MacRumors

In its quest to turn the iPhone into a comprehensive health repository for every iPhone user, Apple has teamed up with Health Gorilla, a company specializing in aggregating diagnostic information, reports CNBC.

Citing two sources familiar with Apple's plans, CNBC says Apple is working with Health Gorilla to add diagnostic data to the iPhone by cooperating with hospitals, imaging centers, and lab-testing companies. According to Health Gorilla's website, the startup offers a secure clinical network that aggregates health data from a range of providers, offering doctors and hospitals access to a comprehensive overview of a patient's health.

While the service is aimed at medical providers, patients are also able to use the service to get a copy of their medical records "in 10 minutes."

Access your complete health profile in one place, from prior medical history, to doctor and specialist referrals, to your latest test results. It's all available through Health Gorilla's secure clinical network, anytime - from your computer or your favorite device on the go.

Thousands of physicians, specialists, labs, clinics, health centers, hospitals, and other facilities are already connected to Health Gorilla. Reach them easily, and securely share information with everyone in your care circle - whether medical professionals or family and loved ones.

Last week, CNBC said Apple has a "secretive team" within its health unit that has been communicating with developers, hospitals, and industry groups with the aim of storing clinical data on the iPhone and turning it into a "one-stop shop" for medical info.

Apple wants to create a centralized database for all of a person's health data, which would allow the medical community to overcome existing barriers that often prevent or complicate the transfer of patient data between providers, ultimately resulting in better care for patients.

Through Health Gorilla, the Health app on the iPhone could perhaps include a range of data sourced directly from different health providers in the future, offering up blood work results, x-rays, physical therapy information, and more.

In addition to allegedly working with Health Gorilla, Apple is also said to have hired several developers familiar with the protocols dictating the transfer of electronic health records, and it has also talked with several health IT industry groups dedicated to universal medical records, including The Argonaut Project and The Carin Alliance.

Integration of detailed health records would make the Health app, which already aggregates medical data and health information from the Apple Watch and other connected devices, an even more valuable resource for iPhone users.

Apple today seeded the fourth beta of an upcoming macOS Sierra 10.12.6 update to developers, a little less than week after seeding the third beta and more than a month after releasing macOS Sierra 10.12.5, a minor bug fix update.

The fourth beta of macOS Sierra 10.12.6 can be downloaded through the Apple Developer Center or through the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store.

We didn't find any significant features or notable bug fixes in the first three macOS Sierra betas, and because Apple does not provide beta release notes, it's likely we won't know what's included in the update until it sees a public release.

macOS Sierra 10.12.6 is likely to be one of the final updates to the Sierra operating system as Apple transitions to macOS High Sierra, which was introduced at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

Update: A fourth public beta of macOS Sierra 10.12.6 is also available for public beta testers.

At WWDC this year, Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi performed a demo of the company's new augmented reality platform, ARKit, while mentioning popular furniture company IKEA as an upcoming partner in the technology. Similarly, Apple CEO Tim Cook referenced an IKEA AR partnership in a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek.

Now, Ikea executive Michael Valdsgaard has spoken about the company's partnership with Apple and ARKit, describing an all-new augmented reality app that will help customers make "reliable buying decisions" for IKEA's big ticket items (via Digital.di) [Google Translate].

Valdsgaard said that the app will support between 500 and 600 IKEA products at launch with more being added afterwards. The augmented reality experience will even directly play into the development and launch of new products, as Valdsgaard explained that the company plans to first debut new pieces of furniture in the app to give customers a taste of what's coming.

"This will be the first augmented reality app that allows you to make reliable buying decisions," said Michael Valdsgaard, digital transformation manager at Inter Ikea Systems, the company that owns the brand Ikea.

Going forward, it will play a key role in new product lines. "When we launch new products, they will be first in the AR app."

Selling furniture directly within the app is a possibility as well, but isn't the company's focus for the first iteration of the software. Valdsgaard said, "Ideally, you could put a sofa in your home with the help of the app, and then with one click add it in the shopping cart on the site. But we have a tight deadline."

Several teams are working on the technology behind the augmented reality app, including one "innovation team" of 150 people located in Älmhult, Sweden -- where the first IKEA opened -- as well as a twenty-person team specifically responsible for the 3D modeling of furniture. The ARKit-powered IKEA app is expected to launch this fall, following the iOS 11 update.

