I believe, however, that one thing is already clear: these new iPad Pros are ushering us into a new era of iPad design and functionality as a truly portable computer that can scale from couch to desk, from wireless accessories to USB-C connections, and from games and note-taking apps to Photoshop, AR, and beyond. It almost feels like Apple has taken the best aspects of the iPhone X experience and applied them to reimagine the modern portable computer in the shape of an iPad.
Yesterday's event had its fair share of subtly awkward moments as Apple tried to present its two philosophies for how it believes you're supposed to use a computer. On the one hand, there was a new laptop. This clamshell design still matters, Apple was insisting. Moments later, the company was touting a tablet it clearly sees as the real future of computing, something better and more advanced than a notebook. Cook even called the iPad not only the most popular tablet, but also, "the most popular computer in the world."
"It's going to push what you can do on iPad, or on any computer, even further." Cook snuck it in there: "Or on any computer." Apple believes the iPad should be compared to any kind of computer—even the MacBook Air, though it didn't say as much. The MacBook Air, after all, is what computers have been. But it doesn't necessarily mean that's what they will be in the future.
When Apple starts working towards something across its entire product line, individual updates almost start to feel like inevitabilities, not choices. But in pushing towards larger displays and more external display support, Apple is very much deciding that its devices should take up more of your perspective.
Apple made a bunch of announcements about the iPad Pro that I could summarize as: “Yes, this is a computer.”
According to its newest published security guide, the chip comes with a hardware microphone disconnect feature that physically cuts the device’s microphone from the rest of the hardware whenever the lid is closed.
“This disconnect is implemented in hardware alone, and therefore prevents any software, even with root or kernel privileges in macOS, and even the software on the T2 chip, from engaging the microphone when the lid is closed,” said the support guide.
So the real question is, why did people keep buying the MacBook Air all this time? Was it that $999 price? Was it the design? The size? The fact that it was the last Apple laptop without the new butterfly keyboard design?
[...]
The days when the Mac mini was a bridge for switchers to use to replace their PCs seem… almost quaint now? The Mac mini serves a different purpose. In reality, it’s probably been serving that purpose for a long time. Apple has finally caught up.
Apple’s first update to iOS 12 is now available to download. The iOS 12.1 update comes with the much anticipated fix for the front camera bug that was overly smoothing skin on the iPhone XS and XR, as well as new emoji. (The bagel emoji!)
Apple's latest iOS update brings battery management routines including throttling phones that have chemically depleted batteries to the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X, though the company is optimistic most people won't notice any difference.
A small number of users on Reddit, Twitter, and our own Guilherme Rambo are reporting that their Apple Watch has been bricked after updating to watchOS 5.1, getting stuck on the Apple logo. Restarting the Apple Watch and paired iPhone doesn’t seem to fix the issue and some users have been waiting several hours to no avail.
[...]
Apple has now pulled watchOS 5.1. Users who haven’t updated should refrain from doing so if it was downloaded, but not yet installed.
The first notable addition to Shortcuts in version 2.1 is the inclusion of three new Weather actions that let you retrieve current weather conditions, fetch hourly and daily forecasts, and extract details for specific data points such as highs, lows, humidity, precipitation chance, and more. Shortcuts' new Weather actions expose the same data available in the built-in Weather app for iPhone, but they're also available on iPad (which still doesn't have a native Weather app). Apple's Weather actions can be configured with custom parameters and Magic Variables, they're fully integrated with Shortcuts' Content Graph engine, and they're a fascinating example of how a future Shortcuts API could work for all kinds of iOS apps.
Alongside its new MacBook Air in three new colors today, Apple has quietly discontinued the rose gold 12-inch MacBook. In its place, however, the 12-inch MacBook’s standard ‘gold’ color has been updated to match that of the new MacBook Air.
Following the announcement of the new iPad Pro at this morning’s special event in downtown Brooklyn, Apple has released two new informational videos that provide guidance for developers and designers updating their apps for the new displays and features.
Fans of Del Rey’s previous work will immediately recognize the familiar dreamlike, almost apathetic tones on her new tracks. Despite the pleasant performance, which took place at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, the most enchanting part happened after Del Rey stopped singing. Apple CEO Tim Cook came out to give Del Rey a hug and thank her for performing, and Del Rey confessed that she’s “always so nervous” about performing.
“No, I’m the one who’s nervous,” Cook said, laughing as he walked with Del Rey.
It’s a glaring irony that’s also a major force behind class- and race-based discrepancies in academic achievement. In what’s often referred to as the “homework gap,” the unequal access to digital devices and high-speed internet prevents 17 percent of teens from completing their homework assignments, according to the new Pew analysis, which surveyed 743 students ages 13 through 17. Black teens are especially burdened by the homework gap: One in four of them at least sometimes struggle to complete assignments because of a lack of technology at home. And close to half of teenagers in the bottom income bracket have to do their homework on a cellphone occasionally or often.
The web page for the new iPad Pro doesn’t really work on my old iPad Pro, especially towards the bottom-most / right-most portions.
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Thanks for reading.
After months of rumors, Apple has today announced a completely redesigned iPad Pro with slimmed-down bezels, Face ID, a USB-C port, and far more powerful specs than its predecessor. Just like prior years, the new iPad Pro comes in two screen sizes: 11-inch and 12.9-inch. The 11-inch model has essentially the same proportions as the prior 10.5-inch model. And the 12.9-inch model puts the same-sized display into a much smaller form factor.
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Both iPad Pros feature Face ID and the TrueDepth camera setup that began with the iPhone X. But unlike the iPhone X, XS, and XR, the new iPad Pro lacks a notch; its Face ID components are housed in the top, flat bezel. On the iPad, Face ID can work when the device is oriented horizontally — when it’s connected to a keyboard, for example.
The new Smart Keyboard Folio magnetically attaches to the new iPad Pro and protects the front and the back. It also now includes two angles instead of the single one on the existing keyboard.
You can attach it to the tablet and it won’t get in the way if you’re using it in landscape. Even better, you no longer need to remove a cap to plug it to the Lightning port. The Apple Pencil charges when it’s attached to the iPad. It works pretty much like a regular wireless charger.
[...]
Apple added a gesture on the Pencil so that you can change the color or the shape of your strokes. You just need to tap twice with your finger.
For instance, you can plug a 5K display to your iPad Pro and show some video on the external display. It’s still unclear how it’s going to work when it comes to software, but it opens up a lot possibilities.
You can also use USB-C dongles to plus all sort of data accessories. SD card readers, Ethernet cables, etc. The iPad Pro is looking more and more like a traditional laptop. Many third-party accessory makers will probably use this opportunity to develop docks and other hubs.
Just plug in your iPhone (or, presumably, any other device that you want to charge up) into the iPad’s USB-C port, and you’ll be able to charge it up. Apple hasn’t said yet what kind of power that iPad will be able to push — you probably won’t be able to charge up another iPad Pro or a Mac, for instance — but if you’re out and about and need some extra juice for your phone, it’s a neat option to have.
Like it or not, Apple is removing the headphone jack from the new 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pros. If you want to use a 3.5mm audio jack with one of the new models, then you will need one of Apple’s USB-C to 3.5mm dongles. That’’s right: the new iPad Pro moves from a Lightning cable to USB Type C.
The updated notebook is still called the MacBook Air and still features a 13.3-inch display, but the borders surrounding that screen are dramatically smaller, and the aluminum bezels that adorned the last MacBook Air are gone. Apple says the display contains "over 4 million pixels" and "48% more color" compared to the prior (and admittedly very dated) model. There's an "HD" front-facing camera above the display.
There's no Touch Bar on the new MacBook Air, but there is Touch ID functionality for signing into the laptop more quickly. There are two Thunderbolt 3 ports on the notebook's side.
Unfortunately, Apple has also decided to change the keyboard. While the old Air used a tried and true scissor switch, and my 2012 model still types like a dream, the new model uses the much-criticized “butterfly switch” mechanism.
Apple is finally updating its Mac mini. It’s the first time the Mac mini has been updated since the end of 2014, and Apple is adding a quad-core 8th Gen Intel processor instead of the 4th Gen Intel Core i5 dual-core processor that shipped in the device four years ago. There’s even an option for six-core versions, too.
The new Mac mini includes support for up to 64GB of RAM, and every model has flash storage with up to 2TB of space. Apple is also including its new T2 security chip on the new Mac mini.
Onstage at today’s hardware announcement event, Apple proudly announced that the 2018 models of its MacBook Air and Mac mini would both be manufactured with 100 percent recycled aluminum. Additionally, it announced that its Mac mini would be constructed from 60 percent recycled plastic.
These are different kinds of recycled materials. Specifically, the recycled plastic is “post-consumer” which means that it’s material that’s previously been used in other products and recycled. Meanwhile, the aluminum is recycled leftovers from Apple’s production of other aluminum products. In other words, you’re not getting a laptop made out of old drinks cans.
Apple CEO Tim Cook announced during the company’s “More in the Making” event in New York City that the company has hit a new milestone: 100 million active Mac users. He added that 51 percent of Mac buyers are “new to Mac,” and noted that in China, that figure is 76 percent, highlighting growth in the world’s most populous country.
The updated MacBook Pros will deliver up to 60 percent faster graphics performance, which will aid in video editing, 3D design and more.
Apple announced 60 newly designed sessions to its "Today at Apple" in-store tutorial program. It expands sessions focused on video, music and design, and adds walks and labs to categories, and they launch next year.
Angela Ahrendts, Apple's head of retail, said the program will include sessions like Small Screen Magic to learn how to shoot and edit using the Clips app, a Music Lab called Advanced Beat Making with Logic Pro, and Photo Lab for Kids and Fun Family Portraits to teach more photography skills. Apple will also introduce a Design Lab called Drawing Treehouse created with architects Foster + Partners, who redesigned Apple Stores.
Yes, the thing is finally fast enough to make some apps viable. And again, the larger screen makes a big difference. That mixed with the fact that the initial round of crummy Apple Watch apps have largely fallen by the wayside, while many that remain finally understand how to actually leverage the device, means actually useful apps!
This upgrade is a big deal, and I’m incredibly happy about it. If you already use Nisus Writer Pro, you should buy the new version immediately because it will make your work easier and solve problems, saving you time and effort far out of proportion to its cost. And if you’ve been tempted to buy Nisus Writer Pro but weren’t sure that the previous version was quite good enough, you can put those doubts behind you now.
There are those, of course, whose modest word processing needs are adequately met by TextEdit or Google Docs, or to whom it never occurred that Pages or Microsoft Word might have any deficiencies or usability issues. If that describes you, there’s nothing to see here—I’m not going to convince you that you need a better tool. But if you make words dance for a living, you deserve the best word processor you can get, and Nisus Writer Pro is it.
The headlining feature is support for Portrait mode effects for everything, not just people, which is currently the limiting factor of Apple’s built-in camera app on iPhone XR.
In addition to the new aerial screensavers that came along with tvOS 12, like footage from the International Space Station, Aerial now features sunset/sunrise, dusk/dawn modes, advanced brightness controls, and margin adjustments.
After a feature-rich update over the weekend, Apollo for Reddit has today been removed from the App Store. Developer Christian Selig took to Reddit to explain that he received an email from the App Store Review team explaining that his app violates App Store Guidelines by offering push notifications as an in-app subscription upgrade.
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What makes Apple’s approval and subsequent rejection puzzling, however, is that Selig worked directly with Apple to ensure the update did not violate the App Store Guidelines. He was originally told by Apple that so long as he bundled realtime push notification support with other features, such as theming and custom app icons, the update would be approved and not in violation of the guidelines.
For some users, however, the software is much more than a convenience. Hughes explains that, for him and others whose conditions leave them unable to type with a keyboard, voice dictation software is a line to the outside world.
[...]
"I have followers on Twitter who are in employment and run businesses and they say this news will hit their productivity hard," Hughes explains.
"Blind people, people with dyslexia are also likely to be affected adversely along with severely physically disabled people like myself."
The Android store is famously full of toxic software but Apple’s app stores have, until recently at least, enjoyed a cleaner reputation. It’s weird because Apple’s customers are known for being much easier to monetise (i.e. shake down) than el Goog’s.
It makes sense for scammers to target them.
Holding music, either in your hand or on a personal hard drive, is a relic of Obama-era music consumption. Though vinyl sales incrementally increase year-over-year, the rapid freefall of CD sales continues, joined now by digital downloads. While over 223 million songs were digitally sold over the first half of 2018, overall numbers dropped over 27 percent in that same time period. This climate gives rise to the oft repeated (though never substantiated) rumor that Apple will shut down the iTunes store.
The rumor’s persistence highlights an unspoken anxiety among longtime supporters of digital music ownership. People who once saw a collection of mp3s as an ideal way to consume music relatively unbonded by the constraints of the record industry. An mp3 could be downloaded, copied, remixed; all without a tangible corresponding product it offered the music fan a nearly unencumbered way to access music. At their most radical, mp3s were supposed to break the record business.
In his book How Music Got Free, Stephen Witt recounts how Karlheinz Brandenburg and the German team of engineers who developed the mp3 format struggled for years to find investors. The issue wasn’t that prospective parties from within the music industry didn’t understand the technology; it was that they quickly saw how outsiders might tap into the format’s potential and undermine a business built on selling discrete objects. But before the broader music industry could wrap its head around how to market and sell the mp3, the internet freed it to the masses.
Today, a new icon found within iOS offers a more detailed view of the 2018 iPad Pro, which we expect to be announced during the Tuesday event in Brooklyn. This icon shows an iPad with rounded corners, no home button and no notch. An interesting aspect of this icon is how large the bezels look when compared to the recent iPhones.
One of the new features of Apple Watch Series 4 is the ability to take an Electrocardiogram of the user’s heart through a series of new sensors on the back of the device and on the revised digital crown. Since this feature requires regulatory approval by health authorities, Apple Watch ECG will roll out to users in the United States first, where Apple was able to get clearance from the FDA.
This limitation is not enforced by hardware, and if you buy an Apple Watch Series 4 in any country, it includes the new sensors. Looking at code within iOS related to the ECG feature, we’ve been able to confirm that its limitation to the US will be based on the software region of the user’s devices (iPhone and Apple Watch).
App dependence was (and is) a major hurdle. It’s tough to convince customers to download a service they’ve never used, even with the promise of discounts — especially considering up to 70 percent haven’t heard of beacons.
[...]
Beacons tend to be spammy, too. Google cited “a significant increase in locally irrelevant … notifications” as the reason it decided to discontinue Nearby Notifications, and not without good reason. One recent study showed a 313 percent decline in shopping app use by customers who received more than one beacon notification in a single location.
"We are urgently investigating the report that student interns added in September are working overtime and night shifts," a company spokesperson told the Financial Times. "We have zero tolerance for failure to comply with our standards and we ensure swift action and appropriate remediation if we discover violations."
A Hong Kong-based labor rights group, Sacom, said it interviewed 28 such students this summer at a Quanta factory in Chongqing. The people said that they had nominally been sent to the factory on internships, but in reality handled the same tasks as anyone else, often working overtime and night shifts, which are illegal for student interns in China yet a recurring problem.
So, there are rumors that the smart connectors for the new iPad Pros will be moved to a different location. And the reason for the move has to be because the smart keyboards will be new and different, right? Maybe the new smart keyboard can be used in both iPad landscape and portrait orientations? Or maybe the iPad and keyboard combo can be used like Microsoft's Surface Studio?
So, there are rumors of a new Mac mini? I bet it will be way smaller than the existing Mac mini, and will be way more expensive than the existing Mac mini. The question, if there is indeed a new Mac mini, is whether this new machine will be a good indication on what the upcoming Mac Pro will look like? Or, perhaps, there will be a new teaser for the 2019 product?
So, there are rumors of a new iPad mini? Will this be even cheaper than the iPad (regular size)?
We shall find out in less than 24 hours...
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Thanks for reading.
Of all the things we stare at during the day, the one we turn to the most is the same for many of us: the filthy, fingerprint-stained screen on our tiny pocket computers. This is why I choose to adorn that space with a photograph of Harry Styles wearing tweed trousers and a sweater with a giant “H” on it. And it is also why other people pick a photo of their significant others.
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I heard from dozens of people, some in relationships, some single, about significant others as phone backgrounds, and guess what? People have a lot of thoughts about it, ranging from “of course my girlfriend is my background, I love her” to “phone backgrounds are a dogs-only space” and finally to this absolutely nuclear take: that couples do this in an attempt to convince themselves they are happy when, in fact, they are not. Here are their answers.
We have heard from several different carrier sources that they are readying for an iOS 12.1 launch on October 30, coinciding with the rollout of eSIM support for iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR.
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Users will be able to add another line to their existing iPhone, giving the device two phone numbers for calls and texts, and take advantage of the different data packages offered by each of the plans. iPhone XS and iPhone XR include a technology called Dual-SIM Dual Standby, which means both phone numbers are active simultaneously. The iPhone will actively answer calls from both numbers automatically.
So after downloading a bunch of different Minesweepers from the App Store, I finally found the version she was playing. It’s Minesweeper Q by Spica, and it has the best UX you need to play the game on a phone: a quick flagging mode, and a quick open feature when you tap a number next to a flag.
It’s true that, according to Gartner, AR appears to haven’t moved very much since last year, despite the emergence of mobile AR platforms, ARKit and ARCore, that have for their part imbued all of our smartphones with the environmental awareness to drive mainstream AR.
And that makes perfect sense if you hold on to some perspective on the accelerated timelines in motion here and consider that, although the tech is all but ubiquitous in its potential of being immediately realized, the app developer community, which is comprised of mere organic humans still operating under organic time, just hasn’t had enough breathing room to catch up.
I am using an all-black wallpaper for my iPhone.
For a brief moment, I tried out the dynamic wallpapers in Mojave, but I got tired of them pretty soon. I'm now using a gray wallpaper on my Mac.
On the other hand, I am using one of the early Mac OS X wallpapers on my iPad.
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Phones are the most important computer in most people’s lives. They’re the only computer in many people’s lives. Nobody says it’s crazy to spend up to $1,500 on a laptop — but most people use and care about their phone more than they do their laptop. That’s why phone displays are getting bigger. We’ve been corrupted by thinking of them as “phones” in the pre-2007 sense of the word.
