Category: Apple Insider

These two new mobile USB-C drives are major upgrades over what were already well recieved drives including better performance, better warranties, and higher security.

The most impressive of the two new devices is the SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD. Relying on custom NVMe technology, SanDisk says it can get up 2000 megabytes per second read and write speeds, up from 1050MB per second.

It retains the popular design with an aluminum core that acts both as a rigid structure as well as a heat sink. It is coated in liquid silicone for good grip and two-meter drop protection and carries an IP55 water and dust resistance rating.

Another change is the move to 256-bit AES hardware encryption, rather than the software-based encryption it used to have.

The USB-C SanDisk Extreme Pro comes in a 2TB capacity at launch for $499 and a 1TB version will launch this holiday season.

The Pro version pushes the limits of an NVMe drive but may be above what’s necessary. That is where the SanDisk Extreme comes in. It is cheaper and still has twice the performance of its predecessor.

SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD V2

Many aspects of the SanDisk Extreme have been upgraded, including from a SATA SSD to NVMe media like the Pro. The move to NVMe as well as the move from USB 3.1 Gen 2 to USB 3.2 Gen 2 aids a massive boost in performance. It has improved from 550MB per second to 1050MB per second read speed and 1000MB per second write speed.

SanDisk has increased the warranty now to five years and the drive is protected with two meters of drop resistance and an IP55 rating. It too has 256-bit AES hardware encryption for securing your files.

The SanDisk Extreme V2 is available in 500GB and 1TB sizes at launch for $119 and $199 respectively. A 2TB configuration is arriving this holiday season.

If you blinked in confusion at the claim widgets were this great security risk, we’re with you. If you looked at your iPhone and wondered what a calendar widget could possibly do with the information that you tapped on it once, we’re still right there with you.

The idea, though, is that having installed a rogue widget, it doesn’t just notice when you tap on it. Instead — and trust us, we cannot underline enough that this is such nonsense that we want to use a stronger word — it enables a keylogger.

That is, after you’ve installed this, anything you type is recorded and sent to a nefarious developer. All your passwords, all your account details, every one of those Messages — who knows, maybe even including emoji — now in the hands of a bad actor.

If there’s a department in Apple collating reactions to all of the new features in iOS 14, they’ve just opened a document they’ve called “Give us strength.” They might also be scribbling into it that you just can’t please some people.

Apple was doomed for not having Android-style widgets, now it’s destroying our lives and wrecking our children’s future. Or something.

We don’t come to knock widgets, they are a great and useful addition to iOS that we are all having a very good time playing with. But really the only thing that is different between a widget and the app icons we’ve had since 2007 is the size, and what they use that size for.

Aside from Apple’s own Clock app, which has always displayed the current time, apps show an icon which you tap on to open the app. Widgets show very big icons which you tap on to open the app.

No widget does anything else but show big icons and open an app when you tap on them. And that’s because no widget can do anything else.

The big icons are great because instead of just being an app developer’s logo, they can be actually useful. Widget icons can display text, images, news headlines, anything.

It is precisely this which makes them useful — and it is precisely that which makes them actually slightly less useful than you’d hope. It would be brilliant to be able to tap on, say, a Notes or a Drafts 5 widget and start writing something immediately.

You can’t.

A widget may display lots of different information, but it is only displaying it, and it is only waiting for you to tap to open its app. Every widget might as well be an app’s icon, because there is nothing else going on here at all.

Apple’s logo for WidgetKit, the developer resource for making widgets.

We are tempted to say, “search us,” but there are reasons some people have thought widgets are doing this, and why others have agreed they must be. The first is that on upgrading to iOS 14, some users are getting notifications that their passwords have been compromised.

This is not iOS 14 shouting out your passwords to everyone, it’s iOS 14 doing a good job of notifying you of a problem. If you’re really lucky, it’s a recent problem. More likely, you’ve been using passwords on sites that have long since been compromised.

Then most people who are adamantly saying online that widgets are evil, are saying it because their phone slowed down suspiciously when they installed the widget.

