CNBC:

Apple said on Thursday it will start offering independent repair shops parts, tools and guides to help fix broken iPhones.

The new repair program allows big and small repair outfits to sign up and get access to parts for common out-of-warranty repairs, something that was previously restricted to Apple’s network of authorized service providers.

The move represents an about-face for Apple, which typically encourages any repairs to be made by its authorized service providers and makes it difficult for users to replace aging or broken parts themselves.

This is undoubtedly a reaction to the “right to repair” movement with Apple trying to head off legislation. The good news is that the new program is free for independent repair shops to join.

A few months ago, BBC Radio ran a program on the 1970s, with a specific episode dedicated to the founding of Apple.

From the episode writeup:

Author and broadcaster Michael S. Malone tells the story of the Apple II personal computer, an invention which helped to revolutionise the way we work and play. “The stunning Apple II, with its new rainbow logo, put the scores of other, cruder personal computers in the shade, ” he says. “They looked like the past. The Apple II looked like the future, the only future, for personal computing.”

Follow the headline to listen to the episode. Then check out the comments below. These came directly from Woz (and are published here, with Woz’s permission) and clarify some of the points made in the linked BBC Radio episode.

The Atari comments are off base. Atari started without microprocessors. a game had 70 to 150 chips and thousands of wires that an engineer skilled in digital hardware and analog television technology had to spend months constructing to develop a new game idea. Those Atari games were not programs. They were not software. They didn’t have microprocessors. In fact, my Apple II was not just a computer. My love of games led me to create a computer that was also a good game machine and that meant arcade games.

The game that I developed for Atari in 4 sleepless days and nights was Breakout. Nolan Bushnell was tired of his game designers in Grass Valley coming up with games that took 120-180 chips (and correspondingly thousands of wires). Nolan knew that I came with Steve Jobs and that I designed things with much fewer parts than anyone else. I did not think it was possible for me to design an arcade game in 4 days (Jobs needed money that soon to buy into a commune in Oregon, I suppose now) but I managed to design Breakout, using 45 chips.

During that sleepless period my mind drifted and hit on one of the major keys to Apple’s success. All the Atari games then were hardware (not programs) and all were in black and white only. I thought that it would be incredible if someday arcade games were in color. It was like when TV moved from black and white to color. The method to create color for our analog TV’s back then I knew well as an engineer. It involved sine-wave signals on wires that were adjusted and mixed by precision parts and designs requiring differential calculus. Such a device might cost $5000 of today’s dollars. But the idea that popped into my head was that a digital number in a computer, consisting of 0’s and 1’s, could be put onto a wire into an analog TV, and the TV would ’think’ that was a color signal if done exactly right. You could get color on a TV for ZERO DOLLARS!

My Apple II computer was not just a computer. Who needed a computer in their home back in 1975? Nobody kept inventory and salary records at home, the things that computers did. Games were the key. With the human affordable Apple II, I took computer games to a new level. It was the first time that arcade games became color (note that our first Apple logo was in 6 colors) and it was also the first time that arcade games were software. A 9-year old could program a decent arcade game in a day, rather than having skilled engineers develop a game in a year. Another key item to the Apple II was that the programmer could put a number into memory and a color pixel on the screen would change. That made the world of software games truly accessible to users. It’s little surprise that this computer, so far ahead of anything else, would be Apple’s only successful (profit earning) product for the first 10 years of the company that we know today.

The microprocessor I chose for the Apple II was more advanced and more capable than the Intel ones I could not afford, even though this 6502 microprocessor only cost me $20 cash. Yes, this was a more capable processor than the Intel one. Steve Jobs was not around and didn’t see my develop this computer that I showed off at the Homebrew Computer Club and gave away my designs for free and helped others build. Steve Jobs did not come into town and find me in a basement with a computer and drag me to the club. Steve Jobs had never attended that club and I’d been there since the first day. No, it was I who brought Steve Jobs to the club. Don’t believe how Ashton Kushner saw Steve Jobs’s role in this. This was the computer that became the Apple I.

