Sunday, July 13, 2025
Saturday, July 12, 2025
Wednesday, July 09, 2025
Tuesday, July 08, 2025
Sunday, July 06, 2025
EU confirms Apple can make a portless iPhone without USB-C - 9to5Mac
EU confirms Apple can make a portless iPhone without USB-C
"The iPhone 17 Air is expected to be the slimmest iPhone Apple has ever made, and a report over the weekend suggested that the company even considered making it the first portless phone. It said the iPhone maker ultimately decided against this, in part because it feared removing the USB-C port would have brought it into conflict with the EU.
However, I’ve had confirmation from the bloc that dropping the USB-C port for a completely portless phone would in fact be completely legal …
Apple’s forced switch to USB-C
Apple famously had to swap out its proprietary Lightning port for a USB-C one in order to comply with EU environmental legislation – specifically the Common Charger Directive.
The EU was concerned about needless electrical waste when different smartphones and other consumer electronics devices used different charging ports. This resulted in consumers needing multiple chargers for different devices. The bloc therefore required all devices sold in the European Union to use a common charging port.
Amusingly, when the legislation was first proposed, the most common port used was the truly awful microUSB, so this would have been the standard specified. Fortunately, by the time the law was finalized, USB-C had become the new de-facto standard, so this became the port embodied into law.
Apple had already adopted USB-C charging for Macs and iPads, but was still using the Lightning port for iPhones. The law required it to switch to USB-C for iPhones also.
As the January 2025 deadline approached, the only remaining iPhones with Lightning ports which Apple still sold directly were the iPhone SE and the iPhone 14. Apple ceased sales of both models just ahead of the deadline.
Bloomberg says Apple worried about portless iPhone
We’ve long suggested that Apple would at some point drop wired charging from one or more iPhone models, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that the company had considered doing so for the iPhone 17 Air.
An even bigger idea was to make the Air device Apple’s first completely port-free iPhone. That would mean losing the USB-C connector and going all-in on wireless charging and syncing data with the cloud. The world is probably ready for this change.
He went on to say Apple had decided against this, in part because of the EU legislation.
Apple ultimately decided not to adopt a port-free design with the new iPhone, which will still have a USB-C connector. One major reason: There were concerns that removing USB-C would upset European Union regulators, who mandated the iPhone switch to USB-C.
But EU confirms portless phones are permitted
However, it was my understanding that the Common Charger Directive only said that ifa device has a wired charging port then it must be USB-C – that’s not the same as saying a USB-C port is mandatory.
I’ve now confirmed this with European Commission press officer Federica Miccoli, whose remit covers the internal market and industrial strategy, asking whether a portless phone would be compliant with the law.
Yes. Since, such radio equipment cannot be recharged via wired charging, it does not need to incorporate the harmonised (wired) charging solution.
The law does call on the EU to take action in support of wireless charging standards, rather than proprietary ones.
The Commission will promote the harmonisation of wireless charging in order to avoid future fragmentation of the internal market and any negative effects on consumer and the environment. The Commission will monitor the evolution of all types of wireless charging technologies (not only inductive), particularly market developments, market penetration, market fragmentation, technological performance, interoperability, energy efficiency and charging performance.
As stated in recital 13 of the Common Charger Directive, “the Commission should take action towards promoting and harmonising such solutions to avoid future fragmentation of the internal market.”
However, Apple has already ‘donated’ the MagSafe standard to the Wireless Power Consortium, where it has become a common standard branded Qi2. This means that a future portless phone with only MagSafe charging would be perfectly legal to sell in EU countries.
It may not be happening in this year’s iPhone 17 Air, but a fully portless iPhone is only a matter of time."
Friday, July 04, 2025
Thursday, July 03, 2025
Monday, June 30, 2025
Trump Wants America to Make iPhones. Here’s How India Is Doing It. - The New York Times
Trump Wants America to Make iPhones. Here’s How India Is Doing It.
"India is carving out a new space for Foxconn and other high-end manufacturers, just as President Trump demands American companies do at home.
By Alex Travelli and Hari Kumar
Photographs and Video by Saumya Khandelwal
Reporting from 11 businesses in Devanahalli, India, near the Foxconn plant north of Bengaluru.
A new iPhone factory in an out-of-the-way corner of India looks like a spaceship from another planet. Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles most of the world’s iPhones for Apple, has landed amid the boulders and millet fields of Devanahalli.
