MacRumors

Apple has removed its Activation Lock status checker on iCloud.com at some point in the past few days. The tool enabled users to enter the serial number or IMEI of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and find out if the device is secured with Activation Lock, helping buyers avoid purchasing a device locked to another user.

An individual purchasing a used iPhone on eBay or another website, for example, was able to request the device's serial number and use Apple's tool to verify that Activation Lock had been turned off. If the device was still locked, or if the seller refused to provide the serial number, then it was likely lost or stolen.

The iCloud page where the tool was available now returns a "Not Found" page aka 404 error. Apple also removed the following reference to the tool from a related Find My iPhone support document earlier this week:

How do I check for Activation Lock before purchasing a used device?

When you buy an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Apple Watch from someone other than Apple or an authorized Apple reseller, it is up to you to ensure that the device is erased and no longer linked to the previous owner’s account.

You can check the current Activation Lock status of a device when you visit icloud.com/activationlock from any Mac or PC.

Apple has not explained why it removed the page. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Activation Lock, enabled automatically when you turn on Find My iPhone, is designed to prevent anyone else from using your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Apple Watch if it is ever lost or stolen. A device with Activation Lock enabled requires the owner's Apple ID and password before it can be used, even if it is erased or reactivated.

Last year, a number of users who purchased a brand new iPhone experienced an Activation Lock issue where their device was locked to someone else's Apple ID. Apple disabled Activation Lock for affected users upon being provided proof of purchase, but it is unclear if the strange issue factored into the page's removal.

Activation Lock was introduced alongside iOS 7. The tool to check the Activation Lock status of a device had been available since October 2014.

Apple CEO Tim Cook today sent an email to employees speaking out against the immigration executive order that United States President Donald Trump signed yesterday afternoon. In the letter, shared with MacRumors by an Apple employee, Cook says Trump's order is "not a policy we support."

Cook goes on to say that Apple's HR, Legal and Security teams are in contact with all Apple employees who are affected, and he says Apple has "reached out" to the White House to "explain the negative effect" on the company. Cook's full letter is below:

Team,

In my conversations with officials here in Washington this week, I've made it clear that Apple believes deeply in the importance of immigration -- both to our company and to our nation's future. Apple would not exist without immigration, let alone thrive and innovate the way we do.

I've heard from many of you who are deeply concerned about the executive order issued yesterday restricting immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. I share your concerns. It is not a policy we support.

There are employees at Apple who are directly affected by yesterday's immigration order. Our HR, Legal and Security teams are in contact with them, and Apple will do everything we can to support them. We're providing resources on AppleWeb for anyone with questions or concerns about immigration policies. And we have reached out to the White House to explain the negative effect on our coworkers and our company.

As I've said many times, diversity makes our team stronger. And if there's one thing I know about the people at Apple, it's the depth of our empathy and support for one another. It's as important now as it's ever been, and it will not weaken one bit. I know I can count on all of you to make sure everyone at Apple feels welcome, respected and valued.

Apple is open. Open to everyone, no matter where they come from, which language they speak, who they love or how they worship. Our employees represent the finest talent in the world, and our team hails from every corner of the globe.

In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, "We may have all come on different ships, but we are in the same boat now."

Tim

Cook's letter addresses the immigration executive order signed by Trump on Friday, which suspends entry of all refugees to the United States for a total of 120 days, bans Syrian refugees for an indeterminate amount of time, and blocks citizens of seven countries (Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen) from entering the United States for 90 days. The order has left immigrants stranded at airports around the country and has sparked panic and outrage among tech companies with affected employees.

The letter comes after Cook spent a week in Washington, where he met with Utah senator Orrin Hatch to discuss the economy and tech industry and had dinner with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. While Cook did not meet with President Trump during the trip, back in December, he and several other tech leaders like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk sat down with Trump to discuss a range of topics including trade and immigration.

