Microsoft Surface Pro 4 vs. Apple iPad Pro: High-end tablets face off

Microsoft’s Surface lineup is unfairly maligned in some quarters. While it may have started weak, it got pretty damn good around the third iteration. I’d certainly buy one now. Most of the problems stem from two key places: Microsoft’s continued insistence in advertising the Surface and its Type Cover as things that belong together, yet are actually separate when you go to buy them; and originally splitting the Windows OS with an RT version. Microsoft only rectified the latter mistakerelatively recently; the non-Pro version of Surface is now x86-based as well.

Microsoft has now shown how serious it is about hardware with its new, high-end Surface Book, a laptop Microsoft is directly comparing with Apple’s MacBook Pro with Retina Display. A bit lost amid the press coverage for that surprise model is the Surface Pro 4, the latest version of the company’s tablet hybrid, and an initial glance indicates it’s the best one yet. Does it have what it takes to go up against the similarly priced Apple iPad Pro, now that Cupertino is finally making a larger iPad with an optional keyboard? Let’s take a look and find out.

Form Factor and Display

The Surface Pro 4 isn’t a marked departure from the third-generation model. The new one measures 11.5 by 7.93 by 0.33 inches (HWD) and weighs 1.73 pounds. Microsoft increased the display size from 12 to 12.3 inches, with resolution at 2,736 by 1,824 (267 PPI) and a 3:2 aspect ratio, and reduced the bezel depth by a similar amount. In comparison, the iPad Pro measures 12 by 8.68 by 0.27 inches and weighs 1.57 pounds, and has a larger 12.9-inch, 2,732-by-2,048-pixel (264 PPI, 4:3 aspect ratio) display to compensate for the larger height and width. So Apple still wins a bit on getting the tablet slimmer and lighter.

Hardware

The iPad Pro gets an upgraded A9X processor, although we don’t yet know about a lot of the details underneath the surface. The Surface Pro has a range of sixth-generation (Skylake) Intel Core i3, i5, and i7 processors, with configuration options from 4GB to 16GB of RAM. Both products offer the latest wireless technology, including 802.11ac Wi-Fi support at both 2.4GHz and 5GHz, and Bluetooth 4.2.

Operating System

This is the largest differentiator between the Surface Pro and the iPad Pro. The Surface Pro 4 runs full-blown Windows 10, just like the Surface Pro 3 did; it’s probably the biggest case you can make about why this comparison should be against the MacBook Air instead of the iPad Pro. Windows 10 also, in our opinion, a better all-around OS than iOS is; like many people, we still can’t imagine ourselves multitasking on an iPad, even with iOS 9’s new split-window mode. Regardless of what you think of Macs, OS X is still the main desktop and laptop OS, not iOS, so it’s not exactly a fair fight to pit Windows 10 against iOS to begin with. This bleeds down to the keyboard choice (which I talk more about below); the Surface Pro 4’s Type Cover has a glass trackpad to control the Windows 10 cursor, whereas the Smart Keyboard doesn’t; with iOS, you touch the screen for everything.

Apps

By definition, the different OSes mean different app selections: Take your pick of Windows 10 programs or iOS apps. The former means full-blown versions of Adobe Photoshop, Avid Pro Tools, and any other pro software you can think of, whereas the latter means less-capable, if sometimes more intuitive, iOS versions. We’re tired of people degrading iOS based on whether it’s meant for “professional” media content creation, or just consuming content; of course it’s meant for content creation as well. It’s just different, and if you’re a working professional, you may know you need desktop-class apps and should be looking at a MacBook Pro. Or the Surface Pro 4.

Multimedia

The iPad Pro has an 8MP camera with an f/2.4 aperture, a five-element lens, and a variety of software enhancements like face detection and exposure control. It can record 1080p video at 30fps and has a 120fps slow motion mode with stabilization. The iPad Pro’s front camera is 1.2MP and f/2.2 with 720p video recording. The Surface Pro 4 has a 8MP rear-facing camera as well, but the front-facing camera bumps up to 5MP. Both the iPad Pro and the Surface Pro 4 play music in stereo out of built-in speakers, with two on the Surface Pro and four on the iPad Pro.

