Last week we posted about the iOS 9 iBoot source code leak that was headlined to be the biggest leak in history.
Motherboard has followed up with details on the leak itself:
A low-level Apple employee with friends in the jailbreaking community took code from Apple while working at the company’s Cupertino headquarters in 2016, according to two people who originally received the code from the employee. Motherboard has corroborated these accounts with text messages and screenshots from the time of the original leak and has also spoken to a third source familiar with the story.
Motherboard has granted these sources anonymity given the likelihood of Apple going after them for obtaining and distributing proprietary, copyrighted software. The original Apple employee did not respond to our request for comment and said through his friend that he did not currently want to talk about it because he signed a non-disclosure agreement with Apple.
To me, this is theft, clear as day. Not sure if Apple will go after the leakers, but if I were those leakers, I’d get some sound legal advice.
When do the strongest adult musical preferences set in?
And:
For this project, the music streaming service Spotify gave me data on how frequently every song is listened to by men and women of each particular age.
And:
Consider, for example, the song “Creep,” by Radiohead. This is the 164th most popular song among men who are now 38 years old. But it is not in the top 300 for the cohort born 10 years earlier or 10 years later.
Note that the men who most like “Creep” now were roughly 14 when the song came out in 1993. In fact, this is a consistent pattern.
I did a similar analysis with every song that topped the Billboard charts from 1960 to 2000. In particular, I measured how old their biggest fans today were when these songs first came out.
I was about 11 when I first really latched on to music, 12 when I got my hands on my first guitar. And by 14, I was deeply immersed in what would become my forever comfort music.
Apple posted this series of videos over the weekend. All three are about a minute long and, if you’ve got a HomePod or one in your future, they’re worth watching.
Side note, as part of walking you through the specifics of how to use Siri with HomePod, this first video says “Hey Siri”, followed by a command. Being my inquisitive self, I replayed the video a few times sitting in a room with my HomePod, just to see what would happen.
Sure enough, my HomePod picked up on the commands, though not nearly as cleanly as if I spoke the same words. I know that the Amazon Echo filters out some Alexa occurrences. I wonder if Apple does something similar, or if the voice quality coming out of my MacBook Pro speakers is not nearly as clear as my voice.
Drone shows like the one on display at the Pyeongchang Games have taken place before; you may remember the drone army that flanked Lady Gaga at last year’s Super Bowl. But the burst of drones that filled the sky Friday night—or early morning, depending on where in the world you watched—comprised four times as many fliers. Without hyperbole, there’s really never been anything like it.
Good luck with your #homepod launch @Apple. We made you a playlist.
And they linked it to a playlist. But not just any playlist – one that sent a message to Apple.
Hello / Apple / Something About Us / Together / Feels Right / Even Though / You’re Crazy / For This / Home / POD / Remember / Two Is Better Than One / Just Playing (Dreams) / It’s A Party / Everybody’s Coming To My House / Even You / Come As You Are / Fruit Machine / No Matter What You’re Told / We’re Going To Be Friends / Over Everything
The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern and the Verge’s Nilay Patel each posted their take on Apple HomePod. Both of these are informative and worth watching.
If the Lyft app is installed on your iPhone, you can ask Phone Siri to order you a car. But you can’t ask Mac Siri to do the same, because she doesn’t know what Lyft is. Compare and contrast this with the SDKs for Alexa and the Google Assistant – they each run third-party software server-side, such that installing the Lyft Alexa “skill” once gives Alexa the ability to summon a ride regardless of if you’re talking to her on an Echo in your bedroom, a different Echo in your living room, or via the Alexa app on your phone.
This is a major difference in approach between Alexa and Google extensions, which both use a server-side approach, and Siri, which runs extensions client-side. In a nutshell, Siri’s approach allows for a more custom and, at the same time, limited approach, using communication and negotiation between devices to work out what’s what.
Currently, this communication seems limited to which Siri should respond to a request. If you lift your wrist and say “Hey, Siri”, your Apple Watch gets priority. If your HomePod Siri is enabled and your wrist is down, HomePod gets priority. You get the idea.
What’s missing is an intelligent mesh of negotiation and handoff. For example, if HomePod gets a request to make a phone call, that request should be handed off to your iPhone, perhaps verifying the handoff with a “Would you like me to make that call on your iPhone?” first.
There are permissions issue to deal with in this kind of scheme, but it certainly seems a logical need. If I ask HomePod to call a Lyft and HomePod doesn’t have that capability, seems logical for HomePod to hand that task off to another device that can order one for me.
All that said, I can only imagine that Apple is hard at work on a solution for this Siri mesh issue.
UPDATE: I left the word extensions out of the original writeup. Siri is server side, but the extensions are client side. I’ve not actually built a Siri extension, so I’m on shaky understanding here, but I believe this is correct.
