I know that when it comes to tech news, there can be somewhat of a bubble, with writers and readers thinking that certain things are more well-known to the general public than they are. But really, if you’ve walked into Best Buy’s laptop section at some point in the past decade, you probably would’ve seen some of the things the people in the ad are shell-shocked by: two-in-one laptops that fold to become a tablet have been popular since the early 2010s, Intel’s been pushing laptops with two screens since 2018, and PC gaming was a thing before the original IBM Personal Computer that popularized the term “PC.”
Exactly.
The ad has the potential to make a point about expandability and repairability. Fair issues to raise, if you indeed have a better solution. But it insults (badly) the very people it hopes to sway.
When Apple Pay launched, the tech giant got big banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Capital One Financial Corp. and Bank of America Corp. to agree to pay fees that would allow their cardholders to pay by iPhone. But some banks have grown unhappy with the costs, especially after Apple Inc. introduced its own new credit card in 2019, according to people familiar with the matter.
A proposed change:
Currently, banks pay Apple a fee when their cardholders use Apple Pay. Under the planned new process, the fees wouldn’t apply on automatic recurring payments such as gym memberships and streaming services.
Sounds like this change is not yet set in concrete.
The article also digs into the specifics on fees:
Banks agreed to pay Apple 0.15% of each purchase made by their credit cardholders. (They pay a separate fee on debit-card transactions.) Those fees account for most of the revenue that Apple makes from its digital wallet, according to people familiar with the matter.
Interestingly, the fees are specific to Apple:
The terms had the potential to be uniquely lucrative for Apple. Banks don’t pay fees to Google for its wallet.
Feels like a significant amount of tension in the bank / Apple Pay model.
My memories of that brutal, heartbreaking day 10 years ago are scattered and random. I cannot remember driving down to his house. I do remember a hazy October sky and shoes that were too tight. I remember afterwards Tim and I sat quietly in the garden together for a long time.
And:
Steve’s last words to me were that he would miss talking together. I was sitting on the floor next to his bed, my back against the wall.
After he died, I walked out into the garden. I remember the sound of the latch on the wooden door as I gently pulled it closed.
It’s a beautifully written piece, worth reading in full.
A few more bits, embedded below. First, there’s the Think Different commercial with Steve narrating (as opposed to the Richard Dreyfus narration we’re more familiar with).
And, below that, there’s the dedication, back in 2014, of the new Steve Jobs Theater.
Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s VP, Engineering and Infrastructure, in a blog post responding to yesterday’s worldwide outage that took down Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp:
To all the people and businesses around the world who depend on us, we are sorry for the inconvenience caused by today’s outage across our platforms. We’ve been working as hard as we can to restore access, and our systems are now back up and running. The underlying cause of this outage also impacted many of the internal tools and systems we use in our day-to-day operations, complicating our attempts to quickly diagnose and resolve the problem.
Ironically, Facebook had to turn to Twitter to communicate with the world as its normal communications mechanisms were all down.
The blog post is straightforward, but short on details. If you are interested in the actual cause of the outage, follow the link to this detailed blow-by-blow account of the outage as seen from the outside.
Great reporting by Celso Martinho and Tom Strickx. Someone should option the movie rights to this.
It takes a lot of energy to light up and refresh that display, so the fewer times it has to redraw what you’re looking at, the better. Other devices with high refresh rates might adjust based on what is showing on the display. For example, if you’re watching a film shot at 24 frames per second, the display might refresh at 24 or 48Hz. If you’re playing a game, it might refresh at 120Hz.
And:
On the iPhone, that’s still true, but Apple took it further by quietly included a remarkable way of deciding what refresh rate to use. Your iPhone 13 Pro or 13 Pro Max literally measures the speed of your finger on the screen, and then adjusts the refresh rate of the display.
And:
Reading a tweet, the iPhone 13 Pro drops down to 10Hz. If you start to scroll slowly, it might choose a faster refresh rate, say 60Hz. If you scroll quickly, it can ramp up to 90 or 120Hz. Apple doesn’t say exactly how many different refresh rates the display uses, only that it designed the system to match the refresh rate to the speed of your finger.
Great read.
In my opinion, ProMotion is an under appreciated feature. It works everywhere on the 13 Pro models, scrolling is smooth as glass, and there are no artifacts that hint at refresh rate changes. Beautifully implemented.
So Siri means in Norwegian, “beautiful woman who leads you to victory”.
