This is another entry in Jean-Louis’ terrific 50 Years in Tech memoir.
One bit that struck me:
As described in the Firing Frankness Monday Note, my exit arrangement with Apple involved staying another six months or so as a ”minister without portfolio”. As I pondered my next move, I got a pair of phone calls from Steve Jobs. First, he asked me how it felt to be fired, a smirking question that I deserved given that I was instrumental in his own dismissal. A few days later, another call. This time, Jobs offered to talk because “we could do great things together”. I declined. As discussed before, I knew I didn’t have the emotional strength to work for the charismatic NeXT founder.
The whole thing is worth reading. Makes me hungry for the next entry in the series, even though I know how this part ends.
If you love movies, this is a terrific multi-media project to make your way through. For each movie, there’s a highlighted scene snippet (sadly, no sound), followed by a writeup on the importance of the scene, followed by a take from someone involved, like the actor, director, or writer.
Yes, it’s a list, so there are no doubt omissions, or bits you think shouldn’t be on the list. But, in my opinion, a terrific read, worth your time.
My favorite? The section titled “But wait…” from Iron Man. It introduced something fun to the movie going experience.
Batteries are consumable, we all know so well now, and that’s proven true for the tiny batteries inside AirPods after two years of daily use. Battery life that once exceeded five hours now struggles to power AirPods through three hours of continuous usage at the same volume.
And:
In practice, I used to never hear the low battery alert during usage. I rarely listened to audio with AirPods for five straight hours before charging in the carrying case without thought. More recently, I’ve heard the bloop sound much more regularly, frequently followed by AirPods dying before I’m ready to recharge.
Yup. I’ve had my AirPods for about two years, and the loss of battery life is noticeable. And, as Zac points out, though I do feel the tug to buy a new set for fresh batteries, a product refresh is rumored to be on the horizon.
I wish Apple offered an inexpensive battery replacement program. Or a trade-in program, replacing aging AirPods with a new set, for a fee. I’d absolutely go for that.
UPDATE: To be clear [H/T, Gabriel Jordan], Apple does have an official AirPods battery replacement program. The cost seems to be $49 per AirPod. So $98 for a battery refresh. Plus tax and shipping. Though there’s an out-of-warranty fee of $69 per. Going to assume that’s for non-battery repair.
No matter, $98+ to refresh the battery is incentive for me to wait and apply that money to the next generation. Just hope it comes soon.
Your twitter feed is no doubt filled with discussion about Facebook and Google misusing Apple’s Enterprise Certificate system and Apple canceling those certificates.
Consider this small quote from Google’s official response to this situation:
The Screenwise Meter iOS app should not have operated under Apple’s developer enterprise program — this was a mistake, and we apologize.
“This was a mistake, and we apologize.” Such simple words to say. Facebook could easily have ended all this discussion with something similar.
Instead, they denied accountability, insisted that they did what anyone would do. They even sent out a company wide internal memo, just to make it clear to their employees that this was all a big misunderstanding.
TechCrunch, who was named in the memo, took the memo apart, brick-by-brick. Brilliantly.
Follow the headline link, read the Facebook memo and TechCrunch’s interstitial comments. There’s some real insight here.
Your iPhone might shut off if you’re walking outside during the kind of freezing temperatures that we’re seeing all around the United States thanks to the polar vortex. It’s a problem many of my New York City-based colleagues verified when I asked about it Thursday morning.
Sometimes their iPhones just turn off, they said, and the phones don’t turn back on until they’re warmed up or plugged in again.
And that’s the last thing you want to happen when you’re freezing as you walk on the sidewalk and use your phone to find directions.
There are a lot of serious issues when it comes to the cold hitting parts of North America this week so this may seem minor but it’s good to keep in mind regardless.
Apple has now shut down Google’s ability to distribute its internal iOS apps, following a similar shutdown that was issued to Facebook earlier this week. A person familiar with the situation tells The Verge that early versions of Google Maps, Hangouts, Gmail, and other pre-release beta apps have stopped working today, alongside employee-only apps like a Gbus app for transportation and Google’s internal cafe app.
“We’re working with Apple to fix a temporary disruption to some of our corporate iOS apps, which we expect will be resolved soon,” says a Google spokesperson in a statement to The Verge.
Apple has meted out the same punishment they gave Facebook.
The Criterion Collection announced that the Criterion Channel, stocked with over 1,000 classic and contemporary art-house films, will launch April 8 in the U.S. and Canada. The Criterion Channel will be regularly priced at $10.99 per month or $99.99 for an annual subscription.