New images and a video of a screen protector for the upcoming "iPhone 8" have been posted to the Chinese social network site Weibo and shared recently by leaker Benjamin Geskin and leak aggregation site SlashLeaks. The tempered glass screen protector is said to be made for Apple's upcoming iPhone 8 with a 5.8-inch display, and represents a design that falls in line with current rumors for the unreleased iPhone.

The screen protector's bezels are noticeably thin and are the same thickness all the way around, with the exception of the front-facing cutout for the device's camera and various sensors. Although reports have failed to largely agree upon how Apple will incorporate the iPhone 8's front camera into a device with dramatically thinner bezels, recent renders have suggested a minor cutout for the camera, ambient light sensor, proximity sensor, and potentially a 3D sensing module.

To make the cutout less noticeable, iOS could then use deep black technology provided by the new OLED screen to make the area atop the screen appear like one uninterrupted dark strip. As Geskin tweeted out over the weekend, the new tempered glass screen protector aligns nicely with his previous iPhone 8 renderings.

Following a report last year that Apple employees were referring to the 2017 iPhone as the "iPhone 8," that nomenclature has largely become the go-to title for the 5.8-inch device. More recently, Japanese site Mac Otakara has suggested that the device could be called the "iPhone Edition," marking the new iPhone as a higher-end device similar to the Apple Watch Edition. The "Edition" name would furthermore differentiate it from the iterative iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus updates also expected to launch this fall.

The European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs has published draft proposals that would enforce end-to-end encryption on all digital communications and forbid backdoors that enable law enforcement to access private message data.

The proposed amendment relates to Article 7 of the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights, which says that EU citizens have a right to personal privacy, as well as privacy in their family life and at home. By extension, the "confidentiality and safety" of EU citizens' electronic communications needs to be "guaranteed" in the same manner.

Confidentiality of electronic communications ensures that information exchanged between parties and the external elements of such communication, including when the information has been sent, from where, to whom, is not to be revealed to anyone other than to the parties involved in a communication.

The principle of confidentiality should apply to current and future means of communication, including calls, internet access, instant messaging applications, e-mail, internet phone calls and messaging provided through social media.

The regulation states that the disclosure of contents in electronic communications may reveal highly sensitive information about citizens, from personal experiences and emotions to medical conditions, sexual preferences and political views, which could result in personal and social harm, economic loss or embarrassment.

In addition, the committee argues that not only the content of communications needs to be protected, but also the metadata associated with it, including numbers called, websites visited, geographical location, and the time, date, and duration of calls, which might otherwise be used to draw conclusions about the private lives of persons involved.

The regulations would apply to providers of electronic communication services as well as software providers that enable electronic communications and the retrieval of information on the internet. However, the amendment goes further by stating that the use of software backdoors by EU member states should be outlawed.

When encryption of electronic communications data is used, decryption, reverse engineering or monitoring of such communications shall be prohibited.  

Member states shall not impose any obligations on electronic communications service providers that would result in the weakening of the security and encryption of their networks and services.

The proposals appear to have been tabled in response to comments made by EU member states such as the U.K., which has argued that encrypted online channels such as WhatsApp and Telegram provide a "safe haven" for terrorists because governments and even the companies that host the services cannot read them.

The U.K. home secretary Amber Rudd recently claimed that it is "completely unacceptable" that authorities cannot gain access to messages stored on mobile applications protected by end-to-end encryption. A leaked draft technical paper prepared by the U.K. government was leaked shortly after Rudd's comments, containing proposals related to the removal of encryption from private communications.

The EU proposals could also put European security policy at odds with federal legislators in the U.S., who recently called on technology companies to compromise the encryption built into their mobile software. Last year, Apple and the FBI were involved in a public dispute over the latter's demands to provide a backdoor into iPhones, following the December 2015 shooter incidents in San Bernardino.

Apple said the software the FBI asked for could serve as a "master key" able to be used to get information from any iPhone or iPad - including its most recent devices - while the FBI claimed it only wanted access to a single iPhone.

The European Union proposals have to be approved by MEPs and reviewed by the EU council before the amendments can pass. It remains unclear how the laws would apply in the U.K. after Brexit, initial negotiations for which begin on Monday. 