I worked with a lady named Siri in Norway and wanted to name my daughter Siri and the domain was available. And also consumer companies need to focus on the fact that the name is easy to spell, is easy to say…
TextSniper is the fastest way to copy uncopyable text, wherever it may be: in photos, screenshots, PDFs, videos, online presentations, apps, or websites that annoyingly block copying.
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TextSniper can also copy URLs and text embedded in QR codes, as well as barcode numbers. It even can read the recognized text to you. And because the app supports Continuity Camera in macOS, you can use your iPhone or iPad camera to capture text right to your Mac.
Available on Intel and M1 Macs, running macOS Catalina and higher.
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Mention Steve Jobs and most people will picture him in his trademark blue jeans and black mock turtleneck, on stage at one of Apple’s events, an iPhone in hand. But for me, the name recalls the memory of the original black and silver iPhone leaving Jobs’ hand, sailing through the air and hitting the floor with a clack.
Follow the headline link, read the anecdote. Steve died 10 years ago tomorrow. The feeds are full of reminiscence.
Apple today announced Apple Watch Series 7, featuring the largest and most advanced Apple Watch display ever — and a reengineered Always-On Retina display with significantly more screen area and thinner borders — will be available to order beginning Friday, October 8, at 5 a.m. PDT and available in stores starting Friday, October 15.
Given the steadily slipping shipping dates of the iPhone Pro (as of this writing, the iPhone I ordered shows a delivery date of November 4-11), and the fact that Series 7 pre-orders have already been pushed back more than 3 weeks (the announcement was September 14th), if you want a Series 7, I’d get on it as soon as the doors open.
From the footnotes:
Customers can buy Apple Watch (GPS + Cellular) directly from apple.com/store or at an Apple Store and get $100 back when they activate it with T-Mobile/Sprint or Verizon.
Our long national iOS 15 Safari nightmare ended last month, praise be, but the lesser of the two bad Safari designs unveiled at WWDC persists and actually shipped: the new tabs in Safari 15 for Mac. Safari 15 on iPad suffers similarly, but it’s the Mac version I’ll concentrate on here.
This is an excellent showcase of Safari’s broken tab metaphor. Don’t miss the short little video in the middle highlighting the jarring look of shifting from one tab to another and back again.
John focuses on the Mac in his post, but his comments might just as well apply to Safari for iPadOS 15. Though there are differences between the two implementations of Safari tabs, both joyously break the tab metaphor. If you think about the origins of the tab model, it’s a drawer full of vertical files, where the tab juts up, attached to a specific folder. As you paw through the folders, it’s clear which folder the tab is attached to. The tab and folder are clearly part of the same object, visually connected.
In this new model, the tabs are floating on their own, no longer physically connected to the pages they represent. This new model breaks the physical tab metaphor in a number of ways, chief of which is the lack of a unifying block of color attaching the tab and the page. For most pages, the current tab is one shade of grey, and the other tabs a slightly different shade of grey. Occasionally, the background color will bleed through the tab, offering another tab color to confuse your brain even more.
I see the iPad tab model and Mac tab model as being equally broken. The iPhone model, with the address bar at the bottom, really works well for me. I especially love the hint to the right and left of the address bar, letting you know you can slide side-to-side to get at adjacent pages. This “hidden tabs” model feels like an improvement over previous models.
The iPad and Mac Safari tabs have lost touch with the functionality of the tab metaphor. Color me disappointed. Props to Gruber for taking the time to dig into such detail on each individual point.
iOS 15.0 introduces a new feature: an iPhone can be located with Find My even while the iPhone is turned “off”. How does it work? Is it a security concern?
This is a bit of a techie rabbit hole, but I found it fascinating.
At its core is a discussion of the AOP, or Always On Processor:
All chips and various embedded devices Apple manufactures run a real-time operating system, called RTKitOS. The AOP on the iPhone is no exception. However, the AOP has a special role. It connects to almost every other chip in the iPhone. For some chips, it only does basic tasks like power management, and for other chips, it acts as a transparent proxy that wakes up iOS when needed.
This way, a processor that is always on actually saves energy. iOS can go to sleep while the AOP waits for hardware events. A simple example is the motion sensor. Without touching any button on the iPhone, the display wakes up.
If this sort of technical arcana is of interest, follow the headline link and dig in. Skip the stuff you don’t understand. After each technical deep dive, the author returns to the surface before discussing the next bit.
