The people for whom macOS 14.6 Sonoma may be most exciting are owners of the 14-inch M3 MacBook Pro because the update adds support for using up to two external displays when the laptop lid is closed.
Emergency SOS via satellite expanded to Japan with the iOS 17.6 update that was released yesterday, according to Apple. Japanese customers with an iPhone 14 or an iPhone 15 can use Emergency SOS via satellite to get in touch with emergency services even when a Wi-Fi or cellular connection is unavailable.
iOS 17.6 and iPadOS 17.6 have added a feature called Catch Up, which is targeted at sports fans who use Apple's TV app.
The feature allows users to watch a quick sequence of highlights that have been produced so far from an in-progress Major League Soccer game before joining the live feed.
The bottom line if you use Safari: You should feel reasonably good about the privacy (and security) protections, but you can probably do better — either by tweaking your Apple settings or using a web browser that’s even more private than Safari. I’ll dig into the details.
Dumb Phone is designed to minimize cognitive distractions with a minimalist user interface. The goal is to make your phone a tool again instead of being a doom-scrolling device, which it is for many people. It also aims to reduce all friction for the apps and tools you choose to use by making everything reachable with one hand.
I realize that it sounds curmudgeonly to complain about software updates. Don’t apps provide us with enough miraculous conveniences? Through Spotify, I can browse many decades of published music more or less instantly; I can freely sample the work of new musicians. Yet it has become aggravatingly difficult to find what I want to listen to.
No matter how good the audio sounds, how shiny the UI looks like, it doesn't work if customers cannot listen to what they want to listen when they want to listen.
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If you’ve been looking forward to injecting a little intelligence in your Apple devices, the time is now. Apple on Monday rolled out developer beta releases of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, which include access to several—but notably, not all—of the company’s previously announced AI-powered features.
Apple relied on chips designed by Alphabet's Google rather than industry leader Nvidia to build its new artificial-intelligence software infrastructure that will power its forthcoming suite of AI tools and features, according to an Apple research paper it published on Monday.
[...]
Unlike Nvidia, which sells its chips and systems as standalone products, Google sells access to the TPUs through its Google Cloud Platform. Customers interested in buying access must build software through Google's cloud platform in order to use the chips.
So far, the system is largely holding up to the Olympic stress. There are some obvious reasons for that—locals are on vacation, new stations opened on time, many more trains are running than during a typical summer. To direct travelers, the regional transportation network has mobilized 19,000 purple-vested helpers, a ubiquitous presence in the stations and on platforms.
And then there’s a reason that’s quite unusual. Paris is working with navigation apps like Google Maps and Apple Maps to direct travelers away from the fastest routes.
AppleVis is shutting down. The site has been a crucial resource for blind and visually-impaired Apple users since iOS accessibility was new, though it’s always covered all Apple platforms. It’s a news site, an informed but opinionated blog, a place to track OS releases and their accessibility features, an accessible app directory, and a lively community forum. AppleVis has long served newer Apple users along with those of us who own the moniker “power user.”
In a post on the site on Saturday, AppleVis founder David Goodwin said he is no longer able to keep the all-volunteer project going.
Whether I'm working, imagining, or even crocheting, Freeform has me covered with everything I need to focus on and manage my ideas.
Unread by Golden Hill Software has long been an excellent and elegant RSS client for iOS and iPadOS. Today, it arrives on macOS with version 4.0. While I have been exploring new ways to keep up with my favorite feeds as the web enters its federated era, using Unread on the Mac hasn’t felt like a step backwards. Unread 4.0 is a fully native, fully-featured app built using AppKit and SwiftUI that feels modern and performs incredibly quickly.
The BeeStation’s best feature is how it makes good backup habits automatic. Within a couple of weeks of setting it up, I had both my and my spouse’s Drive and Dropbox accounts synced and regularly backed up; my older music, movie, and miscellaneous files stashed away; and our photos regularly backed up from our phones. All this was then backed up to Synology’s cloud servers every week (for an add-on cost), and everything was accessible remotely and on the local network.
South Korea is the only country where Find My does not work, which has led online petitioners to accuse the US firm of discrimination against the country.
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“There are no regulations restricting the Find My service under the current Location Information Act,” a Korea Communications Commission official said. “Similar services are already available here, as the operators have completed the registration process with the agency.”
The film’s scenes were given a sepia tint in post-production, seemingly to depict Thailand as it was 30-50 years ago.
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Critics pointed out other negative portrayals, such as an airport depicted in poor condition, with outdated luggage carousels and buildings, and a taxi driver with long hair in an untidy uniform.
Hundreds of websites trying to block the AI company Anthropic from scraping their content are blocking the wrong bots, seemingly because they are copy/pasting outdated instructions to their robots.txt files, and because companies are constantly launching new AI crawler bots with different names that will only be blocked if website owners update their robots.txt.
In particular, these sites are blocking two bots no longer used by the company, while unknowingly leaving Anthropic’s real (and new) scraper bot unblocked.
I like the idea of being more ruthless. I could start to be intentional about my digital archive. I could prune and delete. I could dump data into a so-called “second-brain app” designed as external memory for everything from texts to to-do lists. But Note, the archivist, assured me that I was not an idiot for failing to find a good way to organize my digital attic; as of now, there isn’t one. For institutions, there are powerful preservation solutions, “but it requires a lot of labor and a lot of resources”, she said. “It just hasn’t trickled down to personal digital archiving. I think eventually it will, but right now there’s not some solution out there that exists that people just aren’t aware of.”
Today I learnt a new iOS gesture that is probably around since iPhone X: to quickly get back to the first page of your home screen while you are at some other pages further to the right, swipe up from the bottom as if you are in an app and are trying to get back to the home screen.
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A lengthy iCloud Private Relay outage was finally resolved on Sunday morning, according to Apple’s status page – but problems with XCode Cloud remain.
Many users had to disable iCloud Private Relay when the service became slow or completely unusable, with Safari unable to display websites.
The company is planning to begin rolling out Apple Intelligence to customers as part of software updates coming by October, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That means the AI features will arrive a few weeks after the initial iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 releases planned for September, said the people, who declined to be identified discussing unannounced release details.
[...]
The release plan for Apple Intelligence presents the possibility that the first iPhone 16 models shipped to consumers this year will lack the new AI features and require a software update weeks later.
Hé Tongxue, one of the top creators on Bilibili (youth-centric top video site in China), explores music creation and storm chasing with two student creators while enjoying “paomian” (instant noodles). Paomian is a staple in Chinese student life, providing quick meals during countless nights of studying. Just as Mac powers students’ explorations, “paomian” fuels their journeys in college.
As these creators explore beyond traditional paths, the film, shot entirely on iPhone 15 Pro, gives insights into how they manage to do it all on Mac.
Apple has held talks with the UK’s TV ratings body in the latest sign that the tech giant is planning to introduce adverts on its streaming service.
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Barb, which is jointly owned by broadcasters including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky, provides official viewing data for British TV.
Well, we do know that Apple is doing advertisement in their sports programmes, so perhaps this is what they are discussing in the UK? As far as I can tell, the current programming on Apple TV+ doesn't have any natural points where advertisements can be inserted?
I am (still) watching the latest season of The Bear. Even though my subscription doesn't have advertisements, there are still ad-breaks in the episodes that I've watched, where there is a less-than-one-second no-visual no-sound black screen. Which is so jarring.
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In recent weeks we’ve begun to see signs that that moment may be approaching. The technology is being commoditised. The AI companies have started to release smaller and (allegedly) cheaper LLMs. They won’t admit this, of course, but that may have something to do with the way the energy costs of the technology are ballooning. The industry’s irrational boosterism cuts little ice with economists. And while millions of people have tried ChatGPT and its peers, most of them haven’t displayed enduring interest. Virtually every large company on the planet has had an AI “pilot” project or two, but few of them seem to have made it into actual deployment. So could it be that this sensation du jour is about to get boring? A bit like the latest shiny smartphone, in fact.
