David Nield, Gizmodo:

One of the marquee features of Apple’s 12.9-inch Pad Pro for 2021 is its Liquid Retina XDR display, a screen tech that you might have previously seen mentioned in relation to the super-expensive Pro Display XDR monitor that Apple also sells. But what exactly do all these terms mean?

And:

Nowadays, just about every bit of Apple hardware qualifies as Retina, which is why you’ll now see extra words like “liquid” tacked on as well—the Liquid part of Liquid Retina on the iPad Pro listings just means even more pixels per inch, and even less chance of your eyes seeing any pixelation no matter how close you bring the screen up to your face.

And:

In the simplest terms, XDR is an enhanced version of HDR (High Dynamic Range) that extends its benefits.

And:

The key to HDR is having a very high contrast ratio, or the difference between the blackest blacks and the whitest whites that a display can put out. With XDR, Apple has pushed that range even further. The Apple Pro Display XDR can manage 1,000 nits of full-screen, sustained brightness, and a peak of 1,600 nits, resulting in a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio.

My current iPad (the 2018 “education” iPad) is 500 nits. My M1 MacBook Air display is only 400 nits. So the leap to 1,000 nits, with a peak of 1,600 nits is a bit mind-blowing.

There’s a lot more of this in the article. After reading it, makes me want to order the new iPad Pro just to experience this screen in my day-to-day iPad life.

Josh Centers, TidBITS:

tvOS 14.5 has introduced a new feature, called Color Balance, that can automate the process of correcting the colors on your Apple TV.

Note that this changes the video that your Apple TV generates, does not change your TV’s own settings.

The feature is available on all tvOS-compatible Apple TV models: the Apple TV HD, first-generation Apple TV 4K, and the upcoming second-generation Apple TV 4K. However, you need an iPhone that supports Face ID.

And, interestingly:

To get started, update your Apple TV and iPhone to tvOS 14.5 and iOS 14.5, respectively. Color Balance calibration will fail midway if you have HDR enabled, so you’ll want to disable HDR on your Apple TV in Settings > Video and Audio > Format.

Really well done walkthrough, worth exploring.

Kirk McElhearn pulled together a list of things you might want to track with an AirTag. While some might feel obvious, this is worth a scan, just to wrap your head around what’s possible, get you thinking about your own situation.

One thing on the list I did not think of is leaving an AirTag in my car. There’s theft tracking, which is not an Apple recommended use, but there’s finding your car in a crowded parking lot. I’m definitely in on that use case.

Sami Fathi, MacRumors:

Apple says that it will ban and reject apps on the App Store that attempt to offer users monetary incentives to enable tracking through App Tracking Transparency (ATT), one of many measures the company is taking to ensure developers follow through with the new framework.

From Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines:

Don’t offer incentives for granting the request. You can’t offer people compensation for granting their permission, and you can’t withhold functionality or content or make your app unusable until people allow you to track them.

Don’t display a custom message that mirrors the functionality of the system alert. In particular, don’t create a button title that uses “Allow” or similar terms, because people don’t allow anything in a pre-alert screen.

Don’t show an image of the standard alert and modify it in any way.

Don’t draw a visual cue that draws people’s attention to the system alert’s Allow button.

And:

If you display a custom screen that precedes a privacy-related permission request, it must offer only one action, which must display the system alert. Use a word like “Continue” to title the action; don’t use “Allow” or other terms that might make people think they’re granting their permission or performing other actions within your custom screen.

This seems fair. Everything about Apple’s approach to third party App Tracking feels loaded to provide perfect transparency to the user, to prevent an app from misleading the user.

Laura Bradley, Daily Beast:

But it’s not just the Oscars’ notorious default setting of awarding Pixar almost every chance it gets that makes Wolfwalkers’ loss to Soul so upsetting. It’s the fact that Wolfwalkers itself is a masterpiece—an imaginative and heart-rending story made all the more captivating by Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon’s meticulous and full-hearted embrace of its medium.

And:

With every frame, Wolfwalkers becomes more enchanting. The greenery of the forest is a glimmering watercolor wonder—as enchanting as a lovingly illustrated children’s book, and alluring enough to compete with the mysterious allure of any real-life forest. 17th-century woodcuts inspire the walled town’s animation, imparting a militant stiffness.

And:

But on top of its craftsmanship, Wolfwalkers’ story, with its carefully braided themes and folklore, merits recognition in its own right.

As much as I enjoyed Soul, I have to agree with Laura here. Wolfwalkers was a magnificent work, and in my opinion, should have won the top prize. If you’ve not seen it, add it to your list. It’s on my shortlist of the very best of Apple TV+, and of well told stories.