Follow the headline link for the September 27th episode of Smartless, wherein hosts Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Bojack HorsemanLego BatmanReeses shill Will Arnett bring on a mystery guest to faff around with.
In this case, it’s Jon Stewart, here to pitch his new Apple TV+ show, “The Problem with Jon Stewart”. If you want to skip the intro, jump to about 3 minutes in.
I’m a long-time fan of Smartless’ profound silliness and goofing around, your mileage may vary. But this is specific to Apple and I thought it might be a good fit for readers of The Loop. Don’t miss how everyone refers to Apple TV+ streaming service (Stewart’s show is “on Apple”) as well as the anecdote wherein Jason Bateman skips the line for the very first iPhone.
Apple TV Plus will not be moving ahead with a second season of “Mr. Corman,” A24’s schoolteacher drama starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the streamer has confirmed.
As far as I know, this is the shortest run of a show on Apple TV+. Even Planet of the Apps (technically not an Apple TV+ show, but still) was alive for a full year, premiering in June 2017, officially canceled in July 2018.
Apple’s relationship with Joseph Gordon-Levitt continues with his exec produced, animated “Wolfboy and the Everything Factory.”
Dave and I talk about some of the features we like in iOS 15 and how they fit in with the new iPads and iPhones that were just released. We also talk about some of the shows we’re watching on Apple TV and some of the other channels that you can find on the service.
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A serious bug in the iOS 15 Messages app can cause some saved photos to be deleted, according to multiple complaints we’ve heard from MacRumors readers and Twitter users.
And:
If you save a photo from a Messages thread and then go on to delete that thread, the next time an iCloud Backup is performed, the photo will disappear.
Even though the image is saved to your personal iCloud Photo Library, it appears to still be linked to the Messages app in iOS 15, and saving it does not persist through the deletion of the thread and an iCloud backup.
There’s more detail in the linked article. To be safe, until this bug is either disproved or fixed, don’t delete Messages threads with Photos you care about.
The video below shows the iFixit teardown of the new iPad mini. If teardown are not your thing, skip to 1:20 in for a great shot of the iPad mini “jelly scrolling”. Best video of this I’ve seen.
As you watch it, note the left and right sides of the screen alternating their refresh. That’s the effect. Slightly annoying, perhaps, but it is what it is, and for me, it’s more interesting than it is a problem.
A small commercially available piece of radio equipment is placed near the the iPhone, which tricks it into believing it is dealing with a ticket barrier
At the same time an Android phone running an application developed by the researchers is used to relay signals from the iPhone to a contactless payment terminal – this could be in a shop or one the criminals control
Because the iPhone thinks it is paying a ticket barrier, it doesn’t need to be unlocked
Meanwhile the iPhone’s communications with the payment terminal are modified to fool it into thinking the iPhone has been unlocked and a payment authorised – allowing high value transactions to be made without entering a PIN, fingerprint or using Face ID
The response to this:
Apple said the matter was “a concern with a Visa system”.
Visa said payments were secure and attacks of this type were impractical outside of a lab.
Impractical? As we’ve long seen (at least in the US), credit card hacking devices can get very small and surreptitious. And from the description above, the only thing that needs to be in place near the ticket barrier is a radio, which can certainly be small enough to be practically unnoticeable.
That said, this is all theoretical, not something that’s made its way into the wild. Yet. Still time to address this point of weakness, if these researchers are proven correct.
Been using the iPhone 13 Pro Max for MACRO eye 👁 photos this week. Impressed. Will innovate patient eye care & telemedicine. 👀 forward to seeing where it goes 😊 …
Photos are from healing a resolving abrasion in a cornea transplant. Permission was obtained to use photos 🙏🏼.
PS: this “Pro camera” includes a telephone app too! 😂
Follow the headline link, check out the images. If you’ve got an iPhone 13 Pro, you can pretty easily take closeup eye pics like this. Bit by bit, tech like the iPhone 13 camera module and the Apple Watch are bringing telemedicine to life.
Side note: If you’ve not seen it, check out this macro pic I took last week, taken with an iPhone 13 Pro. This camera is incredible.
If you want an iPhone 13 Pro and have not yet placed an order, best get in the queue now. As of this writing, all iPhone 13 Pro models show a Nov 2 – Nov 9 delivery date. Some iPhone 13 (not Pro) models are delivering mid-October, some a bit later, but the Pro models all show November availability.