They didn’t install the widget. They installed iOS 14 and then they installed a third-party widget, or they added one of Apple’s built-in ones.

The key thing there is iOS 14. Any update of the operating system is a huge difference and it will regularly slow down your device at first while it rebuilds the indexes that make search work. The indexes that mean when you want to launch an app, iOS knows where it is and opens it immediately.

People who think it’s more than this are convinced that anyone capturing your keystrokes must have done it so badly that they visibly slow your phone. People who are certain that this is what happened have even been known to completely wipe their iPhones of all data and start again from nothing.

Yes. Your iPhone will be faster. It would be faster anyway if you’d just waited a while, but a completely wiped iPhone with nothing on it will feel faster because there’s no search index rebuilding going on. Because there’s nothing there to search.

We would love for widgets to be more interactive, to be more than posters for their main apps, but they’re not. Right now, they cannot be.

It’s not as if it’s arduous having to swipe left or right on your Apple Watch to change the face. Not unless you have 30 faces and 6 of them are the Infograph one with different complications to suit different jobs you do.

Now, though, with watchOS 7 and iOS 14, you can tell your Apple Watch to display Infograph number 3 on Mondays, Modular number 29 from Wednesday-Thursday. Or to just switch from any face with complications to a simple one at the end of the working day.

It’s all done via Shortcuts, and whether you’ve ever or never used iOS’s Shortcuts before, this is about as simple as that gets. You can choose to have the face change at certain times — or certain locations.

Part 1 – set when (or where) you want the Watch face to change

1. Open Shortcuts on your iPhone
2. Tap the Automation tab at the bottom of the screen
3. Tap the plus sign at top right
4. Choose Create Personal Automation
5. Tap to select Time of Day
6. Choose from Sunrise, Sunset, or Time of Day to tap in a specific time
7. Choose whether to repeat this Daily, Weekly, or Monthly
8. Tap Next
9. Tap Add Action
10. Scroll or search for Set Watch Face and tap that
11. Tap on the box at the end of the words Set active watch face to
12. Choose from the list of faces that are on your Apple Watch
13. Tap Next
14. Turn off Ask Before Running
15. Confirm by tapping Don’t Ask in the dialog that appears
16. Tap Done

You may hit a problem when you reach the section where you have to choose what face you want to switch to., because the faces are shown to you in a list by name. The name is that of Apple’s official title, and if you do have six Infograph faces then the list will just say, “Infograph” six times.

However, the list is in order of how the faces are arranged on your Watch. The top one on the list is the one that you get if you swipe all the way to the left.

Note, too, that if you choose Sunrise or Sunset instead of a specific time of day, you’ll be prompted to say more. You can choose exactly sunrise or sunset, and the change will happen at the right time any day, or you can elect to choose options such as 45 minutes before sunrise.

Then it’s important to be sure you switch off Ask Before Running. If you don’t, then at sunrise, sunset, or whatever time you’ve specified, the face won’t change. Instead, your iPhone will ask you if you want to run this Shortcut.

That rather takes away the whole point of automation, having to manually say yes, you want something to happen automatically. Curiously, Apple does not give you the option of this Ask Before Running if you instead want the face to changed depending on your location.

Part 2 – set what face you want to change to

1. Open Shortcuts on your iPhone
2. Tap the Automation tab at the bottom of the screen
3. Tap the plus sign at top right
4. Choose Create Personal Automation
5. Tap to select either Arrive or Leave
6. Tap on the word Choose
7. Search for a map location, tap Current Location, or choose from recent destinations
8. Tap Done
9. Choose between Anytime or Time Range to specify what times or days you want this change to happen on
10. Tap Next
11. Tap Add action
12. Scroll or search for Set Watch Face and tap that
13. Tap on the box at the end of the words Set active watch face to
14. Choose from the list of faces that are on your Apple Watch
15. Tap Next
16. Tap Done

Now, for instance, you can have your Watch automatically switch faces when you leave home in the morning, or leave work in the afternoon, but not on Thursdays. This is how you can have your Watch face switch to one that has travel apps, or podcast ones, for your commute, and so on.

