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CARROT Weather has released a new update today that includes some major changes for its Apple Watch app along with some new features for iPhone and iPad.

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A sizeable number of Apple Pencil fans have been waiting impatiently for iPhone support ever since Tim Cook apparently let slip that it was on the way …

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While Apple Pay works with nearly all of the major banks across the United States, there are still plenty of regional banks and credit unions with customers waiting for Apple Pay to work with their institution. The latest expansion includes nearly 40 more banks and credit unions in the US:

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In the entire history of operating system bugs, I don’t think there have been many bigger than the one reported this week. Allowing anyone with physical access to a Mac to login to it without a password is inexcusable; letting them in as root, so they have complete control of the machine and all accounts on it, is simply mind-boggling in its incompetence. Especially when the bug turns out to have been known for at least a couple of weeks.

We can at least take comfort in the fact that this bug wasn’t there for long, at least in the official release. But there have been smaller bugs and glitches that have literally lasted for years without being fixed.

I think it’s time for another Snow Leopard: a macOS update where the core focus is on security, stability and bug fixes rather than shiny new toys …

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Apple and Stanford are launching a joint study to research irregular heart rhythms using the Apple Watch. The study was first announced back in September and kicks off today.

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Apple says that the amount raised this year from the sale of (RED) products – where a proportion of the price contributes to a global fund to fight AIDS – has reached a record high of more than $30M.

The company says that this is the equivalent of 144 million days of life-saving ARV medication  which prevents the transmission of HIV from mothers to their unborn babies …

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Apple is apparently well underway in developing its own in-house power management chips for its iPhone models. Today, the integrated circuitry for power management is designed by Dialog, a UK company. Nikkei is reporting that Apple wants to use its own custom chips as soon as next year, meaning they could feature in some 2018 iPhones but the timeframe is not locked down.

Apple has systematically taken on more silicon design in the last few years, ranging from its own A-series CPUs and GPUs found in iPhones and iPads, Apple Watch system-in-a-package and more.

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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just granted the first ever approval for an Apple Watch accessory to be used as a recognized medical device. Obtaining approval took just over two years, around a year longer than the company had hoped.

AliveCor’s Kardiaband EKG reader is a Watch band that provides a much more convenient and discreet way to obtain an EKG reading, which can be used to detect abnormal heart rhythm and atrial fibrillation (AFib) …

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Brits who used an iPhone between June 2011 and February 2012 could receive as much as £500 ($672) each from Google as compensation for the search giant bypassing Safari privacy settings between those dates.

A British campaign group has launched a ‘representative action’ (the UK equivalent of a class action lawsuit) on behalf of the 5.4M iPhone users in England and Wales affected by what is known as Google’s ‘Safari workaround.’ The lawsuit could be worth as much as £2.7B ($3.63B) in total …

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