Type of Article: MacNews News Article

TechCrunch is reporting (https://tinyurl.com/y94vztsg) that Apple has scooped up Buddybuild, a company that “ties together continuous integration, continuous delivery and an iterative feedback solution into a single, seamless platform.”

The company’s tech will fold into Apple’s Xcode suite of development tools for the companies various operating systems. The Buddybuild team will keep working from their Vancouver base. 

Buddybuild will continue to support existing customers of its standalone product. New customer signups ended today.  

Apple has instructed its retail store employees to offer the $29 replacement batteries to anyone who owns an iPhone 6 or newer, according to Seeking Alpha (https://tinyurl.com/y8al8sdf). The internal instructions follow reports of workers refusing the discount if a phone’s battery passed a diagnostic test. 

Cisdem (www.cisdem.com) has updated Duplicate Finder Mac to version 4.0. It’s a utility tool that can detect and delete duplicates from external and internal hard drives to free up the space.

The new version adds support for finding similar images.IT alsods three view does to preview found files.

Duplicate Finder Mac 4.0 requires macOS 10.10 or higher. It normally costs $29.99, but is available for $19.99 for a limited time. A demo is available for download.

Happy NewYear greetings to all our readers and advertisers. May you have a blessed 2018.

MacTech and MacNews won’t be updated today, but we’ll be back on our usual schedule tomorrow (Tuesday Jan. 2.)

Apple has published an apology letter to customers in regards to “Batterygate” for slowing down older phones to compensate for erratic battery performance. The letter starts off this way:

“We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize.

“There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we’re making.”