Peter Garritano:

Quietly tucked away in a few unassuming buildings in lower Manhattan, massive flows of data pulse through some of the world’s largest and most heavily guarded hubs of global internet infrastructure.

Check out the images. Pretty cool. I wonder how many of these sites there are in the world and how similar they are, design-wise.

Great pair of posts on color gamut, color spaces from Bjango.

• Here’s a link to Part One.

• Here’s a link to Part Two.

There’s a lot to love in this teardown. The insides of the iMac Pro are gorgeous. What a clean looking design.

With the iMac Retina 5K, to change out RAM, you popped open the rear door and had at it.

With the iMac Pro, you’ll pretty much need to jump through all the hoops iFixit did. That said, the good news is, you can still upgrade the RAM yourself:

We waste no time in testing a little upgrade: How does four 32 GB modules for a “Maxxed” total of 128 GB sound? After speedily reassembling everything, we’re pleased to report that the result is epic.

No doubt.

Chris Smith, BGR:

If the same image is shown on an OLED screen for a long period of time, burn-in effects may set in. This goes for TVs, monitors, and smartphones. It took the iPhone X 510 hours of continuously displaying the exact same image on the iPhone X for burn-in effects to become permanent. That’s Cetizen’s conclusion, and that’s great news for all iPhone X users.

And:

Cetizen stopped at various intervals to check for burn-in traces, but the iPhone X did not show visible effects until hitting the 510-hour mark. The screens on the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S7 Edge, meanwhile, were impacted sooner.

The original site quoted by BGR is in Korean but is pretty understandable if you use Google Translate to translate the page to English. It’d be interesting to see what the burn-in number is for the Pixel 2 XL.

The Register:

A fundamental design flaw in Intel’s processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.

Programmers are scrambling to overhaul the open-source Linux kernel’s virtual memory system. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to publicly introduce the necessary changes to its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday: these changes were seeded to beta testers running fast-ring Windows Insider builds in November and December.

And:

Similar operating systems, such as Apple’s 64-bit macOS, will also need to be updated – the flaw is in the Intel x86-64 hardware, and it appears a microcode update can’t address it. It has to be fixed in software at the OS level, or go buy a new processor without the design blunder.

The worst news is that since the issue is in the hardware itself, a software patch of something so deeply rooted in the pipeline will cause a performance hit.

Terrible new for Intel. More spark for Apple to roll their own CPUs.

UPDATE:

Finally, macOS has been patched to counter the chip design blunder since version 10.13.2, according to operating system kernel expert Alex Ionescu.

Here it comes. Now that you’ve invested in this useful tech, found a nice place for it in your workflow, we’re going to start serving up ads.

Makes me wonder if the original Echo shipped with a disclaimer that ads might be part of the experience. If not, seems like a liability for Amazon, potential for a law suit. Either way, this seems like a decidedly negative turn in that particular road.

Sapna Maheshwari, New York Times:

> At first glance, the gaming apps — with names like “Pool 3D,” “Beer Pong: Trickshot” and “Real Bowling Strike 10 Pin” — seem innocuous. One called “Honey Quest” features Jumbo, an animated bear like that one on https://www.fuseanimation.com/why-3d-animation-is-the-alternative/. > > Yet these apps, once downloaded onto a smartphone, have the ability to keep tabs on the viewing habits of their users — some of whom may be children — even when the games aren’t being played.

Yesterday, we posted about a technique ad houses use to glean your identity using your browser’s password manager.

This is a similar data-farming trick, this time using your phone’s microphone to track your TV watching habits.

> The apps use software from Alphonso, a start-up that collects TV-viewing data for advertisers. Using a smartphone’s microphone, Alphonso’s software can detail what people watch by identifying audio signals in TV ads and shows, sometimes even matching that information with the places people visit and the movies they see. The information can then be used to target ads more precisely and to try to analyze things like which ads prompted a person to go to a car dealership.

Most of this occurs in the Android universe, but some iOS games use Alphonso as well. I’m willing to bet that though the games ask permission to use the microphone, not one of those games adds in, “so we can eavesdrop, track your TV viewing habits”.

This is despicable. Apple should do something about this.

[Via DF]

UPDATE: Missed this nugget:

> Mr. Chordia [Alphonso CEO] said that Alphonso has a deal with the music-listening app Shazam, which has microphone access on many phones. Alphonso is able to provide the snippets it picks up to Shazam, he said, which can use its own content-recognition technology to identify users and then sell that information to Alphonso. > > Shazam, which Apple recently agreed to buy, declined to comment about Alphonso.

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.

Fortune has an interesting article asking if Apple has lost its design mojo. There is no doubt some things haven’t worked as well as others, but I don’t agree with everything in story. Instead of picking out a few key paragraphs, you go should go read the entire article to get it all in context.