While you sit in the queue, you can also check your carrier’s web site to see what their delivery date is. And if you’ve got a reasonably nearby Apple Store, drop by and see if they’ve got one in stock, even if the Apple Store shows no stock. If either of these bear fruit, you can always cancel your Apple Store order.
Buyers of Apple’s new iPhone 13 are facing longer-than-expected delivery times due to the COVID wave in Vietnam and the U.S. tech giant’s deployment of a new camera feature, Nikkei Asia has learned.
The disruption is mainly associated with constrained supplies of camera modules for the four iPhone 13 models because a significant number of its component parts are assembled in Vietnam, according to people familiar with the matter.
And:
[Apple] has expanded the use of its new sensor-shift optical image stabilization (OIS) to all four iPhone models when previously it was only in the premium iPhone 12 Pro Max. This has put suppliers in the position of having to ramp up production without jeopardizing production quality, against the backdrop of severe restrictions due to COVID.
Perfect storm of a supply chain shift (from a Pro Max only component to a component shared by all 4 models) and Covid.
From the linked Ars Technica post, here’s Apple’s response:
In response to our inquiry, Apple has told us that the “jelly scroll” issue on the 6th-generation iPad mini is normal behavior for LCD screens. Because these screens do refresh line by line, there is a tiny delay between when the lines at the top of the screen and lines at the bottom are refreshed. This can cause uneven scrolling issues like the ones observed on the iPad.
And Ars’ take on this response:
We maintain that this effect is noticeable on the iPad mini in a way that it is not noticeable on other 60 Hz LCD iPads we’ve tested, like the iPad Air 4 and the latest $329 iPad. There’s also a clear dividing line down the middle of the screen in portrait mode, as observed in our testing and in the video linked below—it’s not a problem isolated to the extreme edges of the display. The upshot is that the company doesn’t believe there is a hardware or software issue to “fix,” and that the screen apparently is the way it is.
Bottom line, Apple is saying, “Is what it is, get used to it”.
The new $30 AirTag tracking device from Apple has a feature that allows anyone who finds one of these tiny location beacons to scan it with a mobile phone and discover its owner’s phone number if the AirTag has been set to lost mode. But according to new research, this same feature can be abused to redirect the Good Samaritan to an iCloud phishing page — or to any other malicious website.
And:
When scanned, an AirTag in Lost Mode will present a short message asking the finder to call the owner at at their specified phone number.
And:
Apple’s Lost Mode doesn’t currently stop users from injecting arbitrary computer code into its phone number field — such as code that causes the Good Samaritan’s device to visit a phony Apple iCloud login page.
And this bit of espionage history:
If this sounds like a script from a James Bond movie, you’re not far off the mark. A USB stick with malware is very likely how U.S. and Israeli cyber hackers got the infamous Stuxnet worm into the internal, air-gapped network that powered Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities a decade ago. In 2008, a cyber attack described at the time as “the worst breach of U.S. military computers in history” was traced back to a USB flash drive left in the parking lot of a U.S. Department of Defense facility.
There clearly seems to be a phishing opportunity here. Guessing that Apple could add code to the firmware to prevent the injection of code to an AirTag phone number. No matter, good to be aware of this sort of attack.
From this Variety review of Blush at the Tribeca Film Festival back in June:
At Disney Animation, where he worked for 25 years, rising to head of story on “Big Hero 6,” Mateo started out as a clean-up artist and 2D animator.
And:
“Blush” is inspired by Mateo’s wife, Mary Ann, who lost an eight-year battle against breast cancer in 2017.
And:
After I lost Mary Ann, I suddenly couldn’t breathe, it was a scary moment. I had to call a friend who is a doctor and ask him: ‘What is going on with me?’ He said: ‘Joe, you are having a panic attack. I realized that Mary Ann was my air. I was struggling to breathe because I lost my air.
With that in mind, watch the trailer embedded below. Blush (an animated short) goes live on Apple TV+ on Friday.
Mothership, covering an accident that happened in Singapore:
The motorcyclist, named Muhammad Fitri, fell off his bike after colliding with a van at Ang Mo Kio.
While lying on the ground, he saw the vehicle drive off before losing consciousness, he told Chinese daily Lianhe Wanbao.
And:
Fitri said that his Apple’s smart watch detected a hard fall and promptly sent a message to his emergency contacts, which included his girlfriend. The smart watch also called for an ambulance.
