If you have a Series 2 or later Apple Watch and want to take it into the pool with you, you’ll want to put your Apple Watch into water mode (a feature that’s been around for years, but one that easily escapes notice).
If this doesn’t mean anything to you, take a minute to watch this short Instagram video. It’ll show you what to do.
[VIDEO] A quick look, courtesy of iDownloadBlog, at sharing your iPhone audio with multiple AirPods. The video is embedded in the main Loop post. I’m really excited about this feature, hoping it makes its way to tvOS, if it hasn’t already.
John Naughton, The Guardian:
The advent of the compact disc in the early 1980s meant that recorded music went from being analogue to digital. But CD music files were vast – a single CD came in at about 700MB.
And:
In 1993, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany came up with a way of shrinking audio files by a factor of 10 or more, so that a three-minute music track could be reduced to 3MB without much perceptible loss in quality. They called their new standard MP3.
And:
In 1999, a teenage geek named Shawn Fanning created a neat software system that enabled internet users who had MP3 tracks on their PCs not only to find others with similar assets but also to exchange these tracks with one another. Fanning called his file-sharing system Napster, released it on the internet and in the process changed the world.
Nice little look back at the market forces that made the music industry ripe for disruption. Enter Steve Jobs and Apple. And iTunes of course.
This is an old article, appearing on the 10-year anniversary of the iTunes Music Store, but given the big changes Apple has announced for macOS Catalina, including a complete iTunes revamp, seemed appropriate.
A great read. Here’s a taste:
In its first week, iTunes sold one million downloads and soon became not only the top online music retailer but, displacing Walmart and Best Buy, the top music retailer. In a way, the service hastened the revolution that record executives feared the most – it shifted the business from expensive, high-revenue CDs to cheap, low-revenue singles. But there was no choice. There would always be online music thieves, but most consumers simply needed an easy, legal way to download songs. This was how fans would buy music in the future, whether the record industry liked it or not.
Jobs had incredible vision. Not sure anyone else could have pulled this off.
[VIDEO] After you get done looking through Apple’s official iOS 13 features page, watch the 9to5Mac video (embedded in the main Loop post), as Jeff Benjamin shows the new iOS off, feature by feature.
[VIDEO] Equal parts entertaining and enlightening, Gruber outdid himself in this year’s Talk Show live from WWDC (embedded in the main Loop post). Put your feet up, grab a tall beverage, and settle in for some fun, wrapped in great production values. Really well done.
To truly get a sense of how massive an update iOS 13 is, spend a few minutes digging through this page.
A few highlights:
Hide My Email Not sure you want to share your email address with a particular app? You’re in control. You can choose to share or hide your email address. You can also choose to have Apple create a unique email address for you that forwards to your real address.
And (in Maps):
Junction View helps drivers eliminate wrong turns and directional misses by lining them up in the correct lane before they need to turn or enter an elevated road.
And:
Explore where you’re going before you get there with an immersive 3D experience that gives you a 360-degree view of a place. And enjoy smooth and seamless transitions as you navigate your way around.
Not to mention the addition of traffic lights and stop signs.
And the all new Reminders design, and the new anti-aging battery technology, and, and, and. The list goes on and on. This is one amazing update.
The Verge:
Starting this fall in the US, Walmart customers in select cities can choose to have their groceries delivered directly into their refrigerators when away from home. The InHome service will use Walmart vehicles and its own workers equipped with proprietary wearable cameras. Using undisclosed “smart entry technology,” Walmart employees will be able to enter homes to make deliveries, while customers will be able to control access and watch the deliveries remotely.
This raises so many questions for me. Would you allow someone you don’t know to enter your home to put groceries in your refrigerator? This is one step beyond Amazon’s front door access that let’s them stick a package just inside your house.
And what about the footage of the interior of your home that is captured and put on the internet? How is this footage secured? Who can see it? It is available for you to see on the net, so the potential is there for other lurkers to see it as well.
Wondering if my kids will someday see this all as normal.
[VIDEO] The video is embedded in the main Loop post. From the trailer description:
What if the space race had never ended? Watch an official first look at For All Mankind, an Apple Original drama series coming this Fall to Apple TV+.
And:
For All Mankind is created by Emmy® Award winner Ronald D. Moore (Outlander, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica), Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi. Told through the lives of NASA astronauts, engineers and their families, For All Mankind presents an aspirational world where NASA and the space program remained a priority and a focal point of our hopes and dreams.
Ronald D. Moore created the excellent reboot of Battlestar Galactica. High hopes for this one. Looking forward to seeing more official trailers as they emerge.
Note the branding at the beginning of the trailer: “An Apple Original”. Wonder if this will be the open for all the series. Also wonder if Apple will create a signature sound, similar to what you hear when you start a Netflix show.
We posted a raft of Apple releases yesterday. One item that might have gotten lost in the shuffle, but that I believe has incredible importance, is this, from Apple’s tvOS 13 press release:
tvOS 13 adds support for the best and most popular game controllers in the world, Xbox One S and PlayStation DualShock 4, making it even easier for gamers to take advantage of Apple Arcade and other great games on the App Store.
And this tied footnote:
tvOS 13 supports the Xbox Wireless Controller with Bluetooth.
In order for Apple to climb into the tier of a first class gaming machine, they need first class game controllers, like the PlayStation DualShock 4 and Xbox One S. Such a smart move leveraging these two controllers, controllers most gamers are already familiar with, controllers that benefit from generations of refinement.
This announcement, combined with the release of the new iPod touch (a relatively inexpensive entree device for Apple Arcade), show a real vision to expand Apple’s gaming presence beyond the casual gamer.
Looking forward to seeing Apple Arcade’s official rollout later this year.
Reuters:
Two app developers on Tuesday sued Apple Inc over its App Store practices, making claims similar to those in a lawsuit brought by consumers that the U.S. Supreme Court recently allowed to proceed.
And:
California-based app developer Donald R. Cameron and Illinois Pure Sweat Basketball alleged in federal court in San Jose, California that Apple engaged in anticompetitive conduct by only allowing the downloading of iPhone apps through Apple’s official App Store.
And:
California-based app developer Donald R. Cameron and Illinois Pure Sweat Basketball alleged in federal court in San Jose, California that Apple engaged in anticompetitive conduct by only allowing the downloading of iPhone apps through Apple’s official App Store.
Apple’s take:
The company has said it enforces its App Store rules evenhandedly, regardless of whether it competes with app makers, and that many competitors, such as Microsoft Corp’s email apps, thrive on the App Store.
Apple has also emphasized that free apps that do not use its billing system are hosted and distributed at no cost to developers beyond a $99 fee to be part of its developer program.
This lawsuit is testing the waters. It is specific to the iOS App Store (you can distribute your own apps on the Mac). Obviously, if successful, this would force Apple to change the App Store model in some way.
Wondering if Apple created a sandboxed side environment for unapproved apps, an environment that is walled off from all the approved apps and the core of iOS, if that would pass muster with the courts.
Fun to play with. Tweak the controls.
There’s an iOS app too.
Malcolm Owen, AppleInsider:
Cardiogram will be allowing its users to start recording their heart rate on the Apple Watch continuously before the WWDC keynote begins, one which uses the Apple Watch’s heart rate sensor. The data is shared minute-by-minute with the company, which is then compiled with data provided by other users.
During the event, a dedicated live heart rate chart will update to show what the current heart rate of participants taking part in the monitoring scheme is, and what the group rate was in previous minutes. In theory, the heart rate will be highest shortly after major new announcements.
This is a pretty fascinating idea, borrowing a page from political polling rooms that track people’s reactions to a speech with buttons they press, in real time, when they strongly agree with a particular sentiment.
I can only imagine these two worlds colliding.
Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:
The file size limit prevents iOS users from accidentally downloading a big game on LTE and blowing through their carrier’s data cap. However, the cellular limit is often mocked as a stupid feature as Apple offers no opportunity to override the limit and force the download to succeed.
It is also silly because the cellular limit is enforced non-discriminately, which means even iPhone users with unlimited data plans are still barred from downloading apps and games over 200 MB.
The alert would be better implemented as a warning, informing the user that they are about to download a large file but including a ‘Continue Download’ button to allow the download to complete. Even users with capped data plans may need a big app in a pinch from time to time.
Perfectly put, completely agree.
Add to this the places where cellular is fast enough and so readily available, that WiFi is just not part of the mix. There should be a setting to turn this limitation off. It’s an artifact.
And at the same time, Apple, bump that 5GB cloud base storage to something actually usable.
John Vorhees, MacStories:
There does seem to be friction holding iOS developers back from making the leap to the Mac. Part of it is that developing for the Mac is just different enough from iOS that it makes adapting an iOS app to the Mac harder than many developers would prefer. Combined with the smaller Mac market, that friction seems to be enough to keep many iOS developers off the Mac.
It’s into this environment that Apple announced Marzipan, its effort to make it easier to build apps for both the Mac and iOS.
And:
Web services are a bigger part of the productivity app market than ever before, and few seem interested in building traditional Mac apps. Exacerbating the problem is the rather thin competition in some app categories and limited migration of iOS apps to the Mac. Instead of letting third parties with little stake in the Mac’s success control the direction of the Mac experience through a patchwork of inferior apps, I’m eager to see a solution from Apple that leverages the strength of iOS.
Of all the technologies to dig into at WWDC, Marzipan seems the most important for the future of the Mac, and the topic I’m most interested in watching unfold.
As Craig Hockenberry explains in his post The Future of Interaction, Marzipan is a big win for developers, helping them support multiple platforms with a much smaller baseline of code to maintain.
If you’re an iMessage developer, you have to think about a product that works on iOS, macOS, and watchOS. You get a pass on tvOS, but that’s small consolation. The same situation exists in various combinations for all of Apple’s major apps: Music, Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Mail, etc.
It’s likely that all of these apps share a common data model, probably supported by an internal framework that can be shared amongst platforms. That leaves the views and the controllers as an area where code can’t be shared.
And:
With this insight, it’s easy to see Marzipan as a way towards views that share code. A UIView can be used on your TV, on your desktop, on your wrist, and in your pocket. That’s a big win for developer productivity.
And a big win for developer productivity is a big win for users and, in the end, for Apple.
Interested in WWDC bu not able to make it out to San Jose for the big happenings? John Sundell has your back.
WWDC by Sundell is a clean, snappy web site that promises to closely follow the conference. And that coverage has already started. Check it out.
[Via DF]
Spoiler: Cleveland has the fastest mobile speed!
Some pretty interesting charts to chew through. Can’t help but wonder if we’ll eventually have a global satellite-based broadband service that brings equal speeds to everyone.
This is a dramatic headline, but read the Reddit post. There’s an embedded video that appears to be taken soon after the fire went out, smoke still pouring out and what appears to be char marks on the floor.
Is this real? Seems like it. Hard to say for sure. But lithium-ion batteries can fail, and can explode, under the right circumstances.
One interesting nugget:
I went inside and was able to remove the computer to the porch using gloves (it was scalding hot). Below is a short video taken when I re-entered the house a few minutes after the explosion. After it cooled for an hour or so, I took it to the local Apple store in a rage. They understood the severity of the situation but said nothing could be done until it spent 24 hours in a fire-proof safe and that they’d call me with a plan/update.
Is there a fire-proof safe in every Apple Store? I remember reading about safes in Apple Stores when the gold Edition Apple Watch first came out. I wonder if this was a use case when they added a safe to the Apple Store designs.
Bottom line, I do see value in being careful with lithium-ion batteries. Recycle them. And do get them checked out if you notice bulging in your Mac.
Eric Slivka, MacRumors:
Following Apple’s shift to California-themed names for its Mac operating systems with OS X Mavericks back in 2013, Apple appeared to take steps to protect a number of other California-related names by filing for trademarks under a series of shell companies intended to mask the true identity of the applicant.
