Tech Reflect:
I wrote this little anecdote shortly after Steve Jobs passed away. Despite it happening more than 5 years ago, it still is imprinted on my brain and does a great job of illustrating the person I felt he was.
Found this in my saved links bin, a post from back in 2017. Steve died just about 10 years ago. A sweet little anecdote.
Linked by Jason Snell here, and pairing well with his Cutting the Cord post from a few weeks ago, Suppose.tv uses your location to help you work through the math of cutting the cord.
Pick a channel from the list on the right and Suppose will give you all the options in that list that give you access to that channel, with the cheapest option listed first. Keep adding channels, home in on the service or combination of services that will fill your needs for the cheapest price.
Great find, Jason.
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?
To get a sense of the goal here, the dream, jump to 25 seconds in and check out the looped videos posted by French video artist Romain Laurent. They are both whimsical and seamless.
Better yet, take a look at this page, where you can see them all in full motion.
With that in mind, watch the video below, where Romain shares some hints with Today at Apple.
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.
I do realize that most of you know how to do this, but thought this was worth passing along for the folks who don’t, and for you to pass along to the folks who you tech support.
Don’t miss that bit about turning the mic on and off.
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.
Matt Birchler:
While I’m quite a bit older than I was when After Dark’s bizarre flying toasters were popular, I still enjoy it when the internet is weird. I think that many people confuse “owning my enemies” with “weird”, but despite that crowd, there is so much out there that’s just people trying funky things to see what happens.
Yup. Flying toasters. Most everyone with a Macintosh back in the late ’80s, early ’90s, had this screensaver on their Macs, or at least had seen it in action.
And now you can experience this glory for yourself. Here’s a link to the Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers, ported to CSS. Enjoy.
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.
The linked report from Mark Gurman is full of spoilers, so don’t follow the headline link if you want to be surprised by Apple’s coming hardware event.
And the text below has one of those spoilers, a tiny one, but one I think may compel a lot of people to make the leap to a new iPhone.
Read on, fairly warned:
The new handsets will include a video version of the phone’s Portrait mode feature.
Portrait mode, and the accompanying Portrait Lighting effects brought a huge wave of excitement and, I suspect a big wave of iPhone updates. Portrait mode arrived about 5 years ago (back in September 2016), hinted at with a much-analyzed bokeh invitation.
Portrait mode was possible because of a big leap in iPhone processing power. Bringing this power to video? That’s huge, sure to bring a new wave of TikToks taking advantage of the effect. And also (IMO) sure to bring a new wave of upgrades.
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.
Mark Gurman, from his Power On newsletter:
When Apple introduced the Apple TV in 2007, the rationale for buying one was clear: The box could store TV shows and movie files and pull media from the owner’s Mac onto the big screen. The next version in 2010 had its own unique place: It was a $99 cloud streaming device to watch Netflix, download video rentals from iTunes and AirPlay media from an iPhone or iPad. Even the 2015 model had its reason for being: the App Store.
So far, so good. But:
Buying an Apple TV no longer gives users a content advantage. We are in the age of streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu, and business models have shifted so that every service is available on every device—phones, tablets, TV sets, streaming sticks and game consoles.
Apple, known for its closed ecosystem, is even embracing the shift by offering many services on smart TVs and boxes made by competitors. Those services include iTunes movie and TV rentals, the Apple TV app, Apple TV+, Apple Music and AirPlay.
And:
That made the Apple TV a mostly pointless accessory, and consumers seem to agree: 2020 data from Strategy Analytics found that the Apple TV holds 2% of the streaming device market.
And:
The product isn’t without its benefits, though, for the Apple ecosystem’s most loyal users. Integration with HomeKit, Fitness+, AirPods and the iOS remote app is useful. The new remote control and faster chip in this year’s version are definite improvements, and the box is getting SharePlay and Spatial Audio support later this year. Still, I don’t see these enhancements moving the needle for most people.