The end of the world just got a little closer. Apple confirmed that the much-anticipated second season of its postapocalyptic series Silo will start streaming on November 15th.
Now, podcasting is turning into an industry of megastars who command the most money and the biggest audiences. There are still nearly 450,000 active shows that have published recent episodes, according to Podcast Industry Insights. But the top 25 podcasts reach nearly half of U.S. weekly listeners, according to Edison Research. The top talents have tours, merchandise and multiyear deals in the nine figures. Big advertisers want in.
I am glad that anyone can still make a podcast, even if they are not making all the money. And I am glad I can listen to these podcasts.
My concern is not about podcasts not getting made. My concern is about I not getting to find out podcasts that I will enjoy.
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At Aspen, Jobs wasn’t bothered by the specter of unintended consequences. When an audience member asked him about privacy violations—another headache caused by pervasive digital tech—he shrugged off the question. “I haven’t heard a ton of issues concerning these giant databases knowing everything about us that had much substance to them,” he said. “The thing I’m most concerned with is the ability to turn all this stuff into something we can do something about.”
Eventually Jobs came to recognize the double-edged nature of computer tech, and tried to shape Apple as a champion of privacy. But his early apparent naivety is one of the startling aspects of this speech. Just as digital tech was finding its way, so was Steve Jobs. Technology historian Leslie Berlin, executive director of the archive, says revealing that was a big reason for the exhibit. “It shows Steve very young, with so many of the elements that made him great, and also still figuring things out,” she says. “We felt this talk could really resonate with that stage of people's lives where they’re working outside the main lanes, trying to pull together things that haven’t been pulled together in exactly this way before.”
The company says that artists can now see “when and where” their music is being played on radio stations around the world.
The Pixelmator Team has issued Pixelmator Pro 3.6.5 with extended RAW image support. You can now open and edit RAW images from more than 20 new camera models, including the Nikon Z 6 III, Olympus E-M1 Mark II, and the newly released Fujifilm X-T50 cameras.
Apple Inc. has reached a tentative collective bargaining agreement with retail employees in Maryland, the International Association of Machinists said Friday, a first for the company’s US stores.
The deal is subject to approval by the roughly 85 employees in the bargaining unit, who are slated to vote on it Aug. 6. The agreement includes rules about scheduling, severance, and sub-contracting, and requires that any discipline not be “arbitrary, capricious or without merit,” an IAM spokesperson said. The three-year deal will increase pay by an average of 10% and maintains the status quo on healthcare, retirement, and staffing, according to the union.
But despite these features and its widespread use, one area Homebrew has always lacked is the ability to work well with teams of users. This is where Workbrew, a company Mike founded with two other Homebrew maintainers, steps in.
We need deep complexity in our technological systems, and that will require changes in the market. Right now, the market incentives in tech are to focus on how things succeed: A company like CrowdStrike provides a key service that checks off required functionality on a compliance checklist, which makes it all about the features that they will deliver when everything is working. That’s exactly backward. We want our technological infrastructure to mimic nature in the way things fail. That will give us deep complexity rather than just surface complexity, and resilience rather than brittleness.
How do we accomplish this? There are examples in the technology world, but they are piecemeal. Netflix is famous for its Chaos Monkey tool, which intentionally causes failures to force the systems (and, really, the engineers) to be more resilient. The incentives don’t line up in the short term: It makes it harder for Netflix engineers to do their jobs and more expensive for them to run their systems. Over years, this kind of testing generates more stable systems. But it requires corporate leadership with foresight and a willingness to spend in the short term for possible long-term benefits.
I find the Paris Olympics opening ceremony to be elegant and effortless -- even though it is also obvious a lot of effort has been put into it. Too bad about the rain, though.
And now, let's see how many other ceremonies are moving out of the stadium in the coming years.
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Apple Inc. is the latest company to agree to a set of voluntary safeguards for artificial intelligence crafted by President Joe Biden’s administration as it tries to guide the development of the emerging technology and encourage firms to protect consumers.
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The principles call for companies to transparently share the results of those tests with governments, civil society and academia — and to report any vulnerabilities.
This Friday, July 26, the men’s soccer Leagues Cup kicks off. Apple’s MLS Season Pass is the only place where fans can watch every match. Apple is also prepping a coordinated Leagues Cup celebration across Apple Music, Podcasts, Maps, and more.
You can think of ProNotes as an app that doesn't do anything independently, but one that adds power-user features to Notes. The improvements here are so good that it basically turns Notes into a full-on word processor.
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence today penned a blog post on the Sonos website apologizing for the controversial Sonos app redesign and promising ongoing updates throughout the year.
Epic Games plans to bring Fortnite to the third-party iOS app store AltStore PAL, which is only available in the EU. The company made the announcement in a Thursday blog post about its strategy for mobile stores, and it says it expects to announce support for “at least two other third-party stores soon.”
I was having weird dreams last night. The only one I can remember now is that I was spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to spell entrepreneur.
I have no idea now why I needed to spell entrepreneur.
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Maps on the web is currently available in English, and is compatible with Safari and Chrome on Mac and iPad, as well as Chrome and Edge on Windows PCs. Support for additional languages, browsers, and platforms will be expanded over time.
Apple Maps on the web seems to be rather limited so far. The web app supports panning and zooming on the map, searching and tapping on locations, looking up directions, and browsing curated guides. However, it isn’t currently possible to tilt the map to view 3D building models or terrain elevation, and directions are limited to Driving and Walking. Look Around (Apple’s equivalent to Google Street View) is also not available on the web yet, but Apple says the feature will arrive in the coming months.
I’m not about to wax poetic about all of the ways using wired headphones in 2024 “changes everything” like a clickbaity YouTube video, but I will say that the proliferation of USB-C on pretty much every device is slowly returning the EarPods to their once-ubiquitous days of the 3.5mm jack. Yes I’m using them on my iPhone when I’m commuting, doing chores around the house, meditating, and what-have-you — but being able to plug them into my gaming devices, laptop, and tablet does in some ways feel like a return to form when it comes to ease of use.
For me, at least, being more curious about plant life is as revelatory and expansive as learning a language. It’s a restful and proactive way to be in the world: when I look closely at a flower’s hidden geometry or brush through overhanging fronds, I feel appreciative and grounded.
The first batch of third-party apps are making their way onto AltStore PAL, just over three months after the alternative iOS app marketplace first launched in the EU. Three out of the four apps being released today are exclusive to AltStore PAL and can’t be found on Apple’s official iOS App Store. The apps developed by people other than AltStore PAL co-creator Riley Testut include two torrenting apps and a social discovery app for dating.
Apple Intelligence is still not available as of the fourth developer beta of iOS 18 this week, leading some to wonder if the features have been delayed. However, we have confirmed that Apple still plans to add some of the new Apple Intelligence features to an upcoming beta this summer. In other words, developers will be able to test the first Apple Intelligence features at some point before iOS 18 is widely released to the public.
Sunny, a new sci-fi dramedy on Apple TV Plus, is different from most visions of the future — mainly because it barely has any screens. Instead, the show imagines a time when technology is more seamlessly integrated into our lives. Phones rely primarily on audio, friendly robots help around the house, and computer monitors look like they’re made of paper. For showrunner Katie Robbins and the rest of the production crew, designing Sunny became an opportunity to do something different in the realm of science fiction.
The losses were driven by major firms including Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple and Tesla.
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"Investors are now becoming more concerned about all this expenditure with AI without the revenue benefit," said Jun Bei Liu, Portfolio Manager at Tribeca Investment Partners.
It has been twelve years since the unveiling of Apple Maps, apology by Tim Cook, and departure of Scott Forstall, and it has always been a native-app-only experience.
So, Apple Maps on the web -- why now? Is it a slow-and-steady thing, or a better-late-than-never thing, or something else completely different?
