Chicago Tribune:

Six people from New York state have been charged in “an organized criminal enterprise” during which fraudulent transactions allegedly were attempted at an Apple store in Deer Park, according to Lake County authorities.

The sheriff’s office obtained information last week that the enterprise was attempting to make fraudulent purchases at various Apple stores in the Chicago area, according to a news release from the sheriff’s office. Further investigation revealed the suspects were using stolen identities and stolen credit card numbers of victims throughout the country to make the purchases, police said.

Christopher Covelli, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, said the suspects would fly into O’Hare International Airport, rent a car and go to Apple stores to attempt to make purchases.

I do a lot of long drives, and over time, have made the shift to Apple Maps. Apple Maps has made obvious, continuous improvements since its rollout and it serves me well. I made a long trek this weekend and was pleased when Apple Maps weighed in, mid-route, with a suggested alternate route to save me time due to an accident ahead.

Accepting this new guidance took a single tap and the new route got me there faster. How do I know? Because Apple Maps shows me my expected arrival time, and with the new route, that expected arrival time changed. And proved accurate.

Add the Apple Watch to this mix. I love the fact that as I drive, I get steadily updated turn by turn directions on my Apple Watch, with haptic taps on my wrist to remind me of upcoming turns.

Apple Maps does a terrific job of getting me where I need to go.

Is this new version of Google Maps better? Here’s an experiment to try. Go to the announcement page, then scroll down to the video that shows off the interface. Use Apple Maps to head over to Oakland, California, then follow the video as it zooms in to the Rockridge area. Zoom in as the video zooms in, eventually revealing places of interest on College Ave, south of Route 24.

What do you think? Which shows more, Google Maps or Apple Maps? Is one noticeably better than the other? If anything, I’d say that Google Maps is catching up to Apple Maps, where it used to be the other way around.

I’m glad to see these improvements to Google Maps, good to have an alternative. But it was definitely enlightening to see them side by side. As always, give this a try, judge for yourself.

Nicholas Windsor Howard shares his thoughts on what he perceives as a decline of the OS X interface. There’s a lot to process here, a reasoned, well thought out essay.

Just a taste:

In Apple’s view, an icon depicting a camera and a photo was too literal for an application that handles photos. Therefore, when iPhoto gave way to its replacement in 2015—Photos—the previous carefully-rendered icon gave way to this bland, meaningless rainbow abstraction.

Is the move from the obvious to the minimalistically abstract a step up? A step down? Read this, decide for yourself.

If you are interested in Apple’s upcoming earnings call, spend a few minutes looking through these Above Avalon charts, which lay out the numbers, making it easy to see the numbers Apple needs to hit to meet expectations.

Terrific job by Neil Cybart pulling these together.

You can listen in on Apple’s official earnings call page.

From the Celebration Apple 1 auction site:

The “Celebration” Apple-1 is an original Apple-1 pre-NTI board that has many unique features, period correct power supply, original Apple-1 ACI cassette board (also populated with Robinson Nugent sockets), early Apple-1 BASIC cassettes, original marketing material, and the most complete documentation set of the known Apple-1 boards.

The “Celebration” Apple-1 is extremely rare not only because of the scarcity of Apple-1 computers, but according to Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, no known PCB boards of this type were ever sold to the public. At this time, this is the only known Apple-1 to show the signs of starting out as a blank original-run board and not part of the two known production runs, so this board appears to be unique from all other known Apple-1 boards.

The “Celebration” Apple-1 was authenticated by Apple Expert and Historian, Corey Cohen. Mr. Cohen believes The “Celebration” Apple-1 has the potential to be “powered up” with minor restoration, but has recommended against it to maintain the board’s unique configuration.

The Apple-1 Computer is considered the origin of the personal computer revolution and was built in Steve Jobs’ parents’ home on Crist Drive in Los Altos, CA. 200 were hand-built by Steve Wozniak, but it is believed that less than 60 are still in existence.

If you bid on this, please let me know. The current bid is US$270,000.

The world’s biggest online retailer, which has laid out plans to start using drones for deliveries by 2017, said a cross-government team supported by the UK Civil Aviation Authority had provided it with the permissions necessary to explore the process.

I just don’t know about this whole thing.

