Linked List: July 31, 2019

Wednesday, 31 July 2019

Damned If They Do, Damned If They Don’t ★

Headline from Jon Swartz’s report for MarketWatch on Apple’s Q3 results: “The iPhone Just Did Something It Hasn’t Done in Nearly 7 Years, and It Isn’t Good for Apple”.

What could it be? This:

Sales of signature smartphone are less than half of Apple’s quarterly revenue for the first time since 2012.

So from 2013-2018, the oft-repeated narrative was that Apple was in trouble because they were too dependent on iPhone sales. Now they’re diversifying, particularly through services and wearables, and that’s “not good for Apple”. OK.

LG Updates Their 5K 27-Inch UltraFine Display ★

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors:

Available for $1,299.95, the new LG UltraFine 5K Display offers the same 5120 × 2880 resolution as the previous UltraFine 5K Display with 14.7 million pixels and P3 wide color gamut.

The display connects to a Mac using a Thunderbolt 3 cable, and this version of the monitor can connect using USB-C, which means that it’s also compatible with the iPad Pro. There are three downstream USB-C ports with speeds up to 5Gb/s, and when used with a Mac notebook, charging over TB3 is supported with up to 94W of power available.

When connected to an iPad Pro via USB-C, it’s limited to 4K resolution, but the old 5K UltraFine Display didn’t support iPad Pro at all. When the previous 5K UltraFine Display started disappearing from retailers — especially Apple’s own store — most of us assumed it was being discontinued, leaving Mac users with no good options for a 5K display. Good to know it was simply being updated.

But I’ve been holding out hope that in addition to the $5,000–7,000 Pro Display XDR, Apple might also release their own 6K (or even 5K) Pro Display without all of the advanced color and brightness capabilities, for pro users whose work doesn’t require those expensive features. This update to LG’s UltraFine Display makes me think that’s now less likely.

Apple Maps in iOS 13 ★

Ryan Christoffel, writing for MacStories:

Timed with the spread of its first-party mapping data, Apple is giving the Maps app a big upgrade in iOS 13 that represents the company’s biggest push yet to overtake Google Maps as the world’s most trusted, go-to mapping service. Apple Maps in iOS 13 represents — if you’re in the US at least — Apple’s purest vision to date for a modern mapping service. Here’s everything that it brings.

Comprehensive overview of what’s new, and where Apple Maps stands versus Google Maps.