Whereas Apple's new 13-inch MacBook Pros feature integrated Iris Pro graphics, the 15-inch MacBook Pros feature dedicated AMD graphics, resulting in significant performance improvements over previous MacBook Pro models. Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham found the Radeon Pro 455 graphics chip in particular to be a "significant boost" over the dedicated GPUs available in the 2012-2015 MacBook Pro models, such as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 650M, Nvidia GeForce GTX 750M, and AMD Radeon R9 M370X. MacRumors reports: AMD's Polaris-based Radeon Pro 450, Radeon Pro 455, and built-to-order Radeon Pro 460 GPUs in the new 15-inch MacBook Pro support up to six displays, whereas Intel's integrated GPUs affixed to the logic board can drive a total of three displays. The expanded support enables the new MacBook Pro to drive two of Apple and LG's new UltraFine 5K displays at 60Hz simultaneously. Intel's GPUs can't because, due to bandwidth limitations of the DisplayPort 1.2 spec, the two 5K displays technically function as four displays. This method is known as Multi-Stream Transport (MST). Apple could have used Nvidia's faster Pascal-based GPUs, which support DisplayPort 1.3, but Thunderbolt 3 and most monitors do not support the higher-bandwidth spec yet. In the meantime, Nvidia's GPUs can only drive up to three displays beyond the main MacBook Pro screen -- not enough for dual 5K displays over MST. Apple officially says the 15-inch MacBook Pro offers up to 130% faster graphics performance, and up to 2.5x more computing power per watt, compared to the previous-generation 15-inch MacBook Pro, but those stats are based on the built-to-order Radeon Pro 460 chip that costs between $100 and $200 extra.

Valve is planning to introduce beta versions of its SteamVR platform for Mac OSX and Linux users within a few months, RoadToVr reports citing an executive. From the report:One thing's for sure, if you're a PC user wanting to indulge in a spot of immersive entertainment right now, the choice of operating systems on which you can do so are mostly limited to just one. Windows dominates the VR PC landscape right now and that looks set to continue for a while longer. However, Valve will soon move to encourage a diminishing of that monopoly, as it plans to bring SteamVR -- the company's Steam-integrated VR platform -- to both Linux and Mac OSX platforms within the next few months. The initiative was revealed by Valve's Joe Ludwig during a talk at this year's developer-focused Steam Dev Days event in Seattle last month. During the talk, Ludwig outlined the company's view that VR should be as open to innovation as possible, touting the benefits for the long term evolution of virtual reality and how Valve, with OpenVR, are trying to keep what Ludwig calls platform "gatekeepers" from (as they see it) stifling progression in the VR space. Additionally, Ludwig stated that it's been listening to developer and user feedback during SteamVR's first year in consumer hands, and says that they've heard clearly that a version of SteamVR is wanted on other operating systems.

Microsoft will finally bring Visual Studio, a "true mobile-first, cloud-first development tool for .NET and C#," to Mac later this month, the company has said. From a report on TechCrunch:The IDE is very similar to the one found on Windows. In fact, that is presumably the point. By making it easy for OS X users to switch back and forth between platforms, Microsoft is able to ensure coders can quickly become desktop agnostic or, barring that, give Windows a try again. From the release: "At its heart, Visual Studio for Mac is a macOS counterpart of the Windows version of Visual Studio. If you enjoy the Visual Studio development experience, but need or want to use macOS, you should feel right at home. Its UX is inspired by Visual Studio, yet designed to look and feel like a native citizen of macOS. And like Visual Studio for Windows, it's complemented by Visual Studio Code for times when you don't need a full IDE, but want a lightweight yet rich standalone source editor.

US president-elect Donald Trump would be a "naive" fool to launch an all-out trade war against China, a Communist party-controlled newspaper has claimed. From a report on The Guardian:During the acrimonious race for the White House Trump repeatedly lashed out at China, vowing to punish Beijing with "defensive" 45% tariffs on Chinese imports and to officially declare it a currency manipulator. "When they see that they will stop the cheating," the billionaire Republican, who has accused Beijing of "the greatest theft in the history of the world", told a rally in August. On Monday the state-run Global Times warned that such measures would be a grave mistake. "If Trump wrecks Sino-US trade, a number of US industries will be impaired. Finally the new president will be condemned for his recklessness, ignorance and incompetence," the newspaper said in an editorial. The Global Times claimed any new tariffs would trigger immediate "countermeasures" and "tit-for-tat approach" from Beijing.

