MacRumors

Apple Card got its first group of public test users today. A limited number of customers who signed up on Apple's website to be notified about the release of ‌Apple Card‌ are now able to apply for the card in their Wallet app as well as order a physical ‌Apple Card‌ (via TechCrunch).

Sign-up invites for ‌Apple Card‌ Preview are going out to a random selection of people who signed up to be notified about ‌Apple Card‌. Apple hasn't disclosed exactly how many people are part of its preview rollout, but a full rollout of ‌Apple Card‌ is expected later this month.

The ‌Apple Card‌ signup process on iPhone asks for your address, birthday, income level, and the last four digits of your Social Security number. This information is sent to Goldman Sachs, which approves or declines the application in less than a minute. Once the card is approved it shows up immediately in the Wallet app.

TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino, who has been using ‌Apple Card‌ for a few days, called the card's app interface "multiples better to use than most card apps," thanks to spending categories and clear transaction names (including logos in some cases).

The card on the screen has a clever mechanism that gives you a sort of live heat map of your spending categories. The color of the card will shift and blend according to the kinds of things you buy. Spend a lot at restaurants and the card will take on an orange hue. Shop for entertainment related items and the card shifts into a mix of orange and pink. It's a clever take on the chart based spending category features many other credit cards have built into their websites.

The Verge's Nilay Patel also received a physical titanium card early and had this to say about it.

"I got to hold the card itself and it is very nice, although it is fairly thick and felt a little bit heavier than the typical metal credit card. You can use the card without your phone nearby like any other card, but it doesn’t support contactless payments — Apple obviously wants you to use your phone or watch for that."

Apple Card is limited to the United States at the current time, but may expand to additional countries in the near future. Apple is already in talks with European regulators, and has trademarked ‌Apple Card‌ in Europe, Hong Kong, and Canada.

‌Apple Card‌ is a no fee credit card. There are no annual fees, international fees, fees for making a late payment, or fees for exceeding your credit limit, which means there are no penalty rates for missing a payment.

As part of its ‌Apple Card‌ Preview, Apple has also shared a series of videos via its YouTube channel explaining how to set up and use ‌Apple Card‌ on iPhone.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said last Tuesday that the ‌Apple Card‌ will launch in August, so the full rollout could be coming any day now. Goldman Sachs last week made its Customer Agreement available providing more detail on the ‌Apple Card‌. For questions about how everything will work, make sure to check out our Apple Card guide.

Samsung smartphone users in the United States experience faster LTE data speeds on average than Apple iPhone users, according to a recent global study conducted by Opensignal.

The study looked at over 3 billion measurements from more than 23 million devices from April 1 to June 30, 2019, concluding that Samsung users in the U.S. experienced download speeds 8.2Mb/s faster than iPhone users on average.

Samsung users also saw faster download speeds than Apple users in 35 percent of countries, across 40 countries analyzed. Apple users saw faster speeds in just 17.5 percent of countries, and in the remaining 48 percent, neither Apple nor Samsung (nor Huawei) offered the fastest devices.

Apple's iPhones had the biggest edge over Samsung in Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates, where iPhone speeds were 8Mb/s faster than Samsung device speeds. Samsung had the biggest edge over Apple in Norway, where Samsung users saw mobile speeds that were 14Mb/s faster than those experienced by Apple users.

All in all, Apple's iPhones were faster than Samsung and Huawei (the third most popular worldwide smartphone) in Brazil, Costa Rica, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and UAE.

Samsung won out in the United States, Australia, Chile, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, and Sweden.

Opensignal's testing split smartphone users into three groups (low, mid, and high-tier) based on each smartphone's mobile network capabilities, with the highest tier representing the newest smartphones with technology than Opensignal says is more sensitive to mobile network improvements.

Amid higher-tier smartphones, differences in speeds between the three largest smartphone brands (Apple, Samsung, and Huawei) were smaller. Higher-tier smartphones included the iPhone XS and XS Max, along with the Galaxy S8, S9, and S10, among others.

Higher-tier Samsung users saw faster speeds than Apple and Huawei users with global download speeds of 26.6Mb/s vs. 25.1Mb/s (Apple) vs. 24.4Mb/s (Huawei), but Apple users saw the fastest speeds of the three in the mid-tier category, which included the iPhone XR, X, and 8, along with the Samsung M40 and A80 and others.

Middle tier iPhone users, which make up the bulk of Apple users, saw speeds of 16.5Mb/s, compared to 16.3Mb/s for Huawei users and 14.4Mb/s for Samsung users. Samsung ultimately won out in the higher-tier smartphone category (aka the newest devices) and won the overall speed contest because most iPhone users have iPhones with slower modem hardware.

