Apple Card, created by Apple, is the only card issued by Goldman Sachs, which ranked highest among the Midsize Credit Card segment in the J.D. Power 2021 U.S. Credit Card Satisfaction Study and received a chart-topping score of 864. Apple Card and issuer Goldman Sachs also ranked highest in the Midsize Credit Card segment across all of the surveyed categories, including interaction, credit card terms, communication, benefits and services, rewards, and key moments.
And here’s the link to the original J.D. Power study. That second chunk of bar chart data, all the way at the bottom, shows the results. As Apple points out, Apple Card is the only card issued by Goldman Sachs, so that top position is Apple’s.
I’ve used Apple Card since day one and have to say, it’s been a real pleasure to use.
Follow the headline link, check that first image, showing the two new options for the Safari address bar in the latest iOS 15 beta.
Personally, I think both of these approaches are head and shoulders better than what we had before. I love that Apple listened to all the beta tester grumbling/feedback.
Still waiting for my iPad to find the beta 6 update to see what changes look like there. I’m hopeful we’ll see a similar redesign on iPadOS 15.
This is an incredible list, filled with tiny details, many of low discoverability. Even the most powerful of power users are sure to find a tip or two that are new to them. Perfect to pass along to folks who are new to iOS and who love digging in to the details.
A New York robbery crew that targeted drug runners hit the jackpot late last year, netting $500,000 in cash after tracking a targeted criminal’s car — with a hidden Apple Watch, new court documents show.
The seven-person crew based in the Hudson Valley pulled off the major score in January 2020 after their alleged leader, 30-year-old Darren Lindsay, bought an Apple Watch and linked it to his AT&T account.
And:
The thieves put the watch underneath the bumper of a car that belonged to a drug-runner they suspected was flush with cash, the documents say.
The suspects then tailed their mark, who was not identified, from Orange County to a hotel parking lot in Hartford, Conn., the feds said.
This is eerily similar to this story, where an iPhone was used as a tracking device.
Apple’s next Apple Watch Activity Challenge is set to take place on Saturday, August 28th, in celebration of national parks worldwide.
Apple:
Let’s take a day to appreciate the beauty of national parks all over the world. On August 28, earn this award by recording a hike, walk, run, or wheelchair workout of a mile (1.6K) or more with any app that adds workouts to Health.
PairPlay transforms your AirPods into a two-player adventure! You and your partner split the AirPods (one takes the left, one takes the right) and you hear OPPOSITE sides of the same story.
To get a sense of this at work, watch the video embedded below.
This is but a taste of what’s possible here. What strikes me is the power of that immersive audio, like the radio shows back in the days before TV came to dominate. In the same way that the best casinos online to withdraw without sending any documents offer players a seamless, hassle-free experience, this audio augmented reality unleashes the power of your imagination, removing barriers to fully engaging with the content.
For game players working remotely, imagine a dungeon crawler that used separate audio tracks, customized for each player, that allowed fully remote collaboration to solve puzzles and make your way through the game.
As is, PairPlay seems like a lot of fun, especially if you’ve got kids.
Once FaceTime screen sharing has started, you can navigate to any app that you want to share with the callers. A sharing icon will remain in the top-left corner of the screen to indicate that FaceTime screen sharing is active, and you can tap it to reveal the FaceTime control panel.
Another delightful nugget coming with iOS 15, especially useful for folks who are tech support for their families.
That $69.01 difference (about a 28% discount) is pretty huge. Does it say anything about the rumored September Apple event?
Spoiler rumor ahead:
Mark Gurman hinted at a new AirPods release. He specifically did not mention new AirPods Pro. But (pure speculation on my part) this does feel like inventory clearing pricing. Is it because the new base level model, in Mark’s words, offer “a design closer to the AirPods Pro, including a new in-ear shape and shorter stems”.
Even if the price discount is business as usual, nothing to do with the September event, it’s interesting to wonder what will become of the AirPods Pro at that event. Will Apple introduce a new base model that hews closer to the Pro design and leave the AirPods Pro as is?
Apple has always allowed you to disable Night Mode for low-light shots, but the process isn’t fast. If the iPhone detects that Night Mode should be used, the camera automatically enables it.
