MacRumors

In a profile of Apple's operations chief Jeff Williams, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has revealed some interesting anecdotes about development of the Apple Watch, which Williams has reportedly overseen since 2013.

Months before the Apple Watch launched in 2015, for example, the report claims some employees testing the device began having allergic reactions to the type of nickel used in its casing, leading Williams to make the decision to scrap thousands of already-produced units and restart manufacturing with a different kind of nickel.

The amount of nickel eventually included in select Apple Watch models and bands falls below restrictions set by the European Union, according to Apple:

Apple Watch models with a stainless steel or an aluminum case, the stainless steel portions of some Apple Watch bands, the metallic portions of the Hermès bands, and the magnets in the watch and bands, each contain some nickel. However, they all fall below the strict nickel restrictions set by European REACH regulation. Therefore, while nickel exposure is unlikely to be a problem, you should be aware of the possibility in case you're susceptible to nickel-related reactions.

The report claims employees also noticed that the Apple Watch's Taptic Engine was prone to long-term failure from corrosion. In that case, Williams decided to give those few thousand watches to employees, according to Gurman.

As for the $10,000-plus, 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition, the report claims Apple's sales were "in the low tens of thousands" of units, with "few after the first two weeks." The line was discontinued in September 2016 after just 16 months and, humorously, the gold models are now stuck on watchOS 4 and below.

Williams now oversees the development of all Apple hardware products, according to the report, and he is widely considered a frontrunner to succeed Tim Cook as CEO when the time comes — the two share similar backgrounds and mannerisms.

Last month, Apple announced that Jony Ive will be leaving Apple later this year to form an independent design company, with Apple among its primary clients. In turn, Apple indicated that its operations chief Jeff Williams will spend more of his time working with its design team in their studio.

Williams has long been considered a frontrunner to succeed Tim Cook as CEO of Apple, and with his expanded design-related oversight at Apple, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman believes he is "unambiguously the second-most important person at Apple" and first in line to succeed Cook when the time comes.

In line with his calm demeanor on stage at Apple events, Gurman notes that Williams has over the years distinguished himself as a modest, disciplined, and demanding leader, much more like Cook than Steve Jobs.

From the report:

"He's the closest thing at the company to Tim Cook, and you'll get more of that," a former senior Apple executive says of Williams. "If you think Cook is doing a good job, then it's a good choice."

Williams is considered to be slightly more hands-on with product development than Cook, however, as evidenced by his leadership of the Apple Watch team since its inception. Williams is also said to attend weekly reviews of product and industrial design progress and brief Cook on the discussions.

Gurman:

Williams now oversees the development of all Apple hardware products, holding weekly meetings to gauge their progress. Although the process is formally called NPR, or New Product Review, some employees call this the "Jeff Review." During the development of the AirPods, some of them noticed that Williams continued wearing Apple's wired headphones instead of the new product. Williams wasn't yet happy with the fit of the wireless model.

The big question mark with Ive's impending departure is whether Apple will remain innovative. Critics will argue that Apple has already become complacent under Cook, and with Williams having a similar operations-focused approach, the narrative is that Apple might falter without a Jobs-era visionary.

From the report:

"One doesn't necessarily need a visionary as CEO of Apple as long as there's a visionary in the company that the CEO can work with," says Michael Gartenberg, a former Apple marketing executive. "Tim Cook had Jony Ive. The question is, with Ive gone, who is the visionary at the company that can guide the next big thing?"

Depending on how involved Ive remains with Apple through his independent design firm, that might not be a concern for several more years to come. Apple has also more than doubled its market value under Cook, so any concerns that Apple has fallen behind in the post-Jobs era are arguably overblown.

It's worth noting that there is no sign that Cook plans to step down any time soon. Williams, 56, is also less than three years younger than Cook.

Apple's iPhones next year may feature displays capable of up to 120Hz refresh rates, allowing for a smoother on-screen experience, according to one mobile leaker.

"Apple is considering a switchable 60Hz/120Hz refresh rate screen on the iPhone in 2020, and is discussing with Samsung and LG," tweeted Ice Universe on Sunday.

The leaker, who goes by the Twitter handle @UniverseIce, doesn't usually comment on Apple's plans, but is a well-regarded source of Samsung rumors. Samsung has supplied Apple with OLED panels for the ‌iPhone‌ X, ‌iPhone‌ XS, and ‌iPhone‌ XS Max.

Apple already uses variable refresh rate technology in its iPad Pro models, but they still use LCD panels rather than OLED. Bringing it to a new breed of OLED iPhones would raise the smartphone performance bar even higher.

