The video below shows the iFixit teardown of the new iPad mini. If teardown are not your thing, skip to 1:20 in for a great shot of the iPad mini “jelly scrolling”. Best video of this I’ve seen.
As you watch it, note the left and right sides of the screen alternating their refresh. That’s the effect. Slightly annoying, perhaps, but it is what it is, and for me, it’s more interesting than it is a problem.
A small commercially available piece of radio equipment is placed near the the iPhone, which tricks it into believing it is dealing with a ticket barrier
At the same time an Android phone running an application developed by the researchers is used to relay signals from the iPhone to a contactless payment terminal – this could be in a shop or one the criminals control
Because the iPhone thinks it is paying a ticket barrier, it doesn’t need to be unlocked
Meanwhile the iPhone’s communications with the payment terminal are modified to fool it into thinking the iPhone has been unlocked and a payment authorised – allowing high value transactions to be made without entering a PIN, fingerprint or using Face ID
The response to this:
Apple said the matter was “a concern with a Visa system”.
Visa said payments were secure and attacks of this type were impractical outside of a lab.
Impractical? As we’ve long seen (at least in the US), credit card hacking devices can get very small and surreptitious. And from the description above, the only thing that needs to be in place near the ticket barrier is a radio, which can certainly be small enough to be practically unnoticeable.
That said, this is all theoretical, not something that’s made its way into the wild. Yet. Still time to address this point of weakness, if these researchers are proven correct.
Been using the iPhone 13 Pro Max for MACRO eye ???? photos this week. Impressed. Will innovate patient eye care & telemedicine. ???? forward to seeing where it goes ???? …
Photos are from healing a resolving abrasion in a cornea transplant. Permission was obtained to use photos ????????.
PS: this “Pro camera” includes a telephone app too! ????
Follow the headline link, check out the images. If you’ve got an iPhone 13 Pro, you can pretty easily take closeup eye pics like this. Bit by bit, tech like the iPhone 13 camera module and the Apple Watch are bringing telemedicine to life.
Side note: If you’ve not seen it, check out this macro pic I took last week, taken with an iPhone 13 Pro. This camera is incredible.
If you want an iPhone 13 Pro and have not yet placed an order, best get in the queue now. As of this writing, all iPhone 13 Pro models show a Nov 2 – Nov 9 delivery date. Some iPhone 13 (not Pro) models are delivering mid-October, some a bit later, but the Pro models all show November availability.
While you sit in the queue, you can also check your carrier’s web site to see what their delivery date is. And if you’ve got a reasonably nearby Apple Store, drop by and see if they’ve got one in stock, even if the Apple Store shows no stock. If either of these bear fruit, you can always cancel your Apple Store order.
Buyers of Apple’s new iPhone 13 are facing longer-than-expected delivery times due to the COVID wave in Vietnam and the U.S. tech giant’s deployment of a new camera feature, Nikkei Asia has learned.
The disruption is mainly associated with constrained supplies of camera modules for the four iPhone 13 models because a significant number of its component parts are assembled in Vietnam, according to people familiar with the matter.
And:
[Apple] has expanded the use of its new sensor-shift optical image stabilization (OIS) to all four iPhone models when previously it was only in the premium iPhone 12 Pro Max. This has put suppliers in the position of having to ramp up production without jeopardizing production quality, against the backdrop of severe restrictions due to COVID.
Perfect storm of a supply chain shift (from a Pro Max only component to a component shared by all 4 models) and Covid.
From the linked Ars Technica post, here’s Apple’s response:
In response to our inquiry, Apple has told us that the “jelly scroll” issue on the 6th-generation iPad mini is normal behavior for LCD screens. Because these screens do refresh line by line, there is a tiny delay between when the lines at the top of the screen and lines at the bottom are refreshed. This can cause uneven scrolling issues like the ones observed on the iPad.
And Ars’ take on this response:
We maintain that this effect is noticeable on the iPad mini in a way that it is not noticeable on other 60 Hz LCD iPads we’ve tested, like the iPad Air 4 and the latest $329 iPad. There’s also a clear dividing line down the middle of the screen in portrait mode, as observed in our testing and in the video linked below—it’s not a problem isolated to the extreme edges of the display. The upshot is that the company doesn’t believe there is a hardware or software issue to “fix,” and that the screen apparently is the way it is.
Bottom line, Apple is saying, “Is what it is, get used to it”.