A cell phone used to be just a wireless telephone. No longer. They are our ever-present personal computers. They are also our most important cameras (and often our only cameras). A decade ago, point-and-shoot cameras ran $200-400, easily. It’s your watch, it’s your alarm clock, it’s your Walkman, it’s your map and GPS. It’s your wallet full of photos of your family and friends. It’s also, increasing, your actual wallet.
For the first time in years, a new iPhone has hit the market without any first-party Apple cases for the company to sell alongside it. The lack of such an obvious accessory is odd. Apple has made no public comment on why it hasn’t prepped its usual silicone and leather case options for the XR’s launch. A clear case that was mentioned in the company’s press materials in some regions has also been a no-show. If you walk into an Apple Store today, you’ll find a few options from Otterbox and other brands, but none from Apple itself. At least not yet.
Unfortunately, there’s not much you can to improve the security of your cellphone. Unlike computer networks, where you can buy antivirus software, network firewalls, and the like, your phone is largely controlled by others. You’re at the mercy of the company that makes your phone, the company that provides you cellular service, and the communications protocols developed when none of this was a problem. If it doesn’t want to bother with security, you’re vulnerable.
This is why the current debate about phone privacy, with the FBI on one side wanting the ability to eavesdrop on communications and unlock devices, and users on the other side wanting secure devices, is so important. Yes, there are security benefits to the FBI being able to use this information to help solve crimes, but there are far greater benefits to the phones and networks being so secure that all the potential eavesdroppers—including the FBI—can’t access them. We can give law enforcement other forensics tools, but we must keep foreign governments, criminal groups, terrorists, and everyone else out of everyone’s phones. The president may be taking heat for his love of his insecure phone, but each of us is using just as insecure a phone. And for a surprising number of us, making those phones more private is a matter of national security.
A recent conversation on Slate’s Slack revealed just how creative writers can be in avoiding the Insert path. Many admit they Google, copy, and paste characters that are AWOL on the QWERTY when they need them: the dashes, the accents, the umlauts. In high school, I regularly Googled the name of my own school—after all, when you attend Sacré Cœur and take an obnoxious pride in spelling it correctly, the search engine becomes your meilleur ami. Others admit to typing the letters c-a-f-e in Word and stealing the autocorrected é when they need it (déjà vu works too), but if you want to be a jerk about how you spell doppelgänger and Sūdoku, there’s no obvious autocorrect for umlauts or macrons—if you’re trying to write about Björk, it’s back to Google or the cumbersome Word process.
The debate surrounding the use of the em dash rages on in editorial circles—perhaps, as the Ringer writer Kate Knibbs tweeted, the difficulty of applying it discourages its overuse (and perhaps that em dash could have been a semicolon). But it’s not working—we writers are a resourceful bunch, at least when it comes to em dashes. There’s Google, of course (Slate editor Dan Kois admits to keeping a bookmark of the search results for “em dash”), but the true em dash abusers among us have actually learned the keyboard shortcut: [Option] + [Shift] + [-] on Mac, or [Ctrl] + [Alt] + [-] on PC.
Snap, which likes to call itself a camera company, is bringing that camera to the desktop. Snap Camera, which is available today for Mac and Windows, will integrate with apps including Twitch, YouTube, Skype, and Zoom. With Snap Camera running, you’ll be able to use Snapchat’s filters — lenses, in Snap speak — while streaming a game of Fortnite or updating your co-workers on fourth quarter sales. For Snap, a move to the desktop represents a way to extend its reach into users’ lives, while harnessing the advantages the company has built up in augmented reality filters.
The problem with this new policy is that the nature and prices of in-app purchases vary wildly depending on the developer and type of app or game. Users could previously check out the description and prices of the in-app purchases to determine if they were reasonable before downloading or buying an app. Now, it seems, users must download and launch the app to see the same information.
Have I ever mentioned how frustrating I find programming in Shortcuts? I have? Well, I’m going to do it again. This time, I’m going to vent about Magic Variables, which everyone says are great but which I despise. Sort of.
By focusing on user experience, accessibility, and solving the complex challenges around heterogenous enterprise setups: “I think we’ve embedded design into our definition of agile and how we build software and how we build solutions,” Previn explained.
“The philosophy is that if we spend enough time on engineering up-front so we have fewer problems coming into the environment, we can then afford to staff more qualified people as we don’t need so many of them. Then, when you call the help desk, they are totally driven and focused on delivering a great user experience to you.”
Amazon isn’t alone in apparently retaliating against Bloomberg over a report it says is untrue and riddled with inaccuracies. According to multiple sources, Bloomberg was not invited to Apple’s fall product event next week in Brooklyn.
Silicon Valley parents are increasingly obsessed with keeping their children away from screens. Even a little screen time can be so deeply addictive, some parents believe, that it’s best if a child neither touches nor sees any of these glittering rectangles. These particular parents, after all, deeply understand their allure.
But it’s very hard for a working adult in the 21st century to live at home without looking at a phone. And so, as with many aspirations and ideals, it’s easier to hire someone to do this.
Enter the Silicon Valley nanny, who each day returns to the time before screens.
Probably for the first time in my life, I've replaced Apple products with non-Apple products. I've been using AirPorts since 2001, but starting three hours ago as I am typing this, the wireless network in my apartment is now powered by NetGear's Orbi.
This may also mark the start of another tradition: just buying whatever Wirecutter recommends.
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Thanks for reading.
Apple, as a modern company, was built on music. It was the iPod that turned it from a niche computer company into a mass-market consumer brand, and it is the iPhone – itself very much trading on the iPod’s musical heritage – that made it the world’s first trillion-dollar company. Music has been a massive friend to Apple; it’s time for Apple to return the favor.
So that’s my view: Apple could and should care about all the genres it streams. Please share your own thoughts in the comments.
But by so consistently defining itself by its security, the company is also setting itself up for heightened risk of losing face on this topic. Investors will be watching for any sign that these concrete security and privacy goals have started to crack.
You need three ingredients to get a lock-screen weather forecast on your iPhone: iOS 12, the Stock weather app set to always know your location and the Bedtime alarm.
Linea Go is the little sister of Linea, perhaps the best pick-up-and-go drawing app on the iPad. And unlike the iPad, where there are a ton of really top-end drawing and painting apps, the iPhone has far fewer, especially if you just want a great way to lay down a quick sketch.
Mortimer Goth settles in to one of the 15 wicker chairs that have suddenly appeared by his lit fireplace. He feels strangely compelled to sit and remain seated, as if guided by an unseen hand, even as the room he’s in grows curiously hotter and hotter. Before he knows it, the chairs around him burst into pixelated flames. He’s on fire! He calls for help, but his wife, Bella, can’t hear him. She’s swimming in circles in their backyard pool, searching fruitlessly for a ladder that doesn’t exist.
For the uninitiated fiddling around their family desktop, the original version of “The Sims” was mostly about nurturing humanlike characters through life’s minutiae. For everyone else, “The Sims” was and is a game about death, about wacky, inconsequential death, about fiery death and watery death, death by starvation and death by electric shock and death by skydiving malfunction ― Mortimer and Bella’s worst recurring nightmare. And as the game evolved over the years, a kind of meta-game has formed around it: a subtle relationship between creative, death-obsessed “Sims” players and the game’s ever-adapting designers, keen on raising the stakes of the simulated lives we so easily ended.
There are days when I am feeling nihilism. Then I reach home and I sleep.
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I was tired last night, and went to bed early at 10am. (Yes, 10am is usually early for me.) A good 8 hour of sleep should be good for me, I thought.
Then I woke up at 1.30am and couldn't get back to sleep.
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Thanks for reading.
Apple has waded into the messy world of news with a service that is read regularly by roughly 90 million people. But while Google, Facebook and Twitter have come under intense scrutiny for their disproportionate — and sometimes harmful — influence over the spread of information, Apple has so far avoided controversy. One big reason is that while its Silicon Valley peers rely on machines and algorithms to pick headlines, Apple uses humans like Ms. Kern.
The former journalist has quietly become one of the most powerful figures in English-language media. The stories she and her deputies select for Apple News regularly receive more than a million visits each.
Their work has complicated the debate about whether Silicon Valley giants are media or technology companies. Google, Facebook and Twitter have long insisted they are tech entities and not arbiters of the truth. The chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and others have bet heavily on artificial intelligence to help them sort through false news and fact-based information. Yet Apple has unabashedly gone the other direction with its human-led approach, showing that a more media-like sensibility may be able to coexist within a technology company.
"We don't want the media to create an incentive structure that ignores treating Chinese citizens as less-deserving of privacy protections because a CEO is willing to bad-mouth the business model of their primary competitor, who uses advertising to subsidize cheaper devices," Stamos said in a series of tweets responding to recent comments made by Apple CEO Tim Cook.
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Though Stamos said he agreed with "almost everything" Cook said, in a series of tweets he called out Apple for blocking the ability to download VPN and encrypted messaging apps in China, which could provide ways to connect to the internet and send messages privately and without surveillance.
Google and Facebook have faced blistering criticism lately for their attempts to work in China. That Apple has operated for so long in the country with so little discussion of the potential for government access to user data seems, in light of Cook’s speech, all the more conspicuous.
Multiple sources familiar with the GrayKey tech tell Forbes the device can no longer break the passcodes of any iPhone running iOS 12 or above. On those devices, GrayKey can only do what's called a "partial extraction," sources from the forensic community said. That means police using the tool can only draw out unencrypted files and some metadata, such as file sizes and folder structures.
[...]
Though it's clear Apple has locked GrayShift out, no one actually knows just how the iPhone maker has done it. Vladimir Katalov, chief of forensic tech provider Elcomsoft, bas repeatedly uncovered weaknesses in Apple technology. But he was stumped too.
If you’d like to watch next week’s Apple Special Event on a bit larger display with a group of friends, you might be in luck. Select Apple stores around the world will be live streaming the keynote, and you can sign up to attend.
The over-blur that sometimes happens now as a result of the noise reduction can be a bit much, but I just add a little grain if I feel it goes overboard, and it’s nice that dark shadows aren’t as noisy because of it. I also like that Apple is trying to improve auto exposure, even if it misses the mark sometimes. I like that it’s in an effort to help everyone get properly-exposed shots. I like that portrait mode keeps getting better and that I can now emulate the look of a prime lens with a device that fits in my pocket. And that is why, deep down, more than for my own sentimental reasons, I will always love the iPhone: It’s a powerful, accessable, and unintimidating camera.
Apple’s #ShotoniPhone campaign has grown tremendously over the years with everyday users tweeting pictures or videos on Twitter and Instagram. Today, Apple is sharing a compilation of photos and videos shot on iPhone XS using the new Depth Control.
As is the case with stuff like Markdown and Apple Pay, technologies not built expressly for accessibility’s sake, the Shortcuts app is so well considered and approachable that anyone can use it, regardless of ability. There are no complicated settings or special modes; as Apple designed it, it just works as they intended it.
That’s what makes Shortcuts’ star shine brighter. Yes, Apple is pitching it for speed and convenience. Yes, shortcuts can be as pedestrian or as nerdy as you want them to be. Above all, however, the Shortcuts app is accessible. It's an app that's reachable to the widest possible audience, turning its utilitarianism into something far greater.
Nuance has announced that the company has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac. This was the most recent name of the company’s speech recognition software for macOS.
The new Safari beta includes support for the ‘prefers-color-scheme’ CSS media query. This will allow websites to adapt automatically to changes in system appearance.
At its heart, the Guardian Mobile Firewall — currently in a closed beta — funnels all of an iPhone or iPad’s internet traffic through an encrypted virtual private network (VPN) tunnel to Guardian’s servers, outsourcing all of the filtering and enforcement to the cloud to help reduce performance issues on the device’s battery. It means the Guardian app can near-instantly spot if another app is secretly sending a device’s tracking data to a tracking firm, warning the user or giving the option to stop it in its tracks. The aim isn’t to prevent a potentially dodgy app from working properly, but to give users’ awareness and choice over what data leaves their device.
Strafach described the app as “like a junk email filter for your web traffic,” and you can see from of the app’s dedicated tabs what data gets blocked and why. A future version plans to allow users to modify or block their precise geolocation from being sent to certain servers. Strafach said the app will later tell a user how many times an app accesses device data, like their contact lists.
"I was public because I started to receive stories from kids who read online that I was gay," he told Amanpour.
He said the emails and letters came from children who said they had been ostracized, bullied or abused because of their sexual orientation.
Cook said he is a private person but ultimately decided that he was being "selfish" by keeping quiet about his identity when he could help people by coming out.
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has joined the chorus of voices warning that data itself is being weaponized again people and societies — arguing that the trade in digital data has exploded into a “data industrial complex”.
Cook did not namecheck the adtech elephants in the room: Google, Facebook and other background data brokers that profit from privacy-hostile business models. But his target was clear.
[...]
Cook said Apple is “in full support of a comprehensive, federal privacy law in the United States” — making the company’s clearest statement yet of support for robust domestic privacy laws, and earning himself a burst of applause from assembled delegates in the process.
The themes of this year’s conference is “Debating Ethics: Dignity and Respect in Data Driven Life", Cook is the first tech CEO to serve as the keynote speaker for the conference and was invited to speak.
He talked about data, put in a bid for a bill of U.S. digital rights, slammed competitors for profiting while unleashing powerfully negative forces, and spoke up for a GDPR-style privacy protection in the U.S.
Once more, ahead of Apple’s October 30 event, the Eurasian Economic Competition database has listed filings for new Mac models running macOS 10.14. Four of these model identifiers relate to as-yet-unannounced machines.
Apple’s streaming television service, which is said to resemble Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, will launch in the first half of next year, according to a report today from The Information. The service, which may exist as a standalone app or within the existing TV app, will launch in the US first and become available in more than 100 countries after a few months of availability, the report says. It will feature a mix of original programming, access to third-party services, and the ability to subscribe directly to channel packages offered by network and cable providers, similar to Amazon’s Channels feature.
It should be obvious to anyone who takes a closer look that my podcast, WAVes, is over a year old and has exactly zero reviews. So the fact that it’s charting is very fishy. As of Sunday, two days after all of this activity, the podcast racked up 170 more downloads than it had previously. Much of that activity, not surprisingly, was from Bangladesh.
[...]
I don’t know if podcasters use click farms regularly. Apple has said it’s working on cracking down on this. But my experience shows that this cheating thing sort of works — though I’m still waiting for the call that my podcast has been optioned for a TV series.
With this iPad app, you can automatically extract information from a large aerial imageryand have the analysis presented in a useful view.
Jamf has just announced a new pair of apps aimed to allow iPad and iPhone to be used in more situations in the enterprise market. While Apple has had a shared iPad deployment model for the past few years in K–12, it’s never been extended to enterprise use.
The code being open-sourced offers IT departments the ability to gather additional information about their employees during macOS setup and allows employees to customize their enrollment by selecting apps or bundles of apps to install.
Adware Doctor is one of the most popular paid apps in the App Store for Macs, and it’s on sale! Unfortunately, you probably don’t want to take advantage of the bargain because new research shows it’s essentially spyware and is periodically transmitting user data to a server in China.
Patrick Wardle is a respected security researcher who’s made some big discoveries of issues with Apple before. On Friday, he published a post on his Objective-See blog that details the ways in which Adware Doctor violates Apple’s App Store policy and betrays its users.
When colleagues and I recently examined the medical literature on direct-to-consumer diagnostic apps in a study published in Diagnosis, we repeatedly found studies marred by bias, technological naïveté, or a failure to provide crucial information for consumers. There was also a glaring lack of studies with actual consumers to see how they use these apps and what the impact on individual health, whether for better or worse, might be.
One minute into using my Mac earlier this evening, I discovered that the AirPort Utility app, which usually does not appear on the Dock, appeared in the dock.
So I click on the app's icon, and the usual window comes up, and I was alarmed to find the error message informing me that my Time Capsule may be overheating.
That's not comforting.
So I rebooted the Time Capsule. And the error message reappears after a few seconds.
Not good.
Next, I tried turning off "Enable file sharing."
So far, touch wood, the error message has not appear.
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I think I'm going to shop for a new wireless setup. No chance of Apple coming back with a new Time Capsule next week, right?
~
Also, is it just me, or is the AirPort Utility app stucked on Dark mode?
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Thanks for reading.
The iPhone XR is not the most technologically advanced iPhone; many of Apple's superior components have been reserved for the costlier device. But the iPhone XR is still a moderately great phone. It's great not in the way that super-futuristic, game-changing technology devices are. It's great in the way that a bunch of already-possible things have been packaged together cleanly and nicely.
Most people—those who don't spend their lives comparing specs and staring at bezels on multiple models of new smartphones each fall—are going to be very happy with this phone if they buy it. Especially if those people are upgrading from an older iPhone, which I believe will be the case for a lot of people buying the iPhone XR. They'll have a phone that's running on Apple's top-of-the-line processor. They'll have FaceID, and they'll experience the learning curve that comes with an iPhone without a home button, which feels like a small price to pay for an edge-to-edge display.
Look. The display on the iPhone XR is… fine. It’s fine! It has lower resolution and pixel density than the OLEDs in new flagship phones like the iPhone XS, Galaxy S9, and Pixel 3, but it’s the same 326 pixels per inch as Apple’s previous non-Plus LCD iPhones. Anyone coming to this phone from any iPhone save the iPhone X will not notice a huge discrepancy in resolution. I suspect most people will find it totally acceptable.
[...]
To be clear, the bezel is there for a reason: it houses the LCD backlight. Apple did a lot of custom engineering to pack a dense array of LED backlights into that bezel, and tucked the display controller up under the display itself to eliminate the need for an unsightly chin, which virtually no other phone manufacturer has been able to avoid. The tradeoff? Well, the bezel, and a Lightning port that’s vertically off-center on the bottom.
But only the iPhone XR offers a 128 GB storage tier, and it’s just $50 more. If you want more than 64 GB with an iPhone XS, you’ve got to pay $150 more than the base price and jump all the way to 256 GB. So in terms of what I would actually recommend for most people — getting the storage tier one level above entry level — the 128 GB iPhone XR costs $350 less than the 256 GB XS and $450 less than the XS Max.
