This is the first time that I have written a post for iPhone J.D. by candlelight, just like they used to blog in medieval times. Like most folks in New Orleans, I haven’t had electricity at my house since Hurricane Zeta came through on Wednesday. We’re told that it could take 10 days to get power restored to all of the residential areas (yikes!) but hopefully it won’t be that long. A late October hurricane in New Orleans is incredibly rare, but this is, after all, 2020. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- I discovered a new advantage of 5G this week. When the 4G LTE network is completely overwhelmed by an entire city relying upon cellular data to keep up with the news during and after a hurricane because there is no other source of the internet, I had much better luck getting a signal using 5G. Even 5G has not worked all of the time, and the speeds are nothing like what I was seeing before the hurricane, but most of the time it has worked, often with enough speed to stream live video of a local news station. I’m still finding circumstances in which LTE is faster, but 5G tends to be more dependable.
- On March 24, 2020, Apple added vastly improved mouse and trackpad support to the iPad. At the time, I noted that it would be fantastic to see this implemented in Microsoft Word for iPad. This week, Microsoft announced that the feature is on its way, although it isn’t out quite yet.
- Jason Cross of Macworld posted a review of the iPhone 12 Pro. He likes the camera and the design of the phone, and thinks that 5G helps to future-proof the device.
- Geoffrey Fowler of the Washington Post also write an interesting review of the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro.
- Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac reports that according to the insurance company Allstate, the iPhone 12 performs better than any other phone in a drop test.
- Lovejoy also explains how you can use the LiDAR scanner on an iPhone 12 Pro to quickly measure a person’s height.
- Harry McCracken of Fast Company has been using an iPad as his main computing device for years, so he knows his way around an iPad. He is impressed with the new iPad Air and wrote about it in this review, noting that it is the perfect happy medium in the iPad lineup.
- John Gruber of Daring Fireball reports that Apple’s new MagSafe charger only charges at full speed when you use a 20W power adapter. In a series of follow-up posts (1, 2), he recommends buying two third-party chargers that are cheaper than the one sold by Apple.
- Julia Alexander of The Verge reports that, starting today, you can subscribe the new Apple One service, which combines multiple Apple services into a single package.
- If you want to create a short video, the Clips app from Apple has always been powerful, but until now was limited to make square videos. As Ryan Christoffel of MacStories reports, this week the app was updated with many new features, including the ability to create landscape (or portrait) videos.
- And finally, Apple hired some creative folks to produce and use an iPhone 12 Pro to film a video called Dark Universe, part of its Experiments series. There is also a behind the scenes video that shows how they did it. Pretty cool:
