Apple

[UPDATE 2, new statement from Avid and Google] Avid releases statement on widespread issues affecting Mac Pros and Avid software

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Earlier this morning, we linked to a Variety article detailing a mysterious issue knocking out Mac Pros across Hollywood.

Avid emailed us the following statement:

Avid is aware of the reboot issue affecting Apple Mac Pro devices running some Avid products, which arose late yesterday. This issue is top priority for our engineering and support teams, who have been working diligently to determine and resolve the root cause. As we learn more, we will immediately publish information—directly to our customers and via our community forums and social media platforms—in order to resolve this issue for all affected customers and prevent any further issues.

More as we hear it.

UPDATE: Avid shared a video with us this evening, with the latest updates on the situation. The video is embedded in the main Loop post.

UPDATE 2: Avid sent us this update this morning:

Today, Avid is confirming that the root cause for a reboot issue encountered by some of our customers has been identified and is unrelated to Avid and its creative tools. Google confirmed that a Chrome update “may have shipped with a bug that damages the file system on macOS machines.” Google has paused its release and provided instructions for affected users.

Avid is also pleased to share that it has received no reports of data loss by affected customers. From the beginning when this issue was made known to Avid, our teams actively worked with customers, Apple and partners to identify solutions and communicate them to customers. At this time, most affected Avid customers have recovered from this issue by reinstalling their macOS. Avid received no reports of incidents from customers running on non-Mac operating systems. To reiterate, this was not an Avid issue, as was reported in some early media coverage.

And from the Google Chrome support team:

We recently discovered that a Chrome update may have shipped with a bug that damages the file system on macOS machines with System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled, including machines that do not support SIP. We’ve paused the release while we finalize a new update that addresses the problem.

If you have not taken steps to disable System Integrity Protection and your computer is on OS X 10.9 or later, this issue cannot affect you.

If this bug affected you, follow this link to the Google Chrome support article for details on the fix.

Mysterious AVID issue knocks out Mac Pros across Hollywood

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This one is still unfolding, but wow.

Variety:

Film and TV editors across Los Angeles were sweating Monday evening as their workstations were refusing to reboot, resulting in speculations about a possible computer virus attack. Social media reports suggested that the issue was widespread among users of Mac Pro computers running older versions of Apple’s operating system as well as AVID’s Media Composer software.

This is astonishing. Not just one or two Mac Pros, but a bunch of them, all refusing to reboot.

Some analysis by affected users seemed to suggest that the outage may not have been caused by a virus, but by a recent software update that may have corrupted some data, with some suggesting a OS X reinstall that keeps the existing data to restart the machine. Either way, it’s a good idea for anyone running AVID software on a Mac to back up all data right away.

Note that these are the trash can Mac Pros, not a secret rollout of the not yet released Mac Pros announced at WWDC.

Massive iPhone battery drain test

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[VIDEO] This battery test includes all the iPhones 11, and selections from previous generations, back to the iPhone 8 Plus.

Start off by jumping to 1:32 in, to see all the phones labeled with name and battery capacity. Then jump to 8:37 for the first victim.

Scientific? Rigorous? No, but scientific enough for me to find this worth watching. Video embedded in main Loop post.

Google Play Pass: Sort of like Apple Arcade, but only in pricing

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Google:

Play Pass is a new subscription service that gives you access to more than 350 apps and games that are completely unlocked—all free of ads, in-app purchases and upfront payments. Play Pass offers a high-quality, curated collection of titles from Stardew Valley to AccuWeather, with new apps and games added every month.

This feels like Google recognizing Apple’s move into services and the Apple Arcade model. It’s apps and games, not just games.

But it’s not new content. And the titles (like Monument Valley, for example) are not unique to Android or the Google Play Pass.

Is this worth $4.99 a month? Could be, if you find enough useful content. But don’t think of this as an Apple Arcade competitor. I’ve been playing a lot of Apple Arcade games, and I’ve yet to find a weak one in the bunch. And you won’t find a single Apple Arcade title on Android.

Apple Arcade, trailer of the day

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[VIDEO] Not sure how long Apple can keep this up, but they’ve now dropped their 4th Apple Arcade trailer in as many days. This one is for Shinsekai into the Depths. It does not disappoint.The trailer is embedded in the main Loop post.

Apple drops three new Apple Arcade trailers

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[VIDEO] Apple Arcade really lives up to the hype. Especially if you add a controller into the mix.

Three new game trailers. They look great, but this is just a drop in the bucket. Videos embedded in main Loop post.

iFixit iPhone 11 Pro Max teardown

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Lots of pictures, and, most importantly, on that possible bilateral charging board (so your phone can act as a Qi charger for other phones):

Apple did post a new support document today, stating that iPhone 11 Pro contains new hardware for monitoring and managing battery performance. So maybe that’s all this is, and it just looks suspiciously like bilateral charging hardware.

