MacRumors

The latest shipment estimates for Apple's upcoming mmWave-enabled 5G iPhones are several million units lower than previously expected, which is intensifying competition among suppliers of AiP substrates, reports DigiTimes.

Shipments of mmWave-enabled 5G iPhones slated for launch later this year are estimated to reach only 15-20 million units in 2020 compared to a previous supply chain estimate of 30-40 million units, intensifying competition among Apple's suppliers of FC-AiP substrates for the new phones, according to industry sources.

Apple is believed to be designing its own antenna-in-package or "AiP" module for mmWave iPhones, which use a set of 5G frequencies that promise ultra-fast speeds at short distances, making it best suited for dense urban areas. By contrast, sub-6GHz 5G is generally slower than mmWave, but the signals travel further, better serving suburban and rural areas.

According to DigiTimes, Apple's AIP package is more cost-effective than previous designs, but some analysts believe that models with support for ultra-fast mmWave technology will likely launch after sub-6GHz models due to production challenges and the global health crisis. To counter these challenges, Apple has diversified its supply chain for the modules to minimize risk.

The upcoming mmWave 5G iPhones will adopt more cost-effective FC-AiP process, with ASE Technology to package AiP modules, the sources said. But Apple reportedly has finalized three suppliers of BT-based FC-AiP substrates, including one based in Taiwan and two in South Korea, and they will together supply 30-50 million substrates, the sources said, adding one iPhone will require 2-3 AiP modules.

Prior to the global health crisis, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said Apple was still on track to release both sub-6GHz and sub-6GHz-plus-mmWave "iPhone 12" models simultaneously in the second half of 2020, with shipments beginning in the late third quarter or early fourth quarter.

Kuo has not indicated whether those plans have since changed, but other analysts have said they believe the mmWave iPhones may not arrive this year because Apple's custom antenna-in-package is proving to be more of a battery drain than the company would like.

Kuo has said 5G iPhone models with mmWave would be available in five markets, including the United States, Canada, Japan, Korea, and the United Kingdom. He also believes Apple may disable 5G functionality in countries that do not offer 5G service or have a shallow 5G penetration rate to reduce production costs.

Safari 14, introduced in the iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur betas, introduces HDR video support and allows Netflix users to watch content in 4K HDR and Dolby Vision for the first time.

As pointed out by 9to5Mac, Netflix has long offered 4K content that can be viewed on other platforms like the 4K Apple TV, but it has not been available to Mac users due to hardware limitations.

Safari in macOS Catalina and earlier has limited Netflix content to 1080p resolution, but with macOS Big Sur, Netflix works in 4K and supports Dolby Vision and HDR10 for more vivid colors.

Watching 4K HDR content on Mac requires a Mac introduced in 2018 or later, so older Macs will continue to be limited to 1080p resolution on Netflix with macOS Big Sur.

As we covered last week, tvOS 14 and iOS 14 are now compatible with YouTube's VP9 codec, allowing 4K YouTube content to be watched on those platforms, but the codec is not yet supported in Safari 14 in macOS Big Sur.

Apple today launched a new Apple Card program and website that are designed to help people who have their ‌Apple Card‌ applications declined improve their credit to qualify, reports TechCrunch.

Starting today, declined ‌Apple Card‌ applicants will begin seeing emails that offer the Path to ‌Apple Card‌ program, which is opt-in and can run for four months. It uses the information from the initial ‌Apple Card‌ credit application to provide people with details on why they were declined as well as suggestions on how to improve financial markers that could help them get approved next time.

Examples of suggestions include resolving past due balances, making payments to secured and unsecured debt accounts on time, and lowering credit card and personal loan debt. Apple will send out a once-a-month update on progress toward improvement.

When a customer has completed the program, Apple invites them to reapply for the ‌Apple Card‌. Apple has also launched a website that has specific details on how the Goldman Sachs approval process works and how people can boost their chances of approval before applying.

As TechCrunch points out, the suggestions that Apple offers are obvious to those with knowledge of how credit works, but there are many people who do not have a strong grasp on the factors that can impact credit worthiness, and Apple's program could help these people.