Apple markets the iPad Pro-exclusive tech under the moniker "ProMotion," which it says dynamically adjusts the display to the movement of content for fluid scrolling, greater responsiveness, and smoother motion. It does all this on the fly, which means it also conserves battery life.

Apple's adaptive ProMotion IAPs also reduce Apple Pencil latency, and reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has said that ‌Apple Pencil‌ support is a possibility for a future ‌iPhone‌.

Previous rumors have suggested Apple will complete its transition to an all-OLED ‌iPhone‌ lineup in 2020 with new 5.4-inch, 6.1-inch, and 6.7-inch devices.

But before 2020 comes around, Apple is widely expected to launch a trio of new iPhones this September, including two higher-end 5.8-inch and 6.5-inch OLED models and one lower-end 6.1-inch LCD model.

Upon returning to Apple in the late 1990s, Steve Jobs came up with a 2×2 product grid in an effort to simplify Apple's then-bloated lineup of computers. The grid was split into four quadrants, including a professional desktop, a consumer desktop, a professional portable, and a consumer portable.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of Jobs unveiling the fourth and final product in the grid, the iBook, at the 1999 Macworld Expo in New York City.

Targeted at consumers and students, the iBook easily stood out from other notebooks of its era with its unique clamshell-like design, consisting of hard, translucent plastic casing topped with soft, colorful rubber. Initial colors included Blueberry and Tangerine, with later models available in Graphite, Indigo, and Key Lime.

The original iBook, priced from $1,599, was equipped with a 12.1-inch display with an 800×600 resolution, a full-sized keyboard, and a trackpad. It also featured a retractable handle along its hinge, with Apple calling it an "iMac to go," although it was decently heavy at 6.7 pounds — even for its time.

Above all, the iBook was the first mass consumer product with support for wireless networking, with the 802.11b standard allowing for speeds up to 11 Mbps. Wireless support was not built in and required purchasing an optional $99 AirPort wireless card and a $299 AirPort base station.

Jobs demonstrated the iBook's wireless networking by walking across the stage with the notebook while loading a website, with the audience erupting in cheers. He then placed it through a hula hoop to prove there were no cables attached.

Memorably, a younger Phil Schiller even jumped from a height while holding the iBook as it wirelessly transferred accelerometer data. Referencing the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, Schiller quipped "this is definitely one small step for man, and one giant leap for wireless networking."

Other tech specs included a 300MHz PowerPC G3 processor, 3.2GB hard drive, 32MB of RAM, ATI Rage Mobility graphics, 10/100 Ethernet, a CD-ROM drive, and up to six hours of battery life. To keep costs down, it had no FireWire port, video out, or microphone, and only one speaker and one USB port.

Apple went on to introduce a redesigned iBook with a more traditional notebook design in May 2001, followed by the white polycarbonate MacBook in 2006, but the original will always be an important part of Apple's history.

Last year, YouTubers iJustine and MKBHD teamed up to unbox an original, sealed iBook:

For more nostalgia:

• CNN news article about the iBook from July 21, 1999
  

• CNN interview with Steve Jobs from July 21, 1999
  

• iBook page on Apple.com circa October 1, 1999

We invite any readers who still own an iBook to share a photo in the comments section.

An Israeli security firm claims it has developed a smartphone surveillance tool that can harvest not only a user's local data but also all their device's communications with cloud-based services provided by the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

According to a report from the Financial Times [paywalled], the latest Pegasus spyware sold by NSO Group is being marketed to potential clients as a way to target data uploaded to the cloud. The tool is said to work on many of the latest iPhones and Android smartphones, and can continue to harvest data even after the tool is removed from the original mobile device.

The new technique is said to copy the authentication keys of services such as Google Drive, Facebook Messenger and iCloud, among others, from an infected phone, allowing a separate server to then impersonate the phone, including its location.

This grants open-ended access to the cloud data of those apps without "prompting 2-step verification or warning email on target device", according to one sales document.

Attackers using the malware are said to be able to access a wealth of private information, including the full history of a target's location data and archived messages or photos, according to people who shared documents with the Financial Times and described a recent product demonstration.

When questioned by the newspaper, NSO denied promoting hacking or mass-surveillance tools for cloud services, but didn't specifically deny that it had developed the capability described in the documents.

In response to the report, Apple told FT that its operating system was "the safest and most secure computing platform in the world. While some expensive tools may exist to perform targeted attacks on a very small number of devices, we do not believe these are useful for widespread attacks against consumers." The company added that it regularly updates its operating system and security settings.

The news raises concerns that such spyware could be used by repressive regimes and other shady attackers to monitor members of the public. In May, for example, WhatsApp disclosed a vulnerability that allowed hackers to remotely exploit a bug in the app's audio call system to access sensitive information on an iPhone or Android device.

