The latest research data on top selling global smartwatch brands from Counterpoint
Apple saw a 48 percent year over year sales growth thanks to the popularity of Apple Watch Series 8
The Series 8 accounted for about 56% of the overall shipments.
Overall the global smartwatch market grew 30% YoY.
Apple saw a slight decrease in overall high-level OS (HLOS)* marketshare from the first half of 2022. They still maintained a 50.6 percent share though that was down slightly from 54 percent
*can install apps
Apple’s partner, Huish Outdoors, launched the promised Oceanic+ app which lets the Apple Watch Ultra function as a dive computer for recreational scuba diving
Supports depths up to 40m / 130ft
Has current depth, dive time, no-decompression time, water temperature, time to surface, maximum depth, ascent speed, battery level, gas mix selected (air or Nitrox mix up to 40%), and more.
Apple’s reduced China dependency
Apple has been working to try and reduce it’s manufacturing reliance on China
They’ve opened or made relationships with manufacturing and component suppliers in India, Vietnam, Thailand, and the US. I think also Brazil?
This is all great, except for iPhone, where some estimates are that Apple still relies on China for approx 95 percent of devices with 80 percent coming from a single plant.
Thus Ming-Chi Kuo's recent prediction that iPhone 14 and 14 Pro shipment for the Holidays could be down by 15 to 20 million units
That plant in China was reportedly at just 20 percent capacity in November, but expected to be up to 30-40 percent in December.
Piper Sandler also believes production will be resolved in December, but it has Apple still behind original revenue estimate by about $8 million
The bigger concern now is that buyers who can’t gen an iPhone 14 model now might just decide to wait for the iPhone 15s and that will hurt revenue.
According to Kuo, it could be down by 20 to 30 percent or more vs analyst predictions in Q4 2022
Apple is still hoping to have more US production of chips by 2024 with partner TSMC
They’re building a new Arizona facility that was originally slated to start with production of 5nm chips producing about 20,000 wafers per month.
Bloomberg is now reporting that Apple and other want them to start with 4nm production and there’s expected to be an event attended by President Biden and Tim Cook this coming week to announce the new plans.
Apple is expected to use about a third of that capacity though for what is a bit in debate
Original reports claimed the facility would be used for chips for less sophisticated components as it didn’t have the capabilities to produce processors
This weeks report says the facility will make processors which implies the possible production of A or M series chips
TSMC is also expected to announce a plans for a second facility in Arizona for production of 3nm wafers.
Geekbench results surfaced this past week for what might be the upcoming ‘M2 Max’ chip
A post by ShrimpApplePro on Twitter showed results for a "Mac14,6” with a 12-core CPU, and 96GB of RAM.
The chip scored 1,853 in single-core and 13,855 in multi-core. Which is just slightly above the 1,755 and 12,333 scores of the M1 Max
That’s up to about 15 percent faster and is close to in line with what we saw with the difference from the standard M1 to M2s in the MacBook Airs (~15-18%)
What’s interesting about the report is the 2 additional cores. The M1 to M2 remained at 8 (4 performance and 4 high efficiency) it was expected the Max would do the same, stay at 10 cores (eight high-performance and two high-efficiency)
Photo improvements for iPhone 15
In a report from Nikkei they claim Apple’s next iPhones will have a new “state of the art” image sensor from Sony
The new sensor use a technique of placing transistors in layers separate from the photodiode layer allowing them to pack in more photodiodes
The result is a sensor that can capture more light and increase saturation.
This can help provide better results in tricky photo situations like low light and extreme backlight and offers better exposures
The piece doesn’t mention if the new sensors will be limited to the Pro models.
Apple fixed one “crash” on the iPhone 14s only to be plagued by another
Apple released iOS 16.1.2 that provides Crash Detection optimizations on iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro models along with adding improved compatibility with wireless carriers
This is expected to address the issues we heard about where some devices were calling emergency services when users were riding rollercoaster at amusement parks
But just as this was being released MacRumors mentioned reports out of a ski area in Utah that they’re getting up to 3 to 5 calls a day from skiers
AR/VR headset OS name change?
