apps.
— Adi Robertson (@thedextriarchy) May 5, 2021
Even if every single browser feature was available on mobile Safari or even if Apple allowed alternative browser engines on the iPhone, a web app will never match the performance of a native app. At the end of the day, though, all the discussion of web apps in the Epic v. Apple case highlight the limitations of Apple’s App Store policies, not PWAs.
João Silva 15 hours ago Featured Tech News, Software & Gaming
UL Benchmarks has recently announced the Wild Life Extreme benchmark, a more demanding version of the Wild Life benchmark. Unlike Wild Life, the Extreme version won’t be limited to smartphones and tablets, allowing users to run it on Apple computers with M1 CPUs and Windows 10 PCs, including those powered by Arm processors.
The new Wild Life Extreme benchmark is three times more demanding than the original Wild Life benchmark thanks to the addition of new effects, enhanced geometry, and more particles. Moreover, Wild Life Extreme can run at up to 4K resolution, making it even more demanding. On Windows and Android, the Wild Life Extreme benchmark uses the Vulkan API, but Windows 10 on Arm devices use DirectX 12. On Apple devices, the benchmark uses the Metal API.
With the Wild Life Extreme benchmark, users may compare the GPU performance across most of their devices. The higher the score, the better it performs. Users may choose the quick benchmark to measure peak performance or a longer one for testing sustained performance. Besides showing how your GPU performs against other machines and devices, the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme score can also predict the framerate your system will output in some games.
3DMark Advanced Edition includes the Wild Life Extreme as a free update. Customers with a valid annual license of 3DMark Professional Edition also have free access to the Wild Life Extreme benchmark.
Android users can now download Wild Life Extreme as a free update for the 3DMark Android benchmark app. To run it, your mobile device has to run Android 10 or later and support the Anisotropy feature level 16 and above.
As for Apple users, the Wild Life Extreme benchmark is available on the free 3DMark Wild Life iOS benchmark app. The iOS device compatibility list starts with the iPhone 7 Plus and beyond. Only Apple Mac computers powered by the M1 CPU are compatible with the benchmark.
KitGuru says: Have you already tried the Wild Life Extreme benchmark? What score did you get on your device?
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That question was asked — implicitly and explicitly — over and over on the third day of Epic v. Apple testimony. The antitrust trial started on Monday with some heady pronunciations about Fortnite, the game and/or metaverse at the heart of the case. Yesterday, both sides argued about whether iPhones and iPads were truly locked down. And today, Apple and Epic delved into one of the biggest questions of the trial: whether saying iOS violates antitrust law would make every major game console an unlawful monopoly too.
Apple’s attorneys issued a dire warning to Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft during its opening statement, saying that their business models were all fundamentally similar. “If Epic prevails, other ecosystems will fall too,” they warned. But today, Epic called up Microsoft’s Xbox business development head Lori Wright as a sympathetic witness. In response to a line of questioning, Wright divided computing devices into “special-purpose” and “general-purpose” devices — in a way that clearly defined iPhones as the latter.
The Xbox, as Wright describes it, is a special-purpose device. “You are basically building a piece of hardware to do a specific thing,” she told a judge. “The Xbox is designed to give you a gaming experience. People buy an Xbox because they want to play games.” As a result, Microsoft keeps tight control of what content users can access — it’s a “curated, custom-built hardware/software experience.” The market is also much smaller: tens or hundreds of millions sold, compared to “billions” of Windows devices. Later in the day, Epic engineering fellow Andrew Grant gave his own, similar definition of gaming consoles in general, calling a console “a single-purpose device for entertainment.”
Windows computers, according to Wright, are “general-purpose” devices. “You’re buying it to do a wide variety of things, and that changes every day as new ideas are getting created,” she said. “It can do a bunch of things already, and it has the aperture to do a bunch more things.” These platforms can support unexpected, emergent applications across more aspects of people’s lives, particularly when it’s easy to get an app onto them in the first place.
Wright made a point of discussing all the different ways that users could get apps on Windows. That includes Microsoft’s own app store, but also Steam, the Epic Games Store, and direct downloads from a website. Microsoft recently dropped its commission on Windows apps to 12 percent to compete with Epic, while the Xbox still takes a 30 percent commission. Wright says there’s no plan to change that discrepancy. That’s despite the fact that under the hood, there’s not a massive hardware difference between an Xbox and a desktop PC.