People who are looking for some way that iPhone XR purchasers are getting screwed have it backwards. If anyone is getting screwed on pricing, it’s XS and XS Max purchasers, who don’t have the option of buying a 128 GB device for just $50 more than the baseline 64 GB models.
[...]
Effectively, this means that the iPhone XR is more like a smaller XS Max than it is a larger iPhone XS. And the difference between standard and zoomed modes on the iPhone XR is far more subtle than it is on the XS Max.
Yes, the portrait mode works. No, it’s not as good as the iPhone XS. Yes, I miss having a zoom lens.
All of those things are true and easily the biggest reason I won’t be buying an iPhone XR. However, in the theme of Apple working its hardest to make even its ‘lower end’ devices work and feel as much like its best, it’s really impressive what has been done here.
[...]
I honestly wouldn’t overthink this one too much. The iPhone XR is made to serve a certain segment of customers that want the new iPhone but don’t necessarily need every new feature. It works great, has a few small compromises that probably won’t faze the kind of folks that would consider not buying the best and is really well built and executed.
If you crack that notched LCD display, it’ll cost you $199 to fix (if you don’t have AppleCare+). That’s significantly cheaper than the OLEDs on the iPhone XS and XS Max: the XS costs $279, and the XS Max costs $329. Meanwhile, a battery replacement will cost $69 across the three new devices.
Ever since the iPhone XS came out, there’s been criticism of its front camera — specifically, that it overly smooths skin. This, of course, was dubbed “Beautygate” in reference to Samsung-style beautification filters, which Apple has always insisted it doesn’t use.
Whatever the case, it was definitely there, but now it’s going away: during our iPhone XR review, Apple told me that iOS 12.1 will fix a bug in its smart HDR camera system that resulted in smoother-looking photos taken by the front camera on the iPhone XS and XR.
On two occasions on the same bus route, I couldn’t stand to watch late-middle-aged persons (eyeglasses perched on forehead in one case) struggle to read their iPhones. I took hold of their phones for a moment each (I got permission) and brought up the well-hidden screen for text-size selection. They picked the bigger fonts they’d needed all along. They were so grateful it was embarrassing.
[...]
My almost-blind friend upgraded from an iTouch to an iPhone 8, then couldn’t check his voicemail for weeks because iPhone keyboards and keypads randomly change or invert their colours and he simply could not see or locate the number buttons.
It’s widely known that Apple Park Visitor Center offers highly-coveted custom merchandise for guests. The curated selection of T-shirts, caps, souvenirs, and more isn’t available to purchase at any other Apple store or online. Even the old Infinite Loop campus has a separate line of gear. Today, Apple updated its T-shirt selection at the Visitor Center for fall with some designs that long-time fans might remember.
After opening branches in London and Los Angeles, the company finally got around to opening a New York studio for its Beats 1 crew. The studio is located in Manhattan’s Union Square. “I want this space to represent the sound and energy of New York, and how multicultural this city is,” said Ebro Darden, host of New York’s seminal radio program “Ebro in the Morning” and a Beats 1 legend.
The feature arrives in the new Firefox 63, released Tuesday, though it's disabled by default for now. It's designed to cause fewer problems with websites than the tracking protection that debuted as an option in Firefox 57 last November, which Mozilla found could break websites and block advertisements. Millions of us run ad blockers, but the intent of the tracking protection tool is something else entirely -- blocking advertisers from figuring out who we are as we skip from site to site.
The app uses human curators who scour the web for video content from various sources including YouTube and Reddit. Neverthink takes its human curation approach seriously denouncing the use of algorithms. The curators add hours of new video content to the app every day into pre-defined channels. Some channels include: AWWW, Business News, Food, Tech News, Learn something, LOL, Millennial AF, and Travel.
Apple has identified an "issue" with the GasBuddy app that may result in some iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone X, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max devices becoming "unresponsive," according to an internal announcement shared with Apple Stores today. The memo was obtained by MacRumors from a reliable source.
Apple says affected iPhones will have a black screen with an endlessly spinning wheel—aka a respring loop. In its memo, Apple says it is working with GasBuddy to "resolve" the issue, which started "sometime after October 18, 2018."
Participating students will find themselves in a four-week program developed by Apple in conjunction with educational experts. It will add on to Simplon's existing Web development program, which runs for seven months.
But in my experience, waking up obscenely early allows you to wear two hats, and the wearing of the first one allows for a much more peaceful wearing of the second one, if that makes sense. In times of stress, my early-morning self makes the day more pleasant for my regular self.
Cook’s week in Europe began with a visit to Berlin. As he documented on Twitter, the Apple CEO met with developers of the augmented reality app mauAR. This app is designed to let iPhone users recreate the Berlin wall with augmented reality. While mauAR isn’t yet on the App Store, Cook touted it as a “new way to learn from the past” and said Apple looks forward to it launching on iOS:
Cook continued his travels through Germany with a visit to Asana Rebel, another augmented reality application which focuses on yoga and wellbeing. “We’re thrilled when entrepreneurs like you use the App Store to turn their passion into a thriving global business,” Cook tweeted about his visit with Asana Rebel.
Uninstall tracking exploits a core element of Apple Inc.’s and Google’s mobile operating systems: push notifications. Developers have always been able to use so-called silent push notifications to ping installed apps at regular intervals without alerting the user—to refresh an inbox or social media feed while the app is running in the background, for example. But if the app doesn’t ping the developer back, the app is logged as uninstalled, and the uninstall tracking tools add those changes to the file associated with the given mobile device’s unique advertising ID, details that make it easy to identify just who’s holding the phone and advertise the app to them wherever they go.
Lobbying group Information Technology Industry (ITI), which counts Apple, Facebook and Google as members, introduced a proposed framework for privacy regulations in Washington this week as lawmakers look to enhance user protections.
The best journalism lends itself to reverse engineering. Though no news organization may ever match the recent New York Times investigation of Trump family finances, for instance, the newspaper published documents, cited sources and described entities with a public footprint. “Fear,” the recent book on the dysfunction of the Trump White House, starts with the story of a top official removing a trade document from the president’s desk, an account supported by an image of the purloined paper.
Bloomberg, on the other hand, gives readers virtually no road map for reproducing its scoop, which helps to explain why competitors have whiffed in their efforts to corroborate it. The relentlessness of the denials and doubts from companies and government officials obligate Bloomberg to add the sort of proof that will make believers of its skeptics. Assign more reporters to the story, re-interview sources, ask for photos and emails. Should it fail in this effort, it’ll need to retract the entire thing.
I'm wishing for a new Mac Mini that looks like just a dongle with HDMI on one end, power on the other end, and maybe an USB-C port in the middle.
Small is beautiful.
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Thanks for reading.
"I love cars and things that go fast, and R and S are both letters used to denote sport cars that are really extra special," he said with a smile. That's not exactly the answer I was hoping for, but I'm not sure what I should've expected from a) Apple's SVP of global marketing and b) a longtime fan of Porsches and Audis.
[...]
"If we're going to push the upper boundaries with XS and XS Max to make something the best, how do we make something that's more affordable for a larger audience? To make the overall iPhone audience even larger? What choices can we make and still make it a phone that people can hold and say, 'I have the best too'?"
Those were the questions Apple grappled with while developing the XR, according to Schiller. The company's answers came in many parts, some more straightforward than others.
To piggyback on Panzarino’s thesis that Apple Watch saves you time, from my perspective as a disabled person, Apple’s smartwatch makes receiving notifications and the like a more accessible experience. As someone with multiple disabilities, Apple Watch not only promotes pro-social behavior, the device’s glanceable nature alleviates the friction of pulling my phone out of my pocket a thousand times an hour. For people with certain physical motor delays, the seemingly unremarkable act of even getting your phone can be quite an adventure. Apple Watch on my wrist eliminates that work, because all my iMessages and VIP emails are right there.
The fourth-generation Apple Watch, “Series 4” in Apple’s parlance, is the best, most accessible Apple Watch to date. The original value proposition for accessibility, to save on physical wear and tear, remains. Yet Series 4’s headlining features — the larger display, haptic-enabled Digital Crown and fall detection — all have enormous ramifications for accessibility. In my testing of a Series 4 model, a review unit provided to me by Apple, I have found it to be delightful to wear and use. This new version has made staying connected more efficient and accessible than ever before.
That’s the thing about the Apple Watch: for everything it purports to do for the good of the person, all it does is seek to make them more addicted to the tech itself.
Apple often overestimates the cost of repairs to its products and threatens third-party shops who are willing to fix them for a fraction of the price, a CBC News investigation has learned.
Customers who enter an Apple Store with a seemingly minor hardware problem, such as a flickering screen, are often faced with a large bill because they are told they need to replace major parts of the device.
[...]
Apple declined to be interviewed for this story, but denied that there is a pattern of overcharging customers for repairs.
Autumn is a great season to spend time outside, experience cooler temperatures, gorgeous sunsets, unique events and beautiful foliage. Combine these autumn opportunities with some new-found photography knowledge and leaf peeping “iPhone-ographers” will be all set to experience and document a beautiful autumn season.
At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous.
Just as we are waking up to a panopticon reality of cameras watching (and recognizing) us with ever greater accuracy, we might want to think about how much trust we’re willing to grant the growing numbers of connected object in our lives. Beyond the device maker’s avowed goals, which are problematic enough, what should we think of the potential for unauthorized use by unknown masters of the moles living inside our devices?
How can an industry that, unlike other business sectors, persistently promotes itself as doing good, learn to do that in reality? Do you want to not do harm, or do you want to do good? These are two totally different things.
And how do you put an official ethical system in place without it seeming like you’re telling everyone how to behave? Who gets to decide those rules anyway, setting a moral path for the industry and — considering tech companies’ enormous power — the world.
Surely someone is creating an AI-powered RSS reader that can predict what articles I will be interested in reading, even without me subscribing to the RSS feeds?
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Thanks for reading.
As of this writing, every color and storage capacity for the iPhone XR remains available for launch day delivery on AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint. This means that if you order today, you’ll still receive your device on Friday, October 26th.
[...]
It’s easy to assume that the extended launch day availability of the iPhone XR means slower sales for the device, and that’s entirely possible. Gene Munster notes, however, he “remains optimistic that the XR will be the top-selling iPhone over the next 12-months, given it represents the greatest value.”
Even after the rise of Google and Facebook, Apple remains the most closely watched technology company. From the Apple II’s debut in 1977 through the iPhone — the 21st century’s defining gadget, which took Apple to profitable new heights — skeptics and hyper-loyal fans have tracked its every move. It shouldn’t shock anyone, then, that Apple has always generated an unusually high volume of misunderstandings masquerading as common knowledge.
You already split your screen time between your smartphone and your computer. Why not put the two together? There are several ways to use your devices in harmony, increasing the efficiency of both. From syncing data to jumping between apps, here are five ways to make your phone and computer play nice.
All you need is an iPhone or iPad, a tripod, the right software, and a bit of creativity. Let's look at how to create stop motion movies via your iPhone or iPad.
As a result, the development of Windows 10 is still following a trajectory similar to the one it did before Windows 10. Features get merged and stability and reliability drop. The testing and stabilization phase is expected to shore things up and beat the codebase back into an acceptable shape.
The inadequate automated testing and/or the disregard for test failures means in turn that the Windows developers can't be confident that modifications and fixes do not have ripple effects. This is what gives rise to the "ask" phase of development: the number of changes that are accepted as the update is finalized has to be very low, because Microsoft doesn't have confidence that the scope and impact of each change is isolated. That confidence only comes with massive, disciplined testing infrastructure: you know that a change is safe because all your tests run successfully. Whatever testing the company has in place for Windows, it isn't enough to earn this confidence.
Some say Kodak made the mistake that George Eastman, its founder, avoided twice before, when he gave up a profitable dry-plate business to move to film and when he invested in color film even though it was demonstrably inferior to black and white film (which Kodak dominated). However, with the advent of the digital era, it was not about making an evolution in the same industry, it was a matter of conducting a revolution: dropping the crappy digital photo industry and using the internal know-how to diversify in other markets.
Amid a chorus of conservative complaints that Facebook and YouTube have become hostile to right-leaning views — and as those social media giants take steps to limit what they see as abusive or misleading viral content — a few Republican consultants have begun building a parallel digital universe where their political clients set the rules.
One start-up has built an app for the lobbying arm of the National Rifle Association that has been downloaded more than 150,000 times. Supporters of President Trump can download an app from Great America, a big-spending pro-Trump political action committee, or America First, Mr. Trump’s official 2016 campaign app, which has some features that remain active. Many backers of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas use Cruz Crew, an app built for his re-election campaign.
The apps deliver curated partisan news feeds on what are effectively private social media platforms, free from the strictures and content guidelines imposed by Silicon Valley giants. Some allow supporters to comment on posts or contribute their own, with less risk that their posts will be flagged as offensive or abusive.
The problem I have with Shortcuts on my iPhone is that it is unreliable.
For example, as I am typing this now, the only thing I see in the Shortcuts widget is the error message: "Unable to Load", and I have no idea how to fix this problem. I can't find any buttons with large friendly words such as "Don't panic. Click here to reload."
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Thanks for reading.
“There is no truth in their story about Apple,” Cook told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview. "They need to do that right thing and retract it."
[...]
“We turned the company upside down,” Cook said. “Email searches, data center records, financial records, shipment records. We really forensically whipped through the company to dig very deep and each time we came back to the same conclusion: This did not happen. There’s no truth to this.”
Asked if a scenario like the one Bloomberg described could occur without him knowing about it, Cook replied, “The likelihood of that is virtually zero.”
To achieve this strength, Corning has had to transform glass, which is naturally fragile. By soaking glass in a chemical salt bath, the company also introduces compressive stress into the inside of the glass. That internal stress helps counteract any drops and falls the glass might face in the future once incorporated inside a smartphone. Over the years, as smartphone makers demand thinner glass to incorporate into sleeker phone designs, Corning has had to introduce more and more internal stress to keep up the resilience. It works well in theory and has produced plenty of more drop-resistant generations, but in exchange, the internal stress makes the glass easier to scratch.
A month later, I think I’ve determined I actually prefer the ‘X’ — and now the ‘XS’ — size. This wasn’t the case when “downgrading” from a ‘Plus’ phone to the “regular” iPhone in generations past — I found the smaller versions to be almost comically small when switching between the two. With the ‘Max’ to the ‘X’ or ‘XS’, to be honest, I just like the latter form factor more — I find it to be a more natural size that feels better in the hand.
Obviously, your mileage may vary, but I think part of my feeling is due to the fact that unlike when the ‘Plus’ models hit, it doesn’t seem like developers have really done anything to tailor their apps for the larger screen of the ‘Max’. Apple did, but not in the same way as they did with the ‘Plus’, where the entire OS changed in landscape mode, for example (it doesn’t here). And as a result, many apps just look sort of chunky now. I thought reading would be a huge advantage on this screen, but it looks weird reading sort of chunky text.
Speed is probably more key on a watch than on a phone, if you're counting on quick glances and instant info, I can't think of a better wearable.
[...]
More than the watch's really nice refined design, I truly appreciate the way it handles speakerphone functions. A louder speaker truly helps with quick Siri requests (which I really do, on my wrist, when setting timers or alarms or quick tasks). A new raise-to-speak function in WatchOS 5 means I can lift and talk really closely into the watch and not have to say "Hey Siri," and it usually works. But for phone calls at home, when my phone's lost somewhere and my sister or mom calls, I can talk with the whole family via my wrist and it works perfectly -- it's no different than a speakerphone call on the phone.
The new app, simply called “Spend,” arrived on the App Store on Thursday, offering automatic expense tracking for work reimbursement purposes or for taxes.
As the smart home revolution began to thrive, police saw new opportunities to obtain data where they hadn’t before. Police sought Echo data from Amazon to help solve a murder. Fitbit data was used to charge a 90-year old man with the murder of his stepdaughter. And recently, Nest was compelled to turn over surveillance footage that led to gang members pleading guilty to identity theft.
Yet, Nest — a division of Google — is the only major smart home device maker that has published how many data demands they receive.
Apple Inc. said it will hold a product announcement Oct. 30 in Brooklyn, New York, likely to unveil new iPads and Mac computers.
The invitation to media reads, "There’s more in the making," without specifying what would be introduced. The Cupertino, California-based technology giant is planning the biggest revamp to the iPad Pro since it first went on sale in 2015, as well as a lower-cost MacBook laptop and a new Mac mini desktop, Bloomberg News reported earlier this year.
As with any Apple event, there’s plenty of speculation about what the October 30 show could bring. So far, those whispers have largely been about new iPads with Face ID and edge-to-edge displays, and possibly a new Mac mini and/or consumer-level MacBook. Plus, of course, there’s always the expectation of there being a few surprises up the company’s sleeves.
Of course, those surprises are the most interesting part, so let’s focus on what the company might have in store for announcements that aren’t about the company’s major product lines.
But unlike its usual event invitations, this year, Apple has done something different: it created tons of unique, colorful versions of its logo, and everyone seemingly received a different style on their invitation.
For now, the developers behind Affinity and Procreate say they aren’t worried. The arrival of a giant competitor doesn’t automatically mean it will be successful, as Facebook learned the first half-dozen times it cloned Snapchat. But Facebook eventually caught up to Snap when it added a Stories feature to Instagram.
It's a surprising story because Aperture had much going for it. The Mac is the preferred computer of photographers across the world and Aperture addressed a genuine need. It's too simplistic to blame its failure on a handful of specific issues but as a whole those problems do mean that Aperture is a major Apple app that died.
In this blog post, we publish the results of our extended analysis and demonstrate that the changes made by Apple mitigated one symptom of the problem, but did not address the cause. Security Code AutoFill could leave Apple users in a vulnerable position after upgrading to iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, exposing them to risks beyond the scope of our initial reports.
We describe four example attacks that are intended to demonstrate the risks stemming from the flawed Security Code AutoFill, but intentionally omit the detail necessary to execute them against live systems. Note that supporting screenshots and videos in this article may identify companies whose services we’ve used to test our attacks. We do not infer that those companies’ systems would be affected any more or any less than their competitors.
