Joe Rossignol, who scooped this, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple on late Friday evening added a “while supplies last” notice to its iMac Pro product page worldwide, and removed all upgrade options for the computer, leaving only the standard configuration available to order for now.

And:

We’ve since confirmed with Apple that when supplies run out, the iMac Pro will no longer be available whatsoever.

As I tweeted when I first read the news, the M1 is a hard reset on the Mac. The leap in performance from Intel to the M1 is just so great, with a massive improvement in battery life as well, the end-of-life of every Intel Mac is writing on the wall.

And if you have thoughts of selling your Intel based Mac, expect less, as a replacement that does more (at least for most models) is relatively inexpensive.

CBC News:

Fatemeh Ghodsi was skeptical at first when she got a text from someone saying they found her phone nearly six months after she lost it in Harrison Lake.

Ghodsi, who lives in Vancouver, was confused and thought one of her friends might be playing a prank on her. But she was soon convinced and made the trip to Chilliwack to collect the phone, which amazingly still works.

Clayton Helkenberg and his wife Heather found the lost iPhone 11 during a sweep of the lake bottom under the water park at Harrison Lake — part of a hobby that includes the odd treasure find, but mostly just lots of garbage clean up.

Amazing that a previous generation iPhone could live under water for 6 months and still work perfectly. That’s a pretty solid waterproof test.

[H/T John Kordyback]

Peter Kafka, Recode:

Here is the straight news headline: Square, the financial services company run by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, is buying Tidal, the streaming music service founded by Jay-Z.

And here is the question you, a normal person, may have about this deal: WTF?

I had that exact reaction. WTF?

Kafaka follows with some speculation that really clicked for me:

It doesn’t take much imagination to come up with Square + Tidal rollouts in the future: A Square-enabled way for artists to sell T-shirts on tour, or even when they’re not on tour, for instance.

Yeah, I do see the fit there, but seems like there’s got to be more oomph there.

More intriguingly, given Dorsey’s love of All Things Blockchain, and the current mania over NFTs, it won’t be surprising to see Square + Tidal work on their own NFT scheme.

And:

So you can picture the Jay-Zs of the world selling songs, or snippets of songs, or the digital version of a lyric scribbled on a napkin, as NFTs, in deals that let Square and the artist get part of the deal.

Boom. This makes so much sense. Are NFT’s a way for digital artists to better capitalize on their work? A backroom bubble, cooked up by billionaires to create new revenue streams? Why can’t it be both?

Apple:

The Apple TV+ comedy sensation “Ted Lasso” triumphed at the 2021 Critics Choice Awards, winning the coveted Best Comedy Series, Best Actor in a Comedy Series for Jason Sudeikis, and Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for Hannah Waddingham, sweeping all categories in which the widely acclaimed series was nominated.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer show.

Here’s a list of all the winners.

Here’s Jason Sudeikis, accepting his award (jump straight to 3:22). Two months ’til season two.

This is a fair amount of work, but I think it’s an excellent learning exercise and you’ll end up with some Terminal experience, an install of Homebrew (a package manager that comes up a lot if you want to install open source stuff), and some info on the health of your Mac’s SSD.

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

The third-generation Apple TV streaming media box continues to lose access to its limited collection of apps, and there’s no replacement product from Apple in the sub $100 part of the market.

Apple released the first 1080p Apple TV set-top box for $99 many, many, many moons ago in 2012. Three years later, Apple dropped the cost to the nice price of $69 before discontinuing it a year and a half later.

The lowest end 4K Apple TV sells for $179. Some other Apple TV+ friendly options:

• Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K sells for $39.99
• Google’s Chromecast with GoogleTV sells for $49.99 ($89.99 with 6 months of Netflix included).

And there are others. Is Apple TV the best privacy option? Sure. But the leap from $40-$50 all the way up to Apple’s $179 cost of entry is a big one. More and more, the Apple TV box feels like a big markup without big benefits.

Streaming TV hardware is being commoditized. Hoping Apple has something stylish and splashy up its sleeves.

Wall Street Journal:

Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry.

The Alphabet Inc. company said Wednesday that it plans next year to stop using or investing in tracking technologies that uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the internet.

The decision, coming from the world’s biggest digital advertising company, could help push the industry away from the use of such individualized tracking, which has come under increasing criticism from privacy advocates and faces scrutiny from regulators.

So much to unpack here. Start with the obvious: This is a good thing.

Google accounted for 52% of last year’s global digital ad spending of $292 billion, according to Jounce Media, a digital ad consultancy.

