If GarageBand will no longer open on your iPhone or iPad after you have updated to iOS 11, you're not alone. Thankfully, Apple is aware of the issue and is “investigating solutions.”
As noted on Apple's System Status webpage for consumers and the corresponding dashboard for developers, many iCloud services are currently displaying “intermittent issues”.
Apple on Tuesday released a minor iOS 11.0.2 software update for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch following the bug-fix iOS 11.0.1 update which dropped a week ago.
Learn what to do if your Text Replacement phrases and shortcuts are not syncing across all your iPhones, iPads, and Macs.
Released yesterday, iOS 11.0.1 fixed a problem with the Mail app where Outlook.com, Office 365 and Exchange customers would see their messages rejected by the server.
Apple has confirmed in a statement to The Verge that an upcoming iOS update will fix an annoying software bug affecting some iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 owners who have reported hearing intermittent crackling sounds or static noise during both cellular and FaceTime calls.
Apple on Tuesday published a new support document on its website which has acknowledged an issue with the Mail app in iOS 11 where Outlook.com, Office 365 and Exchange customers are seeing their messages rejected by the server.
The cellular edition of the forthcoming Apple Watch Series 3 has been found to suffer from a weird software bug where the device may connect to unknown Wi-Fi networks with no connectivity, which in some cases may prevent it to use LTE networks.
The macOS feature that allows you to unlock your Mac with your Apple Watch offers security and convenience. The problem may arise when that feature doesn't work as expected.
If you have set up your Mac to be unlocked with your Apple Watch and are having issues with the feature not working properly, there are a few things you can try.
According to a report from Motherboard, iPhone, iPad and Mac bugs are too valuable to report to Apple, which leads to sky-high prices for iOS and macOS exploits on the grey market.
“For now, security researchers who have been invited by Apple to submit high-value bugs through the program prefer to keep the bugs for themselves,” reads the article. All of the eight bug hunters that the publication interviewed said they have yet to report a bug to Apple.
According to Nikias Bassen, a security researcher for the company Zimperium, and who joined Apple's program last year:
People can get more cash if they sell their bugs to others. If you're just doing it for the money, you're not going to give bugs to Apple directly.
Apple's bug-bounty initiative debuted at the Black Hat conference in August 2016.
The program offers between $25,000 and $200,000 for an iOS or macOS exploit, depending on where it is and what it does. For now, the initiative is invite-only.
As The Loop's Dave Mark put it, the question here is, are the bugs valuable enough for Apple to raise their bounties to compete with the grey market?
A major malfunction at one of its manufacturing facilities in Taiwan has caused DRAM chip provider Micron Technology to scrap half of the wafers produced at the plant, trade publication DigiTimes said Thursday. About 60,000 units of twelve-inch wafers have been scrapped.
The problems with nitrogen gas have caused production lines at the fab to stop temporarily, said a report from Taiwan's TechNews, without citing its source.
Research firm TrendForce said that a nitrogen gas dispensing system malfunction had led to the contamination of wafers and equipment in Micron's plant near central Taiwan.
The facility in question is known to have produced LPDDR4 RAM for iPhone devices in the past.
”The temporary shutdown of Fab-2 could have an impact on shipments of the upcoming new iPhone devices as well,” added the research firm.
TrendForce analysts base their reports on channel checks in the supply chain.
“Regarding recent rumors about Micron's fabrication facility in Taoyuan, Taiwan, Micron hereby clarifies that there was no nitrogen leaking incident nor evacuating of personnel,” Micron said in a statement to Reuters.
“There was indeed a minor facility event but operations are recovering speedily without material impact to the business.”
According to DRAMeXchange in June, the average selling price of these chips will rise five percent sequentially in the third quarter of this year as supply remains tight. The rise in DRAM prices could also be seasonal due to the expected ramp up in iPhone production during the summer ahead of new models coming in the fall.
DRAMeXchange is a division of TrendForce.
It's unclear if the incident at the Micron plant will impact Apple's launch volume targets for the OLED-based iPhone 8 and the iterative LCD-based iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus smartphones.
The Cupertino company typically diversifies its suppliers in order to minimize risk.
For what it's worth, Apple has also experienced a shortage of 3D NAND flash chips for 2017 iPhones due to lower-than-expected yield rates for SK Hynix and Toshiba's 3D NAND technologies, forcing the Cupertino giant to turn to Samsung as a supplier.
iPhone 7 X-ray image courtesy of iFixit
Apple today acknowledged ongoing issues with iCloud backups, noting on its System Status webpage that a small percentage of customers have been unable to create new iOS device backups in iCloud or restore from previous saves since Tuesday morning.
“Users may be unable to restore from an iCloud backup,” reads Apple's notice.
According to the System Status webpage, less than one precent of Apple users are affected by the outage. Given the company's one billion active devices in the wild, that seemingly small percentage potentially translates into tens of millions of affected customers.
The company states that its iCloud Backup service has been down since 8am Pacific on Tuesday. The downtime had persisted at the time of this writing, but other iCloud systems didn't seem to have been affected.
Are you experiencing issues creating iCloud backups or restoring from previous ones?