Apple

Test shows how good iPhone X’s OLED screen is at preventing burn-in

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Chris Smith, BGR:

If the same image is shown on an OLED screen for a long period of time, burn-in effects may set in. This goes for TVs, monitors, and smartphones. It took the iPhone X 510 hours of continuously displaying the exact same image on the iPhone X for burn-in effects to become permanent. That’s Cetizen’s conclusion, and that’s great news for all iPhone X users.

And:

Cetizen stopped at various intervals to check for burn-in traces, but the iPhone X did not show visible effects until hitting the 510-hour mark. The screens on the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S7 Edge, meanwhile, were impacted sooner.

The original site quoted by BGR is in Korean but is pretty understandable if you use Google Translate to translate the page to English. It’d be interesting to see what the burn-in number is for the Pixel 2 XL.

Fundamental design flaw in Intel chips forces significant redesign of Linux / Windows / macOS kernels

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The Register:

A fundamental design flaw in Intel’s processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.

Programmers are scrambling to overhaul the open-source Linux kernel’s virtual memory system. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to publicly introduce the necessary changes to its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday: these changes were seeded to beta testers running fast-ring Windows Insider builds in November and December.

And:

Similar operating systems, such as Apple’s 64-bit macOS, will also need to be updated – the flaw is in the Intel x86-64 hardware, and it appears a microcode update can’t address it. It has to be fixed in software at the OS level, or go buy a new processor without the design blunder.

The worst news is that since the issue is in the hardware itself, a software patch of something so deeply rooted in the pipeline will cause a performance hit.

Terrible new for Intel. More spark for Apple to roll their own CPUs.

UPDATE:

Finally, macOS has been patched to counter the chip design blunder since version 10.13.2, according to operating system kernel expert Alex Ionescu.

Games on your phone (mostly Android, some iOS) that track what you watch on TV

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Sapna Maheshwari, New York Times:

At first glance, the gaming apps — with names like “Pool 3D,” “Beer Pong: Trickshot” and “Real Bowling Strike 10 Pin” — seem innocuous. One called “Honey Quest” features Jumbo, an animated bear.

Yet these apps, once downloaded onto a smartphone, have the ability to keep tabs on the viewing habits of their users — some of whom may be children — even when the games aren’t being played.

Yesterday, we posted about a technique ad houses use to glean your identity using your browser’s password manager.

This is a similar data-farming trick, this time using your phone’s microphone to track your TV watching habits.

The apps use software from Alphonso, a start-up that collects TV-viewing data for advertisers. Using a smartphone’s microphone, Alphonso’s software can detail what people watch by identifying audio signals in TV ads and shows, sometimes even matching that information with the places people visit and the movies they see. The information can then be used to target ads more precisely and to try to analyze things like which ads prompted a person to go to a car dealership.

Most of this occurs in the Android universe, but some iOS games use Alphonso as well. I’m willing to bet that though the games ask permission to use the microphone, not one of those games adds in, “so we can eavesdrop, track your TV viewing habits”.

This is despicable. Apple should do something about this.

[Via DF]

UPDATE: Missed this nugget:

Mr. Chordia [Alphonso CEO] said that Alphonso has a deal with the music-listening app Shazam, which has microphone access on many phones. Alphonso is able to provide the snippets it picks up to Shazam, he said, which can use its own content-recognition technology to identify users and then sell that information to Alphonso.

Shazam, which Apple recently agreed to buy, declined to comment about Alphonso.

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.

iMac Pro benchmarks running Pro apps

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A solid case study comparing the new iMac Pro, iMac 5K, a 2013 Mac Pro, two flavors of 2010 Mac Pro.

Just one example: In the Final Cut Pro X export test, the iMac Pro is three times as fast as the 2010 Mac Pro. How far we’ve come. Makes me really curious about the performance we’ll (hopefully) see in the 2018 Mac Pro.

Using drag and drop to reorder the icons on your iOS share sheet

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Not sure how long this has been the case (likely since the very beginning of share sheets), but this feature is definitely new to me, thought it worth sharing.

  • Bring up an iOS app, then bring up a share sheet. In the Safari app, bring up a web page, then tap the share icon (square with up arrow) to bring up the Safari share sheet.
  • Press and hold an icon until it grows slightly, then slide to the left or right to move it to a new location.