Pricing and storage

The iPad Pro starts at $799 for a 32GB version. $949 gets you 128GB, and $1,079 adds an LTE cellular radio to the 128GB model. You can get all three versions in silver, space gray, or gold. The Surface Pro 4 starts at $899, but you already get 128GB at that price. You can configure the Surface Pro 4 more like a regular PC, with Core i3, i5, and i7 options, and RAM ranging from 4GB to 16GB as mentioned above, and storage options go all the way up to 1TB. The Surface Pro also has a USB 3.0 port, which lets you connect external drives.

The Surface Pro also comes with the Surface Pen; Apple’s pen is optional. But still to our utter puzzlement, the Type Cover is another $130 on top of the Surface Pro 4’s base price. Apple’s Smart Keyboard is also optional (and more expensive at $169), but Apple doesn’t picture the iPad Pro with the keyboard in almost every single photo and makes it clear that it costs more. Microsoft continues to make you search and search to figure out that the Type Cover is optional, which is a problem that has plagued the Surface lineup since day one.

Conclusions

Both Microsoft and Apple are playing up the versatility of these machines, including the ability to draw on the capacitive touch screen and type comfortably on the optional backlit keyboards. While we still have some bones to pick with Microsoft’s overall Surface strategy and marketing, the Surface Pro 4 looks like a killer Windows 10 tablet; just buy it with the keyboard and plan on spending over $1K. If you’re already an iPad fan and want to run iOS apps on a larger screen, the iPad Pro is a killer option as long as you don’t mind the lack of a true multi-window OS.

Ad blocking for the masses, part three: Apple iOS 9 and the future of web browsing

My three-part series covering the recent spurt of ad blocking software was supposed to be simple. Part one dealt with uBlock Origin for desktop browsers. Part two took a look at the new Adblock Browser for Android and iOS, from the developers of Adblock Plus. In order to write part three, all I had to do was wait for Apple to release iOS 9, update my iPhone, and find and test a third-party add-on ad blocking extension. What I got instead was a bit of drama, when three ad-blocking extensions raced to the top of the iTunes store’s paid app category soon after iOS 9 was released — and then one was promptly pulled.

The app, Peace: Block Ads and Trackers, Powered by Ghostery, hit the number-one spot and stayed there until its superstar developer, Marco Arment (Tumblr co-founder and developer of the popular Instapaper and Overcast iOS apps), pulled the app from the store two days later, saying it “just doesn’t feel right.” Ghostery, which developed the filter Marco used in his app, clarified their joint position by saying: “Specifically, the black-and-white, all on/all off approach to content blocking in Peace ran counter to our core belief that these aren’t black-and-white decisions.”

By comparison, uBlock Origin lets you choose to unblock on a per-website basis. Adblock Browser uses Adblock Plus’s “acceptable ads” EasyList to decide which ads will be allowed to be displayed on a web page.

Nearly two weeks after iOS 9’s release, the $1.99 Purify Blockerremains in the iTunes App Store’s top 50 paid apps list at number 6 (as of October 4, 2015), indicating consumers’ continued interest in blocking ads in mobile Safari. Unlike the former best-selling Peace blocker, Purify lets the user maintain a whitelist of sites whose ads will be allowed to pass through its filter. This content blocker appears to be a less-blunt instrument than Peace. And the Crystal ad block extension’s developer said he will work with Eyeo (which produces Adblock Plus) to use its acceptable-ads whitelist.

Not all iPhone and iPad models can make use of ad-blocking extensions — they only work on iOS devices with 64-bit processors. This means the oldest devices that support the extensions are the iPhone 5s, the iPad mini 2, and the iPad air. Apple says this is thanks to the performance limitations of 32-bit devices. Note that the option to turn content blocking on in iOS doesn’t appear in the Settings menu until you actually install one of the content-blocking extensions.

