Plenty of Apple, iPhone, and iPad news gets released every single day – but we know you’re busy, so we’ve got your back. Here, we’ve picked out some of the most important stories from the past week or so and summarized them for easy digestion. You’re welcome.
Let’s take a quickfire look at some of the most interesting recent headlines of late. As ever, click through to read the full stories if you want to know more!
Apple to scan iCloud for abusive images
Apple intends to aid law enforcement agencies by scanning photos stored in iCloud for abusive images, according to a new Financial Times report (via The Verge). The so-called neuralMatch system will “proactively alert a team of human reviewers if it believes illegal imagery is detected, who would then contact law enforcement if the material can be verified”. Starting in the US, every image uploaded to iCloud will be given a ‘safety voucher’ indicating whether or not its content is suspect. Once a certain number of photos are labelled suspect from a particular user, Apple will enable those images to be decrypted, and the appropriate law agency will be notified.
AirPower prototype spotted in the wild
It’s been more than two years since Apple consigned its AirPower charger to the scrapheap, having overshot its initial 2018 launch date. Now a video of what appears to be a fully working AirPower prototype has emerged onto the internet via Apple collector Giulio Zompetti, leading us to wistfully pine for what might have been. AirPower was intended to be able to charge several Apple devices simultaneously, specifically an iPhone, a set of AirPods, and an Apple Watch. Apple could never get the congested multi-coil system to work to its satisfaction, but the emergence of this prototype shows how close it came.
Steve Jobs biographer turns attention to Elon Musk
Elon Musk has confirmed that Walter Isaacson will be writing his biography. The American author is perhaps most famous for getting the nod from Steve Jobs himself to write his self-titled biography, which was released less than a month after the Apple founder’s death. Musk announced the news via a series of tweets, which went on to reveal that Isaacson had already commenced shadowing him. Like Jobs before him, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is known for his immense wealth, forthright opinions, and tendency to create controversy.
iOS 15 set to remove lens flare from photos
We’re used to Apple improving its camera technology with each successive iPhone, but it seems at least one forthcoming improvement is going to be wholly software-based. It’s been observed that in the latest version of Apple’s iOS 15 beta, instances of lens flare are magically disappearing from images. As pointed out by Reddit user Doubleluckstur, the offending green blobs still appear in your iPhone’s viewfinder when you’re lining up a shot, but are mysteriously absent when the final image is viewed back. Further Reddit comments seem to suggest that this post-processing trick only applies to iPhones containing the A12 Bionic chip and later.