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Across the internet, nearly a decade's worth of posts, comments, and blogs lament Duolingo's brusque bedside manner, which one Redditor half-jokingly described as an attempt at emotional blackmail to spur reengagement. The nagging goes beyond email subject lines and push notifications; inactive users might look down at their phones to find that the Duolingo app icon suddenly depicts a sadder and older version of the owl's face — or one that's melting into a carnivalesque nightmare. Parents have even complained that the capricious owl is attacking their children's brains and making them cry. Though it's widely accepted that Duolingo can be a real jerk, some have gone so far as to suggest the company's manipulative messaging is flat-out unethical.
For Duolingo, though, the relentless nagging seems to be a boon to its bottom line. Following the first quarter of 2024, the company reported 54% year-over-year growth in daily active users (to over 31 million), 45% growth in revenue, and record profitability. Not too shabby for an app whose affect has been described as "psychotic," "unhinged," and "abusive" — attributes that, if anything, the company appears to be leaning into. Haters may hate Duolingo's scolding, but more often than not, the company's largely under-30 user base laps it up. Love him or loathe him, the owl's got rizz.
The people gathered this late June evening are total strangers, matched through the app Timeleft. After answering a lengthy questionnaire about their personality, identity and dining preferences, participants are algorithmically matched with five others in their city for dinner on a Wednesday night, the restaurant kept a secret until that morning. There are no expectations, but a chance for connections to develop organically.
Apple is rolling out a new Environment for Apple Vision Pro today. The new Lake Vrangla Environment transports Vision Pro users to Norway. It’s available for all Vision Pro users starting today, rolling out as an over-the-air download.
Kino, the professional-level video recording app for iPhone from the makers of Halide, is getting its first major update that includes more color grades, toggle-able tap-to-focus, and an overhauled new user experience that makes the app a lot easier to understand.
The CNMC, as the regulator is known, said that Apple may have imposed unequal commercial conditions on developers of mobile applications sold at its app marketplace.
The practices could be considered a very serious violation of competition law and could carry a fine worth as much as 10% of the company's global revenues, the regulator said in a statement.
Ten percent, ten percent there, pretty soon, it may make more sense to Apple for the iPhone to become a real 'game console', and only invited 'partners' are invited to be third-party developers. Just like how mobile phones work before the iPhone.
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So, if you take Microsoft spokesperson’s comments at face value without judgment, it only reinforces my ongoing arguments that today’s regulators are so woefully out of touch with actual technology and how it all works. They not only fail to understand how it all works, but they can’t even contemplate unintended consequences of their regulations. These regulations are more political theater than doing actual good for consumers.
If Microsoft could have restricted kernel access in the way Apple does, it is much less likely this precise catastrophic failure by a third-party company would have occurred. But it is beside the point. It seems it could have done so at any time if it did not unfairly give its own security products elevated access. Left unexplored is why it has not done so.
The list features the most popular classical music albums that are streamed globally, combining five data sources from more than 165 countries. Top 100 comes from Apple Music Classical streams, Apple Music streams, iTunes downloads, iTunes song sales, and Shazam tags.
Apple says the update brings more data for MLB games and improved support for following along live with the League Cup.
Eastgate Systems has released version 10 of its Tinderbox note-taking assistant, introducing the new dynamic Gaudí view that continuously adapts the shape and placement of each note to keep more notes in sight.
Through it, you get to manipulate a document’s content by adding or removing any elements, protecting the file with a password, shrinking its size, etc. So, for many users, there’s not much to ask for beyond these core functionalities. It should meet (and, in some cases, exceed) the general expectations.
“We have a great relationship with Apple,” he said. “As much as I love their products, there’s a reason that ironically is very consistent with Apple ethos for us to want to control the ecosystem.” CarPlay isn’t “consistent with how we think about really creating a pure product experience,” Scaringe said.
One example given by Scaringe includes CarPlay’s inability to “leverage other parts of the vehicle experience,” which would require Rivian customers to leave the app in order to do things like open the vehicle’s front trunk. “We’ve taken the view of the digital experience in the vehicle wants to feel consistent and holistically harmonious across every touchpoint,” said Scaringe.
In a surprise move Google has abandoned a plan to block third-party cookies from its Chrome internet browser.
The idea was first announced four years ago, but after a series of delays it has now been cancelled entirely.
We are still living in the aftermath of the browser war of the 1990s. If we know what we know now, all these cookies and javascript and stuff will be designed quite differently.
(Thankfully, we no longer have Blinks and Marquees.)
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Apple’s road from kexts to System Extensions has been long, controversial, and only succeeded when Apple silicon Macs couldn’t use kexts without being run at Reduced Security. The devastation wrought by the CrowdStrike bug is vindication for all the pain that deprecation brought.
Where macOS remains at risk is with Apple’s own updates.
Based on interviews with more than a dozen people, including former employees, current employees and business partners, Apple services boss Eddy Cue has been having regular meetings with studio chiefs Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht to go over budgets, pushing them to exert more control over spending on projects. Van Amburg and Erlicht have told some of their top creative partners that they want to change their reputation as the biggest spender in town, according to these people.
Apple doesn’t buy the most projects in Hollywood — that is still Netflix. But it splurges on individual titles. The studio spent more than $500 million combined on movies from directors Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and Matthew Vaughn, and upward of $250 million on the World War II miniseries Masters of the Air, one of more than a dozen new series released this year.
Just like the Dynamic Island, NotchNook expands out from the notch, revealing a “Nook” with basic media controls (sort of like Live Activities in iOS) and other customizable widgets. Then there’s a “Tray” tab that you can drop files or apps into; it’s similar to the macOS dock, except that the tray empties when you quit NotchNook.
You may not realize it, but your iPhone is a far more powerful gaming device than you think. It can handle more than your typical mobile games. Here's how I use my iPhone as my primary gaming device and how you can make the switch too.
All US-based tech companies are obligated to report all cases of CSAM they detect on their platforms to NCMEC. The Virginia-headquartered organization acts as a clearinghouse for reports of child abuse from around the world, viewing them and sending them to the relevant law enforcement agencies. iMessage is an encrypted messaging service, meaning Apple is unable to see the contents of users’ messages, but so is Meta’s WhatsApp, which made roughly 1.4m reports of suspected CSAM to NCMEC in 2023.
“There is a concerning discrepancy between the number of UK child abuse image crimes taking place on Apple’s services and the almost negligible number of global reports of abuse content they make to authorities,” said Richard Collard, head of child safety online policy at the NSPCC. “Apple is clearly behind many of their peers in tackling child sexual abuse when all tech firms should be investing in safety and preparing for the roll out of the Online Safety Act in the UK.”
I am going to assume that Apple has better QA than CrowdStrike when it comes to pushing updates and data files. And I am gong to assume, perhaps with a little less confidence, that Microsoft should be able to push through a similar deprecation exercise just like Apple did. I don't think the EU will object too much.
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In 2020, Apple told developers that its MacOS operating system would no longer grant them kernel-level access.
That change was a pain for Apple’s partners, but it also meant that a blue screen-style problem couldn’t happen on Macs, said Patrick Wardle, the chief executive of Mac security maker DoubleYou.
[...]
A Microsoft spokesman said it cannot legally wall off its operating system in the same way Apple does because of an understanding it reached with the European Commission following a complaint. In 2009, Microsoft agreed it would give makers of security software the same level of access to Windows that Microsoft gets.
Building a modern enterprise API for endpoint detection was not easy, and the entire industry had to transition with them. Apple’s framework is how it should be done. An endpoint security tool should not be able to crash a system to the point where it’s unusable.
The new partners are Aspen Music Festival, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Hong Kong Philharmonic, and the Verbier Festival. Subscribers have access to exclusive playlists related to a partner’s programming. These playlists and new albums can be found on the app’s page dedicated to each partner.
Recent updates added a new “Enhance Audio” feature and better multiplayer support, joining other key updates over the last few weeks.
How smug can Mac users be this week, knowing that the EU is also knocking on Apple's door?
:-)
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As brands activate their Olympic sponsorships with ads featuring athletes competing in Paris 2024, Apple is looking toward the future of the Games with the latest entry in its long-running “Shot on iPhone” campaign.
