This is just super fun. Follow the headline link, scroll through the list of cities, pick one, and you’re instantly driving around the city.

If sound is on, turn on street noise and click through the local radio stations. So great!

Jason Snell:

One of its most colossal flops, the Power Mac G4 Cube, was famously put “on ice” rather than retired, in a press release that fantasized that it might eventually return.

And:

Considering that pride, what happens when the company decides that many of the decisions it made a few years earlier were mistakes, actually? What does it look like when Apple makes a strategic retreat?

It feels like we’re about to find out.

And:

So here we are in early 2021, with a strong possibility that Apple is about to undo most of the big changes it made to the MacBook. The Touch Bar is rumored to be a goner, MagSafe is reportedly returning, and Apple may be adding other I/O—HDMI? an SD card slot?—to the MacBook Pro as well.

A very interesting look at Apple’s history of handling product retreats. Will we see the return of MagSafe for Mac? Will non-USB-C ports return to the high-end MacBook line? Will a new generation of M1 make its debut at this year’s WWDC? Good times for the Mac.

Gambling Industry News:

Apple faces a new $5m class action lawsuit filed by a group of over 100 social casino game players, many whom are fans of Canada sports betting apps. This is the second lawsuit of its kind filed against Apple so far this year, however, this particular lawsuit is focused on Zynga’s poker and casino apps.

The lawsuit was filed in US District Court for the Northern District of Columbia and alleges that Apple is making a profit from illicit gambling apps that have in-game purchases.

Lots of lawsuits filed against Apple. This one struck me as particularly interesting in that it attempts to pierce Apple’s App Store protections, protections that shield Apple as a vendor of goods, not a creator of those goods.

If they lose this lawsuit, will that open a liability crack for those scam subscription apps that make their way into the App Store?

YouTube blog:

Every year, increasing numbers of people come to YouTube to launch their own channel. But we know there’s still a huge amount of people who find the bar for creation too high. That’s why we’re working on Shorts, our new short-form video tool that lets creators and artists shoot snappy videos with nothing but their mobile phones.

Here’s a link to the Shorts blog announcement from last September.

Back to the YouTube blog:

Currently, Shorts is available in beta in India. Since the beginning of December, the number of Indian channels using Shorts creation tools has more than tripled, and the YouTube Shorts player is now receiving more than 3.5 billion daily views globally. In the coming weeks, we’ll begin expanding the beta to the US, unlocking our tools to even more creators so they can get started with Shorts.

3.5 billion daily views. That’s no small competitor for TikTok. Especially considering Shorts is an India-only beta.

Follow the headline link for the full list, or this link to get right to the decade old Apple front page.

Just me, or did Apple use to have much more focus on beautifully manicured hands?

This is fun. In the latest iOS beta, fire up Music and bring up a song’s lyrics. You can tap to select multiple chunks (here’s a tweet with a couple of screen grabs from my explorations), then use the share interface to send the lyrics on your favorite social media.

Even better, check this out:

You can also select multiple lines of text from the special share lyrics screen and create longer cards for Instagram/iMessage. (Up to 5 lines.) This is really well done. pic.twitter.com/Z8VFOpe6iZ

— Federico Viticci (@viticci) February 17, 2021

If you share on Messages/Insta, a playable version of the song centered on those lyrics will appear on the receiving end, assuming the recipient has the latest beta.

Love this.

Gruber:

I’d like to think that no one has made more hay over Ed Colligan’s infamous “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in” quote — just a few weeks before the unveiling of the iPhone — than yours truly.

Absolutely fair.

So I feel like I’m in a position to declare that these remarks by Herbert Diess are not an Ed Colligan moment. Ed Colligan, as the CEO of Palm, should have known that in 2006, the future of phones was gadget-like computers, not the computer-like gadgets the industry (including Palm) had been making until then.

And:

Apple hasn’t shown anything that suggests they’ll be good at designing and producing cars. The dashboard interface? Sure. But the car part of the car? Nothing Apple has ever done is like that. I’m not betting against them, but I don’t think Diess’s remarks are the least bit clueless.