What’s Next?
I received what seemed to me a strongly worded tweet soon after we published the first two parts of this ad blocker article series. It read:

“Internet ads are life blood of marketing, journalism. If no ads, your fav media disappears #NoAdBlocking”

This assumes the the web is some kind of inflexible unchanging entity. In reality, advertisers and websites will have to adjust — just as they have through the years, such as when pop-up window blocking became the default option in web browsers to prevent annoying pop-up and pop-under windows. While misbehaving and even malicious web ads will continue to make some people feel the need to block ads, the mainstream industry will eventually have to react and reach some kind of armistice with the blockers.

Google’s Senior Vice President of Ads & Commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy, said in an on-stage interview that he “thinks crappy ad experiences are behind the uptick in ad-blocking tools, and that Google, along with the advertising and publishing industries, is obliged to come up with a fix,” as Re/Code reported. “We need to recognize, as an industry, that this is something we need to deal with. We need to work together to come up with a definition of what an acceptable ad is and what an acceptable ads program can be.”

The vast majority of people do not mind ads all that much. What bothers them are the ones that ruin the web experience. An article in The New York Times looked at ads on 50 mobile sites and found an interesting spectrum of load times for ads versus content. Boston.com, for example, had 15.4 megabytes of ads which took 30.8 seconds to load. Its content was 4 megabytes and took 8.1 seconds to load. On the other end was the smallest overall mobile website, USAToday.com. Its ads were a mere 0.4 megabytes (400 kilobytes) and its home page content was one megabyte large, which resulted in load times of 0.8 and 2 seconds for the ads and content, respectively.

It’s also still possible for all kinds of ad annoyance to get through ad blockers. A recent Security Now podcast (#527) points out LingsCars.com, a horrifying-but-useful site specifically designed to demonstrate an amazing array of annoying ad types that will get through desktop and mobile ad blockers. (Go there at your own risk.)

iPhone 6s owners are seeing their new phones randomly turning off

Apple’s new phones shut down without warning, requiring a hard reset, according to internet users

Owners of the iPhone 6s are reporting their new devices turning off at random, even if they are fully charged.

The issue, which has been reported by dozens of users on Apple forumsand Reddit, sees the iPhone switch off completely. When this happens, the phone requires a “hard reset” – holding down the power and home button for 10 seconds – for it to restart.

While most of the phones affected appear to be the new 6s and 6s Plus, some older models of iPhone are also being affected, according to users of the MacRumors forums.

This suggests it may be a software bug, with users of iOS 9.0.1 – an update to iOS 9 that was released last week – appearing to be most affected.

Apple released its latest update, iOS 9.0.2, released two days ago, and itcontained a number of fixes, including one for a bug that allowed anyone to bypass the lock screen to access photos and contacts.

However, iPhones turning off was not mentioned in the list of fixes that Apple gave, so even those who have updated to the latest software may have been affected, and many users will not have updated their operating system.

The Telegraph has requested comment from Apple.

“The only way the phone would turn on was when I held the power and home button together for like 10 seconds. When the phone came to life, it had 100 per cent battery and everything else seemed normal,” one userwrote on Reddit.

Others reported that their home button would be unusually hot when they turned it back on.

A list of reported cases collated by MacRumors users found 50 incidents, the vast majority of which were issues with the iPhone 6s or 6s Plus. Most have only noticed one incident, and many were running beta versions of the software, but some reported repeated incidents.

The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus went on sale last week, and Apple said it had seen record opening weekend sales of the phones, with some 13 million sold.

Lockscreen Bug Fix Conspicuously Absent in iOS 9 Update

Apple on Wednesday released the first update to its new iOS 9 operating system to clean up some bugs in the original version of the software.

Bugs addressed in the update, iOS 9.0.1, include a system freeze on the slide to update screen, alarms and timers that would fail to go off, and frame distortion in paused videos. One bug Apple didn’t address allows an intruder to bypass a device’s lockscreen.

Still, compared to some past versions of iOS, the latest version of the software is “very stable,” said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies.

That’s borne out in the latest crash statistics released by Crittercism. They show that the crash rate five days after release of iOS 8 was 3.3 percent, compared with 2.2 percent for iOS 9 for the same period.

Comparing iOS 8 to iOS 9 may not be entirely fair, however, because the jump from their predecessors differed.

