Farhad Manjoo, New York Times:

On the surface, the camera doesn’t sound special. Like home internet cameras made by Nest or Netgear, the Wyze device can monitor an area for motion or sound. When it spots something, it begins recording a short clip that it stores online, for access on your phone or your computer.

But the WyzeCam has one groundbreaking feature that no rival can match. It is being sold for such an unbelievably low price — $20 — that it sent me tunneling into the global gadget industry to figure out how Wyze had done it. That, in turn, led to a revelation about the future of all kinds of products, from cameras to clothes.

And:

Nest’s and Netgear’s comparable indoor cameras sell for around $200 each, while Wyze’s device goes for $20 plus shipping if you buy directly from the company’s website.

And, most importantly:

Wyze did not create a home internet camera for a tenth of the price of rivals by skimping on quality. Though the camera comes in extremely spare packaging, it otherwise offers many features you would expect in big-brand devices, including tough security.

This is a remarkable story, with Amazon leading a wave of coming disruption, allowing incredibly inexpensive Internet-of-things gadgets to skip the traditional retail stepping stones and markups, ship directly to you at just about cost (plus Amazon’s markup, of course).

Reminds me of big-box disruption, where a seller would bring a parade of cheaply made goods into their offices, pick one that combined “good enough” quality with the lowest possible price, then buy at huge volumes to stock their stores.

Very interesting read.

Google blog:

Featured Snippets are algorithmically generated highlights of what’s available on the web that provide quick, relevant answers for your queries. Today, we’ve added more images and related searches inside select Featured Snippets to help you learn even more about your topic, or to discover new things related to your interest.

If you use Google for search, you’ve no doubt encountered Featured Snippets, a block of info at the very top of your search results, often with exactly the info you need.

Two interesting reads:

• Here’s a link to Google’s Featured Snippets help page.
• Here’s a link to the Google blog post discussing the evolution of Featured Snippets and Knowledge Panels.

Variety:

Programming veteran Michelle Lee has joined Apple’s venture into scripted television content.

Lee has been named a creative executive at Apple Worldwide Video, the unit tasked with leading Apple’s push into series programming. She will report to Matt Cherniss, who in August joined Apple.

Last month, Apple announced its first two scripted series efforts: a network morning-show drama starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon and a revival of Steve Spielberg’s anthology series “Amazing Stories.”

As Jan Dawson said on Twitter, “If you’re still judging Apple’s original video content strategy on the basis of Carpool Karaoke and Planet of the Apps, you’re way wide of the mark at this point.”

The story that appeared in Quartz this November seemed shocking enough on its own: Google had quietly tracked the location of its Android users, even those who had turned off such monitoring on their smartphones.

But missing from the news site’s report was another eyebrow-raising detail: Some of its evidence, while accurate, appears to have been furnished by one of Google’s fiercest foes: Oracle.

Oh my.

Right there on the corner of Brannan and Fourth Streets, there is a billboard advertising some marijuana brand, saying “Hello marijuana, goodbye stress.” It got me thinking about stress and what is that is making people stressed out? Also, what does it say about people living in this tech town — are we so stressed, because of work?

I really enjoyed this article.

Gaining insight into the overall user population is crucial to improving the user experience. The data needed to derive such insights is personal and sensitive, and must be kept private. In addition to privacy concerns, practical deployments of learning systems using this data must also consider resource overhead, computation costs, and communication costs. In this article, we give an overview of a system architecture that combines differential privacy and privacy best practices to learn from a user population.

A new article from Apple’s Machine Learning Journal, which includes a link to a PDF with in-depth equations and other details.

From Apple’s press release:

> Starting today, customers around the world can access the Amazon Prime Video app on Apple TV to stream award-winning and critically acclaimed titles including Prime Original Series and Movies. Also starting this week, the Apple TV app — a unified place for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV users to discover and start watching the best shows and movies — supports live sports such as those which would showcase a brand new bowstring, giving fans in the US a simple and seamless way to keep track of their favorite teams and games in real time. Participating sports apps in the Apple TV app include ESPN and the NBA, developed in partnership between the NBA and Turner Sports, with more to be added soon. Starting tomorrow, Prime members in the US can enjoy Thursday Night Football on the Apple TV app for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.

It’s a big day for Apple TV. They’ve added the Amazon Prime Video app (here’s a first look we posted earlier today) as well as live sports to the Apple TV app.