The Internet Association -- a group of 40 top internet companies including Airbnb, Amazon, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Netflix, Twitter, Uber and Yahoo -- issued an open letter on Monday that congratulates Donald Trump on his victory and offers a long list of policy positions they hope he'll consider during his time as president. From a report on CNET:That list includes:
Upholding Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so internet companies can't get sued easily for things their users say or do online.
Upholding Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act so internet companies can't get easily sued if they quickly remove copyrighted content that users upload (such as infringing photos and YouTube videos).
Reforming the 30-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- "Internet users must have the same protections for their inbox as they do for their mailbox," states the association. Supporting strong encryption (Trump called for a boycott of Apple when it refused to comply with an FBI order to unlock an iPhone linked to terror.)
Reforming Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which lets the NSA collect online communications without a warrant.
Providing similar copyright protections for companies that operate outside the US.
Reforming the US Patent Office to deter patent trolls, a term for companies that sue other companies based on patents without actually producing new products.Here's the full list.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For almost five months -- possibly longer -- the Spotify music streaming app has been assaulting users' storage devices with enough data to potentially take years off their expected lifespans. Reports of tens or in some cases hundreds of gigabytes being written in an hour aren't uncommon, and occasionally the recorded amounts are measured in terabytes. The overload happens even when Spotify is idle and isn't storing any songs locally. The behavior poses an unnecessary burden on users' storage devices, particularly solid state drives, which come with a finite amount of write capacity. Continuously writing hundreds of gigabytes of needless data to a drive every day for months or years on end has the potential to cause an SSD to die years earlier than it otherwise would. And yet, Spotify apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux have engaged in this data assault since at least the middle of June, when multiple users reported the problem in the company's official support forum. Three Ars reporters who ran Spotify on Macs and PCs had no trouble reproducing the problem reported not only in the above-mentioned Spotify forum but also on Reddit, Hacker News, and elsewhere. Typically, the app wrote from 5 to 10 GB of data in less than an hour on Ars reporters' machines, even when the app was idle. Leaving Spotify running for periods longer than a day resulted in amounts as high as 700 GB. According to comments left in the Spotify forum in the past 24 hours, the bug has been fixed in version 1.0.42, which is in the process of being rolled out.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: Reviews for Apple's new MacBook Pro have yet to officially go live, despite a couple false starts earlier this week. Those should arrive any day now ahead of a retail release for the machine, but one pro video editor today published his early hands-on review after using the new 15-inch model in a real-world setting. The review also aims to address some of the early criticisms of the new MacBook Pro from pros, showing how the machine held up in a real-world, professional environment. The author Thomas Grove Carter works at Trim Editing, a studio in London where he edits "high end commercials, music videos and films" using Final Cut Pro. The review specifically focuses on the experience using the machine in a professional video editor's daily workflow. Carter's conclusion is that the new 15-inch model he was using (he doesn't detail specs), is more than capable of handling daily editing in FCP X with 5K ProRes footage. He also notes that machine "tears strips off 'superior spec'd' Windows counterparts in the real world." Thomas Grove Carter writes: "First off, It's really fast. I've been using the MacBook Pro with the new version of FCP X and cutting 5k ProRes material all week, it's buttery smooth. No matter what you think the specs say, the fact is the software and hardware are so well integrated it tears strips off 'superior spec'd' Windows counterparts in the real world. This has always been true of Macs. If you're running software with old code which doesn't utilize the hardware well, you're not going to get great performance (as pointed out here)."

