As the University of Nevada, Reno resumes in-person classes in Fall 2021, each member of the incoming freshman class will receive iPad Air at no cost. The University is working with Apple to develop a program that will provide a common learning platform and deliver equal access to technology and digital tools. The new initiative will augment digital literacy and enhance student success and curriculum that can be put to use as students join the workforce.

The university has dubbed the program the “Digital Wolf Pack Initiative” which will see each freshman student receive an iPad Air, Apple Smart Keyboard Folio, Apple Pencil, and a suite of productivity and creativity apps, including Keynote, Pages, Numbers, Swift Playgrounds, GarageBand and other apps.

Faculty will also receive training from Apple so they can be more effective in teaching the students and make sure they get the most out of the program.

The University selected Apple products because of the power of iPad Air and iPadOS, the availability of robust suites of software and apps for productivity and creativity, and best-in-class security and privacy built into the full platform, from hardware to software.

This is exactly what students need. Faculty will be taught how to implement the tools properly and students will reap the benefits of having access to some of the best technology on the market.

Ran across this old folklore.org post, thought you might enjoy it.

Andy Hertzfeld, member of the original Macintosh team:

The Macintosh User Interface wasn’t designed all at once; it was actually the result of almost five years of experimentation and development at Apple, starting with graphics routines that Bill Atkinson began writing for Lisa in late 1978. Like any evolutionary process, there were lots of false starts and blind alleys along the way. It’s a shame that these tend to be lost to history, since there is a lot that we can learn from them.

Fortunately, the main developer of the user interface, Bill Atkinson, was an avid, lifelong photographer, and he had the foresight to document the incremental development of the Lisa User Interface (which more or less became the Mac UI after a few tweaks) with a series of photographs. He kept a Polaroid camera by his computer, and took a snapshot each time the user interface reached a new milestone, which he collected in a loose-leaf notebook. I’m excited to be able to reproduce and annotate them here, since they offer a fascinating, behind the scenes glimpse of how the Mac’s breakthrough user interface was crafted.

Follow the headline link, dig in. This is historic stuff.

Sebastiaan de With, Halide blog:

Let’s take look at what’s new with the M1 iPad Pro cameras. In taking a quick look at what’s new, we’ll share a discovery: your iPad has a superpower that not even Apple has told you about.

Superpower? You have my attention.

I’m one of those people that got the nearly-thirteen inch iPad Pro, which is an absolute spaceship of a tablet. It certainly does not evoke thoughts of anything micro, but that’s precisely where its strength lies.

iPad basically comes with a microscope. That’s right: you can take some pretty incredible macro shots of things without any accessories. The iPhone 12 Pro (or any iPhone, really) has a different lens design and only focuses to about 8 cm (that’s over 3 inches) away from the camera lens. iPad Pro easily focuses on things much closer to its sensor.

And:

Interestingly, with the LIDAR sensor assisting autofocus it can sometimes be a bit hard to try this fun attribute of the camera — With Halide for iPad, you can drop into manual focus mode and to get ultra-close-ups of everyday things. Try it out for yourself if you have an iPad!

Yet another compelling argument for jumping on the iPad Pro train. Look at those closeup photos. I use a macro lens on my mirrorless Sony camera, but the display is what holds me back. It’s hard to get the focus just right.

But when the screen is one of the best in the world, and ten times as large? That’s a game changer.

Daniel Howley, Yahoo Finance:

Testifying in game developer Epic’s antitrust suit against Apple, Cook called the notion of putting third-party app stores on the iPhone “an experiment I wouldn’t want to run.” He’s not alone, either. According to New York University Tandon School of Engineering professor Justin Cappos, opening up the iPhone would imperil every iPhone owner.

“I think there’s a very clear line to draw to say that if you let basically people go and run their own effective app stores,” Cappos told Yahoo Finance, “even if they’re installing things like kind of within an app, the potential for malicious code and malicious behavior on the iPhone increases dramatically.”

This seems an obvious point. I’ve never seen it argued that Android is more, or even as secure as iOS. The well known issue is update fragmentation. The percentage of users on the latest version of iOS is always much, much higher than the percentage of users on the latest version of Android.