This technique works with both the app shelf and the tool shelf.

To see this in action, watch the video in the tweet below:

https://twitter.com/ulliverti/status/947937748777885696

Good stuff.

Why Apple is replacing the battery on my iPhone SE

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Kirk McElhearn:

While I currently use an iPhone 8+, a still have the iPhone SE that I bought in March, 2016. With all of the attention to batteries on the iPhone, I decided to check this device’s battery. It hadn’t seemed particularly slow to me, but the battery hadn’t been lasting a full day for some months before I got the iPhone 8+ and stopped using the SE.

Kirk uses iMazing, a Mac app, to check the iPhone SE battery health (current max charge vs max charge when it was new). If you are thinking about checking and, possibly, replacing your iPhone battery, this is an excellent case study.

Side note: You might also check the Coconut Battery app, which will tell you about your Mac battery, as well as the battery in any USB connected iOS device.

Browser password manager used to track you, even with tracking blocked

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FreedomToTinker:

We show how third-party scripts exploit browsers’ built-in login managers (also called password managers) to retrieve and exfiltrate user identifiers without user awareness. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to show that login managers are being abused by third-party scripts for the purposes of web tracking.

To see this for yourself, fire up Safari and go to this demo page.

  • When the page loads, type in a fake email address and a fake password. Don’t use your real info.
  • Click the link at the bottom of the page.
  • Safari will offer to save your password for that site. Click Save.

The demo will then jump to a sniffer page which contains an invisible login form. Safari will helpfully populate the form, and this new demo page will display the sniffed results.

This approach is only possible when a third party has script access to the first-party domain. Thus, our third-party script is only able to recover the credentials you saved for this website (senglehardt.com). It is not possible for us to access credentials for other websites.

So far, your data is visible to a script running on a site with that script installed. The problem is with scripts that run on multiple sites:

We found two scripts using this technique to extract email addresses from login managers on the websites which embed them. These addresses are then hashed and sent to one or more third-party servers. These scripts were present on 1110 of the Alexa top 1 million sites. The process of detecting these scripts is described in our measurement methodology in the Appendix 1. We provide a brief analysis of each script in the sections below.

Bottom line, the scripts are saving hashed (encrypted) versions of surreptitiously harvested login info and comparing it to a saved database of other hashed results. If it finds a match, it knows who you are.

This is all a bit complicated, but my 2 cents, Apple should address this in some way to prevent this form of cross-site tracking.

Apple’s $29 iPhone battery replacements are available right now

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Brian Heater, TechCrunch:

Those $29 battery out-of-warranty replacements Apple promised are now available for impacted users with an iPhone 6 or later. The company was initially aiming for a late-January timeframe in the States when it first offered up the discount, following blowback against its admission that it had slowed down older model phones to maximize performance.

“We expected to need more time to be ready,” the company said in a statement offered up to TechCrunch this weekend, “but we are happy to offer our customers the lower pricing right away. Initial supplies of some replacement batteries may be limited.”

No word yet on the timing of the battery health iOS software update.

Using the iPhone X to make your face invisible

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This is pretty cool. Watch the video embedded in this tweet:

https://twitter.com/noshipu/status/945844851261579264

The developer built an app that runs on the iPhone X and uses the face mesh to render your face invisible. A neat trick. Not sure how useful this is, but A for effort.

Apple keeps losing legal battles to an Italian company called “Steve Jobs”

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Gizmodo:

When two brothers from Naples decided to stop doing fashion design for other companies and start a brand of their own, they went hunting for an attention-grabbing name. They discovered that “Steve Jobs” wasn’t trademarked and decided on that. Now, a protracted legal battle has come to an end, and they have big plans for using the Apple founder’s name on pretty much anything.

And:

As expected, Apple’s legal department soon sent the brothers four large folders of legal documents and went to war. But the brothers won the case.

It’d be one thing if the founder was named Steve Jobs. But this is straight-forward riding on someone else’s coattails.

That said, there are plenty of precedents. Here’s one that springs to mind.

A message to our customers about iPhone batteries and performance

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From Apple’s public statement on the iPhone battery throttling issue:

We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize. There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we’re making.

First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that.

Apple then goes into detail on battery aging and some battery shutdown history, all pretty readable. But at the very bottom is this:

Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com.

