By Jarrett Green 30 Dec 2019

In August, 2019, the Apple Card was officially launched. At the same time, the company had to re-evaluate having people listen to Siri recordings, and the US/China trade tensions got complicated.

August 2019: FileMaker revives the old Claris name (left); Apple Card launches (center)l and Siri is listening to you (right)

Given that across the whole of 2019, Apple launched at least as many major hardware updates as ever, still this year feels like it’s when the company pivoted to services. By August, we had Apple News+ and we knew we were getting both Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade. But it was this month’s launch of the Apple Card that may end up being the most significant.

Apple Card

Around six months after it was first unveiled, and following series of internal testing, Apple Card finally opened to applications in August 2019.

Initially available only by invitation —which didn’t go flawlessly —Apple Card was formally opened to all eligible applicants on August 20.

It’s conceivable that Apple Card is the company’s fastest success. Shortly before its release, a survey reported that consumer interest was “remarkably high,” for instance.

Apple Card is finally here.

It appeared that Goldman Sachs, the issuing bank, was expecting big things because it was putting its money where its mouth is. Reportedly it was spending $350 for every Apple Card signup, although, separately, it was suggested that it may also be accepting “subprime” applicants.

It’s a credit card, so you do need to know what you’re getting into with it, but there were two more signs of success.

First, Tim Cook was pressed into saying that yes, yes, okay, we’ll be bringing Apple Card to more countries, enough already. And, second, the earliest users were finding that the physical card shows wear.

They may just have repeatedly been taking it out of wallets and purses to show off, mind. Admit it —you’d do the same. It’s the credit card that clangs when you drop it on the table.

Speaking of clangers

Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Note 10 but left something out. A headphone jack. After mercilessly mocking Apple for removing the jack, Samsung had done precisely the same.

But there was a difference. In the hope that nobody would notice, Samsung also removed something else —the company took down its anti-Apple video ad on the subject.

It just didn’t do it very well. Search YouTube for it, and it’s true, the US ad is gone. But the Portuguese Samsung account still has it, and it’s in English.

Meanwhile, at the Samsung Unpacked, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked up the partnership between the two companies. And Microsoft, semi-accidentally, released a new build of the Microsoft Edge browser for Mac.

It wasn’t accidental. It’s not as if Microsoft didn’t know it was doing it. Microsoft Edge uses the engine from Google Chrome and since that’s on Mac, so is Edge.

Whatever the reason we’ve got it, and whatever we can expect Microsoft to support in the future, this latest build introduced a key feature called Collections. It was still a beta and a little flaky, but it added facilities for researchers to gather their work.

Complicated

That Collections research feature is for managing information you collect online and if you wanted to test it on anything, the White House was busy giving you lots and lots of data to track and update and stay on top of.

For all the months in which the US and China have had their current trade dispute, it seemed as if August 2019 was the most complicated.

Starting right on August 1, President Trump threatened a 10% tariff on electronics, which was to begin a month later. He later suggested he was open to discussions with China, but in the meantime had dinner with Tim Cook to discuss it.

Did Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak ever imagine Apple having to lobby the government?

After that, the president praised Cook’s communication skills, and said that he’d made a good case for Apple being excused the tariffs.

We’ll never know the full details, but some time after Cook’s dinner, the White House did make some changes.

“Certain products are being removed from the tariff list based on health, safety, national security and other factors and will not face additional tariffs of 10 percent,” reported the United States Trade Representative in a statement on August 13.

However, by August 23, things were changing again.

“Our country has lost, stupidly, Trillions of Dollars with China over many years,” tweeted the President. “We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far better off without them. The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP.”

Consequently, throughout August, Apple’s share value was, well, interesting to say the least, and the company was being studied to see what it could and would do. Apple was predicted to absorb any potential tariff prices increases rather than pass them on to the consumer, for instance.

Then Apple was seen to have many options to reduce the impact of any tariffs, including exploiting a perceived lowering of production costs on the iPhone.

For us

The direct upshot, for us, of all the political impact on Apple, could be that iPhones became more expensive. Yet that’s only an issue if you’re planning to buy one, and there was reason to suspect that 2019’s iPhones weren’t going to be all that great. Not when it’s 2020’s models that are going to get 5G.

