Apple is introducing a policy that will give new parents a four-week grace period after returning from leave. During that time, they will continue to be paid like full-time employees but will have the flexibility to work part-time and set their own hours with their manager’s oversight.
And:
These benefits extend to Apple’s retail workers, as well, who account for nearly half of the company’s employees.
That last bit is especially interesting. Cool that retail workers get this benefit, interesting that they account for almost half of Apple’s employees.
Privacy and everything it entails is not easy to explain. Under the hood, it’s driven by complex mathematics and code. However, in practice, app privacy starts with how apps are designed. Some are designed to collect information about you, and others aren’t.
With Apple’s update to its privacy page today, the company has created a site that explains how privacy drives the design of its apps in clear, concise language. However, for anyone who wants to understand the nitty-gritty details, Apple has also published white papers and linked to other materials that provide a closer look at the issues that the main page addresses.
Privacy is hugely important but “annoying” and “boring” for many average users. Apple does a great job of trying to lead people to learn and understand what the company is doing to protect users.
Doubt what you believe. From M. Night Shyamalan, Servant follows a Philadelphia couple in mourning after an unspeakable tragedy creates a rift in their marriage and opens the door for a mysterious force to enter their home.
I’m pretty gunshy about Shyamalan movies but will watch this on Apple TV+.
I absolutely love the sequence of WILL IT WORK videos, connecting various devices to an iPhone. But this one takes the cake. Connecting an original old-school Macintosh keyboard and mouse to an iPhone? Ridiculous. No way.
Apple and the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) today announced that veterans across the nation and surrounding territories1 now have access to the Health Records feature in the Health app on iPhone. The VA gradually launched Health Records to select patients this summer, and now veterans who are iOS users and receive their care through the Veterans Health Administration can see a fuller, more comprehensive picture of their health that includes information from multiple providers.
And:
The VA is the largest medical system in the United States, providing service to more than 9 million veterans across 1,243 facilities, including hospitals and clinics. Today, the VA joins Johns Hopkins, University of California San Diego, Quest Diagnostics, Allscripts and 400 other health care provider organizations, laboratory networks and electronic health records vendors who all support Health Records on iPhone.
Fantastic accomplishment. Here’s hoping this is a step toward unifying an extremely fragmented health records system. Certainly great news for the VA.
One of the things John Gruber and I discussed on my visit to The Talk Show last week was the concept of an Apple version of Amazon Prime. Pay one price, get a bunch of services in a bundle.
For Amazon, Prime includes free shipping, music, and Prime Video. What might an Apple Prime include?
This Reddit post asked if $2000 a year would be worth the price, if you got:
New iPhone every year
New Apple Watch every year
New iPad Pro every 18 months
New MacBook Pro every year
All Apple services (Music, 2TB iCloud, Arcade, TV+, etc.)
An interesting proposition. One tweak I’d make to that model is to allow for different hardware levels. Price it to allow for a new base model iPhone 11, MacBook Air, and Apple Watch, for example. Then, you’d pay up to move to a Pro subscription, which would allow an iPhone Pro, MacBook Pro, perhaps a ceramic Apple Watch.
Difficult to price, difficult for a consumer to value properly. At the very least, I’d price it monthly, rather than yearly as Amazon does.
And more likely a reality, how about a yearly “all the services” bundle, which would include:
Apple Music
Apple News+
Apple Arcade
Apple TV+
2TB iCloud
Priced aggressively, that would bring subscriber numbers up for all Apple services, and also provide a predictable revenue stream. It also has the advantage of getting people to try out services they might not pay for otherwise.
Personally, I’d sign up for the services bundle right now.
Seventeen-year-old Pakistani American teenager Hala (Geraldine Viswanathan) struggles to balance desire with her familial, cultural and religious obligations. As she comes into her own, she grapples with a secret that threatens to unravel her family. Written and directed by Minhal Baig and executive produced by Jada Pinkett Smith, ”Hala” was an official selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.
