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The Pinch-to-Stretch Edition Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Apple’s Racial Equity And Justice Initiative Surpasses $200m In Investments, by Apple

Apple today announced its Racial Equity and Justice Initiative (REJI), a long-term global effort to advance equity and expand opportunities for Black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Indigenous communities, has more than doubled its initial financial commitment to total more than $200 million over the last three years. Since launching REJI in June 2020, Apple has supported education, economic empowerment, and criminal justice reform work across the U.S., with recent expansion to Australia, the U.K., and Mexico.

MacBook Air 15-inch Exclusive: I Ask Apple About 'World's Thinnest' Design, $1,299 Price, Why We Didn't Get More Ports And More, by Mark Spoonauer, Tom's Guide

We honestly started by setting our target of can we make a 15-inch laptop that is the same thickness as the 13-inch? It's not as easy as in the in the video when you hit the pinch to stretch and it just magically gets two inches bigger. One of the big things that the team really had to focus on is reliability performance and durability over that large screen size. The display where the LCD needs to be structurally really sound. And so we use a structural adhesive to attach the panel to the chassis piece that we call the display housing.

Beware Of Siri Creating Alarms Instead Of Timers, by Adam Engst, TidBITS

Something has recently changed with Siri such that it occasionally misses the final word—usually “minutes”—in the standard command, turning “Set a timer for 20 minutes” into “Set a timer for 20.” I have become so accustomed to timers just working that I hadn’t been looking at the screen like Paul had, so I didn’t notice that Siri interprets that second command as a request to set an alarm for “20” (8 PM.) As you can see from the scrollbar in the third screenshot below, I’ve ended up with a slew of random alarms in the Apple Watch’s Alarms app.

Apple Vision

Apple Vision Pro: A Watershed Moment For Personal Computing, by Federico Viticci, MacStories

I’m convinced that Vision Pro and the visionOS platform are a watershed moment in the arc of personal computing. After trying it, I came away reflecting that we’ll eventually think of software before spatial computing, and after it. For better or worse – we can’t know if this platform will be successful yet – Apple created a clear demarcation between the era of looking at a computer and looking at the world as the computer. Whether their plan succeeds or not, we’ll remember this moment in the history of the company.

Coming This Fall

Apple’s Latest Sherlock Targets Your Grandparents’ Tech, by Wes Davis, The Verge

We’re used to seeing Apple’s new features come from some currently popular app. But it’s less common for Apple to reach back and find inspiration in old, once-ubiquitous tech that predates the iPhone and even the company itself — and this year, that’s exactly what it did, starting with answering machines.

PSA: Disabling iCloud Drive In iOS 17 No Longer Turns Off Third-Party App CloudKit Syncing, by Tim Hardwick, MacRumors

By making iCloud Drive and third-party app iCloud access configuration independent from one another in iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma, cloud management better reflects the Settings interface. It also means that users with company-issued devices where iCloud Drive is disabled as a matter of policy will still be able to use third-party apps that depend on iCloud syncing to function properly.

Stuff

Yoga Day Challenge Returns To Apple Watch With New Stickers To Unlock In Time For iOS 17, by https://9to5mac.com/2023/06/13/yoga-day-challenge-apple-watch/, 9to5Mac

The International Day of Yoga takes place on June 21 this year, and Apple is marking the occasion with a special Yoga Day Challenge for Apple Watch users.

Rex’s New App Makes It Easy To Discover And Share Recommended Places With Friends, by Sarah Perez, TechCrunch

Using a combination of AI and computer vision technologies, the app aims to make it easier to get started sharing your recommendations by scouring your phone's Camera Roll for photos from favorite spots, which you can then add to curated playlists that are shared with friends and followers.

Satechi’s New USB-C Docking Station Lets Your 15-inch MacBook Air Drive Three 4K Monitors, by Rikka Altland, 9to5Toys

The new Triple 4K Docking Station arrives with the ability to drive three monitors at once, turning your MacBook Air into more of a desktop-worthy machine with 100W pass-through charging and some additional I/O.

Nomad’s New Stand And Base Charge Slower But Cost Less, by Antonio G. Di Benedetto, The Verge

Want a fancy-looking charger for your MagSafe-compatible iPhone but don’t want to pay such a hefty premium price? Nomad is offering a new pair of chargers that do just that, and the key is cutting out Apple’s true MagSafe compatibility and its required Made for iPhone tax.

Notes

Apple’s Original Vision Products Were A Line Of CRTs, by Stephen Hackett, 512 Pixels

but like many other Apple products, it’s using a name steeped in history.

Ok, steeped may be a little strong, but Apple has had other products with “vision” in their names over the years. Seven products, to be exact, and all of them are long-forgotten CRT displays.

Bottom of the Page

I am not attracted to the 15-inch MacBook Air, just because I want my notebook computer to be really portable.

But if my eyes continue to worsen as I get older, and if I am not going anywhere after I retire, a large-screen notebook computer that allows me to move between the living room and the bedroom will be more attractive.

Will I have enough spare money lying around to get me a desktop computer and a notebook computer? That may be more of a limiting factor.

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Thanks for reading.