Financial company Nomura Instinet figured would happen, with it saying the 2019 iPhones would fare poorly. It also, for thoroughness, said everyone else is wrong about the demand for 2020’s 5G iPhones.

Apparently just because you and we really want 5G, that doesn’t mean anyone else does.

Apple itself didn’t appear to be expecting a barn-burner with the iPhone 11, reportedly sticking to predictions of selling about the same as last year.

Whatever the predicted sales volumes, though, Apple was now reportedly looking to include the word “Pro” in certain iPhone models. It’s just a name, but it caused a lot of fuss.

But while we’re on the subject of future iPhones, reports of the 2019 range’s demise did not stop any predictions about the next few years of the product. We saw solid reports that the notch could vanish, for instance, and that Touch ID could return in 2021.

Other hardware

It’s not just the iPhone that could get 5G, either. You wouldn’t be surprised to see it in a future iPad Pro, but sources were saying now that we may even get a 5G MacBook Pro in 2020.

The FAA was thinking about MacBook Pro machines this month too. It decided to prohibit the carrying of specific models on flights, the 15-inch ones from September 2015 to February 2017 that were the subject of Apple’s voluntary recall over battery issues.

Software

While we looked forward to what was coming next, both with new hardware and the forthcoming releases of iOS 13 and macOS Catalina, FileMaker Inc was also looking to the past. It looked so far back in its own timeline that it stopped being called FileMaker Inc. In a nod to Apple history —though possibly not a very thorough nod —the company rebranded itself as Claris.

And then it seemed that everybody, just everybody, was looking at Siri.

Amazon, Google and Apple’s voice assistants have long been recording our requests of them and getting human beings to listen later to see how it worked. Not everything is recorded, not everything is listened to, and all of it is anonymized, but people were getting to hear what Siri heard and sent for analysis.

In truth, maybe Apple could have shouted about this more, but it had always told us it would do this. Nonetheless, a self-styled whistleblower contacted the press about how Siri is listening to us.

This followed previous reports saying the same for Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.

But if they were all at it, at least Apple reacted the most promptly. It said it would suspend the program while investigating and we all thought yeah, sure, of course you will.

It did. Apple suspended that program and it investigated. It didn’t just open some investigation and wait for us to forget about it, either, it released its findings. Before the end of the month, Apple changed how it worked the program and what it would tell us about.

But speaking of telling us things, Apple rounded out the month by doing its usual cryptic message.

By Innovation Only

We knew that there would be new iPhones announced in September, we knew there might not be much to them, but we didn’t know the date. Until now.

Apple revealed that September 10 was the day the new phones would be announced —and it called this year’s event “By Innovation Only.”

Whether that was to tell naysayers that this year’s phones would be good, or it was to fool us into thinking they might be, we’d soon find out.

Keep up with AppleInsider by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube, Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos.

The year is still ending and the perfect time to reflect and look back at some Magazine articles continues. This time, let’s see if the editors chose some interesting ones from 2019. Yes, they did!

Red Hat, IBM, and Fedora

IBM acquired Red Hat in July 2019, and this article discusses how nothing changes for the Fedora project.

Some tips for the Workstation users

Using Fedora Workstation? This article gives you some tips including enhancing photos, coding, or getting more wallpapers right from the repositories.

Fedora and CentOS Stream

In this article, the Fedora Project Leader discusses the CentOS Stream announcement from September 2019 — including the relationship of Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS.

Contribute to Fedora Magazine

Fedora Magazine exists thanks to our great contributors. And you (yes, you!) can become one, too! Contributions include topic proposals, writing, and editorial tasks. This article shows you how to join the team and help people learn about Linux.

The internet went wild for Baby Yoda in the new Star Wars series The Mandalorian, so Sega decided to follow this up recently with the reveal of Baby Sonic. These aren’t the only baby versions of notable characters that have ever existed, though.

As many pointed out, Baby Mario has been around for a long time and we even saw a Baby Crash Bandicoot in Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled. What about Capcom’s blue bomber Mega Man, though – does he have a baby version? Of course, he does. In fact, there’s been a baby design for him since the release of Rockman 2 (the Japanese version of Mega Man 2) in 1988.

