Krebs on Security:

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.

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.

Another great Apple Watch rescue story.

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.

Ferrari press release:

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.

Go ahead and give it a click. Clever.

Kif Leswing, CNBC:

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.

Reuters:

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.

From TSMC’s announced plans:

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.

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

The iPad mini 6 launched this week to much fanfare, thanks to its radically modern redesign and latest-generation A15 processor.

However, as customers receive their new iPads, a prominent issue is being spotted again and again. Colloquially referred to as ‘jelly scrolling’, it seems that one side of the iPad mini display is refreshing slower than the other side, which appears as a noticeable wobble effect down the middle of the screen when content is moving quickly — like scrolling a web page.

Here’s video showing what this looks like in slo-mo:

Here is is slow-mo video of scrolling on the iPad Min i slowed down EVEN MORE in a frame-by-frame step through. Notice how the right moves up faster than the left.

In normal usage you barely see it, but every now and then it become noticeable. In landscape it goes away entirely pic.twitter.com/iq9LGJzsDI

— Dieter Bohn (@backlon) September 22, 2021

I see this on my iPad mini, though I didn’t notice it until I started reading about it. Of course, now I can’t not see it.

This doesn’t bother me, particularly, but I do hate to see this fly in the ointment of a terrific product launch. Since this issue involves the way video refresh is done, not clear if this is simply a software fix, like the Unlock with Apple Watch issue appears to be.

Here’s hoping.

Apple:

With the release of iOS 15, Apple Maps gets its biggest update ever with a city experience that offers rich details, driving routes with better navigation, immersive walking directions shown in augmented reality, and much more. The update, which expands on the new map that Apple spent years building from the ground up, is now available in London, Los Angeles, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area, with more cities to come.

And:

Apple Maps introduces a new way to navigate cities with a visually stunning 3D map that offers unprecedented detail for neighborhoods, commercial districts, marinas, buildings, and more. Now users can see elevation details across a city, new road labels, and hundreds of custom-designed landmarks like Coit Tower in San Francisco, Dodger Stadium in LA, the Statue of Liberty in NYC, and the Royal Albert Hall in London, with more to come. A beautiful nighttime mode with a moonlit glow activates at dusk.

And:

Later this year, it will be available in Philadelphia, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. Support for additional cities, including Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, will be available next year.

Follow the headline link, scroll through the images to get a sense of what this looks like (at least to folks who can access it).

With every new Apple rollout, there are issues that crop up. Sometimes, it’s an unfixable hardware issue (thinking butterfly keyboard failure here). Other times, it’s a bug, fixed by a subsequent system release.

From the headline-linked Apple support note:

Apple has identified an issue where Unlock with Apple Watch may not work with iPhone 13 devices. You might see “Unable to Communicate with Apple Watch” if you try to unlock your iPhone while wearing a face mask, or you might not be able to set up Unlock with Apple Watch.

Yup. I’m experiencing this issue. I see the “Unable to Communicate with Apple Watch” alert when I try to turn the feature on.

Fortunately, Apple follows this with:

This issue will be fixed in an upcoming software update.

Hoping the iPad mini jelly scrolling issue (I’ll get to that in a couple of posts) is just as fixable.

Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch, got the chance to speak with Apple VP Kaiann Drance and Human Interface Team designer Johnnie Manzari about Cinematic Mode.

“We knew that bringing a high-quality depth of field to video would be magnitudes more challenging [than Portrait Mode],” says Drance. “Unlike photos, video is designed to move as the person filming, including hand shake. And that meant we would need even higher-quality depth data so Cinematic Mode could work across subjects, people, pets and objects, and we needed that depth data continuously to keep up with every frame. Rendering these autofocus changes in real time is a heavy computational workload.”

And:

“We didn’t have an idea [for Cinematic Mode]. We were just curious — what is it about filmmaking that’s been timeless? And that kind of leads down this interesting road and then we started to learn more and talk more … with people across the company that can help us solve these problems.”

That second quote offers an interesting insight into how features like this are born. Sometimes new features are the result of trying to solve a specific problem in a clever way. Cinematic Mode was more born from an exploration into an existing process, trying to bring an existing solution from the complex, expensive, hardware heavy filmmaking world to the iPhone.

Nice writeup by Panzarino. Don’t miss the section “Testing Cinematic Mode” with the embedded demo reel. Don’t just watch the demo reel. It needs the context of Matthew’s descriptions to give a true sense of what Cinematic Mode is and isn’t. Great read.

If you are curious about Apple TV+’s latest series, Foundation, this review by Liz Shannon Miller, Collider, is an excellent place to start. There are spoilers here, but nothing you wouldn’t get in the briefest conversation about the show, or the book series (a revered trilogy, with add-ons over time, by Isaac Asimov).