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The series includes a 6-year-old Indian striker who was named the best player at the 2024 PPJ Sari Cup in Helsinki and a 6-year-old golfer who was the youngest player in the 2023 Singapore Junior Development Tour tournament.
Apple this week updated the Apple Maps app in Paris in preparation for the 2024 Summer Olympics, which are set to begin on Friday, July 26. All permanent venues, such as the Parc de Princes and Centre Aquatique Olympique, are displayed as custom, hand-built 3D landmarks.
A sense of competition can be similarly disruptive. When we engage in social comparison and fear the judgment of others, Christensen says, we create a “really stressful state for the body and brain to be in, and that will not be conducive to flow”. Taking small steps – and celebrating our progress without looking for others’ validation – will be much more likely to increase our engagement over the long term. They say that slow and steady wins the race – but, if we are to feel flow, we need to avoid a sense of rivalry altogether. “The process is what matters,” says Christensen.
She is adamant that we can all build our ability to enter the flow state. “It’s a skill – you can learn it.” She believes that her own quest to find flow has led to something of a personal transformation. “I have photos from before and after, and I can see the difference,” she says. “I became a new me through this.”
It doesn’t take a distinguished physicist with a literary hinterland to see that right now Google search looks both deeply vulnerable and totally unstoppable. How can we be sure the company really has our interests at heart? And can we still trust it to tell us the truth?
Good luck to all Olympians. May there be no CrowdStrike updates in the next few weeks.
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Starting this week, Apple is releasing all-new series and films captured in Apple Immersive Video that will debut exclusively on Apple Vision Pro. Apple Immersive Video is a remarkable storytelling format that leverages 3D video recorded in 8K with a 180-degree field of view and Spatial Audio to transport viewers to the center of the action.
Apple TV+ has carved a niche for itself with strong original programming, and while it's still far behind the likes of Netflix in terms of subscribers, it has seen a fairly strong initial run. To build on that, Apple is talking with major studios about ways to complement its slate of original programming with films from other companies in order to expand and extend the service's appeal.
That's according to Bloomberg reporters Lucas Shaw and Thomas Buckley, who cite people familiar with Apple's workings. Those sources say Apple is "having discussions" with more than one large film studio about bringing more movies to the service.
The statement says that Figma “carefully reviewed” the Make Designs’ underlying design systems during development and as part of a private beta. “But in the week leading up to Config, new components and example screens were added that we simply didn’t vet carefully enough,” writes Noah Levin, Figma VP of product design. “A few of those assets were similar to aspects of real world applications, and appeared in the output of the feature with certain prompts.”
It’s being described as the biggest outage ever, and while there have been a few lately, it’s certainly hard to recall something that has taken out as many services and companies across the world as this one has. I stopped updating my list of brands reporting issues within an hour of starting it because there were simply so many names to keep track of.
You may never have heard of the anti-virus firm Crowdstrike before but something it did to its virus scanner Falcon had a very adverse effect on computers running Windows software – in their millions.
I am thankful I am not flying today. I am also thankful I don't have to abandon working-from-home and trot back to office to boot machines into safe modes, one by one.
But, like many other people, I suspect, I will have to re-read a lot of planning documents to see if there are changes needed.
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According to Apple, OpenELM was created only for research purposes, not for use to power any of its Apple Intelligence features. The model was published open-source and is widely available, including on Apple’s Machine Learning Research website.
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Apple also tells me that it has no plans to build any new versions of the OpenELM model.
Cellebrite, the well-known mobile forensics company, was unable to unlock a sizable chunk of modern iPhones available on the market as of April 2024, according to leaked documents verified by 404 Media.
[...]
For all locked iPhones able to run 17.4 or newer, the Cellebrite document says “In Research,” meaning they cannot necessarily be unlocked with Cellebrite’s tools. For previous iterations of iOS 17, stretching from 17.1 to 17.3.1, Cellebrite says it does support the iPhone XR and iPhone 11 series. Specifically, the document says Cellebrite recently added support to those models for its Supersonic BF [brute force] capability, which claims to gain access to phones quickly. But for the iPhone 12 and up running those operating systems, Cellebrite says support is “Coming soon.”
In many ways, this year’s Emmys are in a strange position. From the fact that we already had one Emmy ceremony this year (2023’s celebration took place in January of this year following last summer and fall’s duel strikes) to the omission of major players like the now-ended Succession or the ineligible House of the Dragon and The Last of Us, it was a toss-up to see who would step in to fill the vacuum left by many of our favorite shows.
Well, we now have the answer, and it’s slightly surprising: aside from FX’s record-breaking 25 nominations for Shōgun and 23 nominations for The Bear, the often-underrated Apple TV+ also dominates the major categories this year, with everything from the star-studded The Morning Show to under-the-radar favorite Loot to the limited series triumph Lessons in Chemistry.
“It has been an immensely rewarding morning to witness so many talented artists recognized with Emmy nominations across such an extraordinary number of categories,” said Zack Van Amburg, Apple’s head of Worldwide Video. “Everyone at Apple is profoundly appreciative to the Television Academy, and we send our congratulations to all of the nominees.”
Apple today shared a humorous new video on its YouTube channel that dramatizes many of the uses of Apple devices, including its Apple Vision Pro spatial computing device.
Microsoft Designer lets you use templates to create custom images, stickers, greeting cards, invitations, and more. Designer can also use AI to edit images and restyle them or create collages of images.
But with an arrow pointing directly to my destination, I can make more efficient route choices even in meandering mode. Even better, by trying to follow the arrow as directly as possible, I get to explore routes I’ve never cycled even on journeys where I thought I’d pretty much explored all the possible variations.
Cuppa is how I wish every app experience was: free of ads, free of corporate tracking, and built to just get out of the way and let you do what you got the app to do. There are robust customization settings enthusiasts like me can tweak, but the defaults will likely serve you well.
All of the effort spent pushing Apple to support RCS would have been better spent pushing Apple to ship iMessage for Android. And without a supported iMessage client for Android, that role ought to go to WhatsApp, not RCS. WhatsApp is free, secure, and works equally well on all phones.
Meta knows this, and clearly smells the opportunity. Does Apple?
This week, I am reminded of this essay by Joel Spolsky, about developers choosing to rewrite an entire application from scratch, and thus damaging the product by having no new features and enhancements while introducing regressions and bugs.
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Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps, Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda told Axios.
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The deal is also a recognition from Apple that growing its ad business will require a serious sales operation — one that, if Apple doesn't build internally, will need to be outsourced.
For over a decade, I have been critical of Taboola (and its one time rival, Outbrain), equating them to the internet’s venereal disease that never goes away. No way I want to pay to let Taboola and its terrible advertising re-enter my information streams.
Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its commitment to privacy.
After updating, you’ll see a redesigned navigation bar at the bottom with For You, Products, Go Further, Search, and Bag. The new Go Further tab, for example, is meant to show you information about the products you already own and how to use them.
Sales tax holidays provide a limited-time opportunity to purchase select Apple products online or in stores without paying sales tax. Eligible products and price limits vary from state to state, with complete details outlined on Apple's website.
Apple today shared a new privacy-focused Safari ad, which is designed to highlight the ways that Safari protects user privacy compared to other browsers.
Apple's Beats brand has done a number of collaborations over the years with fashion designers, artists, and even Disney, and the latest partnership is with Minecraft for special-edition Beats Solo 4 headphones in recognition of the game's 15th anniversary.
By relentlessly highlighting everyday use cases, Apple has managed to wrangle the more hysterical promises of AI into something approachable (and monetizable) inside its ecosystem.
New data shows that Resident Evil 7, which was recently ported to iOS devices, was purchased and downloaded by less than 2,000 players, yet another example of big games failing to succeed on Apple’s powerful portable devices.
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These AAA games were designed to be played for hours and hours, often in a comfy chair or couch, with a controller or keyboard and a big screen. And that’s just not the experience you get with a phone.
