Today Apple announced the next phase of its efforts in medical research studies. Following the Heart Study which debuted in late 2017 and shared its first results earlier this year, Apple now has three new studies it’s launching at once, which users can sign up for through a brand new Apple Research app.
In 1976, the Harvard School of Public Health and two other major medical institutions started a study on nurses that has become one of the largest and longest research efforts ever conducted on women’s health. They have so far enrolled more than 275,000 participants.
On Thursday, the Harvard school announced an even more ambitious women’s health study, one that aims to enroll a million women over a decade.
The new ingredients allowing the huge scale: Apple’s iPhones, apps and money.
I’m not going to argue that Apple has made a massive course correction when it comes to creating products—it’s not that dramatic. But what has happened, somewhere, is that Apple has reordered its priority list. For the MacBook Pro, that means challenging engineers to make a powerful system with long battery life—and letting them come to a good size and weight for the laptop as a result of that process. Those attributes still matter—of course they do, they matter for any mobile product. But with the 16-inch MacBook Pro, they weren’t the primary driver of design decisions—and it shows.
It’s a shift that encourages me that the future of the Mac, and of Apple’s Mac hardware design, is the brightest it’s been in years.
The old metaphor for something that’s slow to change is "turning a battleship," but Apple is so big at this point that it’s more like turning a flotilla of aircraft carriers that have been lashed together as a floating city. In the middle of a glacier.
We’re talking slow here, people.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro released this week points to the fact that Apple can bring its ships around, eventually. And even when they do get on a new heading, it might not be exactly the one that all of its users are looking for. But there are certainly enough significant changes in this latest update to indicate that the company is looking to keep its customers, especially its most vocal ones, happy.
Apple has released a firmware update for the AirPods Pro. The excellent new wireless earbuds originally shipped with firmware revision 2B584, the new revision is 2B588. It is not clear what the new firmware does; Apple does not typically issue release notes for accessory firmware updates. The minor revision number suggests that it is a small bugfix or reliability update.
There is no good way to force your AirPods Pro to update the firmware—they do so when they connect to your iPhone, on a schedule determined by Apple. You just have to use them as normal and trust that they will eventually be updated.
Iconfactory, known for its popular apps like Twitterrific, Linea Sketch, and more is out today with Triode, a free (without ads) internet radio player made for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV that offers handy features like iCloud syncing, Siri Shorcuts and CarPlay support, and more.
Iconfactory describes Triode as “The best way to enjoy all of your favorite Internet radio stations wherever you go.”
This is the ideal way to make sure you can use your AirPods Pro just about everywhere, including with airplane seatback entertainment systems.
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This is the first version of the product from TwelveSouth that offers the ability to stream audio in, as well as out. That means you can use it with a car stereo system that only access auxiliary audio-in, for instance, to stream directly from your iPhone to the vehicle’s sound system.
Logitech's Circle 2s became the first cameras to support Apple's HomeKit Secure Video storage feature on Thursday with the release of a beta firmware designed to upgrade units already in customers hands.
Amid growing health concerns over e-cigarettes, Apple will remove all 181 vaping-related apps from its mobile App Store this morning, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: The move comes after at least 42 people have died from vaping-related lung illness, per the CDC. Most of those people had been using cartridges containing THC, though some exclusively used nicotine cartridges.
Yes, it is “part of my job” to experiment with these various infotainment systems and report back about their cheap graphics, laggy activation, and garbage AI assistants. (And yes, I realize that most everyone doesn't have the same 100-cars-a-year gripes.) But my real issue is that car manufacturers haven’t glommed onto the reality that their systems are irrelevant. I use CarPlay for everything, in every car I get into, and if you aren't committed to wasting time in horrible menu structures or gasping at chrome-edged onscreen "buttons" teleported from 2011, you would, too. Whatever phone is in your pocket is already the most valuable, most efficient system for interacting with information in your world. You know it by heart—or, better yet when it comes to the driving at 75 miles per hour, by reflex.
Apple said on Friday moves in Germany to force it to open up its Apple Pay mobile payments system to rivals could hurt data protection and the security of financial information.
A German parliamentary committee unexpectedly voted in a late-night session on Wednesday to force the tech giant to open up Apple Pay to rival providers in Germany.
I'm having a too-much-excitement day at work today, dealing with problems that has nothing to do with programming in PHP.
Interesting times.
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Thanks for reading.