This was a four hour deposition and there’s a lot to read. It starts with 20 pages of redaction, so if you are interesting in exploring, jump to page 26, with the questioning of Phillip Shoemaker, who worked on building the App Store review team.

There’s an interesting nugget on page 29, discussing rules that are arguable:

Q: You also called the rules arguable. What did you mean by that?

A: Well, it’s objectionable material…Porn…I’ll know it when I see it. Those were a lot of the guidelines and you read them, you’ll see that most were written in a gray, a very subjective manner. And developers read them one way…spend time, spend money to build an app and submit it and we reject it because we interpret that line differently.

When they’re arguable, they’re really difficult to enforce and…it breeds a lot of anger, hence, my numerous death threats.

Death threats! Wow, had no idea. And they were numerous.

So much to process in this deposition. Here’s the big breakdown to help you navigate (the page numbers are the numbers at the very bottom of the document viewer, not the page numbers embedded in the document itself):

• Phillip Shoemaker starts on page 26
• Eddy Cue starts on page 49
• The discussion of whether or not to open iMessage on Android is on page 54
• Scott Forstall starts on page 67

Fascinating look behind the scenes at Apple.

Seeking Alpha:

The incentives for this are clear: a reduction of the App Store fee from 30% to 15% or even to 0% would make all of these would-be accusers immensely more profitable. In the case of Tile, Epic and Spotify’s victory would give legal precedent to pile on to the misleading claim that Apple engages in anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior.

And on the punishment of a monopoly:

The Sherman Act imposes criminal penalties of up to $100 million for a corporation and $1 million for an individual, along with up to 10 years in prison. Under federal law, the maximum fine may be increased to twice the amount the conspirators gained from the illegal acts or twice the money lost by the victims of the crime, if either of those amounts is over $100 million.

And:

Apple is not a monopoly. It does not produce necessity goods and it does not force consumers to use its products or the App Store. It does not force developers or competitors to use its products either – Fortnite or Spotify’s offerings do not constitute necessity goods and can be purchased elsewhere – not only through Apple’s App Store. At the end of the day, any company that chooses to sell its products through the App Store has a choice, as does the consumer.

There’s a lot more to this read. Hard to say whether this conclusion is valid, but it is an interesting take.

Also worth a look, the Sherman Antitrust Act Wikipedia page, a deep, deep rabbit hole of information.

Apple:

iOS 14.5 brings exciting new features to iPhone, including the ability to unlock iPhone with Apple Watch while wearing a face mask, more diverse Siri voices, new privacy controls, skin tone options to better represent couples in emoji, and much more. iOS 14.5 builds on the reimagined iPhone experience introduced in iOS 14, and is available today as a free software update.

Here are the major bullet points in Apple’s article:

• Unlock iPhone with Apple Watch
• Siri Enhancements
• More Privacy Controls
• New Emoji
• Report an Incident in Apple Maps

This is followed by a raft of additional features. Take a look, worth knowing what’s new.

Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:

In iOS 14.5 and later, Apple has added a Waze-like feature to its native Maps app that lets you report accidents, hazards, and speed checks along your route when getting directions. Keep reading to learn how it works.

Given that, for me, the vast majority of the time this comes up I am behind the wheel, the simplest (and safest) way to do this is:

“Hey ‌Siri‌, there’s an [accident/hazard/speed check]” and ‌‌Siri‌‌ will send in a report to ‌Apple Maps.

Note that, at least for the moment, this feature is US and China only.

Apple:

Clips, Apple’s easy-to-use video creation app for iPhone and iPad, gives users even more fun options to record captivating videos. With all-new AR Spaces powered by LiDAR on iPhone 12 Pro and iPad Pro models, creators can transform a space by adding immersive visual effects that map to the contours of a room. Recently, there has been increasing buzz around platforms like casino ohne lugas, where seamless experiences and innovative features are becoming more common, much like the advancements in video creation technology. These videos can be easily shared with anyone, making creativity accessible to all.

And:

With AR Spaces in Clips 3.1, users can easily scan a room and see a live preview of effects that bring dynamic lighting, falling objects, and immersive scenes to life. Using the rear camera on a supported iPhone or iPad, users will see effects appear on walls, floors, surfaces, furniture, and objects.

This looks like a lot of fun. Depends on the LiDAR Scanner introduced on last year’s iPad Pro and found on the iPhone 12 Pro as well.

Matthew Panzarino interviewing Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Greg Joswiak and Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus about the new iPad Pro:

Last year’s model is still one of the best computers you can buy, with a densely packed offering of powerful computing tools, battery performance and portability. And this year gets upgrades in the M1 processor, RAM, storage speed, Thunderbolt connection, 5G radio, new ultra wide front camera and its Liquid Retina XDR display.