Listen to this article with reporter commentary
The sleek buildings rising on the 300-acre site, operational but still growing, are emerging evidence of an estimated $2.5 billion investment.
This is what President Trump wants Apple to do in the United States. What is happening in this part of India shows both why that sounds attractive and why it will probably not happen without sustained government financial support to revive U.S. manufacturing and training to expand the pool of qualified factory workers.
In India, Apple is doubling down on a bet it placed after the Covid-19 pandemic began and before Mr. Trump’s re-election. Many countries, starting with the United States, were eager to reduce their reliance on factories in China. Apple, profoundly dependent on Chinese production, was quick to act.
Analysts at Counterpoint Research calculated that India had succeeded in satisfying 18 percent of the global demand for iPhones by early this year, two years after Foxconn started making iPhones in India. By the end of 2025, with the Devanahalli plant fully online, Foxconn is expected to be assembling between 25 and 30 percent of iPhones in India.
This newest factory is the largest of several making Apple products in India. Its full frame is still rising from red dust. Cranes are at work above the skeletons of high-rise dormitories for women workers. But about 8,000 people are already at work on two factory floors. Soon there should be 40,000.
The effects on the region are transformative. It’s a field day for job-seekers and landowners. And the kind of crazy-quilt supply chain of smaller industries that feeds Apple’s factory towns in China is coalescing in India’s heartland. Businesses are selling Foxconn the goods and services it needs to make iPhones, including tiny parts, assembly-line equipment and worker recruitment.
Some of the firms are Indian; others are Taiwanese, South Korean or American. Some were already in the area, while others are setting up in India for the first time.
The changes spurred by Foxconn are rippling broadly through Bengaluru, a city of eight million people that had a start in the 20th century as home to India’s first aerospace centers. But its manufacturing base was pushed aside, first by call centers and then by flashier work in microchip design and outsourced professional services. Going back to the factory floor, as they’re doing in Devanahalli, is what Mr. Trump wants American workers to do.
To see the changes afoot here is to understand the allure of bringing back manufacturing. Wages are rising 10 to 15 percent around the Foxconn plant. Businesses are quietly making deals to supply Foxconn and Apple’s other contractors.
A factory that makes plastic parts for bank cash machines hosted a team from Foxconn for a tour. A foundry that makes yarn-spinning machinery was hoping it might start making the metal bits Foxconn might need in its new factory.
Neither Foxconn nor Apple replied to requests for comment about their operations in India.
India has been working toward a breakthrough like this for a long time. Its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, called hydroelectric dams, steel plants and research institutes the “temples of modern India.” In 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a “Make in India” policy. Since 2020, his government has committed $26 billion to subsidizing strategic manufacturing goals.
India’s most urgent reason for developing industry is to create jobs. Unlike the United States, it does not have enough: not in services, manufacturing or anything else. Nearly half its workers are involved in farming. With India’s population peaking, it needs about 10 million new jobs a year just to keep up.
It also wants to achieve the kind of financial power and technological autonomy that China found as it became the factory to the world.
One problem is that India’s electronics factories still import the most valuable of the 1,000 components that go into a finished iPhone, like chips and camera modules. Skeptics disparage India’s success with the final assembly of iPhones as “screwdriver work,” complaining that too little of the devices’ value is made in India.
But the government, dangling subsidies, is persuading companies like Apple to source more of those parts locally. It is already getting casings, specialized glass and paints from Indian firms. Apple, which opened its first Indian stores two years ago, is required by the Indian government to source 30 percent of its products’ value from India by 2028.
Indo-MIM, an Indian company with an American-born boss, is the kind that contributes to the neighborhood forming around Apple’s production and also benefits from it. At a plant near Devanahalli, in southern Karnataka State, Indo-MIM’s engineers perform metal-injection molding for hundreds of companies around the world. It makes parts for airplanes, luxury goods, medical devices and more.
The company is already making jigs or brackets for use in the Foxconn plant. In addition, a “critical mass” of specialty firms means that Indo-MIM no longer needs to make many of the tools it uses to make its products, said Krishna Chivukula, its chief executive.
“You don’t want to have to make everything yourself,” he said, adding it means Indo-MIM can concentrate on what it does best.
Mr. Chivukula said the work force made Devanahalli fertile ground for factories. “The people here are very hungry,” he said. “They’re looking for opportunity, and then on top of that millions of them are engineers.”
Still, despite the surplus of engineers, companies are bringing in talent from East Asia. Prachir Singh, an analyst for Counterpoint, said it had taken 15 years to figure out what would work in China and five years to import this much of it to India.