Samsung and Huawei have prioritized "Gigabit" LTE modems over the course of the last few years, while Apple's only devices with modems in that class are the iPhone XS and the XS Max. Even the iPhone XR, a 2018 device, doesn't have an LTE modem comparable to the modem chips Samsung has been using for the last couple of years.

Apple's challenge is that few of its current models are high-tier devices when we group iPhone models based on their mobile network experience capabilities. In our measurements, just 14% of Apple users are high tier. Instead, Apple has chosen to focus its handset designs on other capabilities such as facial recognition, camera innovation, long battery life, and extremely fast application processors and graphics using Apple's in-house silicon designs.

While all Samsung and Huawei flagship models for the last couple of years have featured so-called "gigabit" capable modem designs -- LTE Category 16 and above -- only the iPhone XS and XS Max have such capability. Even the current iPhone XR includes a less-capable LTE Category 12 modem, which we therefore class as a mid-tier smartphone on mobile network experience.

Apple's 2019 version of the iPhone XR is expected to feature faster LTE speeds that may eventually help Apple gain an edge over Samsung. The looming worldwide adoption of 5G will also shake things up, though Apple is not set to start debuting 5G capable devices until 2020, while Samsung already has 5G devices in 2019.

More detail from Opensignal's report can be found on the Opensignal website.

Apple is planning to give security researchers access to special iPhones that will make it easier for them to find security vulnerabilities and weaknesses, reports Forbes, citing sources with knowledge of Apple's plans.

Apple is going to announce the new program at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, which kicked off earlier this week and is continuing until Thursday.

The "special" iPhones will be similar to "dev devices," aka iPhones that are not as locked down and that will better allow security researchers to locate bugs.

What makes these iPhones special? One source with knowledge of the Apple announcement said they would essentially be "dev devices." Think of them as iPhones that allow the user to do a lot more than they could on a traditionally locked-down iPhone. For instance, it should be possible to probe pieces of the Apple operating system that aren't easily accessible on a commercial iPhone. In particular, the special devices could allow hackers to stop the processor and inspect memory for vulnerabilities. This would allow them to see what happens at the code level when they attempt an attack on iOS code.

The iPhones won't be identical to the developer iPhones that are provided to Apple's internal staff, as they won't be as open. They are described as "lite" versions of the developer devices by Forbes, with security researchers unlikely to be able to decrypt the iPhone's firmware.

iPhone prototypes created for Apple's internal staff are popular with security researchers and hackers and can fetch quite a lot of money, as noted in a report earlier this year from Motherboard. Described as "pre-jailbroken devices," the iPhones are valuable because they can be used to find vulnerabilities both by those who have good intentions and those who have bad intentions.

Releasing a similar device to security researchers who participate in the bug bounty program will perhaps allow Apple to better locate serious bugs, leading to faster fixes.

Apple is also planning to announce a new macOS bounty program, which will provide rewards to people who find and report security vulnerabilities in macOS.

Apple's announcements could perhaps come on Thursday, which is when Ivan Krstić, Apple's head of security engineering, is set to offer a "Behind the Scenes" look at iOS and macOS.

Japan's Fair Trade Commission is investigating Apple to determine whether it pressured Japanese suppliers and abused its position of power, thereby violating antimonopoly rules, reports Reuters.

The FTC in Japan surveyed Japanese companies and found that Apple had signed contracts forcing its partners to provide free technology and know-how for parts manufacturing.

When one of the companies called Apple's contract an infringement of intellectual property rights and demanded a revision, Apple allegedly threatened to end the business relationship between the two companies.

Apple has not commented on the report, but this is just one of several antitrust investigations that have been launched in recent months.

In South Korea, Apple has been accused of offering local carriers unfair iPhone contracts that require them to pay advertising and repair costs, and in Europe, the European Union is investigating Apple's App Store policies following an accusation from Spotify that said Apple uses its ‌App Store‌ to deliberately disadvantage other app developers.

In the United States, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is investigating the impact of Apple's sales agreement with Amazon on independent resellers, and the U.S. has also launched a broad antitrust review into major tech companies.

Spam phone calls have become increasingly problematic in the United States over the course of the last few years, and most people receive multiple spam calls per week, and some, per day.

Apple is aiming to help combat spam phone calls in iOS 13 with a new "Silence Unknown Callers" feature, which does what the name suggests - it silences incoming phone calls from numbers that are not in your contacts list. In our latest YouTube video, we checked out this feature to demonstrate just how it works.