“The difference between iOS 7 and iOS 8 was greater than the one between iOS 8 and iOS 9,” said Kevin Krewell, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

“The software is very stable, and since I’ve been working with it, I haven’t had any significant hiccups,” he told TechNewsWorld.

Bugs Squashed Before Release

Two contributing factors to iOS 9’s stability are the size of the software download and the length of time it was in public beta, Bajarin told TechNewsWorld.

“Past versions of iOS were about 5 GB in size. This one is less than 2 GB, so it’s a much smaller code update,” he said.

“Another reason it has fewer bugs is it has been in public beta for four or five months, so a lot of bugs were caught before it was released to the public,” Bajarin continued.

“With any operating system, you’re going to find bugs when it first comes out,” he said. “The good news is, when they do it like this with a public beta, by the time it comes out, any bug is going to be minor.”

Lockscreen Vulnerability

One serious unaddressed bug in iOS 9, discovered by Jose Rodriguez, allows an intruder to bypass a device’s lockscreen and access photos and contacts on it.

Rodriguez, who also discovered a lockscreen bug in iOS 6.1.3 two years ago, posted a video to YouTube demonstrating proof that the OS’ five-attempt lockout policy could be breached, and that Siri could be enabled from the lockscreen.

The technique apparently works only with four- or six-digit passcodes, according to AppleInsider.

Apple is no stranger to lockscreen bugs, as they were discovered in iOS 4, 6 and 7, too, it noted.

“These lockscreen vulnerabilities seem to be a trend for Apple when they release a new OS update, whether it be PIN codes or the fingerprint scanner,” said Armando Orozco, a senior malware intelligence analyst forMalwarebytes.

“It boggles my mind how these trivial methods have been used to bypass lockscreen security,” he told TechNewsWorld.

Convenience vs. Security

Allowing Siri to respond to voice commands before a device is unlocked is a feature that must be used with caution, advised Paco Hope, a principal consultant at Cigital.

“If you have Siri enabled from the lockscreen, you have to be careful what you enable it to do,” he told TechNewsWorld. “That’s always been the case.”

Accessing Siri from the lockscreen is enabled by default. If it were turned off by default, it would make an iPhone more secure, but Apple may not want to do that.

“If you create really usable features but they have to be enabled manually, then nobody ever uses them,” Hope said.

The lockscreen vulnerability came to light as Apple scrambled to purge an infestation of apps infected with malware.

“Every week it’s another vulnerability in iOS,” Trend Micro Chief Cybersecurity Officer Tom Kellermann told TechNewsWorld. “It’s troublesome that more and more of these things are coming to light.”

The best new features of iOS 9

Earlier this week, Apple released iOS 9 unto the world. While some aspects have stirred up controversy, the overall response has been mostly positive. It runs on the vast majority of Apple’s existing mobile devices, the performance is solid, and the upgrade process is relatively painless. At first glance, it’s not drastically different from iOS 8, but a handful of strategic changes will make your iPhone and iPad significantly easier to use.

iOS 9 contains far too many changes to mention in a single article, but after using it extensively on my primary devices, I’ve settled on seven major improvements and additions that are worth bringing to your attention. Now, let’s jump in, and explore what exactly iOS 9 has to offer.

Content Blockers

Regardless of the ethical and business aspects of blocking ads, the introduction of content blocking extensions for Safari in iOS 9 is a good thing. Giving the end user more control over what content is being loaded, and how they’re being tracked, is an incredibly smart move for Apple as a company focused on the user experience.

Keep in mind, this isn’t all about removing ads. In fact, Marco Arment’s $2.99 Peace content blocker is actually using the Ghostery database to detect and block trackers. And if reading comment sections makes you sick to your stomach, you can simply toggle them off completely.

While this addition is definitely controversial, the implications for improved mobile privacy are too massive to ignore. Good on Apple for prioritizing its customers over advertisers.

Battery improvements

This time around, Apple is focusing heavily on improving battery life. The built-in apps and core technologies have been optimized to draw less power, so you should see a longer battery life on your existing devices after you make the jump to iOS 9. It’s certainly not going to double your battery life, but Apple estimates that you’ll be able to squeeze in an extra hour of use between charges.