Note that whenever you do it in this particular way, you are telling the Watch to change to a particular face, and that’s it. You can’t tell it to change to that for an hour, for instance, and then change back. Not using this method.

So if you do want a face to appear only during work hours or just on the weekends, the easiest thing is to do all of this twice. Once for the start when you want the face to change to something, then once again for the ending time or the ending location when you want it to change to something else.

There is a way to make it start and stop automatically, though. It involves diving a little deeper into Shortcuts.

You can have your Watch face change every time you go to a particular theater.

That Add action step is how you make any Shortcut. Actions are the steps and the building blocks of all Shortcuts automations, and as well as making something happen, they can be used to check things.

You can only use one action when you go through the Automation step, but you can have have action be Run Shortcut. Then you can build up as complex a Shortcut as you like, and have it automatically be run when you leave or arrive somewhere, or at certain times of day.

So your shortcut could first check whether today is a weekday or the weekend, for instance, and then switch faces. Or look to see if it’s Wednesday afternoon, your calendar is empty, the surfing conditions are great, then change your Watch face to the Solar Dial — and text your partner to say you’ll be late.

That can be arduous to set up, especially when you compare it to swiping left or right on your Watch. But it is also excellent fun and what’s more, when you’ve done it once, you never have to do it again.

From then on, a single glance at your Watch will remind you that you should be at your desk or that you could be out at the beach.

The latest in an occasional AppleInsider series, looking at the world of Apple-related crime.

Surveillance video surfaced in mid-September of police from New York City’s Department of Homeless Services handcuffing a Queens man after he photographed them without masks. The video also shows the officers pulling off the man’s mask and attempting to unlock his iPhone with FaceID, but the man said he was able to swerve out of their way.

According to Patch, which obtained and published the video, the footage contradicts earlier statements by the officers, who have since been suspended.

An alleged drug dealer in Wisconsin is accused of beating a man with a glass bong, as part of an alleged home invasion that included the theft of two iPhones and an iPad. The Racine Journal Times reports the incident arose out of a dispute over THC vaping cartridges, and the stolen items include an iPhone 7, an Apple iPhone XS Max, an iPad Pro, an Xbox One, and $2,700.

The accused assailant, who is only 18 years old, was charged with two felony counts of armed robbery, a felony count of substantial battery, and a felony count of burglary of a building or dwelling, the newspaper said.

Forbes reported September 16 that Apple agreed to hand over iCloud data to the FBI, to apprehend a man accused of firebombing two police cars in Seattle. The firebombing took place on May 30, during the early days of the protests following the killing of George Floyd.

The data included screenshots of both the suspect in the act, a list of “ingredients” for a Molotov cocktail, and even incriminating videos. The man was arrested and brought up on federal charges of unlawful possession of a destructive device and arson.

A student who lives in Malaysia lost his iPhone for a day in early September and feared that it had been stolen. But it’s not the kind of theft that’s going to lead to an arrest, because the phone was actually taken by a monkey, who proceeded to take several selfies.

Per The Hindustan Times, the man found the phone after losing it, and a relative suggested that he check the photo library for clues, since more than one iPhone theft has been solved that way in the past. But instead, the culprit turned out to be a monkey, who had retrieved the phone from a jungle behind the man’s house:

Police in Calgary said September 15 that a cache of 192 smartphones was stolen from an area warehouse in August, and that customers should be aware of any phone they buy and make sure they’re not stolen.

In addition to phones from Samsung, LG, and Huawei, the missing phones include iPhone SE, iPhone XR, and iPhone 11 models. Police added that the phones cannot be activated on a wireless network, although they could work with Wi-Fi.

Those who followed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation closely may remember that multiple people indicted by Mueller, including Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, were incriminated by material found in their iCloud accounts. Now, there’s controversy related to the iPhone security habits of Mueller’s team.