Since the reveal of Baby Sonic, Protodude, the guy who runs the fantastic Mega Man fan site Rockman Corner, decided to remind the internet Baby Mega Man exists, by showing off official artwork featured inside the flaps of Rockman’s 2 box art. As can be seen above, there’s also an image of Mega Man as an adult wearing a jacket.

The next Mega Man game on the way to the Switch is the Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to play as a baby version of the character in this release and it’s also been delayed until 25th February.

At the start of 2019, Nintendo fans got quite the shock when Nintendo restarted the development of Metroid Prime 4. It has potentially set its eventual release back multiple years. If a finding by the YouTuber Doctre81 is anything to go by though, the game could be arriving sooner than expected.

He’s been digging around online and believes he has now found “definitive undisputed proof” of the environmental work in the game being outsourced. Posted less than a day ago is a job listing for Retro Studios and it’s a contract for an environment outsourcing review artist. Doctre81 further explains how the description of this listing states the role is to:

Review outsourced content to ensure final deliverables reflect the desired artistic vision.

Although the specific game isn’t mentioned, the description goes onto state how the roles require the individual to test levels in the game and “assess” both aesthetics and performance on the Switch.

You can get the full rundown in the video below:

Doctre81 is best known for finding references to the Nintendo Switch in CD Projekt job listings, months before The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was officially announced for the platform.

How would you feel about Retro outsourcing the environmental work in Metroid Prime 4 to speed up the development cycle? Leave a comment down below.

Grey skies got you down? Constant snow gone from a delightful wintry treat to an icy inconvenience? Santa not returning your phone calls? Get this holiday season back on track with the Minecraft Season of Giving Sale!

From December 20 (hey that’s today!) to January 2 (hey that’s a whole year away! Kinda!) we’ll have big discounts on maps, skins, worlds and more in the Minecraft Marketplace (which, FYI, is called the store for PlayStation 4 players – but don’t worry, you still get the sale too!)

So what discounts are available? Personally I think that’s none of your business, but luckily for you, I’ve been outvoted, so every day there’ll be a daily doorbuster, a select piece of content reduced by 75%!

WOW!

I agree! And that’s far from all. We’ll have loads of content discounted throughout the sale, PLUS a free map available today PLUS PLUS another freebie on December 25! Are we giving away so much free Minecraft Marketplace content that bankruptcy is inevitable? Guess we’ll find out in 2020!

Dwarf Fortress, Tarn and Zach Adams’ remarkable game of dwarf community management, has been in development since 2002 and was cited as the inspiration for games like Minecraft and Rimworld.

However, one of the most intriguing aspects about the game is the massive (and still active!) cult following it has gained and maintained for over 16+ years since its initial development in 2002. Now,  Game Developers Conference organizers are excited to confirm that the GDC 2020 Business & Marketing track will play host to a unique talk about the care and cultivation of the Dwarf Fortress player community!

You’ll find it at the GDC 2020 Community Management Summit as “The ‘Dwarf Fortress‘ Story: Lessons from 16 Years of “Cult” Management“, and you’ll want to attend if you have any interest in nurturing interest in a game, especially one as unique and often overwhelming for new players as Dwarf Fortress.

In this joint talk by its developer Tarn Adams (Bay 12 Games) and publisher Victoria Tran (Kitfox Games), GDC 2020 attendees will enjoy a deep dive into the numbers, strategies, and challenges of managing a community for over a decade, fostering a new one for the game’s eventual mainstream release onto Steam, and true long term lessons learned for other developers to take with them for their own communities. Don’t miss it!

Next year GDC 2020 runs from Monday, March 16th through Friday, March 20th. This will be the 34th edition of GDC, and now that registration is officially open, you’ll want to take a look at the (ever-expanding) session schedule and your GDC pass options — register early to lock in the best price!

For more details on GDC 2020 visit the show’s official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent company Informa Tech

Apple debuted Apple Arcade earlier this year on iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, and TVOS as a way to sort of level the playing field between free-to-play games and premium experiences, as far as player attention goes. It’s far from the first pay-for-access subscription library of its kind, but the platform-bound nature of the Apple device-exclusive service, and the semi-exclusivity of many of its games, made Arcade an interesting space for mobile games in 2019.