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.

Apple named its next-generation version of the Mac operating system High Sierra because it's designed to improve macOS Sierra through several major under-the-hood updates. While most of what's in High Sierra isn't outwardly visible, there are some refinements to existing features and apps like Safari, Photos, Siri, FaceTime, and more.

We went hands-on with the High Sierra beta to give MacRumors readers a quick idea of what changes and improvements to expect when the software comes out this fall. Check out the video below to see what's new.

Safari is gaining a new autoplay blocking feature for videos, Intelligent Tracking Prevention to protect your privacy, and options for customizing your browsing experience site-by-site, while Mail improvements mean your messages take up 35 percent less storage space.

Siri has a more natural voice, just like on iOS 11, and can answer more music-related queries. iCloud Drive file sharing has been added, and in High Sierra and iOS 11, all of your iMessage conversations are saved in iCloud, saving more storage space.

When installing High Sierra, it will convert to a new, more modern file system called Apple File System or APFS. APFS is safe, secure, and optimized for modern storage systems like solid-state drives. Features like native encryption, crash protection, and safe document saves are built in, plus it is ultra responsive and will bring performance enhancements to Mac.

APFS is accompanied by High Efficiency Video Encoding (HEVC) which introduces much better video compression compared to H.264 without sacrificing quality. The other major under-the-hood update is Metal 2, which will bring smoother animations to macOS and will provide developers with tools to create incredible apps and games.

Metal 2 includes support for machine learning, external GPUs, and VR content creation, with Apple even providing an external GPU development kit for developers so they can get their apps ready for eGPU support that's coming to consumers this fall. Apple is also working with Valve, Unity, and Unreal to bring VR creation tools to the Mac.

macOS High Sierra will run on all Macs that are capable of running macOS Sierra. For a more detailed overview of what's included in the update, make sure to check out our macOS High Sierra roundup.

Charitybuzz today launched an auction in which the winning bidder will have lunch with Apple's services chief Eddy Cue at the company's newly constructed Apple Park headquarters in Cupertino, California.

Here's your chance to have lunch with Eddy Cue at the stunning new 175-acre Apple Headquarters in Cupertino, CA, where you will learn more about Apple's industry-leading content stores and online services. This is a rare opportunity to see “Apple Park” and engage in a one-on-one, in-depth conversation with one of the most innovative business minds of our generation.

The auction has an estimated value of $50,000. Bids can be placed between now and June 28 at 12:00 p.m. Pacific Time, in support of the National Association of Basketball Coaches Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri.

The National Association of Basketball Coaches Foundation is a non-profit organization that aims to bring attention to the positive aspects of the sport of basketball and the role coaches play in the academic and athletic lives of today's student-athletes. Cue is a longtime basketball and Golden State Warriors fan.

The private meet and greet will be scheduled at a mutually agreed upon date by June 30, 2018. The winning bidder must be at least 18 or older. The cost of the meal and gratuity is included, but travel and accommodations are not. The experience cannot be resold, re-auctioned, or transferred.

The lunch does not include a formal tour inside Apple Park facilities, and photography is not permitted, according to Charitybuzz.

Cue, who is officially Apple's senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, currently oversees the iTunes Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, Siri, Apple Maps, iCloud, and Apple's iWork and iLife suites of productivity apps.

Apple executives have participated in several Charitybuzz auctions over the years, with CEO Tim Cook most recently raising over $680,000 for the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

Back in February, noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo laid out his expectations for the display resolution on the so-called "iPhone 8," a brand-new iPhone scheduled for release later this year that forgoes the traditional Home button and LCD screen in favor of an OLED display that fills essentially the entire front of the device.

Working from his expectations, we believe we are seeing increasing evidence of iPhone 8 devices visiting MacRumors. The numbers are unsurprisingly extremely low, but what we're seeing matches what we'd expect from Kuo's resolution claims. It has also become consistent enough that it's increasingly unlikely these data points are fakes or one-off blips in our analytics.

According to Kuo, the iPhone 8 will feature a 5.8-inch display, but with a strip along the bottom of the display reserved for a "function area." Details on exactly what the function area will be used for are unclear, but it will likely be some sort of dock-like area that could include fingerprint sensing, Home button functionality, and likely other dynamic icons and buttons for interacting with the device.