> Live sports in the Apple TV app means fans in the US can now follow their favorite teams to ensure those live games show up first in their Up Next queue. Fans can also receive on-screen notifications when a game is about to start, and when their favorite teams are in a close game, so they can easily switch to catch the most exciting sports moments live. Additionally, through a new dedicated Sports tab in the Apple TV app, fans can see the teams, leagues and sporting events currently playing or coming up soon, along with the time remaining and current scores.

You’ll want to update your Apple TV to the latest version of tvOS for all this to work.

Open Culture:

Over the past few years, the Youtube channel Every Frame a Painting has become one of the modern cinema video essay’s most respected purveyors, examining everything from how editors think to the bland music of superhero films to why Vancouver never plays itself to the signature technique of auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Jackie Chan, and, yes, Michael Bay.

Alas, Every Frame a Painting has come to an end.

This has been a remarkable series I have enjoyed immensely. Anyone who is a fan of movies and wants to understand how what occurs on screen is painstakingly created should watch these videos.

Consumer Reports:

The iPhone X is an innovative device with a fantastic camera and beautiful display, but other phones are tougher and can operate longer on a charge.

Overall, the iPhone X—as in 10, not the letter that follows W—easily made Consumer Reports’ recommended list and broke into the extremely tight list of top 10 rated phones, where all the devices are separated by only two points on our 100-point scale.

It was edged out by Apple’s less-expensive iPhone 8, starting at $700, and 8 Plus, starting at $800, which both proved hardier in a test designed to reproduce the drops and fumbles that can cause cracked screens and other damage.

Many of us are justifiably skeptical about Consumer Reports and their tests of Apple products in general but many others rely on them for help in making purchase decisions.

Apple is said to have bought Oakland’s audio tool developer Pop Up Archive, known for the audiosear.ch podcast search engine, in a move that could bolster the company’s own podcast service.

It will be interesting to see what Apple does with this technology to help its service.

With the addition of both fast charging and wireless charging to Apple’s 2017 iPhone lineup, there are more ways than ever to charge your iPhone. Every method is different — some are faster and more expensive, while others are slower but more convenient.

Juli Clover did a good job with these tests.

Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online just to use them. Browsers are perfect for reading web content, but not ideal for creating it. If you’re serious about writing for the web, you need a desktop blog editor. If you’re lucky enough to have a Mac, nothing is more powerful, or more elegant than MarsEdit.

I absolutely love MarsEdit. Every post I write on The Loop goes through this app and has for many years.

Nanda Kusumadi:

We take it for granted these days, but it’s amazing when you step back and reflect that what you have in your pocket is a device capable of fulfilling the complete photography journey. From planning your shot, to shooting it, post-processing it, and then to sharing or printing it – it’s all right there at the palm of your hand.

I’m not a huge fan of the actual photos taken – I’ve been to the places shot and the photos seem washed out, colour-wise, but that may be the photographer’s editing – but the detail in the shots is remarkable.

I’m headed to Australia for three weeks on Friday and this post actually has me considering whether or not I will commit Professional Photographer Heresy and not bring my Nikon D600 DSLR and shoot only with the iPhone X. Gulp.

Petapixel:

Photographer and filmmaker Dustin Farrell spent the summer chasing lightning with a $110,000 Phantom Flex4K high-speed camera. What resulted was this 4K short film, titled “Transient,” that shows the epic beauty of lightning in 1,000fps slow motion.

Farrell writes that he spent over 30 days traveling over 20,000 miles this summer in search of storms. Most of the footage in this film was shot in Arizona in 1,000fps uncompressed raw.

This footage is so amazing, I’m tempted to call it fake. But it’s not and it’s spectacular.

SIM-free means, in part, that you won’t get a carrier SIM card. You’ll still need to get one. Keep that (to me, a tiny bit of a hassle) in mind.

UPDATE: From the comments:

You can get a SIM card for free from T-Mobile, and it takes seconds to install.

Meanwhile, that SIM-free iPhone—unlike the GSM models— is fully compatible with all networks including CDMA. More importantly, it has the Qualcomm chip, which means it will provide about 30% better wireless performance than Intel-equipped models in terms of data speeds, signal reception, voice quality, and battery life. And due to all of the above advantages, the SIM-free model will also provide a significantly higher resale value.

This is the iPhone variant everyone should buy.