The film looks beautifully shot, the trailer lays out the framework of a coming of age story, cultural conflict. The key will be in the resolution. This hits Apple TV+ on December 6th. Will watch.
On a recent visit to New York City to be the keynote speaker at a gala for Ceres, a nonprofit focused on sustainability, Cook sat down with a small group of journalists, including ELLE Decor editors, to discuss his ambitious agenda for transforming Apple into a global leader in renewable energy and climate-friendly practices.
Here are our top 10 takeaways from the conversation.
Good read, combines well with Apple’s $2.5 billion commitment to combat California’s housing crisis and, ironically, arrives as the US formally exits the Paris climate agreement.
Apple TV is an app on Apple TV that curates content you can buy from Apple and also content you can stream through other installed apps (but not all apps, and there is no way to tell which ones).
Apple TV is an app on iOS/iPadOS devices that operates similarly to Apple TV on Apple TV. Apple TV on iOS/iPadOS syncs playback and watch history with Apple TV on Apple TV, but only if the iOS/iPadOS device has the same apps installed as the Apple TV – and not all apps are available on all platforms. Apple TV is also an app on macOS, but it does not show content that can only be streamed from external apps on an Apple TV or iOS/iPadOS device.
This stuff is confusing enough without this kind of crap. How can the average, non-techy user figure this out?
Scientists at the University of British Columbia are getting a rare glimpse into the underwater behaviour of northern and southern resident killer whales off the B.C. coast, with the help of aerial drones.
The unique footage, filmed in collaboration with the Hakai Institute, will help researchers determine if endangered southern residents are getting enough of their preferred prey, Chinook salmon, to meet their nutritional needs. The insights will inform conservation and recovery efforts for the population that has dwindled to under 75 individuals.
These orcas live in my “neighbourhood.” I’m so lucky to live in a place where sightings are a regular occurrence. This drone footage gives even greater insight into their activities.
Long op-ed from Benjamin Mayo on 9to5Mac. Lots of solid points. One in particular that struck me:
It’s also frustrating that the “Library” is not really a library. The Library only includes iTunes content. I want to be able to build a personal library of content regardless of how I paid for it. TV+ shows should be able to be saved to the library to find later, or any Apple TV Channels content for that matter.
If Apple wants the TV app to be the universal go-to place for watching TV, they need to create a universal watch/wish list that you can edit. I’d love a master TV list that would let me add shows I want to watch, even if they are shows from Netflix, Disney+, HBO, etc.
If Apple wants the TV app to be universal, they need to support their competition. If that’s not the goal, fine, at least add all the features that Netflix offers for managing content.
Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are vulnerable to attacks that use lasers to inject inaudible—and sometimes invisible—commands into the devices and surreptitiously cause them to unlock doors, visit websites, and locate, unlock, and start vehicles, researchers report in a research paper published on Monday. Dubbed Light Commands, the attack works against Facebook Portal and a variety of phones.
The article is fascinating, no doubt. But I had to laugh at the idea of shining a laser at Siri. She’s both immortal and invincible.
Kidding aside, the exploitable tech here is the MEMS mic. Interesting read, not a thing to worry about, at least for most mortals.
I had a truly terrible experience trying to drop Adobe Creative Cloud. I ended up paying a monthly fee all the way through my yearly anniversary, then making a phone call to cancel in a specific window to prevent my subscription from rolling over.
I love Illustrator, miss it more than all the other Adobe apps. Hoping Adobe has changed their cancellation policy, and that Illustrator for iPad ships with a full feature set, offers a standalone subscription like Photoshop’s $9.99 a month.
Apple TV+ has the highest streaming quality we’ve seen for 4K so far. It’s higher than most iTunes movies. Over the weekend, I took the first batch of measurements.
Lots of little nuggets here. If you are digging into Apple TV+, worth your time to watch in 4K. Interesting to watch a service unfold in which every single show is at least 4K.
The US and UK governments have tried to help consumers make better decisions about warranties. The US Federal Trade Commission advises people to consider the likelihood of product failure and cost of repairs, for example.