When it comes to privacy, Apple knows whether a person has chosen to participate in the program, but it does not store personally identifiable information or know details about participants' financial situation. Goldman Sachs does not share the information with third parties for advertising or marketing purposes.

Apple was hoping to use OLED panels sourced from display manufacturer BOE for some of the iPhone models coming in 2020, but BOE will not be a supplier for the first batch of panel shipments for the new iPhones due to manufacturing issues.

According to DigiTimes, BOE has failed to secure Apple's validation for the OLED screens.

Apple is planning to release four OLED iPhones this year, measuring in at 5.4 inches, 6.1 inches (x2), and 6.7 inches. The 5.4-inch ‌iPhone‌ and one 6.1-inch model will be positioned as more affordable successors to the ‌iPhone‌ 11, while the other 6.1-inch ‌iPhone‌ and the 6.7-inch model will be "Pro" devices that follow the ‌iPhone‌ 11 Pro.

Samsung Display will be the major OLED panel supplier for all of the new iPhones, while BOE and LG Display were developing OLED screens for the entry-level 6.1-inch ‌iPhone‌ model. BOE is working out the quality issues impacting its manufacturing and is hoping to begin shipping OLED panels to Apple in the fourth quarter of 2020.

LG Display will pick up the slack and plans to ramp up shipments for the 6.1-inch model, shipping 23 to 25 million units up from the 18 to 23 million originally planned. Samsung Display is expected to ship 18 to 20 million units for the 5.4-inch ‌iPhone‌, 16 to 18 million for the higher-end 6.1-inch ‌iPhone‌, and 22 to 24 million units for the high-end 6.7-inch ‌iPhone‌.

BOE's failure should not have a significant impact on the release date of Apple's 2020 iPhones as Apple can rely on Samsung Display and LG Display. Other factors may somewhat delay this year's ‌iPhone‌ lineup, and there have been rumors suggesting some or all of the iPhones could be announced in September and launched later, perhaps in October.

BOE began volume manufacturing flexible OLED panels in 2019, but its yield rate barely reaches around 20 percent at the current time, which Apple is unable to work with.

BOE is now trying to improve its yield rate by combining the front-end process of its B7 fab and the backend process of the B11 line, indicated the sources, noting that the B7 fab, also located in Sichuan, kicked off volume production in 2017 and has since ramped up its yield rate to about 70-80% recently.

If BOE's efforts to improve yield rate are successful, it could ship somewhere around two million OLED panels to Apple in 2020, but that's a best case scenario.

DigiTimes' report confirms rumors from earlier in June that suggested BOE had failed to deliver its first shipment of OLED panels for Apple's ‌iPhone‌ 12 due to an inability to pass OLED quality control tests.

The New York Times today announced that it is pulling out of Apple News, as the service does not "align with its strategy of building direct relationships with paying readers."

Starting today, articles from The New York Times will no longer show up in the ‌Apple News‌ app. The news site says that Apple has given it "little in the way of direct relationships with readers" and "little control over the business." Rather than allowing its articles on ‌Apple News‌, The New York Times wants to drive readers to its own website and app.

"Core to a healthy model between The Times and the platforms is a direct path for sending those readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers, and the nature of our business rules," Meredith Kopit Levien, chief operating officer, wrote in a memo to employees. "Our relationship with Apple News does not fit within these parameters."

In a statement, an Apple spokesperson said that The New York Times only provided a few ‌Apple News‌ stories a day and that ‌Apple News‌ will still provide readers with trusted information from thousands of other publishers. "We are also committed to supporting quality journalism through the proven business models of advertising, subscriptions, and commerce," said the spokesperson.

The New York Times, along with The Washington Post, was a publication that Apple courted to participate in ‌Apple News‌+, Apple's paid news service. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other major news sites declined to participate, though Apple did ink deals with The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and Condé Nast.

‌Apple News‌+ was not enticing as The New York Times has its own successful online subscription option already. The New York Times says that advertising in the standard ‌Apple News‌ app has also "generated little revenue for news organizations," plus Apple takes a 30 percent cut of subscriptions sold in the app.

The New York Times has more than six million subscribers and has seen increasing revenue from digital subscriptions on its site. The New York Times does not expect exiting ‌Apple News‌ to have a "material impact" on its business, and the company will continue to work with Apple on apps and podcasts.