Jesse Hollington, writing for iLounge, reviews a HomeKit-enabled power strip that provides three independently-controlled AC outlets plus three USB charging ports. This seems a pretty easy entry point to start exploring HomeKit, and a nice HomePod companion.
iTunes backups of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch don’t contain apps and some kinds of media. They contain settings and certain kinds of documents stored within apps, and may contain images stored in an iOS device’s Camera Roll. Some apps that use iCloud or other cloud-based sync mark their local content as not needing to be backed up, since it can be restored by logging back into an account or resyncing.
Confused? Fair enough. What does and does not get backed up, and where various elements do get backed up, is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. Glenn Fleishman does his best do lay all this out.
My two cents? Backup your music library, photos, critical documents on removable media, store it somewhere safe. Update that backup periodically.
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After his report on his “Inside Apple’s HomePod Audio Lab” tour, several commenters asked Jim what it sounded like inside the anechoic chamber. This video may help.
One thing that I did find puzzling: About 30 seconds in, you’ll see emoji for Super Villains and Super Heroes. The difference? Super Villains wear pink and purple. Super Heroes wear red and blue.
Not crazy about this path. Associating specific colors with good and evil is, to me, the first step down a bad road. Maybe make the Super Villains distinctive in some other way?
To be clear, these were mockups crafted by Emojipedia, not from Apple, so hopefully the final Apple versions will follow a different path.
I hate headlines like this. Biggest leak in history? Come on.
Here’s where the reaction comes from:
Someone just posted what experts say is the source code for a core component of the iPhone’s operating system on GitHub, which could pave the way for hackers and security researchers to find vulnerabilities in iOS and make iPhone jailbreaks easier to achieve.
The GitHub code is labeled “iBoot,” which is the part of iOS that is responsible for ensuring a trusted boot of the operating system. In other words, it’s the program that loads iOS, the very first process that runs when you turn on your iPhone. It loads and verifies the kernel is properly signed by Apple and then executes it—it’s like the iPhone’s BIOS.
This is true. It’s also true that Apple filed a copyright takedown and GitHub removed the post. But that’s a side note. Important, but a side note.
Buried down in the Motherboard article is this nugget:
This source code first surfaced last year, posted by a Reddit user called “apple_internals” on the Jailbreak subreddit.
This has been known about for some time. It’s iOS 9 source code and, while it’s likely true that some of that source code remains in iOS 11, Apple has known about this for long enough that they’ve certainly made any necessary changes to limit their exposure. I’d suggest that this GitHub publication had more value to the original poster and to Motherboard than to the anyone trying to hack the current version of iBoot.
This post from Pavan Rajam is long, well researched, and insightful, well worth the read if you are interested in Apple and their pursuit of the TV market.
Just a bit from the report:
Content development and production are not things Apple has done before. Will these shows even be good? Based on Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu’s progress on this front, success is possible but not guaranteed.
And:
In the current market, content is used to differentiate services, not hardware. Amazon, for example, uses original content to drive Prime subscriptions. It could care less whether you watch it on a Fire TV or another device.
And:
If growing Services revenue is a high priority, will this original content be available on non-Apple platforms (like Apple Music on Android, or iTunes on Windows)?
Those are just a taste of a much bigger picture. Great read.
Apple Watch shipments beat expectations, topping 18 million in 2017, up by more than 54% on 2016. The Series 3 was the key growth driver, as total shipments of the latest version of Apple’s Watch were just under 9 million, making up nearly half of all shipments in 2017. Apple’s Q4 performance was impressive in itself, as shipments grew by more than 32% over Q4 2016 to 8 million, the highest ever number of shipments in a single quarter, not just for Apple, but for any wearable vendor.
I recognize that these are vastly different products, but Apple’s success with Apple Watch after much skepticism from the market reminds me strongly of the imminent rollout of HomePod.
The early watchOS experience is quite different from what we’ve got today. Complications (the hot spots on the watch face that update with things like notifications, current weather, etc.) and Activities integration are but two major changes that rolled out over time and significantly changed Apple Watch’s usefulness.
What’s critical to me is that those changes rolled out as free software updates. And they work on the original hardware. I have on my wrist a Series 0 Apple Watch (the very first publicly available model) and it works with the latest rev of watchOS. It can be a bit slow at times, but other than that, it works perfectly.
The point is, Apple Watch at birth was almost nothing like what we have today. And I believe the same thing will be true for HomePod. Yes, there are limitations on what we can get from Siri today, limitations on what and how we connect to HomePod. But I believe a year or two will bring a sea change of improvements and functionality. And I believe those changes will continue to work on the existing hardware.
Eddy Cue took the stage for an Apple Music Q&A at Variety’s Pollstar conference:
Eddy Cue, Apple senior vice president of software and services, says the goal is for everyone to have nothing in their pockets.