ExploreCams:

This infographic assembled by Explorecams meta-data, to collect and analyze 6,657,180 photos from year 2016 which have been posted on an assortment of websites, including Flickr, 500px and Pixabay, with ExifTool technology.

Interesting look at what cameras are popular among the millions and millions of photos the company has looked at. You can also check out the most popular lenses and camera settings.

Recently, there has been a virtual tsunami of articles about the so-called hidden dangers of using the Pokémon GO app. The vast majority of them concern potential violations of the privacy rights of both consumers and landmark-owners. The media’s Chicken Little-like take on this is that augmented reality apps are opening the door to a dystopian future.

However, what has not been widely discussed is the impact of all this on the developers of augmented reality apps.

There are so many things to consider, it’s almost mind boggling.

Dan Frakes:

I’ve long recommended creating a bootable installer drive—on an external hard drive, thumb drive, or USB stick—for the version of OS X you’re running on your Mac. It’s great for installing the OS on multiple Macs, because you don’t have to download the ~5GB installer onto each computer, and it serves as a handy emergency disk if your Mac is experiencing problems.

Dan takes you through all the steps using Terminal.

Ars Technica:

Verizon has confirmed earlier reports that it will buy ailing Internet pioneer Yahoo in an all-cash deal with a price tag of nearly £3.7 billion ($4.8 billion).

The sale doesn’t include Yahoo’s shares in Alibaba, Verizon said. Yahoo’s Japan shares, its non-core patents, and minority investments are also set to be cut loose from the planned takeover.

Yahoo will be thrown into the mix with AOL—also a faded Internet star that burned brightly in the ’90s.

It’s been a long slow decline for Yahoo but the CEO who presided over it will make out like a bandit to the tune of a quarter billion dollars in salary and bonuses during her tenure. Personally, my biggest question will be what will happen to Flickr, the popular but also fading photo sharing service.

Many people suffer from depression—some people are in so deep, they don’t even know it. Sometimes it takes strong people like Robert Macmillan telling their story to make you realize that you’re not alone. If you know someone suffering from depression, help them.

There are many of us—errr, people—who build stuff with Legos at all ages. Having grown up with loads of hand-me-down Legos (and having a Lego Wall-E sitting on my desk right now), I started to wonder how Legos evolved from the sets I remember from my childhood to what they are today.

Everyone loves Lego.

[Via Coudal]

Bob Mansfield had stepped back from a day-to-day role at the company a few years ago, after leading the hardware engineering development of products including the MacBook Air laptop computer, the iMac desktop computer, and the iPad tablet. Apple now has Mr. Mansfield running the company’s secret autonomous, electric-vehicle initiative, code-named Project Titan, the people said.

Mansfield is a very smart guy and is well respected inside and outside of Apple.

Chuck La Tournous:

I’ll begin this story the same way I began the phone call to my wife: “I’m OK, but…”

I’ve known Chuck for a long and he’s a friend. I’m glad you’re okay!

This is the story about the ten levels John Hanke had to achieve in his life in order to create Pokémon Go.

Here are the first four levels:

1st Level up: In 1996, while still a student, John co-created the very first MMO (massively multiplayer online game) called ‘Meridian 59’. He sold the game to 3DO to move on to a bigger passion: mapping the world.

2nd Level up: In 2000, John launched ‘Keyhole’ to come up with a way to link maps with aerial photography, and create the first online, GPS-linked 3D aerial map of the world.

3rd Level up: In 2004, Google bought Keyhole and with John’s help, turned Keyhole into what is now ‘Google Earth’. That’s when John decided to focus at creating GPS-based games.

4th Level up: John ran the Google Geo team from 2004 to 2010, creating Google Maps and Google Street View. During this time, he collected the team that would later create Pokémon Go.

Read the rest. Interesting to watch this all unfold.

Dan Moren takes you on a detailed tour of iOS 10 Messages. Good stuff.

Jean-Louis Gassée, writing for Monday Note:

In the old days, circuits were prototyped by hand using a primitive breadboard. After the circuit was debugged and pronounced fit, it was translated into masks for printed circuit boards.

As integrated circuits grew to comprise thousands and then millions of logic elements, breadboards were virtualized: The circuit-to-be was designed on a computer, just as we model a building using architectural Computer Assisted Design (CAD).