It’s hard to call the iPhone anything but a general-purpose device under Wright’s definition. (She described a “special-purpose” Apple product as something like an iPod.) Intentionally or not, Wright also linked the distinction to one of Epic’s major talking points: profit.
Epic describes profit as one of the biggest differences between iPhones and consoles. It argues console makers have to treat app makers better because they lose money on hardware, unlike Apple, so they need to plan around attracting developers to the platform. And from Microsoft’s point of view, Wright emphasized in testimony that no Xbox console has been sold at a profit, even late in a generation’s lifespan after manufacturing costs fall. So part of that curated hardware/software experience includes planning around a specific genre of app and attracting the developers who will build it, rather than simply turning it loose and seeing what happens.
Microsoft later hedged in a statement saying that “profits are generated in game sales and online service subscriptions,” but it didn’t really contradict the claim — it just made clear, as Wright did, that the overall operation is profitable.
Will these distinctions convince the court? It’s hard to say, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has asked questions that appear lightly skeptical of Epic’s hard lines between consoles and iPhones and Wright’s strict delineation of “general” and “specific” devices.
Apple’s attorney didn’t spend as much time arguing over precise definitions. Apple’s strategy relied more on questioning Wright’s credibility by noting that she’d failed to produce documents that Apple requested. Later, an attorney similarly lambasted Grant for working on the hotfix that secretly introduced a new payment system into Fortnite, insisting that “you knew you were being dishonest, didn’t you?”
But Apple did push Wright to lay out in detail just how much more locked-down Xbox is than Windows, asking whether it did things like support rival game stores or streaming services. (This questioning was muddled by the fact that Microsoft refers to both its consoles and general gaming division as “Xbox,” so you can have an “Xbox store” on PC — a fact that led to some confusion during cross-examination.)
Why is this useful to Apple? Well, Epic began the trial by saying that iOS should work more like macOS. Both operating systems have a reputation for relative security and seamlessness, but only the latter allows installing software from outside the App Store. Epic’s opening statement questioned why Apple needed to lock down the iPhone when it had already created a perfectly workable but more open system. But with Wright and Microsoft, Apple has a perfect comparison point: a major computing company that offers two very different versions of a big black box.
In 2020, Microsoft was battling to bring xCloud or Xbox Game Streaming to the iPhone and iPad, and the conversations had an unlikely victim: Shadow — a third-party cloud gaming app that lets you stream PC games to an iPhone or iPad.
Emails between Microsoft and Apple, revealed in the Epic v. Apple trial today, show how the Xbox maker was trying to get xCloud on iOS. Microsoft was trying to figure out how Shadow, Netflix, and other similar “interactive” apps were able to exist in the App Store while Apple was refusing to approve xCloud. Microsoft put forward Shadow as an example of such a service, only to see it suddenly removed from the store.
“We were showing two examples where a game or an application was able to exist, and we didn’t understand why we couldn’t,” explained Lori Wright, Microsoft’s head of business development for Xbox, during the Epic v. Apple trial today. “I believe they [Apple] ended up pulling Shadow out of the App Store based off this email we sent until they submitted changes. That was not our intention of course, it was a byproduct.”
Shadow on iPhone.Image: Shadow
While Shadow’s removal wasn’t permanent, Apple has temporarily removed the app from the App Store twice in the past year. Shadow was first removed in February last year, with Apple reportedly citing a “failure to act in accordance with a specific part of the Apple App Store Guidelines.” Apple once again removed Shadow from the App Store in February, and the app returned a week later.
Shadow revealed that the app was removed the second time “due to a misunderstanding” around the nature of the app. “Unlike game streaming services, Shadow provides a full Windows 10 PC, rather than a library of games,” explained Luc Hancock, a community manager for Shadow. “This unique approach allows Shadow to comply with the App Store guidelines, so that you can access your Shadow PC on any iOS device to run your favorite games and software.”
Valve struggled for more than a year to launch its Steam Link game streaming service on iOS. Apple rejected the app, likely because it allowed an iOS user to access another app store, Steam, within Apple’s tightly controlled ecosystem. Apple revised its rules after rejecting Steam Link, and the app was finally approved two years ago in May 2019.
xCloud on iOS via the web.Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge
Apple continued to make it difficult for services like xCloud and Stadia to run the way Microsoft and Google wanted to on iOS devices after those conversations, only slowly making App Store policy carve-outs that would let the services operate under severe restrictions. Apple now insists that developers individually submit games as separate apps using their streaming tech, only then bundling them together as a “catalog”-style app.
