Charlotte Henry

iPhones are both popular with thieves and help catch them. AppleInsider has a nice roundup of Apple crime-related stories. They include how $19m worth of iPhones were stolen, and how one device helped bring in a Mueller investigation witness.

A fraud ring based in New York stole $19 million worth of iPhones over a period of seven years. Per Quartz, the perpetrators ran a scam in which they posed as cell phone subscribers, received new iPhones at little to no cost by using fake IDs and fraudulent debit cards, and then sold the phones on the black market. The case was reported earlier this spring, but the full criminal complaint was unsealed this week, revealing the perpetrators operated the scam in at least 34 states.

iFixit put the Powerbeat Pro headphones on their teardown table earlier this week. Cult of Mac ran through what they found, and it isn’t pretty.

The first thing you’ll discover when you attempt to get into the Powerbeats Pro is that … you can’t. Not easily, at least. Like most Apple products these days, there’s copious amounts of glue holding everything together. It’s not totally impossible, then, but you’ll need a lot of luck on your side if you want to get your Powerbeats Pro open without breaking them. There’s no real reason to open them up anyway. Every internal component is permanently attached to another, “so a full disassembly can only be accomplished destructively,” iFixit explains. You can’t just replace a single part.

Mouse-support is coming to the iPhone and iPad this fall. This is a feature many users have wanted for a while. However, on Cult of Mac, Killian Bell argues Apple still has the wrong attitude to the issue.

Apple “strongly emphasized this was designed and developed expressly for a certain segment of user.” In other words, Apple wants you to use touch if you can. You shouldn’t be controlling your iPhone or iPad with a mouse unless it’s absolutely necessary. But why is Apple so adamant about that? Why can’t it embrace the fact that some people — mostly those who use an iPad for work — would just prefer to use a mouse? What worries me about Apple’s view is that it will hold back iPad mouse support in the future. It’s almost as if Apple doesn’t want to make mouse support too good, just in case those who can use touch choose to use a mouse instead.

YouTube star ReSet tricked a homeless man into eating biscuits filled with toothpaste and posted the video online. He has been sentenced to 15 months in prison, ordered to pay his victim €20,000, and banned from social media for five years, the Guardian reported.

ReSet, who was born in China but grew up in Spain, was among the 200 most popular YouTubers in Spain and Latin America, with 1.1 million followers. In 2017 he accepted a dare to scrape the cream out of Oreo cookies and replace it with toothpaste. He found a Romanian man who was living on the streets of Barcelona, handed him the doctored biscuits and a €20 note, and filmed the encounter. The man later vomited. “Maybe I went a little too far, but look on the bright side: this helped him clean his teeth,” ReSet, 21, said. “I don’t think he’s brushed them since he became poor.”