Though Apple has butted heads with Trump over the past few months after Trump suggested he would force the company to build its products in the United States instead of overseas, Cook explained to employees that he attended the summit to "influence these issues" because "being on the sideline" is not "a successful place to be."

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 CEO Tim Cook met with senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) on Friday afternoon to discuss topics like technology and economy, reports BuzzFeed.

Hatch, who is a member of the Judiciary Committee and leads the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force, has met with Cook several times in the past and participated in Apple's ongoing encryption debate with the U.S. government, calling for a private Senate briefing with Apple attorney Ted Olson following the dismissal of the San Bernardino case.

During Friday's meeting, Hatch told BuzzFeed he and Cook talked about ways to grow the economy and the technology industry. They also spoke about Cook's trip to Utah in October, where Cook took part in a privacy-related Q&A session hosted by Hatch.

"During today's meeting with Apple CEO Tim Cook, we discussed ways to grow the economy and our tech industry, as well as his recent visit with me in Utah," Sen. Hatch said in an statement to BuzzFeed News. "Given the issues I work on as chairman of the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force, it's especially useful to listen to innovators like Tim."

Cook, along with Apple's vice president of environment, policy, and social initiatives Lisa Jackson, also had dinner with Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, on Thursday evening. They dined at Italian restaurant Tosca, located near the White House, but it's not clear what was discussed.

Cook's meetings with Hatch, Trump, and Kushner follow a December tech summit that saw Cook and other leaders like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, IBM CEO Ginny Rometty, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk meet with U.S. President Donald Trump to discuss topics like trade, immigration, and vocational education.

At the time, Cook told Apple employees he attended the tech summit with Trump because Apple plans to continue to focus on key areas like privacy, security, education, human rights, and combating climate change. "Personally, I've never found being on the sideline a successful place to be," he said. "The way that you influence these issues is to be in the arena."

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 has been in the smart home market for over two years, having introduced its HomeKit framework in the fall of 2014 alongside iOS 8, but HomeKit has been slow to get off the ground because of the company's strict requirements.

Amazon, meanwhile, entered the smart home market somewhat later with its Alexa-enabled Echo in-home speaker officially launching in the summer of 2015, but Amazon's Echo already supports a wider range of products.

The difference between the two? Open and closed development, as explored by Reuters in a new article that details the different approaches that Amazon and Apple have taken when developing their smart home offerings.

Apple maintains strict control over its HomeKit platform, with a heavy focus on security and simplicity. Manufacturers who want to create a HomeKit product are required to use special HomeKit chips priced up to $2, along with specific WiFi and Bluetooth chips.

HomeKit devices have to be made in factories certified by Apple, and then have to be sent to Cupertino for rigorous testing, a process that can take three to five months and must be conducted in secret.

Amazon's process for smart home products that work with Alexa is much simpler, taking a matter of days to complete. Smart home companies simply need to write code and send it for Amazon to review -- that's it. No special chips, no secure factories, and no specific oversight. Companies can send a product to a third-party lab for testing to earn a specific "Works with Alexa" label, a process that is completed "within 10 days."

As Reuters points out, while HomeKit doesn't work with as many products, it supports Bluetooth, is much more secure, and has a quicker setup process. Security, which Amazon can't promise, is a key differentiator between the two companies and a factor that could ultimately entice more consumers in the long run. A non-hackable smart home product like a door lock or a camera provides more peace of mind than quick compatibility.

Amazon acknowledges that unlike Apple, it can't guarantee the security of third-party devices. A company spokeswoman did note that sensitive commands like unlocking doors have an extra layer of security such as a voice-controlled PIN.

Reuters spoke with several HomeKit manufacturers, and all were satisfied with Apple's approach. "It makes for a better user experience," said Incipio senior engineer Ahmed Abdallah, speaking about HomeKit's ability to work offline. "They found issues with our product before we released it that we didn't find in our testing," said Nanoleaf CEO Gimmy Chu.

