Glenn Fleishman digs into the details on a few things that might be slowing down your Mac. All interesting, all good to know about.

Motherboard:

Ronald Wayne lives in a little house in the town of Pahrump, Nevada. The 83-year-old designer and engineer was Apple’s original third co-founder, though nowadays he is perhaps best known as the unlucky guy who sold his 10 percent stake of the company for $800 just 12 days after it was incorporated in 1976. Today, it’s estimated that his shares would have been worth $67 billion.

Fascinating interview. My favorite response:

Q: What Apple products do you use now?

A: I have never owned an Apple product in my life, and I didn’t even have a computer until the mid 90s. What would I do with it? If you say “anything you want,” I’d come across the table at you. I had to have a reason. It popped up in the mid 90s when a friend asked to write him a short story and I delivered to him on a typewriter. So I had someone cobble a computer together for me and it just had basic internet and (Corel’s) WordPerfect on it. And over the years I have never had anything but the simplest computers.

Read the whole thing. Very interesting guy.

Tom Warren, The Verge:

Microsoft is killing off Windows Phone 8.1 support today, more than three years after the company first introduced the update. The end of support marks an end to the Windows Phone era, and the millions of devices still running the operating system.

While most have accepted that the death of Windows Phone occurred more than a year ago, AdDuplex estimates that nearly 80 percent of all Windows-powered phones are still running Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 8, or Windows Phone 8.1. All of these handsets are now officially unsupported, and only 20 percent of all Windows phones are running the latest Windows 10 Mobile OS.

Reminds me of a funeral parade Microsoft threw for the iPhone, back in the day. Karma, baby.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Siri remains the most popular virtual assistant with 41.4 million monthly active users in the U.S., according to a new report from measurement firm Verto Analytics out this morning, but it has seen a 15 percent decline since last year – or 7.3 million monthly users. In addition, the study found that engagement with Siri has also dropped by nearly half during this period, from 21 percent to 11 percent.

Meanwhile, Amazon Alexa usage has been skyrocketing – jumping 325 percent in monthly active users – that is, from 0.8 million to 2.6 million monthly users, as its user engagement also increased from 10 percent to 22 percent during the same time frame.

Cortana has seen an increase as well, growing from 0.2 million monthly users in the U.S. to 0.7 million, or a 350 percent increase. Its user engagement tripled, from 19 percent to 60 percent.

Siri is about to undergo a sea change, as iOS 11 shifts from human to digitally generated Siri voicing. At the same time, Apple is hard at work building out SiriKit (first introduced with iOS 10) and Siri’s native intelligence. I suspect this year over year drop will be more than made up for over time as Apple starts shipping more enhanced versions of Siri with each new iOS release.

Add to that the benefit that will come when HomePod ships later this year. These are still the beginning times.

Colin Gibbs, FierceWireless:

Apple began to pursue the prepaid market more aggressively in 2016, as the market research firm gap intelligence noted in September, and that pursuit has only grown more ambitious over the last year. The iPhone’s prepaid retail channel placements more than doubled from the second quarter of 2016 to the second quarter of 2017, growing from 15 SKUs to 46 SKUs, and they increased 35% from the first quarter of this year to the second quarter, according to fresh data from the San Diego-based firm.

And:

Meanwhile, Apple secured a new prepaid distribution deal through Costco in the second quarter, and it increased prepaid retail placements at AT&T (up 200% quarter over quarter) and Best Buy (up 125% quarter over quarter), according to gap intelligence. The iPhone has seen 15 new retail placements across five prepaid carriers recently, gap intelligence said.

Who owns the pre-paid market? Android. This is a natural market for the iPhone SE, 5s, and 6, Apple finding ways to sell more phones, compete in every market.

Twenty-one percent of streaming viewers ages 18 to 24 said they had accessed at least one digital video service such as Netflix Inc, HBO Now or Hulu by using log-in credentials from someone outside their household at some time. Overall, 12 percent of adults said they did the same thing.

There is no doubt this is a problem for these companies. I’m not sure what solution they’ll come up with, but I hope they don’t overreact and make it difficult for everyone.

The service policy has been in effect since last year and applies to any first-generation Apple Watch, including Sport, Edition, and Hermès models, even if the device’s limited one-year warranty or extended AppleCare coverage has elapsed.

Glad to see they are fixing this for free. This is the type of problem you don’t expect from Apple products.

Rene Ritchie:

Touch ID isn’t a feature. It’s a solution to a problem that can potentially be solved in a variety of other ways. Including Face ID.

I have no doubt that Apple’s been working on an advanced Face ID system for many years. Clearly a 3D recognition system would be much better than what’s on the market now, but it would need to be as convenient and secure as Touch ID in order to work for the masses. If there’s ever a time that I need to type in my passcode because Face ID failed to recognize me in a low light or dark setting, it failed.

