O'Grady's PowerPage

Tag: December

  • AIM protocol to be shut down after 20 year run

    You have to admit, 20 years is a good run for a messaging protocol.

    After 20 years, AIM, the AOL Instant Messenger protocol, will be shut down on December 15th, 2017. The announcement was made by Oath, the Frankenstein merger of AOL and Yahoo! created by now-parent company Verizon.

    AIM, which surfaced from the original America Online community, served as one of the earliest cross-platform instant messaging tools with Apple embracing it in early versions of OS X.

    But AIM was eventually overshadowed by the rise of social networking. Everything from Twitter to Facebook to Snapchat and scores of other networks lured people away from AIM and the other early instant messaging services. The rise of SMS as an ubiquitous means of communication also took its toll.

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  • Leaked HomePod firmware hints at resizable virtual Home button for iPhone 8

    It’s the leaked firmware that keeps on giving.

    In a recent discovery, developer Steve Troughton-Smith found code strings within the HomePod firmware that indicated a virtual Home button for the iPhone 8. The Home button can apparently be hidden and resized as needed.

    There apparently isn’t a way to change the Home button’s color, and tab bars that display at the bottom of apps will appear below the button.

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  • AMD unveils Vega 54, Vega 64 GPUs slated for inclusion with the iMac Pro

    These are the graphics cards that may wind up in the new iMac Pro.

    AMD officially rolled out PCI-E versions of its Vega 54 and Vega 64 GPUs that will be in the iMac Pro upon its release in December. The cards themselves will be released to retail in the middle of August.

    AMD will ship a trio of cards based on the Vega architecture. The air-cooled Radeon RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64, plus the water-cooled Radeon RX Vega 64 Liquid. All three cards feature 8GB of VRAM, differing in compute units, and clockspeed.

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  • Rumor: Next-gen iPhone could be delayed until Q1 2018, might not be available in white color, facial recognition “highly likely”

    With the launch of the next-gen iPhone en route, a rumor from Macotakara cites possible delays and initial supply shortages of the handset. The report explains that the “premium model” will likely be unveiled alongside the iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus, but its release will likely be delayed to near the end of 2017.

    The report states that the release “has the possibility” of slipping to the first half of Apple’s Q1 2018, which runs from October through December.

    It’s also been rumored that the next-gen iPhone will not arrive in a white color option. While the specifics of this rumor are unclear, sources close to the early production line have said that it is “not possible” to have the new iPhone arrive in white, thereby suggesting less of a color variety than with previous models.

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  • Apple shuts down Repair Extension Program for 2011 MacBook Pro notebooks with GPU-based issues

    The bad news: Apple is no longer offering extended support for its 2011 MacBook Pro notebooks via its Repair Extension Program for Video Issues.

    A group of updated support documents point out that Apple is still covering 15-inch Retina models of the Pro from 2012 and 2013, as long as they were bought less than four years ago. The program was slated to end on December 31st, 2016, although Apple has kept it in effect for users within a four-year window.

    Apple first launched the Repair Extension Program for Video Issues in February of 2015. The program addressed what the company claimed was a “small percentage” of Pros with absent or distorted video, or prone to sudden reboots. Problems came to light as far back as 2013, however.

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