The update includes Apple’s new Journal app, which is designed to get you writing about events in your life with prompts that draw from data on your phone as well as the option to record spatial videos.
How is Apple’s Journal any different from writing anywhere else? For one, it’s more secure than one of those tiny metal locks for notebooks that you can pry open with a pin. In all seriousness, I could link a dozen studies about how journaling can help ease anxiety and encourage you to work through complicated feelings. But whether you feel like working through it on your iPhone is entirely up to you. The point is that Apple offers a native way to connect with that inner side, so you rely on your device for that emotional release.
In the end, Journal feels a bit like Apple applied its trademark fixation on privacy to social networking: it’s a social network of one person, for one person. Which is perhaps admirable (and yes, oh-so-very Apple) in an age where we may spend way too much time broadcasting every thought we have. Can the Journal app steal time, attention, mindshare from the routine dopamine hits of the endless scroll? It might not be a bad thing if it did, but I think that the company has an uphill climb ahead of it.
Now that iOS 17.2 is out, any previously-mentioned iOS 17 features that we don’t yet have are going to come in 2024. Apply may begin beta testing iOS 17.3 any minute now, but the actual release is definitely not coming until the new year.
That means two key features—Apple Music collaborative playlists and AirPlay in select hotels—aren’t going to be here in time for the busy holiday travel season.
The watchOS 10.2 update adds support for using Siri to access and record data in the Health app on the Apple Watch Series 9 and the Apple Watch Ultra 2. Users can ask Siri questions like "How did I sleep last night?" or "How many steps have I taken this week?"
According to Caldbeck, Siri support for health-related queries on the watch has been a highly requested feature. But the company waited for the Series 9 and Ultra 2 because it wanted to make sure such requests could be processed locally with low latency. That means data doesn't have to leave your watch for the request to be fulfilled.
Katie Skinner, senior manager for user privacy engineering at Apple, said the company's health products are designed with four privacy principles in mind: data minimization; on-device processing; transparency; and control and security. These principles are broad enough to apply to new and updated products as the industry changes, as evidenced by Apple's decision to wait until the Apple Watch could process Siri requests locally before supporting health requests.
macOS Sonoma 14.2 introduces an Enhanced AutoFill feature for PDFs, which Apple announced earlier this year. It automatically identifies common fields like name and address, allowing them to be autofilled similar to a website.
The revamped design includes a more sidebar-centric navigation interface. The update also begins the discontinuation of the iTunes Movies and TV Shows apps on tvOS.
Prior to the update, it was easy for live sports and other streaming sources to get buried under Apple’s TV Plus original programming. The new interface does more to highlight this third-party content, which is part of the tech giant’s rumored plan to make the Apple TV app a streaming hub for everything, not just Apple TV Plus.
See, Beeper Mini works a little differently this time: you must now sign in with an Apple ID, whereas previously it would automatically register you to iMessage via your phone number. Beeper says it’s working on a fix to restore phone number registration with iMessage, but until then, your friends won’t be able to send iMessages directly to your phone number. Instead, the blue bubbles will have to come to and from your email address. That’s not nearly as convenient, but at the end of the day, it’s still iMessage.
Beeper can (and does!) vouch for the privacy and security of their client app, but Apple can’t. Beeper is correctly arguing that Beeper Mini does not (and cannot) compromise the security of the iMessage protocol, but that doesn’t mean that its existence doesn’t open security concerns for Apple and Apple users.
With Bridges you can save a link and then give it your own custom title as you move it into a folder of your choosing – this in itself will instantly make your link saving less fuss-free.
In 2021, while watching a Super Bowl commercial on a TV bolted to the wall of a cell block, I saw something I had never seen before. A checkered black-and-white square appeared at the center of the screen. The weird little square—which I now understand was a QR code—made no sense to me or my incarcerated peers, and no one from the commercial was explaining it. I vaguely recalled seeing similar symbols in magazines and on some products from the prison canteen, but not what they were for.
When I finally asked a friend on the outside about the mysterious symbol, she explained that people took pictures of it to gain access to information. I felt ignorant and out of touch. My primary source for information about tech in the outside world—TV commercials—had failed me.
Apple has offered to let rivals access its tap-and-go mobile payments systems used for mobile wallets, three people familiar with the matter said, a move that could settle EU antitrust charges and stave off a possible hefty fine.
The EU competition enforcer last year charged Apple with curbing rivals' access to its tap-and-go technology, Near-Field Communication (NFC), making it difficult for them to develop rival services on Apple devices.
But Epic v. Google turned out to be a very different case. It hinged on secret revenue sharing deals between Google, smartphone makers, and big game developers, ones that Google execs internally believed were designed to keep rival app stores down. It showed that Google was running scared of Epic specifically. And it was all decided by a jury, unlike the Apple ruling.
Mind you, we don’t know what Epic has actually won quite yet — that’s up to Judge James Donato, who’ll decide what the appropriate remedies might be. Epic never sued for monetary damages; it wants the court to tell Google that every app developer has total freedom to introduce its own app stores and its own billing systems on Android, and we don’t yet know how or even whether the judge might grant those wishes.
As The Verge noted in the report on Epic v. Google, we shall have to wait for the judge to decide on remedies to get a better understanding on how Apple might be affected by this case, even though Apple has essentially won the case against Epic in the other case. Even then, there will be appeals and appeals and appeals before anything is decided.
But, I suspect, the things Apple will be forced to do against its desires will mostly be determined by EU regulators instead. Whatever happens in U.S. courts will quickly be overtaken by events across the Atlantic.
It does seem that Apple will be forced to allow for alternative app stores on iPhones. The fighting ground between Apple and regulators will probably be what the company can impose on app stores operators, due to technology, security, and privacy. Given the track records of regulators on technical issues, I predict Apple will be able to water down a lot of these potential impacts on its business model.
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