Apple announces official start of Oprah’s Book Club

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Apple:

Winfrey’s first book selection is “The Water Dancer” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, available for pre-order now on Apple Books in both ebook and audiobook formats, and debuting tomorrow.

And:

Winfrey will interview Coates for the first installment of her new exclusive Apple TV+ series, “Oprah’s Book Club,” premiering November 1. A new episode will be available every two months.

Interested in reading along with Oprah? Here’s a link to “The Water Dancer” preorder page.

iPhone 11 Pro vs the world: Night mode battle

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[VIDEO] Rene Ritchie compares all the Night modes. But even more importantly, Rene demonstrates each Night mode, from your side of the camera, and explains how the technology works, in terms I can understand. Video embedded in main Loop post.

iOS 13 and CarPlay

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Over the weekend, got into a Twitter discussion on iOS 13 and the improvements it brought to CarPlay. Thought I’d share two posts that lay out the details of what’s changed.

If you have CarPlay or are considering a new car purchase and want to learn more, here are two articles to make your way through:

Future smart fabric Apple Watch bands will embed gas sensors, visual output, audio, touch input and more

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Patently Apple:

Although the invention could apply to a wide range of future products such protective covers, advanced versions of Apple’s Smart Keyboard, clothing, furniture, wearable electronic devices, and other items using fabric, the focus for this invention is a future smart fabric Apple Watch band.

And:

According to Apple’s invention, a fabric-based item may include fabric formed from intertwined strands of material with embedded circuitry.

And:

The circuitry in the fabric-based item may gather input from a user and from the user’s surroundings. The circuitry may supply visual output, audio output, tactile output, and/or other output.

And:

In the I/O segment of system 8 may include Sensors such as temperature sensors, pressure sensors, force sensors, gas sensors (e.g., carbon monoxide sensors), particulate sensors, moisture sensors, light sensors, magnetic sensors, capacitive sensors (e.g., sensors for touch or proximity measurements), gesture sensors, image sensors, proximity sensors, touch sensors, button sensors (e.g., switches coupled to movable button members or button regions),

This is a fascinating, far reaching patent.

Apple drops new Apple Arcade trailer

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[VIDEO] You know what I’m going to do this weekend? Yup, I’m going to hide myself away and immerse myself in some high quality games. Seeya! (trailer embedded in main Loop post)

iOS 13: Top features & changes

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[VIDEO] Jeff Benjamin clearly and calmly offers a guided tour through the main changes that come with iOS 13. Very easy to follow, full of detail. Video embedded in main Loop post.

MacStories posts remarkable, encyclopedic iOS and iPadOS 13 review

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Federico Viticci, MacStories:

It was only natural (and well-deserved) for the iPad to begin advancing in a parallel direction to iOS – informed and inspired by it, but also capable of growing on its own and tackling problems that an iPhone doesn’t have to solve.

From this standpoint, there are two sides to iOS 13: on one hand, an underlying tide that raises all platforms, featuring a distillation of themes Apple comes back to on an annual basis; on the other, a fork in the road, opening a new path for the iPad’s next decade. And against this backdrop, a single question looms large:

Can Apple balance both?

This is a remarkable read, just chock full of detail on every aspect of iOS and iPadOS 13. As you make your way through it, tap the table of contents icon in the upper right corner (looks like a 2×2 grid of squares) to get a sense of the overall structure, and to jump to a particular chapter that interests you.

This is incredible work.

You can now ask Siri to play any song on Spotify

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Reddit:

I am running both iOS 13 beta (it gets publicly released in a few hours) and Spotify beta. iOS 13 is required, as well as the latest version of Spotify from the iOS App Store for this to work.

Here’s a link to an image, showing this at work.

If you use the Spotify app on iOS 13, give it a try.

An exclusive look inside Apple’s A13 Bionic chip

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Om Malik, Wired:

About 72 minutes into the annual iPhone launch event, Apple senior vice president of marketing Phil Schiller invited Sri Santhanam to come onstage and talk about the brand new A13 Bionic chip found inside all three of the new phones.

And:

By the time Santhanam was done talking, all I could think of were the numbers. Apple’s new chip contains 8.5 billion transistors. Also, there are six CPU cores: Two high-performance cores running at 2.66 GHz (called Lightning), and four efficiency cores (called Thunder). It has a quad-core graphics processor, an LTE modem, an Apple-designed image processor, and an octa-core neural engine for machine intelligence functions that can run a trillion operations per second.

This new chip is smarter, faster, and beefier, and yet it somehow manages to consume less power than its predecessor. It’s about 30 percent more efficient than last year’s A12 chip, one of the factors that contributes to the extra five hours per day of battery life in the new iPhones.