The magnetic charger is identical to the existing Apple Watch charger, except you can plug it into a USB-C port rather than USB-A.
The two short spots differ in style but convey the same general message: iPhone XR has arrived.
The dark mode looks much better on OLED phones, and the design changes give the app a fresh new feel. I wasn’t sure I’d like the addition of auto-play video, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find I do, though it’s easy enough to turn off if you don’t. The haptic feedback is another good addition that provides a subtle tactile response to actions taken in the app.
This is the best weather app on iOS right now. It’s not even close. There’s simply no other weather app which has this information density in such a fast format.
As you read a children’s book aloud, your iPhone, iPad or connected speakers play custom music and sound effects to enhance the story. The system uses voice recognition technology to drop in the sounds at the perfect moment, so you can go at your own pace. [...]
Novel Effect works with more than 200 different books, from classics to recent bestsellers. There are some titles that come with the app, but for most of the selections, you must already have a copy of the book, whether print or digital.
Square on Thursday unveiled the Terminal, a portable device meant to accept all forms of retail payment, including NFC-based platforms like Apple Pay and Google Pay.
Microservices aren’t something you start off with from day 1, just like you wouldn’t attempt to create a perfect open source external library on day 1 before you even wrote a line of code. At that point you don’t even know what you’re making.
A microservices based architecture is something you might grow into over time as you come across real problems working with your code base.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Ive was questioned if the Apple Watch is really a watch, but responded suggesting it is more than a timepiece. "I think that this is a very powerful computer, with a range of very sophisticated sensors, that is strapped to my wrist," said Ive, adding "That's neither very descriptive nor very helpful."
Citing its similar challenge in describing the iPhone at its launch, Ive suggests "Clearly the capability of the iPhone extends way beyond the function of what we would traditionally call a phone."
There’s a world of difference between the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, known commonly as G.D.P.R., and China’s technologically enforced censorship regime, often dubbed “the Great Firewall.” But all three spheres — Europe, America and China — are generating sets of rules, regulations and norms that are beginning to rub up against one another. What’s more, the actual physical location of data has increasingly become separated by region, with data confined to data centers inside the borders of countries with data localization laws.
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As governments push toward a splintered internet, American corporations do little to counteract Balkanization and instead do whatever is necessary to expand their operations. If the future of the internet is a tripartite cold war, Silicon Valley wants to be making money in all three of those worlds.
In fact, the killing of Google+ is a perfect storm of Google's vision vacuum. It's driven by their antipathy toward passionate users, and also their failure to understand the human element generally.
[...]
Google is the new Yahoo, the company that kills its own products.
After watching a few of the new iPhone XR YouTube videos, my X really feels small.
(I should go and dig out my iPhone 3G to remind myself how big my iPhone X actually is.)
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Thanks for reading.
You’re not going to see much change from previous years — the privacy pages still state the same commitments that Apple’s long held, like that privacy is a “fundamental human right” and that your information is largely on your iPhones, iPads and Macs. And, now with a bevy of new security and privacy features in iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, the pages are updated to include new information about end-to-end encrypted group FaceTime video calls and improvements to intelligence tracking protections — and, how it uses differential privacy to understand which are the most popular features so it can improve, without being able to identify individual users.
One key addition this time around: Apple is expanding its data portal to allow U.S. customers to get a copy of the data that the company stores on them.
Earlier this year when I requested my own data (before the portal feature rolled out), Apple sent me a dozen spreadsheets with my purchase and order history, a few iCloud logs, and some of my account information. The data will date back to when you opened your account, but may not include recent data if Apple has no reason to retain it.
But because most Apple data is stored on your devices, it can’t turn over what it doesn’t have. And any data it collects from Apple News, Maps and Siri is anonymous and can’t attribute to individual users.
A lot of the criticism of the iPad Pro as a flawed tool for doing real work comes down to software. The hardware is capable—but where’s the software? These arguments have been weak for a while now—I think Microsoft Office for iPad is aces, and Apple’s iWork apps are remarkably capable, too—but with every major app that arrives on the platform, the quieter that criticism has to get. Adobe’s also bringing a simplified version of Premiere, called Premiere Rush, to the iPad. I wonder if Apple’s considering just how Final Cut and Logic might work on the iPad?
[...]
Photoshop on the iPad isn’t the magic key that unlocks the future of the iPad Pro. But it’s one of the biggest signs yet that things are changing—and that the iPad won’t be denied as a destination for people who want to get work done.
So, what can we conclude from this network graph? Here's my take:
If the podcast charts are based on subscription velocity, it's highly likely that some or all of the podcasts in the isolated clusters have artificial subscriptions. We can't be certain that every podcast in each isolated cluster is subject to manipulation. But the combination of highly interconnected shows, plus isolation from the “main cluster” of popular shows, plus disparate subject matter suggests that something deeply strange is happening across a sizable number of podcasts. It's been suggested that click farms are used to artificially boost subscriber counts.
There’s also a new machine-learning enhance feature, support for Quick Actions in the Mojave Finder and some batch effect actions in Automator. Pixelmator Pro also now supports SVG Fonts for richer, graphic, typography.
The music streaming service's Endless Artist Radio lets you search for a playlist based on your favorite musician and find a matching endless stream.
Creating apps isn’t new for Martin, who was in seventh grade when he developed one for King’s Schools in Palm Desert, where he was enrolled.
He developed a prototype and was working with the city when he did a presentation at a meeting with representatives of cities valleywide, who saw it and wanted to be included. This ultimately led him to Scott White, chief executive and president of the Greater Palm Springs Convention & Visitors Bureau.
“It’s been a long journey,” Martin said.
Apple has just about always offered iOS apps on the App Store, separate from what apps come bundled on its devices from the factory.
Sometimes, these apps get promoted to being part of the iOS image, like Podcasts and iBooks have. Once stuck hanging out on the App Store, they now ship on the iPhone and iPad by default.
A lot of other apps weren't luck enough to get that lifeline, and have since been removed from the App Store. Let's take a look at a few examples.
"Taking into account that the payment into the escrow fund of the illegal aid removed the distortion of competition caused by that aid, the Commission has today decided to withdraw the court action," a statement from the European Commission said today.
The funds will be held in the escrow account until final judgments are made in appeals against the original Commission decision.
Yes, many of these phones make similar mistakes with overbearing UI decisions — hello, Huawei — and yes, it’s easy to mock some designs for their obvious thrall to iOS. But these are phones created in a very different context to Android devices as we’ve previously understood them.
The Chinese phone market is a spiraling behemoth of innovation and audacity, unlike anything we’ve ever seen. If you want to be on board with the already exciting hardware, it’s worth trying to understand the software.
Many of the Today Widgets on my iPhone are simply taking up too much space. It will be so nice if they can appear as a watch-like complication on the iPhone's lock screen.
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I used to play a heck of Vortex) on my iPod. Nowadays, I'm playing Orbital on my iPhone while listening to my audiobooks and podcasts.
I think I can see the similarities between the two games.
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Thanks for reading.
Every time I described the 2017 MacBook Pro I sold because I couldn’t stand its non-functional keyboard and asked an Apple store employee if the new one would screw me over the same way, each assured me that Apple had changed the keyboards so that that would never happen again. I described my issues with “dust” to one shop associate at the Apple Store at the World Trade Center and asked if the new computers were any better. “Yeah, yeah, they fixed that problem… it was a BIG problem,” she told me. “So it doesn’t happen at all?” I asked. “No, it shouldn’t happen,” she said. Maybe the bad days were finally over.
But checking around online, it appears the new keyboards have the same old issues. They may be delayed, but they happen nonetheless. The MacRumors forum has a long thread about the the “gen 3 butterfly keyboard” where users have been sharing their experiences since Apple updated the design. “How is everyone lse’s keyboard doing? I rplaced th first one because ‘E’ and ‘O’ gave double output. The replacment ither eats “E”, “O”, “I” and “T”, or doubles them,” wrote one poster. “I didn’t correct the typos above on purpose.”
The problem with all the other so-called smartwatches on the market is that they lack ambition. They seem to be designed as either exercise trackers or as smartphone extensions.
Apple’s plan is far more ambitious.
To me, the Series 4 Apple Watch is an inflection point. The gentler corners, classier (when customized) Infograph watch face, less bombastic LTE indicator, smoothed dock button, and gold stainless steel materials have pushed the Apple Watch into a new jewelry echelon, for both men and women.
For the first time, I’d wear an Apple Watch with a sport coat. For the first time, the Apple Watch has become a “timepiece,” with every bit of snobbery assumed in that title.
People with speech disabilities use the same language and grammar that others do. But their speech musculature—things like their tongue and jaw—is affected, resulting in consonants becoming slurred and vowels blending together, says Frank Rudzicz, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Toronto who studies speech and machine learning. These differences present a challenge in developing voice-enabled technologies.
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Andy Theyers, who’s written about his struggle to use voice assistants due to his stutter, says that this is, in part, a reflection of an industry that doesn’t always prioritize accessibility from the beginning of a product’s development. Sean Lewis, a motivational speaker with cerebral palsy, agrees. “Unless [tech developers] personally know someone with a disability,” Lewis says, they “have no idea how a lack of technology affects people’s lives.”
These special edition Mickey Solo 3 headphones feature the same hardware and specs as the standard version, but come with a custom Disney/Beats carrying case, 90th anniversary pin, and decal in addition to the Mickey Mouse design.
Skydio, the California-based drone maker that specializes in self-flying software, is announcing a new update today that will let owners of its R1 drone launch, control, and even manually fly the drone entirely from an Apple Watch. Since the R1’s launch earlier this year, the company has positioned its self-flying drone, which uses artificial intelligence to provide advanced obstacle avoidance and automated piloting, as perfect for action sport enthusiasts. Now, with Apple Watch support, Skydio hopes it will open up new possibilities for people to easily film themselves with the R1, while doing all types of outdoor activities.
As is typical with Hue lighting products, the Outdoor Lightstrips aren't cheap, but they're certainly well made and are able to hold up to continued exposure to outdoor conditions.
Using data the device collects, what you drink and how often, Apple Health then estimates your caffeine intake. While this may sound like a stretch, the Ember already senses quite a bit about its (and your) activity.
The process for setting up a bundle, which will allow developers to offer up to 10 Mac apps as a single purchase, appears to be the same as it is for iOS developers.
The current recommendation is that sites switch to TLS 1.2 (which happens to be the minimum required for HTTP 2.0) and offer only a limited, modern set of encryption algorithms and authentication schemes. TLS 1.3 was recently finalized, but it currently has little widespread adoption.
If you own or operate a web server that does not support TLS 1.2 or newer, please upgrade now.
Apple, however, appears to be cracking down on dubious titles. Both QR Code Reader and Weather Alarms are no longer available on the U.S. App Store, while 11 of the 17 apps mentioned in the Forbes article have also disappeared.
The matter boils down to customer awareness and vigilance, and Apple is at perhaps partially to blame for aberrant behavior after carefully pruning the apps in its walled garden.
When programmers discuss the relative merits of different programming languages, they often talk about them in prosaic terms as if they were so many tools in a tool belt—one might be more appropriate for systems programming, another might be more appropriate for gluing together other programs to accomplish some ad hoc task. This is as it should be. Languages have different strengths and claiming that a language is better than other languages without reference to a specific use case only invites an unproductive and vitriolic debate.
But there is one language that seems to inspire a peculiar universal reverence: Lisp. Keyboard crusaders that would otherwise pounce on anyone daring to suggest that some language is better than any other will concede that Lisp is on another level. Lisp transcends the utilitarian criteria used to judge other languages, because the median programmer has never used Lisp to build anything practical and probably never will, yet the reverence for Lisp runs so deep that Lisp is often ascribed mystical properties. Everyone’s favorite webcomic, xkcd, has depicted Lisp this way at least twice: In one comic, a character reaches some sort of Lisp enlightenment, which appears to allow him to comprehend the fundamental structure of the universe. In another comic, a robed, senescent programmer hands a stack of parentheses to his padawan, saying that the parentheses are “elegant weapons for a more civilized age,” suggesting that Lisp has all the occult power of the Force.
The new arrangement is the latest sign that global technology companies are adjusting their business practices in Europe to account for stiffer regulations there.
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By obligating handset makers to load the free apps along with the Android operating system, regulators said, Google had boxed out competitors. With the company now required to separate its services in Europe, handset manufacturers like Samsung and Huawei will now have more flexibility there to choose what applications they want to pre-install on phones.
I support Apple's drive to make its devices thinner and lighter. (If I have to choose, I'll prioritize on lighter. But I guess thinner comes with lighter.) I want devices that are so light that I don't have to think twice before putting them in my bag.
However, if something as critical as the keyboard is not working -- and by working, I'm not talking just about the failure rate, which I assume Apple has all the stats, but the lack of confidence from Apple's customers -- Apple should have the courage to revert back to an earlier design, as soon as possible.
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Thanks for reading.
"What I'm more concerned about," said Ive, is preserving the interpersonal benefits of person-to-person interaction. "The more you remove people, the more technology can become transactional," he said. Ive says the work Apple has been doing on emoji and messaging are meant to "restore some humanity to the way we connect."
In his remarks, Ive turned again and again to the theme of human connection. It's important to Ive not just professionally (it’s central, for example, to his team's vision for the future of Apple's retail experience), but personally. "I moved to the US in 1992 for two reasons: I loved Apple and I loved the US." At the time, he said, "optimism was tangible and material"—particularly in Silicon Valley.
The connection appears to also be what will keep him at Apple. Asked whether he plans to continue designing for the foreseeable future, Ive answered in the affirmative by pointing to the collaborative environment at the company, which he characterized as more diverse than ever.
A big part of what made Apple successful in its turnaround was a commitment to sweating the details and living or dying on “it solves your problem, and it just works”. And over the last few years, Apple’s lost that level of detail and commitment to quality. It’s all about sweating the details, and bluntly Apple’s not doing a great job of that right now.
It needs to find it again.
“Fine”, says Apple, grumpily, “so just turn on Reduce transparency”. Only it’s not that simple. Because when you do, Apple designers get in a strop and hurl logic out of the window. What you’d expect to happen is for macOS to remove the semi-transparent bits. So instead of Finder sidebars or the macOS app switcher showing what’s beneath them, they’d just have a neutral solid background. Nope. Instead, in its infinite wisdom, Apple’s decided those components should instead be coloured by your Desktop background.
Today, most subscription-based businesses thriving on the App Store come from legitimate developers. But they know how scammers could easily ruin the market for everyone involved. If allowed to continue, these scams could lead to consumer distrust in subscriptions in general.
In a worst-case scenario, consumers may even go so far as to avoid downloading apps where subscriptions are offered as in-app purchases in order to protect themselves from scams.
Nike+ Run Club for Apple Watch has been updated to fill the larger 40mm and 44mm displays on the new Series 4 models — 10 days after the Series 4 version of the Apple Watch Nike+ hit stores.
For standalone Apple Watch playback, meanwhile, Podcasts and Overcast are both fantastic choices. Podcasts could use a bit of interface refinement to distinguish between local and remote episodes, and Overcast would benefit from some bug fixes and performance improvements.
But, with impeccable pedigrees and interfaces that already go a long way to making the Apple Watch a kick-ass podcast player, these two apps are definitely worth a look.
For now, though, we’ve got a camera so good that you can shoot straight into the sun and it kind of doesn’t matter, other than the risks of J.J. Abrams-style lens flare. A lesson anyone using a camera learns early on is that you don’t want to shoot backlit subjects, because the light from behind them will wash out the rest of the picture, and you’ll be left with silhouettes or a completely useless, blown-out image.
Using the iPhone XS camera has required me to retrain myself. You’re always going to be better off not shooting directly into the sun, but it matters a lot less when every shot you take is actually a combination of multiple shots and exposures capturing different portions of the image at different light levels, and sticking them all together on the fly into a single image that can show the sun, the sky, and the faces of the people who are feeling that sun on their backs. This is a technique Apple calls Smart HDR, and it is a remarkable step toward making iPhone photos match what your eye actually sees.
Remote works via a companion menu bar app that you install on your Mac, which allows your iOS device to send system events and other actions to your Mac while both are on the same network. Once the menu bar app is installed and running, everything else happens in Remote’s iOS app, which is divided into five tabs: Media, Input, Apps, Menu, and System.
[...]
Remote Control for Mac is another excellent example of an iOS utility that Siri shortcuts makes more useful. Instead of grabbing my iPhone, finding the app, and hunting for the command I want, I can take care of waking my Mac and turning on the lights with one Siri command. Remote also shows the power that is possible when iOS and macOS are used together, which is something I hope is part of Apple’s plans to bring iOS apps to the Mac.
What sets the Libratone Zipp and Zipp Mini apart from other speakers is their versatility. They work with AirPlay 2 and Bluetooth in a variety of different scenarios. You can be at home, use them on Wi-Fi while plugged in, and also be used while on the go using Bluetooth and the built-in battery. So far, these are also the only battery-powered, portable AirPlay 2 speakers.
MyMobility from musculoskeletal healthcare firm Zimmer Biomet “uses Apple Watch to facilitate a new level of connection between patients and their surgical care teams, which can immediately impact the journey patients experience when they undergo these procedures,” the company announced today.
Apple has apologized for a recent spate of account hacks in China, which it says affected a ‘small number’ of user accounts.
Although details on exactly what happened have not been disclosed, Apple said that the affected accounts were not secured with two-factor authentication. This allowed criminals to phish for account credentials and then extract money using apps like Alipay.
Attesting to the close collaboration required to bring Photoshop from the desktop to a multi-touch device like the iPad, Schiller noted that Apple and Adobe’s relationship goes back decades. As the iPad becomes more powerful, it is increasingly important to creative workflows. Apple’s A-Series chips, recent GPUs, and innovations like the ProMotion Retina display were noted as critical features for pros. “Adobe has understood the potential of the iPad from the beginning,” Schiller said.
Apple has released a new version of its forthcoming bagel emoji. Now including cream-cheese, this aims to address concerns raised about the previous design.