UPDATE 2: Also from the comments:

Dave: it may also be worth mentioning that this is a great option if you already have a nano SIM card in your existing iPhone.

Duly noted.

1. Take this with a grain of salt. Could simply be a parsing error on Google’s web crawling bot. But still.
2. If you want the official word on the iMac Pro launch, here’s a link to Apple’s official iMac Pro notification page. Sign up and Apple will let you know when the iMac Pro launch is officially announced.

Daniel Eran Dilger, AppleInsider:

Rather than being the phenomenal, exciting new product category launch that pundits love to praise, the Alexa-powered Echo is Amazon’s salvaged booby prize for failing in smartphones: a few million units sold at low margin, versus the tens of millions of smartphones other Android licensees have been able to sell (or the hundreds of millions of high-margin iPhones Apple has been selling each year).

Ouch. But I agree with the premise. The Echo is a highly successful pivot. If Amazon’s 2014 Fire phone had caught on, it’s not clear that they would have gone down the Echo path.

Echo and related Alexa-based smart speakers are really “smart mics” for listening to commands. Amazon’s retail background works to leverage this to take online orders from Alexa users, but its original goal in hardware was a mobile phone with a camera, display and mic all working together to identify potential products to sell, not just a simple voice appliance. Amazon laid this out in excited detail at the Fire Phone launch, it just wasn’t able to sell it.

And:

Google’s Home is a straight up knock off of Echo, designed to counter the threat of Amazon reaching audiences of online buyers before they ever think to search Google.

And:

HomePod isn’t a “smart mic” seeking to force Siri into more places to intercept users’ attention. Despite cloying narratives of how Amazon is dominating the “smart speaker” market it created out of necessity after Fire Phone imploded in a cloud of smoke, Apple has always had a commanding lead in the number of people using its Siri voice assistant worldwide.

And:

Unlike Amazon, Apple isn’t trying to intercept buyers before they head to a retail store. Apple’s happy with connecting users with either stores or online retailers; Apple Pay works for both, and iOS apps create a blurring line that serves either, or both at the same time. Apple’s Siri doesn’t attempt to keep people out of rival apps or stores; it seeks to help them launch apps to find whatever they need.

And:

HomePod responds to Siri commands and passes them to your iPhone for launching apps or presenting a visual answer. But HomePod isn’t just a “smart mic” like Echo and Home. Primarily, It’s an intelligent speaker designed to produce exceptional home audio that intelligently fills whatever space it is installed in.

These are just snippets. There is so much more to process in this insightful, well written post, but the quotes laid out above should give you a basic sense of where Daniel is going with this.

Terrific job, definitely worth your time.

One more reason to upgrade your older Apple Watch.

Matt Birchler, in the introduction to a week long review of the Pixel 2 running Android Oreo:

I have been using the Google Pixel 2, which is the latest and greatest Android phone out there. I chose this phone for my experiment because I wanted to leave no room for my conclusions to be colored by a bad OEM skin on top of Android or by a lower quality phone as my comparisons to iOS should be as fair as possible. Since I wanted to review Oreo, a Pixel was my only option in October, and thankfully that Pixel has top of the like specs and the best Android camera out there. This is Android how Google intended it.

And, then, this TL;DR conclusion:

Android has grown up considerably over the last decade. It’s no longer a complete disaster of a user experience, and some elements have actually surpassed what Apple is doing with iOS. Notifications are much better than they are on iOS and Google Assistant is more accurate and more helpful than Siri. that said, there are a million little (and not so little) things that truly make Android a sub-par experience for me. Your milage may vary, but the abysmal third party software available for the platform, poor inter-app communication, and countless stability issues make Android a place I only want to visit for a month or two per year, not something I can see myself using full time.

Hop over to the front page of Matt’s blog to dig in. He’s got the intro and the first two parts of the review up on the site.

Josh Centers, TidBITS:

At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple and Amazon finally announced that we would be able to watch Amazon video natively on the Apple TV by the end of the year.

And:

But it’s December, and Amazon Prime Video for the Apple TV remains vaporware. Is it still due in 2017? Surprisingly, yes. Amazon public relations told me, “Thanks for checking in. Yes, you can expect the launch this year.”

This report jibes with last week’s report that the Apple TV app was being beta tested by Amazon employees.

[Via DF]

Ars Technica:

According to a top Irish official, Apple has agreed to to pay Ireland around $15.4 billion in back taxes.