Even better, Apple also introduced a new low power mode that will help you conserve battery power until you can find an outlet. Head to Settings > Battery, and toggle on the “Low Power Mode” switch. Background activities like mail fetching and notifications will cease, fancy home screen animations will be turned off, and the CPU clock speed will actually dynamically drop. It’s not something you’ll want to use everyday, but it will likely come in handy during emergencies.

Siri and search improvements

Since its introduction in 2011, Siri has steadily continued to improve. This year, the big changes are based around context awareness. When you reference what’s on your screen, Siri will actually know what you’re talking about. Need a reminder about a certain email? Just tell Siri “Remind me to read this email when I get home.” It will set a reminder, and when you return home, a notification will pop up with a link to that specific message.

Want to show your co-workers some photos from your family reunion? You can tell Siri “Show me photos taken in Pennsylvania” or “Show me photos taken on September 13th.” Same goes for email as well. Need to find your receipt? Tell Siri “Show me emails from Amazon in the last week.” Better yet, simple conversions are now handled locally instead of using the Wolfram Alpha API, so results will come in faster than ever.

Prefer to search with your thumbs instead of your voice? iOS 9 has that covered as well. Swipe to the right on your home screen, and you’ll be greeted with a fully functional search bar, contact and app recommendations, and dedicated search buttons for nearby locations (restaurants, gas stations, et cetera).

Bread crumb trail

iOS has long allowed for one app to launch a different app with custom URL handlers, but getting back to where you started has been something of a hassle. If your Twitter app kicked you to Safari to load a page, you’d have to double-tap the home button, swipe, and relaunch the original app.

With iOS 9, you’ll now see a small string of text in the upper left-hand corner. Give it a tap, and it will instantly bring you back to the app you were using before. Combine this with iOS 9’s improved method of loading web pages within apps, and you’ll see that Apple is slowly moving towards merging dedicated apps and the open web into a single seamless experience.

App slimming

“Fat binaries” are a legitimately neat concept. Instead of having developers compile and upload different versions of their apps for each device, all of the different assets can be bundled up in a single app that works on all supported devices. Unfortunately, that also means that as more platforms are supported, the larger the size requirements grow. And since Apple refuses to stop shipping devices with a mere 16GB of storage, massive apps are a serious issue for consumers.

Thankfully, iOS 9 now supports a suite of features dubbed “app thinning.” Only the assets needed to run the app on your device are stored locally, and the cruft is excised. If you’re running on a non-retina device like the iPad 2 or first iPad Mini, you should see some significant savings here.

And since developers can now choose to dynamically download or delete specific resources within the app, you won’t always need to have a complete installation when you’re only using a small subset of what an app offers. It will likely take some time to see widespread adoption of this functionality, but it has a lot of space-saving potential for games or multifaceted apps like Garageband.

iPad keyboard improvements

If you do a lot of typing on your iPad, you’re in for some big improvements. Selecting text is significantly easier to pull off, the shortcut bar on top on the software keyboard allows for easy editing, and support for shortcuts on Bluetooth keyboards is even better. Now you have no excuse not to write that novel you’ve been kicking around in your head.

Side-by-side multitasking

On newer iPads, various forms of side-by-side multitasking are now possible. Split view — effectively two iPad apps running next to each other — is available on the iPad Pro, iPad Air 2, and iPad Mini 4. Slide over — a feature much like the Xbox One’s snap mode — works with the iPad Pro, the original iPad Air (and above), and the iPad Mini 2 (and above). And as a nice little bonus, picture-in-picture mode allows you to keep watching videos as you browse. Older models don’t get any of those benefits, but that’s not particularly surprising. Frankly, I’m just amazed that the iPad 2 is being supported at all.

An update to remember

Taken as a whole, iOS 9 serves to make the iPhone and iPad fundamentally better devices. Usability is clearly still Cupertino’s number one concern, and this is hands-down the best OS it’s ever shipped. Even so, there’s still plenty of room for improvement by the time iOS 10 rolls around next year. Let’s just hope that Apple fixes watchOS 2 in the meantime.