What it has done is hire a few employees of the company — specifically the three founders, Sony Theakanath, Austin Chen and Chris Zhang — who are all now working at Apple at Apple Music. (Apple has done this before: for example, it hired a team from the mapping app PinDrop in the UK; at the time it was also misreported as an acquisition.)
It’s not clear if the three will be working on similar technology, or other kinds of tools to affect how music is discovered on Apple Music. Apple has already launched a beta of its own analytics service called Apple Music for Artists.
Will 2019 be the year when Apple revamps the iPhone's home screen and lock screen? I hope we'll have custom clock faces with custom complications on the lock screen; why let Apple Watch has all the fun? And I wish for multiple home screens, maybe one during working hours and one during leisure hours.
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Thanks for reading.
What? She wasn't going to try and talk me into buying today, right now, this minute? She wasn't even going to talk me into pre-ordering the XR on October 19?
What has happened to the sales industry? Has it become human?
"Come back on the 26th," she told me. "I'll be here." This was true customer service, something that I've often experienced in Apple stores.
Then, came the nearly miraculous moment when I realized how light these buds felt in my ears. Sure, they're called AirPods, but how did Apple manage to make them feel so airy, though still secure enough that I never worried about them falling out? It's a miracle of industrial design. With the AirPods in my ears, ready to rock, I pressed Play on my daily playlist, which was set to Shuffle. Instantly, the delicate flutes of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" fluttered into my ears, soon backed by the track's signature horns. Having used Apple's own earbuds for so many years — and writing a column in my college newspaper about their poor quality, back in 2006 — I was shocked at how good the AirPods sounded.
A full, desktop-class version of Photoshop on iOS has been one of the most hotly anticipated creative apps for designers and artists since the original iPad’s introduction in 2010. In the years since, competitors have released their own products hoping to fill the void, but can’t offer true integration with Creative Cloud that existing Photoshop customer have come to expect. Today at 2018’s Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles, Adobe is answering the requests of the creative community by previewing what it calls real Photoshop CC for iPad.
"I’m going to go on a limb here and say that the era of the file is over. I think that a creation is really a combination of components. Look at a Photoshop “file.” What is it really? It’s a collection of fonts, images and layers of edits and other things taken in from other places, composited together. It’s a collection. All those components, those ingredients of that composition both still exist in their original form as well as their combined altered form, which is ultimately the composition you’re making in a PSD."
"What we’ve done — what powers Photoshop on iPad — is what we call the Cloud PSD. The Cloud PSD is in a sense, a manifest of all of these ingredients together."
The phrase “real Photoshop” came up several times during my week-long preview of an early version of the software giant’s long-awaited app. The underlying code is the same as desktop Photoshop, and although the interface has been rethought for the iPad, the same core tools line the edges of the screen.
But the biggest change of all is a total rethinking of the classic .psd file for the cloud, which will turn using Photoshop into something much more like Google Docs. Photoshop for the iPad is a big deal, but Cloud PSD is the change that will let Adobe bring Photoshop everywhere.
Adobe Premiere Rush (previously Project Rush), as you might recall, is a cross-platform video editing app for smartphones, tablets, and PCs. It became available in beta this summer for select customers, and today during Adobe’s annual Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles, Adobe announced that it’s launching broadly on PC, Mac, and iOS devices.
A startup founded in Palo Alto, California, by a trio of doctors, including the former director of the US National Institute of Mental Health, is trying to prove that our obsession with the technology in our pockets can help treat some of today’s most intractable medical problems: depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance abuse.
Mindstrong Health is using a smartphone app to collect measures of people’s cognition and emotional health as indicated by how they use their phones. Once a patient installs Mindstrong’s app, it monitors things like the way the person types, taps, and scrolls while using other apps. This data is encrypted and analyzed remotely using machine learning, and the results are shared with the patient and the patient’s medical provider.
The seemingly mundane minutiae of how you interact with your phone offers surprisingly important clues to your mental health, according to Mindstrong’s research—revealing, for example, a relapse of depression. With details gleaned from the app, Mindstrong says, a patient’s doctor or other care manager gets an alert when something may be amiss and can then check in with the patient by sending a message through the app (patients, too, can use it to message their care provider).
With more ways to prevent the spread of HIV than ever before, we’ve learned that using many options together works much better than any one strategy alone. Called “combination prevention,” this approach involves offering patients multiple medical and behavioral strategies for reducing their risk based on what is the best fit for them. Yet the success of combination prevention requires matching each person with the right interventions at the right time. It can also require a lot of from patients: periodic HIV testing, steady adherence to medication schedules, and good communication with medical providers.
Smartphones and other Internet-connected devices may hold the key. In 2017, more than three-quarters of American adults owned a smartphone, and that number continues to grow. People use their devices almost continuously, with studies suggesting that our phones are within arm’s reach 90 percent of the time and that we check them more than 2,600 times a day. The widespread adoption of smartphones, along with specialized devices, apps, and sensors, allows us to provide “just-in-time, adaptive interventions” that intervene at critical moments when someone is about to slip up and do something harmful or when they are most receptive to making a positive change.
The Apple Watch is in use by scientists across the country to monitor everything from the symptoms of Parkinson's disease to postpartum depression. Now, researchers are aiming to see how well the device can track eating disorders.
The University of North Carolina's medical school will soon be starting a study called BEGIN, which stands for Binge Eating Genetics Initiative, to better understand overeating. People with binge eating disorder often eat large amounts of food uncontrollably in a small period of time. Those who follow with compensatory behavior like purging or excessive exercise are typically diagnosed with bulimia nervosa.
Apple has acquired Asaii, a startup that built a music analytics engine for music labels and artist managers, sources confirm to Axios.
Asaii’s main product is a dashboard that pulls together data from both music services and social media. This dashboard is advertised as having multiple uses, such as helping record labels plan marketing campaigns and live tours. But, its main feature is allowing labels to discover artists before they make it big. Asaii claims that its tech is able to find artists “10 weeks to a year” before they chart, allowing for the discovery of “the next Justin Bieber.”
Apple's bands can carry a higher price tag, but when it comes the colors, feel, and quality, few can come close.
Put simply, better concentration makes life easier and less stressful and we will be more productive. To make this change means reflecting on what we are doing to sabotage personal concentration, and then implementing steps towards behavioural change that will improve our chances of concentrating better. This means deliberately reducing distractions and being more self-disciplined about our use of social media, which are increasingly urgent for the sake of our cognitive and mental health.
It takes about three weeks for a repeating behaviour to form a habit, says Jeremy Dean, a psychologist and the author of Making Habits, Breaking Habits. Getting into a new habit will not happen overnight and adaptation can be incremental. Start by switching off smartphone alerts, or taking social media apps off your phone, then switching off the device for increasingly long periods.
Practise concentration by finding things to do that specifically engage you for a period of time to the exclusion of everything else. What is noticeable is that you cannot just go from a state of distraction to one of concentration, in the same way that most of us cannot fall asleep the minute our head hits the pillow. It takes a bit of time and, with practice, becomes easier to accomplish.
In Cupertino, I had met Regis McKenna, Apple’s Eminence Grise, the Valley’s marketing guru who helped put Apple on the media map.
We got along nicely and he smilingly approved of my simplified view of his trade: Marketing’s primary task is positioning, defining identity. Put another way, if you don’t have a clean, clear, resonant identity, there no story to tell — and your efforts and budgets are wasted.
Repeat it again: The new Palm isn't a phone, but it works with the phone you already have. When you want to watch videos, play games or take fancy portrait shots, reach for your main device. But when you want to go for a jog, run a quick errand or focus on the people around you, Palm wants you to take its gadget instead. For Palm (yes, Palm is the name of the product and the company), the device is a lifeline when you need it, not an object to obsess over like you would your usual phone.
I briefly tried out the Palm, and it's nuts.
Each year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation releases its annual Goalkeepers Report. The publication is thick with charts and graphs, metrics and statistics. And usually, it’s optimistic — global poverty, infant mortality, and a host of other key measures have dashed toward decency in recent years, and the Gateses have sought to make sure the public knows that progress is being made.
The 2018 edition, however, started on a tougher note. “Optimism requires being candid about the hard problems that still need to be solved,” the Gateses write. “That’s what this year’s Goalkeepers Data Report aims to do: confront a pressing yet neglected challenge, and identify some of the most promising strategies to meet it.”
“To put it bluntly,” they continue, “decades of stunning progress in the fight against poverty and disease may be on the verge of stalling. This is because the poorest parts of the world are growing faster than everywhere else; more babies are being born in the places where it’s hardest to lead a healthy and productive life.”
Palm -- the pocket-watch.
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Thanks for reading.
Apple this weekend has shared a pair of short Apple Watch how to videos on its YouTube channel. The videos are relatively basic, covering the Workout application and using Emergency SOS mode.
The Apple Watch itself is still a 4.5 out of 5. The hardware is solid, the execution is excellent. The changes Apple has made as the product has evolved has focused the product into what it needs to be —and we've said this before.
However, Nike's part of the effort in software is lacking. It's not like the release of the Apple Watch Series 4 was a surprise, and the fact that the Nike complications and software are untouched is unacceptable.
Most of the developers I spoke with seemed to believe the same thing I did when I reviewed the Apple TV: there's a lot of potential here for this to be the Apple gaming console that people have speculated about for years. But, they add, Apple just isn't trying hard enough to let consumers know what the TV can do or to make it easy for them to use the TV explicitly for gaming purposes.
There's another angle on all this too: Apple has begun working on a project called Marzipan, which would make developing apps that can be deployed to both macOS and iOS easier than it is today. From what we know about it so far, the relationship from a developer's point of view could be somewhat similar to that between tvOS and iOS now.
I think, first of all Candy Crush is a great game; it's a fun game. But it's actually structured in a way that it does not require you to play for many hours in a row. It's exactly the opposite in fact. We structured the game in a way that it's easy to learn — you can play it in three minutes. Candy Crush now has more than 3,800 levels, but each level can be played over just three minutes. Because we think that the mobile experience is not one where you stay many hours on the device playing, but is one where we want you to be able to play in a short space of time — while you’re waiting for the bus, or you're in the underground, or you have a moment for yourself and you want just to relax. In fact, the model in which we started with the business model was: stopping the player from playing.
Use these tools and you can, for instance, have your shared Dropbox folder automatically delete files over a week old. Drag a file in to share with someone, give them a few days to get it, then delete it rather than taking up your Dropbox space.
Or when you have a giant job on, you can get your Mac to rename a thousand files in a moment. Then with a keystroke you can have the Mac tag one file or a thousand and make sure both tags and filenames are consistent so that you can find them again later.
One thing. None of this can be done with Apple's software, you need to buy third-party apps and they are not casual purchases. For what they do, they're cheap, but each one is extremely powerful. What we're going to do with them here doesn't even count as scratching the surface.
And while society has a ways to go in fully coming to terms with this sobering truth, it's become enough of an acute issue that one of the driving forces behind it all saw the need for addressing it head-on. Enter: Apple’s "Screen Time,” a new iOS12 feature that not only creates a daily and weekly activity report showing the total time spent on each app, but also counts how many push notifications are received, and how often the phone is physically picked up. And once the reality of phone, and in turn, social media addiction inevitably sets in, a user can take back the reigns with the "App Limits" tool and control how much time they spend on certain apps by setting a limit. Users also have the option of restricting use of certain apps based on the time of day with "Downtime," a feature that blocks notifications by placing a badge over flagged apps.
M&S have become the latest to test out an app which would save shoppers having to go through a checkout to pay.
Being a well rounded iOS developer means knowing how to work with App Review. The rarely useful, often infuriating process occurs at the end of the dev cycle when time and tempers are short. This combination makes any rejection at this stage costly and deflating.
However, we are not powerless. Below are some of the tricks I’ve picked up over the years that help to reduce avoidable rejections as well as some advice for dealing with rejections when they do happen.
The notion that streaming services might someday totally supplant the monolithic cable package has glittered on the horizon for years now. But as that future becomes increasingly the present, an uncomfortable reality has set in: There’s too much. To Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and HBO Now, add WarnerMedia, Disney, and Apple as omnibus, general interest streaming destinations. Investors have poured a billion dollars into something called Quibi, which has an unfortunate name but exclusive Guillermo del Toro content. And the niche options continue to proliferate as well, whether it’s DC Universe or College Humor. If we’re not at the breaking point yet, we’re surely about to find it.
In February this year, researchers from Alphabet Inc’s DeepMind division released thumbnail images of a range of everyday subjects: a dog, a butterfly, a hamburger and an ocean view. All were AI-generated images produced from scratch by an algorithm called BiGAN. All look disturbingly like real photographs. Sooner than we think, it will be impossible for the human eye to tell the difference between an AI-generated image and a real photograph. The future is already here and photography is the medium shaping it – and us – in ways that make all these anxieties about the meaning of photography seem almost irrelevant. And, in another way – against a backdrop of fake news, alternative facts, and artificial intelligence – more relevant than ever.
I've easily adapted to having to swipe down from the top-right corner to get Control Centre on my iPad. Not a problem at all.
Now, my iPhone 6 (which I used mostly as a backup alarm clock and radio) is the only device where I have to swipe up from the bottom for Control Centre. Fortunately, I most don't need to use Control Centre on this device.
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In a seven-page letter to the Australian parliament, Apple said that it “would be wrong to weaken security for millions of law-abiding customers in order to investigate the very few who pose a threat.”
“We appreciate the government’s outreach to Apple and other companies during the drafting of this bill,” the letter read. “While we are pleased that some of the suggestions incorporated improve the legislation, the unfortunate fact is that the draft legislation remains dangerously ambiguous with respect to encryption and security.”
“This is no time to weaken encryption,” it read. “Rather than serving the interests of Australian law enforcement, it will just weaken the security and privacy of regular customers while pushing criminals further off the grid.”
Amateur iOS hacker Jose Rodriguez on Friday unearthed another obscure, yet effective, lock screen bypass that leans on an unpatched bug in VoiceOver to gain unauthorized access to photos on a target device.
GDPR was conceived to be a broad and flexible framework, but its prescriptive elements can seem impractical or unreasonable. And this hints at the larger tension between the need for codified disclosure requirements, and the difficulty of making rules that account for all situations.
The good news is, the number of users whose accounts were hacked was 30 million, down from Facebook’s original estimate of 50 million. Facebook also now says that it believes users’ accounts on Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp, and third-party apps were not affected. [...]
The bad news is Facebook can now confirm that the vast majority of those victims did indeed have their personal information stolen. (All it had said previously was that their accounts were accessed.) And while Facebook still doesn’t know just what the hackers plan to do with that information, the possibilities are many. As for who did it, Facebook said: “We’re cooperating with the FBI, which is actively investigating and asked us not to discuss who may be behind this attack.”
Like its predecessors, the Apple Watch Series 4 is a worthy fitness companion for all levels. The longer battery and better screen are great incentives for distance runners who were waiting to make the plunge to an Apple Watch or just looking to upgrade from an older model. But 6 hours of tracking is still miles behind other dedicated fitness watches that can go for days on a charge.
The biggest selling point of the Apple Watch is that it does so much more than just fitness. The added cell connectivity means you can comfortably leave your phone behind on a run and still have all the essentials: music, messages, calls or car service.
And with the Series 4 you have new health features like the EKG, irregular heart rate notifications and fall detection.
At the end of the day, exercise should be a joyful experience that makes you feel good — not shamed — about your body or activity level. And for me, sharing my stats with a supportive loved one who I trust to make me laugh with silly messages adds a layer of fun that my workouts were otherwise missing.
Introducing reflective thread details for runners to improve visibility during low-light runs is clever. The hoop and loop closure makes it infinitely adjustable so you can easily tighten it for a run and loosen it during daily wear. The reflective detail is only dramatic when it makes contact with a bright light source so it won’t stand out too much away from headlights and camera flashes. As a safety measure for running at night, the reflective thread is certainly helpful but the strap is a small target for making you visible to drivers. I often run at night with the blinking flash light feature enabled on Apple Watch, but it’s just one more safety precaution in addition to a few others.
So last week I spent a lot of time working through ideas around making better complications for the Apple Watch Series 4. This showed some progress but is ultimately limited by the constraints imposed by the current watchOS watch face system.
So when the broader discussion got to the point of talking about totally custom watch faces I was very interested. Especially when Steve Troughton-Smith worked out a little hack to hide the time from full screen watchOS apps. Now I was off to the races. We don’t have a means to replace the actual watch faces on our watches but we can make watch apps that look like them and run those on my wrist.
Now that the macOS counterpart, Mojave, is in the wild, I want to focus on some of the features that make it stand out.
While there have been a few “central hubs” for shortcuts that have popped up following iOS 12's release, I like RoutineHub’s simple, organized layout—and its growing number of shortcuts. More importantly, if you have a shortcut you want to share with the world, RoutineHub makes it easy to add in an update module, which gives you version control and your shortcut’s fans a way to get the latest and greatest version of your creation.
So if you temporarily turn off iCloud Photo Library and turn it back on, it might be easier to just delete all your photos from your iPhone first, and let them all sync back from iCloud.
More recent research, from then-psychology graduates students at Harvard, suggests it is not so simple. Some types of fluid intelligence peak early. Raw processing speed, ie. how quickly we do a mental task, reaches its greatest potential around 18 or 19, but we don’t master other abilities, like reading emotional states, until our 40s or 50s. As we age, we combine our changing fluid intelligence with our increased wisdom. As a result, we are not our smartest selves at any one age; we excel in different areas at various points in our lives. The researchers estimated we are best at facial recognition before 20. But many other tasks that involve thinking and knowledge peak in middle age. It turns out you are best at solving arithmetic problems and comprehension in your 40s and into your 50s.
As technology grows more sophisticated, Brown-Philpot thinks robots and machines will become more integrated into our everyday lives, more as intermediaries between customers and employees than as direct substitutes. Sure, the TaskRabbit of the future could be summoned to your home by a smart fridge programmed to automatically send out a repair request when malfunctioning, posits Brown-Philpot. But the nuanced human expertise of the dispatched Tasker is irreplaceable. “I just believe that robots are never going to replace the empathy and judgment that humans can provide,” she added.