An anonymous reader writes: "A bug in the iOS WebView component allows an attacker to force someone's iPhone to dial any number, while also locking the user's interface for a few moments, preventing him to cancel the outgoing call," reports BleepingComputer. "The bug was at the heart of the recent accidental DDoS of 911 call centers across the U.S." At the heart of the issue is a Safari bug reported in 2008, which was fixed in iOS 3.0. The same bug also exists in the WebView component used by app makers to show web pages inside other apps. The researcher that found the bug writes in a blog post: "If you think automatically dialing a phone number after clicking a link in an app is not a big issue think again. DoSing 911 is pretty terrible but there are other examples such as expensive 900 numbers where the attacker can actually make money. A stalker can make his victim dial his phone number so he gets his victim's number. Altogether things you don't want to happen. [...] Apple should change the default behavior of WebViews to exclude execution of TEL URIs and make it an explicit feature to avoid this kind of issues in the future."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: As Donald Trump's shock election victory reverberated around Silicon Valley late on Tuesday night, some high-profile technologists were already calling for California to secede from the United States. The broader west coast is a stronghold for the Democrats, and significantly more politically progressive and racially diverse than large swathes of central U.S. California is also the biggest economy in the U.S. and the sixth largest in the world with a gross state product of $2.496 trillion for 2015, according to the IMF. The campaign for independence -- variously dubbed Calexit, Califrexit and Caleavefornia -- has been regarded as a fringe movement. But support was revitalized by influential Uber investor and Hyperloop co-founder Shervin Pishevar, in a series of tweets announcing his plans to fund a "legitimate campaign for California to become its own nation" -- posted even before the full results were in. A few hours later, Hillary Clinton conceded the election to Trump, and Pishevar told CNBC that he was serious about Calexit. "It's the most patriotic thing I can do," he said, adding that the resulting nation would be called New California. "We can re-enter the union after California becomes a nation. As the sixth largest economy in the world, the economic engine of the nation and provider of a large percentage of the federal budget, California carries a lot of weight," he said. Pishevar was supported by others in Silicon Valley. Angel investor Jason Calacanis said that California succession would be simple in the wake of both Brexit and a Trump win. Evan Low, a Democrat serving in the California state assembly, said that he'd support the introduction of a bill to start the independence process. The proposal illustrates the technology industry's frustration with Trump over his repeated criticisms of Silicon Valley companies. Trump has said in the past that he would make Apple build computers in the U.S. He also thinks Amazon CEO "Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post to exert political power and avoid paying taxes, and claimed that Mark Zuckerberg's push for specialist immigration would actually decrease opportunities for American women and minorities." In July, 145 technology leaders wrote in an open letter about how "Trump would be a disaster for innovation."

New submitter TheFakeTimCook writes: An article on MacRumors has revealed that Apple's latest MacBook Pro has already outsold all competing laptops this year, according to new data shared by research firm Slice Intelligence: "Slice Intelligence says the new MacBook Pro accumulated more revenue from online orders during its first five days of availability than the Microsoft Surface Book, ASUS Chromebook Flip, Dell Inspiron 2-in-1, and Lenovo Yoga 900, based on e-receipt data from 12,979 online shoppers in the United States. The new MacBook Pro generated over seven times the revenue that the 12-inch MacBook did over its first five days of availability, according to Slice Intelligence. If accurate, that means it took the new MacBook Pro just five days to accumulate 78% of all the revenue generated by the 12-inch MacBook since its April 2015 launch. The data follows Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller's claim the new MacBook Pro had received more online orders than any previous MacBook Pro as of November 2. Apple has also reportedly told its overseas manufacturers to expect strong MacBook Pro shipments to last until at least the end of 2016. Slice Intelligence extracts detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts."

In the past, Apple has only sold refurbished Macs, iPads and various niche devices on its refurb store. Now the company is officially selling refurbished iPhones, offering the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus in its refurb store. 9to5Mac reports: Apple has sort of sold refurbished iPhones before, but those sales were relegated to an eBay store front and never fully acknowledged by the company. This is the first time that the company has offered iPhones on its official refurb store online. Customers will find the iPhone 6s in 16 GB storage varieties for $449.00. The larger iPhone 6s Plus is being offered in two storage varieties: 16Gb and 64GB for $529 and $589, respectively. It seems that all colors are currently available, which includes Silver, Space Gray, Gold, and Rose Gold. In the end, users can expect to save up to 15% ($110) by going the refurbished route, and remember that these devices come with a full 1-year factory warranty, which makes refurb units a great idea for budget-conscious shoppers. It's also worth noting that all of Apple's official refurbished iPhones are unlocked and come SIM-free, plus they all include a brand new battery and outer shell. It's as close to a new iPhone as you'll get without actually buying one brand new.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: The tax debate between Apple, Ireland, and the European Union may escalate in the next few months. According to recent reports, the Irish Finance Minister, Michael Noonan, will bring the debate to the EU court, a move that could trigger a years-long court battle. The battle stems from a European Commission finding that Ireland had been giving Apple tax breaks, something that has attracted a number of multinational employers to Ireland. The EU, however, has ordered the practices to change. After a three-year probe into Ireland's relationship with Apple, the European Commission ordered Ireland to collect $14.5 billion in back taxes from the company. That is the largest state-aid payback demand in history. The decision has been the subject of criticism, particularly from this side of the Atlantic. The U.S. Treasury Department says the decision is a threat "to undermine foreign investment, the business climate in Europe, and the important spirit of economic partnership between the U.S. and the EU." Apple has also vowed to fight against the EU decision, and those appeals will follow the ones already pending in Luxembourg, where the EU is headquartered. Those pending appeals include cases against Starbucks.