Only then can you turn off Night Mode for that shot or shooting session. Fire up the camera after a break, and Night Mode will once again default to on when low light is detected.
And:
Turning this setting on tells your camera to keep Night Mode off if you’ve disabled it for a shot. You can still use Night Mode when you need it by manually engaging it in the Camera app, but you make the decision now instead of the iPhone.
Follow the headline link for the details on the new Night Mode default setting. Good to know that setting exists. More to the point, once you upgrade to iOS 15, worth spending time in the “Preserve Settings” section of the Camera settings to remind yourself what’s there.
Apple today released a new version of its iCloud for Windows app, with the 12.5 update adding a new iCloud Keychain password manager app for Windows users.
And:
With the new password management option, those who are running Windows can access their iCloud Keychain passwords and can add, edit, copy and paste, delete, and look up usernames or passwords.
And:
New iCloud password extensions for Microsoft Edge and Windows Chrome work in tandem with the password feature, letting iCloud passwords be autofilled on a Windows machine just like in Safari.
A few things to unpack here:
Interesting to watch Apple extend the reach of their password management mechanism as password titan 1Password faces pushback on moving away from a native Mac application to Electron.
Is there anyone working on blue bubble Messages support for Windows? Android? Password management support for Android?
Are there security implications for opening up password access on Windows? Or is the encryption up and down the stack bulletproof?
Joanna Stern, Wall Street Journal, got the chance to interview Craig Federighi about the backlash in response to Apple CSAM scanning plans.
The video embedded below is worth watching, both for Craig’s take on what Apple did wrong in the rollout, but also for Joanna’s excellent pause and explain take on Craig’s response, on the difference between what’s happening in Messages and the neural hash analysis in the cloud, and what Apple is really doing here. Really, really good.
One piece of this puzzle is who gets notified when a CSAM image is flagged.
I think there’s a reasonable worry that a government could use this as a way to shuttle other kinds of content detection through the system, by simply providing hashes of images of political activism or democracy or whatever some dictatorial leader would like to oppress. Apple’s defence for this is that all flagged images are first sent to Apple for human review, before being sent on.
That cuts to the core of the problem many people have with this approach, the “slippery slope” argument. Apple is saying, we won’t let that happen. The argument is, the chances of a false positive are already really low, and the images being sent on to Apple (imagine being on that particular image review team) for review raise the bar even further.
One issue here is, who gets notified if a CSAM matching image is found? As is, seems the notification happens behind the scenes.
Back to Benjamin:
My suggestion would be that all flagged images are reported to the user. That way, the system cannot be misused in secret. This could be built in the software stack itself, such that nothing is sent onward unless the user is notified. In press briefings, Apple has said they don’t want to do this because their privacy policy doesn’t allow them to retain user data, enabling a legitimate criminal who is sharing CSAM would simply be able to delete their photo library when alerted. I think tweaks to policy could solve it. For instance, it would be very reasonable for a flagged image to be automatically marked frozen in iCloud, unable to be deleted by a user, until it has gone through the review process. The additional layer of transparency is beneficial.
Thoughtful take. Worth reading the whole piece, worth watching Joanna Stern’s interview with Craig Federighi, embedded below.
AgileBits chose to build the new version of its Mac app using Electron, a system based on web technologies that’s used by numerous cross-platform apps, including Slack, Skype, and Discord.
And:
Electron apps have a reputation for being slow, eating up a lot of system memory, and—perhaps most offensively—failing to behave like proper, “native” apps on whatever platform they operate.
And:
The root problem is this: 1Password, originally a Mac-forward software developer, has simply decided that the Mac isn’t important enough.
And:
Fey’s post clearly spells out AgileBits’s priorities. Android and iOS apps are built with native platform frameworks in order to create the best app experience possible on mobile. For iOS, AgileBits decided to use Apple’s new SwiftUI framework rather than the venerable UIKit, in order to skate “to where the puck was going.” Their plan was to use SwiftUI on the Mac, too. In doing so, AgileBits was buying into the vision Apple has for SwiftUI as a tool to build interfaces across all of Apple’s platforms. Unfortunately, it seems that SwiftUI didn’t measure up on the Mac:
And:
AgileBits was willing to put in the extra work for iOS, because it’s an important platform and SwiftUI is clearly the future there. But implementing it on the Mac required a lot of duplicate work—and what’s worse, SwiftUI apps aren’t compatible with older versions of macOS. AgileBits was planning on covering the older versions with an Electron version, but once it decided the SwiftUI implementation for the Mac was too much work, it pulled the plug—and now plans to ship an Electron version to all Mac users.