Apple is teaming up with the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund, Sobrato Philanthropies, and Destination: Home — all experts in affordable housing development — to launch the new Bay Area Housing Innovation Fund. This fund, which will make targeted, favorable loans to advance affordable housing development, is part of Apple’s broader $2.5 billion commitment to address housing affordability in communities across California.
Can Apple be considered to be serious about something it outsources?
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If I made an appointment for a delivery to arrive between certain hours on a day, and the delivery arrived before the agreed-upon hours, but I am at the location anyway at that hour to receive that delivery... do I have anything to complain about? (Honestly, I am having mixed feelings.)
:-)
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Our investigation found that subtitles from 173,536 YouTube videos, siphoned from more than 48,000 channels, were used by Silicon Valley heavyweights, including Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple, and Salesforce.
The dataset, called YouTube Subtitles, contains video transcripts from educational and online learning channels like Khan Academy, MIT, and Harvard. The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the BBC also had their videos used to train AI, as did The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, and Jimmy Kimmel Live.
You can now download the public betas for iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and watchOS 11. Apple’s updated operating systems will eventually include Apple Intelligence AI features and a better Siri — if you have the right device, that is. For now, the betas will bring less exciting but still useful features to the various Apple devices.
From the app’s main screen to playlist and podcast pages, show notes, chapters, and search, this new version of Overcast looks completely modern, and it feels fast. But at the same time, the app remains true to itself and retains a familiar look, with no drastic visual changes that would disorient its long-time users.
AgileBits has issued 1Password 8.10.36, adding support for generating QR codes for Wi-Fi networks.
St. Clair Software has issued Default Folder X 6.0.8, bringing support for adding URLs as Favorites and opening them in your default Web browser.
British regulators said on Monday they were looking into the soaring use of digital wallets offered by Big Tech firms, including whether there are any competition, consumer protection or market integrity concerns.
The Financial Conduct Authority and Payments Systems Regulator is seeking views on the benefits and risks, and will assess the impact digital wallets, such as Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal, have on competition and choice of payment options at checkout, among other things.
So, er.... Apple Intelligence will be able to do a monologue every night?
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You can now order the HomePod mini in a new Midnight colorway. This joins the previous collection of White, Blue, Yellow, and Orange color options. The very similar ‘space gray’ color option has been replaced by the new Midnight option.
The difference between the space gray HomePod mini and the new midnight color is very slight, with midnight having a slightly bluer tone. To an untrained eye, though, both are ‘black’.
But getting the files off the drive is just the first step: Then you have to open them, and leave them in a state that will be openable for decades to come. It's a job that's given Stuchell a reason to think about strategies for keeping documents around as long as possible. I asked him what those of us who aren't professional archivists should do to ensure our files last decades.
Apps outdoors can be superfluous. I like being phone-less when I can. But sometimes it’s nice learning about nature while in it. Below are the apps I’ve found most useful.
So, no new iPhone colors for the spring, but a new HomePod mini color for the summer.
Or is that just a new color name?
:-)
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It seemed like the simplest of things — the sound of her own voice. But Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.) “cried happy tears” recently when she typed out some words and heard them read aloud by an artificial intelligence-generated version of the speaking voice she has all but lost to a degenerative medical condition.
“My new — old — AI voice,” she called it in a recent video introducing the voice to her constituents.
Apple has approved UTM SE, an app for emulating a computer to run classic software and games, weeks after the company rejected it and barred it from being notarized for third-party app stores in the European Union. The app is now available for free for iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS.
These advergames (adverts presented in the format of a video game), typically splash corporate branding over a set of game mechanics simple enough for Roblox’s young player base. And despite broader allegations of a lack of child safeguarding levelled against Roblox (which they deny), corporates are rushing to build them. Brands from Walmart to Wimbledon, McDonald’s to Gucci, Nike to the BBC have all launched advergames on the platform. Some have been visited hundreds of thousands of times, others tens of millions, all while Roblox courts further brand involvement by touting its huge, young user base as a big draw in a crowded advertising market.
The Verbier Festival and Apple Music Classical will offer subscribers exclusive playlists from VF Gold, the Festival’s musical programming, artists and more, in a dedicated space on the app that will be regularly updated.
Bear, an Apple-exclusive note-taking app, easily stands out due to its aesthetics, customization options, robust note organization, and affordable pricing. It strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and functionality, and doesn’t require a masterclass to get started.
The latest update is a major one, not only bringing a version of the emulator that’s optimized for iPad, but also seamless switching between iPhone and iPad, some improvements to DS compatibility, new skins and menu button gestures, and a new logo.
The model was helpful—but only to an extent. They found that while AI improved the output of less creative writers, it made little difference to the quality of the stories produced by writers who were already creative. The stories in which AI had played a part were also more similar to each other than those dreamed up entirely by humans.
The research adds to the growing body of work investigating how generative AI affects human creativity, suggesting that although access to AI can offer a creative boost to an individual, it reduces creativity in the aggregate.
Universities are in a race for relevance in the field of generative AI as private companies, loaded with talent and pricey chips, drive the conversation.
Outspent by Silicon Valley, some are turning their research focus to less computing-power intensive areas of artificial intelligence, even as they seek to build additional computing resources capable of powering bigger models.
I just remember that I have stopped using the Apple Music Classical app. I am using the regular Apple Music app for both of my classical and non-classical music entertainment needs. Perhaps I missed the advantage of using the Apple Music Classical app, or Apple hasn't worked hard enough to differentiate them?
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"Well, the fun part of the job is putting all the incredibly brilliant and talented people who work for Apple to also work on behalf of the planet. We don't just want to make the best products in the world, they need to be the best planets for the world as well," Lisa says proudly.
"My team is quite small and we call on people throughout the company to step up and help us figure out the challenges that we might be dealing with. For example, mechanical and metallurgical engineers are thinking about recycled materials. They evaluate how we can make our products from recycled materials so we can spare the environmental burden of having to mine material out of the earth.
Apple and Meta are the two big players but VR is a crowded market - there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of different headsets already out there.
But what unites them all is none have quite hit the mainstream.
An investigation by India's antitrust body has found that Apple exploited its dominant position in the market for app stores on its iOS operating system, engaging "in abusive conduct and practices", a confidential report seen by Reuters showed.
U.S. phone giant AT&T confirmed Friday it will begin notifying millions of consumers about a fresh data breach that allowed cybercriminals to steal the phone records of “nearly all” of its customers, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.
In a statement, AT&T said that the stolen data contains phone numbers of both cellular and landline customers, as well as AT&T records of calls and text messages — such as who contacted who by phone or text — during a six-month period between May 1, 2022 and October 31, 2022.
Sandvik said it’s more concerning for higher-risk individuals affected by the breach. “Some may consider changing their numbers and using a different provider, but it just really depends on the circumstances.” Higher-risk individuals can also include those who have a reason to shield their identity, such as survivors of domestic abuse.
Sandvik also said that using encrypted chat apps — like Signal, which doesn’t hold the type of metadata AT&T just lost; and WhatsApp — could be better for security because these companies have a better track record of protecting user data.
Several times a day, Francesca Simon, the author of the Horrid Henry children’s books, gets out her phone to check the weather – not just for where she is, but where friends and family live, where she has been on holiday, where she was brought up.
“I love weather apps. I find them quite magical,” she said. With about 10 locations logged, her friends make fun of her “weather porn” habit. “If I don’t like what I’m seeing on one app, I’ll check another.”
Meteorological institutions record observations using a network of instruments and tend to share them freely, so most weather services start with roughly the same data. But differences arise in how each office analyses and models the data to produce a forecast, and the chaotic nature and complexity of the climate system means small changes can produce huge variation.
A good weather app may not brighten this so far lacklustre British summer, but it can help people prepare for drizzle or occasional sunshine. Here is our pick of the five best weather apps.
In the film, Cornejo goes on a journey to Mexico to seek inspiration from his roots for a new hit, and he ends up on a great adventure. His song "Intercambio Injusto" is included, and there is a soundtrack for the film available on Apple Music.