Movies in Criterion Collection’s catalog include Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai,” Sidney Lumet’s “12 Angry Men,” Robert Altman’s “3 Women,” George Sluizer’s “The Vanishing,” Fritz Lang’s “M,” Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter,” Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love,” Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” and Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.”
Were you looking for yet another streaming service to spend 10+ per month on? Well, here you go.
Hey, who likes riddles? Here’s one! What’s the difference between KITT from Knight Rider’s self-driving system and a Tesla on Autopilot? The answer? Nothing! They’re both fictional when it comes to being fully self-driving and if you sleep in your Autopilot-mode Tesla you’re an idiot endangering everyone around you. Also, only one could be used while David Hasselhoff enjoyed a cheeseburger.
With this in mind, this video of a guy sleeping at the wheel of his Tesla Model X should be even more infuriating.
This guy should never be allowed behind the wheel of a car ever again.
Apple Inc. plans to launch iPhones with a more-powerful 3-D camera as soon as next year, stepping up the company’s push into augmented reality, according to people familiar with the plans.
The rear-facing, longer-range 3-D camera is designed to scan the environment to create three-dimensional reconstructions of the real world. It will work up to about 15 feet from the device, the people said. That’s in contrast with the current iPhone 3-D camera system, which points toward users and operates at distances of 25 to 50 centimeters to power Apple’s Face ID facial-recognition feature.
I tend to avoid rumors but, right or wrong, this article is full of fascinating detail. If and when AR gains enough traction to be part of our day to day lives, I think Apple will be perfectly placed to sell an entirely new generation of iPhones.
NOTE: Do not confuse AR with VR. AR (augmented reality) layers simulated information on top of what you see through your iPhone’s camera. VR (virtual reality) is a virtual world, fed to you through special interface devices, like gloves and helmets.
I see AR as eminently useful, letting you measure rooms and place virtual furniture, or helping map your trip through the grocery store, finding items and comparing prices. The use cases are here, the hardware and software is still in the works.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I was on the road this week. One thing I looked forward to when I got back to my Mac (I did the whole road-trip on my iPad, no complaints) was installing AirBuddy, the phenomenal Mac utility from iOS and macOS spelunker Guilherme Rambo.
Worth the wait.
In a nutshell, AirBuddy gives your Mac the same AirPods magic that you see on your iPhone. Open your AirPods case near your iPhone, and a popup instantly appears that shows you the battery status of your AirPods, lets you know the AirPods are ready to connect.
With AirBuddy’s helper app in place (launch the app once and the helper app is installed), that same magic happens when you open the AirPods case next to your Mac.
AirBuddy eases the friction of connecting your AirPods to your Mac. No more going into Bluetooth, clicking your AirPods, then Connect, and waiting for the connection. Instead, AirBuddy sits there, waiting for you to open your AirPods case and brings up that familiar interface.
AirBuddy is $5+ (meaning you can pay more). To me, the price is worth it to support Guilherme’s spelunking efforts. It certainly is a fun experiment.
Two videos embedded below. The first is the results, a gorgeous special effects video. And the second is the behind the scenes on how all this was done.
Starting Friday, Apple Music subscribers can enjoy their access to over 50 million songs, playlists and music videos on any domestic American Airlines flight equipped with Viasat satellite Wi-Fi with no Wi-Fi purchase required. American Airlines is the first commercial airline to provide exclusive access to Apple Music through complimentary inflight Wi-Fi.
The way I read this, the experience will be the same as using Apple Music on the ground. Not a limited version of Apple Music, but straight-up Apple Music without having to buy the plane’s Wi-Fi package.
I love this idea, hope other airlines follow suit.
While I was on the road this week, a blizzard of interesting stories broke. One of them involved both Facebook and Google, both linked by Shawn yesterday.
One detail that stuck out to me was the vastly different responses from each company.
Key facts about this market research program are being ignored. Despite early reports, there was nothing ‘secret’ about this; it was literally called the Facebook Research App. It wasn’t ‘spying’ as all of the people who signed up to participate went through a clear on-boarding process asking for their permission and were paid to participate. Finally, less than 5 percent of the people who chose to participate in this market research program were teens. All of them with signed parental consent forms.
Absolutely no mea culpa here. This feels more like “we’re being unfairly blamed”. But from that same article:
Facebook’s claim that it doesn’t violate Apple’s Enterprise Certificate policy is directly contradicted by the terms of that policy. Those include that developers “Distribute Provisioning Profiles only to Your Employees and only in conjunction with Your Internal Use Applications for the purpose of developing and testing”. The policy also states that “You may not use, distribute or otherwise make Your Internal Use Applications available to Your Customers” unless under direct supervision of employees or on company premises.