Steve Jobs had nothing to do with the Apple II design and did not direct it. We were able to show off my Apple II computer before we ever delivered an Apple I. The Apple I was not a Wozniak computer design. It was a quick addition of a microprocessor (brain) and the right type of memory to a product I’d already built, a home terminal to access the ARPAnet when it was only 6 computers across the U.S., and the forerunner and inspiration for what became today’s internet. The Apple I computer showed the world that the path to a personal computer was a keyboard and video display. The video display was based on the fact that I had no money but had a TV. But the Apple I was limited in capability by a terminal that was optimized (in cost and chips) for low-speed telephone connections to far-away ARPAnet computers. The Apple II was a computer and arcade machine from the core and would be the basis of a big company.

Jobs did an incredible job that was needed. I was a great engineer but had no desire for the politics of business or marketing. Keep in mind that neither of us had any savings or rich relatives. Nor did we have any business experience. And we were both in our early 20’s. As in this audio, Mike Markkula was the adult in the house and really established a new technology company. Steve Jobs wanted to be an important person so he worked with all the business people while I just wanted to have a laboratory to invent things in, day and night, and usually alone.

I felt that in starting Apple Computer (now just Apple) it was OK to receive money for my great design but that was not my motivation at all. I wanted to bring my work to the world, and that took a company. I did love HP but finally chose to leave on the basis that I could still remain an engineer for life and not have to run a company, which was too political for me. Read my book iWoz to learn more about my non-political stance. In our market share loss, the business side of the company chose to conceive of new computers and failed with all of them. Steve Jobs didn’t know the hardware or software technology of computers. His mark would be made much later with human lifestyle products like the iPod and iPhone.

I never actually left Apple. I was never disgruntled with Apple. It’s the greatest company ever. I had a plane crash in February, 1981. Five weeks later I came out of anterior grade amnesia (forward amnesia, often called short term memory loss although your short term memory works find it’s long term memories that aren’t being created and saved) and called Steve Jobs to tell him that it was my choice to take my last chance to go back to Berkeley for my last year in order to graduate. My name was famous so I enrolled under a fake name and my Berkeley diploma reads “Rocky Racoon Clark.” I did not officially leave Apple either. To this day I am the only person who has received a paycheck every week from Apple. Stories about me leaving Apple, on 2 occasions for different reasons, out of disgust are what some want to say but they are totally incorrect.

Jobs was never fired. A lot of people want to say this to parrot Jobs but it’s not true. Jobs had lost a business battle, with the company at stake due to a horrendous failure of the Macintosh computer, and he felt that even though he could be financed to the hilt he couldn’t work with those who had sided against him. Jobs left of his own accord, to have a better chance at creating a computer success elsewhere.

Follow the headline link for an article posted by Microsoft on the process of designing and implementing Dark Mode for Office 365. Glad to see it, interesting post.

But whether you read the post or not, take a minute to watch Microsoft’s Dark Mode video, embedded below. Eerily beautiful, looks like it was all practical effects, old school.

Russell Brandom, The Verge:

On October 13th, 2018, two men walked into a Great Midwest Bank in a suburban strip mall outside Milwaukee. They were the first two customers when the bank opened, barely recognizable behind sunglasses and heavy beards — but it soon became clear what they were after. One man jumped onto the teller counter and pulled out a handgun, throwing down a garbage bag for the tellers to fill with money. They left the bank at 9:09AM, just seven minutes after they entered, carrying the bag full of cash, three drawers from the vault and teller station, and the keys to the bank vault itself.

In the months since, police and federal agents have struggled to track down the bank robbers. Local media sent out pictures from the bank’s security cameras, but it produced no leads. Finally, police hit on a more aggressive strategy: ask Google to track down the bank robbers’ phones.

Great read. And not just in a “true crime” way. There’s a major privacy issue at stake, all laid out in the article.