Microsoft wasn’t impressed with Apple’s approach, calling it a “bad experience for customers.” This public spat has now boiled over into the courtroom battle between Epic Games and Apple, with lawyers on Epic’s side questioning Microsoft and Nvidia representatives about their struggles to bring cloud gaming apps to iOS.
Both Microsoft and Nvidia have had to give in to Apple’s restrictions and launch their cloud gaming services through the Safari web browser instead.
There is nothing better than tech that just works. The satisfying joy that comes with transferring files via AirDrop, the relief when a new pair of wireless earbuds automatically pop up on a phone screen and ask to be connected without opening the Bluetooth settings. These moments are still rare, but when they happen it feels like I’m actually living in the future promised to me. One of seamless connection and endless possibilities.
And the iPhone’s MagSafe (not to be confused with the old MacBook MagSafe, RIP), it just works.
Moment’s MagSafe accessories are stainless steel disks with a matte finish.
Moment, which is well known for its high-quality phone lenses and cases, has always had a strong focus on creating products for the photo or video creator. And its new line of MagSafe accessories has something for all levels of creativity. From a car vent mount to a multi-threaded mount to attach other accessories to, there is a way to attach an iPhone 12 or later to almost anything. More importantly, you can even mount more things to the phone itself through the Moment accessories. The range starts at $19.99 for a basic wall mount puck and goes up to $59.99 for the tripod mount adapter.
Moment MagSafe accessories
$20
Prices taken at time of publishing.
Moment’s line of MagSafe accessories lets you attach your iPhone 12 or 12 Pro to a wide variety of things, including a tripod or other camera gear. They make it easy to attach or remove your phone thanks to their use of strong magnets.
$20
at Moment
$20
at Amazon
Apple’s own MagSafe wallet accessory notoriously did not provide enough strength to stay attached to the back of the iPhone when taking the device out of a pocket. And if you have used the MagSafe charger, you might think these magnets are not strong enough to hold your device on a tripod out in front of you. But Moment developed its (M)Force magnet array that claims to use “custom tuned magnets” with a “grippy backer pad” for extra strength to boost the holding power of Apple’s base system.
I stored these MagSafe mounts on the side of a metal filing cabinet.
When I received these mounts, I attached them to the outside of my metal filing cabinet for safekeeping and was pleasantly surprised at just how hard it was to pull them off the side of the cabinet when I went to use them. And in my testing, my phone remained glued to the mounts no matter what they were mounted to. Pulling the phone off of these mounts was easy, too; with a bit of a twist the device disengages.
Moment’s MagSafe accessories work on a bare iPhone 12 or later or in a MagSafe-compatible case. I was able to test out Moment’s iPhone 12 Pro Thin Case with MagSafe and found it to be equally as strong as the bare phone. Moment’s cases also allow you to attach their lineup of lenses to your camera’s wide and telephoto sensors. Moment has also included the MagSafe technology in cases for the Galaxy S21 lineup, which you can preorder now for $49.99, and they should provide a similar experience to the iPhone’s built-in magnets.
Moment currently offers a sticky wall mount, a car vent mount, a cold shoe mount, a cold shoe and ¼” thread mount in both portrait and landscape orientations, a ¼” thread mount, and a multi-threaded mount. The pucks themselves are stainless steel disks with a matte finish. They are just the right amount of heavy: they feel durable and ready to be put into action while maintaining an extremely strong magnetic connection to the iPhone 12 Pro I was using.
The best part about using these mounts, and MagSafe at large, is the ease in quickly being able to put your phone on and pull it off of various accessories. I’m used to using mounts that grip the sides of my phone. Mounting my phone to a tripod, for example, meant having to attach it to the mount first, which is a two-step process: first the phone goes into the mount, then you have to close the mount’s sides to hold the phone. None of this process seemed to be too much of a problem until I didn’t have to do it anymore.
Each mount has a rubber, grippy back to keep your phone protected and attached.Becca Farsace / The Verge and Becca Farsace / The Verge
Being able to seamlessly pull my phone off of any tripod, even with a light or mic attached via a cold shoe, is the time-saving, hassle-free experience I didn’t know I needed. I quite literally toss my phone on the puck and I’m ready to go. And it feels really good knowing I could answer the phone mid-take without putting a whole rig up to my ear with it.
Moment’s MagSafe accessories are available now, though some of the line is currently on backorder.