Apple's Developer Transition Kit equipped with an A12Z iPad Pro chip began arriving in the hands of developers this morning to help them get their apps ready for Macs running Apple Silicon, and though forbidden, the first thing some developers did was benchmark the machine.

Multiple Geekbench results have indicated that the Developer Transition Kit, which is a Mac mini with an ‌iPad Pro‌ chip, features average single-core and multi-core scores of 811 and 2,871, respectively.

As developer Steve Troughton-Smith points out, the two-year-old A12Z in the ‌Mac mini‌ outperforms Microsoft's Arm-based Surface Pro X in Geekbench performance, running x86_64 code in emulation faster than the Surface Pro X can run an Arm version natively.

Averaging seven Geekbench 5 benchmarking results, Microsoft's Surface Pro X features a single-core score of 726 and a multi-core score of 2,831, meaning the A12Z outperforms the Surface Pro X in single-core testing and is on par or slightly better in multi-core performance.

The Surface Pro X features a Microsoft-designed 3GHz Arm processor based on the Qualcomm SQ1 chip.

Apple's DTK provided to developers is just a test machine using an older A12Z chip (it's the same as the A12X chip in the 2018 ‌iPad Pro‌ but with an extra GPU core unlocked). Apple's Arm-based Macs that run ‌Apple Silicon‌ will have new chips designed for the Mac and based on the A14 chip created for the 2020 iPhone lineup with a 5-nanometer process.

Apple says its ‌Apple Silicon‌ Macs will bring major improvements in performance and power efficiency, and the first Arm-based Mac is set to be released before the end of 2020.

Following WWDC last week, Apple's VP of Technology Kevin Lynch has taken time to discuss the Apple Watch's new sleep tracking and hand washing features in watchOS 7 with publications like The Independent, CNET, and TechCrunch.

While some third-party apps provide very detailed sleep analysis, Apple's implementation of sleep tracking is fairly basic, focusing only on duration of sleep, movement disturbances, and heart rate. Lynch told CNET that this simplicity was an intentional decision, noting that Apple did research and found that extra data was not entirely useful.

"Movement of your arm is an input, but it's not a complete picture of what's going on inside your brain," said Lynch, as an example.

"You can't really coach yourself to have more or less REM stages," he added. "We felt like that wasn't the best way Apple could add value here on sleep. We focused on the transition to the bed, which we think is way more actionable, and will result in people getting a better night's sleep, which then has secondary effects of perhaps your REM stages sorting themselves."

Lynch said that, through research, Apple ultimately determined that duration of sleep is the most important metric.

"In any of these adventures we go on when building things here we ask, what will make the most difference for people that, from a mainstream perspective, will be easy, helpful and empowering," Lynch told The Independent.

Like many other health features on the Apple Watch, the Sleep app provides positive reinforcement only. If users meet their sleep goals, they receive positive feedback, but if they do not, the Watch stays silent.

"There could be anxiety that people have about going to sleep, and that anxiety itself can actually cause more problems in terms of going to sleep," Lynch told CNET. "Many people are already well aware that they haven't been getting enough sleep, and so we're not adding to that, but we are positively acknowledging when you have achieved your goals."

As for hand washing coaching in watchOS 7, Lynch told TechCrunch that the functionality was the result of "years of work." The feature encourages users to wash their hands for a CDC-recommended 20 seconds by providing a countdown with haptic feedback. If a user opts in, the feature automatically activates when the sound of hand washing is detected.

While the terms and conditions for Apple's new "Developer Transition Kit" forbid developers from running benchmarks on the modified Mac mini with an A12Z chip, it appears that results are beginning to surface anyhow.

Geekbench results uploaded so far suggest that the A12Z-based Mac mini has average single-core and multi-core scores of 811 and 2,781 respectively. Keep in mind that Geekbench is running through Apple's translation layer Rosetta 2, so an impact on performance is to be expected. Apple also appears to be slightly underclocking the A12Z chip in the Mac mini to 2.4GHz versus nearly 2.5GHz in the latest iPad Pro models.

It's also worth noting that Rosetta 2 appears to only use the A12Z chip's four "performance" cores and not its four "efficiency" cores.

