Apple Weekly News Roundup: iPhone 6s rumors, Apple Watch SDK and more

Several rumors regarding the iPhone 6s (or iPhone 7?) emerged last week. The next generation iPhone will reportedly upgrade the camera with a 12 megapixel Sony sensor that will employ RGBW technology (which adds a white subpixel to the traditional red, green and blue subpixels) to improve low-light photography. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have 8 megapixel cameras.

Additionally, the new iPhone will likely feature Force Touch, like the Apple Watch and the newer MacBooks. Force Touch employs haptic feedback technology to measure the pressure of a tap, adding a new dimension to trackpad and touchscreen sensing. With the technology, users will be able to use different types of taps for different functions (e.g. a light tap, hard tap or "Force Tap," the latter being a sustained hard tap).

A new patent granted to Apple last week could eventually spell the end for trackpads. The "Fusion keyboard" is a mechanical keyboard in which the individual keys have touch sensors, allowing it to detect both touch events and key depressions. Some keys would have multiple levels of depression for different functions.

A malicious bug called Unicode of Death surfaced last week. It is a text of Arabic characters that, when your phone tries to interpret, crashes the app and starts respringing your phone. Apple says it will fix it in the next iOS update, but in the meantime you can fix it by using Siri to access Messages and delete the offending thread.

During an interview at last week's Code Conference, Apple senior vice president of operations Jeff Williams revealed that Apple will unveil an Apple Watch SDK at the Worldwide Developer Conference next week. This will allow third party developers to write native apps for the Watch, rather than apps for the iPhone that are accessed by the Watch while paired.

Apple revealed last week that it added 5K support to the MacBook Pro, allowing it to use Dell's UP2715K 27-inch 5K monitor when equipped with an AMD Radeon R9 M370X graphics chip.

Apple launched an official Lightning Dock for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus last week. The dock is also compatible with the iPhone 5, 5s, 5c and iPod Touch.