That seems an impossibly good deal, 50% off from AT&T.
Is there a catch? Not seeing it. But it does make me think this is cheaper than a year of Apple TV+, assuming this qualifies for the free year. And it also makes me wonder if this is an indicator of new hardware coming.
This is from the Halide blog. It goes deep, and is full of fascinating insight into the new camera system. Or, rather, the emergence of the incredibly important role that machine learning has taken on in the iPhone 11 camera.
If you are at all interested in the iPhone camera, set aside a few minutes and make your way through this.
[VIDEO] This (video embedded in main Loop post) is interesting, both because it runs dark mode alongside light mode on an iPhone XS Max with an OLED Display, but also because robotic arm (via MacRumors).
Aimee Green, Oregon Live:
Police wanted to search the contents of an iPhone they found in Catrice Pittman’s purse, but she never confirmed whether it was hers and wasn’t offering up a passcode. Her defense attorney argued forcing her to do so would violate her rights against self-incrimination under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Article 1 Section 12 of the Oregon Constitution.
But a Marion County judge sided with police and prosecutors by ordering Pittman to enter her passcode. On Wednesday, the Oregon Court of Appeals agreed with that ruling — in a first-of-its-kind opinion for an appeals court in this state.
This is a precedent that will resonate, make it more likely that courts will order defendants to unlock their phones.
Side note, I found this sequence very interesting:
Scott said the ruling won’t affect many Oregon defendants whose phones are seized by police because police already have technology that allows them to crack into most of those phones.
But:
The latest iPhones, more often than other phones, have proven difficult, Scott said.
“For people who want their information private, I would recommend getting an iPhone,” Scott said. “And Apple is not paying me to say that.”
Yet another reason to buy an iPhone.
[VIDEO] From MIT, a fascinating device that puts artificial intelligence in the hands of any guitarist.
To get a sense of what this is about, watch the two videos embedded in the main Loop post. The first gives you a sense of the mechanics of MIT’s Guitar Machine, and the second puts Guitar Machine in the hands of some traditional guitarists.
Read the linked article for more detail on how all this works. I would absolutely love to play with one of these.
BBC News:
After being challenged as to whether homeowners should tell guests smart devices – such as a Google Nest speaker or Amazon Echo display – are in use before they enter the building, he concludes that the answer is indeed yes.
And:
“Does the owner of a home need to disclose to a guest? I would and do when someone enters into my home, and it’s probably something that the products themselves should try to indicate.”
Fascinating ethical question. If you have a device that records, do you need to disclose this to a visitor? Or should all people assume they are being recorded at all times?
Solid interview with Google Senior Vice President, Devices & Services Rick Osterloh.
In today’s edition of “Oh Samsung”:
A flaw that means any fingerprint can unlock a Galaxy S10 phone has been acknowledged by Samsung.
And:
After buying a £2.70 gel screen protector on eBay, Lisa Neilson found her left thumbprint, which was not registered, could unlock the phone.
She then asked her husband to try and both his thumbs also unlocked it.
And when the screen protector was added to another relative’s phone, the same thing happened.
Yikes.
Stephen Shankland, CNET:
When Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller detailed the iPhone 11’s new camera abilities in September, he boasted, “It’s computational photography mad science.” And when Google debuts its new Pixel 4 phone on Tuesday, you can bet it’ll be showing off its own pioneering work in computational photography.
The reason is simple: Computational photography can improve your camera shots immeasurably, helping your phone match, and in some ways surpass, even expensive cameras.
But what exactly is computational photography?
Nice explainer.
Mitchel Broussard, MacRumors:
Apple has added the Xbox Wireless Controller to Apple.com, although the accessory is currently unavailable to purchase at the time of writing. Apple sells a few different gaming controllers on its website to connect to iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS devices, but as of yet the company has never directly sold Microsoft or Sony’s own gaming controllers.
I’ve been using an MFi controller on my iPad and, I have to say, it makes all the difference in playing Apple Arcade games.