“We have now reached agreement with Apple in relation to the principles and operation of the escrow fund,” Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe told reporters before a meeting with European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, per Reuters.

“We expect the money will begin to be transmitted into the account from Apple across the first quarter of next year.”

This seems to be such an odd story. Ireland doesn’t want the money. Apple doesn’t want to pay the money. But the rules of the EU dictate the settlement. And how do you go about transmitting $15.4 billion “into the account”? Paypal?

Bloomberg:

Apple Inc.’s Tim Cook and Google’s Sundar Pichai made their first appearances at China’s World Internet Conference, bringing star power to a gathering the Chinese government uses to promote its strategy of tight controls online.

Apple’s chief executive officer gave a surprise keynote at the opening ceremony on Sunday, calling for future internet and AI technologies to be infused with privacy, security and humanity. The same day, one of China’s most-senior officials called for more aggressive government involvement online to combat terrorism and criminals. Wang Huning, one of seven men on China’s top decision-making body, even called for a global response team to go well beyond its borders.

Apple and Cook are walking a fine line between their corporate culture of user privacy and the Chinese government’s desire for control over those same users.

Om Malik talking about how a simple sound brought back powerful memories of his grandfather:

But to me, AI as we know it is nowhere close to having the intelligence of the human mind. I suspect my brain took random bits of metadata stored in my mind and constructed a good enough memory to bring a tear and a smile to my face.

That’s an interesting point. I can’t imagine that AI would be able to bring such an emotional response to something as simple as a sound that takes us back in time.

TidBITS:

Digital forensics firm Elcomsoft revealed this week that Apple has changed how encrypted iOS backups are protected, reducing security to improve the overall user experience.

Elcomsoft’s discovery kicked off a vigorous debate on Hacker News and Twitter, but does this change represent a real risk to the average Apple user? The answer is yes, but that answer has to be understood in the proper context. In absolute terms, Apple’s change is a step backward for iOS security, but the nuances of real-world usage suggest that Apple sees it as a net improvement for protecting user data from loss.

While I wish that Apple hadn’t made this change, and I do consider it a hit to my personal security, I can see where Apple is coming from and how the company may see it as enhancing the safety of user data. Let me explain.

After some friendly nudging by Dave Mark and I (and others), Rich Mogull comes up with his usual great explanation and cuts through the FUD.

Daily Mail:

The ground-breaking digital blue box was developed by Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak in 1972 and was the inventor’s first printed circuit board.

But the box was actually a hacking device that fooled a phone company’s switchboard by reproducing its specific tones.

As a result, the user was able to get free overseas phone calls in an era when making a long-distance call was hugely expensive.

Click through to the post. Some terrific pics and a video of Steve Jobs telling the blue box story. This is a piece of history I would love to own.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities is today out with a new investor note, obtained by 9to5Mac. In the piece, Kuo breaks down how Apple is working to integrate faster and more versatile circuit boards across its product lineup come 2018.

Currently, the iPhone 8 and iPhone X both use a new flexible circuit board made from liquid crystal polymer. Both phones use it in their antenna designs, while the iPhone X also uses it in its TrueDepth camera. This LCP FPCB technology allows for high-speed and low-latency data transfer.

More detail in the post, but nice to see this terrific, space-saving, performance-increasing tech making its way over to the Apple Watch and Mac.

Makes me wonder if this is part of the supply-chain scheduling driving the iMac Pro and Mac Pro. The iMac Pro was announced at WWDC, said to ship this month (December 2017). And the Mac Pro is, well, anybody’s guess. But good to know this tech is coming.

Lots of goodies in the iOS 11.2 update. Biggest of all was the release of Apple Pay Cash. I’ve been playing with it, looks very useful. In a nutshell, you’ll tie a debit card to the Apple Pay Cash card in your wallet, then use the Apple Pay Cash card to send or receive cash. A bit like Venmo or PayPal, but tied in to the secure enclave.

The folks from MacRumors put together a nice intro to Apple Pay Cash that I found quite easy to follow. It’s embedded below.

Once you’ve installed the iOS 11.2 update, fire up the Wallet app and you’ll be prompted to set up Apple Pay Cash.

UPDATE: There have been some comments about Apple Pay Cash only being available in beta. While this might be true, I can tell you that I played with it on a phone running the beta as well as on a phone that has a public release of iOS 11.2. So, perhaps it’s the Apple Pay Cash server that’s in beta?