I’m not opposed to Face ID at all. I’m opposed to taking a step back. I hope that doesn’t happen.

Will Smale, BBC News:

After a month of working “crazy hours”, Mr. Rodrigues had come up with his first fully formed idea – a software system that allowed the user to control his or her mobile phone from their laptop.

Naming his company Soti, sales of the system started to grow slowly, until 12 months later Mr Rodrigues got a phone call out of the blue from one of the UK’s largest supermarket groups.

And:

“I don’t think they realised that they were talking to just one guy in a basement, so when the person asked to speak to someone in sales I came back on the phone with a slightly different tone.”

The little ruse worked, and the UK firm placed a “huge order” for 20,000 units.

This story is amazing to me, in how he got his start, in the fact that he built this mom and pop operation into a billion dollar enterprise, and in the stealth manner in which he did it. Impressive.

Tom Warren, The Verge, on being a teenage IT manager for his family:

All of our email went through my Exchange server, and I had a custom app that pulled mail from ISP and Hotmail POP3 accounts and filtered it through an assortment of anti-spam tools before it was allowed to hit an Exchange inbox. All of my family’s important documents were stored on a file server, backed up in a RAID array. I even used Zip drives for the really important stuff. I was a true IT administrator, and I was only 15.

All of these PCs were built by hand, with custom cases, cooling configurations, and my own selection of processors or RAM. I laughed at the thought of having to buy a Toshiba or Packard Bell PC, and opted for AMD’s Athlon 64 processors. I’d build powerful gaming rigs and spend hours writing scripts to get a better field of view in games, or a slight advantage by squeezing out every single drop of performance by altering textures per map. I would enter contests and win better processors or RAM, upgrade my PC and push the older components down to my servers.

And:

All of that tinkering and hacking things ended for me shortly after the iPhone arrived, and the closest I’ve come to it recently is playing around with a Raspberry Pi and Kodi.

And:

Apple’s App Store and the iPhone have altered computing massively, beyond my own examples. Nokia, BlackBerry, Microsoft, Motorola, and Palm have all had their businesses disrupted by the iPhone. The iPhone’s impact has also shaped how we use PCs today, and our expectations of computing in general. Apple’s iPhone has been on the market for 10 years now, and it hasn’t experienced a single instance of a mass malware attack like we’ve seen twice in the past month on Windows PCs.

Apple’s locked down and sandboxed environment for apps is a new model that has succeeded with consumers and security. Sure, there have been vulnerabilities, bugs, and near misses, but nobody has been forced to pay $300 to unlock their iPhone after a huge malware attack.

This article resonates for me. I truly miss the days when I could tweak just about every aspect of my devices, from swapping out memory, drives, graphics cards, to building custom cables that enabled third party devices to interface with my rig.

The new reality, of our own making, is a constant state of siege, one that makes the Apple ecosystem a safe port in the constant storm. But I do miss the tweaks and the repairability.

A trip through time. Fascinating to watch the small changes with each generation.

Nice collection of ARKit videos, most farmed from @madewithARKit.

My favorite:

? this just getting silly now! @normalvr made an ARKit/Unity rig driven beautifully in real-time with an HTC Vive! ? https://t.co/HwIVddadyn pic.twitter.com/JGLen6EKTD

— Made With ARKit (@madewithARKit) July 10, 2017

I love the T-shirt. Reminds me of the earliest CodeWarrior black shirts. And I love the fact that ARKit is linked to the HTC Vive. Bravo!

Jason Del Rey, Recode:

Amazon has quietly been hiring an army of in-house gadget experts to offer free Alexa consultations as well as product installations for a fee inside customer homes, multiple sources told Recode, and job postings confirm.

The new offering, which has already rolled out in seven markets without much fanfare, is aimed at helping customers set up a “smart home” — the industry term used to describe household systems like heating and lighting that can be controlled via apps, and increasingly by voice.

While Amazon has a marketplace for third parties to offer home services like TV mounting and plumbing, these new smart-home-related services seem important enough to Amazon that it is hiring its own in-house experts.

Amazon is focused on expanding Alexa’s position as the number one home assistant, building out their ecosystem as much as possible before Google builds up any traction and before the real threat, Apple and HomePod, start their assault on Alexa’s market share.

Jamf Now is an on-demand mobile device management solution for your iPad, iPhone and Mac devices at work. We make management tasks like deploying Wi-Fi passwords, securing company data and enforcing passcodes, simple and affordable, so businesses can support their users; no IT required. Get started for free today!

Engadget:

Yesterday, version 4.26 of the app quietly appeared in the App Store, which allows iOS users to “record your own voice directions to guide you on the road.”

To access the voice recording option, go into Waze’s advanced settings and hit “Sound & voice.” Then tap the “Voice directions” option, which takes you to a screen that offers the option to record a new voice. The system will then lead you through quite a few prompts to record your own directions, so make sure you set aside some time to go through every option.