That 52% is a massive number. Imagine the impact on journalism if you could remove Google and Facebook from the advertising equation. Advertising dollars wouldn’t go away, they would flow to many more places. And journalism would flourish.

“If digital advertising doesn’t evolve to address the growing concerns people have about their privacy and how their personal identity is being used, we risk the future of the free and open web,” David Temkin, the Google product manager leading the change, said in a blog post Wednesday.

Um. Not sure Google is leading the privacy charge there. Just a guess, but Apple’s move to ensure transparency might have something to do with this.

Still, glad to see this. Question is, is this very public move by Google because they have found another path to make sure their ownership of the ad space is secure?

Apple:

Apple TV+ today announced an expansion of its sweeping international slate with a series order for “Dr. Brain,” a new sci-fi thriller based on the widely popular Korean webtoon that will be written and directed by visionary filmmaker Kim Jee-Woon (“A Tale of Two Sisters,” “I Saw the Devil”), and star SAG Award-winner Lee Sun-Kyun (“Parasite”). The series marks the first Korean-language project for Apple TV+.

And:

“Dr. Brain” is an emotional journey that follows a brain scientist who is obsessive about figuring out new technologies to access the consciousness and memories of the brain. His life goes sideways when his family falls victim to a mysterious accident, and he uses his skills to access memories from his wife’s brain to piece together the mystery of what actually happened to his family and why.

On my list. Can’t wait. I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with Apple’s dubbing and subtitling. A good dub makes all the difference if the movie is in a language I don’t speak.

Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:

Apple today added a new “Apple for Kids” portal to its support website, offering parents and guardians a one-stop hub for getting their children set up on Apple’s devices, services, and platforms, and managing their usage.

If you have kids, worth a look. Most interesting to me:

In the U.S., users over 13 can also find links showing them how to update their Apple ID birth date. Apple advises that if a child is under 13 and their ‌Apple ID‌ birth date is wrong, a parent or guardian will need to contact Apple Support on their behalf. The age cut-off for both actions varies by country or region.

If you are setting up an Apple ID, get the age right. Good to know you can fix this, but getting it right in the first place, especially if you are setting this up for someone else, will save hassle down the road.

I know some folks use an incorrect date to allow someone under age to access a service with a minimum age. Pure speculation, but I’m guessing that’s why this page is necessary.

Alex Webb, Bloomberg:

Consider all the paywalls and paid services that are rolling out across the internet. News, films, music and even theatrical streaming are now available for a subscription fee. The latest example is Twitter Inc., which announced last week that it plans a paid product, dubbed “Super Follows,” where users can charge followers for “premium” tweets and other content.

Why is this?

The move is a way for the company to decrease its dependence on advertising revenue — a pot of money that’s increasingly being swallowed up by just Google and Facebook.

Not sure I agree that subscriptions are caused by the precipitous drop in advertising revenue, but I definitely agree with the premise that the drying up of ad revenue is caused by the success of Google and Facebook in swallowing up the lion’s share of the ad business.

In the past decade, however, that ad money has gone overwhelmingly to the search and social media giants. Last year, Google and Facebook hoovered up 74% of the $300 billion spent globally to advertise on the web, according to the World Advertising Research Council. That’s left everyone else who had been reliant on ads scrambling to make ends meet.

And that is harmful. It makes it harder and harder for indies to make a living, makes it harder for news outlets to cover the news objectively.

Not sure what can be done here, but something’s gotta give, or we’re all going to become plot lines in a future edition of Dark Mirror.

SpeedCheck:

The data collected from 1 October 2020 to 31 December 2020 by our speed test , which measures the quality of Internet connections on millions of devices yearly, shows that 5G networks in the US did not deliver the super cellular connections that we were promised.

And:

5G download speeds across the country were only 2.7 times faster than 4G speeds. These real-world results pale in comparison with the promise of a hundred times faster connections. In some cases, 5G was even slower than 4G.

Three main reasons:

In every country around the world that has launched 5G – except the US – the C-band frequencies (that is airwaves between 3.4GHz and 4.2GHz) are at the very heart of the new technology, as they offer a great combination of good coverage and high-speed connections. In the US, most of the spectrum available in the C-band (280MHz) was not auctioned until January this year, forcing the major carriers to rely heavily on lower frequencies, which work over long distances but deliver slow speeds, or higher frequencies (mmWave), which carry far larger amount of data but on short-range signals.