Amazon's simpler certification process has led to over 250 smart home products being certified to work with Alexa, while Apple has certified approximately 100 devices. Alexa-enabled devices have also been selling rapidly, with an estimated 10 million sales over the holiday season, while Apple's HomeKit sales are less clear.

Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said the company is leading the industry by being the first to integrate home automation into a major platform with iOS 10. "The number of HomeKit-compatible accessories continues to grow rapidly with many exciting solutions announced just this month," she said.

Apple is rumored to be ramping up its smart home efforts through a smart home hub that's similar to the Amazon Echo, with built-in Siri capabilities, a speaker, and a microphone, allowing it to be used for controlling smart home accessories.

For more detail on the lengths that Apple goes to in order to ensure that its HomeKit products are secure, make sure to read the full analysis over at Reuters.

Microsoft on Thursday reported a 5% increase in revenue from licensing Windows to PC makers as part of its latest quarterly earnings results.

In a subsequent conference call, Microsoft's chief financial officer Amy Hood said its "partner ecosystem continued to see growth and share gains in the Windows premium device category," according to Business Insider. The comment has been interpreted by some as Microsoft stepping up its game against the Mac.

Microsoft reportedly defines "premium devices" as computers that are in the $900-plus price range, which equates to the higher end of the market traditionally led by Apple products such as the MacBook Pro. By its own definition, this includes Microsoft's latest Surface Book and Surface Studio desktop.

Last month, Microsoft said "more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before" following "the disappointment of the new MacBook Pro." The company has not released actual sales numbers to back that claim, however, while Microsoft's latest results include licensing to all Windows PC vendors.

While research firm Gartner says the worldwide PC market continues to decline, Mac sales grew by 2.4% in the fourth quarter. Lenovo, HP, and Dell, the top three vendors, saw an estimated 5.4%, 4.3%, and 1.6% growth respectively during the quarter as well, while Asus, Acer, and others faced declines, according to Gartner.

After teasing fans to "come see our latest creation" in the weeks leading up to one of its famous media events, seven years ago today former Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the first-generation iPad to the world. The iPad was announced as a larger-screen counterpart to the company's three-years-old iPhone, with Scott Forstall pointing out during the conference that the tablet could run "virtually every" iPhone app thanks to an on-screen button that users could press to scale the app's resolution up and down on a whim.

The original iPad launched with a 9.7-inch 1024 x 768 resolution touch screen, in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities. The 1.5lb tablet included Apple's A4 chip and was priced at $499, $599, and $699 for Wi-Fi only models, and $629, $729, and $829 for Wi-Fi + 3G models in each respective capacity. The Wi-Fi version debuted on April 3, 2010, while users interested in Wi-Fi and 3G had to wait until April 30 for Apple's new tablet.

Steve Jobs on the iPad:

“iPad is our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iPad creates and defines an entirely new category of devices that will connect users with their apps and content in a much more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

After the event in 2010, initial reactions to the iPad were largely positive, with sites like Engadget calling it "blazingly fast" and remarking that the tablet had no lag when hopping around its various apps. The screen was thought to be "stunning" and the iPad's iBooks application impressed, thanks to its flipping page animations and library-inspired bookshelf space for eBooks that upheld Apple's then popular skeuomorphic iOS design.

The original iPad's largest drawback centered on its substantial 1.5lb weight, as well as the lack of Flash in its operating system, no multitasking, and no camera. Seven years later, Apple has iterated on its original design and addressed most of these user complaints with each update to the iPad.

The current 12.9-inch iPad Pro weighs about the same as the original iPad at 1.57lbs, and still runs a larger version of iOS, but it's thinner (6.9mm vs 13mm) and is the "most capable and powerful" iPad yet, according to Apple, putting it on par with desktop-class machines.