By comparison, iPad Pro models with the A12Z chip have average single-core and multi-core scores of 1,118 and 4,625 respectively. This is native performance, of course, based on Arm architecture.

ExxonMobil today announced that it is the first U.S. gas station chain to offer 3% Daily Cash to customers who pay with an Apple Card using Apple Pay at Exxon and Mobil stations. 3% Daily Cash is now available for fuel, car washes, and convenience store purchases at over 11,500 Exxon and Mobil stations across the United States.

To avoid inserting their card and touching the pin pad, Exxon and Mobil customers can use the Apple Card with Apple Pay in the Exxon Mobil Rewards+ app for iPhone to pay for fuel at the pump on a contactless basis.

Other brands that offer 3% Daily Cash with Apple Card include Apple, Nike, T-Mobile, Uber, Uber Eats, Duane Reade, and Walgreens.

Apple today named eight app and game developers receiving an Apple Design Award following WWDC 2020. Apple says winners are recognized for outstanding app design, innovation, ingenuity, and technical achievement.

Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations:

Every year, app and game developers demonstrate exceptional craftsmanship and we're honoring the best of the best. Receiving an Apple Design Award is a special and laudable accomplishment. Past honorees have made some of the most noteworthy apps and games of all time. Through their vision, determination, and exacting standards, the winning developers inspire not only their peers in the Apple developer community, but all of us at Apple, too.

This year's winners are highlighted on the Apple Newsroom:

• Photo and video editing app "Darkroom" by Bergen Co.
• Animation playground "Looom" by iorama.studio
• CAD app "Shapr3D"
• Digital sheet music app "StaffPad"
• "Sayonara Wild Hearts" from Simogo and Annapurna Interactive
• "Sky: Children of the Light" from thatgamecompany
• "Song of Bloom" from Philipp Stollenmayer
• "Where Cards Fall" from The Game Band and Snowman

Apple says more than 250 developers have been recognized with Apple Design Awards over the past 20 years.

As part of WWDC last week, Apple announced that it will be switching to its own custom-designed processors for Macs starting later this year. As part of this transition, the company is allowing developers to apply for a modified Mac mini with an A12Z chip and 16GB of RAM to develop and test their apps on a Mac with Arm-based architecture.

As noted on Twitter and in the MacRumors forums, some developers are now beginning to receive this Mac mini, which is officially known as the "Developer Transition Kit."

Apple promises that its Macs with custom chips will have industry-leading performance per watt. Apple said it plans to ship the first Mac with its own silicon by the end of the year and complete the transition in about two years. One of the first Apple Silicon Macs will be a redesigned 24-inch iMac in late 2020, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Apple said that it will continue to support and release new versions of macOS for Intel-based Macs for years to come, and it also confirmed that it still has some new Intel-based Macs in development in the interim.

Two new camera modes could be coming to some models of Apple's "iPhone 12," according to YouTube channel EverythingApplePro and Max Weinbach.

Specifically, the video modes are said to include the ability to shoot 4K video at 120fps and 240fps. The new modes are thought to be coming to Apple's higher-end "‌iPhone‌ 12 Pro" and "iPhone 12 Pro Max".

Weinbach reportedly tore down the Camera app in the recently released developer build of iOS 14 and found references to the new video modes.

Weinbach's Apple source subsequently confirmed that Apple is internally testing these new camera modes for upcoming iPhones, and that they'll likely be reserved for the higher-end models in this year's upcoming lineup.

Camera improvements are expected in the "‌iPhone‌ 12" lineup. For example, rumors suggest some of the new ‌iPhone‌ models coming in 2020 will feature a 3D camera, which sounds like the LiDAR Scanner feature that Apple added in the 2020 iPad Pro models.

However the new 4K shooting modes are probably something to do with Apple's A14 chip. Current iPhones are limited to 4K at 60fps and 1080p at 240fps.

Apple plans to release four "‌‌iPhone‌ 12‌" models with OLED displays in the fall, including one 5.4-inch model, two 6.1-inch models, and one 6.7-inch model, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. All of the devices are expected to support 5G and they may sport a new design that includes more of a flat edged metal frame like the ‌iPad Pro‌ or ‌‌iPhone‌‌ 4.