Vratislav Holub In this regular column, every day we look at the most interesting news that revolves around the California company Apple. Here we focus exclusively on the main events and selected (interesting) speculations. So if you are interested in current events and want to be informed about the apple world, definitely spend a few minutes on the following paragraphs.
It could be interest you
Demand for iPhone 12 is slowly falling, but it is still significantly higher year-on-year
Last October, Apple presented us with a new generation of apple phones, which again brought a number of great innovations. We must definitely not forget to mention the powerful Apple A14 Bionic chip, support for 5G networks, a return to the square design, or perhaps the great Super Retina XDR display even in the case of cheaper models. The iPhone 12 was an almost immediate success. These are relatively popular phones, the sales of which are higher year-on-year. Currently, we received a new analysis from an analyst from the prestigious company JP Morgan named Samik Chatterjee, who points to a weakening demand, which is still significantly higher year-on-year.
Popular iPhone 12 Pro:
Gallery
In his letter to investors, he lowered his own assumption about the number of iPhones sold in 2021 from 236 million units to 230 million units. But he continued to note that this is still a roughly 13% year-on-year increase compared to last year 2020. These assumptions are based on the huge popularity of the iPhone 12 Pro model and the unexpected drop of the smallest variant called the iPhone 12 mini. According to him, Apple will completely cancel the production of this unsuccessful model in the second half of this year. According to some information, its sales in the United States during October and November were only 6% of the total number of Apple phones sold.
Apple is training Siri to better understand people with speech impediments
Unfortunately, the voice assistant Siri is not perfect and still has room for improvement. According to the latest information from The Wall Street Journal currently, the technology giants are working on making their voice assistants better understand people who unfortunately suffer from some kind of speech defect, mainly stuttering. For these purposes, Apple has reportedly collected a collection of more than 28 audio clips from various podcasts featuring people who stutter. Based on this data, Siri should gradually learn new speech patterns, which could significantly help the apple users in question in the future.
The Cupertino company has already implemented the feature in the past Hold to Talk, which is the perfect solution for the aforementioned people who stutter. It often happened to them that before they finished something, Siri interrupted them. This way, you just hold the button, while Siri just listens. This can come in handy, for example, for those of us who have to rely on the English Siri. In this way, we can better think about what we actually want to say and it doesn't happen that we get stuck in the middle of a sentence.
It could be interest you
Pavel Jelic Of course, Google is also working on the development of its voice assistants with its Assistant and Amazon with Alexa. For these purposes, Google collects data from people with speech defects, while last December Amazon launched the Alexa Fund, where people with a given defect train the algorithm themselves to subsequently recognize similar situations.
Apple in France has started giving repairability scores to products
As a result of new legislation in France, Apple had to provide a so-called repairability score for all products in the case of its Online Store and the Apple Store application. This is determined on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best possible value where the fix is as simple as possible. The rating system is quite similar to the methods of the popular portal iFixit. This news should inform customers whether the device is repairable, difficult to repair, or unrepairable.
All last year's iPhone 12 models received a score of 6, while the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro fared a little worse, namely with 4,6 points, which was also scored by the iPhone XS Max. In the case of iPhone 11 Pro Max and iPhone XR, it is 4,5 points. The iPhone XS is then rated 4,7 points. We can find better values in the case of older phones with Touch ID. The second generation iPhone SE received 6,2 points, and the iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus received 6,6 points. The best is the iPhone 7 with a repairability score of 6,7 points. As for Apple computers, the 13″ MacBook Pro with the M1 chip got 5,6 points, the 16″ MacBook Pro got 6,3 points and the M1 MacBook Air got the best 6,5 points.
It could be interest you
Right on the site of French Apple Support you can find information on how the repairability score was determined for each product and what the criteria were. These include the availability of the necessary repair documentation, the complexity of disassembly, the availability and cost of spare parts and software updates.
