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After years of waiting for an upgrade, the announcement of a new MacBook Air last Tuesday was understandably greeted with some excitement. In an 8/10 review of the device, Wired‘s Lauren Goode referred to the slick new model as the “sushi knife of laptops.” She was particularly impressed by the new retina display,  which boasts a 1,440 by 900 pixel resolution, with 128 pixels per inch pixel density. For all the praise, the review does concede that if you’re someone doing high-end graphics work then this is not the machine for you. It also laments the reduced number of ports on the new MacBook Air. Here is a hint of what Ms. Goode has to say:

If you’re someone who builds graphics, edits 4K videos, or processes large photos for a living, the Air isn’t going to cut it. It will, however, handle 15 to 20 browser tabs at once, let you edit photos in Lightroom without any hiccups, and keep ten apps running smoothly at once. I know because I’m doing all of this right now as I type. The memory can also be configured up to 16GB, which gives it twice as much memory capacity as the previous MacBook Air.

There has been a lot of discussion about Apple’s decision not to reveal hardware unit sales following its earning’s call on Thursday. Investors certainly did not like it and we saw Apple’s stock price tumble by as much as 7% in the aftermath. There is an interesting—if sometimes snarky—piece of analysis on Yahoo! Finance that discusses Apple’s attempts to project itself as a services company, less reliant on hardware sales than it has ever been.  It concludes that this is a transition phase for Apple. Here’s a snippet:

Apple may want to project itself as a services company and want to direct investor attention to the services story and also, how it is a great place for customer satisfaction and security.

But it’s a little hard to sell that story when the services business contributed just 16% of revenue — yes even if that 16% represents a 27% increase from last year after one-time items, and even if that growth rate was substantially higher than the rest of the business.

Digital Trends has compiled a list of 20 iPhone camera apps. “Whether you’re looking for a new way to shoot, edit, or organize your photos, these camera apps are here to help. Turning a boring shot of your feline companion into a masterpiece has never been easy.” Oddly, a very good camera app that specializes in low light photography was omitted, NightCap Camera, so I’ll add it here as #21.

Back in 2008, the MacBook Air was miles ahead of anything available on the Windows platform. Tom Warren at The Verge says that 10 years on that is no longer the case and that “Apple’s new MacBook Air doesn’t do much to overtake these [sic] latest crop of Windows laptops”. He certainly has a point that last week’s MacBook Air update was “more a refresh than a revolution,” and that there has been a “quiet revolution” in Windows laptops over the last decade. He also discusses how the new iPad Pro has once again changed the tablet vs laptop debate, as iPad sales grow.

Apple’s new MacBook Air won’t drive the laptop market forward significantly, but the iPad Pro is stealthily making advancements. It’s been clear for some time that Apple is prioritizing the iPad Pro over the MacBook as its consumer “computer” of choice, but it was made even clear during Apple’s event earlier this week. Apple revealed it has sold more iPads in the past year than the entire lineup of notebooks from any single manufacturer. “This makes iPad not only the most popular tablet, but the most popular computer in the world,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Now that we have had a chance to fully digest what was announced at Apple’s event in Brooklyn last Tuesday, it is time to consider what was missing. Over on 9to5 Mac, they note the absence of announcements relating to an iPad Mini 5, AirPower and wireless charging for AirPods, any upgrades to the iMac line, an ECG app in Watch OS 5.1 and updates to the 12-inch MacBook. Few were really expecting new AirPods or AirPower, but other devices had been the subject of rumors, and it was surprising we didn’t hear about at least some of those products at Apple’s “There’s More in the Making” event. Here’s a snippet:

Apple’s October event included the tentpole announcements everyone was expecting: new iPad Pros, a new MacBook Air, and an update to the Mac mini. Many of the smaller updates, however, did not come to fruition.

Perhaps most perplexing of all is AirPower, which was promised as coming in 2018, but is still nowhere to be found. AirPower is also the product with the most confusing future. Does it still exist? Will we see it eventually, but in a different form? Only time will tell it seems.

On November 6th Apple is replacing the 2018 Midterm Elections channel in the News app with Election Night. The updated channel will offer real time updates, news, infographics, and election results. The switch will happen at 8 PM eastern time, according to TechCrunch. They say,

All the news coverage in the hub isn’t being driven by algorithms. For Apple News’ team, Election Night is an all-hands-on-deck type of situation involving real human editors. In fact, human editorial oversight is a key difference between Apple’s approach to news aggregation and curation, compared with competitors like Google, Twitter and Facebook — all of which have come under fire for their outsized roles in the spread of information, and, at times, disinformation.

The Election Night channel will replace the News Digest tab at bottom of the News app so it’ll be easy to find.

Global shipment of smartphones tumbled in the third fiscal quarter of 2018, IDC’s Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker shows. The firm says 355.2 million units were shipped in total during the quarter, a year-on-year decline of 6%. This fall was in large part down to Samsung, whose sales in the quarter dropped 13.4% from the same time last year. Huawei beat Apple for sales this quarter, but researchers said that the holiday period could see Apple return to the top of the pile. IDC believes there could be growth in the smartphone market in 2019. Manufacturers will certainly hope so—Q3 2018 was the fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year declines.

Apple’s newest iPhones helped push third quarter shipments to 46.9 million units, up 0.5% from the 46.7 million units last year. Apple once again launched three new devices at its Fall event, as the new 6.5-inch iPhone XS Max and 5.8-inch iPhone XS were joined by the more affordable iPhone XR in the Apple line-up. The new XS Max and XS continue off the success from last year’s iPhone X but bring a new screen size option with more power and increased performance to the table. And Apple has once again improved the camera, upped the storage, and added a new faster processor via the A12 Bionic chip, which is the first 7-nanometer chip for Apple. Older iPhones, such as the 6S, 7, and 8, all received price cuts late in the quarter, which will balance the iPhone portfolio across all price tiers for the holiday quarter. The older SE and iPhone X from last year have been dropped from the Apple line-up. The fourth quarter will include shipments for the vastly popular iPhone XR, which have not been counted in IDC’s Q3 figures.

The BBC Russian Service has learned that at least 81,000 Facebook accounts have been compromised. Private messages have been published online and the perpetrators are trying to sell account login details. Facebook insists that its security has not been comprised and that it was likely the data had been obtained via malicious web browser extensions. The full details of the hack and the BBC’s investigation shed light into how our data is traded online.

The BBC understands many of the users whose details have been compromised are based in Ukraine and Russia. However, some are from the UK, US, Brazil and elsewhere.

The hackers offered to sell access for 10 cents (8p) per account. However, their advert has since been taken offline.

“We have contacted browser-makers to ensure that known malicious extensions are no longer available to download in their stores,” said Facebook executive Guy Rosen.

“We have also contacted law enforcement and have worked with local authorities to remove the website that displayed information from Facebook accounts.”

Smartphone users have long insisted that their device’s battery life is getting worse. Now the Washington Post’s Geoffery A. Fowler, along with colleagues at other tech sites, have found that really is the case. Last year’s top smartphones mostly all out performed this year’s versions. One of the exceptions to this was the iPhone XR, which lasted for three hours more than a top-of-the-range iPhone XS.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been performing the same battery test over and over again on 13 phones. With a few notable exceptions, this year’s top models underperformed last year’s. The new iPhone XS died 21 minutes earlier than last year’s iPhone X. Google’s Pixel 3 lasted nearly an hour and a half less than its Pixel 2.

The report confirms that improvements in battery technology just aren’t keeping up with the high resolution OLED screens, processor heavy apps, and how much we use our phones each day. In other words, don’t look for battery life to improve any time soon.

The new, more powerful, MacBook Airs and iPad Pros launched at Apple’s “There’s More in the Making” event in Brooklyn on Tuesday gave users a compelling choice – could these be our main machines instead of something we just throw in a backpack?  Vlad Savov outlines the argument well over at The Verge:

In crafting its most compelling iPad and MacBook Air to date, Apple also created a major headache for people like me. I’m a member of that classic Intel ultrabook demographic whose computing needs are light but constant. You won’t catch me doing 3D modeling or 4K video production on my laptop, but I do a litany of small tasks online, in a word processor, or in Adobe’s Lightroom. I’ve been using a MacBook Pro for two years that does most of what I want, but it really doesn’t last long enough. Now, Apple is offering me the much better battery life I need with the high-quality display I desire, but it’s fragmented the choice. Both the new MacBook Air and new iPad Pro could be the ideal computer for me.

A not dissimilar conversation was on TMO Daily Observations in the wake of the event.

Apple is reportedly in talks to buy a stake in iHeartMedia. The radio broadcast company is currently US$20 billion in debt and desperately in need of a big cash infusion, which an Apple deal could provide. For Apple, it could bring Apple Music’s Beats 1 streaming radio station to a much wider audience. The Financial Times (subscription required) says,

A partnership could see Apple Music’s Beats 1 radio station, which is only available through its apps, make its debut on broadcast radio. Extra distribution would give Beats 1 and Apple Music greater awareness among older audiences who are later adopters of streaming services. A deal would also put the Apple station into more cars or kitchens.

The bigger benefit for Apple could be negotiating power. iHeartMedia is the largest radio broadcast company in the U.S., and owning part of that could help Apple to convince artists and labels to release first on Apple Music instead of Spotify.