Charlotte Henry

YouTube Music will replace Google Play Music as the default music app on Android devices. It will come pre-installed on smartphones and be part of Android 10, Sky News reported.

The service – which has struggled to seize a significant portion of the music streaming market – will replace the relatively unsuccessful Google Play Music app. The move is more a matter of Google consolidating its estate of products rather than attempting to meet the standards of competitors. YouTube Music will come pre-installed on new Android smartphones and will be included in the next version of its operating system, which will simply be known as Android 10 after Google ditched its dessert-themed naming conventions.

On September 28, 1997, Apple released the Here’s to the Crazy Ones commercial. 22 years on, Cult of Mac reflected on the iconic spot.

Narrated by actor Richard Dreyfuss, the TV spot starts out with an instantly memorable salute to counterculture ideals. “Here’s to the crazy ones,” Dreyfuss intones. “The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers — the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. Black-and-white images of more than a dozen 20th-century visionaries, from Albert Einstein and Buckminster Fuller to John Lennon and Martin Luther King Jr., flow past as masterful marketing copy praises the power of bold ideas. The spot ends with the powerful (and grammatically questionable) advertising slogan, “Think different.”

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber was frustrated at the delay in Spotlight search when using an external keyboard with an iPad. He confirmed Saturday that this issue had been fixed in iPadOS 13.

A little birdie told me this would be fixed in iOS/iPadOS 13. And I’m happy to confirm that — so far at least — Spotlight search with an external keyboard hasn’t missed a keystroke for me yet. There actually are bug fixes in iOS 13, too.

On Sunday, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reiterated his view that sometime between late 2020 and mid-2021 high-end iPad and MacBooks with Mini-LED displays will land. MacRumors took a look at the anaylt’s latest note.

LG Display will supply the Mini-LED display panels, while other Mini-LED component suppliers will include Epistar, Zhen Ding, Radiant Opto-Electronics, Nichia, Avary Holding, and TSMT, according to Kuo. Kuo believes the Mini-LED displays will allow for thinner and lighter product designs, while also offering good wide color gamut performance, high contrast and HDR, and local dimming, which dims the backlight behind areas of the screen that are displaying black while keeping the bright parts of the screen bright.

iFixit posted its teardown of the iPad 7.  It found very little to differentiate if from its predecessor.

Well there you have it, the 10.2″ iPad 6 iPad 7 laid out after facing the business end of a teardown. This turned out to be a pretty light refresh! Just a size increase, the addition of a Smart Connector, and an extra GB of RAM. The display and digitizer still aren’t fused together, despite the addition of Pro-like features, which is something we’re very happy to see survive. Non-laminated, separately replaceable cover glass and LCD makes most screen repairs far less expensive. The LCD is simple to remove once you separate the cover glass/digitizer. As with all iPads, a solid barrier of very strong adhesive hinders all repairs. The Lightning port, a common point of failure, is soldered to the logic board. More adhesive holds nearly everything else in place. Battery and logic board replacements are particularly obnoxious.

After a five-month delay, and a lot of mockery, Samsung’s Galaxy Fold is finally available to purchase in the U.S. Techcrunch reports there are still some problems with the device.

Five months after originally planned, the Galaxy Fold goes on sale today in the U.S. The handset has had its share of setbacks, of course. The first round ran into problems from several reviewers for a variety of reasons. And as I outlined yesterday, I ran into my own issues with the reinforced version of the handset. Even in its current version, the Galaxy Fold is a fragile thing. That’s something Samsung has been abundantly cautious about disclosing, through a video pleading to “just use a light touch” and a lot of paperwork that ships with the device. I’ll be giving more thoughts on my time with the product in an upcoming write-up. In the meantime, however, anyone thinking of plunking down the $2,000 (and up) needs to factor that into the equation.

Amazon unveiled a host of new and upgraded hardware at an event on Wednesday. The Verge has a rundown of what waas announced, including the new Echo Buds headphones.

The company announced 15 new products, including the Echo Buds truly wireless headphones, the Dolby Atmos-equipped Echo Studio speaker, and the Echo Frames, which have built-in microphones so you can chat with Alexa. A few of the announcements were minor revisions, like the Echo Dot smart speaker with an integrated clock, and the Alexa Smart Oven that can convection bake and air fry food items (in addition to being a regular microwave). But there were more than a few unexpected surprises, including the Echo Loop smart ring, the new, affordable Eero mesh Wi-Fi router, the Amazon Fetch pet tracker, and more.

Thinking of getting an Apple Watch Series 5? Got one on the way?  iFixit have a very interesting teardown of the device.

The Series 5 uses Apple’s new S5 system-on-chip, which packs in twice the storage and the new compass. But it also contains the same CPU and GPU as the S4 chip in the Series 4, and the overall performance specs are the same. Other than that, the Series 5 is very similar to the Series 4 on the inside. But Apple has made enough minor changes that many parts are not interchangeable, thanks to redesigned connectors on the taptic engine, display and battery. Now, about Apple’s claim that the Series 5 Sport cases are made from “100% recycled aluminum.” While using recycled materials is great, the truth is most of the world’s aluminum is already recycled, and recycled aluminum is dramatically cheaper than the freshly-mined variety. The real question is whether Apple uses any recycled aluminum that wouldn’t have been recycled anyway. And after analyzing Apple’s statements on the matter, the answer seems to be no.

The 2020 iPhone could resemble the iPhone 4. That’s according to a research note from Ming Chi Kuo, reported on by MacRumors.

In his research note with TF International Securities, Kuo says Apple will change its flagship iPhone design “significantly” next year. Specifically, the new devices will feature a new metal frame with “a more complex segmentation design, new trenching and injection molding procedures, and sapphire or glass cover assembly to protect the trench injection molding structure.”
We predict that the new 2H20 iPhone design will change significantly […] The metal frame and the front and rear 2/2.5D glass are still used, but the metal frame surface will be changed to a similar design to the iPhone 4, replacing the current surface design.

iPhones are tested to be resilient. However, The Next Web spoke to someone whose device took that to the next level. Haukur Snorrason’s iPhone 6s fell from an airplane into the Icelandic wilderness. The device was found over a year later. It still worked.

Last year, photographer Haukur Snorrason was on an aerial photo tour of the Skaftá river in South Iceland to grab pictures of the yearly glacier river floods. Unfortunately, when he grabbed his iPhone to film the flood, the phone got swept away by a gust of wind. Falling 60 meters (200 feet) down on rocky terrain — where a massive river was overflowing and rupturing roads — the time came for Haukur to say goodbye to his phone forever – or so he thought. Or so he thought, until 13 months later, when he received a phone call from people that had found his phone while hiking. After falling from a plane, and spending over a year exposed to the harsh Icelandic elements, it still worked!