Among all electronics, an extended warranty cost 24% of the product’s price on average. And customers bought warranties between 20% and 40% of the time.
There are very few situations where I’d recommend an extended warranty – I have one on my motorcycle because I’m mechanically incompetent – and am very happy to have my warranties doubled buy buying on a credit card.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Did I not wake up black this morning? Because I’m pretty sure I did. Yup…still black.” It may be my own personal biases coming through but with this storyline and this cast, this may be the one thing on Apple TV+ that makes me really want to sign up.
There’s a lot of interesting detail in this video. For one: I always thought noise cancelation was mathematically perfect, but some sounds are harder to cancel than others.
And the point about foam being a better solution for sealing off noise than the tips Apple created. Not sure I buy that Apple over-engineered their solution when cheap foam would have been better. I’m interested in an audio engineers take on this.
One of the more puzzling aspects of Apple TV+ is the occasional, fleeting appearance of the picture-in-picture icon, whenever you touch (but not press) the Apple TV remote.
To see this yourself, fire up your Apple TV, then switch over to the TV app and launch one of the Apple TV+ shows (the first few episodes are free, require no signup). As a show is playing, touch the touchpad on the Apple TV remote. A PiP icon will appear. See if you can figure out how to turn on picture-in-picture mode.
Turns out, this is a tvOS 13 feature, specific to the TV app, and not specific to Apple TV+. If you tend to use individual apps like Netflix or Hulu, rather than the TV app, you might never have encountered the PiP icon. But since Apple TV+ lives in the TV app, you’ll definitely encounter the PiP icon once you move to Apple TV+.
As to the specifics of using PiP in tvOS 13, TidBITS posted an article when tvOS 13 dropped last month that lays it all out.
The key is to swipe up when you see the icon, then click the touchpad to bring PiP to life. Read the article for all the mechanics of swapping PiP window positions, swapping video between full screen and PiP, all worth knowing.
Seems clear to me that the public expects a full version of Photoshop, and will be disappointed by the limited functionality here, no matter how terrific a job Adobe’s developers did. Adobe lost control of the message early on. The MacStories piece does a great job laying all this out.
In the regular phone call with Wall Street analysts, Apple CEO Tim Cook tried very hard to get investors excited about Apple’s opportunities to make lots of money while not making it seem like Apple’s lost its soul in the process.
And:
Consider the soul-sucking term ARPU. It stands for Average Revenue Per User (or, alternately, Unit), and it’s a useful-yet-noxious lens through which businesses can view their customers. Of course, businesses should be aware about how much revenue their customers are generating—the issue is more that focusing on ARPU is often a sign that a business is on a path that will attempt to wring every last penny out of its customers.
Jason does a nice job explaining the balance Apple finds between being purely focused on ARPU, and prioritizing a positive customer experience. Part of that balance is the. “gift” of Apple TV+:
The analysts wanted to understand why Apple, after spending billions of dollars on developing a bunch of new premium television content, was going to give it away to purchasers of Apple hardware for a year.
And Tim’s reply:
Yeah, it’s it’s a gift to our users, and from a business point of view, we’re really proud of the content, we’d like as many people as possible to to view it. And so this allows us to focus on maximizing subscribers, particularly in the early going.
Read the whole article. It’s interesting, and really frames the competing pressures of maximizing revenue, quickly building up a subscriber base from nothing, and finding a way to keep customers happy, all at the same time.
Apple today announced a comprehensive $2.5 billion plan to help address the housing availability and affordability crisis in California. As costs skyrocket for renters and potential homebuyers — and as the availability of affordable housing fails to keep pace with the region’s growth — community members like teachers, firefighters, first responders and service workers are increasingly having to make the difficult choice to leave behind the community they have long called home. Nearly 30,000 people left San Francisco between April and June of this year and homeownership in the Bay Area is at a seven-year low.
