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from the half-eaten-fruit-strikes-again dept.
Apple Doesn't Want You Weighing Things With Your iPhone Just Yet
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 Sales, Profit Surge On iPhone Strength
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: 3, Insightful) by quacking duck on Friday October 30 2015, @02:22PM
A lot of Apple fans are pissed that Apple is still starting storage at only 16 GB, the same amount the iPhone 3GS started with in 2009. Personally I'm also pissed that optical image stabilization is only available in the larger 5.5" 6/6S Pluses, not the smaller 4.7" 6/6s. So to get a reasonable storage amount and OIS, I have to pay an extra $200 USD and carry a bigger phone than I want to.
That said, this is not a life-saving drug selling for extortionist amounts of money (looking at you pharma bro, you entitled asshole), it's a luxury item selling for exorbitant amounts of money.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SanityCheck on Friday October 30 2015, @02:53PM
I think these are all valid complaints. As a defacto "luxury" brand the entry level specs should be much higher. I am unsure why they have decided to go that route. There might be a more hidden motive there, like they want to ensure that people are compelled to use their cloud for storage of images, so this is a way to force people to do it. Very sinister, but usually that's how poor engineering decisions are made.