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The Say-Air Edition Tuesday, July 4, 2023

With The 15-inch MacBook Air And Apple Silicon, Apple Is Making It Clear: The Mac Means Business, by Jason Aten, Inc

"When we set out, we wanted to make a 15-inch MacBook Air," Metz told me. "But when you think of what the designs looked like previously, it just didn't work. It just did not say 'Air' to us. It was only with Apple Silicon where we were able to have all the right components to bring that larger display along with the battery life and performance that users would expect from a MacBook Air."

[...]

"Apple Silicon suddenly made MacBook Air that much more capable for business use," said Tan. "So we're certainly seeing a lot of customers making that wholesale switch that otherwise we wouldn't have seen before. We're seeing customers in retail industries adopting MacBook Air for everyday use, we're seeing that in manufacturing, and we're seeing that in health care. So we think Apple Silicon has broadened the appeal to enterprise customers by a significant margin."

Apple Says Latest 13-Inch MacBook Air Now Supports Bluetooth 5.3, by Joe Rossignol, MacRumors

While the 13-inch MacBook Air with the M2 chip initially supported Bluetooth 5.0 when it was released in July 2022, the laptop now supports the faster and more reliable Bluetooth 5.3 standard, according to Apple’s tech specs.

On App Stores

Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft Say They Meet EU Gatekeeper Status, by Foo Yun Chee, Reuters

Companies labelled as gatekeepers will be required to make their messaging apps interoperate with rivals and let users to decide which apps to pre-install on their devices.

They will not be allowed to favour their own services over rivals' or prevent users from removing pre-installed software or apps, two rules that will hit Google and Apple hard.

Apple Faces March 5 Deadline For Third-party App Stores – But Don't Hold Your Breath, by Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac

The case will take years to work its way through to the final appeal.

So yeah, the March 5 deadline is a thing, but don’t expect much to change by then.

Apple To Ask US Supreme Court To Undo App Store Order In Epic Games Case, by Mike Scarcella, Reuters

Apple said in a court filing it will ask the justices to take up its appeal of a ruling on Friday by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that kept in place most of the order issued in 2021 by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

The judge's order said Apple could not prohibit developers from providing links and buttons to payment options in their apps that take consumers outside of the App Store - a step that could reduce sales commissions paid to Apple.

Stuff

Why iCloud Keychain Asks For An Old Device's Password--and Why You Don't Need To Worry, by Glenn Fleishman, Macworld

While this request looked sketchy or problematic, it was poorly labeled rather than a security hole.

Wait, Fujifilm's App Is Good Now?, by Dan Bracaglia, DP Review

Fujifilm makes a lot of lofty promises about the new XApp and delivers on most of them. In addition to a cleaner, more straightforward design, the company says it should connect and transfer images with better reliability at faster speeds than the old app. The XApp also includes new features, many of which are quite innovative.

Apple Store Database App Facades Just Got A New Set Of Enhancements, by Zac Hall, 9to5Mac

Facades is a catalog of all 500+ Apple Store locations with historical data and a built-in store tracking journal. The latest update introduces all-new grid and thumbnail views for easily browsing the vast library of stores. You can also filter results between indoor and outdoor locations starting with today’s release.

Notes

Game Porting Toolkit In macOS Sonoma Won’t Fix What’s Broken With Mac Games, by Peter Cohen, iMore

Apple’s infamous for shifting priorities after announcing new game technology and walking away from it. Over the course of the years, there have been other examples of promising game technology from Apple that ultimately go nowhere. QuickDraw 3D RAVE and Game Sprockets are good examples from the classic Mac days - a hardware abstraction layer for 3D acceleration long before OpenGL, and a DirectX-style set of game APIs. Both were abandoned well before Apple even made the move to OS X. Apple leaned hard on OpenGL as its 3D API of choice for years, but ultimately ceded space to make way for Metal, the 3D API now so integral to Game Porting Toolkit.

Apple's $3 Trillion Market Cap Is Nice And All, But Does It Really Matter?, by The Macalope, Macworld

Once Apple passed $1 trillion in valuation, though, things began to change. The very idea it could go out of business was less and less publishable. When it passed $2 trillion, you needed to be selling a book or something and just trying to get attention. Now that it’s back at $3 trillion, don’t expect to see it floated much if at all.

So, maybe as an Apple customer, there is a benefit after all.

Bottom of the Page

If you are saying that mandating sideloading on your mobile phone does not affect your security and privacy because you can choose not to sideloads any apps, then maybe you are forgetting that:

Your employee can force you to sideload apps or be fired…

Your government can force you to sideload apps in order to vote in the next election…

Other governments can force you to sideload apps when you visit their countries for work…

And who knows what these apps do.

Oh, you can just quit your job and find better employments? Oh, your government is better than other governments and is not corrupted? Oh, you can just buy a burner phone when you visit other countries? Then, you are just privileged and you don't care about other people's security and privacy.

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Thanks for reading.