Apple must be struggling to work out the name of it’s upcoming baby
Reports this week from Bloomberg that Apple has another potential new name for the OS that will drive is rumored upcoming headset
Original reports were it was being called Reality OS or rOS. Guess that didn’t quite fit Apple’s vision. Now the claim is it’ll be called “xrOS” with the XR for “Extended Reality”
The name is meant to potentially set Apple’s product apart as it’s expected to focus on it’s AR as well as VR capabilities. We’ve heard Apple will have version of Maps and Messages at launch that will leverage the AR experience in new ways
Meanwhile that new OS might be giving Apple some trouble that could delay their launch plans according to a note from Ming-Chi Kuo
Earlier reports have said we could see a headset announcement in the back half of Q2 2023.
Now Kuo claims it could be delayed to the second half of 2023 due to “software issues”
That still might not delay the announcement though, which makes sense.
Components are expected to start shipping soon, but the finished product might not be here until the Fall
Apple could still announce and demo the product, say at WWDC, to give developers time to plan and produce apps for the device at launch.
Kuo originally mentions a January announcement and did not mention if he believes that will be delayed or not.
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Feedback, commentary, opinions
Alt Outdoor smart plugs
I gave my pick, tentatively
Many of you wrote to remind me that I could add Homekit support with [Homebridge](https://homebridge.io/)
The first of which was… “How can I search the iTunes Store in the Music app on the Mac”?
First thing is you may or may not see the iTunes Store inside the Music app. If it’s not enabled you may not find the search option.
Look in the sidebar and if you don’t see “iTunes Store” listed you’ll need to turn it on.
Go to “Music” > “Settings…”
Then under “Show:” in the “General” tab make sure “iTunes Store” is checked and click “OK”
Now you should see the iTunes Store in the sidebar
Now that it’s there… Search in Music is at the top of the sidebar and it’s a “global” search.
Click in the search box and then in the top right corner of the main window you should see tabs to control where in Music to search.
Apple Music
Your Library
iTunes Store.
Mike’s second question had to do with restoring the original OS back to an old 2008 iMac he was taking to recycling / donation
The issue was it wanted the Apple ID / iCloud Login. That failed because of two factor authentication being enabled on the account and the older OS pre-dating 2FA
Mike was getting the 2FA alerts and code on his other devices, but there was no pop-up on the old Mac to enter the code.
I tried to find the details on Apple’s support site and couldn’t find them, so I’m not 100% sure this old trick will work, but… it use to be possible to add the code after the password in the login on older devices and that would work.
Worth a shot.
Packet sniffing on the Mac
I mentioned these cheap wifi smart plugs I got for my Christmas lights last week.
Eufy advertised their product did not send data to the cloud and it turns out it was.
They also claimed encryption on their video streams and that was proven to not be true either.
Accessing the URLs need to view these things did require being logged into the website or apps. And access to the streams seems to require the stream to be initiated, but that’s hardly the point. The company was making claims that turned out to be untrue and then tried to deny it when they were caught. Not a good way to handle things.
Control + Option click on the Wi-Fi icon and choose “Open Wireless Diagnostics…”
When the tool is open… don’t use the Wizard. Choose “Sniffer” from the Windows menu.
You can then choose the Channel and Width you wish to sniff and choose “Start”
You can use the “Scan” option to see what channel and width you may want to scan.
e.g. my devices were on the 2.4GHz band of my network which was on Channel 8 at a width of 20MHz
When running you will be disconnected from Wi-Fi
Choose “Stop” and a .pacp file will be saved to your `/var/tmp` directory (Use “Go to folder” from the “Go menu in the Finder)
The file can be analyzed using a tool like Wireshark or from the Terminal using the command “tcpdump”
I was also able to get some info from my Router tools. I have Orbis and there was data like the devices were “Tuya” and I could see the MAC addresses and IPs they were connected on.
From there I could see and find them in the sniffer logs
I’ll be honest… I don’t yet know how to analyze and use Wireshark. A lot of what I’m looking at seems like gibberish, but there are tutorials and info on the site. I’ll be digging in.