2023 could be the year of the foldable iPhone, reckons renowned analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. In an investor note seen by MacRumours, Kuo claims that Apple is beavering away on a folding iPhone with an 8-inch QHD+ flexible OLED display. He even goes so far as to say the tech giant will ship 15 to 20 million folding smartphones in 2023. A bold prediction indeed.
Kuo also claims the “the foldable iPhone will adopt TPK’s silver nanowire touch solution”. Silver nanowire (SNW) is a new conductive film solution said to be a cost-effective way to make paper-thin, bendable OLED displays. If that’s true, there’s every chance the first foldable iPhone could resemble the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold.
Not convinced? Kuo believes Apple is already using SNW to make the touch interface for the successor to the HomePod Mini smart speaker. The idea being that Apple will have time to “master the technology” and iron out any production issues – before rolling the tech out to its flagship 2023 iPhone (set to be the iPhone 15). Makes sense.
This week’s prediction comes hot on the heels of rumours that Apple is working on a foldable display with a “mostly invisible hinge” that could unfold to around the size of the iPhone 12 Pro Max. Kuo has also weighed in on this debate in the past, tipping Apple to launch a 7.5- to 8-inch foldable iPhone in 2023 ‘provided the California company can solve key production issues’.
There’s even been talk of a foldable iPad lately. Kuo says it could “blur the product separation between mobile phones, tablets and notebooks”.
Only time will tell, especially when you consider there’s currently no concrete evidence that Apple will pursue a foldable future. The firm has its hands full with the launch of the recently-announced iPad Pro 2021 and new Apple TV 4K, not to mention the upcoming iPhone 13.
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I know there’s a ton of other Apple news happening today, but if you’re reading it on a Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch (okay, that last one may be a stretch), you should probably pause and update that device — today’s update fixes a security issue that Apple says may have been actively exploited.
The updates contained in iOS / iPadOS 14.5.1, macOS 11.3.1, and watchOS 7.4.1 are meant to fix arbitrary code execution exploits present in WebKit, Apple’s framework that renders most of the web content you see on your device (unless you’re using, say, Chrome or Firefox on Mac). In normal language, the updates patch a hole that let malicious websites run unchecked code on your device, so it’s not the type of update you want to put off.
If you have an older device, such as an iPhone 5 or 6, iPad Air or Mini 2 and 3, Apple also released iOS 12.5.3, which addresses WebKit flaws.
If this story sounds a little familiar, it’s because there have been two recent updates, iOS 14.4 and 14.4.2, that closed similar security holes. Even if you don’t think you should update because you use an alternative web browser on your Mac, or don’t browse the web on your Apple Watch (for obvious reasons), it’s still worth updating any devices you may have — WebKit can be used in unexpected places, and it’s never good to have security holes open on your devices, especially ones that may have been exploited.
Both Apple and Epic have released their opening presentations on why they feel they should win this week’s trial, which is set to determine the future of the App Store. In the documents, which you can look through below, each company lays out its case.
The lawsuit started when Apple removed Epic Games’ Fortnite from the App Store after Epic bypassed Apple’s system for in-app purchases. But it’s turned into a much deeper examination of Apple’s walled-garden approach to technology, and whether some of the walls the company puts up might violate antitrust law.
We took a deeper look at the companies’ legal strategies in advance of the trial, but you can see the same arguments play out in these presentations. Epic uses metaphors of brick walls and gas stations to argue that Apple’s control over what can and cannot be installed on the iPhone is unfair, and that allowing other methods of installing apps wouldn’t harm iOS’s security. Apple’s pushes back saying that Epic getting the openness that it wants would harm not just the App Store but other stores from Sony and Nintendo.
The Epic Games v. Apple trial is starting today, and it has begun with a court conference call full of kids screaming for Fortnite to return to mobile. The public call line allows anyone to dial in and listen to today’s proceedings, but the court didn’t manage to properly mute all participants for more than 20 minutes. The result was what sounded like a chaotic Discord call.
More than 200 participants were dialed into the public line, with many screaming “free Fortnite” or “bring back Fortnite on mobile please judge.” Others played Travis Scott tunes, chatted away, or advertised their YouTube channels.
The trial was supposed to begin at 11:15AM ET, and court clerks could be heard attempting to mute participants multiple times unsuccessfully. At 11:30AM ET, silence finally fell on the line in preparation for the court to hear Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney today.
For a brief period, though, Fortnite fans were pleading for the return of the game on the iPhone and iPad. Over the next few weeks, we’ll find out whether that’s likely to happen.
Epic Games didn’t sue Apple to get a big payout, but that’s because the lawsuit itself is an investment. And to rewrite Apple’s rules, Epic is spending a fortune.