Ad blockers top Apple charts as iOS 9 debuts

Apple’s newest mobile software lets you use third-party apps to block Web ads, which the maker of the Peace app calls “creepy, bloated, annoying and insecure.”

Ad-blocking apps have soared to the top of Apple’s App Store charts following Wednesday’s debut of iOS 9.

A $2.99 app called Peace, which promises to block “most ads and privacy-invading trackers on web pages” is the top paid app in the App Store, according to mobile analytics firm App Annie. A $3.99 app called Purify Blocker is at No. 4 on the paid-apps charts. And a 99 cent app called Blockr is No. 17 on the charts.

Why this sudden interest in ad blockers? Apple’s new iOS 9 software, which powers iPads and iPhones, adds a feature that allows the Safari Web browser to tap into content blocking from third-party apps. You simply install such an app and then set Safari to use it to block advertisements and similar content as you surf the Web.

Those ads have long been a sore spot for people surfing the Internet.

Blocking ads benefits users by speeding up Web performance and keeping ads from cluttering the screen. But advertisers naturally use ads to generate income, and many websites that are free rely on ads in order to bring in revenue. If ad blocking becomes too prevalent, advertisers argue, then many websites might have to charge users to access their content or else shut down.

The counterargument from the user side is that many ads on the Web are intrusive, annoying and infringe on privacy. Advertisements use video, animation and other in-your-face techniques to try to grab your attention. But the privacy issue is perhaps one of the strongest, with people increasingly concerned about the data collected by advertisers.

“Web advertising and behavioral tracking is out of control,” Marco Arment, the developer of Peace, said in a blog post on Wednesday.” They’re unacceptably creepy, bloated, annoying, and insecure, and they’re getting worse at an alarming pace.”

Arment contends that people who use ad blockers shouldn’t feel guilty that they may be hurting advertisers and websites that depend on ad revenue.

“If publishers want to offer free content funded by advertising, the burden is on them to choose ad content and methods that their readers will tolerate and respond to,” Arment said.

By adding the ability to integrate ad blocking, Cupertino, California-based Apple is clearly taking the side of users. Now we’ll see how advertisers react.

Is Apple finally making a 12.9-inch iPad Pro?

For as long as the iPad has existed, the rumor mill has been obsessed with Apple changing the screen size. While 2012 saw the release of the 7.9-inch iPad Mini to better compete against the 7-inch Android tablets, we’ve yet to see the iPad grow in size. But if the latest rumor is to be believed, that’s about to change in the next couple of weeks.

Yesterday, word started to spread that Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at KGI Securities, believes Apple will begin manufacturing a 12.9-inch iPad Pro model in the next two months. More interestingly, Kuo seems to think that Apple will be contracting with Cheng Uei to make styluses that work with the Force Touch technology seen in the Apple Watch. Say goodbye, Cintiq!

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s rumor, Digitimes supposedly has details regarding the iPad Pro’s display as well. Sharp is lined up to make the displays, and a Foxconn subsidiary will handle both the touch sensors and the assembly process. Meanwhile, Samsung and TPK will serve as secondary component suppliers.

So far, rumors point to September or October for a full-scale production ramp-up with an estimated four-to-five million iPad Pros being made by the end of the year. As for the release window, the fourth quarter of 2015 is all we know. In the last couple of years, new iPads have shipped around late October or early November, so these estimates seem to make sense. Presumably, Apple would want to get all of its new models on shelves before Black Friday.

Earlier this year, Apple revealed that iOS 9 will allow for true side-by-side multitasking. While it’s still not as flexible as a full-fledged PC operating system, this move makes a lot of sense when you assume that Apple is trying to reach high-end users. With a potential for pressure sensitivity and a 2048×2732 resolution, the iPad Pro could easily become the standard for creative professionals. When I was in art school, our labs were stocked with Power Macs. In a few years, everyone just might be working on iPad Pros instead.