And:
Facebook did not publicly promote the Research VPN itself and used intermediaries that often didn’t disclose Facebook’s involvement until users had begun the signup process. While users were given clear instructions and warnings, the program never stresses nor mentions the full extent of the data Facebook can collect through the VPN.
Google did a somewhat similar thing. When the Facebook news broke, Google released this statement (via this Verge article):
The Screenwise Meter iOS app should not have operated under Apple’s developer enterprise program — this was a mistake, and we apologize. We have disabled this app on iOS devices. This app is completely voluntary and always has been. We’ve been upfront with users about the way we use their data in this app, we have no access to encrypted data in apps and on devices, and users can opt out of the program at any time.
Like night and day. I get that Google had the advantage, in that they got to watch the Facebook story make headlines and had the opportunity to control their message. But Facebook did have the opportunity to own their actions. They chose to prolong the story, to pretend innocence, compounding their bad actions.
Google announced last fall it’s killing off Google+ because of the social network’s laughably “low usage” and “challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers’ expectations,” plus revelations of serious security vulnerabilities.
In a blog post and related support page that went live today, Google explained how the shutdown will unfold, and the important part for most ‘consumer’ users is this: they’re gonna delete all your posts, photos, videos, and comments, starting on April 2.
You’ve only got a couple of months to get your data off of Google+. Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes though.
A tourist in Australia has gone viral after posting a video of themselves holding a blue-ringed octopus. But it hasn’t gone viral just because the animal is beautiful. The blue-ringed octopus is one of the most venomous creatures in Australia and the unnamed tourist is lucky to be alive.
The venom of the blue-ringed octopus, which contains the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin, causes paralysis and the sting is so small that most people have no idea that they’ve been poisoned until it’s too late. It carries enough venom to kill 26 full grown adults in a span of minutes.
I showed this video to my Australian wife when it first made the rounds and she said, “So, how long did it take to kill them?” Don’t mess with the wildlife in Australia.
A recent malware distribution campaign dubbed “VeryMal” leverages an ancient technique called steganography—the hiding of secret information in plain sight—to distribute Mac malware.
Why go to all this trouble? In theory, using steganography or other obfuscation techniques makes it more difficult for endpoint protection and network monitoring software to determine that something suspicious might be happening.
Obviously, this is a bit of self-serving from the folks at Intego but it does serve as a reminder – don’t install any aspect of Adobe’s Flash software.
It looks like Facebook is not the only one abusing Apple’s system for distributing employee-only apps to sidestep the App Store and collect extensive data on users. Google has been running an app called Screenwise Meter, which bears a strong resemblance to the app distributed by Facebook Research that has now been barred by Apple, TechCrunch has learned.
In its app, Google invites users aged 18 and up (or 13 if part of a family group) to download the app by way of a special code and registration process using an Enterprise Certificate. That’s the same type of policy violation that led Apple to shut down Facebook’s similar Research VPN iOS app, which had the knock-on effect of also disabling usage of Facebook’s legitimate employee-only apps — which run on the same Facebook Enterprise Certificate — and making Facebook look very iffy in the process.
Surprising no one, Google may be as guilty as Facebook. Will Apple punish Google as it did Facebook?
The low friction of ice is why speedskaters can reach 35 mph, why figure skaters can twirl in dizzying circles, and why a 40-pound curling stone can glide and accomplish whatever the heck the point of curling is.
But for much of the past two centuries, scientists have struggled to explain why, exactly, ice is slippery — and why skates can glide atop it so well (or for that matter why it’s so easy to slip walking on ice).
So scientists have to rely on their knowledge of physics and chemistry for an explanation. They’ve come up with a few overlapping ones that each elucidate a fascinating property of ice. Given that the the polar vortex has settled over the Midwest this week, it’s a good time to dig in.
Sending out warm thoughts to all of our readers suffering through the “polar vortex”. Or, as we in Canada call it, “a Wednesday in January”.
For the second time in six months, the FBI is accusing a Chinese national working for Apple of attempting to steal trade secrets related to the company’s secret autonomous vehicle program, NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit learned Tuesday.
Apple began investigating Jizhong Chen when another employee reported seeing the engineer taking photographs in a sensitive work space, according to a federal criminal complaint unsealed this week.
This is undoubtedly throwing a pall over all of the Chinese nationals working for the company.