I came away wondering if future data analysis will show a trend of criminals avoiding Android, right alongside civil liberties proponents.

To go along with their press release on Improving Siri’s privacy protections, Apple also posted a knowledge base article with questions and answers on Siri Privacy and grading.

The whole thing was interesting to me, but this bit stuck out:

Is Siri always listening? What do you do to prevent Siri listening when I haven’t said, “Hey Siri”?

No. Siri is designed to activate and send audio to Apple only after you trigger your device by saying “Hey Siri,” use the raise to speak feature on Apple Watch, or physically trigger Siri using the designated buttons on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, AirPods, and HomePod.

To recognize “Hey Siri” we process audio solely on device through multiple stages of analysis to determine if the audio matched the “Hey Siri” pattern. Only when the device recognizes the “Hey Siri” pattern is your audio sent to the server. On the server we do additional mitigation to analyze the full request to confirm it is intended for Siri.

Occasionally we have what’s called a “false trigger,” where Siri activates when you did not intend it to. We work hard to minimize false triggers and have updated the review process to limit graders’ exposure to them. When we resume grading, our team will work to delete any recording which is determined to trigger Siri inadvertently.

The key point, to me, is that the device is always listening for “Hey Siri”, but audio is only passed along to the server when that specific trigger is found, when you’ve specifically made a request.

I’m agree with Jim’s take. I’m good with opting in to help improve Siri.

As a result of our review, we realize we haven’t been fully living up to our high ideals, and for that we apologize. As we previously announced, we halted the Siri grading program. We plan to resume later this fall when software updates are released to our users — but only after making the following changes:

• First, by default, we will no longer retain audio recordings of Siri interactions. We will continue to use computer-generated transcripts to help Siri improve.

• Second, users will be able to opt in to help Siri improve by learning from the audio samples of their requests. We hope that many people will choose to help Siri get better, knowing that Apple respects their data and has strong privacy controls in place. Those who choose to participate will be able to opt out at any time.

• Third, when customers opt in, only Apple employees will be allowed to listen to audio samples of the Siri interactions. Our team will work to delete any recording which is determined to be an inadvertent trigger of Siri.

I mentioned before that I will opt-in to this process to help improve Siri for the future. Apple has proven over and over that they respect our privacy, and they are, in fact, one of the only tech companies that does respect our privacy. There is a lot of information that Apple posted on Siri today that everyone should take a look at.

I joined John Gruber this week to talk about Apple Card and Apple’s upcoming product announcements. There were many hilarious moments, as there usually are when the two of us get together.

MacStories:

An ambient noise app’s most important job is providing a variety of sounds that can evoke a soothing sense of calm, and offer environment control. The App Store is full of apps that accomplish this purpose, and a new one’s being added to that roster today: Dark Noise, from developer and designer Charlie Chapman.

One chief advantage of Dark Noise over its competition is that out of the gate it’s the best of iOS citizens.

We occasionally use a noise generator called Noizio for its simplicity – we only ever use the “rainfall” setting – but if you need something more, check out Dark Noise.

Check out all the pictures. Amazing knockoff. Shameless.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple today released a surprise iOS 13.1 beta, which is unprecedented as the company has never before released a point update for an unreleased software update.

This is a notable move by Apple. To clarify, developers now have access to both an iOS 13 beta series, as well as a first beta for iOS 13.1. Two beta threads to follow.

Hard to know the true rationale behind this forking beta, but given how close we are to the supposed September 10th Apple iPhone event, this feels like a move to push some features off to 13.1 so iOS 13 itself can reach golden master status in time for the new iPhones to ship.

Is this the emergence of a new beta strategy for Apple, a sign of what to expect with future OS releases, or just a one time thing?

UPDATE: I received a surprising number of comments from people pointing out that this is not really a fork, in the software development sense of the word. I yield to my betters, but I’m still kinda happy with the double entendre.

That time of year again. The leaves are about to start turning, at least up north.