Per Fox Business, Congressman Doug Collins of Georgia on September 15 demanded that Tim Cook provide information about iPhones belonging to Mueller’s staff, following the release of Justice Department records showing that several members of Mueller’s team wiped their iPhones due to “forgotten passcodes, irreparable screen damage, loss of the device, intentional deletion or other reasons.”

Nefarious as the wiping of the phones may sound to Mueller skeptics, journalist Julian Sanchez found a note in a report from the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General which stated that the office investigating the origins of the Russia investigation was able to get most of the data it needed. In addition, per that report, “the [Justice] Department routinely resets mobile devices to factory settings when the device is returned from a user to enable that device to be issued to another user in the future.”

A police officer in Wisconsin was at a nightclub investigating a stolen iPhone when an apparently drunk driverstruck his squad car. The incident, according to Patch, took place at 3 a.m. on September 12, and the driver was arrested.

Panyaza Lesufi, a regional member of the Executive Council in South Africa, claimed an iPad Pro with “sensitive information” was stolen from his state-owned BMW in a break-in.

Opera News reports Lesufi had parked his car at a country club.

An Ohio woman who was indicted on charges that she embezzled $65,000 from a Band Boosters club over three years used some of the money on an iPad and two laptops. According to The Dayton Daily News, the woman was the treasurer of the organization and was caught after her successor found discrepancies in financial records.

TikTok is facing a rapidly approaching deadline as Trump’s executive order calling for a ban of the popular social media app takes effect at 11:59 p.m. on Sunday. The company attempted to stop the measure by filing an emergency injunction with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia this week, and now the DOJ has responded.

The Justice Department argues that blocking the ban will “infringe on the President’s authority to block business-to-business economic transactions with a foreign entity in the midst of a declared national-security emergency,” reports The Verge. Today’s late-night filing was heavily redacted, but snippets show an aggressive defense of Trump’s order.

Referring to the supposed security threat that TikTok poses, the agency called Zhang Yiming, CEO of TikTok parent company ByteDance, a “mouthpiece” for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He is allegedly “committed to promoting the CCP’s agenda and messaging,” according to the DOJ.

The argument for banning TikTok in large part deals with user data, specifically where said information is stored. While a section detailing where the agency believes TikTok is holding U.S. data is redacted, a legible portion notes “US user data being stored outside of the United States presents significant risks in this case.”

TikTok is looking to avoid an all-out U.S. ban and is in the middle of hammering out a deal with Oracle. A tentative version of the agreement was approved “in concept” by Trump last week.

Terms of the arrangement call for Oracle and its partners to receive a 20% stake in a U.S. TikTok entity, with the remaining 80% held by ByteDance. Oracle will also be granted access to TikTok’s source code to ensure the software does not include backdoors. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week said the new business would be “controlled by Americans,” with ByteDance acting as a “passive shareholder.”

Following news of the deal, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross delayed enactment of Trump’s executive order by one week to Sept. 27.

As of watchOS 7, you can now buy and download faces for your Apple Watch. It’s not what users and developers have been wanting from the start, though, as it’s still not possible to entirely design every element of a face.

Apple’s limitations mean there’s only so much a third-party company can do. Ultimately, it comes down to offering images as backgrounds to Watch faces, just as you could do yourself from your Photos album.

However, we are just at the start of this. Apple is continuing to inch toward making the Apple Watch be a standalone device, and part of that was last year’s addition of the App Store.

This year it’s allowing the ability to share faces, and third-party companies are beginning to find ways of using this.

1. Open the App Store on your Apple Watch
2. Tap Search
3. Tap the microphone icon to dictate your search term
4. Dictate “watch faces” and tap Done
5. Scroll through the listings that appear
6. Tap Get to buy

How to find and buy Watch faces directly on Apple Watch

You can of course search for anything — and you can scribble your search instead of dictating. What tends to happen is that you either get no search results at all, or you get quite a long list.