Apple has shut down Facebook’s ability to distribute internal iOS apps, from early releases of the Facebook app to basic tools like a lunch menu. A person familiar with the situation tells The Verge that early versions of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and other pre-release “dogfood” (beta) apps have stopped working, as have other employee apps, like one for transportation. Facebook is treating this as a critical problem internally, we’re told, as the affected apps simply don’t launch on employees’ phones anymore.
Facebook has no one to blame but itself. Time will tell how long they’ll be in Apple’s doghouse. This doesn’t affect the Facebook app many of us have on our iOS devices.
The Beach Behemoth is a 12-foot beach ball. Perhaps you think that this is a mere toy, one of those ultimately trivial impulse buys of no permanence beyond momentary amusement. This is because you have not read the buyer reviews at Amazon.
“Do not inflate in your living room…. Or anywhere that has a door between you and where you want the ball to be.”
I don’t think I want one of these but the reviews are hilarious.
From the billions of photos uploaded to Flickr in 2018, we chose the Top 25 Flickr Photos of 2018. Of all the incredible moments captured, we’ve curated a list of the most inspiring photos, which represent a global community of unique perspectives.
To determine top photos, Flickr staff created an algorithm that took into account a number of social and engagement metrics, like how many times the photo was viewed or faved. We made sure to curate the raw data to avoid the results being a popularity contest; we removed spammers and photos that don’t qualify as high-quality. We also tried to ensure diversity of genre. For photographers whose photos placed in the top list multiple times, we selected their top-scoring photo.
Director Todd Douglas Miller crafts a gorgeous documentary Apollo 11 out of never-before-seen NASA footage, restoring the 50-year-old footage into what the director has called “the highest quality digital collection of Apollo 11 footage in existence.”
Miller and his team digitized unprocessed, never-before-seen 65mm footage that was recently discovered in the National Archives along with 11,000 hours of uncatalogued NASA audio recordings to create Apollo 11, a documentary which critics are calling “like science made into a dream,” and a film that will make you “overcome by the sheer enormity of what it meant to leave the Earth and land somewhere else.”
The footage in this trailer is incredible. The story says, “It will open in theaters sometime in 2019.” It has to. 2019 is the 50th anniversary of this seminal event. It would be a travesty if this documentary didn’t make it to theaters this year.
Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store and rewards teenagers and adults to download the Research app and give it root access to network traffic in what may be a violation of Apple policy so the social network can decrypt and analyze their phone activity, a TechCrunch investigation confirms.
Facebook admitted to TechCrunch it was running the Research program to gather data on usage habits, and it has no plans to stop.
At what point will the government step in and do something about the rampant abuses Facebook is consistently subjecting its users to?
Apple on Tuesday reported its financial results for its fiscal first quarter ending December 29, 2018. The company posted revenue of $84.3 billion, a decline of 5 percent from the year-ago quarter, which was expected.
According to Apple, Revenue from iPhone declined 15 percent from the prior year, while total revenue from all other products and services grew 19 percent. Services revenue reached an all-time high of $10.9 billion, up 19 percent over the prior year. Revenue from Mac and Wearables, Home and Accessories also reached all-time highs, growing 9 percent and 33 percent, respectively, and revenue from iPad grew 17 percent.
“While it was disappointing to miss our revenue guidance, we manage Apple for the long term, and this quarter’s results demonstrate that the underlying strength of our business runs deep and wide,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Our active installed base of devices reached an all-time high of 1.4 billion in the first quarter, growing in each of our geographic segments. That’s a great testament to the satisfaction and loyalty of our customers, and it’s driving our Services business to new records thanks to our large and fast-growing ecosystem.”
International sales accounted for 62 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Airline food has been the butt of jokes for decades. People just don’t seem to like what’s on the menu at 35,000 feet. Why is this the case?
I’ve never had a good meal in coach on any of the major (or even minor) North American carriers but I really enjoyed the meals I’ve had on the trips taken on Cathay Pacific. And I’ve enjoyed the few First Class cabin meals I’ve had.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen the quality of smartphone cameras continue to rise. Not surprisingly, the worldwide popularity of handsets has affected the digital camera market, and according to the CEO of Canon, the situation is going to get a lot worse over the next couple of years.
Fujio Mitarai, boss of the Japanese giant, warned that the digital camera industry would keep declining. He said that by around 2021, it will have reached its lowest point, having shrunk by almost 50 percent.
The writing has been on the wall for a long time as smartphones first decimated the point and shoot market and now, according to Canon, may very well drive the company out of the consumer DSLR market as well.
