MyAppleMenu

The Loaner-Devices Edition Thursday, March 5, 2020

Apple Warns Stores About A Shortage Of Replacement iPhones, by Mark Gurman, Bloomberg

The company recently told technical support staff at stores that replacement iPhones for heavily damaged devices will be in short supply for as long as two to four weeks, according to Apple Store employees.

The workers, known as Geniuses, were advised in a memo that they can offer to mail replacement iPhones to customers and provide loaner devices to ease delays.

Spring Forward, Fail Back: Apple Still Can’t Tell Time, by Glenn Fleishman, TidBITS

Why my iPhone can know the warranty is active when an Apple Store database doesn’t, only the deep innards of Apple’s hoary code could reveal. But what this experience really reveals is that there are bugs in both Apple’s code and in the company’s customer service policies.

Stuff

Four Ways To Reduce Stress And Relax With Apple Watch, by Michael Potuck, 9to5Mac

Whether it’s something recurring in your daily life at work or home or an unexpected event, we all experience stress and anxiety in life. You may not have thought about it but if you have an Apple Watch, there’s a great tool on your wrist to offer some peace and calm. Follow along for four ways to reduce stress and relax with Apple Watch.

How To Clean Your Smartphone And Keyboard The Right Way, by David Nield, Wired

The good news is that disinfecting your phone and your other electronic gear doesn't need industrial strength chemicals or hazmat suits. You can do a very decent job of cleaning up your gear using the materials you've already got at home. It's also not necessary to clean your phone every time you go out—in fact it's probably bad for it to be scrubbed and wiped so often—but it's a good idea to do a quick wipe-down when you've been traveling, or after other people have used it, or at the very least every week or so.

DooriGo Keeps Users In Touch With Scheduled Check-ins, Alerts And More, by AppAdvice

Subscribers get a daily text at a time of their choosing. If they fail to respond within a certain timeframe, DooriGo alerts all nominated contacts via email to let them know that something might be amiss.

These alerts contain the GPS coordinates of the user’s last known location, so they’ll be easy to find. It’s also possible to store valuable information in encrypted messages that only the intended recipients can read: passwords, bank account numbers, instructions, the location of your will, and so on.

Develop

Apple Now Allows Push Notification Advertising, Updates Dating App Review Guidelines And More, by Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac

Apple today updated its App Store review guidelines regarding some of the features introduced with iOS 13, besides the compatibility of apps with the latest iPhone and iPad models, and more.

Notes

Apple Might Start Making Travel Recommendations In Maps App, by Thomas Ricker, The Verge

Apple appears ready to add its own opinions about locations in its Maps app, much in the same way it curates the App Store with developer interviews, guides, and recommendations authored by Apple. At the moment, Apple relies heavily on third-party services like Yelp and Wikipedia to describe businesses and points of interest found in Apple Maps. Apple’s expanded editorial role is hinted at by a job description for an Apple Maps writer / editor position in California, which was posted on Monday.

My Late Husband Lives On In His iPhone, Now Used By Our 10-Year-Old Daughter, by Fernanda Santos, Slate

Navigating the bureaucracy of death is an unavoidable, time-consuming, and tedious affair. Call the bank to remove his name from our joint checking account, call credit card companies to cancel his cards, call the car insurance company to delete his vehicle from our policy, call to end the memberships he had and I couldn’t afford to keep. These are also one-dimensional tasks. No one can like, share, or comment on them. With his death, my husband killed their significance.

But there was one account I did not close, at least not entirely. On days that I missed him more than the usual everyday missing of him, I’d tell Siri to call him so I could see his name and number pop on the screen. I disconnected the line about a month after he died, but I still asked Siri to call him once in a while, even if it meant hearing a message telling me the customer I was trying to reach was unavailable. I also held onto the phone itself and to the number, paying $5 a month to make sure it wouldn’t be assigned to someone else—paying so that I could give it to our daughter, Flora, whenever the time was right.

Bottom of the Page

Do you pause Apple Music on your Mac when you get out of your room to get a drink of water so that you are not wasting Apple's data server resources to stream music out to your Mac where no one is there to listen?

I do.

~

Thanks for reading.