Can you turn an iPhone 6S into a working digital scale? The answer, apparently, is yes, but Apple doesn't want you to right now.
In an interesting post on Medium, developer Ryan McLeod explains how he and his friends built a digital scale app for the new iPhones by taking advantage of Apple's new pressure sensitivity feature, 3D Touch. The company only uses 3D Touch for a few functions — adjusting how quickly you scrub through music and video, for example, or quickly accessing app shortcuts from the home screen — but McLeod says he was inspired by all the "creative workarounds" on the App Store to hijack it for something else.
-- submitted from IRC
Apple logged another healthy rise in sales and profits for its most recent quarter on the strength of record iPhone sales and strong results for Macs.
The company's revenue rose 22 percent from a year earlier to $51.5 billion in the fiscal fourth quarter ended Sept. 26. Sales of iPhones reached a fourth-quarter record, and the company said it sold more Macs than ever. Sixty-two percent of revenue came from outside the U.S., and revenue in China nearly doubled.
The company's profit grew even more strongly than sales, up 31 percent to $11.1 billion, or $1.96 per share. For the full year, Apple made $53.4 billion.
Both sales and profit beat the consensus forecast of analyst polled by Thomson Reuters.
What will Apple do with its mounting pile of cash?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 30 2015, @11:50PM
Because of the tax loopholes Apple is using, much of their profits end up at their divisions in Ireland and the Bahamas (perhaps also the Netherlands?). Apple may be biding their time until after the U.S. presidential election. If a Republican president gets installed and wants a tax holiday [wikipedia.org] (meaning Apple could bring its money to the United States and pay a reduced tax, or none), Congress might well go along with the idea.
If that doesn't happen, I recommend they invest in casinos. Casinos are illegal in Ireland, except that there's a loophole in the law under which a private club can operate one for its members. I would assume that casinos are legal in the Bahamas; just about everything is.