My guess: If Apple had to choose between Apple TV device sales and success of the Apple TV+ streaming service, they’d pick the latter. The former is a device that ages quickly (as tech gear does), requires constant renewal and support. And the latter can become evergreen (think of shows like The Office or Seinfeld, still bringing in a huge payday for their creators, with little additional investment required).
TV+ has started off slow. Analysis from Bernstein estimates Apple TV+ revenue of $2.2 billion in 2021, compared with $25 billion for Netflix last year. Apple’s initial content library was incredibly limited, and Covid-19 hit just months after launch, delaying new shows and filming on second seasons by up to two years.
Patience required here. I’d bet on continued growth for Apple TV+. As I’ve mentioned on The Dalrymple Report, Apple TV+ has raised the bar, with higher quality shows per capita than any other streaming service. Put another way, I’d bet that the average IMDb rating for every show/movie on Apple TV+ is higher than the average of every show on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc.
From this tweet by Washington DC Mayor Muriel Bowser:
https://twitter.com/MayorBowser/status/1423995113064251392
Not sure if Apple was involved here, even behind the scenes, but props to whoever came up with this plan.
Steven Aquino, Forbes, responding to the cancellation (covered in this Loop post) of the Apple TV+ original series Little Voice:
The drama, which stars Brittany O’Grady, chronicles the trials and tribulations of aspiring singer-songwriter Bess (played by O’Grady) as she tries to overcome her fear of performing publicly and realize her dream of being a performer. The journey to find herself runs on a parallel track to her relationship with her autistic brother, Louie, played by Kevin Valdez (who has autism) as he tries to find himself in his own right by trying to live more independently.
And:
Little Voice was notable insofar as it was one of two shows on Apple’s roster—the other being the post-apocalyptic drama See—that authentically portrayed disability.
Side note: As Steven notes in his update, the Apple TV+ movie CODA (child of deaf adults) will premier this Friday.
The loss of Little Voice, while run-of-the-mill by Hollywood cancellation standards, is not an insignificant one when you consider its impact on furthering disability representation in film and television. As disability has historically been portrayed as something to be pitied and overcome—too often resulting in pandering, feel-good, ableist fodder which many in the disability community derisively refer to as “inspiration porn”—Apple deserved more acclaim by bucking this trend with not one but two shows.
Thoughtful take from Steven Aquino.
Follow the headline link, type in the name of an artist you love. Music Map offers completion if you are not certain of the spelling.
Once you find your artist, click the name and Music Map will build a tag cloud with artists related to your artist. The closer a tag is to your artist, the greater the probability that you will find their styles similar.
I’ve played with this a bit and, though it’s not perfect, I have enjoyed the rabbit hole of artists it’s led me down.
I do wish they’d link each artist to the artist page on your preferred music service. So when I click Tink, I’d get a link to Tink’s Apple Music artist page. That’d make it much easier to explore and listen.
Juli Clover, MacRumors:
According to Apple’s developer website, the second AirPods Pro firmware update adds support for Conversation Boost, a feature that was missing from the first beta.
Conversation Boost is an iOS 15 feature that uses the beamforming microphones in the AirPods Pro to boost the volume level of conversations, which is ideal for those with mild to moderate hearing challenges.
Think about being in a crowded, noisy restaurant, with a lot of bouncy surfaces and multiple people talking at once. Conversation Boost uses computational audio to focus on and amplify the sounds coming from the direction in which you are facing.
The video embedded below (from back in June) does a nice job showing this.
Kid Pix originally came out in 1989, a pretty popular alternative to MacPaint.
Open the headline link in Safari (works on any device that supports JavaScript) and give it a whirl.
This version of Kid Pix is public domain. Here’s a link to the source code.
Buried at the bottom of the linked J. J. Abrams piece:
Bad Robot also exec produced Apple’s Little Voice, which sources tell THR has been canceled after one season.
Canceling a show is tough, but a necessary part of growth, a sign of Apple raising their expectations for Apple TV+.