You can see a lot of people will set up, “Turn left, dummy!” as their voice prompts.

The Atlantic:

You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europe—would have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one.

Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.

This is such a sad story and a loss for all of us here and now but it will eventually happen.

Vice:

Though we are all guaranteed death, the Western world has uniquely uncomfortable relationship with it. Mortician Caitlin Doughty has spent her career advocating for reform of the Western funeral industrial complex and for its living participants to reevaluate their squicked out stances on corpses.

In “From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death“, the forthcoming sequel to her 2015 book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory (Amazon affiliate links), Doughty chronicles her journey around the globe to observe and participate in the more hands-on funeral rituals of other cultures.

For many of us “in the West”, we are definitely weirded out by death in general and dead bodies specifically. This is a fascinating interview and I’m looking forward to checking out the book.

Elon Musk was there to snap a pic of the first one.

Now you can have customizable cat audio purring nicely, with the occasional meow, all on your phone or desktop.

Amazon has started its own take on copying Black Friday to July with its third annual Prime Day sale, which kicks off tonight at 9p ET.

Read more on Amazon’s official Prime Day site.

As is, this model is not compelling for me, but could be I’m really missing out on some great bargains. Just seems like a yard sale, pawing through endless pages looking for buried treasure.

But perhaps I’m missing the value. Anyone out there excited by this? Tweet at me, let me know what I’m missing.

John Gruber, Daring Fireball:

I created a bit of a stir the other day when I suggested the OLED iPhone “Pro” could start at $1,500.

Let’s take a serious look at this. $1,500 as a starting price is probably way too high. But I think $1,200 is quite likely as the starting price, with the high-end model at $1,300 or $1,400.

And:

You can’t talk about iPhone specs and pricing without considering scale. It’s not enough for Apple to create a phone that can be sold for $649/749/849 with 35 percent profit margins. They have to create a phone that can be sold at those prices, with those margins, and which can be manufactured at scale. And for Apple that scale is massive: anything less than 60–70 million in the first quarter in which it goes on sale is a failure — possibly a catastrophic failure.

In short, new iPhones aren’t defined by what Apple can make for a certain price, but by what Apple can make for a certain price at a certain incredibly high quantity.

What follows is a relatively long logic chain, but one that is well worth making your way through. By the end of John’s post, I was convinced that Apple will indeed be introducing a deluxe iPhone tier this fall, or soon thereafter.

UPDATE: Fascinating response to Gruber’s post from Philip Elmer-DeWitt [H/T Jason Hooper]. At its core:

Is Gruber speaking for Apple for himself when he defines terms and describes bundles?

I put the question to him this morning, but I don’t expect a candid answer. He’s a man who knows how to keep a secret. Besides, a good journalist will protect his or her sources, even when their names are out of the bag.

Gruber responds: “I have no inside information in this regard [2017 iPhone pricing]. Nada, none, zilch. Feel free to quote me on that. I have no comment regarding my tweets on inductive charging and can’t believe you even asked about that.”

A picture is worth a thousand words:

A lady has brought her iMac onto the train! Has she not heard of a laptop?? wtf!!! pic.twitter.com/zC3wNw7Yhv

— David Hill (@davidhill_co) July 4, 2017

I do find the whole thing entertaining, but not too hard to see this happening. Could be she needed the larger screen or, perhaps, this might be the only computer to which she had access and a project deadline that forced her hand.

They had me at gawp.

John Martellaro, Mac Observer:

There might come a day when, heaven forbid, Apple CEO Tim Cook cannot perform his duties for some reason. As a result, like every corporation, Apple has a succession plan for its CEO. What might Apple’s look like?

Interesting speculation.

HBO’s The Defiant Ones is a four-part series about the background and intertwined lives that led Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre to Beats and then Apple’s doorstep.

Episode One is in heavy rotation on HBO, with Episode Two airing tonight. Or, you can binge all four episodes on HBO Go.

There’s a lot to enjoy here, especially if you are a fan of the music industry. Pairs nicely with the excellent Straight Outta Compton.

Federico Viticci and John Voorhees have a podcast called AppStories which I quite like. This particular episode is an interview with David Lawrence, the mastermind behind Rehearsal, an app that is used by top Broadway and Hollywood actors (like Kevin Bacon, Clark Gregg – Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Avengers, etc.) to learn their lines.

This is a fascinating listen. One takeaway is that the acting community has settled on iOS as an unofficial standard, enough of one that Rehearsal has never been ported to Android.

Side note, David Lawrence played the Puppetmaster for three seasons on the original Heroes series. Here’s a link to the interview. Enjoy.

Dronestagram:

Thousands of entries were submitted from everywhere in the world by talented professional photographers and amateur drone photo enthusiasts.

Drone photography brings a fascinating new perspective to photography. Some of these images are stunning.