Taking a look back at another week of news from Cupertino, this week’s Apple Loop includes Apple Music’s corruption of iTunes libraries, the thinking behind the 16 GB iPhone 6S, Apple’s huge production run for the new iPhones, details on the iOS 9 beta, Cupertino’s demands for uniform Apple Store packaging, a new way to charge your iPhone, Apple Watch sales estimates, an analysis of Chinese iPhone sales, and the death of Home Sharing in iOS 8.4.
Apple Loop is here to remind you of a few of the very many discussions that have happened around Apple over the last seven days (and you can read our weekly digest of Android news here on Forbes).
Apple Music Breaks iTunes
The various issues around Apple Music continue to grow after the public launch on June 30th. One of the biggest issues that is causing a lot of pain is down to Apple’s handling of offline listening. To do this, an Apple Music subscriber needs to have iCloud Music activated. This moves all your music libraries into the cloud, so Apple can add DRM versions of Apple Music tracks to your library and you can download these to your device.
Unfortunately iCloud Music’s synchronisation with iTunes on the desktop is flawed, resulting in metadata, tags, playlists, and album art to become corrupted:
When you have spent time collating every song that has appeared in the Eurovision Song Contest, when you have hunted down an obscure studio tracks of Nova singing the Melodifestivalen version of ‘Sommaren som aldrig säger nej‘, when you have a playlist of UK number ones and the metadata holds all the chart information, to have Apple run roughshod over these because it has what it thinks is a ‘better’ version of ‘Lapponia‘ on the server is nothing short of incredibly poor user design and customer satisfaction.
Until there’s any sign of a bug fix, and a valid ‘roll back’ strategy beyond hacking around with .itl files, it’s hard to recommend Apple Music to anyone with a notable collection of digital music.
iPhone 6S Hobbled With 16 GB Of Storage
Leaks of the iPhone 6S hardware continue to offer clues and pointers to Apple’s next iteration on the iPhone, and Forbes’ Gordon Kelly isn’t happy about one discovery. The leaked samples are configured with 16 GB of storage, and that means Apple is likely to continue with a memory option that could be charitably described as snug:
Yes, despite the bump last year to 64GB and 128GB iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus models and the move from rivals to step up to 32GB as the new entry level, Apple will once again leave the entry level iPhone 6S with just 16GB of storage… Apple Senior VP Phil Schiller recently defended the 16GB edition by promoting Apple’s iCloud and Music services as well as attempts to reduce the size of the core iOS installation.
…But don’t let that fool you. A 16GB iPhone 6S will only exist for the same purpose as the current 16GB iPhone 6: to push users to the higher capacity, higher priced 64GB and 128GB models.
Once more, the base model of an iPhone is functional but limited. The cost for an iPhone that is going to remain usable for the life of a two-year contract will be higher than the lowest sticker price used to advertise the handsets.
Are You Ready For 90 Million New iPhones?
Apple looks to be ordering enough iPhones to break last year’s sales records (reports The Wall Street Journal and others). With an initial order of 85 to 90 million units, the ‘interim’ handsets between the major updates looks set to become the best-selling pair of iPhones ever. Phil Godlstein, for Fierce Wireless:The report, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter in Apple’s supply chain, said Apple is asking its suppliers to manufacture between 85 million and 90 million units combined of two new iPhone models with 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch displays by Dec. 31. The screen sizes are identical to the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. The WSJ notes that in 2014 Apple ordered a then-record initial production run of 70 million to 80 million iPhone units. Apple sold 74.5 million total iPhones in the first quarter of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus’s availability.
I guess Apple know there are more subscribers nearing the end of their iPhone 5S contracts this year than there were subscribers approaching the end of their iPhone 5 contracts last September.
Credited: Forbes
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