Follow the link, drag the slider to see when the leaves will be prime for peeping in your neck of the woods.

Daniel Eran Dilger, AppleInsider:

For years, this new Apple product was derided as too expensive to compete against cheaper alternatives. Yet by targeting the premium high end first, it was able to establish itself and then attract an even broader audience of users at broader price points in the future.

And:

HomePod was one of the results of Apple’s largest-ever acquisition —the $3 billion purchase of Beats Electronics in 2014. This acquisition gave Apple the world’s largest and most profitable headphone and speaker business, and contributed to the audio overhaul that brought much higher-quality stereo sound to iPhone 7, iPads, and MacBooks.

And:

Comparing only the emerging sliver of Apple’s overall Siri activity exclusively connected to HomePod against virtually the entire business of Amazon Alexa and often all of its partners is ridiculous, yet market research groups continue to do this.

In a nutshell, HomePod is a clue to an emerging business. The business model has not yet revealed itself.

Google and its licensees haven’t been effective at establishing proprietary features to keep Android users from leaving the platform. Apple has. Over the last decade, Apple has introduced tight Continuity integration between iPhones, iPads, and Macs; introduced Apple Watch and AirPods as wearables with similarly tight connectivity; and launched iMessage, iCloud, AirDrop, Apple Pay, Apple Card and other free and paid Services that keep iOS users reluctant to even examine other options. This year, the new Apple Arcade, Apple TV+ and AirPlay 2 are expanding the tight integration between Apple’s products.

And:

Apple has already launched a successful business in home audio in its first year, without needing to rival Amazon or Google in total unit shipments. Yet HomePod didn’t even need to be commercially successful on its own to be strategically successful for Apple. As part of the Siri, HomeKit, and AirPlay 2 ecosystems, HomePod is a valuable product category for Apple.

Judging HomePod as an expensive speaker playing in the expensive speaker marketplace is a short term view. To me, the long game has just gotten started. Apple is doing what it always does, patiently learning about a market, releasing product to enhance its ecosystem.

Don’t forget, HomePods are said to have brought in about $1.4 billion in revenue last year. Hard to argue that that’s anything but a great success.

The Guardian:

The Australian man who claimed to have invented cryptocurrency bitcoin has been ordered to hand over half of his alleged bitcoin holdings, reported to be worth up to $5bn.

The IT security consultant Craig Wright, 49, was sued by the estate of David Kleiman, a programmer who died in 2013, for a share of Wright’s bitcoin haul over the pair’s involvement in the inception of the cryptocurrency from 2009 to 2013.

First things first, wrap your head around the above. A court ordered someone to hand over about $5 billion worth of bitcoin to someone else.

But this part of the story takes the cake:

Wright claimed to the court that he couldn’t access the bitcoin because he doesn’t have a list of the public addresses of that bitcoin. He claimed in 2011, after seeing the cryptocurrency had begun to be associated with drug dealers and human traffickers, he put the bitcoin he mined in 2009 and 2010 into an encrypted file and into a blind trust. The encrypted key was divided into multiple key slices, and the key slices were given to Kleiman who distributed them to people through the trust.

Even better:

Wright said this meant he could not decrypt the file until he gets access to the key from a bonded courier who will arrive in January 2020.

Crazy.

Nate D Sanders auction page:

Extraordinarily scarce Pixar Animation Studios poster signed by its co-founder Steve Jobs, sometime after 1995 when ”Toy Story”, the first computer-animated feature film, debuted. Jobs’ legendary vision is evident in his backing of Pixar, whose potential was immediately realized in the success of ”Toy Story”, earning three Academy Award nominations, breaking box office records and securing its reputation as one of the finest animated movies of all time. Poster measures 24” x 36”, signed by Jobs in black fiber-tip marker. In near fine condition. With JSA COA.

A minimum bid of $25,000. Ouch. That lets me out.