This is a nice collection of tweets from Tony Fadell, curated by Filipe Espósito for 9to5Mac. I followed along on Twitter, but found myself wishing that someone would gather these in an easier to follow format, since they weren’t threaded on Twitter. And voila. Thanks Filipe.
My favorite bit:
I remember the day when Steve called me to the Board Room to personally sign a $4B purchase order for Samsung Flash for the Nano. “Are you sure we are ordering the right stuff? It’s going to work, right?” It was the biggest single order Apple had ever placed at the time.
I can only imagine the unbelievable pressure of that decision. A huge business gamble, one that paid off and paved the way for all future products.
Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:
You need to be an iPhone and AirPods user to take advantage of the feature. With the AirPods in your ears, you will be able to listen and respond to incoming text messages. Siri transcribes the message so you can hear the text without looking at your phone or watch. You can then ignore or immediately reply without having to say ‘Hey Siri’.
The sense I get is that the H1 chip is required here, so the second gen AirPods or Beats headphones with H1 chip required.
The incoming message alert is accompanied by a special alert tone that differs from the regular text tone. Siri will introduce the message with a phrase like ‘Zac says’ before reading the message. If another text comes in from the same sender, it will adjust its description to naturally continue the conversation.
Time will tell if this feature makes it all the way to the public iOS 13.2 release.
[VIDEO] When I first saw this video (embedded in main Loop post), I was sure it was shot from a tripod, or steady-cam. Apple really has upped their camera/video game here.
Juli Clover, MacRumors:
With the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max, Apple did away with 3D Touch across its entire iPhone lineup, replacing the former 3D Touch feature with Haptic Touch.
In this guide, we’ll go over everything you need to know about Haptic Touch and how it differs from the 3D Touch feature that’s been available since the iPhone 6s.
If you are confused about Haptic Touch, or want to learn about the settings, read the article. Well done.
And personally, I am very happy with this change. 3D Touch and Haptic Touch had too much overlap, confusing discoverability.
[VIDEO] Amazon introduced a lot of new product yesterday, including Echo Ring and Echo Buds. But, to me, the most significant product they announced was a pair of glasses under the name Echo Frames.
Echo Frames brings Alexa to your ears, with new speaker designs that allow you to hear Alexa and listen to music, even in a noisy environment. Most significantly, Echo Frames are designed to take prescription lenses, so they’ll actually replace your own glasses, along with their treated lenses (my glasses are also my sunglasses, so this is important to me).
Apple does not have a solution like this. Yet. True, there’s Siri on your wrist, and in your pocket. And in your ears, at least some of the time.
Echo Frames is Alexa within whispering distance, every minute you are awake.
Watch the video (embedded in the main Loop post) to get a sense of this. Follow the headline link to see the Echo Frames product page, and to sign up for the chance to be one of the testers when the product starts its rollout later this year.
Tiny nugget I found interesting:
We got around to opening up the 40 mm model and noticed a significantly different battery. This one has a snazzy new metal casing, as well as 10% more battery capacity than the Series 4 40 mm model. We’re going to spend some time researching and trying to figure it out. If nothing else, it seems to provide a tougher outer shell that is more resistant to pry damage. We doubt that’s its primary purpose, but we’re rummaging through patent filings for clues.
Always amazed at how much tech can fit in such a tiny enclosure. Even more so with AirPods.
Juli Clover, MacRumors:
Apple’s iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max will offer up a new warning if a repair technician ever uses a non-genuine Apple display when repairing a broken device.
“Unable to verify this iPhone has a genuine Apple display” will show up in the General > About section of the Settings app if a repair shop uses an unverified display component.
Good to be aware of this if you:
Per that last, if you do buy a used iPhone, that’s the first thing I’d check.
Apple:
The new seventh-generation iPad starts shipping on Wednesday, September 25 and will arrive in stores beginning later this week. Starting at just $329, the new iPad brings more screen area and support for the full-sized Smart Keyboard, as well as a new iPad experience with iPadOS. The upgrade packs even more value into the most popular and affordable iPad, featuring a stunning 10.2-inch Retina display and the latest innovations including Apple Pencil support, the fast A10 Fusion chip, advanced cameras and sensors, unmatched portability and connectivity, ease of use and great all-day battery life.