In a nutshell, Jason is pointing out both a weakness in SwiftUI as the one, true mechanism for building an app that serves iOS and the Mac, and the inherent problem of Electron as a cross-platform solution.
We have seen the holy grail of cross platform frameworks come and go over time. They never deliver the same experience as a platform optimized app. Never.
I think the optimization argument is really well expressed in this thread from BBEdit creator Rich Siegel. Building a cross-platform app requires a tradeoff: Either you build an optimized, efficient experience tuned for each platform, or you sacrifice the great for the good-enough.
The larger issue, according to HBO Max insiders, is that the current app wasn’t built from scratch the way Netflix or Hulu were brought to life. Instead, Max has been running on a retrofitted version of the old HBO Go and HBO Now services. While those were both solid applications, they were designed for a very different product.
Interesting back story there, but more generally:
Having so many technical issues crop up in such a short time frame isn’t just a PR headache. Competition for subscribers and audience attention is so intense right now, the last thing any streamer wants is to anger customers with a poor user experience.
And:
For instance, while you can rewind and fast-forward shows on the Peacock connected TV apps, I can report that the process is both painful and slow. Paramount+, meanwhile, somehow launched without giving users the basic ability to add shows to a content queue (it’s since been fixed). This lack of convenience in user experience is something that stands in stark contrast to platforms like instant withdrawal casinos, where ease of use and quick transactions are prioritized. And despite purposely keeping its user interface incredibly simple, Disney+ famously imploded on its first day back in 2019.
All fair points. When a channel follows the Apple TV interface guidelines, the experience is functional and, for the user, predictable, consistent. And the app will work with the new Apple TV remote.
In this week’s show Dave and I look at rumors that the next iPhone will include Portrait mode for video, similar to the photo feature released a few years ago. We also talk about whether sampling in music is theft or good for the industry, and Dave tells a story about Steve Jobs taking a photo for a family.
LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates worth interviewing, faster. Did you know every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/DALRYMPLE. That’s LinkedIn.com/DALRYMPLE to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.
I wrote this little anecdote shortly after Steve Jobs passed away. Despite it happening more than 5 years ago, it still is imprinted on my brain and does a great job of illustrating the person I felt he was.
Found this in my saved links bin, a post from back in 2017. Steve died just about 10 years ago. A sweet little anecdote.
Linked by Jason Snell here, and pairing well with his Cutting the Cord post from a few weeks ago, Suppose.tv uses your location to help you work through the math of cutting the cord.
Pick a channel from the list on the right and Suppose will give you all the options in that list that give you access to that channel, with the cheapest option listed first. Keep adding channels, home in on the service or combination of services that will fill your needs for the cheapest price.
The bipartisan “Open App Markets Act,” introduced by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) would ban app stores from forcing developers to use the store’s payment systems. It would also bar companies from punishing developers that offer lower prices on a separate app store or through their own payment systems, along the lines of Apple’s public dispute with Epic Games. Notably, the bill would also make it unlawful for companies like Apple to use non-public data from their stores to build competing products against companies using their service.
Lots to think about here. First thought is how much support this bill would get from streaming services like Netflix, if it meant they could sign up customers and let those customers pay and track their bills in-App, without having to run those funds through Apple.
Same with gaming services. And developers who want to offer related services/products for sale through their apps.
And that last bit, about building competing products, is this an anti-Sherlock bill?
From one of the bill’s authors:
“For years, Apple and Google have squashed competitors and kept consumers in the dark—pocketing hefty windfalls while acting as supposedly benevolent gatekeepers of this multi-billion dollar market,” Blumenthal said in a statement Wednesday. “This bipartisan bill will help break these tech giants’ ironclad grip, open the app economy to new competitors, and give mobile users more control over their own devices.”
And from Apple:
“Since our founding, we’ve always put our users at the center of everything we do, and the App Store is the cornerstone of our work to connect developers and customers in a way that is safe and trustworthy.” The spokesperson continued, “At Apple, our focus is on maintaining an App Store where people can have confidence that every app must meet our rigorous guidelines and their privacy and security is protected.”
