Recap #1/2018 - what happened in the world of Apple during the past week

The first week of 2018 is behind us, so it's time for the first recap of the year. The beginning of the year is usually a quieter period, after the hectic Christmas and New Year. However, that is definitely not the case this year's first week. See for yourself in the recap.

We started the week with our own prediction of what we could expect from Apple this year. There is surprisingly a lot, and if everything goes as we expect, this year will be at least as rich in news as last year. And Apple fans should like that, because everyone should come up with something of their own...

Next, we looked at an Italian company that was allowed to produce and sell clothing (electronics will come later) under the Steve Jobs brand, although they have nothing to do with Jobs as such or Apple.

At the beginning of the week, an interesting analysis of the cooling capabilities of the new iMac Pro appeared. It was clear from the beginning that it would be quite difficult to cool such a machine, and the stress tests confirmed this hypothesis. Apple tries to make the iMac Pro run as quietly as possible even under load, but this takes away components that operate at extreme temperatures, resulting in relatively frequent CPU/GPU throttling.

If you have bought a new iPhone X and you are worried about its OLED display lasting as long as possible in an intact form, try to look at our article, in which we list some tips to delay the burning of the display as much as possible.

In the first week of 2018, the case regarding worn batteries and performance reduction of older iPhones also continued. Apple has newly confirmed that everyone who requests it will be entitled to a discounted battery replacement, regardless of the condition of the battery in their device.

Another big case has to be faced by Intel, and this time it is a significantly bigger mess than in the case of Apple. As it turned out, all modern processors from Intel (basically since the beginning of the Core iX generations) contain an error in the chip architecture, due to which the processor has insufficient kernel memory security. The case has swelled to gigantic proportions and it is still not over. The conclusions of the investigation will be published in the second half of November, until then everyone has only piecemeal information.

These errors affect all platforms that use Intel processors. Apart from them, there are also problems with ARM architecture chips, so it is clear that Apple must also deal with the whole problem. The company issued an official statement that the most critical security flaws have been fixed in the latest iOS and macOS updates. Users with up-to-date software (macOS Sierra and OS X El Capitan have also received updates) have nothing to worry about.

In the second half of the week, we were able to enjoy a look under the hood of the new iMac Pro. iFixit took them to a show and prepared a traditional instruction/guide for complete disassembly down to the last screw. Among other things, it turns out that out-of-warranty upgrades won't be too bad. It is possible to exchange both RAM, processor and SSD disks. On the contrary, the graphics card is powered on the board.

The topic of burning OLED displays came up once again this week, in an endurance test between the iPhone X, the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and last year's Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. As it turns out, the new flagship is not bad at all with display endurance.