The impact the $5 per month subscription model stands to have on mobile games as a whole in the long run is something to keep an eye on in 2020 and beyond, but in the shorter term developers look to have benefited from signing on with an Apple Arcade project, with Apple reportedly paying out hefty sums to fund the development of games headed to Arcade.

Apple Arcade’s curated library launched with a number of captivating titles, and those ever-growing ranks include several games that wormed their way into the daily lives of Gamasutra’s editorial team and our various devices. So on top of our usual Best of 2019 coverage, here are editors’ personal picks for the best games currently on Apple Arcade.

There are few action games on mobile phone that are as responsive and mechanically sound as Luis Moreno Jimenez’s Bleak Sword. In fact, Bleak Sword‘s combat is just as good as a lot of traditional controller-based action games. Its impressively intuitive one-thumb dodge-block-attack gameplay and unforgiving death loop together serve as a worthy tribute to Dark Souls, while the simple, beautiful pixelated graphics and animations set a tone that turns your phone screen into a window to a foreboding world that you want to come back to over and over again. Bleak Sword shows that when a designer truly respects the constraints — and capabilities — of a game’s respective hardware, small miracles can happen.​

– Kris Graft

Dear Reader takes troves upon troves of literature and combines that wealth of source material with its own varied word-based puzzles to create a game that’s as difficult to put down as a good book. One puzzle might task you with arranging lines from a chapter Pride and Prejudice into the proper order, another might see you removing errant words from an Emily Dickinson poem. It can be an interesting way to piece apart otherwise familiar works while playing on the more leisurely difficulty, or a challenging way to flex your literary know-how on higher, timed difficulties. But all in all the nature of the puzzles themselves offer a fun way to explore each book, whether it’s your first time seeing that particular story or you’re working your way through an old favorite.

– Alissa McAloon 

Like many great games, there was a lot of time between the initial idea of Capy’s Grindstone and actual release but it was absolutely worth the wait. Grindstone is a star of the newly launched Apple Arcade and for good reason. It is a finely-tuned, immensely satisfying puzzler that is a bit like strategically setting up a zigzag of fleshy dominoes, knocking the first one over and watching them burst in colorfully gory explosions. It’s puzzler perfection.

– Kris Graft

In Guildlings, Sirvo Studios brings the same design sensibility that made Threes a phenomenon to reinvent the classic turn-based RPG for the mobile format. Made to be played in portrait mode, Guildlings embraces the ‘chill and relax’ goal that most phone games are designed for. Its aesthetic is a clever mix of fantasy vibes with chill modern life and its characters jabber at each other like kids at play on a Saturday afternoon. It’s relaxing, it’s charming, and it’s a fantastic reinvention of a classic game genre that adapts to the mobile format not only in its controls, but in the adventure it delivers for players.

– Bryant Francis

I hate cars. I hate how they get stuck in traffic jams. I hate the fact those yellow ones insist on crossing that goddamn river. I hate that they don’t use the motorways I want them too, and how they need traffic lights to get ANYWHERE in a vaguely orderly fashion. I hate this game and I love this game. This gorgeous, frustrating, chaotic, unbeatable video game. That’s the maniacal beauty of Mini Motorways. No matter how much you try, you will lose. The very vehicles you’re attempting to chaperone from A to B will betray you like the Caesars of old. Stabbing you in the back with a congestion-shaped knife. And then you’ll come back for even more punishment. This time you’ll believe that maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to build a road network worthy of song. A Michelin star spaghetti junction that could be served up to Massimo Bottura himself. You won’t, of course, and after enough attempts you’ll realize it’s not the high scores or pursuit of perfection that makes Mini Motorways great — but rather it’s ability to make you believe the impossible is finally within reach despite all the failed attempts. Just one more go, you’ll whisper, before cursing the very roads you built. One. More. Go…