With the Silence Unknown Callers feature activated, all incoming calls to our test phone from unknown numbers (aka numbers not in our Contacts list) were silenced.

Silenced means sent straight to voicemail without the phone ringing at all, but the person does have the chance to leave a voice message. The person being blocked still hears the standard number of rings before voicemail picks up, so there's no real indication that Silence Unknown Callers is on.

For a call to come through with Silence Unknown Callers turned on, it needs to be added to the Contacts list. A number previously sent in an email (iOS can sometimes recognize phone numbers from emails) does not green light a call to go through. If you call a number that was sent straight to voicemail, however, it is no longer recognized as an unknown number even if that number isn't added to your contacts.

Silence Unknown Callers is a simple solution, but it's not identifying spam calls or risky numbers specifically. It's blocking out all unknown numbers, which may not always be a desirable solution. Still, those silenced callers can leave voicemails and the numbers are listed in the Recents list in the Phone app, so this is a solid way to cut down on calls that you don't want if you're contacted by a lot of spammers.

You can turn on the Silence Unknown Callers feature in iOS 13 by opening up the Settings app, selecting the Phone section, scrolling down to "Call Silencing and Blocked Contacts" and toggling the Silence Unknown Callers option to the on position.

Silence Unknown Callers is activated right now in both the iOS 13 developer and public betas, and it will be available for everyone with an iOS 13-compatible iPhone when iOS 13 launches this fall.

Ahead of the upcoming launch of the Apple Card, Apple's wallet.apple.com website is active, providing details on the application process. The site also suggests Apple has sent out email invitations for an "‌Apple Card‌ Preview" to some customers.

Customers who have received an email invitation to the ‌Apple Card‌ Preview can sign up for ‌Apple Card‌ in the Wallet app on the iPhone or by going to Settings > Wallet & Apple Pay on the iPad. Apple's wallet site has a tutorial video on the activation steps.

Within the Wallet app, ‌Apple Pay‌ can be accessed by tapping on the "+" button to add a new card and selecting the "‌Apple Card‌" entry. Applicants will be asked to fill in personal information before receiving details on their ‌Apple Card‌ with credit limit and APR if approved.

Customers who choose to activate ‌Apple Pay‌ will be able to use it immediately after it is added to the Wallet app, and a physical card will come within a few days.

Applicants must be U.S. citizens or lawful residents of the United States and must be 18 years of age or older. The most recent version of iOS is required, as is an iPhone that can use ‌Apple Pay‌.

It's not clear how many customers are receiving emails to test out the ‌Apple Card‌ ahead of its launch, but it should be made available for everyone within the next couple of weeks.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said last Tuesday that the ‌Apple Card‌ will launch in August, so it could be coming any day now. Goldman Sachs last week made its Customer Agreement available providing more detail on the ‌Apple Card‌, and for questions about how everything will work, make sure to check out our Apple Card guide.

Apple will launch an iPhone equipped with both Face ID and an on-display fingerprint sensor in 2021, according to a new investor note by Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and obtained by MacRumors.

Kuo's prediction is based on Apple's patents related to fingerprint on display (FOD) and the continued use of the technology in Android smartphones, which together suggest to him that Apple will opt to bring fingerprint scanning back to its smartphone screens.

In terms of technology, we predict that four critical technical issues of FOD will significantly improve in 12–18 months, including module thickness, sensing area, power consumption, and lamination yield rate. Therefore, we believe that Apple will launch the new iPhone equipped with both Face ID and FOD to enhance security and convenience thanks to the multi-biometrics.

Apple has effaced fingerprint recognition entirely in its flagship smartphone lineup, which includes the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and LCD-based iPhone XR. Chinese mobile vendors meanwhile have gone in the opposite direction and extended the adoption of in-display fingerprint sensing technology from their premium smartphones to mid-range models, where they've proved just as popular.

Apple was widely rumored to be attempting to integrate Touch ID under the display on 2017's iPhone X, but the company ditched any form of fingerprint scanning after hitting "early line of sight" with ‌Face ID‌. However, Kuo argues that ‌Face ID‌ and FOD technologies are "complementary, not competitive," because multi-biometrics would offer authentication processes in circumstances where one or the other was inconvenient to use or simply unavailable.

Kuo believes that GIS and Qualcomm will benefit from iPhone's adoption of FOD, with the former providing the "large-area sensing ultrasonic" technology and the latter supplying the ultrasonic FOD module and lamination. Kuo also argues that the likelihood of FOD in iPhones will increase if Apple Watch supports a biometric function in the future.