And:

Apple has essentially ported its enormously good $5,000 Pro Display XDR down to a 12.9” touch version, with some slight improvements. But the specs are flat out incredible. 1,000 nit brightness peaking at 1,600 nits in HDR with 2,500 full array local dimming zones — compared to the Pro Display XDR’s 576 in a much larger scale.

And:

“One of the things that iPad Pro has done as John [Ternus] has talked about is push the envelope. And by pushing the envelope that has created this space for developers to come in and fill it. When we created the very first iPad Pro, there was no Photoshop,” Joswiak notes. “There was no creative apps that could immediately use it. But now there’s so many you can’t count. Because we created that capability, we created that performance — and, by the way sold a fairly massive number of them — which is a pretty good combination for developers to then come in and say, I can take advantage of that. There’s enough customers here and there’s enough performance. I know how to use that. And that’s the same thing we do with each generation. We create more headroom to performance that developers will figure out how to use.

“The customer is in a great spot because they know they’re buying something that’s got some headroom and developers love it.”

And:

“How crazy is it that you can take a chip that’s in a desktop, and drop it into an iPad,” says Joswiak. “I mean it’s just incredible to have that kind of performance at such amazing power efficiency. And then have all the technologies that come with it. To have the neural engine and ISP and Thunderbolt and all these amazing things that come with it, it’s just miles beyond what anybody else is doing.”

The use of the same processor in a smartphone, a tablet, and a desktop is no small things. Intel made a living building custom processors for different enclosures, tuning their chips to get the most performance per watt for each specific device type (Here’s Steve Jobs talking about the origins of this strategy). With Apple’s M1, they’ve flipped this strategy on its head.

“Your battery life is defined by the capacity of your battery and the efficiency of your system right? So we’re always pushing really really hard on the system efficiency and obviously with M1, the team’s done a tremendous job with that. But the display as well. We designed a new mini LED for this display, focusing on efficiency and on package size, obviously, to really to be able to make sure that it could fit into the iPad experience with the iPad experience’s good battery life.

And:

One of the marquee features of the new iPad Pro is its 12MP ultra-wide camera with Center Stage. An auto-centering and cropping video feature designed to make FaceTime calling more human-centric, literally. It finds humans in the frame and centers their faces, keeping them in the frame even if they move, standing and stretching or leaning to the side. It also includes additional people in the frame automatically if they enter the range of the new ultra-wide 12MP front-facing camera. And yes, it also works with other apps like Zoom and Webex and there will be an API for it.

And:

It also goes a long way to masking the awkward horizontal camera placement when using the iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard.

And:

I ask how they would you characterize an iPad Pro vs. a MacBook buyer? Joswiak is quick to respond to this one.

“This is my favorite question because you know, you have one camp of people who believe that the iPad and the Mac are at war with one another right it’s one or the other to the death. And then you have others who are like, no, they’re bringing them together — they’re forcing them into one single platform and there’s a grand conspiracy here,” he says.

“They are at opposite ends of a thought spectrum and the reality is that neither is correct. We pride ourselves in the fact that we work really, really, really hard to have the best products in the respective categories. The Mac is the best personal computer, it just is. Customer satisfaction would indicate that is the case, by a longshot.”

And:

“Contrary to some people’s beliefs, we’re never thinking about what we should not do on an iPad because we don’t want to encroach on Mac or vice versa,” says Ternus. “Our focus is, what is the best way? What is the best iPad we can make what are the best Macs we can make. Some people are going to work across both of them, some people will kind of lean towards one because it better suits their needs and that’s, that’s all good.”

Great interview.

FastCompancy, from the interview with Kaiann Drance, Apple’s VP of worldwide iPhone product marketing, and Ron Huang, senior director of sensing and connectivity:

AirTags don’t rely on an internet connection of their own. Instead, they piggyback off of a network of almost a billion iOS devices and Macs already out in the world. Each AirTag sends out a unique encrypted Bluetooth identifier; other Apple devices can detect it and relay the location of the AirTag directly to an owner’s Apple ID account.

And:

This entire process is end-to-end encrypted so that no one but the owner of the AirTag—not the owners of the crowdsourced devices picking up the AirTag’s location or even Apple itself—ever has access to the AirTag’s current or past location. And the Bluetooth identifiers that AirTags emit are not only randomized but “are rotated many times a day and never reused so that as you travel from place to place with the AirTag, you cannot be re-identified,” Huang says.

And:

The AirTag owner can never see which devices its AirTag’s location is pinging off of or who owns those devices.