MacRumors reader Dante Cesa spotted a man wearing an Apple Maps backpack featuring a LIDAR rig, GPS, and multiple cameras, some of the same equipment that's previously been spotted on Apple's mapping vans.
Tim Cook swung by the headquarters of Bytedance Thursday, tasting life of Internet celebrity on the live-streaming app TikTok with Bytedance founder Zhang Yiming and other creators.
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Meetings with Chinese developers and business partners on Cook’s China trip seem to have grown into a routine for the past years. In March 2017, Cook visited the headquarters of the bike-sharing company Ofo.
But Face ID can of course also work against law enforcement—too many failed attempts with the ‘wrong’ face can force the iPhone to request a potentially harder to obtain passcode instead. Taking advantage of legal differences in how passcodes are protected, US law enforcement have forced people to unlock their devices with not just their face but their fingerprints too. But still, in a set of presentation slides obtained by Motherboard this week, one company specialising in mobile forensics is telling investigators not to even look at phones with Face ID, because they might accidentally trigger this mechanism. “iPhone X: don’t look at the screen, or else… The same thing will occur as happened on Apple’s event,” the slide, from forensics company Elcomsoft, reads. Motherboard obtained the presentation from a non-Elcomsoft source, and the company subsequently confirmed its veracity.
I'm not sure how representative I am, but I subscribe to Apple Music because I want some good audio entertainment. The only 'original' audio content Apple is doing all these while are the various shows on Beats 1, which have a rather narrow focus.
I wish Apple will invest more in audio programming. If Beats 1 can be compared to BBC Radio 1 (I'm not sure because I don't listen to either of them), I hope Apple can do more stuff like BBC's Radio 3, Radio 4, or even World Service.
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I wore my Watch at night, then, when I woke, I took it off and put it on charge until I went to the office, typically about 45 mins after waking. I did that for four nights and found that, actually, that was enough to have the Watch comfortably make it through the whole day as well.
I think what we are seeing here is a return to trust. This is the first year since iOS 7 that I haven’t had at least one person write to ask me if it’s “safe” to install iOS 12. Of course Apple could blow this in the future but, for now, I think users are generally trusting of the iOS and macOS updates again.
A standard leather or silicone case would simply hide the colorful glass finishes entirely. Rather than trying something more extravagant like the iPhone 5c case design, Apple is keeping it simple, and launching their first ever clear plastic case.
Music encyclopedia and lyrics database Genius has announced a partnership with Apple Music, pairing the website’s lyrics with songs. Starting today, Genius lyrics for “thousands of songs” are available on Apple Music, allowing users to read lyrics while they listen to a song.
Earlier versions of 1Password can submit login details fully automatically, so you can be briefly presented with a login screen on a website and then logged-in without taking any action. This is because 1Password entered your password and also transmitted a carriage-return character.
However, macOS Mojave has placed ‘significant restrictions’ on the ability of apps to virtually press the return key, meaning 1Password can no longer do this. Reflecting this, 1Password has removed the auto-submission feature on all versions of macOS.
In response to the problem of AI bias and so-called “black box” algorithms, many machine learning experts, technology companies, and governments have called for more fairness, accountability, and transparency in AI. The research arm of the Department of Defense has taken an interest in developing machine learning models that can more easily account for how they make decisions, for example. And companies like Alphabet, IBM, and the auditing firm KPMG are also creating or have already built tools for explaining how their AI products come to conclusions.
But that doesn’t mean everyone agrees on what constitutes a fair explanation. There’s no common standard for what level of transparency is sufficient. Does a bank need to publicly release the computer code behind its loan algorithm to be truly transparent? What percentage of defendants need to understand the explanation given for how a recidivism AI works?
Mr. Schneier argues that the economic and technical incentives of the internet-of-things industry do not align with security and privacy for society generally. Putting a computer in everything turns the whole world into a computer security threat — and the hacks and bugs uncovered in just the last few weeks at Facebook and Google illustrate how difficult digital security is even for the biggest tech companies. In a roboticized world, hacks would not just affect your data but could endanger your property, your life and even national security.
Apple has quietly been putting considerable effort into building faster and more efficient chips that can help differentiate its hardware from the rest of the consumer electronics pack, and today it’s taking its next (and possibly biggest) step in that strategy: the company is paying $300 million in cash to purchase a portion of Dialog Semiconductor, a chipmaker based out of Europe that it has been working with since the first iPhone. On top of the cash purchase, Apple is also committing $300 million in further purchases from the remaining part of Dialog’s business.
When I pointed out that the Dynamic Desktop feature seemed to be a relatively simple collection of images, Thorsten promised to look into it more. A beta of GraphicConverter arrived soon after, and we went back and forth a few times before he figured out both the image requirements and the necessary metadata to make it all work. GraphicConverter 10.6.5 is now available with this feature when running in Mojave.
Apple is preparing a new digital video service that will marry original content and subscription services from legacy media companies, according to people familiar with the matter. Owners of Apple devices, such as the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV will find the still-in-the-works service in the pre-installed "TV" application, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details of the project are private.
The product will include Apple-owned content, which will be free to Apple device owners, and subscription "channels," which will allow customers to sign up for online-only services, such as those from HBO and Starz.
Given how Netflix is viewed by many as unstoppable, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that consensus expectations remain muted for Disney and Apple in the paid video streaming space. This will likely end up being a mistake. Various publications have been solely focused on casting doubt on Apple’s video efforts instead of highlighting how the paid video streaming market remains attractive for a company like Apple. The cynicism surrounding Apple Video brings back memories of the doubt facing Apple Music in the early years.
Tim Cook and Eddy Cue are reportedly taking a very hands-on approach with Apple’s video initiative, highlighting the service’s importance to Apple. Video will end up being a key ingredient of an Apple entertainment bundle containing various services. The company ends up building not just a video streaming service, but a Hollywood arm. Meanwhile, Disney has the strongest intellectual property out of any video player. The company’s problem up to now has been found with distribution. Those problems are now being addressed.
After our tests of every version of the Apple Watch since the original, the Apple Watch Series 4 is the easiest smartwatch recommendation we’ve made. It’s the best option for iPhone owners who want to keep their phone in their pocket while keeping up with notifications, tracking their fitness, getting directions, and using apps. And the Series 4’s new, larger screen makes it worth splurging on.
After a highly successful Kickstarter campaign, Astro HQ has now made its Luna Display that transforms iPads into a second display for your Mac available to all consumers.
Sonos directs owners to use the iOS or Android app instead for all set up and configuration tasks.
Apple is updating its affiliate program today for the rebranded Apple Books. And with that, Apple is making some changes for authors and publishers that will make it easier to distribute on the platform.
Well, the way to make time for reading is the same way you make time for anything else. You pick a time (schedule it) and then you show up.
Over 700 Chinese iPhone users have inexplicably had money deducted from their Apple ID-bound payment channels, with the highest being RMB 10,000 ($1,440), according to local media.
Alibaba-owned Alipay, whose users were also affected, said that some Apple IDs were stolen, resulting in financial losses. The company reached out to Apple to find out the reasons for the theft, with Apple responding saying that it is addressing the situation.
In a series of tweets this evening, Tim Cook revealed that Apple will make a donation to hurricane relief efforts in the Gulf Coast region. Cook’s announcement comes as Hurricane Michael moves through the southeastern portion of the United States.
“I’m incredibly impressed by the talent and passion of your students, teachers and staff,” the Apple chief executive wrote in a post in Chinese and English on Weibo, the local answer to Twitter.
His note gushed about being at a “truly a model school” that used a curriculum promoted by Apple. Local media reports noted that Cook seemed “in a very good mood” — perhaps with some surprise.
After all, these are very trying times to be an American company operating in China, let alone an American tech giant that counts on China for both contract manufacturing and sales.
There is one final question that overshadows all-of-this: while the home may be the current battleground in consumer technology, is it actually a distinct product area — a new epoch if you will? When it came to mobile, it didn’t matter who had won in PCs; Microsoft ended up being an also-ran.
The fortunes of Apple, in particular, depend on whether or not this is the case. If it is a truly new paradigm, than it is hard to see Apple succeeding. It has a very nice speaker, but everything else about its product is worse. On the other hand, the HomePod’s close connection to the iPhone and Apple’s overall ecosystem may be its saving grace: perhaps the smartphone is still what matters.
You’re not a creep, though you are a thief. You’re also a human.
Other people’s screens are everywhere, once you start to notice them. They’re collectively most obvious at night, as they bob through the city, creating a new, hand-height layer to the ambient lights, or when held up at concerts, like lighters. During the day, other people’s screens hover around us as we wait in line for coffee, or as we sit and drink our coffee, or as we take our coffee on the bus or train.
Will Apple invite antitrust investigation if it is bundling television programs with its devices?
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As the market adapts to this new convenience, Jackson said, people will, perhaps unwittingly, shift away from passcodes, invisibly changing the stakes of our risk calculus. Continuous authentication, like face recognition before, is a massive scaling-up of processing power, and a showcase for the potency of artificial intelligence. If only our privacy and legal protections could scale up at a similar pace.
"To my eyes, which hasn't looked at the Apple Podcast platform in a good while, the charts felt distinctly… broken," Nicholas Quah wrote in his newsletter, Hot Pod, a sort of "Paris Review" for the mattress-ad set.
On Tuesday, however, the problem seemed to be fixed: Serial was back to No. 1, closely trailed by Joe Rogan's show and other brand-name podcasts.
Apple didn't respond to an emailed request for comment on Monday, while the charts were still showing an odd ranking, or on Tuesday, after the issue seemed to have been fixed.
Spektral has developed a technology that can intelligently separate people and objects from their original backgrounds in photos and videos, and overlay a new background, resulting in what is called a "cutout." The solution is driven by deep neural networks and spectral graph theory.
Rossmann is also very talented at his work, and is incredibly successful. We have sent people emailing us about a difficult or expensive repair to his shop to get a second opinion. But, the CBC's implication that Apple should source repair technicians at each store with that level of talent is ludicrous, and if Apple did it, it would remove any economy of scale that the company holds by using a depot for component-level repair.
The Information is reporting today on Apple’s five-year struggle to tackle iPhone repair fraud. The scheme centres around crime gangs who were buying or stealing iPhones, removing valuable parts like CPUs and screens, and then claiming their devices were broken at Apple Stores and getting the Genius to replace them under warranty. The parts were then sold on.
[...]
Apple now requires all warranty iPhone replacements to be sent off to special repair centers that can do more rigorous testing. Apple even added security measures to its iPhone components, including invisible dyes on batteries, and coating iPhone CPUs in special waterproof sealants that are tuned to specific wavelengths.
The prospect of this kind of attack is very real, but the fact that both Bloomberg and the companies named in the story are doubling down is confusing everyone, and a sign that we are probably not done hearing about this story anytime soon.
Apple has today published a new video on its YouTube channel sharing that season two of Carpool Karaoke: The Series will be available via the TV app for free.
And just because it’s detecting heart rates on other objects doesn’t necessarily mean it’s inaccurate at detecting your own heart rate. The biomedical engineer pointed out to us that the software is designed for one purpose: To detect a heart rate from a human wrist. They were likely never designed to detect whether they were strapped to a human wrist or a roll of toilet paper, because, uh, who’d do that?
Ultimately, virtual assistants could ease us into the kind of conformity L’Engle warned of. They will be the products of an emotion-labeling process that can’t capture the protean complexity of human sentiment. Their “appropriate” responses will be canned, to one extent or another. We’ll be in constant dialogue with voices that traffic in simulacra of feelings, rather than real ones. Children growing up surrounded by virtual companions might be especially likely to adopt this mass-produced interiority, winding up with a diminished capacity to name and understand their own intuitions. Like the Echo of Greek myth, the Echo Generation could lose the power of a certain kind of speech.
[...]
If I have learned anything in my years of therapy, it is that the human psyche defaults to shallowness. We cling to our denials. It’s easier to pretend that deeper feelings don’t exist, because, of course, a lot of them are painful. What better way to avoid all that unpleasantness than to keep company with emotive entities unencumbered by actual emotions? But feelings don’t just go away like that. They have a way of making themselves known. I wonder how sweet my grandchildren’s dreams will be.
I believe Banksy’s people (Pest Control) let Sotheby’s know something was up but saved the details for the great reveal. Score one for Banksy, though there are many other ways he could have protested if they wanted to make the point without benefiting financially from the protest.
Time will tell, but this appears to be a “lose, lose” scenario for Sotheby’s. If they were complicit in staging this, they have effectively turned one of the most prestigious auction houses into a bad episode of Storage Hunters. They lose credibility in an industry where credibility is all that matters. If they were not complicit, they look disorganized, unprofessional, and gullible, at best.
Remember Apple once boasted having pro customers working inside the company so that Apple can make better computers?
Maybe it's time to buy a few game studios and house them inside Apple Park too, so that Apple can make a better Apple TV?
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The new iPad Pros will have an edge-to-edge display and will not feature a Home button, much like the iPhone. Unlike the iPhone, however, the iPad Pro will not have a notch.
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The 2018 iPad Pro will include Face ID with the same image signal processor as the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR. Further, we can confirm that Face ID on the new iPad Pro will in both portrait and landscape orientations, though it won’t work upside down.
One of the highest profile issues affected the iPhone XS, which sometimes failed to begin charging when connected to a Lightning cable. Other users reported that after the iOS 12 update, their iPhones would connect to WiFi networks at 2.4 GHz instead of 5.0 GHz even when both were available. Apple's release notes say both issues have been fixed.
Creating new routines and behaviors that don’t involve the iPhone can be key in reducing the compulsive habit of looking for entertainment on your phone. For me, the Apple Watch has played a major role in creating these experiences.
While for most iPhone photographers, Smart HDR will be a major step forward that leads to improved images in most lighting situations, it poses some problems for those who prefer to shoot in RAW using an app like Halide. Because of camera changes designed to make Smart HDR possible, an iPhone XS RAW photo that eschews Smart HDR will often contain additional noise and be overexposed.
To address this problem, Halide's team in version 1.10 is introducing a feature called Smart RAW. Designed specifically for the iPhone XS and XS Max, Smart RAW is a way Halide has been custom-tuned to capture the best photos with the new cameras. I'm no expert photographer, but I'm excited to see what kind of images the new feature makes possible.
Darkroom 3.7 also introduces support for Apple’s new High-Definition depth-map. iOS 12 now generates new depth maps when it detects a face in Portrait Mode, which allows it to capture better detail around the edges of your subject’s face and provides better focus fall off for details like hair strands.
Yoink is the app I use on my Mac every day as a temporary spot to park files, snippets of text, images, and URLs. By itself, Yoink for Mac has been a fantastic time-saver. The latest updates to Yoink for iOS and the Mac, however, have been transformative. There's more that can be done to support the cross-platform use of Yoink, but Handoff support, which makes it simple to move data between my Mac and iOS devices, and several other new features have already added a new dimension to the way I use the app and embedded it deeper into my day-to-day workflow than ever before.
The latest update includes complication support for the new Infograph and Infograph Modular faces on Apple Watch Series 4.
It has made a fast-to-setup Wi-Fi mesh network that is pretty robust and has a number of complex options built-in, but nicely hidden so as not to scare people who just want to get Wi-Fi working fast. It has some decent parental blocking, but not filtering, and makes it easy to set up a mesh network or extend an existing network with an additional mesh node.
Speeds weren't as fast as our main use router, but it really should fill most people's needs as an easy to set up and easy to manage system.
Microsoft is bringing Sticky Notes to your iPhone and iPad. You will be able to use them inside OneNote to quickly jot down notes and reminders on the go, and you’ll be able to sync notes from Windows to iOS.
The game’s removal is being blamed on a lack of players. Developer Mojang explains that it needs to “reallocate resources to the platforms that our players use the most.”
Back in the distant mists of 2012, everyone needed an adapter to plug their collection of 30-pin charging cables into Apple’s new Lightning port. Fast forward to today and this once crucial accessory is no longer necessary. To the point where it’s been dropped from the online Apple Store.
Google did not tell its users about the security issue when it was found in March because it didn’t appear that anyone had gained access to user information, and the company’s “Privacy & Data Protection Office” decided it was not legally required to report it, the search giant said in a blog post.
The decision to stay quiet, which raised eyebrows in the cybersecurity community, comes against the backdrop of relatively new rules in California and Europe that govern when a company must disclose a security episode.
Microsoft has dodged the bruising that its peers have taken this year. Executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter have testified before Congress, pressed to explain their privacy practices and the exploitation of their platforms by Russian operatives. Apple and Amazon are the targets of attacks from President Trump.
But Microsoft, which runs the world’s largest corporate email program and one of the biggest cloud computing businesses, has not only escaped the negative attention of its industry peers, but has turned potential attacks on its systems into an asset.
It's Tuesday evening in my part of the world while I am typing this... and I've moved through the entire day thinking it was Monday.
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Forget OLED, forget pixel density — having a 6.5-inch display is super nice and easier on my eyes. More screen means more content, which means less eye strain and fatigue. Given these factors, it was no contest as to what I prefer. Although I have multiple disabilities, my visual impairment is arguably the most important and the one I should prioritize above all others. I did that, and I’m happier for it.
This is one of the major problems with such a device. The people most in need of it, those who might benefit from tests and distance monitoring, are the least likely to get it. If we truly believed this was a medical test beneficial to the general population, insurance should pay for it. No one is suggesting that should happen.
In fact, many experts don’t think it makes sense to have universal cardiac monitoring of the general public. The United States Preventive Services Task Force has issued a “D” recommendation for screening asymptomatic adults at low risk. The group doesn’t think there’s enough evidence to recommend screening of adults at intermediate or high risk. It doesn’t even think there’s enough evidence to recommend screening adults 65 or older, who are at higher risk, for atrial fibrillation.
This all highlights the true issue with the Mac App Store: its library. Apple may be correct that it’s the biggest collection available via a single portal, but we’re not convinced it’s the best. When it comes to publishing apps to the Mac App Store, there’s just no true draw, and if Apple can’t even convince tech pros it has the best apps available for them to get work done, how can it say the Mac App Store is the best place to publish apps they’ve created?