The App Store on the Apple Watch is automatically filtering the results so that it only shows you what’s relevant. However, there are so many of these that it’s worth doing the search on your iPhone instead, and putting up with the odd non-Apple Watch app in the listings.

Unfortunately, at the moment you are going to have to turn to your iPhone at some point. Even though you can now share faces, and even though you can now buy them straight from the App Store, you can’t actually install them directly on Apple Watch.

Instead, your new Watch app will ask you to open the accompanying iPhone app. This is a bit messy, and it’s not helped by how some Watch face developers word their instructions.

Equally, some apps we tried were clunky to use. Ultimately, though, they all ask you to select a face, and then they open the iPhone’s Watch app. Just as with sharing a face from an individual, you’re then walked through adding that face to your Watch — with or without the apps used in its complications.

In each case, the face you buy comes as part of an app which contains hundreds, or quite possibly thousands, of different ones. Clearly the choice of which watch face you’ll use is up to you, there’s no way to narrow down your options.

Unfortunately, there’s not much in the way of narrowing down which collections of faces you should get. However, most or possibly even all, such collection apps offer you a free trial.

There are also other ways to get new Watch faces rather than via the App Store. Now that Apple’s watchOS 7 enables sharing of faces, you can download them.

You’re going to have to use your iPhone to actually instal the new Watch face

You can expect that there are going to be a lot of sites offering Apple Watch faces. Again, none of them will contain very much in the way of customization. There won’t be any that have an entirely new and different arrangement or sizes of complications, for instance.

What you can already find on sites such as Facer — which is also available as an app — currently boil down to three types of Apple Watch face. The simplest is the photo-based one, which offers you assorted backgrounds for your Watch face.

Then there are ones where people have spent a lot of time finessing Apple’s own Watch faces to offer particularly good balances of color, complications, and so on. Lastly, there are ones that aim to offer useful functions.

They’re really just exploiting the larger complication on a face such as Apple’s Siri one. But there can be, for instance, a language face where every time you turn your wrist to look at the Watch, it displays a new phrase for you to learn.

It will still be better when Apple allows developers to create entirely new faces. And until that happens, you are in theory very limited in what you can get for your Watch.

However, if there are few different capabilities that developers can use, they are already exploiting those en masse. There are thousands upon thousands of Watch faces available to download, even for free.

Alongside its more public-facing promotions of both the App Store and the Apple Developer Program, Apple has now updated its official developer site to promote the benefits of working with the company. The new page contains little that isn’t also on the new public pages, but does specify how developers can leverage Apple’s business and marketing options, as well as its technology ones.

Stressing that its single App Store means reaching five platforms — iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV — Apple says that it supports 40 languages and distributes apps to 175 regions around the world.

“We provide a powerful range of cutting-edge tools and configurations, so you can focus on creating innovative apps that influence culture and change lives using the latest Apple technologies,” says Apple on the new page. “And we make sure that App Store services are always available, thanks to our hundreds of sustainability and reliability engineers who maintain our dedicated data centers (powered by 100% renewable energy).”

The new page repeatedly underlines how a developer in the Program can concentrate solely on creating their app, and leave the rest to Apple.

“Apple verifies user accounts to check that your users are real, helps to see that you get paid, and ensures that your intellectual property is protected,” Apple says. “We also assist with tax obligations in over 60 regions and support any dispute process to help you protect your trademarks and copyrights.”

On the technology side, Apple promotes how it has “250,000 APIs” in its various SDKs. “And with 92% of iPhone devices issued in the last four years running iOS 13, you can confidentially [sic] deliver features using the latest technologies.”

Apple is promoting how one App Store gets developers onto five different platforms

A recurring complaint that developers and other Apple content creators such as Apple News+ publishers, is that the company keeps all user data for itself. The new page doesn’t directly address this issue, but does promote how it provides information about customers to developers.

“Each month, we analyze billions of anonymized data points that give developers valuable business insights,” it says. “Measure your app’s performance with data you won’t find anywhere else, view sales and trends, and view and download payments and financial reports.”

