Of the thousands of memories I have stored on my devices—and in the cloud now—most are cloudless reminders of happier times. But some are painful, and when algorithms surface these images, my sense of time and place becomes warped. It’s been especially pronounced this year, for obvious and overlapping reasons. In order to move forward in a pandemic, most of us were supposed to go almost nowhere. Time became shapeless. And that turned us into sitting ducks for technology.
Our smartphones pulse with memories now. In normal times, we may strain to remember things for practical reasons—where we parked the car—or we may stumble into surprise associations between the present and the past, like when a whiff of something reminds me of Sunday family dinners. Now that our memories are digital, though, they are incessant, haphazard, intrusive.
Recently, reports have surfaced of a few changes to upcoming Apple software intended to fix some persistent issues, and which ought to to help improve the experience of Apple users everywhere. And some of those fixes may arrive pretty soon, to boot.
Multiple references to “120Hz” and “supports120Hz” have been added to tvOS’ PineBoard in the latest beta release. For those unfamiliar with the matter, PineBoard is the internal name of the system that controls the Apple TV interface, similar to the SpringBoard on iPhone and iPad. These references strongly suggest that Apple is at least internally testing a 120Hz mode for Apple TV.
Apple has today shared a new App Clip, which lets you check the status of all your devices, without downloading the full Apple Support app.
Apple’s latest update on the developer website and in the developer app notes: “Unless you receive permission from the user to enable tracking, the device’s advertising identifier value will be all zeros and you may not track them.”
Objective-C, which has been a staple of software development for Apple platforms, slumped in this month’s Tiobe Index of programming language popularity, falling out of the top 20 for the first time since late-2009.
Technicians in Guangzhou, China have discovered that it is possible to detach the RAM from the M1 chip and its nearby SSD module and replace them with larger capacity components, which are correctly recognized by macOS, without breaking the device.
Success! I slept through the night yesterday!
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Thanks for reading.