Apple

I ended last year’s review of macOS High Sierra by lamenting its invisibility but praising the much-needed work it did on the macOS foundation. There weren’t a lot of ways to tell that a Mac was running High Sierra instead of Low Sierra, but Apple quietly replaced the file system and the system’s window server and added (and later finalized) official support for external graphics, among a bunch of other tweaks. The yearly release cycle just kept Apple from actually building a whole lot of new features on top of that foundation.

Apple's new iPhones launch this week, and unlike last year, every one of the new devices comes equipped with the TrueDepth sensor array originally found in the iPhone X. Most consumers who are interested in Apple's products know that piece of technology drives Face ID (an authentication method by which you log into your phone just by showing it your face) and Animojis, those 3D animated characters in Messages that follow your facial expressions.

If you watched last week’s Apple Watch Series 4 unveiling and are dying for those new animated watch faces — but don’t want to buy a new watch — you’ll be happy to know that watchOS 5 brings the best of them to Apple Watch Series 1 and up.

They’re not quite as nice as what you’ll get with the new larger Series 4 watches coming Friday, but they’re still pretty great. Here’s a hands-on look at the new Apple Watch faces.

With watchOS 5 finally available to download, anyone can grab the new animated faces.

If you own an iPhone (5s or newer), or an iPad, you can now officially update it to iOS 12, the latest and greatest version of Apple’s mobile operating system. iOS 12 offers performance improvements, new AR experiences, Memoji, Screen Time, and Siri Shortcuts for apps, to name just a few of the new additions.

With this update, Apple says the camera will now launch up to 70 percent faster, and the keyboard 50 percent faster. Typing is more responsive too. If your iPhone is busy doing other tasks, apps can launch twice as fast under iOS 12 than in iOS 11.

Apple's iOS 12 software update is available today for supported iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices, and on the surface, it looks like one of the smallest new iOS releases Apple has pushed out.

This isn't a surprise; Apple said earlier this year that iOS 12 would be more about performance and stability than adding new features. Some major additions that were originally planned—like an overhauled home screen—were reportedly delayed to a later release.

In one of my several lives, I’m supposed to be a vulnerability researcher working on baseband exploitation. As every vulnerability researcher knows, being up to date with recent developments is of utmost importance for the success of your job. So of course, after Apple announced its new, shiny, big, bigger and biggest line of iPhone smartphones, I downloaded some OTA firmwares from ipsw.me and started to look into the new baseband firmware.

To get an idea of how small the electronic elements are on the Apple A12 Bionic chip at the heart of the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR, first squint really hard at a human hair.

It's thin, obviously. But it's still thick enough that you could fit about 10,000 of an A12's electronic components across its width. That miniaturization is a "huge breakthrough," Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller boasted on Wednesday, saying the A12 is the industry's first chip to be built using a 7-nanometer manufacturing process.

Pre-orders for the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max start tomorrow, Friday, September 14, at 12:01 a.m. Pacific, with the XR going on sale a month later. If you want to be sure of getting a new handset on Day One, you probably need to be quick with your pre-order. If not, you could be faced with waiting for Apple to fill the backlog of orders before you finally get a new iPhone sometime near Christmas.

Every year, there’s a bit of a frenzy as Apple fans set out to pre-order the latest, greatest iPhones. Some models inevitably sell out within minutes.

We’ve seen quite a few articles out there telling you to Beware! if you use the Safari browser, because Attackers Can Spoof URLs!

This sounds like a serious issue, worthy of the boldfaced exclamation points we’ve used above, and here’s why.

Security researchers look at how macOS users can be remotely targeted using document handlers and custom URL schemes – which is behind the “Do you want to allow” popup seen in the above screenshot.

Patrick Wardle explains how a custom APT abuses URL schemes to remotely infect macOS targets