Techlife News #375

2018 was a big year for Apple, with leaps forward in its MacBook, iPhone, and iPad lines. Discover what the future holds for the world’s most exciting tech firm by looking at rumored product reveals, analysts theories and shareholder expectations in a special New Year issue. AGGRESSIVE SALES STRATEGY Towards the end of the 2018 season, Apple offered up some of its biggest discounts and upfront savings in the company’s history, a clear sign that the firm was ready to up its sales strategy and adopt a different approach. Indeed, Apple has managed decades of premium pricing and a strict policy on offering no discounts, but its Black Friday sale offered more gift cards and savings than ever before, offering $200 gift cards to savvy holiday shoppers . The iPhone XR, which was…

OUR COUNTDOWN OF THE PAST YEAR CONTINUES As aficionados of all things Apple, it’s thankfully relatively simple for us to look back on an entire year of upgrades, updates, rumor and news each December. In common with all of us, it seems that Apple likes to wind down a little as a given calendar year draws to a close. December, a month steeped in various holiday traditions all over the world, is habitually a quiet time of year for the tech giants. So, what we’ve been doing is looking back on the great year that 2018 proved to be for Apple. Last week we looked at the first half of the year, from the iOS updates of early January, through to groundbreaking and even record-breaking news in June. Here’s a review of what’s…

When Apple first publicly showed off the iPhone X at a keynote last September, executive Phil Schiller hailed the new handset as “all-screen” and “beautiful to look at”, adding descriptively that “the display fits edge-to-edge, top-to-bottom”. He branded this display “the Super Retina display”, reflecting its improvements upon the Retina displays long featured in Apple devices. In all, he hailed the screen as “the first OLED display great enough to be in an iPhone.” GREATEST NITS: WHAT MAKES THE PHONE X’S SCREEN SPECIAL Many people who have habitually bought a new smartphone year-after-year for the last decade might wonder why it took so long for Apple to finally integrate OLED technology into its iPhone screens. After all, OLED technology has been included in Samsung phones since 2008. However, it seems in-keeping with…

VOLANTE VISION IS COMING This year’s Farnborough International Airshow - one of the world’s most closely-watched annual air shows - was unlike any other. Not only did Boeing and Airbus battle it out to unveil their next generation airliners, Airbus with its latest version of the A320 and Boeing’s 737 narrow-body jets, but the UK showed off their next generation Tempest combat aircraft, which will be flying by 2035 . And alongside the latest innovations in air travel, and a performance from The Red Arrows, the Royal Air Force’s aerobatic team, came a more unusual unveiling. Aston Martin, famed for its luxury high-end cars, used the event to show off its Volante Vision Concept, a product it believes could revolutionize the skies and transform the way we travel from city to city. In…

CASHING OUT – WHY PHYSICAL MONEY IS IN TERMINAL DECLINE Analysts and financial whizz-kids have been predicting for years that electronic payments will overtake old-fashioned notes and coins but with the rise of Apple Pay, it looks like this will now become a reality. In the UK , e-payments including debit card swipes are set to overtake cash as the most frequently used payment method. In 2006, 62% of all payments in the UK were made with cash. In 2016, that fell to 40%. If current trends continue then the figure could be as low as 21% by 2026. At the same time, the number of times people used ATMs and the amount of cash drawn from them are both falling fast. 2016 saw the lowest number of withdrawals for six years while…

FLYING SOLO It’s hard to imagine the internet without Twitter. Whether we’re following a breaking news story, tweeting along to our favorite television shows or watching celebrities argue over music, the social network is a major part of our everyday lives. Whilst Facebook and Instagram are for our friends and family, Twitter is our window to the world - to engage in debates, understand new perspectives and have real-time conversations with people from all walks of life. Twitter was one of the first social networks to make its way to the iPhone with the release of iOS 2, but it was a third-party developer that created the app rather than the company itself. Indeed, Twitter has a history of being open source, and relying on developers to create software for its users,…