Apple’s public beta website confirms every platform that will be getting public beta releases soon, and the Vision Pro unfortunately isn’t among them.
Jessamyn West used to describe Metafilter as a social network for non-friends, a description belied in part by the tight-knit camaraderie that emerges in an online group of only a few thousand people. West herself is an example: She met her partner on the site. She also describes the Metafilter cohort as “a community of old Web nerds.”
This month, the venerated site celebrates its 25th anniversary. It’s amazing it has lasted that long; it made it this far in great part thanks to West, who helped stabilize it after a near-death spiral. You could say it’s the site that time forgot—certainly I’d forgotten about it until I decided to mark its big birthday. Metafilter is a kind of digital Brigadoon; visiting it is like a form of time travel. To people who have been around a while, Metafilter seems to preserve in amber the spirit of what online used to be like. The feed is strictly chronological. It’s still text-only. Some members may be influential on Metafilter, but they don’t call themselves influencers, and they don’t sell personally branded cosmetics or garments. As founder Matt Haughey, who stepped down in 2017, says, "It's a weird throwback thing—like a cockroach that survived.”
Here's wishing MetaFilter many more 25 years.
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“And so the ability for me to get in the position that I want to get in – including lying flat and putting the screen on the ceiling – is an incredible kind of experience.
“And of course, it's a 100ft screen. I mean, it's amazing the level of entertainment that it delivers.
Gentler Streak is a different kind of fitness tracker. In fact, to hear cofounder and CEO Katarina Lotrič tell it, it’s not really a fitness tracker at all.
“We think of it more as a lifestyle app,” says Lotrič, from the team’s home office in Kranj, Slovenia. “We want it to feel like a compass, a reminder to get moving, no matter what that means for you,” she says.
There are four different new ads starring the Beats Pill Dudes currently airing. One of them makes fun of the new Beats Pill generation by calling the Dude characters “Nepo Babies.” Other ads promote features such as the 24-hour battery life and water resistance.
Under the new partnership between Shazam and Ticketmaster, artists will be able to link their live events directly in the Shazam app, so that they appear whenever a user Shazams one of the artist’s tracks.
In the end, situations like this are just depressing because everyone other than the scammer suffers. Readers receive poor information, publications and authors lose traffic, and search engine reputations are damaged.
Apple won a ruling in California federal court on Thursday dismissing a proposed class action that accused the company of restricting technology used to build apps on the iPhone, causing consumers to pay more for their devices.
U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco said the plaintiffs did not have legal standing to pursue their antitrust claims for now that Apple made unlawful agreements with Google and other browser makers to block competing developer technology.
Apple says it must follow local laws in China, even those with which it disagrees, and that it is determined to remain engaged in China, a vital market. But Apple could be more transparent about China’s direct requests for app takedowns from the App Store. Right now, Apple lists the totals but does not say which apps China tried to remove. Casting some sunshine on this information would be a useful step toward fulfilling the company’s declared commitment to openness.
I wonder if Mr Tim Cook eats anything -- popcorn? seven almonds? -- while he watches Apple TV+ shows on his Vision Pro? Are his engineers working on food passthrough for Vision OS?
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What we have now is a safe subscription service that essentially curates the best of what other people have already discovered and (thankfully) strips out ads and microtransactions. That's a nice enough value proposition, especially for the price. But we're unlikely to see breakout hits on Arcade making waves among players, influencers, or the press because, for the most part, Apple is following the headlines with this service, not leading them.
Apple has issued a new round of threat notifications to iPhone users across 98 countries, warning them of potential mercenary spyware attacks. It’s the second such alert campaign from the company this year, following a similar notification sent to users in 92 nations in April.
Apple will open its tap-and-go mobile payments system to rivals, EU antitrust regulators said on Thursday, ending a four-year long investigation that could have resulted in a hefty fine for the iPhone maker.
[...]
Apple said its offer would give European developers an option to enable tap-and-go payments for car keys, closed loop transit, corporate badges, home keys, hotel keys, merchant loyalty/rewards, and event tickets from within their iOS apps.
The critically-acclaimed workplace thriller "Severance" returns to Apple TV+ early next year, according to a teaser video released today.
Apple said the 10-episode season will premiere on Friday, January 17, and then one episode will follow every Friday through March 21.
Apple and Google have teamed up to introduce a new data portability tool that lets users transfer their Google Photos collections straight to iCloud Photos. This follows the launch of a tool that lets you transfer iCloud Photos to Google Photos back in 2021.
Apple today adjusted its trade-in values for select devices in the United States, with several reductions in value going into effect across the iPhone 14 series, Apple Watch models, select Macs and iPads, and some Android smartphones.
The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles has notified digital ID holders that the state is in the process of finding a new vendor to support the program. The FLHSMV has informed users to delete their digital ID apps and revert to only using physical ID cards until a new (cheaper?) vendor is selected.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), along with two other international consumer protection networks, announced on Thursday the results of a study into the use of “dark patterns” — or manipulative design techniques — that can put users’ privacy at risk or push them to buy products or services or take other actions they otherwise wouldn’t have. In an analysis of 642 websites and apps offering subscription services, the study found that the majority (nearly 76%) used at least one dark pattern and nearly 67% used more than one.
Some day, I will need to rewatch the first season of Severance, as I probably have already forgotten half of the plot, and I guess I will need to pay attention to stuff in the second season for this show.
On the other hand, I just started watching Sunny on Apple TV+. No spoilers, but in the first episode, the lead character failed to do something in a room due to a lack of material, and I can't stop thinking whether she did do that something for the rest of the episode. I strongly suspect that is not what the writer wanted me to be thinking. :-)
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Microsoft has given up its seat as an observer on the board of OpenAI while Apple will not take up a similar position, amid growing scrutiny by global regulators of Big Tech’s investments in AI start-ups.
[...]
OpenAI would instead host regular meetings with partners such as Microsoft and Apple and investors Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures — part of “a new approach to informing and engaging key strategic partners” under Sarah Friar, the former Nextdoor boss who was hired as its first chief financial officer last month, an OpenAI spokesperson said.
Apple this month refreshed the security support document that provides iPhone, iPad, and Mac users with tips on how to recognize and avoid social engineering schemes like phishing messages and fake support calls.
The updated information follows recent reports of "smishing" attacks targeting Apple IDs. Malicious actors have been sending out SMS text messages that attempt to get users to provide their Apple ID usernames and passwords on a fake iCloud website.
The Vision Pro might often have been described as a virtual reality headset, and it’s not an entirely incorrect thing to call it, but it’s also not really that at all. Apple’s focus is on ensuring that this new era of spatial computing sits alongside the real world, rather than serving as an alternative to it.
Wayther lets you pick different routes and adjust your departure or arrival times to find the perfect window for a safe and fun trip. The idea behind the app is to get rid of the need to type in multiple locations into a weather app when planning a road trip and trying to determine when potentially bad weather might hit.
Disk Drill Pro shines with its strongest features, which revolve around reliable data recovery from a wide variety of devices. The price is a bit steep, but it is better than it was.
The popular Temple Run series will see a new release as the headliner with two more titles expanding the available games.
Mr Phil Schiller will now have more time to figure out what is the spirit of the law.
But seriously, this arrangement may be better. One can never truly predict the future -- especially if you are not privy to what went on in those Tim Cook meetings -- but Apple is probably going to be more of a competitor to OpenAI in the years ahead, and a seat on the board may spell trouble.
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Nevertheless, speaking as someone with over 34 years of publishing technical content on the Internet—nearly 16,000 TidBITS articles and hundreds of Take Control ebooks—I’m just not that bothered by all this. My overall opinions aren’t usually so divergent from my tech journalism peers, but since no one seems to be acknowledging that there are multiple sides to every issue, I want to explain why I’m largely unperturbed by AI and much of the hand-wringing that seems to permeate coverage of the field.
