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Charlotte Henry

Charlotte is a media junkie, covering how Apple is not just a revolutionary tech firm, but a revolutionary media firm for TMO. She is based in London, and writes and broadcasts for various outlets.

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Articles by Charlotte Henry

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Google Follows Apple And Slashes Play Store Fees

Charlotte Henry ·

Google is reducing the fees it takes from developers in the Play Store, CNBC reported. It is dropping the cut it takes from subscriptions from 30 percent to 15 from day one. The move from Google follows similar ones made by Apple.

Google also said on Thursday that it was introducing a program to allow e-books, music streaming services, and other apps that pay for content to access fees as low as 10%. Apple doesn’t make exceptions for those kind of apps and doesn’t offer a 10% fee to developers in its app store. Apple, which has received more regulator attention over its app store than Google, over the past two years cut its take from 30% to 15% in many cases, including for apps making less than $1 million per year, news apps, and certain premium video streamers that participate in an Apple program. But Apple still charges 30% for the first year of a subscription, meaning that Google’s app store may be more competitive for subscription-based apps.

 

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Is Apple Product Design Better Without Sir Jony Ive?

Charlotte Henry ·

It’s a heretical thought for some but…has Apple product design actually got better since Sir Jony Ive left? Writing for Bloomberg Businessweek, Alex Webb argues that devices now focus on function rather than form, to the benefit of the user.

Evans Hankey, who now heads the industrial design team, has overseen plenty of other tweaks that seem to indicate a change of philosophy. Take the iPhone. The latest iterations have ditched the curved edges that made the display liable to crack if dropped on its side. Or the Apple TV remote, whose symmetry made it visually appealing, but meant that users often inadvertently pressed the wrong buttons by holding it upside down. The design was revamped in May. “Since Jony Ive left, there’s not that gravitational force driving aesthetic before function,” Paul Found, a lecturer in industrial design at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, England. “Those who have taken over are now listening to what customers are saying.”

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It Costs Another US$20 to Get Fast Charging For The New 14-Inch MacBook Pro

Charlotte Henry ·

Apple has mentioned faster charging when launching a variety of devices recently, including the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, However, as iMore pointed out, getting the feature will cost a little bit extra on top of the standard configuration.

Thankfully, the 96W power adapter is available as a $20 upgrade when you are configuring your 14-inch MacBook Pro, but it still seems odd that Apple would bother with the 67W power adapter at all since it doesn’t provide the full experience that its new laptop is capable of. The new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros feature the new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors, Apple’s latest pro-level chips that take the M1 to new heights. The new laptops feature a mini-LED display, MagSafe charging, a new keyboard with function keys, and the return of many ports.

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Facebook is Going to Change Its Name Next Week

Charlotte Henry ·

Facebook is going to change its name next week, The Verge reported. It’s not going to be re-adding a ‘The’ but rebrand in order to reflect Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a ‘metaverse’.

A rebrand could also serve to further separate the futuristic work Zuckerberg is focused on from the intense scrutiny Facebook is currently under for the way its social platform operates today. A former employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, recently leaked a trove of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified about them before Congress. Antitrust regulators in the US and elsewhere are trying to break the company up, and public trust in how Facebook does business is falling.

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Third Generation AirPods Likely to be 'Unleashed' at Apple Event

Charlotte Henry ·

As I, and many others, suspected, it seems we will finally get the third generation of AirPods at the ‘Unleashed’ event on Monday. Leaks from Chinese social media site Weibo, picked up by MacRumors, suggest the earbuds will have an updated design.

Now, as Apple has confirmed its likely last event of the year for this coming Monday, October 18, all the indications suggest that new ‌AirPods‌ will also be announced alongside redesigned MacBook Pros. Weibo leaker @PandaIsBald, which accurately reported the launch of the baseline ninth-generation iPad for Apple’s last event, has claimed that alongside “M1X” Macs, the third-generation ‌AirPods‌ with an updated design will also be announced…The refreshed ‌AirPods‌ are expected to take design cues from the ‌AirPods Pro‌ and leaked schematics and images but appear to confirm those design changes. However, what remains unclear is whether the new ‌AirPods‌ will feature silicone ear-tips, like the ‌AirPods Pro‌, or feature the same in-ear design as the first and second-generation ‌AirPods‌.