Having postponed its annual Amazon Prime Day from its usual spot in July, Amazon now appears to be planning to hold it for the US over Tuesday and Wednesday, October 13 and October 14. The company has held its Prime Day sales in India during August.

Amazon has not publicly confirmed the date for the sales event, however according to The Verge, a series of internal emails have included the news that it will make an official announcement on September 27. Separately, it has reportedly said that no new vacation requests will be accepted from staff between October 13 and 20.

This is the fifth year of the Amazon Prime Day event, and is expected to include many deals on Apple products. The deals are all exclusive to members of Amazon Prime, which costs $12/month. Thus far, members on Amazon Prime’s 30-day free trial have been eligible too.

Note that although Amazon will formally announce the date of Amazon Prime Day, it will not detail what deals are to be available. Many items will be prominently promoted on Amazon during the event, but the sale can feature items across any of the company’s very wide range of products.

To find out about both Amazon’s own Apple deals, and those of third-party resellers on the site, keep checking AppleInsider. In 2019, offers included big discounts on the iPad Pro, and AirPods.

Right from when Steve Jobs insisted the Mac had to have dialog boxes with rounded corners instead of straight rectangles, Apple has been known for sweating the details. This time, two new patents illustrate that painstaking attention — and one of them concerns sweat.

“Feedback coordination for a virtual interaction,” the first of two newly-granted patents, concentrates on something you’ve not realised in real life but would notice if an AR or VR environment got it wrong. When you’re at a concert with a friend, the two of you are hearing subtly different sounds, just because of where you’re sitting.

It’s not that your pal is behind a pillar in the cheap seats, and you’re in the front row. The same thing happens when you stand up or walk by everyone’s knees on your way out. The music sounds different — infinitesimally so, but different — depending on where you are.

“Music processing systems… should ideally strive to improve temporal precision in musical performances in order to enhance music quality and user experience,” says Apple. “This task, known as quantization, may involve presenting playback of sound at a time different from a time of performance of the sound…”

So you see the violin bow move, or you see a guitar riff start, but under Apple’s proposal, you only hear the music at exactly the time you should — according to the artist or where you’re standing. “[Quantization requires] determining that such a modified presentation is more aligned with intentions of the performer and/or the structure of a piece of music.”

Apple wants precision audio to fractionally alter when you hear what, depending on where you are

As well a your physical location relative to the real or virtual sounds, there is an issue of the equipment being used. “A feedback device (such as speaker/headphones, a haptics engine, or the like) often has a predetermined latency between initiation of associated feedback (such as audio, haptics, or the like) and user perception of the associated feedback due to, for example, hardware and/or transmission delays,” continues Apple.

“In turn, feedback associated with a virtual interaction in a CGR environment should ideally strive for life-like coordination (or synchronization) between perception of the feedback and occurrence of the virtual interaction itself,” continues the patent.

The details are extraordinarily fine, but the aim is simple. To enjoy something like a concert, or any experience with audio, for more than a short time, it has to sound real.

“However, existing CGR delivery systems continue to face challenges when it comes to effective and timely coordination (or synchronization) between the feedback and the virtual interaction itself,” says Apple.

Apple’s proposed solutions are all for head-mounted displays (HMDs), and are concerned equally with the audio itself, and with the physical position of the wearer. Not only does the patent describe detecting the HMD wearer’s position in order to alter the sound, it even includes when the sound is being created by that wearer.

“Some existing CGR systems enable a user to play a virtual musical instrument by translating the real-world body pose of the user and trajectory information… into CGR interactions between a CGR avatar/representation associated with the user and the virtual instrument,” says Apple.

It’s not the 1980s, so a user wearing a HMD and playing a virtual instrument can’t wear a sweatband and be taken seriously. Yet all of this equipment requires processing power, and that means heat.

“Structural thermal solutions for display devices,” the second of the

“>newly granted

patents, is concerned with keeping wearers cool.