The law of unintended consequence applies here. If this bill goes through, will this break the iPhone’s very foundation, change the nature of what distinguishes iPhone from Android, breaks Apple’s ecosystem?
To get a sense of the goal here, the dream, jump to 25 seconds in and check out the looped videos posted by French video artist Romain Laurent. They are both whimsical and seamless.
Better yet, take a look at this page, where you can see them all in full motion.
With that in mind, watch the video below, where Romain shares some hints with Today at Apple.
Apple Machine Learning white paper (via MyHealthyApple):
Respiratory rate (RR) is a clinical metric used to assess overall health and physical fitness. An individual’s RR can change due to normal activities like physical exertion during exercise or due to chronic and acute illnesses. Remote estimation of RR offers a cost-effective method to track disease progression and cardio-respiratory fitness over time.
In a nutshell, the research worked out a process for using AirPods to estimate respiratory rate (RR), with the goal of tracking RR over time, getting a sense of things like fitness, disease progression, chronic breathlessness.
This sort of work makes me hopeful for a future with more sophisticated health care available remotely.
I do realize that most of you know how to do this, but thought this was worth passing along for the folks who don’t, and for you to pass along to the folks who you tech support.
Don’t miss that bit about turning the mic on and off.
In iPadOS 15, today’s beta changes the shading of the tab interface in Safari in an effort to make it more clear which tab is the active tab.
In the image that Juli Clover posts, there clearly is a difference between the grey of the active tab and the grey shade used in the inactive tab. But I am running that same beta and I do not see those results.
The lack of tab contrast is one major issue for me. The other is the wild range of colors that can make picking out a specific tab a nightmare for some people. Check the video below:
Flipping tabs in the new Safari is terrible. The flipping of the chrome colour makes it even harder to see what tab is selected. This isn’t an artificial test, these were the tabs I had open. pic.twitter.com/uDOECpgohf
There’s a lot going on here. I do appreciate that Apple gave us a setting to keep a separate address bar above all the tabs. How about a setting to simplify the tab structure, with the main use of color a high shade contrast to clearly mark the current tab?
While Apple mentioned that users will be able to locate lost AirPods with Precision Finding, iOS 15 will also link AirPods with your Apple ID to ensure that you can easily find them anywhere.
And:
To achieve this, the AirPods will finally be tied to your Apple ID. As spotted by 9to5Mac in the iOS 15 internal code, lost AirPods will continue to send their location to the owner through the Find My Network even if someone else connects them to another device.
From personal experience, I know that there are people who don’t understand the difference between those first two systems, or assume that there will be some possibility that they may come under scrutiny for innocent pictures of their own children that may trigger some filter. It’s led to confusion in what is already a complex rollout of announcements. These two systems are completely separate, of course, with CSAM detection looking for precise matches with content that is already known to organizations to be abuse imagery. Communication Safety in Messages takes place entirely on the device and reports nothing externally — it’s just there to flag to a child that they are or could about to be viewing explicit images. This feature is opt-in by the parent and transparent to both parent and child that it is enabled.
Follow the headline link, check out the second image (four iPhone screens). This does an excellent job showing off the CSAM mechanism implemented by Messages. The CSAM announcement raises so many issues, I think it’s worth getting a sense of this part of the process, to help distinguish it from the other half, “CSAM detection in iCloud Photos”.
If you read no other part of the interview, do scan for this question and Paul Neuenschwander’s response:
One of the bigger queries about this system is that Apple has said that it will just refuse action if it is asked by a government or other agency to compromise by adding things that are not CSAM to the database to check for them on-device. There are some examples where Apple has had to comply with local law at the highest levels if it wants to operate there, China being an example. So how do we trust that Apple is going to hew to this rejection of interference if pressured or asked by a government to compromise the system?
To me, this goes to the heart of a lot of the privacy concern. There’s a lot here.
The system as designed doesn’t reveal — in the way that people might traditionally think of a match — the result of the match to the device or, even if you consider the vouchers that the device creates, to Apple. Apple is unable to process individual vouchers; instead, all the properties of our system mean that it’s only once an account has accumulated a collection of vouchers associated with illegal, known CSAM images that we are able to learn anything about the user’s account.