One turn of phrase that stuck out to me:

the downright sumptuous adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s long-thought-impossible-to-adapt novel series is, essentially, a dream come true for him and his fellow fans of hard science fiction.

Sumptuous and long-thought-impossible-to-adapt are key here. And, so far, looks like the show runners have succeeded in bringing the impossible to the small screen.

Thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. New! BBEdit 14 is still the power tool for text and also offers a new Notes capability plus greatly expanded language support! I’ve been using BBEdit for over 20 years and it’s still one of my favorite apps on my computer.

Follow the headline link, pick your iPhone model, then pick your iPhone color.

With those selected, start choosing case colors to see how they’ll look on your new iPhone 13.

Another great iPhone 13 Pro camera review, filled with images to give you a sense of the reach of the newest high end iPhone lenses/modes.

If the camera is driving you to consider an iPhone 13 Pro, this is a great review to make your way through.

The only caveat:

But there’s been one thing that has been bothering me in the week I’ve been testing the iPhone 13 Pros’ cameras. Something so frustrating that, for the first time in a decade, I’m not upgrading to the best iPhone camera that Apple has to offer… at launch. Not until Apple fixes it, at least. And a fix is coming, Apple confirmed to Input.

Here’s the issue:

If you have your iPhone 13 Pro camera set to the 1x wide camera and place an object or a subject within 14 centimeters (5.5 inches) of it, the viewfinder will maintain the 1x framing/composition but use the ultrawide’s close-range autofocusing in tandem. You can literally see the viewfinder flicker/pop and “switch” to this hybrid viewfinder.

Here’s a pair of videos (here and here) showing this flicker/pop effect in action. I get the annoyance, and I appreciate knowing the cause.

Apple’s response:

A new setting will be added in a software update this fall to turn off automatic camera switching when shooting at close distances for macro photography and video.

Perfect.

Austin Mann:

From macro shots of tiny ants to massive landscapes by helicopter, we’ve put the iPhone 13 Pro camera through the paces and I’m excited to share the results with you.

Just start scrolling. I love these shots, especially those shot with the iPhone 13 Pro’s Ultra Wide macro. More than anything else, that macro capability is the part of the iPhone 13 Pro I’m most looking forward to. Mine is arriving tomorrow.

Props to Zoe Schiffer for this headline.

From the post:

Tim Cook sent an email to Apple employees Tuesday evening about an all-hands meeting that leaked to The Verge last week. He said the company is doing “everything in our power to identify those who leaked” and noted that “people who leak confidential information do not belong” at Apple.

Follow the headline link to read the entire leaked thing.

Mark Spoonauer, Tom’s Guide:

We run every phone we review through the Tom’s Guide battery test, which involves continuous web surfing over 5G cellular at 150 nits of screen brightness. And these are the results compared to the iPhone 12 series.

Follow the headline link for the details and a longer list, but here are the iPhone 13 vs iPhone 12 series numbers (hours:minutes):

• iPhone 13 Pro Max … (12:16)
• iPhone 12 Pro Max … (10:53)
• iPhone 13 Pro … (11:42)
• iPhone 12 Pro … (9:06)
• iPhone 13 … (10:33)
• iPhone 12 … (8:25)
• iPhone 13 mini … (8:41)
• iPhone 12 mini … (7:28)

Guessing you won’t drive your iPhone’s as hard as the Tom’s Guide folks did, so your battery life might be even better.

Follow the headline link for an updating list of links.

One video that was missed (at least as of this posting) was this excellent, detailed, video review by Rene Ritchie, which I’ve embedded below. It covers all the iPhone 13 series, including the mini, and touched on a few points I personally found very interesting. A fire hose of detail.

If you’ve only got a quick sec, check out the trailer below. It’ll give you a sense of the new show, which premieres a week from tomorrow.

If you have a bit more time, follow the headline link for an interview with Jon Stewart, specifically focused on the new show, from The Hollywood Reporter.

Louise Guillot, Politico:

The European Commission is set to present a legislative proposal on Thursday to force manufacturers to use a common charger for electronic devices, according to a Commission official closely involved in the file.

The proposal will require all manufacturers to harmonize the charging points on devices — using a USB-C charging point — and to make their software protocol for fast charging interoperable between brands and devices.

And:

Manufacturers will also be required to stop selling a charger with every new smartphone, instead giving consumers the choice to use their old charger.

From Reuters’ original reporting on this legislation last month:

Half of chargers sold with mobile phones in the European Union in 2018 had a USB micro-B connector while 29% had a USB C connector and 21% a Lightning connector, a Commission impact assessment study in 2019 found.

The goal, as I’ve seen it reported, is to force all manufactures to adopt USB-C for devices sold in the EU. Keep an eye on this story. If this goes forward, Apple would have until mid-2024 to have the change in place.