Apple:
This school year, tens of thousands of students will be able to use mobile student IDs on iPhone and Apple Watch to get around campus and make purchases. For the first time, mobile student IDs can be added to the Wallet app in Canada, starting with the University of New Brunswick and Sheridan College this year. In the US, new schools to adopt mobile student IDs include Auburn University, Northern Arizona University, University of Maine, New Mexico State University, and many more colleges across the country.
And:
In April 2021, for the first time since launching mobile student IDs in Wallet, students used their mobile IDs to make purchases and access campus buildings more than they used plastic ID cards. This fall, the University of Alabama will be the first school to exclusively issue mobile student IDs to their 38,000 students with eligible devices.
It was not so long ago that major colleges and universities were using a student’s social security number (in the US) as their actual student ID.
Moving the student ID to a student’s iPhone and Apple Watch is a huge step forward, both in convenience and in security. Will there come a day when we can use our iPhone Wallet as an airline ID (I think so)? To vote in an election?
The new white paper, titled Mac Pro Technology Overview, is chock full of detail, well worth going through if you own, or are considering a Mac Pro.
The paper is pretty long (45 pages), so if you are interested in the new AMD modules, open the PDF and do a find for AMD, which should take you to the description of the Radeon Pro 580X MPX Module.
Also worth checking out is AMD’s Mac Pro-centric web page covering their new graphics cards.
If you like mysteries and have not yet checked out season one of Truth Be Told, do so. It’s a great show.
If you are a fan of Season One, check out the Season Two trailer, embedded below. First new episode drops August 20th, two weeks from Friday.
Deadline:
Brendan Fraser (No Sudden Move) has joined the casts of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Max Barbakow’s Brothers.
The former title from Apple TV + and Paramount Pictures is a crime drama, based on the bestselling book of the same name by David Grann. It’s set in 1920s Oklahoma and will examine the serial murder of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation—a string of brutal crimes that came to be known as the Reign of Terror.
Cool. Who else is in it?
Fraser will appear in Killers alongside Oscar winners Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, Emmy nominated Jesse Plemons, and more. We hear that he will play lawyer WS Hamilton.
De Niro and DiCaprio. Directed by Scorsese. Mix in some Brendan Fraser (along with the under-appreciated Jess Plemons), and a budget said to be more than $200M. Yes please.
Last week, I tweeted an old school iPhone camera tip that prompted some discussion and, for me, led to a rabbit hole deep dive into various camera app settings.
More importantly, it led to the video embedded below (thanks and a H/T to Matt Cassinelli), in which Tyler Stalman talks through a lot of hidden built-in camera app detail that you may not be aware of.
Worth watching, all the way through. Plus, now I’ve added Calgary Stampede to my bucket list.
Parker Ortolani, 9to5Mac:
Microsoft’s new cloud PC system, Windows 365, has officially launched for all eligible businesses and enterprises. While it’s not available to consumers yet, we hope to see it in the future. In the meantime, I was able to go hands-on with Windows 365 on my iPad Pro. Here’s what my experience was like.
And:
Previously, we expected Windows 365 to be only accessible through a web browser. I first tried Windows 365 through Safari in iPadOS 15. It wasn’t a great experience, to be honest. But then I noticed Microsoft’s callout to the Remote Desktop app. I flew over to the App Store and downloaded the app, entered my credentials, and boom — I had a smooth virtual install of Windows running in a native app on my iPad from the App Store. Yeah, you read that correctly.
Here’s a link to the pricing page.
The plan starts at $31 per user per month. That’s $372 per year. This is for businesses, not consumer use. My sense is that this is Microsoft getting in front of the work-from-home trend, giving businesses a way to avoid the computer hardware purchase/configuration/disposal cycle.
Hard to judge the value of this pricing, but it certainly is interesting that you can run your Windows install on your Mac, then switch that exact same configuration over to your iPad.
It does feel like it will shift the burden of hardware ownership from the employer to the employee.