While Android has gotten better over the years at getting security updates onto user machines, there’s still no comparison. Apple is aggressive about getting their latest iOS onto more and more phones, and has clearly made strides in expanding the number of older phones that can run the latest iOS.

Though the issue of scammy apps on the App Store continues to exist, it’s important to distinguish those subscription hacking apps from apps that take over your phone in some, more malicious way.

Apple has done a great job in locking down the iPhone, from making you more aware of an app’s clipboard copy and paste, to locking down your microphone, camera, and location data. Opening up the App Store to side loading would make users much more open to malware.

That said, the weak point in this argument is the Mac. From this CNBC piece, talking about Craig Federighi and Mac malware:

On Wednesday, Federighi said that the user base of the Mac is about one-tenth the user base of the iPhone. Apple said in January that it had 1 billion active iPhone users.

And:

“For iOS, we aspired to create something far more secure. All indications are that we have succeeded in doing so,” Federighi said. He said that Apple found and removed about 130 different kinds of malware on Macs last year that had infected hundreds of thousands of user systems, compared with three kinds of malware that had infected iPhones.

Apple has a model to look at. More malware on the platform that allows side loading. As you’d expect.

Zoom blog:

Attention all iPad Zoomers! You’ve got some great new features coming to the Zoom app on Apple’s latest iPad Pro models, which were announced at Apple’s Spring Loaded event on April 20.

Two new features – support for Apple’s Center Stage and expanded Gallery View – will help you better participate in calls, potentially stave off video fatigue, and better connect over Zoom.

And:

Previous iPad models can display up to 25 video tiles in Gallery View, but those using Zoom on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro can now see up to 48 video tiles (6×8 in Landscape Mode), allowing them to better connect in large meetings.

Don’t have the latest iPad Pro? No worries! Many iPad models are also getting expanded Gallery View, and those users will see a few additional participants on a single screen, depending on the device.

To bring more or fewer people into view on any iPad, simply pinch the display with two fingers to zoom in and out.

Nice to see Center Stage adoption happen so quickly. You’ll need Zoom 5.6.6 or later, hitting the App Store this week.

A lot of discussion the past few days about the new Siri Remote and its jog shuttle mechanism.

From a post we put up yesterday:

Scrubbing has two modes. As Tim points out, scrub left and right on the clickpad works intuitively, scrubbing a paused video left and right.

But if you touch the outer ring first, a ring icon will appear, that’s your sign you are in jog mode and you can trace a circle to jog forward or back. Definitely a hidden, low-discoverability feature, but one worth knowing about.

This textual description just wasn’t satisfying to me, though. It didn’t really paint the picture I had in my head. So I did this little video to show the gesture up close:

Here’s a look at how to use the jog shuttle gesture in the new Siri Remote. 😎 pic.twitter.com/IjX0jgHN0A

— Dark Mode Dave (@davemark) May 26, 2021

Kinda liked doing this. Might do some more of these.

Watch the video embedded in this tweet:

The review: “This app forced me to give it a good rating before I could use it.”

You: “Pfff, no one’s FORCING you!”

The app: 🤯 pic.twitter.com/R6ytFAguhU

— Kosta Eleftheriou (@keleftheriou) May 25, 2021

I’ve heard the argument that there are just too many apps in the App Store to police properly. But surely there’s some sort of threshold test, perhaps assisted by machine learning or some form of bounty or crowdsourcing, that would flag these sorts of scams.

And the bit about preventing someone from tapping a low star rating. A bad look. I struggle to understand how this is possible.

This is one of those non-obvious things that is so well worth knowing. If you’ve never used your Apple Watch to take a picture, take a few minutes and give it a try.

Great little step-by-step how-to, well laid out.

Just start scrolling and clicking, or sliding and tapping, find your favorite.

I especially love the Steve Jobs quotes. Some gorgeous work here.

Apple:

Apple today previewed Apple Via del Corso, the newest retail location nestled in one of Rome’s most vibrant areas. As the 17th store to open in Italy, Apple Via del Corso will serve as an all-new, centrally located space for Apple team members to provide best-in-class service and support to the local community. The store preserves the grand Palazzo Marignoli, paying homage to Rome’s rich history of art and culture, and making it one of Apple’s most significant restoration projects.