The iPad Pro would be made for the professional market — that’s the take-away here. If these rumors are true, this 12.9-inch iPad won’t be intended for browsing in bed like the other iPads. Undoubtedly, a high-end model like this supposed iPad Pro would be a pricey tool for designers, artists, and maybe the corporate types who only want the most expensive gadgets. The standard 9.7-inch and 7.9-inch iPads will most certainly continue to be produced and marketed for typical consumers.

As always, you need to treat this rumor with a mountain of skepticism. There’s no guarantee that we’ll ever see a 12.9-inch iPad, so don’t get excited until we hear official word from Tim Cook. After all, popular rumors often turn out to be completely wrong.

Apple Gives Fans a Taste of New OSes

Apple on Thursday released to consumers a preview of the latest versions of its mobile and desktop operating systems — iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan — which contain a number of new features, including a revamped two-factor authentication scheme.

The latest release of iOS also contains two new smart folders. One automatically collects any photos captured with the front-facing camera in an iOS device — which typically is used for selfies — and the other aggregates any images used for screen shots.

Other new features in beta three of iOS 9:

• a setting to enhance the quality of streaming over cellular networks;
• display of Siri search results with a down swipe;
• display of more apps per folder on an iPad; and
• the debut of a News app. When the app is launched, you can select a number of content sources. News from those sources will be displayed on a News Screen.

“Apple is not only expanding functionality in iOS, but also adding significant capabilities,” said Brian Blau, a research director at Gartner.

“While these preview features are’t final,” he told TechNewsWorld, “it’s good to see that Apple continues to advance their platform to give users more robust access to content, such as with improved streaming quality, and security through two-factor authentication.”

Apple Polishes Security

Two-factor authentication typically requires the user to acquire a code either by text message, phone call or email when trying to log into an account from a new device.

Apple’s new authentication method will be an improvement over it’s existing two-factor verification method, which is less than elegant. With the new system, an Apple ID won’t be sufficient to log on to an Apple service from a new device or browser. Users also will need to authenticate their identity with a password and six-digit verification code.

For those who have an Apple device that’s already been verified and is running the latest versions of Apple’s operating systems, the code automatically will be displayed on that screen. If an Apple device isn’t close by, the user can receive the code through a text message or phone call.

After a device has been authenticated, the user won’t need an authentication code again unless the device data is wiped, passwords are changed, or the device is removed from the user’s approved device list.

A browser can be treated like a device; once a browser is authorized to access an account, the user won’t need to obtain a code for subsequent log-ins.

Unlike Apple’s existing authentication system, the new one is built into iOS 9 and El Capitan. That allowed Apple to streamline the process and perhaps entice more people to use the security measure.

The new system also gets rid of the 14-character code deployed by the existing scheme, which was difficult to remember for most users, but did come in handy if a password was forgotten and access to an account needed to be regained.

Surprises to Come?

New features for the iPad show that while many tablet makers have embraced the idea of slates as primarily content consumption devices, Apple continues to press the idea that its tablets are content-creation machines.

Features such as multitasking and split-screen view on an iPad Air 2 are all “developments that relate to the use of the iPad as a full-featured computing device,” noted Charles Golvin, chief analyst at Abelian Research.

“As is often the case with Apple, many of the features they introduce as ‘new’ are, in actuality, closing or overcoming gaps between Apple’s and competitors’s current products,” he added.

“In these releases, I would point to the natural language search in Spotlight, the proactivity that Google Now introduced, and the long-missing transit option in Maps that Nokia Here premiered several years ago,” Golvin told TechNewsWorld.

“Still missing from Maps,” he said, “is the cycling option that Google has offered for some time.”

Whenever Apple releases a new beta of its operating systems, the code often is scrutinized for clues to features in future hardware products.

“That can delude people into thinking what’s in the release is all that Apple has,” saidIHS Senior Director Ian Fogg.

“If the new hardware needs new software support, we won’t learn about that until a new iPhone model is unveiled,” he told TechNewsWorld.

“You have to be very careful when you look at these beaters,” he added, “because they don’t tell you everything that may be coming. I suspect that there will be software changes that we won’t see for the first time until the next iPhone is out there.”