And this on the competing chips from Qualcomm, Huawei, and Samsung:

Those chips have some faster components and more of them, so you may think those chips perform better than Apple’s. But the reality is that we hardly use the entire capacity of the chips that come in our mobile devices. One or two high-performance cores are enough for most of what we throw at our phones. Apple’s six-core design might seem lagging compared to the eight-core processors from the competitors, but really, the two big processors on its chip easily outperform its rivals’ designs.

This is a terrific read. No special hardware knowledge required.

iPhone 11 “audio zoom”

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[VIDEO] One of the little-covered announcements in last week’s full-to-the-brim Apple event, was the iPhone 11’s so-called audio zoom.

Here’s a video (embedded in the main Loop post) that shows off how this works.

Apple Fifth Avenue: The cube is back

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Apple:

Apple today previewed the new Apple Fifth Avenue, an entirely reimagined space beneath one of New York City’s most recognized landmarks. With its distinctive, luminous glass cube rising above a newly designed public plaza, Apple Fifth Avenue is ready to resume its place at the heart of one of the world’s most vibrant creative communities.

Now nearly double the size of its original version with a higher ceiling and more natural light, Apple Fifth Avenue is a brighter, more expansive space, and the perfect stage for customers to discover and try Apple’s newest products. A new Forum will be home to free, daily Today at Apple programming, which kicks off Saturday with a special series that captures the creative spirit of New York. The area dedicated to Geniuses has also doubled, allowing the team to dramatically increase service capacity. It remains the only Apple retail location open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Follow the headline link, check out those images. Those circular stairs are a marvel.

Apple Arcade could have huge consequences for the iOS app ecosystem

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Great food for thought from The Verge’s Dieter Bohn. Read it, it’s well written, not too long.

Bottom line, it does not seem an unreasonable conclusion that Apple Arcade will impact the App Store, at least in the Games section. The question is, will that impact be seismic?

Will Apple Arcade have a similar impact to music streaming, where all-you-can-eat replaced one-at-a-time song sales?

Will the Apple Arcade grow into the thousands, even tens of thousands? Or will Apple limit the number of games in the catalog?

One thing that is clear to me: For the consumer, Apple Arcade is a big win. Not only for value, but for the ability to live in a world free of scams and the pressure to make in-app purchases.

Interesting.

Apple Arcade, coming in just a few short hours

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You might want to clear the decks around 10a PT, 1p ET, 6p London time. There’re a lot of games to be played.

As we shared yesterday, here’s a nice list of games to get you started, and a growing list of all the games on Apple Arcade so far.

While you wait, now might be a good time to dig out your Xbox One, PS4, or MFi game controllers and charge ’em up.

Once you dig in, ping me with your absolute favorite games.

T-Mobile jumps on 3% Daily Cash Apple Card bandwagon

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T-Mobile:

Today, T-Mobile announced it is the only wireless provider to offer 3% Daily Cash on Apple Card. Starting Friday, September 20, all customers will receive 3% Daily Cash when they use Apple Card with Apple Pay at any T-Mobile store. Combine that with T-Mobile’s current offer — 50% off the latest iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max with 24 monthly bill credits and an eligible trade-in — and customers score serious savings on the latest and greatest.

First things first, if you’re considering a carrier switch, this might be worth considering. As I read it, you have to go to a T-Mobile store. Not clear if this works if you start service on-line or over the phone.

There’s also this:

And this is just the beginning, as T-Mobile will bring Apple Pay to the T-Mobile app and t-mobile.com.

“Will bring”. Not clear when this will happen, but once it does, you should get the 2% Apple Pay bonus when you pay your monthly bill, so add that to the equation.

One final thought on the 3% list. I wish there was an easy way to tell if a merchant I was about to pay offered the 3% bonus. Seems to me, there should be a way, on the Apple Card Wallet page, to tell me the bonus of the nearby terminal. That’s prompt me to use Apple Card in that situation. As is, I have to remember the list of 3% offerers.

7 out of 10 Apple Watch customers are first time buyers, not upgraders

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Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Apple Watch is still a maturing product category for Apple, and that shows in the adoption data. According to CNBC, Apple says a whole 70% of Apple Watch customers are buying their very first model. That means that 30% of Apple Watch customers are actually upgrading from older models, but Apple hasn’t fully tapped into the upgrade pool yet.

Here’s a link to the CNBC article. Great catch by Zac.

70% of Apple Watch buyers are new to Apple Watch. That’s incredible growth. And it’s before Apple Watch Series 5 hits the street.

Doomed.

Night mode on the iPhone 11 Pro. Ready to have your mind blown?

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First off, check this pair of images. So good it just feels fake:

https://twitter.com/SnellingD/status/1173919251079618566

Now move on to this video. Again, amazing. I really appreciate seeing this from the user’s perspective. Great, great work.

https://twitter.com/ZachHonig/status/1173957371783237633

I’m waiting for DxOMark to test the iPhone 11 Pro in their new Night mode comparison tests. It’ll be interesting to see how the iPhone 11 Pro Night mode compares to the Pixel 3 in a rigorous test.