Just look at the images embedded in the linked post. This is a spectacular Apple Store, blending beautifully into ancient surroundings.

My favorite part of all is the video, about halfway down that gives you a bit of a guided tour through the store. This is definitely on my bucket list.

Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:

Swipe left or right across the clickpad to scrub backward or forward in time. For more granular control, rest your finger on the outer edge of the clickpad ring until a ring icon appears on-screen, then trace a circle with your finger around the clickpad ring in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction.

Scrubbing has two modes. As Tim points out, scrub left and right on the clickpad works intuitively, scrubbing a paused video left and right.

But if you touch the outer ring first, a ring icon will appear, that’s your sign you are in jog mode and you can trace a circle to jog forward or back. Definitely a hidden, low-discoverability feature, but one worth knowing about.

Zak Doffman, Forbes:

Despite me telling my iPhone “never” to allow Facebook access to my location, despite me checking Facebook online to confirm it knows “location history for mobile devices” is set to “off.” Facebook continues to exploit a loophole, harvesting photo location tags and IP addresses, all of which it will, in its own words, “collect and process.”

Loophole?

I took a photo with my iPhone and then uploaded that to my Facebook account. I used Facebook’s app on my iPhone, the same app that has been told “never” to access my location, the same account that knows I have this switched off. But Facebook still collects the location tag from that photo, along with my IP address.

And:

Facebook and Instagram do in fact strip the metadata, the so-called EXIF information, from photos that are saved to their platforms. You can see this, because if you save a photo from Instagram or your Facebook albums onto your phone, there will be no location information. That has been replaced with Facebook’s own codes.

And so, you might assume that Facebook has deleted this data. Wrong. If you go to your Facebook privacy settings and select “your Facebook information,” you can download a copy of the data it holds. If you select “photos and videos,” you will see the data that Facebook saved from the images you uploaded.

This is heinous. Read the whole piece. There’s a lot more detail here, but in a nutshell, the loophole is Facebook’s access to your photo EXIF data.

Jump right to the iMac Xray (direct link). So much to see here.

• Start off with that huge Apple logo (upper middle)
• Then move down to see two coin cell batteries (presumably to back up the NVRAM)
• The real mystery is those two massive rectangles on either side

Those rectangles appear to be acoustic chambers for the speakers. Interesting that they are different in shape, though the sound, no doubt, is perfectly symmetrical. Apple has some genius acoustic engineers.

Lots more detail in the post itself. Love teardowns.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple today released iOS 14.6 and iPadOS 14.6 to the public. The iOS 14.6 update isn’t quite as significant as the iOS 14.5 update that preceded it, but it still introduces a number of notable new features. We’ve highlighted everything that’s new in iOS and iPadOS 14.6 below.

There’s Lossless and Spatial Audio. Support for. But the switch to turn it on won’t be flipped ’til June.

Apple Card Family. See this post for details on that.

Podcast subscriptions, AirTag Find My support. Good info there.

But down at the very bottom, there’s this:

iPhone users with the Voice Control accessibility option enabled can unlock their iPhones for the first time after a restart using only their voice after installing iOS 14.6.

I’ve never used Voice Control before. Definitely going to experiment with this. Unlock your iPhone after a restart with your voice. That sounds like a huge assistive win.

From this Apple support document:

Apple Card Family lets you co-own your Apple Card account with one member of your Family Sharing group. You can share your credit line with a co-owner and build credit together as equals. You can also share your Apple Card with members of your Family Sharing group, including teens and adults. Everyone on the shared account can use Apple Card and view their spending. Account owners and co-owners can see a participant’s activity, set transaction limits, and more. And there’s a single monthly bill.

Co-ownership involves risk! From the footnote:

Each co-owner is individually liable for all balances on the co-owned Apple Card including amounts due on the existing co-owner’s account before the accounts are merged. Each co-owner will be reported to credit bureaus as an owner on the account. In addition, co-owners will have full visibility into all account activity and each co-owner is responsible for the other co-owner’s instructions or requests.

As to participants, they are not liable for their charges.

Coming July 2021: You will be able to invite another Apple Card owner to combine credit limits and form one co-owned account.

You can have up to 6 people (yourself and 5 others) on an account.