First things first: Bravo. I’m guessing we’re going to see a wave of responses to this announcement, some of it snarky, some calling for the money to be spent in different ways. But no matter the takes, Apple didn’t have to do this. That’s a big chunk of change for anyone to spend for the public good.
The breakdown:
$1B, affordable housing investment fund
$1B, first-time homebuyer mortgage assistance fund
$300M, Apple-owned and available land for affordable housing
“What do you think of a show where we interview celebrities while making them eat violently hot chicken wings?”
In other words, the idea was to break the format of the celebrity interview in a way that people cared about, which, again, violently hot chicken wings.
It’s a show about hot sauce and hot wings that isn’t really about either of those things at all. And it isn’t a spectacle, either, in the way you might assume a show about eating insanely spicy food on camera could be.
I have an aversion to this kind of painful spicy food but the show, while at times too fluffy, is entertaining nonetheless.
This extension will detect recipes on any page you visit and will highlight them at the top of the page. No more hunting for the actual recipe when you visit a long-winded food blog!
You can turn it off for specific sites if you find it’s not needed and edit the blacklist under “Options” when you right-click the RecipeFilter icon in your toolbar.
If you like reading or collecting recipes (I use the website and iOS app for AnyList), you know the aggravation of just wanting to see the recipe and not the family history or some such five pages of nonsense. This extension puts the recipe at the top.
Used by 2.9 billion people across the globe, these little pictograms have the ability to communicate across countries, cultures, and languages. If you were to consider emoji a language, it would be by far the most popular in the world. Seven billion Facebook private messages a day are solely emoji. And 72 percent of people ages 18 to 25 say they find it easier to express their emotions with emojis than with words.
This emerging language used by so many is controlled by just a handful of people — the powerful and mysterious emoji committee.
My wife was asking who decided on emojis after seeing the new ones and I found this very interesting article. I’m not a huge fan of sending or receiving them but the process of their creation is fascinating.
On 16 August 1858, Queen Victoria and U.S. president James Buchanan exchanged telegraphic pleasantries, inaugurating the first transatlantic cable connecting British North America to Ireland. This milestone in telegraphy had been a long time coming. Samuel Morse first suggested linking the two continents in 1840, and various attempts were made over the ensuing years.
Terrestrial telegraphy was by then well established, and several shorter submarine cables had been deployed in Europe and the United States. Still, the transatlantic cable’s great length posed some unique challenges, especially because transmission theory and cable design were still very much under debate.
What a fascinating story about the early days of transatlantic communication.
I picked up my AirPods Pro earlier this week and have spent my time using them for listening to music, podcasts, and fiddling around with the new noise cancellation feature. I will say there is a lot going on with these new headphones—much more than I first suspected.
Before I get into the AirPods Pro, I have to give credit to Apple for the amazingly simple setup. Yes, it’s the same as the previous generation, but the fact that once paired to one device, it automatically shows up on all of your devices, is quite impressive.
When you first open the AirPods Pro, you will notice that you get three sizes of silicon tips—small, medium, and large. The AirPods come with the medium tips installed by default.
The problem with these silicon tips in most headphones is that you’re not sure which ones are best for your ears. Apple has taken the guesswork out of that process for you.
By opening the preferences for the AirPods in the Bluetooth settings, you will find a Fit Test. It uses an algorithm and an inward-facing microphone to make sure the silicon tips are proving a good seal for your ears. The seal is vital for noise cancellation to work correctly.
Once you put the AirPods in your ear, tap the play button on the Fit Test screen. It will play some music and analyze the seal of the silicon tips in your ears. If it comes back with a “Good Seal,” you’re good to go. If it comes back with a bad seal, you need to change out the tips to one of the other sizes and try again.
Changing tips is easy. You have to give the silicon tips a good tug to get them off because Apple has devised a locking mechanism to keep them in place. This is much better than the peg that other manufacturers have used for years. Once the new tips snap into place, you’re ready to go.
It’s important to understand that Apple measures each ear individually, so it may recommend a different size tip for each ear. That’s fine, go with the recommendation and enjoy the sound.