The reason Epic’s Fortnite got thrown out of the Apple App Store was that Epic rogue-updated Fortnite to offer a payment mechanism that bypassed Apple’s 30 percent cut of all in-app transactions. Apple booted Fortnite for violating its rules. Epic threw an… epic… hissy fit about this, culminating in the trial starting this week. While Epic has cobbled together an alliance called the Coalition for App Fairness — along with Spotify, Match Group, Basecamp, and Tile — there’s one more tech behemoth in play. Epic Games Store runs on Amazon Web Services. So does Fortnite itself.
The fight with Apple echoes Epic’s tactics elsewhere. The Epic Game Store is a clear challenge to Valve, which has an iOS-like store called Steam that also takes a 30 percent cut of sales. In a basic act of moral consistency, the Epic Game Store contains — in addition to games by other developers — other game stores. It also takes only a 12 percent cut of sales. Just last week, Microsoft announced it would cut its take on PC games to 12 percent to match Epic, from 30 percent. (It also filed a letter of support for Epic in the current case.)
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said in 2019 that the Epic Game Store’s hardball tactics against Valve will continue until either the store is profitable or Valve lowers its cut. Epic will torch an estimated $593 million by the end of 2021 on the Epic Games Store, according to court documents in the Apple case. At many companies, losing this much money would be a problem, but that figure is only slightly more than Epic’s Fortnite revenue from April 2020, which was $400 million that month.
Fortnite pretty much prints cash because the video game industry has hit on a business model that almost no other part of the entertainment industry can match: in-app payments. For Spotify, it’s not a fatal problem to dodge the App Store and its cut. I just go to a desktop computer, enter my credit card information, and — thanks to recurring billing — I’m done.
Fortnite is different, and it’s why a video game company is leading the effort to challenge the App Store payment rules. In Fortnite, if I want to buy a sweet dance move, I spend Epic’s V-Bucks to do it. The store refreshes every day, so if I want the new hotness, I need to act immediately. (There’s also a seasonal pass and a recently-introduced monthly subscription, but these do not seem to be as explicitly geared toward impulse buys.) Last year, in-app purchases were estimated to account for 40 percent of all gaming revenue.
Epic’s position gets weirder. Part of the story will involve people who imprinted on Neal Stephenson like ducklings, but before we get there, let’s run down what we know about the economics of Fortnite and the Epic Games Store to get a rough sense of how much money is in play.
It’s true that Fortnite is free to download, but in-app purchases more than make up for that. In 2019, Epic Games had revenue of $4.2 billion, with earnings of $730 million. (We know this because Epic, a private company, sold a stake, and those meddling kids at VentureBeat got a hold of numbers as a result.) Epic’s 2020 numbers are forecast at about $5 billion in revenue, with $1 billion in earnings, according to VentureBeat; in the court documents, Epic’s total 2020 revenue is projected at a mere $3.85 billion. In the two years Fortnite was available in the App Store, iOS customers alone accounted for $700 million in revenue for Epic, according to the court documents.
“Epic is in a fortunate position because Fortnite is the most popular game in the world,” says Christopher Krohn, an adjunct associate professor of marketing at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
Apple’s revenue split from digital purchases is a little complicated — it’s got special rates for small developers, for instance — but in Epic’s case, Apple gets 30 percent of all in-app purchases. That’s in line with Minitel, the French pre-internet, which also had a 30 / 70 split for third-party content, says Bill Maurer, a professor of anthropology at the University of California Irvine who specializes in payment processors. Frankly, it looks like a carrier fee.
“At some level, Apple’s being greedy, because it doesn’t depend on this revenue,” says Michael Cusumano, a distinguished professor of management at MIT’s Sloan Business School. “It’s rolling in money from the iPhone itself.” On March 28, Apple reported its quarterly earnings — almost $24 billion in net income, riding mostly on strong sales of the iPhone and Mac; the previous quarter was a blowout for the company, with revenue of more than $100 billion.
Greed isn’t illegal. It’s also probably what’s motivating Epic, despite its CEO’s bluster. Epic wants to build something called the “metaverse,” an online haven where superhero IP owned by different companies can finally kiss. (The idea is based on Snow Crash, a 1991 book by Neal Stephenson.) The revenue potential here is the kind of thing that sends VCs into thinkfluencing fever dreams.
