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One of the downsides of living in a city is that opportunities to fly your drone tend to be limited. Where I live is well inside the massive chunk of drone-free air over London. Indeed, I’m inside both controlled airspace for my nearest airport (London City, less than five miles away) and a separate Restricted Area above central London.

So if I want to reach clear airspace, it’s either a car ride or train journey away – which means I only really do it when I have a specific reason or project in mind. That makes it hard to build on, or even maintain, my flying skills.

DJI of course has its own drone simulator built into the DJI Go app, but it’s more of a conceptual implementation than an accurate simulation of real-world physics. Which is why I decided to try Zephyr, a simulator for the Mac and Windows that claims to accurately model the actual flight characteristics of the drones it covers …

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Apple will soon announce a new Activity Challenge for Apple Watch users, celebrating February as Heart Month. In this latest activity challenge, users must complete their exercise ring ring for seven days in a row, from February 8th to February 14th.

In addition to the new heart-shaped medal, Apple is rewarding users who achieve the challenge with animated iMessage stickers. See them below. The challenge will go live on the 8th February.

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AAPL’s share price has held steady in after-hours trading despite low guidance on Q2 revenue. Analysts say that the stock had already dropped in response to reports of reduced iPhone X production targets, and the Q2 guidance was thus in line with expectations …

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Apple’s earnings call yesterday was an upbeat one, and with good reason. The company reported that the holiday quarter saw it earn $88.3B in revenue and make $20B in profits – both all-time records. Revenue grew 13% year-on-year, earnings per share were up 16%,

Questions about how well the iPhone X has been selling were also answered, albeit somewhat obliquely. While Apple never breaks down iPhone sales into models, as that’s information it doesn’t want competitors to have, CEO Tim Cook did say that the iPhone X has been the top-selling model every week since its launch …

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Following Apple’s record earnings release earlier today, Strategy Analytics is out this evening with new data on the smartphone industry. The analytics firm says that global smartphone shipments suffered their largest annual decrease during the holiday quarter…

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During Apple’s Q1 2018 earnings call today, Tim Cook addressed Apple’s on-going iPhone battery replacement program and controversy concerning its practice of slowing down iPhones with aging batteries. Cook was asked about whether or not Apple sees the iPhone battery repair program having an effect on upgrade rates moving forward..

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Several months after the iPhone X’s release, Google has finally updated its Voice application to support the new screen resolution.

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Less than a day after the announcement, YouTube TV is now available on Apple’s tvOS platform. The cable-cutter streaming TV service starts at $35/month, with no contracts, and allows users to stream TV from their iPhone and now, Apple TV.

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Today we’ve got a breakdown of Apple’s holiday quarter results, Nintendo promising Mario Kart for iOS, Owl Car Cam from iPod engineers, and our latest HomeKit review with Sylvania Smart+ light strips.

9to5Mac Daily is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play, or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

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