And:

Every AirTag has a unique serial number printed on it, but the identity of the owner cannot be derived from that number unless that owner activates the AirTag’s Lost Mode. That’s a toggle in the Find My app that marks your AirTag as lost. Once you’ve toggled that option on, someone who finds your lost AirTag can then scan it with any NFC-equipped device (such as an iPhone or Android phone) to display a web URL prompt on that device. Tapping on the prompt will take the finder of your AirTag to an Apple support page featuring the AirTag’s unique serial number and—if the AirTag owner so chooses—the phone number of the AirTag’s owner so the finder can call or text.

And:

If you’re an iPhone owner running iOS 14.5 or later and someone slips an AirTag into your possession in secret in order to track your movements, your iPhone will warn you this has happened by sending you an “AirTag Found Moving With You” notification. This notification will appear only when an AirTag is following you that is not paired with your Apple ID or another iPhone that is in your vicinity. That distinction is critical so that your iPhone won’t be notified of AirTags that, for instance, belong to other people on the same bus you’re riding.

This whole interview is a riveting read, full of insight into how AirTags work and showing off how much thought Apple put into the privacy and safety aspects. Learned a lot reading this.

Apple:

Apple today announced an acceleration of its US investments, with plans to make new contributions of more than $430 billion and add 20,000 new jobs across the country over the next five years.

And:

As part of its investments and expansion, Apple plans to invest over $1 billion in North Carolina and will begin construction on a new campus and engineering hub in the Research Triangle area. The investment will create at least 3,000 new jobs in machine learning, artificial intelligence, software engineering, and other cutting-edge fields.

Wonder what they’ll call it. Apple Park east? No matter, this is huge news for North Carolina. Wonder if it will have a political impact on the state, long term.

The official full list of nominees in each category, with the winner marked.

I actually enjoyed the show last night, think I actually preferred this more intimate version, thought it was less hokey, felt more inclusive than in past years.

And they definitely shook things up with Glenn Close showing off some moves, switching the big three order around with Best Picture before Best Actors.

Apple:

An immersive, deep-dive rich with archival footage and interviews, “1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything,” will show how the musical icons of the time were influenced by the changing tides of history; and, in turn, how they used their music to inspire hope, change and the culture around them. The docuseries will examine the most iconic artists and songs that we still listen to 50 years later, including The Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye, The Who, Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed and more.

Definitely looking forward to this one. Premieres on Apple TV+ on May 21 (three weeks from Friday).

This is a great post, chock filled with links to things that stuck out to Federico Viticci as notable, all relating to Tuesday’s Apple Event.

My favorite is the Ted Lasso Easter egg, right at the bottom.

And (H/T Keith Kolmos), David Smith made the secret shortbread recipe!

Philip Michaels, Tom’s Guide:

Right now, Tile tops our choice for key finders. But AirTag takes a very different approach from what other trackers have offered before. This AirTag vs. Tile comparison offers a closer look at how Tile has come to dominate the key-finding business, and how Apple figures to change things up.

This is a great side-by-side comparison, really lays out the Tile ecosystem and, to me, makes it clear why Apple’s AirTag is the better solution.

Key to this is Apple’s U1 ultra-wideband chip, which Tile does not have. And, as Kif Leswing points out in this post, Apple also brings a billion iPhones to the game. The combination of ultra-wideband and the ability to enroll in Apple’s “Find My” service makes the choice of AirTag a no-brainer.

Is Apple’s size and market dominance an unfair advantage? Hard to say. But it certainly is an advantage, much as the advantage a large movie studio has over smaller independent studios when it comes to making a special effects laden blockbuster.

Disney:

The Walt Disney Company (DIS) and Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) today announced a multi-year content licensing agreement for U.S. streaming and TV rights to Sony Pictures’ new theatrical releases across Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution’s vast portfolio of platforms including its streaming services Disney+ and Hulu, as well as linear entertainment networks including ABC, Disney Channels, Freeform, FX and National Geographic.

And:

The deal also grants rights to a significant number of SPE’s iconic library titles, ranging from the “Jumanji” and “Hotel Transylvania” franchises to Sony Pictures’ Universe of Marvel Characters films, including Spider-Man.

We should see Spider-Man arriving on Disney+ starting in June. Right now, a search for Spider-Man on Disney+ yields a raft of animated titles, not including Into the Spider-Verse.

Makes me wonder about Apple TV+ and the lack of a superhero franchise. Will this sort of programming make its way to Apple TV+? Will they license this sort of content from elsewhere? Expensive to make, hard to make well. But tentpole product if they can pull it off.