Security researchers said that the spyware that took advantage of the WhatsApp flaw featured characteristics of the Pegasus spyware from NSO Group, which maintains that its software, costing millions of dollars, is only sold to responsible governments to help prevent terrorist attacks and criminal investigations.

However, the WhatsApp flaw was used to target a London lawyer who has been involved in lawsuits against the NSO Group, and security researchers believe others could have been targeted as well.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Ahead of every new iPhone release, we're inundated with rumors, part leaks, mockups, and dummy models, all of which give us a good idea of what to expect when new devices launch.

2019 is no exception. We've seen all of the above, and now, we've managed to get our hands on three dummy models of the upcoming iPhones, which offer up a look at the designs and feature changes we're likely to see later this year.

Like the 2018 ‌iPhone‌ lineup, the 2019 ‌iPhone‌ lineup is expected to include three iPhones: a 5.8-inch OLED device, a 6.5-inch OLED device, and a more affordable 6.1-inch LCD device, which will be successors to the ‌iPhone‌ XS, ‌iPhone‌ XS Max, and ‌iPhone‌ XR, respectively.

Compared to the 2018 iPhones, there will be few physical design changes. In fact, these new iPhones look identical to the 2018 iPhones in size, shape, and design, with the exception of the rear camera.

The sole major physical change to the new iPhones is a redesigned camera bump that's larger and square-shaped, as we've heard in multiple rumors. Apple is expected to use a triple-lens camera setup for the 5.8 and 6.5-inch iPhones coming in 2019.

A triple-lens camera adds one additional lens and should result in some solid improvements to the photo taking capabilities of the new iPhones. Based on rumors from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple's camera setup could include a 12-megapixel wide-angle lens, a 12-megapixel telephoto lens, and a 12-megapixel super wide-angle lens, which would be the new addition.

This triple-lens camera setup could allow for a larger field of view, a wider zoom range, better low light performance, and it will capture more pixels for sharper, clearer images even when lighting is not ideal. Note that the dummy models we have here feature lenses that protrude slightly -- in the finished versions of the 2019 ‌iPhone‌ models, the lenses are expected to be flush with the bump. These dummy models provide a solid look at what we're expecting, but the completed ‌iPhone‌ is going to look more elegant.

Google has received a lot of attention for its Night Sight mode that allows for bright shots even in the dark, and we wouldn't be surprised to see Apple offer a competing feature in 2019.

We've also heard from Bloomberg that Apple is working on a feature that would use some extra pixel data to do provide tools for automatically repairing a photo or video to fit in a subject that "may have accidentally been cut off from the initial shot." This sounds a little confusing, but it presumably takes advantage of that super-wide angle lens to let you edit the field of view of an image.

While the next-generation 5.8 and 6.5-inch iPhones will have the aforementioned triple-lens setup, rumors suggest the next ‌iPhone‌ XR will have just two lenses, which is still one more lens than the current model. Presumably this will include a standard wide-angle lens and a telephoto lens, allowing the ‌iPhone‌ XR to better mimic the capabilities of the current ‌iPhone‌ XS and XS Max.

Though the next-generation ‌iPhone‌ XR has just two lenses, the dummy model features the same square-shaped camera bump that's on the more expensive models with triple-lens cameras, which Apple may have done for design parity across the 2019 ‌iPhone‌ lineup.

Aside from the rear camera bump changes, the three upcoming iPhones feature no other design changes, at least not in these dummy models. There were rumors that the volume button would be redesigned with a round-style switch that we've previously seen in iPads, but that's not depicted here.

These dummy models are based on schematics and leaks from Apple factories and are likely sourced from case makers eager to be the first to get cases for the new iPhones on the market. There's big money in getting an accurate look at upcoming iPhones to make early cases, and most years, dummy models like these are spot on.

For the most part, these dummy models also are in line with most of the rumors that we've heard, so they're likely an accurate representation of what we can expect. There are no changes to the notch expected this year, though rumors suggest we could see some tweaks in 2020.

Apple may, however, remove 3D Touch from the 2019 ‌iPhone‌ lineup. The 2018 ‌iPhone‌ XR did not have ‌3D Touch‌, and we've heard a few rumors suggesting ‌3D Touch‌ will be eliminated from all iPhones in 2019. It's not yet clear if this is accurate, but iOS 13 does hint at its removal by adding 3D Touch-style Context Menus that can be activated on devices like iPads with a long press.

There were rumors that the new iPhones would use a frosted glass, also not seen in the models we have here. It's possible that a new glass look is still a planned feature and just wasn't included because material wouldn't impact case fit, but there's also a chance that rumor wasn't accurate.

