A new page on Apple's website details its efforts to make Macs and iPhones family friendly, including parental controls and other safety features. The move comes as Apple and other tech giants are under fire over whether their products are addictive, especially for children.
The Touch Bar falls short because you have to look down in order to see where you’re meant to be touching, rather than being able to orient by feel as you can with physical keys. [...] And if you even lightly touch to orient your fingers, you’re touching a touchscreen... which means you’ve just typed something accidentally.
But all is not lost. If you look at a few other areas of Apple tech, you can start to see that Apple may be moving slowly toward building a much better touchscreen keyboard—maybe even one that dinosaurs like me would be happy to use.
A security researcher has successfully exploited a Safari vulnerability to take control of the Touch Bar on a MacBook Pro. Samuel Groß demonstrated the exploit at the first day of this year’s Pwn2Own ethical hacking conference.
Many of the former employees acknowledged for the first time that Apple rushed Siri into the iPhone 4s before the technology was fully baked, setting up an internal debate that has raged since Siri’s inception over whether to continue patching up a flawed build or to rip it up and start from scratch. And that debate was just one of many, as Siri’s various teams morphed into an unwieldy apparatus that engaged in petty turf battles and heated arguments over what an ideal version of Siri should be—a quick and accurate information fetcher or a conversant and intuitive assistant capable of complex tasks.
Presiding over it all has been a revolving door of team leaders and middle managers who lack the kind of vision or clout possessed by Mr. Jobs, who passed away from pancreatic cancer the day after Apple introduced Siri. The absence of such leadership and the constant turnover has held Siri back in key ways, these former employees said, most notably in the failure to open up Apple’s notoriously closed culture to allow outside developers a greater opportunity to create a broader array of useful Siri apps.
The gist of The Information’s story is that Siri has existed for seven years without cohesive leadership or product vision, and the underlying technology is a mishmash of various systems that don’t work well together.
Save for the Echo, each of these assistants is invoked by speaking the words “hey _____.” “Hey Google.” “Hey Siri.” “Hey Cortana.” With Amazon’s device, it’s simply “Alexa.”
Again, this seems like a tiny thing. It’s one syllable. But I think it matters.
To promote the powerful iMac Pro, Apple today has released a series of short films created by filmmakers and CG artists using the all-in-one machine. Each film was put together primarily with the iMac Pro, though some of the 3D graphic renderings required “additional equipment.”
If you rely on a few different alarms to get up in the morning–smart lights that blast on at a certain time, a smart speaker placed far away, and your trusty smartphone alarm—the macOS app Wakefy adds another tool to your arsenal of awakening. It isn’t perfect, but it performs well enough that we’d consider adding it to our morning collection.
I love the NUC hardware, mostly because it’s just so impossibly small. No, I don’t expect that Apple would make a box quite this ugly—those two USB ports on the front of the case would be the first to go—but Apple could definitely make a smaller Mac mini that had plenty of power and went all-in on flash storage.
I hope it does, and soon. I’ll be first in line to buy one. But in the meantime I’ve stuck an Apple logo on this Intel NUC and I’m just going to pretend that it’s a Mac.
If Apple were to invent a touch-screen keyboard that is actually great for touch-typist, I imagine it will arrive on the iPad first. (Nobody touch-types on the iPhone, right?)
So, don't panic yet if you really treasure a physical keyboard on your laptop.
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Thanks for reading.