That’s not the only cost that is going up for Apple in particular: part of the implication of the “Core Technology Fee” model is that Apple has put forth a tremendous amount of engineering effort to accomodate its platform to the DMA specifically. Or, to put it another way, Apple has already forked iOS: there is one version for the E.U., and one version for the rest of the world. This too dramatically changes the calculus: yes, every E.U. user comes in at zero marginal cost, but not the E.U. as a whole: Apple isn’t just paying the expected value of future fines, but actual real costs in terms of engineering time and overall complexity.
In short, the E.U. either has or is about to cross a critical line in terms of overplaying its hand: yes, most of tech may have been annoyed by their regulations, but the economic value of having one code base for the entire world meant that everyone put up with it (including users outside of the E.U.); once that code base splits, though — as it recently did for Apple — the calculations of whether or not to even serve E.U. users becomes that much closer; dramatically increasing potential fines far beyond what the region is worth only exacerbates the issue.
The popular Affinity creative suite for Mac, iPad, and PC is out with an enticing offer today, half a year of free access to the software.
Hidden Bar is a free (that is, completely free, without in-app purchases) app that solves this. All you have to do is install it, and it hides all of your lesser-used menu bar icons behind a little arrow.
Scribble Journey is an art therapy and mental health app that aims to help users express and explore their emotions through art. On Monday, the startup launched a new feature for iOS devices that allows users to complete drawing activities in the app rather than sketching in a physical notebook at home.
Indie App Sales is back with excellent deals on apps from many of your favorite developers.
Are your Philips Hue smart light bulbs seemingly going rogue, randomly turning themselves up to full brightness even if you’ve set them dimmer? Philips Hue parent company Signify is aware of the issue, has figured out the root cause, and tells The Verge that a fix is coming as soon as next week.
If I tell you I am an AI, will anyone object to this little website?
(Actually, come to think of it, I am sure someone out there will object to this website even if I am not an AI.)
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When products such as the iPad launched, it took some time for business and education to follow the strong consumer trend towards the devices. But Cook reckons it could well be the opposite with Vision Pro.
With Australia in mind, Cook is quick to point out some Australian app developers working on Vision Pro, including Melbourne 3D augmented-reality modelling app Jigspace.
Both versions of the Series 10 — codenamed N217 and N218 — will get bigger screens. The change means Series 10 shoppers will be able to pick a screen that’s about as large as the one found on the Apple Watch Ultra. The Ultra itself, meanwhile, won’t get a major design change (but the current one only dates to 2022).
There will be other enhancements under the hood. Both the Series 10 and new Ultra 3 will get a new chip, which could lay the groundwork for some AI enhancements down the road. But if you’re hoping for the device to run Apple Intelligence — the upcoming suite of AI features — you should reset your expectations. For now, that service is only headed to the iPhone, iPad and Mac. Later, it will come to the Vision Pro, but there are no plans to bring the full initiative to the watch.
It doesn't matter whether you're visiting a new city or at home—sometimes you just want to take a walk, but you don't know where to go. A new, free iPhone app called Strolly is the perfect solution. Open the app and it will create three walking routes, usually a loop, near your current location: one short, one long, and one in between. You can flip between the routes and choose the one you like.
My point is, we don’t know. And one party, Apple, is barely commenting on the fracas, and the other, Epic, was just fined a quarter of a billion dollars for tricking users, including children, into making unwanted purchases.
I sure hope that Apple is not all into the bigger screen equals better products. There are many people, I think, who will prefer a not-so-big screen on their watches.
(And, yes, this is where I also chime in to say, I wish there is a new iPhone mini.)
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But the approval is just “temporary,” posted Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, who puts Apple’s request differently. He says the company is “demanding we change the buttons in the next version,” vowing that the company will “fight this.” The apparently conditional approval is just the latest part of the back-and-forth saga between Apple and Epic.
Apple TV+ has quickly (and quietly) been overtaking PBS’ throne in quality programming for kids, bringing considerable value to this parent’s dwindling streaming budget.
Due’s claim to fame is that it repeatedly notifies you about outstanding tasks until you mark them as done or reschedule them. It’s nearly impossible to ignore Due, and many of its controls revolve around managing its reminder notifications.
No, but I had heard that, too. You can’t vilify the phone. You can’t have a broken phone. But it’s funny, because with shows like this and “Severance,” it feels like Apple is working out its own feelings about what they are: “Wait, are we the big, onerous, scary tech overlord? Or are we the ones who have the good intentions, and somebody else comes in and changes the course of the good thing we were supposed to do?” At least they’re in therapy about it, is how I feel. To me, the irony’s not lost about Sunny being this shiny, round, white thing that’s taking over my house and permeating my life. I have one of those—it’s called an iPhone. Obviously, this story is its own thing, because it’s set in the near future and there are villains who aren’t necessarily technology. But there is some coming to terms with the fact that technology is expanding and learning much faster than we had ever imagined, and we’re forced to reckon with this existential question: What does it mean to be human?
I started using Due during the start of the pandemic, when I started working from home, and discovered I was having a difficult time remembering to attend online meetings. I've set as default for reminders to keep pestering me every five minutes, until I either manually mark the reminder as complete, or reschedule it to a later time.
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But to label a six-year-old flagship smart speaker 'vintage' (which means in another two years it'll probably be 'obsolete') is a step too far for me. I imagine many owners feel as if a bond of trust has been broken. The news makes me want to shun wireless audio and go back to actual vintage hi-fi, involving wires, passive speakers, a hi-fi stack, and a turntable.
Apple, opens new tab said on Friday it has approved Epic Games' games marketplace app on iPhones and iPads in Europe, after the "Fortnite" maker escalated its feud with the technology giant, accusing it of hindering its efforts to set up a games store on the devices.
Apple said the latest spat concerned the Epic Sweden AB Marketplace and has nothing to do with the video games maker's Fortnite app which has already been given the green light.
The agreement has substantial financial implications for both companies. For Apple, the payments from Google constitute an important revenue stream as a significant proportion of its profits. If the court rules against Google, it could lose access to approximately 70 percent of iPhone searches. This would significantly impact Google's mobile search advertising revenue, which was a major contributor to its $207 billion in search ad revenue in 2023.
I am enjoying listening to the audiobooks of The Murderbot Diaries. Currently on book 3, and I can't wait to go through the entire series.
And I can't wait to watch Apple TV+'s adaptation.
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The Bear, on the other hand... I haven't started watching the latest season, but I keep seeing not-so-good headlines of reviews in my RSS client.
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Simply put, the maps don’t see the world the way the people who use them do. In the data that underlie a digital map, a road network is represented as a bunch of lines. Those lines have a beginning and an end. Seth Spielman, a geographer who worked for a time as a data scientist on Apple Maps, explained to me that a driver often gets instructions from the app at transition points between those segments. When I turn onto the ramp, then merge onto the freeway, I’ve driven through a pair of segments—and from the map’s perspective, I am thus in need of extra guidance. But I don’t feel that need at all. From my perspective, just a single phrase—Get on the freeway—would suffice.
Outlanders 2: Second Nature, a town-building strategy game, offers new players new tropical and wintery environments to build in, much more resources to work with, and more challenges.
According to the identifiers, the 11th-gen iPad will sport an A16 processor—a decent upgrade from the A14 Bionic in the 10th-gen model—while the mini will get a newer A17 chip, also a two-generation bump.
Code discovered on Apple's backend by MacRumors confirms Apple is indeed working on a long-rumored home accessory in addition to the HomePod and Apple TV.
[...]
The code also indicates that this "home accessory" will be running a software variant of tvOS, much like the HomePod.
I wonder if Apple will continue to roll out new iPhones and iPads that doesn't do Apple Intelligence.
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The very name, Universal Serial Bus (or USB) is an ambitious promise: One port to rule them all. The reality is unfortunately messier than that. While your phone, tablet, and laptop might all use the same USB-C port for charging and transferring data these days, they can all work differently.
What's USB4? What's Thunderbolt? Is it the same as USB-C? I'm here to help answer all of those questions, so you can get the best performance out of your devices.