Fortnite is already a hangout space, one where IP from Marvel and DC can legally interact. Add to that the Unreal engine, which fuels a number of games as well as shows such as Disney’s The Mandalorian, and its other developer tools, and you’re looking at what could potentially be a piece of a metaverse. Should Fortnite, the Epic Games Store, or another Epic offering underpin a major chunk of a metaverse, the amount of money Epic is torching on its store and these lawyers will look like a wise investment against the fuckload of money it stands to make.
You can see why they might not want to cut Apple — or Valve, or Google, or anyone at all — in at 30 percent.
Look, I’m going to pop my popcorn and, as Sweeney put it, “enjoy the upcoming fireworks show” at the trial. I don’t think the outcome will matter much, since any verdict is going to get appealed immediately. But at the very bottom, it seems obvious that Epic’s position is the same as Apple’s: greed is good. Forget the fight to own the metaverse. The real world belongs to Big Tech, and we’re just NPCs who drop loot for the corporate players.
Facebook is continuing its campaign against Apple’s iOS 14 privacy updates, adding a notice within its iOS app telling users the information it collects from other apps and websites can “help keep Facebook free of charge.” A similar message was seen on Instagram’s iOS app (Facebook is Instagram’s parent company). Technology researcher Ashkan Soltani first noted the new pop-up notices on Saturday. They appear as part of an explanation of the updates to iOS 14 rules.
“This version of iOS requires us to ask for permission to track some data from this devices to improve your ads. Learn how we limit the use of this information if you don’t turn on this device setting,” the pop-up screen reads. “We use information about your activity received form other apps and websites to: show you ads that are more personalized, help keep Facebook free of charge [and] support businesses that rely on ads to reach their customers.” (I wasn’t able to get this nag screen to show up on my iPhone which is running iOS 14.5).
The new opt-in requirements in the latest versions of iOS 14, including iOS 14.5, require developers to get express consent from device owners to allow their Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) to be shared and collected across apps. Under Apple’s new policy, app developers are still able to use other information a user provides for targeted advertising, even if the user opts out of letting the app track them, but that information can’t be shared with another company for ad tracking.
If developers try to get around the opt-in requirement, or try to replace the IDFA with another piece of identifying information such as an email address, that app will be considered in violation of the opt-in requirement. The rules also apply to Apple’s own apps.
Facebook has been a vocal critic of Apple’s iOS 14 privacy updates, arguing that the privacy changes could hurt small businesses which may rely on Facebook’s ad network to reach customers. In statements to the press and in newspaper ads, Facebook has said Apple is encouraging new business models for apps so they rely less on advertising and more on subscriptions, which would potentially give Apple a cut.
But the “keep Facebook/Instagram free” tactic seems to run counter to Facebook’s long-standing tagline which indicated the company was “free and always will be.” Of course, Facebook quietly removed that slogan from its homepage in 2019, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t rule out a paid version of Facebook when he testified before Congress in 2018. “There will always be a version of Facebook that is free,” he said.
Facebook didn’t reply to a request for comment Sunday. But Zuckerberg called Apple out during Facebook’s January earnings call, referring to Apple as one of his company’s biggest competitors. “Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work, which they regularly do to preference their own,” Zuckerberg said. “This impacts the growth of millions of businesses around the world, including with the upcoming iOS 14 changes.”
Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment Sunday.
If you’re hoping to get one of the new 12.9-inch iPad Pros with a Mini LED display, you may be waiting a while — the delivery times for even the base model have slipped to late June or early July (via Bloomberg). Leading up to the device’s announcement, there were rumors that the display tech could be a production bottleneck for Apple, and that appears to be the case — Apple’s site says the 11-inch iPad Pro, announced alongside the 12.9-inch, would be delivered in late May.
The Mini LED display that could be to blame for the short supply of iPads is a new tech for Apple, but it promises to bring a ton of improvements compared to normal LED displays. However, they’re trickier to produce — Apple says that the previous iPad Pro’s display had 72 LEDs, while the Mini LED version boasts over 10,000. For a more in-depth look at the tech, we have an explainer here.
For the most part, the rest of the devices Apple announced in its April 20th event seem to be doing okay stock-wise: Apple’s site says the purple iPhone 12 and 12 Mini would arrive in early May, and the Apple TV is shown as shipping by mid- to late May. The lower-end iMac will arrive in late May, though the higher-end versions won’t get to you until early June — the same as the new Siri Remote.
Interestingly, while a single AirTag seems readily available, the four-pack is a bit harder to come by — Apple’s site has them delivering in June, while Amazon has the pack listed as out of stock.
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