“Certain display panels, such as OLED and uOLED panels, for example, can operate at high temperatures,” says Apple in this patent. “In known systems, such as wearable HMDs, for example, display panels are usually supported by a carrier, bezel, or other such structure, which is often formed from a lightweight material (e.g., plastic) to reduce the overall weight of the systems.”

“These structures, however, offer little benefit in terms of thermal regulation,” it continues. “Without proper cooling and heat dissipation, the panels (which are expensive and difficult to replace) can degrade over time, often resulting in irreparable damage or system failure.”

As well as thinking of the wearer’s comfort, then, this patent is also looking to the long-term wear on such devices. Apple points out that existing systems “will often incorporate additional components, such as heat sinks,” to do this, but they come with problems.

“These additional components, however, create design challenges and add to the overall weight of the systems,” says Apple. Its solution “addresses these challenges by providing a display system that integrates thermal solutions into structural components.”

The existing elements of a HMD could be leveraged to dissipate heat too

“This combined functionality not only reduces the overall number of components, complexity, and weight of the display system,” continues Apple, “but increases thermal conductivity and improves thermal management to decrease operating temperatures and extend the system’s usable life.”

It’s not that Apple has any particularly new method of dissipating or reducing heat. Rather, the company aims to leverage the hardware that already has to be present for a HMD to work.

These include the “display panel” plus “a carrier supporting the first side of the display panel.” This carrier, or frame, is a “thermal solution to facilitate heat transfer away from the display panel.”

There are further elements to do with including a heat sink where it can function but not adversely affect the wearer. And there are solutions that mean parts will move in order to “generate airflow.”

This thermal patent is credited to five inventors, including Laura M. Campo, and Sivesh Selvakumar. Their previous related work includes a patent on regulating thermal temperatures for a HMD.

The patent regarding precision audio control is by Christopher T. Eubank, and Daniel P. Patterson. The former holds many related patents including ones to do with spatial audio for “Apple Glass” and other devices.

Mini LED is a display technology that could help TFT screens have a better backlight than existing displays, bringing it closer to OLED in terms of contrast. While Apple has been rumored to bring the technology to market in some form of iPad, it seems Apple may already have a way to boost production.

According to TF Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo in a research note seen by MacRumors, supplier Epistar was previously predicted to be the only supplier of mini LED chips to Apple in 2021. However, progress made on mini LED at Sanan Optoelectronics has been rapid enough to potentially change Apple’s schedule for inclusion.

Previously, Sanan was thought to be included in the mini LED supply chain in 2022, but developments now puts Kuo’s estimate to a 2021 entry instead.

For Apple, having two suppliers for mini LED will be extremely useful, as it will help drive competition and lower the cost of components. It is suggested the die cost of a mini LED display would drop down from around $80 per unit to in the region of $45 per unit.

This reduced cost would in theory result in Apple using the technology more, with mini LED expected in between 30% and 40% of iPad shipments in 2021, and between 20% and 30% of MacBook shipments. Earlier estimates put the mini LED share at around 10 to 20% for each product range.

Apple is expected to employ two different types of display technology in the future, with it having invested in both mini LED and micro LED research and development. Of the two, mini LED will probably find more widespread use first, while micro LED may arrive in 2023 or 2024.

As the name suggests, mini LED consists of very small LEDs, smaller than typically used in current TFT backlight panels. As mini LEDs light up a smaller region of the display, the use of Mini LED will allow for selective dimming of the backlight itself.

By dimming areas of the backlight, the screen will be able to offer deeper black shades, as current TFT panels simply attempt to block out the backlight without turning it off to display a black pixel. With selective dimming of the backlight, darker shades could reach close to levels produced by OLED panels that don’t use a backlight at all, due to OLED’s use of self-illuminating pixels.

Micro LED takes the concept further, in producing even smaller LEDs the size of a display pixel. Rather than as a backlight, micro LED would be used to form the pixels on a display itself, and can potentially offer OLED-quality contrast.