Centum is an Indian-origin contract manufacturer, like Foxconn is to Apple. Centum makes circuit boards that go into products like air-to-air missiles, forklifts and fertility scanners. Nikhil Mallavarapu, its executive director, said the company was in talks to customize testing equipment for the Foxconn factory
Newly hired engineers and other professionals are pouring into the area. Many moved hundreds of miles while others must commute hours a day to get to work. Some rise at 3:30 a.m. to make the 8 a.m. shift.
But India is thick with people. A five-minute walk away, a village called Doddagollahalli looks the same as it did before Foxconn landed. Nearly all the houses clustered around a sacred grove belong to farming families growing millet, grapes and vegetables.
Some villagers are renting rooms to Foxconn workers. Many more are trying to sell their land. But Sneha, who goes by a single name, has found a job on the Foxconn factory’s day shift. She holds a master’s degree in mathematics. She can walk home for lunch every day, a corporate lanyard swinging from her neck.
It is people like Sneha, and the thousands of her new colleagues piling into her ancestral place, who make Foxconn’s ambitions for India possible. Mr. Trump wants to revive the fortunes of left-behind American factory towns, but the pipeline of qualified young graduates is not there.
Josh Foulger has recruited lots of motivated Indian workers like Sneha. He heads the electronics division of Zetwerk, an Indian contract manufacturer with factories in Devanahalli that sees itself as a smaller competitor to Foxconn. He said he routinely got 700 job applications a year from local tech schools. It is a matter of scale: Karnataka State alone, he pointed out, has a population half the size of Vietnam’s.
All of India’s “states are very keen on getting manufacturing,” said Mr. Foulger, who grew up in southern India and made his home in Texas before moving back to India, where he set up shop for Foxconn. India has jobs for engineers and managers and all the way down the ladder. “Manufacturing does a very democratic job” of meeting the demand for good jobs, he said.
Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.
Alex Travelli is a correspondent based in New Delhi, writing about business and economic developments in India and the rest of South Asia.
Hari Kumar covers India, based out of New Delhi. He has been a journalist for more than two decades."
Sunday, June 29, 2025
Saturday, June 14, 2025
iPadOS 26 hands-on: The iPad upgrade pros wished for
iPadOS 26 hands-on: The iPad upgrade pros wished for
“iPadOS 26 introduces three multitasking options: Full Screen Apps, Windowed Apps, and Stage Manager. Windowed Apps, similar to macOS, allows for resizable windows and familiar window controls. iPadOS 26 also includes a new menu bar, a more macOS-like Files app, and the Preview app for viewing and editing PDFs and images.
Screenshot: Apple
Those who want their iPad to function more like a Mac got their wish: iPadOS 26 includes multitasking features very similar to the ones in macOS. This year’s iPad upgrade also borrows plenty of other things from Apple’s desktop OS.
I loaded the initial iPadOS 26 beta on my iPad Pro. Here’s what it’s like to use it … and why pro users should be excited while non-pro users shouldn’t worry.
Broadly speaking, the iPad must satisfy two separate audiences. One group uses the iPad as a light-duty computer for social media and watching videos. But the other group demands much more, using their iPad for traditional Mac/PC tasks.
3 options for dealing with apps and windows in iPadOS 26
iPadOS 26 should satisfy both, because it offers three different ways to display apps on the screen, ranging from basic to advanced. And it wraps it all up in the translucent Liquid Glass design that Apple is rolling out to all its operating systems.
Full Screen Apps
The first group needn’t be concerned that iPadOS 26 will force them to relearn to use their tablets. It includes a new option called Full Screen Apps that makes the iPad act much like the first one did way back in 2010. In this mode, there’s no side-by-side multitasking at all. It’s very simple to use, and ideal if all you want to do is watch video and maybe do some online shopping.
Windowed Apps
The next option for working with applications is called Windowed Apps. It’s new in iPadOS 26, and lets you open applications in resizable windows and place them exactly where you want. It’s very Mac-like.
The iPad used to put limits on where app windows could be placed. They couldn’t completely cover another window, for example, or stretch way off the side of the screen. In iPadOS 26, those limitations disappear.
Whenever you open an application, it joins any other apps already open on the screen. And speaking of Mac-like features, iPad now includes the same red, yellow and green window controls as macOS, allowing you to close, minimize, resize or tile windows in a familiar way.
