By John Moltz
April 19, 2024 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: Stupid iPhone tricks
Big changes at your local app store this week as iPhone sales are decimated (look it up). And we’ll end with a tip for all you felons out there.
Emulation nation
Have you got a giant folder of illegal ROMs? There’s now an app for that.
“Delta Game Emulator Now Available From App Store on iPhone”
Yes, we live in a new world where you can get a game emulator from Apple’s App Store. If you invented a time machine and went back and tried to tell your past self from 2010 about this… well, most of the questions would have been about time travel and how the heck you learned all that physics, you’re a social media manager, Richard.
Delta is an all-in-one emulator that supports game systems including NES, SNES, N64, Nintendo DS, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance.
What about my Fairchild Channel F?!
Hungry iPhone users dying to relive their lost youths downloaded Delta all the way to the top of the App Store charts. Or, possibly, they were just grabbing it in case Apple changes its mind in a week.
Nobody buys iPhones anymore. Too popular.
The quarterly ups and downs of iPhone market share is the chum of the Apple news world.
“Samsung Regains Top Spot as Apple’s iPhone Shipments Fall in Q1 2024”
Apple’s iPhone shipments decreased by nearly 10% globally in the first quarter of 2024, hit by rapid growth in shipments by rival Chinese vendors, based on data provided by the International Data Corporation (IDC).
Good news for Samsung, bad news for Apple, right? Someone apparently forgot to tell Samsung that, as the company reported a disappointing quarter and immediately went into double extreme bananatown mode.
“Samsung shifts executives to six-day workweeks to ‘inject a sense of crisis’”
“Instead of managing smarter, we’re going to manage more.”
Yeah, that oughta do it. Good luck with that.
Apple’s precipitous drop is really more akin to standing up to stretch and then sitting back down again since the holiday quarter, always a high-water mark for Apple, was the first time the company had ever passed Samsung globally.
And, hey, if these newfangled iPhones don’t work out for the company, it can always fall back on the Mac, which recently has done pretty well.
“Macs lead global PC growth as shipments return to pre-pandemic levels”
Also, I hear the chart for Vision Pro sales compared to the previous quarter just goes straight up. Very impressive. So… I think Apple’s gonna be ooookaaaay.
“They took my thumb, Charlie!”
Yes, it is time once again to shave off your fingerprints. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.
“Cops can force suspect to unlock phone with thumbprint, US court rules”
Contrary to what you might have heard from armchair legal experts (like me), the police can coerce your thumb, as the 9th Circuit ruled in the case of Jeremy Payne, a man out on parole and suspected of dealing, oh, gosh, a bunch of stuff ending in “nyl” and “aine”.
While this may seem concerning to law-abiding citizens like you and me (cough, adjusts hot dog costume), the court specified that this ruling was very specific and:
…centers on the mental process involved in a compelled act, and an inquiry into whether that act implicitly communicates the existence, control, or authenticity of potential evidence.
See? Easy peasy. So, the next time you’re pulled over, just clear your mind and make it devoid of existence, control, or authenticity of potential evidence.
Boy, you’d think stuff ending in “nyl” and “aine” would take care of that for you.
Failing, that, though, just squeeze your iPhone’s side button and either of the volume buttons until you feel it vibrate. That will temporarily disable Touch or Face ID. That’s probably better than a drug addiction.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]