By referring to your customers as customers, you’re respecting the fact that someone is paying you for your work. We don’t need to sell customer data—their hard-earned dollars keep us running. Also, a sentence like “15 minutes of downtime” hits harder when you know it’s a customer on the other end.
There are time realists and time optimists, according to Ms. Morgenstern. Time realists look at a task and break down the math of it. They’re conscious of how long things take, and they factor that in to their plans for the day.
Time optimists, by comparison, are just that: hopeful about things they would like to do. It leads to them to overstuff their days and become frustrated when their list of to-dos doesn’t get completed.
Be a time realist. Here’s how.
Apple Vice President for Information Security George Stathakopoulos wrote in a letter to the Senate and House commerce committees that the company had repeatedly investigated and found no evidence for the main points in a Bloomberg Businessweek article published on Thursday, including that chips inside servers sold to Apple by Super Micro Computer Inc allowed for backdoor transmissions to China.
“Apple’s proprietary security tools are continuously scanning for precisely this kind of outbound traffic, as it indicates the existence of malware or other malicious activity. Nothing was ever found,” he wrote in the letter provided to Reuters.
In my first Cupertino visit, I chanced upon a demo by French hardware developers Mssrs. Chaillat and Chaligné. They had designed an Apple ][ extension card that bypassed the mediocre native NTSC and, instead, provided a clean RGB display using the French mandated Peritel connector that was available for a number of display devices, included the ubiquitous Trinitron monitor. I jumped on the opportunity and immediately gave their Le Chat Mauve (!) company a first order for 100 boards. This sort of impulse buy wasn’t exactly standard company policy, but the product looked very good, so did the numbers, and Apple management was otherwise preoccupied… a perfect illustration of the freedom and benign neglect that I found so compelling during my years at Apple — in France. We later repeated the experience with other products such as a Philips color monitor that was designed to fit the Apple ][ case.
This was a happy time when our distribution game worked well. By 1985, Apple France was the company’s largest business outside of the US.
Once enacted into law in Australia, these powerful new tools could help provide the United States with a back door to an encryption back door. The U.S. government cannot ask the Australian government to collect and hand over data that the United States is legally prohibited from collecting on its own, but some data may be shareable under the secret terms of the Five Eyes alliance. Beyond that, if Australia gains the tools to force providers to undermine the security of their products, the United States and other governments could exploit those same tools.
Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they built. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech start-ups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere.
That’s a change from the past, when Silicon Valley workers typically developed products with little questioning about the social costs. It is also a sign of how some tech companies, which grew by serving consumers and businesses, are expanding more into government work. And the shift coincides with concerns in Silicon Valley about the Trump administration’s policies and the larger role of technology in government.
I wish Apple is still making Safari for Windows. No, not because Apple's respect of my privacy, although that will be good. No, my wish came from my hope that I don't have to remember two different web browser user interface... :-)
Now... where is that reload button...
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Just finished watching the entire run of How I Met Your Mother, and I have to agree with a lot of the negative comments out there regarding the ending. It definitely seemed rushed and rough. But, more importantly, despite the structure and all the fore-shadows, the ending didn't seem earned.
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A bug with the complications on the new Infograph faces in Apple Watch Series 4 is causing some very unhappy Watch owners today. Users in Australia have just experienced the daylight savings time change and are finding their Watches are now stuck in reboot loops.
Specifically, it seems the large Activity complication on the Infograph Modular face is not handling the loss of an hour elegantly, and instead causing the entire device to crash and reboot.
This service document certainly paints a grim picture, but ever the optimists, we headed down to our friendly local Apple Store and bought a brand new 2018 13” MacBook Pro Touch Bar unit. Then we disassembled it and traded displays with our teardown unit from this summer. To our surprise, the displays and MacBooks functioned normally in every combination we tried. We also updated to Mojave and swapped logic boards with the same results.
That’s a promising sign, and it means the sky isn’t quite falling—yet. But as we’ve learned, nothing is certain. Apple has a string of software-blocked repair scandals under its belt, including the device-disabling Error 53, a functionality-throttling Batterygate, and repeated feature-disabling incidents. It’s very possible that a future software update could render these “incomplete repairs” inoperative, and who knows when, or if, a fix will follow.
Nothing is wrong with pictures of your food or your children, but following too many accounts with such activity can turn your phone’s push notifications into a waste of time and nerves. Use your apps in a way that receiving notifications can add more value to your day and is a good use of your time. Now when checking those notifications you don’t feel guilty. Instead, you feel productive, encouraged, and enlighted.
I've owned the Apple Watch Series 3 for roughly nine months at this point, and although I haven't really even scratched the surface of its many capabilities (I just discovered nightstand mode, which lets you use your watch like a bedside clock, a few weeks ago), I'm ready to admit that everything I formerly thought about the device was wrong.
Overall, if I had to pick just one, BusyCal feels right at home on macOS while adding some much-needed features to the calendar experience.
Apple shouldn’t promote their privacy stance to schools when they aren’t offering a compelling service that schools can sign up for that replaces G-Suite. They’ve built solutions for schools that are siloed off from most of the student information systems without making an identity management system. They’ve created solutions (like Classkit, Apple Business Manager, and Apple School Manager) that don’t 100% replace anything else a school or business has. They’ve simply added more overhead to deploying iPad. Apple proclaiming their stance on privacy while also accepting a 9 billion payment from Google just makes them look hypocritical. If Apple is really concerned about privacy, they need to be building tools to replace what Google offers enterprise and education customers.
Bosch said the legality of the recording varies by state but here in Tennessee, it is legal to record exchanges with police.
"As long as the recording doesn't interfere with anyone's safety, you can record," he said.
That also extends inside of the courtroom if needed.
“The Department of Homeland Security is aware of the media reports of a technology supply chain compromise,” DHS said in a statement.
“Like our partners in the UK, the National Cyber Security Centre, at this time we have no reason to doubt the statements from the companies named in the story,” it said.
Just finished reading Kate Atkinson's Transscription. Highly recommended.
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For years, the growth in e-commerce outpaced the underlying payments technology: companies wanting to set up shop had to go to a bank, which processes payments, and setup a gateway to connect the two. This takes weeks, lots of people, and fee after fee. Much of the software in place was decades old and written by banks, credit-card companies and financial middlemen.
Paypal – designed to simplify payments – actually made this worse. The company infuriated startups with its restrictions – once turnover hit a certain level, Paypal automatically put the business on a 21 to 60 day rolling reserve, meaning that up to 30 per cent of a company’s revenue could be locked up for up to two months. Developers had to choose between this and complex legacy systems built by banks.
“For us it was quite visceral: these products are not serving the needs of the customers, so let’s build something better,” John Collison argues. “In old-fashioned legacy companies it’s the CFO choosing the payments system. They think all systems are alike, so they just sort the bids from suppliers. But if you’re a developer building the next Kickstarter, or the next Lyft, and you have a two-person team, both of you writing relatively complex code and solving complex infrastructural problem, you need a simple payments API that – once installed – doesn’t keep changing.”
Between security-compromised OS releases and a fair number of Safari issues, bugs and omissions aren’t hard to spot in Apple’s codebases, and some oddly seem to pop up again in later releases after being “fixed.” Better pre-release debugging and greater transparency would go a long way towards addressing issues that have clouded the company this year.
Apple struggled to define the Watch in its first few iterations. “What can it do? What can’t it do?” seemed to be the party line, but in recent years the company’s focused on limited areas—fitness, health, and notifications—as the primary uses of its smartwatch.
Seemingly intending not to make the same mistake twice, Apple came out of the gate with a relatively narrow feature set for the HomePod, focusing on music playback and, to a lesser degree, smart home integration. If you’re not an Apple Music user and haven’t delved into smart home tech, there’s seemingly not much for you in the HomePod. (Not to mention a focus on features that require multiple HomePods—multiroom audio and stereo pairing—is an even harder sell when when your product command a premium.)
Plus of course the impact has already been felt.
Infosec companies are already advising companies what to do, talking about the situation as if it is already a done deal. "First of all, you are unlikely going to spot the additional component on your own. Amazon apparently was able to do so after comparing drawings of a motherboard to what was actually built," notes one post matter-of-factly, adding: "Should you stop buying Supermicro motherboards? The real question is: What are the alternatives?"
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Of course the bigger question is not really about tiny secret spy chips but overall security. There is no reason why a similar ability to hack into motherboards couldn't be included in chips expected to be on the circuit boards – and so be physically undetectable. And, of course, the majority of the world's chips are manufactured, you guessed it, in China and Taiwan. You know: the country that makes everyone's iPhones.
Reached by BuzzFeed News multiple Apple sources — three of them very senior executives who work on the security and legal teams — said that they are at a loss as to how to explain the allegations. These people described a massive, granular, and siloed investigation into not just the claims made in the story, but into unrelated incidents that might have inspired them.
“We tried to figure out if there was anything, anything, that transpired that's even remotely close to this,” a senior Apple security executive told BuzzFeed News. “We found nothing.”
Apple says it discovered malware on a single server in 2016. This does not conflict with its denial of hardware attack; in fact, it bolsters it, because Apple cites the malware as the reason it dropped Supermicro as a vendor in its official statement — not the presence of malicious microchips in servers.
Daily Dictionary's Watch app is noteworthy for employing two capabilities recently added to the Watch: complications for the Series 4's Infograph faces, and a custom UI for notifications.
When you’re feeling buried under a mass of so much stuff, it can feel as if you’re responsible for everything in the whole world.
But it can be liberating when you step back and get clarity about the things that ONLY YOU can do.
I don’t completely understand the limitations there, but I suspect that because commands in the Terminal are running as subprocesses of Terminal, there is some technical challenge to making the permissions apply at such a fine-grained level.
As an alternative, I wonder if Apple could introduce some kind of “Security Profiles” feature for Terminal so that individual windows within the app could be run when different permissions? This could build on Terminal’s existing support for “Profiles” which already support varying Terminal settings dramatically on a per-window basis.
I can't wait to see what else from Apple will be updated in October.
Personally, I am hoping for cheaper AirPods. (There will be higher-end AirPods, probably.) Afterall, all signs point to an Apple moving to a wireless future, and Apple will want to replace the cheap EarPods bundled with iPhones with a cheap set of wireless AirPods, right? Gotta start learning how to make cheap wireless AirPods first.
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Thanks for reading.
Thanks to its health monitoring features, the new Apple Watch Series 4 will save lives, probably within weeks of launch. I’ve been on real calls that may have had happier endings had the person been wearing one. I don’t know if wearing one would have saved that first victim—probably not—but Apple should get full credit for building a mainstream device that will save some lives.
That doesn’t mean it’s perfect. The Apple Watch Series 4 is far from a comprehensive life-saving device. It suffers from some serious limitations and faces some very real obstacles, especially cost and battery life, but in the end, some people will live a little longer because they wear one. Over time these features will become more reliable, more affordable, and more comprehensive, especially as Apple’s competitors catch up.
The Apple Watch Series 4’s three key health-related features are fall detection, atrial fibrillation detection, and a simplified electrocardiogram (ECG). Here’s how they might help, the limitations they face, and where Apple might go next.
Many Web sites and apps now offer two-factor authentication (2FA), which requires you to enter a short numeric code—the so-called second factor—in addition to your username and password. These temporary codes are either sent to you via text message or are generated by an authentication app. In iOS 12 and macOS 10.14 Mojave, Apple has streamlined entering such codes when sent via an SMS text message, reducing multiple steps and keyboard entry to a single tap or click.
I explain just below how this new feature works, but I also want to raise a caution flag. SMS is no longer a reliable way to send a second factor because it’s too easy for even small-time attackers to intercept those messages. It’s time for Web sites that use 2FA to move away from SMS.
For the 2018 MacBook Pro, the requirement applies to repairs involving the display, logic board, Touch ID, and top case, which includes the keyboard, battery, trackpad, and speakers, according to the document. For the iMac Pro, the requirement only applies to logic board and flash storage repairs.
If any of these parts are repaired in an iMac Pro or 2018 MacBook Pro, and the Apple diagnostics are not run, this will result in an inoperative system and an incomplete repair, according to Apple's directive to service providers.
Over the course of the past year, Bloomberg has contacted us multiple times with claims, sometimes vague and sometimes elaborate, of an alleged security incident at Apple. Each time, we have conducted rigorous internal investigations based on their inquiries and each time we have found absolutely no evidence to support any of them. We have repeatedly and consistently offered factual responses, on the record, refuting virtually every aspect of Bloomberg’s story relating to Apple.
On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, “hardware manipulations” or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server. Apple never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any investigation by the FBI, nor are our contacts in law enforcement.
Britain’s national cyber security agency said on Friday it had no reason to doubt the assessments made by Apple and Amazon that refuted a Bloomberg story that their systems contained malicious computer chips inserted by Chinese intelligence.
Just as The New York Times does — even as recently as its coverage of President Trump’s tax affairs, Bloomberg missed an opportunity to be more open and transparent in how it came to the conclusions that it did. Journalism isn’t proprietary. It should be open to as many people as possible. If you’re not transparent in how you report things, you lose readers’ trust.
That’s where the story rests on shaky ground. Admittedly, as detailed and as well-sourced as the story is, you — and I — have to put a lot of trust and faith in Bloomberg and its reporters.
Users are encountering messages like "An error occurred installing macOS," or cryptic references to bridgeOS, the modified version of watchOS used to handle Mac subsystems like the Touch Bar. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, though some people have managed to get around the issue by resetting their Mac's system management controller, or SMC. Even then, users may encounter glitches and strange errors.
The company will offer "at least one free session every day" at each store. Some workshops will include "How To: Get Started with Coding," "Teacher Tuesdays: App Design & Coding Basics," and "Kids Hour: Sphero Maze Challenge."
The Apple Store, which has been open for nine years, is located beneath the pyramid in front of the world-famous, iconic Louvre museum. Don’t fret, however: If you live in the area, Apple is about to open new, better retail store in the area.
I've installed Mojave on my computer for about a week already, and I just realized I haven't checked out any of the iOS-style apps yet. I think I shall go check how's my stocks are doing now.
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Apple, AWS and Super Micro have disputed the report, with Apple saying it did not find the chips as asserted by BusinessWeek — which cites several anonymous government and corporate sources. Super Micro reportedly said it did not introduce the chips during the manufacturing process, as alleged. Apple pointed to denials already published by Bloomberg, and AWS did not immediately respond to follow-up requests for comment by CNBC.
Apple has issued strong denials of the report, stating: "We are deeply disappointed that in their dealings with us, Bloomberg's reporters have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed. Our best guess is that they are confusing their story with a previously reported 2016 incident in which we discovered an infected driver on a single Super Micro server in one of our labs. That one-time event was determined to be accidental and not a targeted attack against Apple."
One official says investigators found that it eventually affected almost 30 companies, including a major bank, government contractors, and the world’s most valuable company, Apple Inc. Apple was an important Supermicro customer and had planned to order more than 30,000 of its servers in two years for a new global network of data centers. Three senior insiders at Apple say that in the summer of 2015, it, too, found malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Apple severed ties with Supermicro the following year, for what it described as unrelated reasons.
[...]
The companies’ denials are countered by six current and former senior national security officials, who—in conversations that began during the Obama administration and continued under the Trump administration—detailed the discovery of the chips and the government’s investigation. One of those officials and two people inside AWS provided extensive information on how the attack played out at Elemental and Amazon; the official and one of the insiders also described Amazon’s cooperation with the government investigation. In addition to the three Apple insiders, four of the six U.S. officials confirmed that Apple was a victim.
In all, 17 people confirmed the manipulation of Supermicro’s hardware and other elements of the attacks. The sources were granted anonymity because of the sensitive, and in some cases classified, nature of the information. One government official says China’s goal was long-term access to high-value corporate secrets and sensitive government networks. No consumer data is known to have been stolen.
Posts on the Apple support forums reveal problems with pairing Bluetooth devices to the latest generation of iPhones. According to the posts, the issues largely relate to connecting their iPhone XS or iPhone XS Max to their vehicle's infotainment unit, but it also apparently affects some other Bluetooth-equipped devices.
The majority of cases also appear to indicate only the new models are affected by the issue, with the iPhone X, iPhone 8, and older devices apparently working normally in the situations. It is also not limited to a specific car manufacturer, as vehicles by Kia, Audi, Subaru, and Mercedes all appear in references to the head unit connectivity failures.
Since the day the Apple Watch was announced, developers have clamored for the opportunity to design custom watch faces. That may never happen—there are plenty of reasons for Apple to consider the face designs sacred and something the company must control itself. But if Apple insists on having a monopoly on face design, it’s incumbent on the company to be a better steward of those faces.
Every face needs to be modernized and support the new complication styles, at least on Series 4. Key system apps and features like Messages and cellular status should be available on all faces. Every face design should be more flexible.
The headphones are now available in just two colors from Apple, silver and black. Blue, gold, space gray, and even white have been eliminated, as has the black and red "Defiant" option.
Apple warns that users —mostly enterprise customers —who download this edition of iTunes will have to update manually, and won't get technical support. The company also specifically notes that this update is incompatible with the new operating system, shedding doubt that it will ever be updated for macOS Mojave.
In my Mojave review, I collected some representative examples of apps that were ready with Dark Mode implementations when the OS update shipped. Since then, many other apps have been updated. I’ve spent time with many of them and have begun to see some design and implementation patterns among the early adopters that are interesting to compare to similar system apps by Apple. It’s also useful to consider how these variations will impact the experiences users have with these apps.
In the sea of dark gray floating before my eyes, I’ve identified a handful of app categories that illustrate some of the subtle differences between the apps I’ve tried. There are many other good examples, but email clients, task managers, text editors, and note-taking apps are categories that best illustrate how Dark Mode is being used by the first wave of developers to put the feature into practice.
Along with the usual slate of new features, this year's updates focus on automating what would otherwise be complex workflows with the help of Adobe Sensei artificial intelligence. Like past Elements releases, Adobe is putting an emphasis on ease-of-use by wrapping powerful software features in an approachable user interface.
Users can pick from pre-built scenes created by designers to evoke a particular mood or create their own using photos or a color picker to control the color and brightness of a group of Hue bulbs.