And:
All told, we identified 19 trademarks that were applied for under six different companies that all appeared to be Apple shell companies. Several of these names, including Yosemite, Sierra, and Mojave, have been used by Apple, while others have yet to be put to use.
And:
Of the original 19 names that were included in the trademark applications, all but four of them have been either used by Apple or abandoned, with the remaining live applications being Mammoth, Monterey, Rincon, and Skyline.
This is some terrific detective work.
Of the four names, I like Mammoth and Monterey. Mammoth Mountain is a popular ski area (one of my favorite places to ski, back in the day) and Monterey is a city, county, and bay and, most importantly, home to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
My money’s on Monterey, for purely sentimental reasons. Though I’d throw in a wild card vote for this list of the top 10 tallest California peaks.
[VIDEO] Not exactly sure what it is about this video (embedded in the main Loop post), but something just clicked. Maybe it was how cool this guy was about the whole thing, or that old school, weatherbeaten iPad case. Or just the fact that a BAT WAS IN THE IPAD CASE!
Andrew O’Hara, AppleInsider, digs through the potential market for the new iPod touch. The biggest bit of this that clicked for me:
Apple also touts the upcoming Apple Arcade which will allow access to several exclusive games for a monthly fee. The new iPod touch is a very clear, inexpensive delivery device for that service.
This seems a solid strategy: Release a relatively low cost device, ready made for parents with kids and a long road trip ahead. A subscription to Apple Arcade is a perfect complement to the new iPod touch.
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg, in an interview with Phillip Shoemaker, who ran app reviews from 2009 to 2016:
App reviewers worked in small conference rooms with Macs, iPhones, and iPads to test applications. Reviewers would come in each morning, pick 30 to 100 apps from a web tool, and download them devices for testing. It was a job that required long hours, Shoemaker recalled. Apple has hired more reviewers since then, and the work spaces in California are more open and collaborative now.
No small thanks go to Phil Schiller for retooling the system, radically improving the approval cycle.
Apple made sure that Shoemaker’s review team treated all third-party developers equally, even if they were giant technology companies supplying important apps for iPhones and iPads. “I was calling out Facebook all the time” on Twitter, he said. “Even though they were one of these privileged developers, they had some of the worst code at the time.”
Ouch.
Here’s a link to the interview, an episode of the Decrypted podcast.
Geoffrey A. Fowler, Washington Post:
On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with.
And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address -— once every five minutes.
And:
You might assume you can count on Apple to sweat all the privacy details. After all, it touted in a recent ad, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” My investigation suggests otherwise.
iPhone apps I discovered tracking me by passing information to third parties — just while I was asleep — include Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit’s Mint, Nike, Spotify, The Washington Post and IBM’s the Weather Channel. One app, the crime-alert service Citizen, shared personally identifiable information in violation of its published privacy policy.
This is a big deal. Privacy is core to Apple’s brand and one of the main reasons I am so loyal to Apple’s ecosystem. Looking forward to Apple’s response to the Washington Post.
[VIDEO] For me, there were three key parts to this video (embedded in the main Loop post):
At about 1:32, you’ll see a walkthrough of the stack that makes up an individual butterfly key. Here’s a tweet with all the piece in one place. Makes it a bit easier to see.
At about 2:38, there’s a closeup look at the dome switch cover, where the change in materials seems to have been made. The new dome switch cover is nylon, a more “robust” material than what was used before.
At about 3:58, you get a closeup of the old and new dome switches.
Not sure you can really draw any conclusions from the video, but I did find the closeup look at the mechanism interesting.
This article is a mixed bag. The tone was a bit Apple-bashing, but there were nuggets at the core that made the whole thing worth reading.
Some highlights:
Three years after their debut, a generation of AirPods is nearing obsolescence as their lithium-ion batteries degrade (or they get lost or dropped down the toilet) and owners upgrade to the new model, which came out in March.
My AirPods started to degrade at the beginning of the year, to the point where the shortened battery life started to get in the way for me. As the article points out, there was no way for me to change out the batteries and the cost of Apple doing it made the possibility of a refresh not cost-effective.