And:

When the US deemed [Chinese-owned] Huawei a national security risk, it caused many 5G deployments to be put on hold. Operators then had to take big steps backward and choose other suppliers for their network equipment, in a move that delayed the commercial launch of 5G in the country.

And:

The majority of the initial 5G deployments in the US were Non-Stand-Alone (NSA), meaning that the new networks were aided by existing 4G infrastructures. On NSA deployments, LTE-controlled communications shift to 5G only when a device wants to exchange, resulting in a 4G-like user experience.

A great read.

[Via 9to5Mac]

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

Apple will retain the Lightning connector on the iPhone for the “foreseeable future,” with no intention of switching to USB-C, according to reliable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

Getting a bit of whiplash here, from rumored moves to USB-C, to no port at all, and now back to square one. Take it all with a grain of salt.

OK, this might be seem the dumbest of questions, but it shows there’s an audience out there, beyond the Apple ecosystem.

The fact that this linked article exists tells us something about the wild success of Ted Lasso. There’s demand out there for an Apple TV+ product that is driven, not from the “free year” for Apple device buyers, but from the outside, from word of mouth appreciation of Ted Lasso itself.

I think this outside pull is a great sign for the potential of Apple TV+.

Robin Harris, ZDNet:

The impressive performance and battery life gains of the new M1 MacBooks have created a historic discontinuity in the normally placid resale market. Should you spend $800 for a one year old MacBook Air when for $200 more you could get a MacBook Air with several times the performance and 50 percent better battery life?

Can’t imagine the new M1 Macs aren’t cratering the used Mac market. That said, this is a once in a generation event. The M1 is a huge performance leap, one we haven’t seen in a long time, and the market shearing effect is the cost of that leap.

Dustin Curtis:

About ten days ago, when I went to update a few apps in the App Store on my Mac, I was met with a curious error.

The post shows an “Account Disabled” alert.

The internet is filled with stories from people whose Google accounts were locked for unexplained reasons, causing them to lose all of their data, including years of email, so I was somewhat concerned. But I’d never heard of similar cases involving Apple’s services, and I wouldn’t expect such behavior from a customer-focused company like Apple, so I figured it was a glitch and made a mental note to try again later.

The next day, Music.app stopped working.

This is definitely alarming. At the very least, it demonstrates how much we’ve grown to depend on the cloud and on those monthly fees we spend to rent storage.

Read the post. In a nutshell, this was about changing bank info and Apple Card no longer having a valid billing mechanism. Is this Apple policy? Or was this a one-off falling through the cracks kind of mistake, one we won’t see again?

No matter, this should be a wake-up call. Do you have a backup plan if your Apple ID suddenly stopped doing its cloud thing?

And to be clear, I think I am less concerned that Apple disabled Dustin’s account as I am that it took so long to address the issue. If the call to Apple customer support had made the issue clear immediately, a couple of clicks would have resolved this. As is, and if true, looks like the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing.

Reuters:

> In October 2020, Miami-based art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile spent almost $67,000 on a 10-second video artwork that he could have watched for free online. Last week, he sold it for $6.6 million.

And:

> The video by digital artist Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, was authenticated by blockchain, which serves as a digital signature to certify who owns it and that it is the original work. > > It’s a new type of digital asset – known as a non-fungible token (NFT) – that has exploded in popularity during the pandemic as enthusiasts and investors scramble to spend enormous sums of money on items that only exist online.

NFTs are exploding. Question is, is this a bubble, rapidly expanding, but without a tangible support structure to keep prices high over the long haul?

And will the climate-cost of powering digital currency mining undermine the market?

Elizabeth Howcroft and Ritvik Carvalho do an excellent job explaining NFTs, with some high flying examples. Aside from NFTs, a service like doge unblocker, known for its innovative approach to bypassing online restrictions, can also be leveraged to generate income through various channels. For instance, it can be employed to access restricted markets and services, enabling users to capitalize on global trading opportunities or niche content platforms otherwise inaccessible. By utilizing Doge Unblocker to reach these areas, users can engage in lucrative online ventures such as affiliate marketing, content creation, or digital consulting. Additionally, its ability to navigate geo-restrictions allows users to offer specialized access or services to clients seeking to bypass regional barriers, thus creating additional revenue streams.

Is this the future of collectibles?