I got curious how many app windows I could open at once. I stopped when I reached eight only because the screen became a crowded, unusable mess. You’ll run out of space before you reach any other limit. And with my iPad Pro, I can have a bunch more open on an external screen at the same time.
Note that Apple says Windowed Apps is available to all iPad users — even those with the budget iPad — not just those with a pricier model.
Stage Manager
Stage Manager is the third multitasking option for users in iPadOS 26. It’s been around for years but has become far less necessary than it used to be now that Windowed Apps is available. It also offers applications in floating, resizable windows, but lets these be grouped into “stages.”
It’s a convenient way to organize your open app windows. For example, I have all my social media apps in a stage so I can open them all at once. Personally, I’ll continue to use Stage Manager because I’ve gotten used to this capability.
Just so there’s no confusion, Stage Manager is no longer necessary to have multiple application windows on an external screen. Windowed Apps can handle the job, too.
Files, Preview and more features borrowed from macOS
Another feature that iPadOS 26 borrows from macOS is a new menu bar at the top of the screen. It’s always there, just hidden until you swipe down from the top of the display or move the cursor to the top of the screen.
The Files app, which is crucial for multitasking power users, also gets an upgrade in iPadOS 26. Early iPads didn’t even come with a Files app, but Apple finally added one in iOS 11, and then steadily improved it. The version in iPadOS 26 is quite close to the macOS one. You can expect resizable columns and collapsible folders.
The macOS Preview app just made the jump to iPad, too. I can view PDFs and images with it, and even make some edits.
iPadOS 26 multitasking features make the iPad more Mac-like
I approve of making the iPad act more like a Mac, but not because macOS is better. However, anyone who frequently switches back and forth between iPad and Mac has to mentally switch gears to handle the different user interfaces. iPadOS 26 makes the switch far easier.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, talked about it in an interview with iJustine this week, saying, “Those elements where things feel familiar from a Mac perspective is just a little bit less of this kind of cognitive overhead of [asking], ‘Oh, how do I do it?’”
Quite good for a first beta
I’ve deliberately not talked about bugs and other problems with iPadOS 26 because I’m trying out the initial beta of an operating system that won’t be released for three months. Of course there are problems.
There’ll undoubtedly be changes between beta 1 and the final version, too. And not just bug fixes.
What’s important is the overall direction Apple is taking the iPad with iPadOS 26, with Mac-like multitasking and other big advances — and that’s a good one.“
Friday, June 13, 2025
Thursday, June 12, 2025
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
Wednesday, June 04, 2025
Apple iPhone 17 Air Tipped To Drop USB-C, Other Ports In Major Design Overhaul
Apple iPhone 17 Air Tipped To Drop USB-C, Other Ports In Major Design Overhaul
“This action paves the way for a new era of incredibly thin smartphones and is consistent with Apple’s vision for the iPhone which will no longer require physical ports.
Apple is anticipated to release the iPhone 17 Air, along with other models in the iPhone 17 series, in September. The iPhone 17 Air is on track to become Apple’s thinnest smartphone to date, with considerable design changes.
In a bid to make the device slimmer, Apple may try a daring move that might change the smartphone industry. The USB-C and other conventional connectors are anticipated to be dropped from the iPhone 17 Air in favour of a fully wireless device.
This action paves the way for a new era of incredibly thin smartphones and is consistent with Apple’s vision for the iPhone which will no longer require physical ports.
iPhone 17 Air To Lead Port-less Devices Of The Future?
Tech experts claim that in a bid to make the iPhone 17 Air thinner, Apple will do away with features like a secondary speaker and SIM card port, as well as shrink the size of the battery. Most significantly, Apple’s goal of a wireless future is demonstrated by the phone’s expected lack of a USB-C port.
Apple has improved its MagSafe technology to comply with the Qi2 wireless charging standard, which is utilised by other smartphone makers, in order to achieve this goal. If the iPhone provides a truly wireless charging experience on par with or better than that of conventional ports, Apple may be able to get around the USB-C mandate of the European Union. It could also herald a new “portless” design philosophy for Apple’s future devices.
Can iPhone 17 Air Duplicate MacBook Air?
Apple has done this design change in the past as well. In the same vein, Apple gave weight and thinness precedence over conventional features in its MacBook Air series.
By pitching the iPhone 17 Air between base and top-tier models, Apple is looking to duplicate this success in the smartphone world, at the same time offering a wider range of devices and more choices to the customer.“