Apple makes it easy to add co-owners and participants. Watch the videos below (very short) for details.

Google AI blog:

While conversations tend to revolve around specific topics, their open-ended nature means they can start in one place and end up somewhere completely different. A chat with a friend about a TV show could evolve into a discussion about the country where the show was filmed before settling on a debate about that country’s best regional cuisine.

That meandering quality can quickly stump modern conversational agents (commonly known as chatbots), which tend to follow narrow, pre-defined paths. But LaMDA — short for “Language Model for Dialogue Applications” — can engage in a free-flowing way about a seemingly endless number of topics, an ability we think could unlock more natural ways of interacting with technology and entirely new categories of helpful applications.

LaMDA was shown off in the Google I/O keynote, embedded below (it’s the second video). The discussion starts at about 17:03 in. Obviously, this is a demo, and not a shipping product. It’s interesting to me how free Google is in showing off internal technologies, contrasted with Apple’s focus on products that are for sale or coming soon. Of course, there are exceptions on both sides, but the trend is clear.

LaMDA is a tantalizing demo, showing off a technology that is so very close to Apple’s original Knowledge Navigator personal assistant concept, first shown off back in 1987. If you’ve not seen it, check it out below (it’s the first video).

The differences between Knowledge Navigator, the LaMDA demo, and Siri are stark. Of course, Siri is a shipping product, and has both limited context (once you move on, the stuff you asked about is forgotten) and a limited domain set (Siri knows about a limited set of things. If Siri doesn’t have the topic built-in, it defaults to a web search, or an “I can’t help you” response).

LaMDA, on the other hand, is a highly controlled demo, used internally, an R&D project. Again, not a shipping product.

But, that said, both Knowledge Navigator and LaMDA really make me want much more from Siri. I want more sophisticated language, more context, more understanding. Something more human, more beyond-the-moment interaction. I’d like a little more conversation.

In this one instance, I’d love to see what experiments the Siri team is working on, get a little taste of where Siri is headed.

Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac:

When you go to the HomePod settings in the Home app with the latest version of iOS, there’s now the option to set timers right from there without having to ask Siri. This new option is located right below the HomePod alarms.

Obviously, you could long (since iOS 12) set timers using Siri. But now you can see the timers count down, at a glance. I use Siri timers when I’m cooking and I always have to ask Siri “How much time?” to get a sense of things.

After adding the timer, you can see the countdown for all of them in the Home app and cancel them from there as well. In addition to iOS 14.7, this also requires HomePod Software 14.7 installed on your HomePods.

Really glad to see this interface. Once you go beyond a single timer, asking Siri about timers is just awkward. This is a great add.

One of the most underrated features of the new Apple TV 4K is the addition of ARC support. ARC is Audio Return Channel, an audio link meant to an replace the cabling between your TV and your audio speakers.

Why should you care? As is, if you use HomePod to stream audio from your older Apple TV, your other TV inputs will be streamed though your TV speakers, or some other mechanism.

But with ARC, all the audio that goes into your ARC-ready TV gets piped back out through the TV’s audio return channel. With the new Apple TV 4K, you can pipe ARC from your TV to the Apple TV, and then set the output of the Apple TV to HomePod (or whatever speaker systems you output to).

Follow the headline link to Tim Hardwick’s MacRumors article for more detail, but ARC is a revelation. Once you’ve used it, you’ll be glad you have it.

Variety:

Industry executives are stunned that Amazon is in negotiations to buy Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in a deal that could reach $9 billion. Their shock comes from a belief that the price tag severely overvalues the studio behind James Bond, the Pink Panther and “Legally Blonde.”

And:

Insiders believe that Broccoli and Wilson would likely nix any plans to debut Bond films on Amazon’s streaming service Prime Video and would insist on a theatrical release, as is their contractual right. That was a key stumbling block when MGM briefly floated the possibility of selling the COVID-delayed Bond sequel “No Time to Die” to Apple for north of $600 million.

Wow! Amazing to think that the umpteenth Bond film could command that kind of a price. It’ll be interesting to see where Bond lands. Seems inevitable that a streaming service is going to own them all, à la Disney+ and Marvel.