I bought the new rev when they went on sale, passed along my old ones. They still do work, after all.
The environmental case against AirPods rests on four main points. First, they don’t last long: Lithium-ion batteries degrade over time, and there have been reports of AirPods failing to hold a charge after as little as 18 months. Second, they can’t be repaired: You can’t crack them open without special tools (and possibly some bloodshed), and even if you could, the components inside are tangled and glued together. Third, they can’t easily be recycled for the same reasons. And finally, it’s irresponsible to throw them in the trash both because they contain minerals that were mined at significant human cost and because their batteries could pose fire and toxicity hazards in waste dumps — though this is true of most modern gadgets.
All fair points. Apple’s response:
As with all of our products, we work closely with our recyclers to ensure AirPods are properly recycled and provide support to recyclers outside of our supply chain as well
I have to say, Apple does make it easy to return their products to them for recycling. You can bring pretty much any Apple device you own to Apple for recycling or, for newer devices, for a trade-in. Here’s a link to Apple’s trade-in page.
That said, the author raises a fair question about the recyclability of AirPods:
Wistron confirmed to me that you can recycle key portions of AirPods, notably the battery, from which the mineral cobalt can be extracted. The problem is that the value of what can be recycled is unlikely to cover the cost of recovering it. With no automated system that can safely open AirPods or extract their components, each device has to be opened by a worker using hand tools, like pliers and jigs. Their first goal is to cleanly dislodge the battery and then the audio drivers, which can also contain precious metals. The battery is sent on to a specialized smelter to extract the cobalt, which can be reused, while the drivers are sent to precious metal refiners.
At the end of the day, the value of the material recovered from AirPods does not appear to cover the cost of recycling them. And that value is what drives recycling.
Ars Technica originally ran this article back in 2012, reposted it over the weekend.
If HyperCard means anything to you at all, take a read for a lovely bit of nostalgia.
I loved HyperCard, loved the simplicity of its design and all the doors it opened. For some reason, Panic’s Playdate tickled that same feeling in me.
[H/T John Kordyback]
TechCrunch:
Apple Pay is hitting select stations this Friday, May 31. When that kicks in, riders will be able to swipe their iPhone or Apple Watch to catch a ride.
And:
The kiosks are actually active, at present, but using them requires a software update — iOS 12.3 and watchOS 5.2.1, respectively. Then a debit or credit card needs to be associated with Express Transit in Apple Wallet, using Face or Touch ID. Once installed, it should work on the iPhone 6s and SE or later, along with the Apple Watch Series 1, 2 and 3, using NFC to get you in.
Can’t wait to try this myself. To me, this is the best example of Apple Pay cutting down on payment friction, joining all the other NFC solutions out there, but with the advantage of being tied to your Apple Watch. No need to pull your phone or metro card out of your pocket.
Apple:
Apple today introduced the new iPod touch with enhancements to power, capability and communication at a remarkable price. The Apple-designed A10 Fusion chip brings improved performance in games, and for the first time on iPod, immersive augmented reality (AR) experiences and Group FaceTime, making it easy to chat with family members, friends or colleagues simultaneously.
Available to order now, in stores later in the week.
Interestingly, the iPod touch is not on Apple’s home page, even though most every other new product and service is there. There’s no iPod category along the top of the store, either.
No matter, my guess is, it’ll appear later today. In the meantime, here’s a link to the main iPod touch page. Pricing starts at $199 for the 32GB model, $299 for 128GB, $399 for 256GB.
Available in six colors, including (PRODUCT)RED™.
[VIDEO] BMedia:
In the case of a recent British Airways advertising campaign, the sky was literally the limit. Through a mixture of old and new, they pushed the limits of billboard advertising to give the world something that had never quite been seen before.
Just watch the video embedded in the main Loop post. Great marketing, terrific implementation. [H/T, Scott Knaster]
[VIDEO] The video embedded in the main Loop post is chock full of interesting observations in preparation for Monday’s WWDC keynote. Rene Ritchie and Guilherme Rambo are both pretty smart cookies.