And:
Fitri could have missed the golden hour of rescue if not for the smart watch’s function.
Kudos to the Apple Support video team. They are putting out a steady stream of useful how-to videos that are great for folks new to the platform, or new to a particular mechanism.
This is the latest, focusing on the brand new Safari Tab Groups in iOS 15, iPadOS 15.
This was interesting, a sort of focus group specifically set up to see if folks noticed the difference between older displays and the new iPhone 13 adaptive refresh ProMotion display.
I love the new display, but not sure I would have noticed the difference when 120Hz came into play. That said, it definitely makes for an overall better experience. Not something that would impact my purchase decision like, say, the 3x optical zoom or macro capability in the camera, something very easy to notice.
Lots of fascinating tidbits here, if teardowns are your thing. But deep down, all the way in Step 10:
Face ID works even when we disconnected the front sensor assembly. However, any display replacement knocks out Face ID. We tried transferring the sensors from the old display and porting over the Face ID hardware, but no dice. It looks like the display is serial-locked to the phone.
And:
TL;DR: Unless Apple revises this behavior in software, screen replacements outside Apple’s authorized repair lose all Face ID functionality.
Is this a security measure to prevent a replacement screen from overriding Face ID on a stolen or seized iPhone? I suspect we’ll never know the logic behind this decision until far down the road.
This is an informative video from 9to5Mac’s Jeff Benjamin. If you already know your way around shutting down and restarting your iPhone, jump to 2:20 in for a little used shutdown method that doesn’t require finger gymnastics, then rolling right into a force restart method you might not be aware of:
Press up volume, then down volume, then press and hold the power button, all in quick succession.
Go ahead and give it a try. You can cancel and, as you’d expect, you’ll need to type in your passcode, just as you would if you did the press and hold the up volume and power button at the same time.
Amsterdam and Maranello, 27 September 2021. Exor N.V. (“Exor”), the leading diversified holding company controlled by the Agnelli family, and Ferrari N.V. (“Ferrari”) announce a long term, multi-year collaboration with Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson at the creative collective LoveFrom.
Marc Newson and Sir Jony Ive:
“We have been friends with John for many years and are great admirers of his insight and vision. We are thrilled to be embarking on such an important, long term collaboration with Ferrari and more broadly Exor. As Ferrari owners and collectors, we could not be more excited about collaborating with this extraordinary company and in particular with the design team expertly led by Flavio Manzoni. We see some uniquely exciting opportunities working together which we believe will yield important and valuable work.”
Ferrari already makes beautiful vehicles. It’ll be interesting to see what Jony Ive and Mark Newson bring to the design.
One interesting side note of the emergence of LoveFrom is the lack of a web site. Yesterday’s Ferrari press release had me check to see if that changed. When I did a LoveFrom search, here’s the Siri recommended web site.
The newest version of the iPhone operating system, iOS 15, has new privacy features for people who pay for iCloud storage.
One of the handiest new features is the ability to create a temporary email address — an address that’s not linked to your identity but still forwards messages to your inbox.
And:
These burner emails are good for signing up in forms on the web that you might not want to share your main email address with, Apple said when it announced the feature in June. Users can spin up as many burner email addresses as they need and delete them when it’s convenient.
We posted about this back in the early beta days, thought it worth re-exploring now that iOS 15 is officially out.
Note that this is part of iCloud+, something you gain access to if you pay Apple for storage. Follow the headline link for the walkthrough.
The $20 billion plants – dubbed Fab 52 and Fab 62 – will bring the total number of Intel factories at its campus in Chandler, Arizona, to six. They will house Intel’s most advanced chipmaking technology and play a central role in the Santa Clara, California-based company’s effort to regain its lead in making the smallest, fastest chips by 2025, after having fallen behind rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd
Intel is betting heavily on this re-roll of its chipmaking process.
TSMC, in the meanwhile:
Intel rival TSMC has also purchased land to build its first U.S. campus in Phoenix, not far from Intel’s location, where TSMC plans up to six chip factories.
The initial fab is relatively modest by industry standards, with a planned output of 20,000 wafers – each of which contains thousands of chips – every month using the company’s most sophisticated 5 nanometre semiconductor manufacturing technology.
Both of these will bring this part of the supply chain onto US shores, though materials that are used in the fabrication process, like silicon, germanium, etc., are still critical path.