While Kuo says the overall 5.8-inch display will have a resolution of 1242 x 2800 pixels, he claims the active "display area" will measure 5.15 inches diagonally with a resolution of 1125 x 2436. That's likely the screen size that would be presented to Safari and other apps as the usable display space.

Ever since the release of the iPhone 4 in 2010, Apple's Retina displays have used pixel doubling or tripling to increase the sharpness of text and other elements shown on the screen. For example, the iPhone 7's display has a native resolution of 750 x 1334, but it presents itself as a device running at half of those numbers in each dimension, or 375 x 667. This logical resolution, known as points, keeps screen content at reasonable sizes but with four pixels making up each point, thus allowing for increased sharpness.

Apple's "Plus" sized iPhone displays with native resolutions of 1080 x 1920 are a bit more complicated, presenting themselves as devices running at 414 x 736 points but in "3x" mode so that a total of nine pixels would be used to make up a single point on the screen. This multiplication factor yields a rendered display resolution of 1242 x 2208, which is then scaled down to fit the actual 1080 x 1920 display.

With iPhone 8 models having been in testing for many months now and production likely to start ramping up soon, it's likely some of these devices are being used to browse the web, and every once in a while one of them may visit MacRumors. Checking into our analytics, we are indeed seeing some activity from devices reporting themselves as having displays of 375 x 812.

A handful of the visits came from IP addresses controlled by Apple, but even those coming from other IPs are localized to Cupertino or nearby cities of Sunnyvale and San Francisco when such data is available.

The number of visits we've seen from these devices is extremely low, totaling roughly three dozen sessions. We do on occasion see strange resolutions being reported by devices in our analytics, but the regularity with which we're seeing this resolution pop up suggests that this is likely a real device.

The 375 x 812 resolution is also the only one we're currently seeing appear associated with iOS 11 devices that can't be explained by an existing product. We similarly saw devices reporting a resolution of 834 x 1132 over a period of months leading up to last week's launch of the 10.5-inch iPad Pro, which corresponded to the 1668 x 2224 Retina display that was rumored for and ultimately appeared on the device.

Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 8 and more traditional "iPhone 7s" and "iPhone 7s Plus" models around the usual September timeframe for iPhone updates, although rumors have suggested supplies of the iPhone 8 could be extremely tight for up to several months after the official debut.

Microsoft executive Ryan Gavin this week suggested Apple released the iPad Pro in response to its Surface devices, per Business Insider.

"When Surface initially launched, everyone was skeptical, including them," said Gavin, general manager of Surface commercial devices at Microsoft. "And then they followed, and the iPad Pro is a clear example of that."

Microsoft positions the latest Surface Pro, released on Thursday, as a "best-in-class laptop" with the "versatility of a studio and tablet."

The new Surface Pro features Intel's latest Kaby Lake processors and up to 13.5 hours of battery life on a single charge. The tablet-notebook hybrid can be configured with up to a 1TB SSD, up to 16GB RAM, and up to Intel Iris Plus 640 graphics, with a USB 3.0 port, microSD card reader, and Mini DisplayPort.

During a 2012 earnings call, when asked to comment on why the MacBook Air and iPad would not eventually converge, Apple CEO Tim Cook argued that combining the products would result in compromises.

"You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator but those won't be pleasing to the user," said Cook, a comment that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella poked fun at four years later, alluding to the iPad Pro.

"I mean, take even Surface," said Nadella, speaking to The Australian Financial Review. "Three years ago, the two-in-one as a form factor was questioned. Does anybody need one? And now guess what, even our competition has decided that it's not a refrigerator and a toaster but it's actually a two-in-one."

While the iPad and Mac remain two fundamentally different products, the iPad Pro is Apple's closest attempt at a two-in-one hybrid device.

Apple released the original iPad Pro with a large 12.9-inch display and Smart Keyboard in November 2015, over three years after Microsoft launched its first Surface tablet with a 10.6-inch display and detachable keyboard.

In contrast, the Surface was arguably Microsoft's response to the iPad as a whole. Apple's tablet launched in early 2010, and the Surface arrived in late 2012.

As for Microsoft following Apple? "We don't really look at Apple," said Gavin.