Google has updated its Gmail app for iOS today, which includes a handful of much-welcomed features and improvements. There is now an "Undo Send" button for mobile, a fresh new look, and faster search. Mashable reports: To unsend an email, just tap the "Undo" button in the lower right corner after you've hit the paper plane send icon. But you have to do it fast. You only get five seconds to hit undo before the email sends. And unlike the desktop version, you can't set it to longer intervals up to 30 seconds. You'll also notice Gmail app's got a fresh new look that resembles the Android version, which makes use of Google's Material Design language. Google's also made search faster with autocorrect suggestions and added in swipe gestures for archiving and deleting. In addition, Google has updated its Calendar application for iOS, bringing an overhauled UI and support for Spotlight search.

An anonymous reader shares a NYPost report: For tech-focused scammers, knocking off sneakers and handbags is so last decade. Thieves in the digital age are slamming consumers right in the app. A slew of knockoff shopping apps have quietly infiltrated Apple's App Store in recent months, looking to lure unsuspecting iPhone owners with bogus deals on everything from jewelry to designer duds. The fake apps mimic the look of legit apps -- and have proliferated since this summer, experts said. It didn't help that earlier this month, Apple introduced search ads in its App Store. The fake apps are buying search terms, it would appear, to increase their exposure to consumers. The crooks are looking to tap into the fast-growing market for mobile sales, which last year leaped 56 percent to $49.2 billion, according to comScore.Further reading on NYTimes (NYTimes has opened its paywall till November 9).

Steve Ballmer once said Apple's iPhone would flop because it cost too much -- though he now admits that he failed to anticipate carriers subsidizing the cost of the phone. But that was only the beginning. An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: The former CEO of Microsoft says he and Gates drifted apart over Microsoft's move into the hardware business in the early 2010s, according to Bloomberg. Ballmer says he was the one who pushed for Microsoft to design smartphones and tablets at a time when Apple was already well established. He says Gates and the board seemed reluctant to do so. "There was a fundamental disagreement about how important it was to be in the hardware business," Ballmer told Bloomberg. "I had pushed Surface. The board had been a little -- little reluctant in supporting it. And then things came to a climax around what to do about the phone business."
Microsoft eventually took a $900 million write down for its first tablet, the Surface RT -- plus most of the value of their $9.5 billion acquisition of Nokia Oyj's handset unit as Microsoft pushed into hardware. "Ballmer's only regret: not doing it sooner," Bloomberg reports, adding that Surface is now profitable and this year will generate more than $4 billion in sales.

One of the biggest complaints with the new MacBook Pros is the lack of ports. There are between two and four USB-C (Thunderbolt 3) ports depending on the model you select -- that's it. If you need a SD card slot, HDMI, USB, or VGA port, you will need an adapter. In response to the criticism, Apple says they will be cutting prices for all of its USB-C (Thunderbolt 3) adapters: "We recognize that many users, especially pros, rely on legacy connectors to get work done today and they face a transition. We want to help them move to the latest technology and peripherals, as well as accelerate the growth of this new ecosystem. Through the end of the year, we are reducing prices on all USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 peripherals we sell, as well as the prices on Apple's USB-C adapters and cables." The Verge reports: It's a sign that Apple recognizes these dongles are a hassle, and it seems to hope that reducing the prices on them will lessen the pain of this transition. Starting immediately, all of Apple's USB-C adapters and some of its USB-C cables will have their prices cut by $6 to $20: USB-C to traditional USB adapter from $19 to $9; Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter from $49 to $29; USB-C to Lightning cable (1 meter) from $25 to $19; USB-C to Lightning cable (2 meters) from $35 to $29; Multiport adapter with HDMI, USB, and USB-C from $69 to $49; Multiport adapter with VGA, USB, and USB-C from $69 to $49; Only USB-C charging cables aren't being discounted. Apple is also cutting prices by around 25 percent on all third-party USB-C peripherals that it sells. SanDisk's USB-C SD card reader is getting a slightly steeper discount, from $49 to $29. The discounted adapters will be available at Apple's physical and online stores through the end of the year. It still has no plans to ship adapters in the box with the new MacBook Pro.

