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The Missed-Pickup Edition Saturday, March 21, 2020

Customers Can't Get Their iPhones Back If They Left Them At An AppleStore Before They Closed Amid The Cornoavirus Pandemic, by Antonio Villas-Boas, Business Insider

Unfortunately for those who missed the pickup window, there's no way for them to get their devices until Apple Stores re-open, the spokesperson said.

As for those who's devices were sent out to Apple repair centers, the company is getting in touch with those customers to have their devices returned to them, rather than the normal route of having them shipped to an Apple Store for pickup.

Apple's Shutter Button Case Highlights The Power Of Software Control, by Chaim Gartenberg, The Verge

It’s a stark reminder of the power that software can add to a button — and conversely, of the difficulty in competing with a first-party product when you don’t have the ability to leverage those software functions on the same level. It doesn’t matter how good or bad hardware is when it’s software that defines how useful a button can be.

Stuff

The 2020 MacBook Air, by John Gruber, Daring Fireball

For what it is meant to be, it’s really hard to complain about anything at all regarding this machine. Now that Apple has extricated itself from its butterfly keyboard thicket, it’s clear that Apple was onto something with this design language, which debuted with the no-adjective 12-inch MacBook in 2015.

Don’t overthink it. The new MacBook Air is what it looks like: nearly perfect.

2020 MacBook Air Review: No News Is Good News, by Jason Snell, Six Colors

If you don’t really need a new Mac laptop, maybe you should wait to see what happens with ARM. But if you’re someone who has been holding out for a new MacBook Air—and ideally one without that infamous keyboard—I wouldn’t recommend that you wait. This is the MacBook Air that you’ve been waiting for.

HeartWatch4: A Streamlined Dashboard For Your Health, by Ryan Christoffel, MacStories

HeartWatch takes the existing heart and activity data captured by your Apple Watch and presents it in a different way than Apple’s own Health app. The app has long offered fresh approaches to visualizing your data, but the sheer amount of information, and how it’s organized, can easily feel overwhelming. The main goal of HeartWatch 4 was to simplify everything, making it easier to navigate and thus more approachable. Spend just a couple minutes with this update and it’s clear that it succeeded.

Aerial Brings Apple TV Screen Savers To The Mac, by Josh Centers, TidBITS

If you have liked these screen savers on your TV, you can get them on your Mac, thanks to the free and open-source app Aerial.

Develop

As Economy Is Upended, Marie Kondo Drops A Workplace Book, by Penelope Green, New York Times

Keep your physical desktop clear of everything except that which you’re working on at the moment, as well as your computer and perhaps a plant. In these dark times, an uncluttered surface anticipates the caress of the Clorox wipe.

As for your virtual desktop, clean that up too. You can thank your digital data for its service, as you once did your balled-up socks at home, and let it go. (Maybe backing the most important of it up first.)

Notes

The iPad's Lidar Is A Dry Run For Apple's AR Glasses, by Brian Barrett, Wired

If you’ve heard of lidar it’s likely because of self-driving cars. It’s a useful technology in that context because it can build a 3D map of the sensor’s surroundings; it uses pulses of light to gauge distances and locations in a similar way to how radar uses radio signals. In an iPad Pro, that depth-sensing will be put in the service of augmented reality. But it’s not really about the iPad Pro. Apple put a lidar scanner in a tablet to prepare, almost certainly, for when it puts one in a pair of AR glasses.

Apple TV+ Cuts Streaming Quality In Europe To Help Reduce Strain On Networks, Alongside Other Streaming Services, by Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac

European officials have instructed streaming services to reduce the amount of bandwidth their services use, in order to reduce strain on internet networks. Usage of streaming services has picked up substantially in recent weeks in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Naturally, when people are in isolation, they tend to watch a lot more TV than normal.

Bottom of the Page

If macOS is migrating to ARM, will there be tablets that can boot into macOS and iPadOS? Because, I will buy that.

(Unfortunately, I think the answer is no. Tying both macOS and iPadOS to the same machine is too much of a constraint for Apple to take.)

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Thanks for reading.