And:

Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.

Stay tuned for the details. Personally, I wish Apple had wrapped their PR arms around this issue a lot sooner. They certainly had all the pieces in place to have avoided this issue entirely.

Some people assign ill will to Apple, feel Apple was trying to do something shady with their battery tech. Some feel Apple was trying to manipulate people into buying new phones. I just don’t see any of that. No way.

Me? I think this was a fumble. This letter makes me feel a bit better about the whole thing, gives me a sense that Apple is both taking this seriously and is learning from this experience.

One final note: iFixit has dropped the price of their DIY battery replacement kits to $29 or less in case you want to do this yourself.

Tim Cook: Salary details, and forced by new Apple policy to only fly on private planes

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Two nuggets from this Bloomberg article:

Cook’s incentive pay totaled $9.33 million for the year ended Sept. 30, the Cupertino, California-based company said Wednesday in a regulatory filing. He also took home $3.06 million in salary and a previously disclosed equity award of $89.2 million, bringing his total payout for the year to about $102 million.

His top five lieutenants each got bonuses of $3.11 million, bringing their total compensation to about $24.2 million each, including salaries and stock awards.

And:

The Apple board stipulated this year that for security reasons the CEO should use private planes for business and personal travel, citing the risk given his high profile. Personal security costs were calculated at $224,216.

My two cents: Tim Cook is a bargain. Apple is an aircraft carrier of a company, both massive and incredibly complex. Tim is overseeing exponential growth while keeping Apple on track, dealing reasonably well with the problems that arise, all while remaining the very public face of a very public company.

As to the private planes, no issue there, makes sense. I just found it interesting that Apple made it policy, mandating that Tim fly private.

Apple is being slandered for what chemistry cannot fix

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Robert Kientz, Seeking Alpha (free reg-wall):

Li-ION is the most advanced, commonly available batteries that are used in portable electronics like laptops and phones. That is because unlike Nickel Cadmium [NiCad], they do not develop ‘charge memories’. And they are better for small electronics than Nickel Metal Hydride [NiMH] because of shorter charge time and higher energy density, both critical for the uses of portable phones.

And:

Li-ION batteries typically fail faster than NiCad because they wear out in less charge cycles, which mean consumers get fewer charges before their batteries will need replacement.

And:

Apple has not designed flaws into its iPhone product with regard to battery management.

What Apple has done is provide software that allows its iPhone users who want to keep their phones to manage their batteries by slowing down the processor during times of lower power and to keep the phones from turning off spontaneously. Contrary to what many have said about this story, what Apple is doing is not abnormal at all.

There are two computer chip manufacturers that you may have heard of, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), that have built advanced power management technology into their chipset designs.

Provocative read. To me, Apple has done an amazing job optimizing its battery technology. Where they’ve slipped up here, in my opinion, is in communications. This would not be an issue of Apple gave users an easy way to tell where their device sits on the battery efficiency curve, made it easier for a user to have a sense of how much better their device would perform if they bought a new battery.

That said, I’m not sure Apple wants to be in the battery swap-out business. If Apple educated their users about the current state of their batteries, I suspect many consumers would develop a habit of updating their batteries, rather than live with a 75% solution.

Susan Kare on coming to work for Apple, designing icons and type

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[VIDEO] The video embedded in the main Loop post is from a few years ago but, if you are interested in icon design and/or Apple history, carve out some time and give it a look. Susan Kare was the original Mac icon and type designer. Lovely stuff, worth the repost.

xkcd: Phone security

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Xkcd proposes some terrific options to set when your iPhone is stolen. Just a nibble:

If phone is stolen, do a fake factory reset. Then, in the background, automatically order food to phone’s location from every delivery place within 20 miles.

Just read it. I’m sure you can think of your own options. And if you’ve never read xkcd before, here’s a link to a completely random one.

How’s Apple doing in India?

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This is a fascinating post from The AAPL Tree, an Apple blog that has moved entirely to Apple News. The linked post mixes a good number of well researched facts about Apple’s India operations with some educated guesses.

If you are interested in Apple and India, don’t miss the crowdsourced revenue/net income chart in the middle of the post. It estimates Apple’s 2017 India revenue at about 11,618 crore. A crore is 10M rupee, about $156,000.