A multibillion industry of software modules that could be plugged into one’s own circuit specifications soon emerged. Companies such as Synopsys, Cadence, and Mentor Graphics offered circuit design tools, and an ecosystem of third-party developers offered complementary libraries for graphics, networking, sensors… The end result is a System On a Chip (SOC) that’s sent off to semiconductor manufacturing companies commonly called foundries.

This was the fertile ground on which ARM has prospered. ARM-based chips aren’t simply more efficient and cheaper than Intel’s x86 designs, they’re customizable: They can be tuned to fit the client’s project.

And this on Intel’s reaction to ARM:

Intel didn’t get it. “Just you wait!” the company insisted, “Our superior semiconductor manufacturing process will negate ARM’s thriftier power consumption and production costs!” But that opportunity has passed. Intel miscalculated the iPhone, failed to gain any traction in the Android market, and had to resort to bribing (er…incentivizing) tablet manufacturers to use their low-end Atom processors. Earlier this year, they threw in the towel on mobile and are now focused on PCs and Cloud data centers.

Great post.

Smithsonian Institution:

To mark the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon-landing mission, the Smithsonian has made available a high-resolution 3-D scan of the command module “Columbia,” the spacecraft that carried astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon. This highly detailed model allows anyone with an internet connection to explore the entire craft including its intricate interior, which is not possible when viewing the artifact in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. The Smithsonian is also making the data files of the model available for download so it can be 3-D printed or viewed with virtual-reality goggles.

This 3D re-creation of the Command Module is really cool, if terrifyingly analog. Click on the globe icon in the upper left to get a walkthrough of the various aspects of the module.

Cool Material:

Who wouldn’t want to own a car that turns more heads than a bikini car wash? Maybe these guys have only driven used jalopies and don’t know anything else. Well, these are the cars they should know. These are the 15 Classic Cars That Define Cool.

There’s no doubt I’d give up body parts to own about half of the cars on this list (that 1969 Ferrari Dino 246 GT is sex on wheels) but it’s odd there are none from after 1970. Were there no “cool” cars made after 1970 (leaving aside the definition of “classic” car?

Vulture:

San Diego Comic-Con is sadly coming to an end, ladies and gentlemen. But don’t frown because it’s over, smile because it happened, and also smile because Comic-Con brought with it the release of a solid amount of trailers for some of the most hotly-anticipated films of 2016 and 2017.

I have no interest in attending a Comic-Con but I love all the sneak peeks and trailers that come out of the show. I’m most looking forward to Suicide Squad but I think the PG13 rating means it won’t be as much “fun” as Deadpool was for me.

Law enforcement agents had seen a YouTube demonstration of a technique developed by Jain’s lab which could transform fingerprint scans into fake fingertips that could fool the sensors on smartphones.

You certainly can’t blame law enforcement for using every trick they can.

There is no doubt that Musk is a very smart man. He went way out on a limb building the things he has over the last decade and he’s succeeded.

Two youths unaware of their surroundings when they were playing Pokemon GO on their cell phones made an illegal border crossing this week from Canada into the United States in a remote part of Montana, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said.

The weirdness goes on.

Om Malik:

As an avid reader, I am often amazed how much of our written materials are about the past (or the near past) and the future (and the near future) but never about the present. Is present too boring? Or is too real? Or is it too incomplete to merit a careful and long deliberation.

That’s an interesting point. I hadn’t really considered that before.

It’s really interesting that they retain knowledge of the people in these experiments, and reacted to other crows and predators, but not pigeons.

Inside the Wilson tennis ball factory. I also find these things fascinating.

iMore:

I know many super smart folks, folks who aren’t remotely Apple fanboys like Steven Sinofsky, who barely use their Macs (or Surface) but do use an iPad Pro.

I’m using my iPad Pro as my primary computer as well, and almost everyone I’ve shown it to has bought one. Yep, bought one … or tried to steal mine. Clearly, there are a lot of people who would buy an iPad.

So why aren’t the sales higher? I think iPad is suffering from the “TiVo paradox.”

This is one of the reasons why Apple created the retail stores – so customers could go in and try out the hardware and software. One of the downsides of devices like the iPad is they are “nice to have” not “I need that”. So the buying experience has to be experiential – that is, you have to try it before you buy it.