This is going to be an interesting quarter because we’ll get a first look at iPhone X sales.

Music streaming company Spotify was sued by Wixen Music Publishing Inc last week for allegedly using thousands of songs, including those of Tom Petty, Neil Young and the Doors, without a license and compensation to the music publisher.

I don’t know how something like this could possibly happen with a company like Spotify. The entire business is getting licenses to stream music, but apparently they didn’t do that.

We’re excited to share that the buddybuild team has joined the Xcode engineering group at Apple to build amazing developer tools for the entire iOS community.

Congrats.

Once again, the iPhone was the best-selling tech product of 2017, selling more units than the No. 2 through No. 5 products combined.

According to Daniel Ives, an analyst with GBH Insights, who compiled the chart for USA TODAY, Apple will sell 223 million iPhones in 2017, up from 211 million phones the previous year.

Up your password game by ditching the pets names and creating strong, unique passwords with these tools and tips.

It’s pretty safe to say that most people’s passwords suck. There are some good tips in here, and some good apps to utilize. I’ve used 1Password for several years and love it.

A German court has ordered Amazon not to lure internet shoppers to its online marketplace when they mistakenly search for “Brikenstock”, “Birkenstok”, “Bierkenstock” and other variations in Google.

I didn’t think the court could do this, but I guess I was wrong. They are basically telling Amazon that they can’t buy Google Adwords for those misspelled terms.

The actual reason Birkenstock is asking for this makes sense:

Birkenstock sought the injunction because it feared unsuspecting shoppers might buy low-quality counterfeits through Amazon that would erode its reputation.

Amazon said it works to detect fraudulent products from being sold. I’m not sure that’s true either—you can buy that kind of stuff all the time on Amazon.

Here today, gone tomorrow. Our annual Year in Search is always a fun look back at the fads that captured our fancy and then fizzled out fast. See what this year’s biggest crazes were, through the lens of Google Search.

Unicorns?

A solid case study comparing the new iMac Pro, iMac 5K, a 2013 Mac Pro, two flavors of 2010 Mac Pro.

Just one example: In the Final Cut Pro X export test, the iMac Pro is three times as fast as the 2010 Mac Pro. How far we’ve come. Makes me really curious about the performance we’ll (hopefully) see in the 2018 Mac Pro.

Kirk McElhearn:

While I currently use an iPhone 8+, a still have the iPhone SE that I bought in March, 2016. With all of the attention to batteries on the iPhone, I decided to check this device’s battery. It hadn’t seemed particularly slow to me, but the battery hadn’t been lasting a full day for some months before I got the iPhone 8+ and stopped using the SE.

Kirk uses iMazing, a Mac app, to check the iPhone SE battery health (current max charge vs max charge when it was new). If you are thinking about checking and, possibly, replacing your iPhone battery, this is an excellent case study.

Side note: You might also check the Coconut Battery app, which will tell you about your Mac battery, as well as the battery in any USB connected iOS device.

FreedomToTinker:

We show how third-party scripts exploit browsers’ built-in login managers (also called password managers) to retrieve and exfiltrate user identifiers without user awareness. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to show that login managers are being abused by third-party scripts for the purposes of web tracking.

To see this for yourself, fire up Safari and go to this demo page.

• When the page loads, type in a fake email address and a fake password. Don’t use your real info.
• Click the link at the bottom of the page.
• Safari will offer to save your password for that site. Click Save.

The demo will then jump to a sniffer page which contains an invisible login form. Safari will helpfully populate the form, and this new demo page will display the sniffed results.

This approach is only possible when a third party has script access to the first-party domain. Thus, our third-party script is only able to recover the credentials you saved for this website (senglehardt.com). It is not possible for us to access credentials for other websites.

So far, your data is visible to a script running on a site with that script installed. The problem is with scripts that run on multiple sites:

We found two scripts using this technique to extract email addresses from login managers on the websites which embed them. These addresses are then hashed and sent to one or more third-party servers. These scripts were present on 1110 of the Alexa top 1 million sites. The process of detecting these scripts is described in our measurement methodology in the Appendix 1. We provide a brief analysis of each script in the sections below.

Bottom line, the scripts are saving hashed (encrypted) versions of surreptitiously harvested login info and comparing it to a saved database of other hashed results. If it finds a match, it knows who you are.

This is all a bit complicated, but my 2 cents, Apple should address this in some way to prevent this form of cross-site tracking.

Brian Heater, TechCrunch:

Those $29 battery out-of-warranty replacements Apple promised are now available for impacted users with an iPhone 6 or later. The company was initially aiming for a late-January timeframe in the States when it first offered up the discount, following blowback against its admission that it had slowed down older model phones to maximize performance.

“We expected to need more time to be ready,” the company said in a statement offered up to TechCrunch this weekend, “but we are happy to offer our customers the lower pricing right away. Initial supplies of some replacement batteries may be limited.”