Doing the math (pulls out Pcalc), 11,618 crore is about $1.8 billion. Not too shabby.

How far ahead of Apple Maps is Google Maps?

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Long ago, Google Maps had a huge edge over Apple Maps, but Apple Maps made great strides. In many areas, Apple Maps caught up. In my travels (mostly in the eastern US), Apple Maps works well, gets me where I need to go, does a solid job predicting traffic, rerouting me as needed. And the tight integration with my Apple Watch makes a big difference when I’m navigating new territory.

I realize Apple Maps is great in some areas, lacking in others, but this post is about one specific feature, a feature in which Google has a decided edge: Representing property, buildings, and structure outlines on map.

Justin O’Beirne has pulled together an incredibly detailed post showing these differences. As you make your way through the post, you can’t help but see how massive Google’s lead in this particular area has become.

Google has repeatedly told journalists that it started extracting data from Street View imagery in 2008, as part of its “Ground Truth” project. So this suggests that Google may have a 6+ year lead over Apple in data collection.

And:

And as we saw with AOIs [Areas of Interest], Google has gathered so much data, in so many areas, that it’s now crunching it together and creating features that Apple can’t make—surrounding Google Maps with a moat of time.

This is not a complaint. For me (and I recognize your mileage may vary here), Apple Maps works quite well. But the arguments and images in Justin’s post are fair proof. Google has a big edge in data collection.

Can Apple catch up? Of course. If they spend the money, make the commitment.

As has been said many times before, data is the new oil.

Students with autism make music with iPads

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[VIDEO] This is a fantastic story. A teacher discovers that an autistic student responds to music, is determined to bring music creation and performance to an entire class of autistic kids.

The result just might bring a tear to your eyes. Video embedded in main Loop post.

Transferring SD card data to iOS, fast

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Jason Snell, Six Colors:

When I’m traveling with only my iPhone and iPad, I can record audio on an external device—an SD-card recorder from Zoom, usually—but how do I get those files onto my iOS device? iOS can’t see the contents of a standard SD card.

And:

It’s still a little bit silly that, now that iOS has a file-management app, you still can’t plug in a mass storage device via a USB adapter and copy files off of it directly.

And this from John Gruber:

Apple even makes an SD card reader for iOS devices. It just seems downright wrong that it only allows you to import photos to your camera roll. Clearly a connected SD card ought to show up as a source in the iOS 11 Files app, right?

To me, the inability of iOS to handle external drives, SD-cards, etc., is a barrier to an iPad becoming a first class computing citizen.

Apple TV now on sale at Amazon, currently out of stock

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Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

It took almost six months since the initial murmurings, but Apple and Amazon have finally resolved their differences. The Apple TV 4K and fourth-generation Apple TV are available to buy from Amazon.com, following the launch of the Prime Video tvOS app earlier this month.

Checked it just now, here’s what I see:

Here’s a US link to the Apple TV 4K – 32GB. Hopefully, Apple and Amazon will work the stock issue out in the next day or so.

Apple’s Shazam adds offline caching mode

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Roger Fingas, AppleInsider:

When users tap the button to listen to a song, the app will now save a sample for upload when internet access returns. A notification should pop up once a result is ready. The Android version of Shazam previously had equivalent offline support.

“Apple’s Shazam”. Weird to hear, but yup, Shazam is now all Apple’s.

Smart addition. Glad to have this in iOS.

Apple’s Mac/iPad twists and turns

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Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note:

Apple execs have had to eat their words after strong but imprudent pronouncements. For example, thus spake Steve Jobs at an August 2010 iOS 4 event:

“It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager… they blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it.”

And:

When Jony Ive explains that Apple didn’t make a stylus but something “more profound”, a Pencil, we welcome the change of mind while smiling at the language Apple’s Chief Design Officer uses to share his insights in the matter of writing instruments and bridging the gap between the analogue (using Sir Jony’s British spelling) and digital worlds.

But this is more than Jean-Louis pointing out Apple crow-eating opportunities. As you read his (as always) well-written reasoning, you’ll explore the real premise:

How far will reversals go?

I’ll start with something I consider unlikely: The introduction of tablet features to the Mac. For Mac laptops, Apple has issued a strong edict: The ergonomically correct way to use a laptop it to keep your hands on the horizontal plane, no lifting one’s arm to touch the screen, no matter how tempting. The MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar keeps our hands where they belong, on the desk.