The way I read this is that Apple passes the vouchers back along to law enforcement. Not clear to me what’s in those vouchers, or if a user is notified of vouchers being sent. This whole thing feels very Orwellian.
While I’m quite a bit older than I was when After Dark’s bizarre flying toasters were popular, I still enjoy it when the internet is weird. I think that many people confuse “owning my enemies” with “weird”, but despite that crowd, there is so much out there that’s just people trying funky things to see what happens.
Yup. Flying toasters. Most everyone with a Macintosh back in the late ’80s, early ’90s, had this screensaver on their Macs, or at least had seen it in action.
Apple’s AirPower wireless charger was supposed to arrive with the unique ability to charge an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods all at the same time. Unfortunately, Apple canceled AirPower in March 2019, citing difficulties in bringing the product to life. Since then, we’ve seen a teardown of AirPower, some AirPower clones, and Apple’s MagSafe battery packs. Now, an Apple prototype collector has obtained a working AirPower unit for the first time.
Follow the headline link to some images as well as a video of the prototype in use.
Is this real? The finder is an Apple prototype scrounger, got this one from “Chinese e-waste sources”. Judge for yourself. Certainly interesting. And makes me wonder how closely Apple guards their prototypes once the actual model ships, or is canceled.
The linked report from Mark Gurman is full of spoilers, so don’t follow the headline link if you want to be surprised by Apple’s coming hardware event.
And the text below has one of those spoilers, a tiny one, but one I think may compel a lot of people to make the leap to a new iPhone.
Read on, fairly warned:
The new handsets will include a video version of the phone’s Portrait mode feature.
Portrait mode, and the accompanying Portrait Lighting effects brought a huge wave of excitement and, I suspect a big wave of iPhone updates. Portrait mode arrived about 5 years ago (back in September 2016), hinted at with a much-analyzed bokeh invitation.
Portrait mode was possible because of a big leap in iPhone processing power. Bringing this power to video? That’s huge, sure to bring a new wave of TikToks taking advantage of the effect. And also (IMO) sure to bring a new wave of upgrades.
As pointed out in our previous post, Apple is about to enter the big leagues in CSAM (child sexual abuse material) reporting.
John Gruber:
I do wonder though, how prepared Apple is for manually reviewing a potentially staggering number of accounts being correctly flagged. Because Apple doesn’t examine the contents of iCloud Photo Library (or local on-device libraries), I don’t think anyone knows how prevalent CSAM is on iCloud Photos. We know Facebook reported 20 million instances of CSAM to NCMEC last year, and Google reported 546,000.
Fair question. Also makes me wonder how the people who review this sort of material are protected, both emotionally (a dark, dark job, sure to mess with your psyche) and legally (they spend their day looking at illegal material — Are there special laws that protect workers like these?)
I also wonder what that job description looks like. Certainly one of the more unusual job interviews.
How is it, then, that a company like Facebook, which is mostly used on mobile — i.e. Android or iOS — made 20.3 million reports of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) in 2020, while Apple made only 265? After all, there are almost certainly more photos on smartphones than there are on social networks — the former is in large part a superset of the latter.
To repeat: Facebook made 20.3 MILLION reports of CSAM. Apple made only 265.
Here’s why:
It’s not because there is somehow more CSAM on Facebook than exists on Apple devices, but rather that Facebook is scanning all of the images sent to and over its service, while Apple is not looking at what is in your phone, or on their cloud. From there the numbers make much more sense: Facebook is reporting what it finds, while Apple is, as the title of Section (3) suggests, protecting privacy and simply not looking at images at all.
And, clearly, as Apple moves from the server side to the client side (i.e., your iPhone), those numbers will likely change dramatically.
There’s much more analysis in the article, but the above really stuck out, obvious though it might be.
The leading photo sharing site, flickr.com, charts the popularity of the cameras used by its membership. Recently the Apple iPhone has jumped into a virtual tie for first place with the Canon XTi. Furthermore, flickr states on its “Camera Finder” page that it can only detect the camera used about 2/3rds of the time, and that, therefore, cameraphones are under-represented on the graphs. Yikes.
This was the moment in time when iPhone photography showed its hand, overtook traditional cameras in popularity.