Last month, Chinese media sources claimed Apple intends to launch a new iPhone for the budget-conscious Chinese market that features an under-display fingerprint sensor. However, those reports said the fingerprint scanning would replace rather than augment ‌Face ID‌ technology, which was deemed too expensive.

Barclays analysts also recently claimed that 2020 model iPhones will have acoustic fingerprint technology that could allow for full-screen ‌Touch ID‌, following meetings with suppliers in Apple's Asian supply chain.

Before these reports, the consensus was that Apple is done with ‌Touch ID‌ in smartphones, despite having explored various in-display fingerprint scanner solutions in the past, including fingerprint sensing MicroLED displays. However, ‌Touch ID‌ has found a new lease of life on laptop keyboards, specifically in Apple's MacBook Pro range and the MacBook Air.

Apple's domestic pricing and shipment forecasts aren't likely to be impacted by U.S. tariffs thanks to "proper preparations" made by the tech giant, according to a new investor note by Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and obtained by MacRumors.

Financial markets were rattled last week by President Donald Trump's surprise announcement of 10 percent tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese imports, effective September 1, in retaliation for moves by the Chinese government.

It's still unclear if Apple's products will come under the tariffs on toys, games, and consumer electronics, but if they do, Kuo believes Apple will absorb most of the additional costs in the mid-short term while increasing its non-Chinese production locations to avoid rising costs in the long run.

In the mid-short term, if Apple absorbs most of the additional costs due to tariffs, there will be a negative impact on its profits from its hardware business, but the company will reap benefits in its brand image and relationships with suppliers. We also believe that the negative impact on Apple are limited and temporary because the profit from service business is growing, and non-Chinese production locations will gradually increase.

Apple has been expanding production in India and Vietnam as part of a strategy to diversify product manufacturing beyond China. Kuo thinks Apple's non-Chinese production locations could meet most of the demand from the U.S. market after two years. Specifically, he believes iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch manufacturing could meet demand as early as next year, but adequate Mac production outside of China won't be achieved before 2021.

The predictions stand in contrast to recent comments made by Apple CEO Tim Cook during his July earnings call, in which he was asked about Apple potentially moving out of China. Cook responded: "There's been a lot of speculation about this, [but] I wouldn't put much stock in it. Parts come from everywhere, including the U.S. We currently make the Mac Pro in the US and would like to continue that."

Earlier last month, Apple asked for a U.S. import tariff exemption on parts for the new Mac Pro, which President Trump said would be denied.

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.

Apps designed for the Mac don't typically receive as much attention as apps made for iPhones and iPads, so we have a series here at MacRumors designed to highlight useful and interesting Mac apps worth checking out and potentially investing in.

This month's picks include apps for overhauling your Touch Bar, updating forgotten Mac apps, controlling music, managing windows, and more, with many of these apps recommended by MacRumors readers.

• MacUpdater ($9.99) - MacUpdater is a simple little app that keeps track of the updates for all of the apps installed on your Mac so you can see at a glance which apps are out of date and need updating. It's super useful for apps that have been installed outside of the Mac App Store. You can scan your apps for free using MacUpdater, but updating more than 10 costs $9.99.
• Moom ($9.99) - Moom is an app that's designed to let you quickly and easily move and resize windows on your Mac. It has preset sizes and locations, and also lets you draw grids to create custom window display sizes. There are also custom controls for moving, zooming, moving windows to a secondary display, centering, resizing and more, and window layouts can be saved.
• Background Music (Free) - Background Music is an audio utility that's designed to automatically pause your music player when other audio starts playing on your Mac, unpausing it afterwards. It also offers per-application volume controls so you can make certain apps quieter than others, and it has an option for recording system audio.
• GoldenChaos BTT (Free) - GoldenChaos BTT is a Touch Bar replacement interface that lets you overhaul the way that your Touch Bar works. It lets you change up the Home Strip, access modifier menus with the app switcher, control strip, window snapping controls, and more, and customize the size of dynamic menu options. It supports dock badges, widgets, and more. GoldenChaos is free, but requires BetterTouchTool, a Touch Bar customization app that costs $7.50.
• EasyFinder (Free) - EasyFinder is a menu bar app that offers up quick access to important and frequently used files and folders, so you can get to what you need with just a click or two. You can add files and folders in different categories like Personal, Work, and Others, and you can get to that content right from the menu bar.

If you have a favorite must-have Mac app that we haven't highlighted yet, let us know in the comments, and we might feature it in a future video. For more of our Mac app picks, make sure to check out our Mac app archives.