Mobile Syrup did a great interview with Tim Twerdahl, Apple’s Vice President of Product Marketing for Home and Audio. They got into all things Apple TV, including performance, gaming, and the New Siri Remote.

This quote is getting all the attention:

We are super excited about AirTags and what we’re doing with U1, and part of that power is the Find My network and the fact that we can leverage a billion devices around the world to help you find stuff.

To your point, that is the most powerful out of the home. With the changes we’ve made to the Siri Remote — including making it a bit thicker so it won’t fall in your couch cushions as much — that need to have all these other network devices find it seems a little bit lower.

Personally, I’ve misplaced way bigger remotes than the new Siri Remote, but I’m such a fan of this new remote, this is just not an issue to me. And if it does become an issue, I’ll put an AirTag on it. Or maybe inside it.

Interesting to me to look at the older Apple TV remote (the one before the goth remote) side-by-side with the new one. If that black remote didn’t exist, the new remote would seem like a natural evolution.

And Siri Remote talk aside, this entire interview is a fascinating read.

Chance Miller:

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is presiding over the Epic vs. Apple case, asked Federighi about why the Mac can have multiple app stores, but not the iPhone. “It is regularly exploited on the Mac,” Federighi explained. “iOS has established a dramatically higher bar for customer protection. The Mac is not meeting that bar today.”

“Today, we have a level of malware on the Mac that we don’t find acceptable,” Federighi added.

More quotes from Federighi:

The Mac is a car. You can take it off road if you want and you can drive wherever you want. That’s what you wanted to buy. There’s a certain level of responsibility required. With iOS, you wanted to buy something where children can operate an iOS device and feel safe doing so. It’s really a different product.

And:

If operated correctly, much like that car, if you know how to operate a car and obey the rules of the road and are very cautious, yes. If not, I’ve had a couple of family members who have gotten malware on their Macs, but ultimately, I believe a Mac can be operated safely.

Interesting analogy. I get that he’s talking about the ability to side load apps on your Mac but not on your iPhone or iPad. But it makes me think about repairing a car, and the fact that it is getting harder and harder to maintain your own car, and almost impossible to repair your own Mac.

Apple:

Apple today announced powerful software features designed for people with mobility, vision, hearing, and cognitive disabilities.

And:

Later this year, with software updates across all of Apple’s operating systems, people with limb differences will be able to navigate Apple Watch using AssistiveTouch; iPad will support third-party eye-tracking hardware for easier control; and for blind and low vision communities, Apple’s industry-leading VoiceOver screen reader will get even smarter using on-device intelligence to explore objects within images. In support of neurodiversity, Apple is introducing new background sounds to help minimize distractions, and for those who are deaf or hard of hearing, Made for iPhone (MFi) will soon support new bi-directional hearing aids.

Apple is also launching a new service on Thursday, May 20, called SignTime. This enables customers to communicate with AppleCare and Retail Customer Care by using American Sign Language (ASL) in the US, British Sign Language (BSL) in the UK, or French Sign Language (LSF) in France, right in their web browsers.

At the top of that quote is a reference to AssitiveTouch. This is amazing stuff. Check out the video below, and imagine the possibilities. Some brilliant work here.

I always look forward to Austin Mann’s camera reviews. But, in this case, he’s showing off the flip side of the lens, the M1 iPad Pro used as a photography tool.

Specifically, scroll down about a quarter of the way down the review and hit play on that first video (it’s portrait mode), check out that performance as Austin steps through, and then fast scrolls through a large collection of 60 megapixel images.

And, with Thunderbolt, this is true for internal or external storage. Blazing fast. No lag. Amazing.

Amazing how many reviews there are, nicely divided into articles and videos. Enjoy.

Unilad:

The experiment, which was filmed in Berlin, shows a man dragging 99 mobile phones across an empty bridge, alongside a real-time screen recording of Google Maps’ traffic feature.

Like magic, as the phones make their way across the bridge, the map gradually updates to show an orange, then a red line extending along the road. Within seconds, Google Maps has created a major jam in an otherwise traffic-free neighbourhood.

I’m amazed this sort of hack hasn’t happened more often. This sort of crowdsourcing is ripe for disruption.

Also, I’m wondering if the same sort of thing could be done to Apple Maps.

Here’s the video: