This is an incredible list, filled with tiny details, many of low discoverability. Even the most powerful of power users are sure to find a tip or two that are new to them. Perfect to pass along to folks who are new to iOS and who love digging in to the details.

From the PairPlay app home page:

PairPlay transforms your AirPods into a two-player adventure! You and your partner split the AirPods (one takes the left, one takes the right) and you hear OPPOSITE sides of the same story.

To get a sense of this at work, watch the video embedded below.

This is but a taste of what’s possible here. What strikes me is the power of that immersive audio, like the radio shows back in the days before TV came to dominate. This audio augmented reality unleashes the power of your imagination.

For game players working remotely, imagine a dungeon crawler that used separate audio tracks, customized for each player, that allowed fully remote collaboration to solve puzzles and make your way through the game.

As is, PairPlay seems like a lot of fun, especially if you’ve got kids.

Link to AirPods Pro on the US Apple Store.

Link to AirPods Pro on Amazon.

That $69.01 difference (about a 28% discount) is pretty huge. Does it say anything about the rumored September Apple event?

Spoiler rumor ahead:

Mark Gurman hinted at a new AirPods release. He specifically did not mention new AirPods Pro. But (pure speculation on my part) this does feel like inventory clearing pricing. Is it because the new base level model, in Mark’s words, offer “a design closer to the AirPods Pro, including a new in-ear shape and shorter stems”.

Even if the price discount is business as usual, nothing to do with the September event, it’s interesting to wonder what will become of the AirPods Pro at that event. Will Apple introduce a new base model that hews closer to the Pro design and leave the AirPods Pro as is?

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple today released a new version of its iCloud for Windows app, with the 12.5 update adding a new ‌iCloud‌ Keychain password manager app for Windows users.

And:

With the new password management option, those who are running Windows can access their ‌iCloud‌ Keychain passwords and can add, edit, copy and paste, delete, and look up usernames or passwords.

And:

New ‌iCloud‌ password extensions for Microsoft Edge and Windows Chrome work in tandem with the password feature, letting ‌iCloud‌ passwords be autofilled on a Windows machine just like in Safari.

A few things to unpack here:

Interesting to watch Apple extend the reach of their password management mechanism as password titan 1Password faces pushback on moving away from a native Mac application to Electron.

Is there anyone working on blue bubble Messages support for Windows? Android? Password management support for Android?

Are there security implications for opening up password access on Windows? Or is the encryption up and down the stack bulletproof?

Follow the headline link and read Mark Gurman’s take on what’s rumored to be coming from Apple next month. It’s a lot.

Or hold out until the event goes live, keep the excitement/surprise maximized.

Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal, got the chance to interview Craig Federighi about the backlash in response to Apple CSAM scanning plans.

The video embedded below is worth watching, both for Craig’s take on what Apple did wrong in the rollout, but also for Joanna’s excellent pause and explain take on Craig’s response, on the difference between what’s happening in Messages and the neural hash analysis in the cloud, and what Apple is really doing here. Really, really good.

One piece of this puzzle is who gets notified when a CSAM image is flagged.

Benjamin Mayo, from this explainer:

I think there’s a reasonable worry that a government could use this as a way to shuttle other kinds of content detection through the system, by simply providing hashes of images of political activism or democracy or whatever some dictatorial leader would like to oppress. Apple’s defence for this is that all flagged images are first sent to Apple for human review, before being sent on.

That cuts to the core of the problem many people have with this approach, the “slippery slope” argument. Apple is saying, we won’t let that happen. The argument is, the chances of a false positive are already really low, and the images being sent on to Apple (imagine being on that particular image review team) for review raise the bar even further.

One issue here is, who gets notified if a CSAM matching image is found? As is, seems the notification happens behind the scenes.

Back to Benjamin:

My suggestion would be that all flagged images are reported to the user. That way, the system cannot be misused in secret. This could be built in the software stack itself, such that nothing is sent onward unless the user is notified. In press briefings, Apple has said they don’t want to do this because their privacy policy doesn’t allow them to retain user data, enabling a legitimate criminal who is sharing CSAM would simply be able to delete their photo library when alerted. I think tweaks to policy could solve it. For instance, it would be very reasonable for a flagged image to be automatically marked frozen in iCloud, unable to be deleted by a user, until it has gone through the review process. The additional layer of transparency is beneficial.

Thoughtful take. Worth reading the whole piece, worth watching Joanna Stern’s interview with Craig Federighi, embedded below.

Makena Kelly, The Verge:

The bipartisan “Open App Markets Act,” introduced by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) would ban app stores from forcing developers to use the store’s payment systems. It would also bar companies from punishing developers that offer lower prices on a separate app store or through their own payment systems, along the lines of Apple’s public dispute with Epic Games. Notably, the bill would also make it unlawful for companies like Apple to use non-public data from their stores to build competing products against companies using their service.

Lots to think about here. First thought is how much support this bill would get from streaming services like Netflix, if it meant they could sign up customers and let those customers pay and track their bills in-App, without having to run those funds through Apple.

Same with gaming services. And developers who want to offer related services/products for sale through their apps.

And that last bit, about building competing products, is this an anti-Sherlock bill?

From one of the bill’s authors:

“For years, Apple and Google have squashed competitors and kept consumers in the dark—pocketing hefty windfalls while acting as supposedly benevolent gatekeepers of this multi-billion dollar market,” Blumenthal said in a statement Wednesday. “This bipartisan bill will help break these tech giants’ ironclad grip, open the app economy to new competitors, and give mobile users more control over their own devices.”

And from Apple:

“Since our founding, we’ve always put our users at the center of everything we do, and the App Store is the cornerstone of our work to connect developers and customers in a way that is safe and trustworthy.” The spokesperson continued, “At Apple, our focus is on maintaining an App Store where people can have confidence that every app must meet our rigorous guidelines and their privacy and security is protected.”

The law of unintended consequence applies here. If this bill goes through, will this break the iPhone’s very foundation, change the nature of what distinguishes iPhone from Android, breaks Apple’s ecosystem?

Apple Machine Learning white paper (via MyHealthyApple):

Respiratory rate (RR) is a clinical metric used to assess overall health and physical fitness. An individual’s RR can change due to normal activities like physical exertion during exercise or due to chronic and acute illnesses. Remote estimation of RR offers a cost-effective method to track disease progression and cardio-respiratory fitness over time.

In a nutshell, the research worked out a process for using AirPods to estimate respiratory rate (RR), with the goal of tracking RR over time, getting a sense of things like fitness, disease progression, chronic breathlessness.

This sort of work makes me hopeful for a future with more sophisticated health care available remotely.

Good read, but:

In ‌iPadOS 15‌, today’s beta changes the shading of the tab interface in Safari in an effort to make it more clear which tab is the active tab.

In the image that Juli Clover posts, there clearly is a difference between the grey of the active tab and the grey shade used in the inactive tab. But I am running that same beta and I do not see those results.

Here’s a screenshot of my tab collection, this one in private mode. And here’s a generic set of tabs in public mode.

The lack of tab contrast is one major issue for me. The other is the wild range of colors that can make picking out a specific tab a nightmare for some people. Check the video below:

https://www.twitter.com/stevex/status/1423604246348500997

There’s a lot going on here. I do appreciate that Apple gave us a setting to keep a separate address bar above all the tabs. How about a setting to simplify the tab structure, with the main use of color a high shade contrast to clearly mark the current tab?

Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac:

While Apple mentioned that users will be able to locate lost AirPods with Precision Finding, iOS 15 will also link AirPods with your Apple ID to ensure that you can easily find them anywhere.

And:

To achieve this, the AirPods will finally be tied to your Apple ID. As spotted by 9to5Mac in the iOS 15 internal code, lost AirPods will continue to send their location to the owner through the Find My Network even if someone else connects them to another device.

Good to know.

Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch:

From personal experience, I know that there are people who don’t understand the difference between those first two systems, or assume that there will be some possibility that they may come under scrutiny for innocent pictures of their own children that may trigger some filter. It’s led to confusion in what is already a complex rollout of announcements. These two systems are completely separate, of course, with CSAM detection looking for precise matches with content that is already known to organizations to be abuse imagery. Communication Safety in Messages takes place entirely on the device and reports nothing externally — it’s just there to flag to a child that they are or could about to be viewing explicit images. This feature is opt-in by the parent and transparent to both parent and child that it is enabled.

Follow the headline link, check out the second image (four iPhone screens). This does an excellent job showing off the CSAM mechanism implemented by Messages. The CSAM announcement raises so many issues, I think it’s worth getting a sense of this part of the process, to help distinguish it from the other half, “CSAM detection in iCloud Photos”.

If you read no other part of the interview, do scan for this question and Paul Neuenschwander’s response:

One of the bigger queries about this system is that Apple has said that it will just refuse action if it is asked by a government or other agency to compromise by adding things that are not CSAM to the database to check for them on-device. There are some examples where Apple has had to comply with local law at the highest levels if it wants to operate there, China being an example. So how do we trust that Apple is going to hew to this rejection of interference if pressured or asked by a government to compromise the system?

To me, this goes to the heart of a lot of the privacy concern. There’s a lot here.

The system as designed doesn’t reveal — in the way that people might traditionally think of a match — the result of the match to the device or, even if you consider the vouchers that the device creates, to Apple. Apple is unable to process individual vouchers; instead, all the properties of our system mean that it’s only once an account has accumulated a collection of vouchers associated with illegal, known CSAM images that we are able to learn anything about the user’s account.

The way I read this is that Apple passes the vouchers back along to law enforcement. Not clear to me what’s in those vouchers, or if a user is notified of vouchers being sent. This whole thing feels very Orwellian.

Tom Warren, The Verge:

Apple’s AirPower wireless charger was supposed to arrive with the unique ability to charge an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods all at the same time. Unfortunately, Apple canceled AirPower in March 2019, citing difficulties in bringing the product to life. Since then, we’ve seen a teardown of AirPower, some AirPower clones, and Apple’s MagSafe battery packs. Now, an Apple prototype collector has obtained a working AirPower unit for the first time.

Follow the headline link to some images as well as a video of the prototype in use.

Is this real? The finder is an Apple prototype scrounger, got this one from “Chinese e-waste sources”. Judge for yourself. Certainly interesting. And makes me wonder how closely Apple guards their prototypes once the actual model ships, or is canceled.

As pointed out in our previous post, Apple is about to enter the big leagues in CSAM (child sexual abuse material) reporting.

John Gruber:

I do wonder though, how prepared Apple is for manually reviewing a potentially staggering number of accounts being correctly flagged. Because Apple doesn’t examine the contents of iCloud Photo Library (or local on-device libraries), I don’t think anyone knows how prevalent CSAM is on iCloud Photos. We know Facebook reported 20 million instances of CSAM to NCMEC last year, and Google reported 546,000.

Fair question. Also makes me wonder how the people who review this sort of material are protected, both emotionally (a dark, dark job, sure to mess with your psyche) and legally (they spend their day looking at illegal material — Are there special laws that protect workers like these?)

I also wonder what that job description looks like. Certainly one of the more unusual job interviews.

Ben Thompson, Stratechery:

How is it, then, that a company like Facebook, which is mostly used on mobile — i.e. Android or iOS — made 20.3 million reports of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) in 2020, while Apple made only 265? After all, there are almost certainly more photos on smartphones than there are on social networks — the former is in large part a superset of the latter.

To repeat: Facebook made 20.3 MILLION reports of CSAM. Apple made only 265.

Here’s why:

It’s not because there is somehow more CSAM on Facebook than exists on Apple devices, but rather that Facebook is scanning all of the images sent to and over its service, while Apple is not looking at what is in your phone, or on their cloud. From there the numbers make much more sense: Facebook is reporting what it finds, while Apple is, as the title of Section (3) suggests, protecting privacy and simply not looking at images at all.

And, clearly, as Apple moves from the server side to the client side (i.e., your iPhone), those numbers will likely change dramatically.

There’s much more analysis in the article, but the above really stuck out, obvious though it might be.

Also interesting was the lead-in, taken from this 2009 Online Photographer article:

The leading photo sharing site, flickr.com, charts the popularity of the cameras used by its membership. Recently the Apple iPhone has jumped into a virtual tie for first place with the Canon XTi. Furthermore, flickr states on its “Camera Finder” page that it can only detect the camera used about 2/3rds of the time, and that, therefore, cameraphones are under-represented on the graphs. Yikes.

This was the moment in time when iPhone photography showed its hand, overtook traditional cameras in popularity.

Here’s a link to Apple’s Expanded Protections for Children pdf.

I’m finding it very difficult to wrap my head around all of this. The best I can do at this point is try to read as much as possible, understand the concerns being raised, Apple’s responses to those concerns.

The video from Apple Support, embedded below, tells you to tap the white side of an AirTag to the top center of your iPhone to read the NFC tag. Watch the video, it’s short.

My instinct, based purely on where the animation appears when I open my AirPods case, would be to tap the AirTag on the bottom of the iPhone. I do recognize that AirTags and AirPods use different flavors of wireless magic, found this interesting, worth passing along.