Well, other than an iPhone, he said, laughing.
Demonstrating the seemingly small but life-changing tech Apple is known for, Cue explained how he goes to work without even carrying keys or a wallet. “Not having keys to anything is really nice,” Cue said. “It’s simple, but it’s a big deal.”
And:
“Anytime you want to purchase something, the number of clicks, the number of things you have to do, you see dropoff,” Cue said. “Depending on how many there are, there are always huge dropoffs. With Apple Pay, you see something you want, you basically do the face ID and you’re done. It’s very easy to complete the transactions.”
And:
“For us, one of weirdest things in the music industry is the lack of transparency,” Cue said. “One of things that we want to do, specifically when we think from an artist point of view, we want to make information available to them as we have, so they can see what is actually happening,” Cue said. “Obviously it’s great for live because you can see where your fan base is, but it’s great for marketing. You can see the effects of what you’re doing basically in near-real time,” such as being on an A-list playlist.
Eddy also talks about the live concert experience and bringing that to more people. Interesting post.
Hyperbole aside, (no Ars Technica – this wasn’t “the moment SpaceX opened the cosmos to the masses”), it was still a pretty cool launch and the simultaneous landings of the two outer cores (the third middle core was lost at sea) was incredible.
Like most of us, I thought the statues and monuments we saw of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and others were a dull white or a boring sandy brown colour. It wasn’t until I traveled to Egypt a few years ago. The tour guide pointed out that of course the things we were looking at were painted in their original form. I realized we aren’t seeing these antiquities as they were originally made. These stories and videos help us imagine what they actually might have looked like.
The Wall Street firm is in talks to offer financing to shoppers buying phones, watches and other gadgets from Apple, people familiar with the matter said. Customers purchasing a $1,000 iPhone X could take out a loan from Goldman instead of charging it to credit cards that often carry high interest rates.
Goldman charges 12% interest on its average Marcus instant payday loans. Credit cards can charge upward of 20% and carry late fees and other charges.
Partnerships with big retailers like Apple are key. They can deliver millions of customers that Goldman would struggle to find on its own.
The HomePod team set out—six years ago—to design a speaker. And not just any speaker. They wanted to make a really great speaker that only Apple could make, one with a brain that could adapt to its surroundings.
Miller pointed me to his post via Twitter and I think it’s a really good take on the disconnect I’ve been feeling regarding many HomePod reviews – “smart speaker vs smart assistant”.
I take Apple at its word that this is a “smart speaker” and I think that’s how it should be reviewed – “How does it sound/work as a speaker?” But so many are comparing it to the virtual assistants of Amazon and Google (where it justifiably pales in comparison).
After reading Miller’s piece, I think Apple may have made a marketing error in calling the HomePod a smart speaker. Reviewers are getting hung up on the “smart” part and assuming it means and is comparable to devices like the Amazon Echo and the Google Home. But what if we redefine smart? Think of the things almost all the reviewers have commented on regarding the HomePod as a standalone music player. The sound quality is universally described as excellent. The design of the internals is mindboggling. The technology for “forming sound” is beyond what anyone else is doing, certainly at this price point.
So, if you think of the HomePod as a speaker leaps and bounds beyond the “intelligence” of any other speaker, then it’s an amazing device. It’s definitely a “smart speaker”. But it’s not a particularly good virtual assistant. It wasn’t designed to be – at least not yet.
Maybe if Apple had called the HomePod a “super speaker” or something else and more directly avoided the comparison to “smart” devices like the Echo and the Home, they wouldn’t be having so many tech reviewers reviewing a Ferrari as if it were a Corolla.
Yesterday saw a river of HomePod reviews. Here are a few that struck me, each with its own unique spin.
For starters, if you have not yet already, spend a few minutes with Jim Dalrymple’s take on HomePod. Jim is passionate about music, is an excellent guitarist, and has a real musician’s take.
With Jim’s review as foundation, take a look at these three reviews:
Rene Ritchie, iMore: HomePod: Retina for your ears. I love Rene’s analogy comparing HomePod’s computation audio to iPhone and portrait mode. Rene’s review might be the most technically detailed of all the reviews I’ve read. He asks a lot of interesting questions, lays out understandable answers.
Apple’s HomePod is easily the best sounding mainstream smart speaker ever. It’s got better separation and bass response than anything else in its size and boasts a nuance and subtlety of sound that pays off the 7 years Apple has been working on it.
As a smart speaker, it offers best-in-class voice recognition, vastly outstripping the ability of other smart speakers to hear you trying to trigger a command at a distance or while music is playing, but its overall flexibility is stymied by the limited command sets that the Siri protocol offers.
Buy a HomePod if you already have Apple Music or you want to have it and you’re in the market for a single incredibly over-designed and radically impressive speaker that will give you really great sound with basically no tuning, fussing, measuring or tweaking.