Note this footnote attached to that Apple Pencil mention:
The first-generation Apple Pencil sold separately.
Just in case you were thinking this iPad worked with the newer Apple Pencil.
Interesting article, but I’d suggest that Apple might be pursuing a less complex keyboard mechanism with the goal of making it more reliable. And with a side benefit of a thinner mechanism and a thinner computer.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:
At its event last week, Apple previewed a new version of Filmic Pro running on the iPhone 11 Pro. It was a compelling demo with the app able to record from multiple cameras simultaneously, like recording the front and back camera together.
If you haven’t seen this demo, take a minute to watch that part of last week’s Apple event. The demo starts at about 1:27:06. It’s short.
What really struck me, and the subject of Benjamin’s post, is the ability of Filmic Pro to record both the front facing camera and the selfie camera at the same time. A very specific use-case, true, but if you have that need, this is a big deal. And, I suspect, there are movie makers who will add this to their bag of tricks and we’ll start to see the double-camera effect make its way into indie features.
The multi-cam recording relies on new API introduced in iOS 13. At the WWDC session on the subject, Apple stressed that this required significant reworking of the hardware pipeline of their devices, but that the necessary changes have been made in the iPhone XS, iPhone XR, and the new iPad Pro models.
If you have one of those existing models, take a read through the linked article.
There’s been a lot of discussion about Apple being late to the 5G game. I get it, 5G is incredibly fast compared to both LTE and even your home WiFi. And Samsung has it now.
But.
From the headline linked PC Mag article:
On a hot Las Vegas morning, my two Galaxy S10 5G phones kept overheating and dropping to 4G. This behavior is happening with all of the millimeter-wave, first-generation, Qualcomm X50-based phones when temperatures hit or exceed 85 degrees. We saw it with T-Mobile in New York, with Verizon in Providence, and now with AT&T in Las Vegas. It’s happened on Samsung and LG phones, with Samsung, Ericsson, and Nokia network hardware.
AT&T and T-Mobile both said they’ll have phones with Qualcomm’s second-generation 5G modem, the X55, later this year. This persistent overheating behavior just makes me more confident in recommending that consumers wait to buy a 5G phone.
If you’re interested in 5G, read the entire article. But one takeaway is that 5G and the rollout of the equipment that makes 5G possible is just not ready for prime time. It’s not nearly in enough places, and the first generation modems are prone to overheating.
Apple has long had a strategy of entering a market only when they could deliver brilliant performance. If Apple rolled out a 5G phone now, they’d have to raise the cost of their phones, and deliver a less than stellar experience to their customers. Lose-lose.
Will 5G be ready for Apple by September 2020? Only one way to tell. Watch next years keynote.
Brian Roemmele:
“Hey Siri, we lost Spot the dog, do you know where he is?”
Siri:”Spot is located 87 feet forward and down 2 feet from the height of the iPhone. Please hold up your phone and follow the Balloon to Spot’s location”
It’s all about spatial awareness.
The “U” in the U1 chip relates to the Ultra-Wide Band Radio Technology (UWB) [1] technology it uses. UWB can be used for many application and use cases. One use case that will become very large for Apple as they move to AR/MR technology and Apple Glasses is to be able to track spacial relationships of objects. One way to do this is using lasers and IR systems, and Apple is already doing this to some degree with FaceID and Animoji. The other way to do this is via the radio spectrum.
Lots of detail here on a chip that is an important addition to Apple’s custom chip arsenal.
Interesting explainer. Note that the Series 4 Apple Watch also has an LTPO display.
This according to the SpeedSmart Speed Test app. Grain of salt, but if true, that’s a pretty big speed increase.
Reminds me of the huge battery gains in the iPhone 11 Pro, all without a major increase in the battery size. This all due to efficiency gains in the A13 bionic chip?