Getting into this headspace may be difficult for product designers who want to stay focused on new exciting ways to use products, who may not yet have had someone close to them pass away. It’s a difficult thing to do, but unlike many flashy features built for a subset of users, this pertains to everyone. Death comes for us all, and I’d like better digital tools in place for us to deal with it.
Although Apple isn’t perfect by any means, this white paper makes it clear that Apple does care about the longevity of its products, more so than its competitors. It also ends with an explicit and emphatic denial of the idea of built-in obsolescence.
Later this year, millions of Apple devices will begin running Apple Intelligence, Cupertino's take on generative AI that, among other things, lets people create images from text prompts. But some members of the creative community are unhappy about what they say is the company’s lack of transparency around the raw information powering the AI model that makes this possible.
The Cyberduck team has issued version 9.0 of its open-source file transfer app, adding support for versioning of files edited in external apps.
Up until last month, people were still asked to submit documents to the government using the outdated storage devices, with more than 1,000 regulations requiring its use.
But these rules have now finally been scrapped, said Digital Minister Taro Kono.
These are the portable storage media that I have used in my entire life so far: floppies, writable CDs, Zips, thumb drives, and flash cards. I do not miss a single one of them.
On the other hand, I do miss the anticipations and novelty of browsing through CDs that came bundled with magazines: all the freewares, sharewares, Quicktime videos, and MP3s.
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Phil Schiller, the head of Apple’s App Store and its former marketing chief, was chosen for the position, according to people familiar with the situation. As a board observer, he won’t be serving as a full-fledged director, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter isn’t public.
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Having Microsoft and Apple sit in on board meetings could create complications for the tech giants, which have been rivals and partners over the decades. Some OpenAI board meetings will likely discuss future AI initiatives between OpenAI and Microsoft — deliberations that the latter company may want Schiller excluded from. Board observers often do oblige and exit meetings during discussions that are seen as sensitive.
Figma disabled the feature, named Make Design, after CEO and cofounder of Not Boring Software Andy Allen tweeted images showing that asking it to make a “weather app” produced several variations of apps that looked almost identical to Apple’s default weather app.
Some career designers were ambiguous about the impact on careers, but many went as far as to assert that designers had nothing to fear: AI, after all, could never replace your job. Unless you were terrible at it.
The problem with that, however, is that in our creative fields by definition, we are all terrible at our work at some point.
Code discovered in Apple's backend by Nicolás Alvarez and shared with MacRumors confirms Apple's plans to release four iPhone 16 models this year, and it indicates that the devices will all have the same A-series chip. There are mentions of new model numbers that are not associated with existing iPhones, and that have the numbering scheme Apple uses for its flagship devices.
It is a menu bar icon that turns red when you're offline. You can also ask it to send you notifications when your online status status changes. It's a simple program, but life saving if you're somewhere with an unstable connection.
One of the biggest selling points is that when you are using this Clicks case, it completely opens up the iPhone display. If you really think about it, the virtual keyboard takes up almost half of your entire iPhone screen in any situation. So now, if I am sending messages, I can see more of a conversation in one glance, or I can edit a YouTube short with the content taking up the entire screen. I think this is where the value really starts to come in.
Apple Inc. is seeking to get a Chinese court to alter its written ruling in a lawsuit the iPhone maker won, an unusual move that underscores the sensitivity of the US company’s position in the world’s largest smartphone arena.
Apple has filed a petition asking the Supreme People’s Court to make tweaks to select sentences in a ruling that ended a dispute over the cut of app revenue it takes from most developers, according to an excerpt of the filing seen by Bloomberg News. The iPhone maker wants the nation’s highest court to strike references to Apple’s “dominant position” from a decision written by a lower court, which in May tossed out the lawsuit due to a lack of evidence. It’s also objecting to a phrase suggesting “unfair pricing may hurt consumers.”
Levoff had been senior director of corporate law at Apple before the iPhone maker fired him in September 2018.
Prosecutors charged him five months later with making stock trades based on advance nonpublic information about Cupertino, California-based Apple's earnings announcements.
Surely with the whole affair of Eric Schmidt (then CEO of Google) on the Apple Board and the Android pivot to become iPhone-like, Apple will not want to have someone sitting on OpenAI's board if it already know it will be competing more directly with OpenAI soon?
Or has Apple determined it doesn't have the ambition to compete directly with all these AI companies?
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Everyone expected Apple’s announcement of Apple Intelligence, but the details on security, privacy, and safety still came as a (welcome) surprise to a security community already accustomed to Apple’s strong baselines. Apple deftly managed to navigate a series of challenges with innovations that extend from the iPhone to the cloud, exceeding anything we’ve seen elsewhere.
I’ve spent over a decade in cloud security, even longer working in cybersecurity overall, and I’m thoroughly impressed. The design of Apple Intelligence and the Private Cloud Compute system backing it sets a new standard for the AI industry by leveraging a range of Apple’s security and privacy investments over the past decade.
Vulnerabilities that went undetected for a decade left thousands of macOS and iOS apps susceptible to supply-chain attacks. Hackers could have added malicious code compromising the security of millions or billions of people who installed them, researchers said Monday.
The vulnerabilities, which were fixed last October, resided in a “trunk” server used to manage CocoaPods, a repository for open source Swift and Objective-C projects that roughly 3 million macOS and iOS apps depend on. When developers make changes to one of their “pods”—CocoaPods lingo for individual code packages—dependent apps typically incorporate them automatically through app updates, typically with no interaction required by end users.
Alternative payment options are now supported starting in visionOS 1.2 for apps distributed on the App Store in the EU.
The built-in pop-up stand provides an optimal viewing angle while your device charges. This feature is perfect for video calls, watching videos, or using your phone to display while it charges.
Last week, I have downloaded the entire catalog of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown podcast. I have just started listening to a couple of the episodes. Of course, CNN does place advertisements within the podcast episodes. And, because I have downloaded all the episodes early last week, I am now doomed to listen to the CNN advertisement inviting me to watch a specific presidential debate for eternity.
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In other media news, I've finally started listening to the Murderbot Diaries audiobooks.
And, yes, I do want to watch the latest season of The Bear. But, I am having some rather stressful days at work, so I haven't start watching the latest episodes in order to keep my heart rate in check.
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None of these were crises, but they were all annoying, a reflection of a world where every service has been crammed into an app or hidden behind a QR code regardless of how little benefit it offers consumers. Every airline, hotel chain, bank, transit system, and pizza joint has its own app. My apartment requires three—one for building and parkade access, one for my thermostat and front door, and a third for making maintenance requests and paying rent. The latter, despite my building strongly encouraging its use, refuses to recognize my bank account, and no one seems to know how to fix it.
When Apple Intelligence was unveiled earlier this month, it was only promised for the Mac, iPhone and iPad. But there’s another device primed to get it: the Vision Pro headset. I’m told that Apple is actively working on bringing the features to the device, but it won’t happen this year. From a technology standpoint, the headset has more than enough memory (16 gigabytes) to run the technology. And the features, including notification prioritization, writing tools, an OpenAI chatbot and the new Siri, make sense for the headset — especially if Apple continues to position the Vision Pro as a device for getting work done and handling computer tasks.
It also shouldn’t be a major engineering task, given that visionOS is a variant of the existing iPadOS software. The bigger challenge will be getting the user interface design team to make it all look right in the mixed-reality environment.
The MLS Season Pass subscription has lowered its price to $49, for access to watch the remainder of the 2024 season. The 50% cut compared to its original $99 price, as of February, reflects the fact that we are now about halfway through this year’s season.
It's striking how ahead of its time Riven was back in 1997—that much is clear while playing this remake.
Perhaps all that mattered was showing that Apple is in the game, integrating AI technology into its devices so that it will be ready when that killer app does appear. Apple’s strength, after all, is perfecting rather than pioneering new technologies. It makes sense that when and if consumer applications for AI blossom, Apple might make some of the most useful versions of them, given its strength in user interfaces and its huge captive user network.
I think I've purchased Riven back in the day, but I don't think I have ever come close to completing it. It was too difficult for me.
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