For the next-generation ‌iPhone‌ XR in particular, while not seen in the dummy model, there are rumors of new colors including a lavender shade and a green shade, which might replace the existing blue and coral colors.

We heard other early rumors about the 2019 iPhones that no longer seem to be accurate. There was talk that Apple's triple-lens camera would have some 3D sensing functionality that would be similar to the TrueDepth camera system, but that's been pushed to 2020 and will be a major feature of the 2020 iPhones.

There was also talk of Apple switching from Lightning to USB-C in the 2019 ‌iPhone‌ lineup because the company brought USB-C to the iPad lineup, but based on these dummy models and a multitude of rumors, Apple's sticking with Lightning.

As for internals, we can expect an upgraded, faster A13 chip, and larger batteries could potentially bring some battery life improvements. One neat internal tweak will let the 2019 iPhones serve as Qi-based chargers for other devices, so you may be able to charge one ‌iPhone‌ with another or charge up your AirPods using your ‌iPhone‌.

Faster Wi-Fi 6 support could be included in the 2019 iPhones, along with ultra wide-band support for improvements to indoor positioning and navigation. Apple may also include an 18W USB-C power adapter and a Lighting to USB-C cable with the new iPhones, allowing for fast charging out of the box.

There's no word on what the 2019 iPhones will be called, but many have taken to referring to them as the ‌iPhone‌ 11, ‌iPhone‌ 11 Max, and ‌iPhone‌ 11R, which is a possibility, though not confirmed.

As for pricing, Apple may be planning to price the new iPhones similarly to the 2018 iPhones as we've heard no rumors about pricing updates. There's still a chance for some pricing tweaks, though, as Apple did see a dip in sales in countries like China that's partially attributable to high ‌iPhone‌ prices.

Apple is expected to unveil the new 2019 iPhones in September, and an event could potentially be held during the week of September 9. MacRumors has heard from a reliable source that Apple is planning to unveil the new iPhones on Tuesday, September 10, which is quite likely given past event dates.

For more on what to expect from the 2019 iPhones, make sure to check out our full 2019 iPhone roundup.

(Thanks to Sonny Dickson for helping us get our hands on these dummy models!)

Apple today released the third public betas of iOS 13 and iPadOS to its public beta testing group, 10 days after seeding the second public betas and a day after the fourth developer beta. The public beta gives non-developers a chance to test out iOS 13 ahead of its upcoming fall launch date.

Beta testers who have signed up for Apple's beta testing program will receive the iOS 13 beta update over-the-air after installing the proper certificate on an iOS device.

Those who want to join the beta testing program can sign up on Apple's beta testing website, which gives users access to iOS, macOS, and tvOS betas. Before installing a beta, make sure to create a full encrypted iTunes backup or an iCloud backup. It's best to install iOS 13 on a secondary device because beta software is not always stable and can include bugs.

iOS 13 is a major update to the iOS operating system that runs on the iPhone and the iPad, but this year, iOS 13 and iPadOS, the version of iOS 13 that runs on the ‌iPad‌, are separate downloads as they've been split up.

iPadOS is identical to iOS 13 in almost every way, though there are some iPad-specific features such as new multitasking capabilities. For the most part, the two operating systems share the same features.

iOS 13 introduces a long list of new features. Dark Mode changes the entire look of the operating system, shifting it from light to dark, while an overhauled Photos app makes it easier to relive your memories with new Days, Months, and Years viewing options.

There's a new photo editing interface that makes it easier to edit photos than ever before, plus there are new tools to work with and options to edit the intensity of the built-in filters. You can edit video right in the ‌Photos‌ app for the first time, and on the newest iPhones, there's a new High-Key Mono lighting effect and an option to adjust the intensity of Portrait Lightning effects.

There's a less obtrusive volume HUD, a new Find My app that combines ‌Find My‌ ‌iPhone‌ and ‌Find My‌ Friends and lets you track your devices even with they don't have an LTE or WiFi connection. A Sign In with Apple feature (not yet active) gives you a convenient and data safe way to sign into apps and websites, providing an alternative to Facebook and Google sign in options.

Maps has a new street-level "Look Around" mode and a Collections feature for making lists of places, Reminders has been entirely overhauled to make it more functional, there's a profile feature in Messages along with new Memoji and Animoji stickers, and Siri has a new voice.

The third public beta should correspond to the fourth developer beta, which brought a new Quick Action for rearranging apps, Share Sheet updates, new 3D Touch settings, and more, with changes available in our what's new in beta 4 article.

There are a ton of additional new features and changes coming in iOS 13, and for a full rundown of what you can expect, make sure to check out our iOS 13 roundup.