The Fit Test said both the medium and small tips provided a good seal for me, so I went with the one that provided the most comfort.
If you happen to lose a tip, Apple said you can buy replacements for $3.95 a pair/per size.
One of the things I found uncomfortable with other manufacturers that use silicon tips is the pressure build-up in your ears. It’s noticeable and can lead to discomfort while you’re listening to music.
Apple solved this by providing a vent to equalize pressure in the ear and adjusts, as needed, 200 times a second. Suffice to say that pressure discomfort isn’t something you have to worry about with the AirPods Pro.
The AirPods Pro also has an adaptive EQ that adapts to each ear. It measures what sound is being absorbed and reflected in the ear, so the chip and algorithm know precisely what to do, giving you the best listening experience.
I guess the biggest test for any headphones is the listening experience. For the AirPods Pro, this also included the noise cancellation feature.
Instead of walking around looking for ways to test noise cancellation, I just used the AirPods Pro like I always would—real-life experience.
The results surprised me quite a bit. First, I didn’t have that swooshing sound in my ear that I had with other noise cancellation headphones. There was also no pressure build-up, as I explained above. The result was just a pleasant experience of listening to music.
The real shocker was when I turned on Transparency Mode. I didn’t realize how much sound was being blocked by the headphones until I turned that on.
Depending on the volume of the music you’re listening to, you can hear most of the sounds around you. Turning noise cancellation back on, you go back into a peaceful experience, blocking out all of the noise.
There are many instances when Transparency Mode will come in handy. For me, it’s when I’m at the airport, sitting at the gate and waiting for the announcements. Other people will find it useful in their daily commute or exercising. Whatever your use case, Transparency Mode works great.
Getting to Transparency Mode is just a matter of squeezing and holding the stem of the AirPods Pro for a second. You’ll hear a distinct beep, and then you’ll be able to hear outside noise. To turn noise cancellation back on, hold the stem and squeeze again.
The squeeze is a little different from the double-tap of the previous generation AirPods. I think the double-tap was a lot easier, but I’m getting used to squeezing after a few days. A single squeeze (and quickly let go) is play/pause; a double squeeze skips to the next song; a triple squeeze goes to the previous song.
The battery life of the AirPods Pro is the same as the previous generation—about five hours. With noise cancellation on, it gets about four and a half hours. That’s fine because even on a long flight, it only takes about 15 minutes to charge to AirPods, so any downtime will be minimal.
With the AirPods Pro coming in at $50 more than the previous generation AirPods with wireless charging case, I can’t see a situation where you wouldn’t upgrade. As I mentioned in the beginning, there is a lot going on with the AirPods Pro with technology to make your experience the best can be.
In Mexico, the Day of the Dead holiday stretches from the eve of November 1 through November 2. During the celebration, family and friends gather to pray for and remember loved ones who have died – often with elaborate homemade altars.
Pre-Colombian civilizations celebrated the deaths of ancestors for perhaps as long as 2,500 to 3,000 years. The festival that developed into the modern Day of the Dead fell in the beginning of August, and was celebrated for an entire month. The festivities were dedicated to the goddess Mictecacihuatl, known as the “Lady of the Dead.” With the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, the indigenous celebration was combined with the festivities of All Saints Days and All Souls Days, and was moved to the current dates.
I find this celebration fascinating not only from a cultural point of view but also from a visual one.
Dave and I go into some detail of the new AirPods Pro after my use with the headphones. We also talk about the HomePod and some of the new features in its latest software update.
In the past month, the company named Paul Meade a vice president of hardware engineering, Jon Andrews a vice president of software engineering, Gary Geaves to a new vice president of acoustics role, and Kaiann Drance as a vice president of marketing.
The Cupertino, California-based technology giant also brought back Bob Borchers, a former iPhone executive who recently worked at Google and Dolby Laboratories Inc. Borchers is now a vice president of marketing.
That’s a good list of people now in lead roles at Apple. I’m especially happy for Kaiann—well deserved.