Apple accounted for over 100 percent of smartphone industry profits in the third quarter of this year, according to estimates published by BMO Capital Markets on Thursday. From a report on MacRumors: Analyst Tim Long, quoted in the Investor's Business Daily, said Apple's staggering 103.6 percent profit share in Q3 2016 came largely as a result of significant losses posted by rival vendors including LG and HTC, and despite Apple continuing to shift fewer handsets year on year. Based on units alone, Samsung accounted for 21.7 percent of all smartphones sold, with Apple coming in second with a 13.2 percent share. In terms of profits however, Samsung came a distant second to Apple, capturing only a 0.9 percent share.

Apple has just received a patent, titled "electronic devices with carbon nanotube printing circuits," that suggests future iPhones may be foldable -- at least to some degree. Geek reports: Based on the language in the patent, it doesn't sound like Apple is specifically talking about a device that has a fully bendable display. It mentions one that can bend "along edges of touch sensors or displays." The carbon nanotube PCBs provide flexibility for some of the phone's internals, but not all of them. Those other parts will likely be covered by other patents if Apple is genuinely working on a seamless foldable device. The usual caveats apply here. For now, this is simply yet another patent padding Apple's already massive portfolio. Could they be planning to release an iPhone that folds in half? Definitely.

Technology critic Marco Arment, who co-hosts an Apple-centric podcast called ATP with John Siracusa and Casey Liss, has shared his take on the design of the recently launched MacBook Pro models. Apple's decision to get rid of USB Type-A ports has irked many, with some saying that the company should have left at least a few USB Type-A ports on the computer, even if what it strives to do is lead the industry in how a computer should look like. Arment shares the sentiment. From a blog post: The new MacBook Pro is probably great, and most of the initial skepticism probably won't age well. But I want to pick on one aspect today. Having four USB-C ports is awesome. Having only four USB-C ports is going to hurt the versatility requirement of pro gear, because there's a very real chance that you won't have the right dongle when you need it. This is going to happen a lot, because even though USB-C is the future, it's definitely not the present. We've had the standard USB plug (USB-A) in widespread use for 18 years, and it's going to take a few more years for USB-C to become so ubiquitous that we can get away without USB-A ports most of the time. A pro laptop released today should definitely have USB-C ports -- mostly USB-C ports, even -- but it should also have at least one USB-A port. Including a port that's still in extremely widespread use isn't an admission of failure or holding onto the past -- it's making a pragmatic tradeoff for customers' real-world needs. I worry when Apple falls on the wrong side of decisions like that, because it's putting form (and profitability) over function."Design for the future, but accommodate the reality of the present," he adds.

Apple's new MacBook Pro models have upset many people for many different reasons. Some are unhappy with the inability to get more than 16GB of RAM, some are upset with the high-price, some are unhappy about the missing physical Escape and function keys, and many are unhappy because Apple didn't put an SD card slot in the MacBook Pro. But Apple has an explanation. From a report on The Verge: Speaking to The Independent (paywalled), Apple exec Phil Schiller said the company had dropped the SD card slot as it was "cumbersome" and because wireless transfer technology for cameras is "proving very useful" as an alternative. Schiller said, "Because of a couple of things. One, it's a bit of a cumbersome slot. You've got this thing sticking halfway out. Then there are very fine and fast USB card readers, and then you can use CompactFlash as well as SD. So we could never really resolve this -- we picked SD because more consumer cameras have SD but you can only pick one. So, that was a bit of a trade-off. And then more and more cameras are starting to build wireless transfer into the camera. That's proving very useful. So we think there's a path forward where you can use a physical adaptor if you want, or do wireless transfer."