No word yet on the timing of the battery health iOS software update.

Gizmodo:

When two brothers from Naples decided to stop doing fashion design for other companies and start a brand of their own, they went hunting for an attention-grabbing name. They discovered that “Steve Jobs” wasn’t trademarked and decided on that. Now, a protracted legal battle has come to an end, and they have big plans for using the Apple founder’s name on pretty much anything.

And:

As expected, Apple’s legal department soon sent the brothers four large folders of legal documents and went to war. But the brothers won the case.

It’d be one thing if the founder was named Steve Jobs. But this is straight-forward riding on someone else’s coattails.

That said, there are plenty of precedents. Here’s one that springs to mind.

From Apple’s public statement on the iPhone battery throttling issue:

We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize. There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we’re making.

First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that.

Apple then goes into detail on battery aging and some battery shutdown history, all pretty readable. But at the very bottom is this:

Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com.

And:

Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.

Stay tuned for the details. Personally, I wish Apple had wrapped their PR arms around this issue a lot sooner. They certainly had all the pieces in place to have avoided this issue entirely.

Some people assign ill will to Apple, feel Apple was trying to do something shady with their battery tech. Some feel Apple was trying to manipulate people into buying new phones. I just don’t see any of that. No way.

Me? I think this was a fumble. This letter makes me feel a bit better about the whole thing, gives me a sense that Apple is both taking this seriously and is learning from this experience.

One final note: iFixit has dropped the price of their DIY battery replacement kits to $29 or less in case you want to do this yourself.

Two nuggets from this Bloomberg article:

Cook’s incentive pay totaled $9.33 million for the year ended Sept. 30, the Cupertino, California-based company said Wednesday in a regulatory filing. He also took home $3.06 million in salary and a previously disclosed equity award of $89.2 million, bringing his total payout for the year to about $102 million.

His top five lieutenants each got bonuses of $3.11 million, bringing their total compensation to about $24.2 million each, including salaries and stock awards.

And:

The Apple board stipulated this year that for security reasons the CEO should use private planes for business and personal travel, citing the risk given his high profile. Personal security costs were calculated at $224,216.

My two cents: Tim Cook is a bargain. Apple is an aircraft carrier of a company, both massive and incredibly complex. Tim is overseeing exponential growth while keeping Apple on track, dealing reasonably well with the problems that arise, all while remaining the very public face of a very public company.

As to the private planes, no issue there, makes sense. I just found it interesting that Apple made it policy, mandating that Tim fly private.

Robert Kientz, Seeking Alpha (free reg-wall):

Li-ION is the most advanced, commonly available batteries that are used in portable electronics like laptops and phones. That is because unlike Nickel Cadmium [NiCad], they do not develop ‘charge memories’. And they are better for small electronics than Nickel Metal Hydride [NiMH] because of shorter charge time and higher energy density, both critical for the uses of portable phones.

And:

Li-ION batteries typically fail faster than NiCad because they wear out in less charge cycles, which mean consumers get fewer charges before their batteries will need replacement.

And:

Apple has not designed flaws into its iPhone product with regard to battery management.

What Apple has done is provide software that allows its iPhone users who want to keep their phones to manage their batteries by slowing down the processor during times of lower power and to keep the phones from turning off spontaneously. Contrary to what many have said about this story, what Apple is doing is not abnormal at all.

There are two computer chip manufacturers that you may have heard of, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), that have built advanced power management technology into their chipset designs.

Provocative read. To me, Apple has done an amazing job optimizing its battery technology. Where they’ve slipped up here, in my opinion, is in communications. This would not be an issue of Apple gave users an easy way to tell where their device sits on the battery efficiency curve, made it easier for a user to have a sense of how much better their device would perform if they bought a new battery.

That said, I’m not sure Apple wants to be in the battery swap-out business. If Apple educated their users about the current state of their batteries, I suspect many consumers would develop a habit of updating their batteries, rather than live with a 75% solution.

Xkcd proposes some terrific options to set when your iPhone is stolen. Just a nibble:

If phone is stolen, do a fake factory reset. Then, in the background, automatically order food to phone’s location from every delivery place within 20 miles.

Just read it. I’m sure you can think of your own options. And if you’ve never read xkcd before, here’s a link to a completely random one.

This is a fascinating post from The AAPL Tree, an Apple blog that has moved entirely to Apple News. The linked post mixes a good number of well researched facts about Apple’s India operations with some educated guesses.

If you are interested in Apple and India, don’t miss the crowdsourced revenue/net income chart in the middle of the post. It estimates Apple’s 2017 India revenue at about 11,618 crore. A crore is 10M rupee, about $156,000.

Doing the math (pulls out Pcalc), 11,618 crore is about $1.8 billion. Not too shabby.

This is something here for everyone.