While the iPad saw strong early adoption, Apple has experienced sales declines in the past few years, with users replacing their iPads less frequently than iPhones. Most commonly, users update their iPhones every year or two, while finding their iPads remain serviceable for longer.

In the company's annual earnings report last October focusing on the fourth fiscal quarter of 2016, iPad sales were down slightly to 9.3 million from 9.9 million in the same year-ago quarter. Although they were also infamously down in sales in 2016, Apple still sold 45.5 million iPhones in the same quarter, down from 48 million in the fourth quarter of 2015.

New iPads are consistently part of the Apple rumor cycle, and 2017 has been no different, with current reports pointing towards the launch of three new iPad Pro models sometime during the calendar year. Apple is believed to put out a new 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch iPad, but the exact screen size of a mysterious middle size model has been up for debate, including 10.1, 10.5, and 10.9-inches.

When it launches, the new 10-inch model may look very different from the 2010 iPad, reportedly doing away with the iconic Home Button, further reducing the size of the tablet's bezels with an edge-to-edge display, and include the usual iterative bumps to camera resolution and speed. One of the ports that the 2017 iPad is rumored to keep intact from its seven-year-old progenitor is the 3.5mm headphone jack, which the iPhone 7 ditched last year.

The full press conference covering Steve Jobs' introduction of the iPad can be viewed on YouTube here.

Apple today seeded the first beta of an upcoming macOS Sierra 10.12.4 update to public beta testers for testing purposes, two days after seeding the first 10.12.4 beta to developers and three days after releasing macOS Sierra 10.12.3.

Beta testers who have signed up for Apple's beta testing program will receive the 10.12.4 macOS Sierra beta through the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store.

Those who want to be a part of Apple's beta testing program can sign up to participate through the beta testing website, which gives users access to both iOS and macOS Sierra betas. Betas should not be installed on a primary machine due to the potential for instability.

macOS Sierra 10.12.4 brings iOS's popular Night Shift mode to the Mac, allowing users to cut down on blue light exposure. Believed to affect sleep by upsetting the body's circadian rhythm, blue light is thought to be more harmful than yellow light.

With Night Shift, the Mac's display automatically shifts from cool to warm at sunset and then shifts back at sunrise. Users can also set custom times for the display's colors to shift, or toggle the effect on manually. A Toggle to turn Night Shift on is available in the Notification Center, and Siri can also be used to activate the feature. macOS Sierra 10.12.4 also includes Shanghainese dictation support, cricket scores for Siri, and PDFKit improvements.

Apple today seeded the first beta of an upcoming iOS 10.3 update to public beta testers for testing purposes, more than a month after releasing iOS 10.2 and two days after providing the iOS 10.3 beta to developers.

Beta testers who have signed up for Apple's beta testing program will receive the iOS 10.3 beta update over-the-air after installing the proper certificate on their iOS device.

Those who want to be a part of Apple's beta testing program can sign up to participate through the beta testing website, which gives users access to both iOS and macOS Sierra betas. Betas are not stable and include many bugs, so they should be installed on a secondary device.

A major 10.x update, iOS 10.3 introduces a new "Find My AirPods" option to help users locate a lost AirPod. Located in the "Find My Friends" app, the Find My AirPods feature marks the last known location where AirPods were connected to an iOS device via Bluetooth and it allows the AirPods to play a sound to make finding them nearby easier.

Along with a Find My AirPods feature, the update also includes a shift to Apple File System (APFS). First introduced in 2016, APFS is optimized for Flash/SSD storage and includes strong encryption and other important features.

Apple recommends all users make an iCloud backup before installing iOS 10.3, as the update will cause the iPhone's file system to switch over to Apple File System.

iOS 10.3 also introduces a tweaked app animation, a new Apple ID profile in the Settings app, a better breakdown on how iCloud storage is being used, SiriKit improvements, new iCloud analytics options, and more. For a full list of what's new in iOS 10.3 beta 1, make sure to check out our dedicated post.