What follows is the review itself. Keep an eye out for the discussion of Siri detection (how HomePod picks up a Siri request with music playing or background noise competing with your voice) as well as Matthew’s appreciation of the HomePod power cord.
John Gruber, Daring Fireball: HomePod. John’s review starts with a tweet-sized summary:
Apple says HomePod:
Has great audio quality.
Is easy to set up.
Makes it easy to play audio content from Apple (Apple Music, iTunes Store, iCloud Music Library, podcasts from iTunes’s directory).
Has primary interaction via Siri. You just talk to HomePod.
Allows secondary interaction using HomePod as an AirPlay speaker.
All of this is true.
Great summary. What follows is really worth reading. John avoids all boilerplate, digging into the good and the bad. Pay special attention to the “What’s missing” section towards the top. Every one of these rang true for me. Other than the lack of a line-in jack (I’ll address that in a sec), each of these issues can be addressed, should Apple choose to, in a future software release.
As to the line-in jack, I get that some people are bothered by this, but this is a speaker made for wireless. To me, a wired input would be old school in a bad way. And if the need is large enough, surely someone will step in with a product that allows you to plug any audio source in, then wirelessly bridge that signal to HomePod via AirPlay.
The final review in my list is sort of an anti-review. This one is from the New York Times and, as is often the case with the Times, is a curmudgeonly take with the title, Apple’s HomePod Has Arrived. Don’t Rush to Buy It. The core of this review is a complaint about Siri:
Siri on HomePod is embarrassingly inadequate, even though that is the primary way you interact with it. Siri is sorely lacking in capabilities compared with Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Siri doesn’t even work as well on HomePod as it does on the iPhone.
Two points here:
Know going in that the Siri domain on HomePod is limited, a subset of the Siri domain on your iPhone. This is no secret, and the reviewer should not have been surprised by this.
Anyone paying attention knows that HomePod is first and foremost about music, about audio. This review doesn’t even look at audio until near the end of the article.
I find reviews like this mind-bogglingly irresponsible. Clearly, Siri is an issue, but that itself is not the story. This feels like an unbalanced slam. Read the other reviews instead. They all carry the good and the bad, they’ll let you know what’s what.
Spotify is removing itself from a number of home audio speakers and receivers from the likes of Onkyo, Denon, Marantz, Bang & Olufsen, Pioneer, and Yamaha. Some devices are losing Spotify integration completely, while others will require firmware updates if users want to continue receiving built-in access to their music. The products in question were once all able to independently play Spotify over the internet — no smartphone required.
And:
[Spotify] announced this change was coming months and months ago. But at that time, things were still working as normal for users who would ultimately be impacted by the move. Over the last few weeks, the cutoff has actually occurred, and Spotify is getting a slew of complaints in its support forums about the lost functionality.
Curious timing. Is this strategy shift by Spotify related to Friday’s HomePod release? I can’t quite connect the dots, but hard to believe this is unrelated to HomePod, or to this Wall Street Journal report:
Apple Music is on the verge of overtaking Spotify AB in U.S. paid subscribers, a sign that the music-streaming world’s dominant force is facing growing competition ahead of its hotly anticipated public stock offering.
WhatsApp used Apple emojis on Android for years, and only recently created its own emoji set for use on Android and the web. Slack, too, offered Apple emojis on all platforms until today.
Whether these changes were due to pressure from Apple, or a growing realisation that this might not be the right way to go about cross-platform use, we don’t know for sure.
Other apps such as Signal and Telegram continue to use Apple emojis on Android.
That’s Android. How about using Apple emoji in your iOS app?
Last week app developer Sam Eckert reported that an update to his iOS app BitTracker was rejected by Apple due to lack of compliance with its guidelines for trademarks and copyrights.
Specifically, emoji use in BitTracker was called out as being problematic in both the iPhone app, and a small ? Chart Decreasing emoji used in the watchOS app was also an issue.
Jeremy goes on to show more examples of app rejection, and Apple’s inconsistency in using emoji in their own teaching materials.
At the very least, Apple is sending mixed signals. It’d be good to have a clear sense of what will fly and what won’t in terms of using Apple emoji in your own app.
Up until this week, the most used version of Android was Marshmallow, which shipped in October of 2015. That has now changed.
As you can see in this official Android pie chart, Android Nougat (which shipped in August 2016) has just squeaked by, with an adoption rate of 28.5% (as opposed to Marshmallow’s 28.1%).
Here’s the current (as of January 18th) iOS adoption picture:
iOS 11, which shipped this past September, is used on 65% of devices. Fragmentation is still a big issue for Android. If nothing else, those old versions of Android carry the malware susceptibilities that, presumably, have been patched in the most recent version of Android, called Oreo.
The capper? Oreo was released one month before iOS 11 and has an adoption rate of about 1%.