Dan Moren, Macworld:

Once you’ve found a way to show a user this mix of real and digital content, one of the big questions is how you interact with all this information. Is it via traditional input methods, like trackpads and keyboards? With cameras that detect where your hands go and when they’re interacting with real or virtual objects? A system that tracks the movements of your eyes? Or is it some other sort of physical controller that lets you seamlessly switch between the world in front of you and the one on your displays?

Dan’s whole writeup is fascinating, raises important questions on how Apple might see the future of augmented reality. Will Apple keep existing models, like documents and a desktop, so creators can mix their AR world with the creative tools on their Macs and iPads?

Or will Apple move to a new universe, take the opportunity to reinvent the creation language completely, without relying on old models for creating new content.

Great read.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

The report explains that the NFL is on the verge of having to renew “most if not all of its media contracts.” While it appears that the Monday Night Football package is likely to remain with ESPN, there are other deals to consider, including NFL Sunday Ticket and Thursday Night Football.

A critical piece of background here: DirecTV (now owned by AT&T) paid about $1.5 billion (with a B) a year for the rights to stream NFL games on Sundays. They are not expected to renew that deal, which expires at the end of this coming NFL season.

The door is wide open for Apple to add the NFL to Apple TV+, which could bring a huge audience to the service. Apple’s interest in adding the NFL has been rumored for years.

Apple was also said to have been involved in negotiations with the NFL for Thursday Night Football in 2016. Ultimately, the NFL ended up reaching a deal with Amazon, which was renewed for two more seasons in 2018 for a whopping $130 million.

Big money. Very interested to see how this plays out.

The NFL’s Sunday Ticket package has not been on the market for more than 15 years. Though the NFL audience has grown significantly since then, that same time has seen pushback on the game, due to raised awareness of the longterm impact of head injuries, social issues (think Colin Kaepernick and kneeling in protest), physical violence, and other issues. Have to wonder how those issues will impact Apple’s involvement with the sport.

Michael Steeber, 9to5Mac:

Every Apple Store in the United States is open for the first time in nearly a year. It was 353 days ago — March 13, 2020 — that Apple closed all of its retail stores outside of Greater China.

While some Apple Stores offer in-store shopping appointments and others can accept Express pickup of online orders only, all 270 US locations are now open in some capacity as of March 1, 2021. Apple Stores in Texas around Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio were the last to reopen today.

Dare I hope that this is the last of these Apple Store forced closures?

Add to this news today’s rollout of the new Johnson & Johnson one-shot-and-you’re-done vaccine, and I feel like this never-ending nightmare might actually be coming to a close.

Chaim Gartenberg, The Verge:

Even over half a decade after its introduction, it stands as one of the most reviled pieces of hardware around.

The failings of the Apple TV remote don’t just stem from a bad touchpad (and don’t get me wrong: it is bad) but from a larger misunderstanding on Apple’s part of what makes a good remote and the fundamental purpose of those devices.

Amazing to me that Apple has stuck with this design after all this time. I do appreciate the elegance of the solution, but the functionality continues to fall short and fail, both in its accidental upsidedownness, and in the frequent miscues of the touchpad.

With the explosive growth of new streaming services, I’m finding problems with the remote growing proportionately, as different services offer their own special spin on interacting with the remote. This is especially problematic watching shows that force ads into a stream, where an accidental wrong remote press can force you to endure a replay of a non-skippable full minute of ads.

I really hope there’s a new Apple TV in the works, and a redesigned remote along with it.

OK, this is silly, but fun and worth trying. Best on your Mac, but even works on your iPhone/iPad, as long as you keep your finger on the screen.

Clubhouse is an iPhone only app. Think about that. Gates was using an iPhone to explain why he prefers Android.

TVLine:

That son of a biscuit actually did it! Titular Ted Lasso star Jason Sudeikis scored Best Actor in a Comedy Series honors at Sunday’s 78th Annual Golden Globe Awards for his work in the Apple TV+ comedy.

That son-of-a-biscuit!

Best part of the night, for me, was Jason’s acceptance speech, embedded below. Everything about this felt so 2021.

Melissa Repko, CNBC:

Target wants to give shoppers another reason to skip trips to the mall: It’s adding mini Apple stores to some locations, with more space devoted to iPhones and other popular gadgets.

The retailer said Thursday that the shops will open in 17 Target stores this month, and it plans to expand to more locations in the fall. Target already sells Apple merchandise, but the shops will double the tech company’s footprint inside of each store, include more accessories and have staff with specialized training from Apple.

Interesting experiment, reminiscent of Apple’s BestBuy partnership.

Also, take a look at Apple’s new Target web site presence.