[Via 9to5Mac]

Jean-Louis Gassée:

Does the world need a new credit card, especially one without any outstanding perks? The answer lies in the way the Apple Card works rather than in the number of miles or the cash rebate percentages.

And:

For a sufficiently large number of Apple customers, the new payment system is a classic How vs What proposition — and the “How” wins. The Wallet app offers complete control over purchases, payments, rebates, timing, and security, all in one place. As for security, three different card numbers track purchases made with the physical card, with a card number on line, or with Apple Pay on your Watch or iPhone. No need to use a special third party app, such as the excellent Mint. Everything is built into the Wallet, itself built in every iPhone and iPad.

A great take on Apple Card. One interesting tidbit was the reveal of two different on-boarding processes for the physical Apple Card. This tweet shows both side-by-side. Anyone know the why on this?

UPDATE: The answer appears to be NFC support. My iPhone XR supports NFC, which was used to activate the card. Brigitte’s iPhone is likely an older pre-NFC model, no auto-activate magic.

Geoffrey A. Fowler, Washington Post:

I recently used my credit card to buy a banana. Then I tried to figure out how my credit card let companies buy me.

And:

Despite a federal privacy law covering cards, I found that six types of businesses could mine and share elements of my purchase, multiplied untold times by other companies they might have passed it to.

And:

When I swiped my cards, of course my banks received data. What’s surprising is who they can share it with. My data helped identify me to Chase’s marketing partners, who send me junk mail. Some data even got fed to retail giant Amazon because it co-branded my card.

And:

This is where the Apple Card is different. In the Goldman Sachs privacy statement, its answer to most kinds of sharing is “no.” Goldman still shares information with credit agencies about whether you pay your bills. But it says it doesn’t feed transactions to marketers or a sister company that mines card data.

The whole article is a fascinating read. But if I had to highlight a single point, it’s that last quoted paragraph above. Yes, you can get more cash back, more frequent flyer miles, etc., but there’s a price, both in a yearly fee charged by most credit cards, and in data sharing.

What’s in your wallet?

Jason Snell:

This is the third year of the iPhone X hardware family, and the second year for the iPhone XR, so changes to the external design of Apple’s phones — often the biggest driver of a huge sales bump — are unlikely. The presence of the iPhone XR adds another wrinkle as Apple continues to try to differentiate it from the company’s more expensive models. And then there’s the iPhone X name itself, which seems unlikely to be continued through another generation. iPhone XRM? iPhone XST? Yuck.

And:

If you ask me, one of the worst product names Apple has ever generated is iPhone XS Max. Apple’s large ultrapremium phone takes the ridiculous Roman numeral/letter combination of the entire 2018 phone generation and, well, maxes it out. iPhone 11 Pro Max would be slightly less bad, but it’s still ridiculous.

Interesting look at Apple’s iPhone naming conundrum. Do you go with XI? 11? Do you follow the Mac’s lead and come up with a long-term name, like iPhone Air, iPhone Pro, and iPhone Max, then append the year to lock in a specific model?

That last approach would help unify Apple’s product strategy, make things just a bit less confusing.

But the die is cast, product names long locked in. Are the first boxes printed and warehoused, ready to jet their way to Apple Stores around the world? Or is that switch still to be thrown?

Inessential:

In case you haven’t been following along until just now: NetNewsWire is an open source RSS reader for Mac. It’s free! You can just download it and use it. No strings.

It’s designed to be stable, fast, and free of bugs. It doesn’t have a lot of features yet, and that’s because we prioritized quality over features. We will be adding more features, of course, but not quickly. We’re also working on an iOS app.

If you’re a RSS junkie like me, go download this now.

Vice:

Apple has just released an emergency patch for the iPhone.

The company was forced to release a patch after it mistakenly made it easier for hackers to jailbreak up to date iPhones with the previous iOS release. In July, Apple released iOS 12.4, an update that reintroduced a bug that had been previously patched. Last week, iPhone hackers and jailbreakers realized Apple’s mistake and published a jailbreak for up to date iPhones—the first time in years it was possible to jailbreak iPhones on the latest version of iOS.