With the new Siri Shortcut support, those scenes can be triggered using Siri and incorporated as actions in custom shortcuts using Apple’s Shortcuts app.
If you're willing to spend, you'll get the full, real, desktop Civilization VI experience in your pocket.
These code signature checks are a vital security step. But Reed, who is the director of Mac and mobile platforms at the security firm Malwarebytes, has noticed that once a program passes a code signature check and gets installed, macOS never rechecks its signature. This means that attackers who buy a legitimate certificate from Apple—or steal one—can potentially trick Mac users into installing their malware. And if it manages to infect other legitimate programs after being downloaded, it could evade detection indefinitely.
In a few weeks’ time Cook will literally stand alongside the architects of Europe’s GDPR, talking up privacy and ethics at the center of a Union whose founding charter grants its citizens data protection as a fundamental right.
The signalling is clear.
While Apple might so far have fallen just shy of calling for a full copypaste of GDPR-level data protections into US law, there’s perhaps an element of strategic caution at play that’s moderating its plain-text political messaging.
I am being forced to change passwords at work every three months. I do change my passwords every time I see that pop-up reminder immediately. And I choose my new passwords mostly based on how I am feeling on that exact moment I see that pop-up. Which means that, given I have to key in that password multiple times per day at work, my mood is affected for the next three months based on how I was feeling on that particular password-changing day.
I haven't had a happy password for a while.
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"I see privacy as one of the most important issues of the 21st century," Cook said during an episode of Vice News Tonight that aired Tuesday on HBO. "I'm not a pro-regulation kind of person, I believe in the free market deeply [but] when the free market doesn't produce a result that's great for society, you have to ask yourself: what do we need to do? And I think some level of government regulation is important to come out of that."
But getting members of Congress to understand technology and privacy enough to regulate them is "a challenge," he said.
“We don’t take a political stand. We’re not leaning one way or the other. You can tell that from the stuff on the App Store and in podcasts, etc. You’ll see everything from very conservative to very liberal. And that’s the way I think it should be,” Cook said. On the topic of a potential coordinated attempt, Cook said, “I’ve never even had a conversation about [Alex Jones] with any other tech companies. We make our decisions independently and I think that’s important. Honestly. I’ve had no conversation. And to my knowledge, no one at Apple has.”
I’ve worn an Apple Watch pretty much every single day since I took delivery of the very first model on day one. I’ve enjoyed using it, but I’ve also enjoyed watching at how the platform has just kept getting better. For the first few years, most of the improvements were on the software side, along with incremental hardware improvements inside the same, familiar exterior.
This year is different. That exterior is familiar, but it’s not the same. It’s new, and surprising, and paints with a much larger canvas. The iPhone is Apple’s revenue driver, the iPad Pro is my ultimate mobile-productivity tool, and my heart will always belong to the Mac—but for my money, the Apple Watch is currently the most interesting product the company makes.
While the Watch will continue to grow as a medical device, it may be more useful now to think of it as a wellness aid. It offers a three-part view of your daily activity, displayed in rings: your overall activity level, how much time you’ve raised your heart rate in exercise and how often you stand rather than sit. In my life, this holistic view has been more useful than counting steps like other trackers.
For now, this impressive facility for collecting and organizing information about you is just that — it’s a great deal of data with not many places to go. This is sensitive information, of course, and Apple’s relative commitment to privacy — at least compared with advertising-centric companies like Google and Facebook — might be enough to get new users strapped in and recording.
As Apple continues its institutional struggle to conceive of what the Apple Watch is, or could be, in the imaginations of its customers, it’s worth remembering that Apple’s stated commitment to privacy is, in practice, narrow. The competitors that Cook likes to prod about their data-exploitative business models have a necessary and complicit partner in his company, having found many of their customers though Apple’s devices and software.
If you have hearing difficulties, the idea of spending hours watching a play may not be that attractive given the risk of key dialogue slipping from your grasp. The National Theater in London is hoping to change that.
On Wednesday, the theater introduced “smart caption glasses” that display dialogue on the lenses as actors speak. The glasses can be used without charge for the play “War Horse” and for the musical “Hadestown,” and they will be available for all of the theater’s 2019 season.
Dystopian possibilities aside, what really stings about self-checkout is that right now it is not even automation, which has been so obviously deleterious to the job market but has also been, for the most part, successfully framed as progress. Self-checkout is sold to us as a high-tech upgrade, but that’s just adding insult to injury — eliminating jobs by making people who have jobs do more jobs. When Walmart installs a new self-checkout, it’s not “automating” the process of checkout; it’s simply turning the register around, giving it a friendlier interface, and having the shopper do the work themselves.
Essentially, while getting pre-approved for your upgrade via the iPhone Upgrade Program, you’ll see a new “Add to Siri” button. Simply tap this and record your own voice command, such as “pre-order my iPhone,” and you’ll be able to pre-order the iPhone XR purely using Siri.
For the times I want to share a Live Photo with a non-iPhone toting friend, Snapthread quickly converts Live Photos into a three-second video. You can string together multiple videos and Live Photos, add an introduction slide to the video, add a quick soundtrack to really build out the Live Photo conversion, and export extremely quickly.
NightOwl is two things. One is a menu bar utility that lets you quickly switch between dark and light themes. The other is a scheduler that lets you automatically switch.
The docking station provides extra expansion capabilities by allowing up to 10 extra devices to be added, including HDMI, DisplayPort, VGA, USB 3.1 Gen 1, SD/MMC/MicroSD, ethernet and audio connectivity – all via one cable.
But what if you want more than just what's available through the App Store? It turns out, there are lots of games and utilities that use the Touch Bar. Here are three of my favourites.
But there’s a deeper reason, I’ve come to think, that so many people don’t have hobbies: We’re afraid of being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time. Our “hobbies,” if that’s even the word for them anymore, have become too serious, too demanding, too much an occasion to become anxious about whether you are really the person you claim to be.
Apple is one of four tech giants to come out in opposition to a proposed new law in Australia which would force companies to provide access to encrypted user data. The fear is that, if the law is allowed to pass, it could set a precedent which other countries are likely to follow – with the USA high up the list of likely candidates to effectively ban strong encryption.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has announced Apple is donating $1 million to help relief efforts taking place in Indonesia after the recent earthquake and tsunami, in a continuation of the iPhone producer's charitable efforts following major disasters over the years.
This is an emoji that New Yorkers and bagel lovers around the world have been expecting for a long time and the disappointment is truly overwhelming. Take a look at this clearly machine-cut monstrosity with its stiff and bready interior, which couldn’t possibly be redeemed by a few minutes in a toaster.
Quick quiz: which is better, 802.11n or 802.11ac?
The answer, if you're familiar with Wi-Fi standards coming from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is 802.11ac -- and by the way, the upcoming 802.11ax is better than both.
But in an effort to make the wireless networking terms more useful and less like alphanumeric gibberish, the Wi-Fi Alliance trade group has some new names it wants for those technologies: Wi-Fi 4, Wi-Fi 5, and Wi-Fi 6.
Outlook (on the web) likes to reshuffle all my Inbox rules, it seems, every other month just to make my life more fun.
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But publishers, burned by Facebook, are now looking with no small amount of optimism to Apple, which has quietly wooed publishers over the past year with a small team of its own Apple News editorial staff, huddling with publisher editorial teams in publisher offices. The Apple News team is headed by Lauren Kern, who left a prominent editor job at New York magazine for Apple last year and whose new title, editor in chief, is straight from the news industry. Kern’s staffers invite publications to pitch stories to be featured in Apple News. The implicit message: We’re just like you, we get it.
“They’re attentive, and you have the sense they’re human beings that are trying to nurture a relationship of some kind,” said a publishing exec who has regular contact with Apple News editorial staff. CNN Digital has daily contact with the Apple News edit team, and it enables CNN to reach an audience for political news and non-political news alike, even though the monetization lags, said S. Mitra Kalita, svp of news, opinion and programming at CNN Digital. “This is very much a human interaction,” she said.
Today, Apple started to integrate university student ID cards — used to access buildings, pay for food or books, and any other transactional campus services — into Wallet, its contactless payment system on the Apple Watch and the iPhone. The first schools to come online are Duke University, the University of Alabama and the University of Oklahoma.
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“iPhone and Apple Watch have brought us into a new era of mobility, helping to transform everyday experiences,” said Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of Internet Services, said in a statement. “When we launched Apple Pay, we embarked on a goal to replace the physical wallet. By adding transit, loyalty cards and contactless ticketing we have expanded the capabilities of Wallet beyond payments, and we’re now thrilled to be working with campuses on adding contactless student ID cards to bring customers even more easy, convenient and secure experiences.”
If you spend any time around technology, and probably even if you don’t, then you’ll probably also have heard some variation on the saying “There’s more computing power in your pocket than was used to send humans to the moon.” It’s true, of course. The chip in the recently announced iPhone XS runs about five million times faster than the Apollo Guidance Computer. But the axiom has been true for rather longer than most people realize.
The other day, I stumbled across a wonderful Twitter thread that talked about the “Great Calculator Race” of the 1970s and detailed some of the wonderful, wacky designs manufacturers unleashed upon the world. The first computing device that would actually fit in your pocket (a man’s pocket, that is) was the Cal Tech, a 1967 prototype created by Texas Instruments, although like many of the earliest pocket calculators it still required an AC power lead to work rather than batteries. It was black, boxy, and incredibly sleek compared to expensive, desk-mounted calculators like the chunky Casio Model 14-A.
The iPhone XS is the smallest year-over-year update the iPhone has seen to date. In most ways that matter, it is the iPhone X. But consumers who held off on the first generation of a new design have been rewarded with small but welcome refinements in performance, the camera, Face ID, durability, wireless data performance, battery life, and charging speeds.
The photos were collected from Instagram and Twitter users who included the hashtag "#ShotoniPhone" alongside their photos, with images showcasing Portrait Mode, Smart HDR, more advanced bokeh, Depth Control, and other features introduced with the iPhone XS and XS Max.
"For me, I couldn't imagine leaving my home in the morning without my iPhone. I think like most people," Joswiak commented. "I still found it fascinating to be able to open up the Screen Time app and see where I was spending my time... That information was useful for me to regulate myself to the behavior that I want. I didn't need limits, I just needed that information."
Beginning today, eight flagship Apple stores in seven select cities across the world will host notable Today at Apple sessions throughout the entire month of October. The sessions are being hosted in collaboration with The Big Draw Festival, a global celebration of drawing.
The two sides revealed today that the second iteration of Apple Music’s “Up Next” program will let bands and other musical acts perform on Kimmel’s stage.
SimplyeE is a modern incarnation of my experience at a physical library, a comfortable place I used to wander in to kill time after school before swim team practice started. Sometimes it means diving deep into the world of YA lit, as I am right now. Sometimes it’s feeling the satisfaction of reading something I’ve known I was supposed to for awhile but couldn’t drag myself to.
The gains from automation have generally been enjoyed not by those who operate the machines, but those who own them. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the share of income going to wages in OECD nations has been decreasing since the 1970s, while the share being funneled into capital—into things like cash reserves and machinery—has been increasing. It can seem that some of the only workers who have realized any scrap of that rusty old promise of automation are the ones who’ve carved out the code to claim it for themselves.
Programmers, of course, have been writing code that automates their work for decades. Programming generally involves utilizing tools that add automation at different levels, from code formatting to merging to different codebases—most just don’t take it to the extreme of fully or nearly fully automating their job. I chatted, via direct message on Reddit and email, with around a dozen programmers who said they had. These self-automators had tackled inventory management, report writing, graphics rendering, database administration, and data entry of every kind. One automated his wife’s entire workload, too. Most asked to remain anonymous, to protect their jobs and reputations.
Several major tech companies—including Apple, Google parent Alphabet, and Facebook—will likely have to add women to their boards of directors by mid-2021 under a pioneering new California law aimed at bringing more women into corporate boardrooms.
[...]
California is the first US state to require that women be represented on corporate boards. Several European countries have similar laws or guidelines, following the lead of Norway, which a decade ago required all companies to have at least 40 percent women on their boards. The Economist reported earlier this year that the laws have led to big increases in women directors in France, Germany, Italy, Britain, and the Netherlands.
The question of whether cops can force someone to unlock their phone in the US for a search hinges on Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination—that no one "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against" themselves. Privacy advocates argue that this extends to the act of unlocking a phone or generally decrypting data on a device. But while that line of thinking has succeeded as a defense against having to produce a passcode, it works less reliably in the context of Touch ID or other biometrics. Something you know, like a passcode, is easier to view as testimonial—legally speaking, a statement made by a witness—than something you have, like a physical attribute.
Why is it that Shortcuts can open some apps on my iPhone, but cannot open others? Didn't the Springboard team gotten the automation memo?
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Apple has widened availability of the Everyone Can Create curriculum, and has now posted the materials on the Apple Books marketplace not just for teachers, but for those wanting to learn from the materials as well.
Everyone Can Create includes four new project guides for drawing, music, video and photos now available for free in Apple Books. Each guide provides a series of projects that build skills progressively, helping students gain not just basic skills, but advanced vocabulary and techniques in each medium. A new teacher guide provides 300 lesson ideas across media, projects, and subjects.
When I walk into music producer Oak Felder’s studio in the hills of Los Angeles for episode 4 of The Future of Music, it doesn’t feel like a “traditional” label studio. That’s because it’s not. Felder bought the property and transformed it from a house into a vibey, chill-out compound that happens to have a fully built recording studio in the lower level. This might be the upper echelon of what a modern home studio is, but it’s recognizable as a home studio nonetheless.
Oak Felder is a songwriter and record producer who is one half of Pop & Oak, who are responsible for crafting hits like Nicki Minaj’s “Your Love,” Alessia Cara’s “Here,” and Demi Lovato’s “Sorry Not Sorry,” among many others. He splits his time between Atlanta, where his actual home is, and LA at this home studio on steroids. Even though celebs come in and out of this space regularly to create their next hits, if you look closely at the gear Felder uses to make all these songs you hear on the radio, it’s not much different from what bedroom producers use around the world. Instead of a big traditional mixing board, there’s a desk for his laptop, where he plugs in and works off of Apple’s DAW, Logic.
“My main computer is a laptop,” Felder tells me. “So, technically, I’m mobile everywhere.”
Earlier this year, when setting out as a freelance writer, I found myself for the first time without the backing of a work computer with Word or a free student account. I faced a dilemma: to pay or not to pay for Microsoft Word. With a perfectly good word processor attached to my Gmail, was it really worth about $7 or $8 per month to be able to type onto the traditional white page I was used to? What settled it was the realization that I needed trusty old Word to communicate with my hopefully soon-to-be editors. Track Changes was the language in which the writer-editor conversation was carried out, at least in my experience. Even if I were to convert my Google words to Word words, and my editor’s Word edits to Google edits, and download my Google response to those edits as a Word response to be sent back, too much could get lost in translation.
Journalism is just one of the many industries debating its continuing relationship with Word. But unlike most industries, we let this debate play out within our work. Writers have been calling for an end to Word for more than a decade now, from Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times to Tom Scocca here in Slate. In his 2012 piece, Scocca compared filing a story in Word in 2012 to filing a story via fax in the ’90s, calling it “cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology.” In a post responding to Scocca’s piece, the pseudonymous blogger Otaku-kun points out that the program is still incredibly important to other professionals, even if not for writers: “Ask any lawyer writing a brief, a scientist writing a grant, or a student writing a dissertation how useful Word is and you’ll get a very different perspective than that of people writing tweets about how Word is too complicated for their blogging.” (Remember blogging?)
While the iPhone is smaller, it’s big enough for most of the jobs we asked it to do. Realistically speaking, the 6.5-inch display is as good as the 7.9-inch one for reading ebooks. There’s more page flipping, but that’s not a significant drawback.
The same goes for social-networking sites like Facebook and Instagram. The experience isn’t as good as the larger screen. But it’s good enough.
The company has unveiled a conversion tool and Apple Photo Project Ordering Service. This tool allows Mimeo Photos customers to convert and reprint Apple photo projects instantly.
And with the new season about to get underway, the app is getting a redesign and adding almost 50 percent more pre-and post-game shows -- along with intermission broadcasts. Immediately noticeable are the overhauled Team Pages that put video up-front and center moments after the puck drops on every new match, including a new pinned video player at the top of each article.
I am less worried about AI; I regard fear of AI more as a mirror of our own society than as a harbinger of the future. AI and intelligent robotics are the culmination of several precursor technologies, like machinelearning algorithms, automation, and autonomy. The security risks from those precursor technologies are already with us, and they’re increasing as the technologies become more powerful and more prevalent. So, while I am worried about intelligent and even driverless cars, most of the risks are already prevalent in Internet-connected drivered cars. And while I am worried about robot soldiers, most of the risks are already prevalent in autonomous weapons systems.
Also, as roboticist Rodney Brooks pointed out, “Long before we see such machines arising there will be the somewhat less intelligent and belligerent machines. Before that there will be the really grumpy machines. Before that the quite annoying machines. And before them the arrogant unpleasant machines.” I think we’ll see any new security risks coming long before they get here.
From Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World.
At 300 Funston Street in San Francisco’s Richmond District, there’s an old Christian Science church. Walk up it’s palatial steps, past Corinthian columns and urns, into the bowels of a vaulted sanctuary — and you’ll find a copy of the internet.
In a backroom where pastors once congregated stand rows of computer servers, flickering en masse with blue light, humming the hymnal of technological grace.
This is the home of the Internet Archive, a non-profit that has, for 22 years, been preserving our online history: Billions of web pages, tweets, news articles, videos, and memes.
Once upon a time, when a company 'proudly' proclaimed that their products were cross-platform, they may just meant that their products were available on both Windows 95/98 and Windows NT/2000. And we Mac users were disappointed.
Similarly, today, if your product is only available on macOS and iOS, I don't think you should be marketing your product as cross-platform. In my opinion, to be limited to only one company's platforms, no matter how big the platforms are, is not truly cross-platform.
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I'm not necessarily looking for Windows (which I use at work) or Android (which I don't use at all) support. What I am expecting, if you are advertising cross-platform, is support for the Web platform.
(And, no, please don't force me to use Facebook login.)
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Thanks for reading.