– Chris Kerr

In the game’s relatively short development cycle, its story about being the last human rideshare driver in a fictional city dominated by driverless cars has only felt more current and more urgent. If Heaven’s Vault gives us a fresh take on the adventure game, Neo Cab is a radiant revision of the visual novel. Told through a sequence of vignettes in the form of different fares, and with a dash of resource management thrown in, you exercise choice in part through who you pick up, where, and when you decide to stop, as well as whether you prioritize personal contacts over fares. It’s slick, beautifully done, and shockingly well written at times with biting satire of tech culture, urban progressivism, late capitalism, gender norms, and much besides caught in the game’s low cyberpunk glow. On that note, this is a game that remembers what that punk part of “cyberpunk” means and lays the stress on it. Neo Cab a neon satire of the gig economy that is not to be missed.

– Katherine Cross

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Sayonara Wild Hearts is a beautiful pop album wrapped in neon, a Rez-tier rhythm game with a killer soundtrack, and a striking example of how music and game design can take each other to new heights.
As usual, it’s like nothing else Swedish developer Simogo has ever made, and more importantly, it’s like nothing else you’ll find on the App Store. Blending luscious, hungry electropop beats with vibrant imagery that evokes everything from Killer7 to the Major Arcana, Sayonara Wild Hearts is an Apple Arcade must-try; you can see most of what the game has to offer in an hour or two, and if you love the music (available as an album from composer Daniel Olsen) the levels add a wonderful new dimension to the experience of relistening to a favorite album from start to finish.

– Alex Wawro

What the Golf is a game a about breaking expectations, building up new ones, and breaking them all over again. The game, and its first level, starts off with a simple gag: instead of opening the game by hitting the golf ball off the tee, the moment of impact of club against ball instead flings the golfer forward and your goal becomes propelling that rag dolled figure to the hole for victory. Each and every level offers some different play on the idea of golf along those lines, to an extent that seems infinite. It’s an interesting example of endlessly iterating on an idea until it takes on a life of its own and somehow, dozens of holes, still manages to surprise, and find humor and fun in an ever-evolving gag.

– Alissa McAloon

Netflix News

• Netflix's The Witcher: 36 Easter Eggs, References, And Other Tidbits You Might Have Missed
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• What's New On Netflix In January 2020

Welcome to a festive edition of Box Art Brawl, where regional box art variants battle each other for the honour of your vote. Christmas is over, New Year is approaching, so it’s time to hit the slopes as the snow settles in the interim.

Last week Star Wars Episode I: Racer raced itself to the podium and t’was decreed by you lovely people that the Japanese variant was worthy of first place, with the subtler European version picking up the silver medal and North America nabbing bronze.

Sticking with the Nintendo 64 this week, we’re racing once again with the rather excellent Snowboard Kids. We can honestly say that this rivals Mario Kart when it comes to comical racing, and that’s not some underhanded snipe at Mario Kart 64, either – Atlus’ downhill racer is really good enough to rival the plumber when it comes to multiplayer mayhem. It also gains extra respect for not succumbing to the tired convention of turning the ‘S’ on that Kids plural into a ‘Z’.

So, without further prevarication, let’s join Slash, Nancy, Jam, Tommy, Linda and Shinobin on the slopes…

Japan

Starting in the east, the cover of Snobow Kids as it was known in Japan features Slash front-and-centre with the rest of the gang positioned around him as they shoot down the slope. The portrait orientation works well here and the cover gives you a good idea of the sort of colourful racing contained within.

Not much else to note here, really. Colourful, energetic – we like it.

North America

The North American variant takes the exact same elements and moves them around to work in the landscape frame. The standard red strip comes in on the right side and the logo moves down while gaining a hot new colour scheme and a little Fido Dido-style smiley.

The same elements reframed, then. We also like this.

Europe

The European version features the black border – elegant or intrusive depending on your point of view – but also has some alternative art for Jam and Nancy, along with a totally different background. The sun appears over the mountain tops and Slash sprays up some powder as he winks at you.

Similar colourful elements, different configuration; it’s another ‘like’ from us. But which one’s a hit with you?

So, there we are! Click the ‘Kids that you think are most deserving and hit the ‘Vote’ button below:

That’s it for this seasonal edition of the brawl. We hope you’re enjoying the holidays – we’ll catch you in 2020 for another round!