On Monday, Apple released iOS 12.4.1, which fixes the bug once again.

To quote my go-to security guy, Rich Mogull, “Patch now.”

Engadget got the chance to sit down with Michael Paull, president of Disney Streaming Services and look at a preview of Disney+.

A few nuggets:

Aside from shows like The Mandalorian and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, which will be available on November 12th, Disney announced at D23 Expo that it has a bunch more in the works, such as Marvel’s Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk as well as a new Lizzie McGuire original.

And:

There’s also going to be a feature that will let people create profiles which are programmed for children seven and under, which are organized by characters (e.g. Mickey Mouse and Disney Princesses) instead of shows or movies.

And:

What’s more, if you’re watching a movie or show on, say, the Apple TV or Xbox One and pause, you can continue watching where you left off on your other devices.

The more I hear, the more this $6.99 a month price is a no-brainer to me. Might be enough content for me to swap out Netflix, which feels like much less of a value.

Apple TV+? I will definitely give it a try, but without a back catalog, might be a tough sell at the rumored $9.99 a month price.

New York Times:

Summer Worden, a former Air Force intelligence officer living in Kansas, has been in the midst of a bitter separation and parenting dispute for much of the past year. So she was surprised when she noticed that her estranged spouse still seemed to know things about her spending. Had she bought a car? How could she afford that?

Ms. Worden put her intelligence background to work, asking her bank about the locations of computers that had recently accessed her bank account using her login credentials. The bank got back to her with an answer: One was a computer network registered to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

And:

Ms. McClain acknowledged that she had accessed the bank account from space, insisting through a lawyer that she was merely shepherding the couple’s still-intertwined finances. Ms. Worden felt differently. She filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and her family lodged one with NASA’s Office of Inspector General, accusing Ms. McClain of identity theft and improper access to Ms. Worden’s private financial records.

Space crime. Sounds like a great title for an Apple TV+ show. Crazy story.

To honor yesterday’s 80th anniversary of the Wizard of Oz release date, Google added a little Easter egg.

Go to Google.com, then:

• Search for “Wizard of Oz”
• On the page that appears, look for the sparkly ruby slippers (here’s a pic).
• With the sound on, tap or click those slippers.
• To get back home, tap the tornado.

I find this charming.

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors, provides an excellent walk through the updated iOS 13 Health App. Lots of pics, easy to skim, worth your time.

No matter your iOS, be sure to check your profile. Get a sense of what’s available, verify that your profile data is correct and up-to-date, and take a minute to set up your Medical ID info.

Medical ID lets you specify health issues, blood type, organ donor signup, lots more.

DPReview:

With the release of every new tablet, photographers peer past their laptops and wonder: could this be the one that lightens my gear load without sacrificing performance? The appeal of a fast and light tablet is seductive, even if you’re not looking to completely replace a desktop or laptop, but tradeoffs have so far made it a difficult choice.

Apple’s latest iPad Pro models boast impressive hardware that’s making them competitive alternatives. Depending on what you need to do, though, the software still isn’t quite there yet. Partly that’s due to limitations imposed by Apple and iOS, but it’s also because third-party developers have only recently had the power to build the types of full-blown apps photographers expect.

The iPad is getting closer and closer to the photography machine I need to take on the road with me.

Freedom to Tinker:

Blocking cookies is bad for privacy. That’s the new disingenuous argument from Google, trying to justify why Chrome is so far behind Safari and Firefox in offering privacy protections. As researchers who have spent over a decade studying web tracking and online advertising, we want to set the record straight.

If the benchmark is original design intent, let’s be clear: cookies were not supposed to enable third-party tracking, and browsers were supposed to block third-party cookies. Study after study has demonstrated that users don’t understand and don’t want the pervasive web tracking that occurs today.

Google taking this tack is disingenuous at best.