This is a terrific read. But I agree with Jean-Louis, a Mac iPad merger is not likely. But he does go down an interesting path. An ARM-based Mac? I definitely can see that happening.

Especially with this precedent.

iPhone X available for next-day delivery in the U.S., same-day pickup from most stores

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Malcolm Owen, AppleInsider:

According to the Apple website, orders in the United States for all combinations of color and capacity of the iPhone X are claimed to be “In Stock” for deliveries, with orders arriving with customers as soon as “Tomorrow.” This appears to apply to devices for all four major carriers, as well as the SIM-free variant.

Bottom line, supply has caught up with demand, and there’s still time to get an iPhone X in time for Festivus.

Apple sold out of AirPods until January

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If you were thinking about picking up AirPods as a Christmas gift, better get moving. eBay is an obvious solution, but if you head to iStockNow, you might be able to find a set at original pricing.

Apple orders Ronald D. Moore series, and Portlandia

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[VIDEO] Nellie Andreeva, Deadline:

Ronald D. Moore is heading back to space. Apple has given a straight-to-series order to a space drama from the Battlestar Galactica developer. The untitled project hails from Sony Pictures Television and Moore’s studio-based Tall Ship Productions.

Created and written by Moore, along with Fargo co-executive producers Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, the untitled series explores what would have happened if the global space race had never ended. Tall Ship Prods.’ Moore and Maril Davis executive produce with Wolpert and Nedivi.

Ronald D. Moore was one of the creators and main writers of the excellent Battlestar Galactica. I’ve got high hopes for this one. Fingers crossed.

How excellent was Battlestar Galactica? Watch the video embedded in the main Loop post to see what happens if you start watching it. And if you liked the video, click here to watch the second half, which brings some recognizable Battlestar faces into the action.

How Apple Watch saved one man’s life — and how it’s empowering him after his heart attack

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Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Scott Killian never imagined his Apple Watch might save his life, but that’s exactly what happened a few weeks ago when he had a heart attack in the middle of the night. Killian recently shared his personal experience with 9to5Mac, and the details of his story are absolutely amazing.

This is a great story, worth reading and sharing. A tremendous side benefit that ships with your Apple Watch and a sign of the health benefits to come as this technology matures.

Amazon’s fake review problem

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An interesting post by Brian Bien on Amazon fake reviews, with an example of three very different reviews of the same product, all of which had this exact sentence:

The light can be pretty bright, you can adjust it where it’ll be dim and slowly brighten 30 minutes before the alarm time.

Brian makes the point:

Amazon – who has some of the world’s most advanced ML – really needs to step up its review fraud detection game. Imagine how great the Amazon shopping experience would be if we could trust its reviews.

This is one of the great potential values of machine learning. Apple’s early machine learning frameworks focused on two specific areas: Image Recognition and Natural Language Processing. Image recognition helps pick out images of cats, or roses, or your best friend Francis from your photo library. Natural Language Processing (NLP) focuses on parsing streams of text to pull out relevant details.

The fake reviews problem is a perfect problem for NLP and machine learning. There’s really no reason Amazon can’t do better. Maybe Apple could give them a hand.

The puzzling price of AppleCare+ for the iMac Pro

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Malcolm Owen, AppleInsider:

Apple is making the decision for customers acquiring the iMac Pro to pick up AppleCare+ with their purchase easier, by keeping the price of the extended warranty service the same as for the iMac despite the increase in hardware cost.

AppleCare+ for the iMac Pro is $169, same as the iMac. AppleCare+ for the Mac Pro is $249.

I’ve always seen AppleCare as an insurance model. More expensive devices equals more expensive coverage cost.

Begs the question, when the Mac Pro ships next year (fingers crossed), will AppleCare+ coverage be priced in line with the iMac Pro? Is this a new cap on AppleCare?

It also begs the question, will the coming Mac Pro be cheaper than the iMac Pro?

Why? Well, the iMac Pro ships with an integrated 5K display. Presumably, the Mac Pro will be standalone. It might have more expensive components, but my thinking is, the cost of the 5K display should more than offset that cost (Insert “I’m no expert caveat” here).