Also fair. To me, complex as the car market is, if Apple does dive in, I’d suggest that all these years of rumored behind the scenes learning will emerge as a brand new take, unlike anything that already exists.

If you are interested in a potential Apple car, take a few minutes to read Gruber’s post. My favorite bit is his quote of this Robert Cassidy tweet:

Apple doesn’t do overnight. They walk into your market, and a few years in you realize they’ve quietly redefined your market and now you’re years behind.

That’s the part that VW should be afraid of.

Take a look at the new emoji coming with iOS 14.5.

Two notable highlights:

• The blood is removed from the syringe emoji, making it more representative of vaccines
• The headphone emoji moves from a more generic headphone to a very specific AirPods Max

One thing I find interesting about moments of emoji change is that if I text, say, a headphone emoji from the new beta and you receive it on the latest public iOS release, you’ll see the old headphones even though I sent the AirPods Max.

If you are interested in the history of Apple emoji, you might enjoy Emojipedia’s Who Created The Original Apple Emoji Set?

Follow the headline link, click the play button, then make your way around the planet checking out all the radio stations.

I’m currently in La Paz, Bolivia, listening to Radio Cumbia. Radio Garden is a great little rabbit hole.

John Voorhees, MacStories, digs into a new game from the creator of The Oatmeal.

If you are a fan of The Oatmeal, read the review, take the game for a spin. The onboarding and the artwork alone are worth the download. It’s free to try, in-app purchase if you like the game, want to take it further.

You can immerse yourself in the official Oatmeal game page, or watch the video embedded below to get a sense of the game mechanic. It’s whimsical as hell.

Take a look at the video embedded below. Obviously, the concept is designed to work with some form of Apple AR glasses.

Need some extra screen real estate? No problem with AR glasses!#xcode #arkit #apple #AugmentedReality #appleglass pic.twitter.com/fsYhxdtHTR

— Dominik Hofacker (@domhofdesign) February 10, 2021

Makes me wonder about the future of devices with screens, if Apple glasses ship and gain enough traction to become widely used. The glasses themselves are screens. Presumably, in addition to adding overlays to real life and existing screens, they could implement the Mac or iPad screen in the glasses interface, no need for the hardware at all, beyond the glasses themselves.

I can also imagine a future with contact lenses, so all the AR is built right into your eye coverings. And, ultimately, Apple Eyes, Apple Eyes Pro, and Apple Eyes Pro Max.

If you are a fan of Ted Lasso, you might enjoy the linked review by Sara Stewart. And if you’re still not on board, do read the review. It does a great job capturing the magic that is Ted Lasso.

A taste:

The Apple TV sitcom, which arrived last summer, is a mental health stealth bomb. Dressed up as a sports comedy, it espouses a philosophy that’s hilariously antithetical to that genre: The notion that being a decent person, and treating other people with respect, is more important than who scored the most goals.

And:

While the character of Ted presents as unapologetically square, his origins are a little trippy: the show, Sudeikis has said, “grew from conversations he and Hunt had walking the streets of Amsterdam on mushrooms.” The experience stuck with Sudeikis, who name-checked the Michael Pollan book “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence” on Brown’s podcast. He and Hunt started writing the pilot shortly after Pollan’s book came out. “Ted is, in a … way, like mushrooms,” said Sudeikis. “He is egoless.”

Indeed. Production of Season 2 is underway.

EFF:

Almost one year after EFF called on Amazon’s surveillance doorbell company Ring to encrypt footage end-to-end, it appears they are starting to make this necessary change. This call was a response to a number of problematic and potentially harmful incidents, including larger concerns about Ring’s security and reports that employees were fired for watching customers’ videos.

And:

Videos taken by the Ring device for either streaming or later viewing are end-to-end encrypted such that only mobile devices you authorize can view them.

And:

Ring now has over a thousand partnerships with police departments across the country that allow law enforcement to request, with a single click, footage from Ring users. When police are investigating a crime, they can click and drag on a map in the police portal and automatically generate a request email for footage from every Ring user within that designated area.

The addition of one-to-end encryption adds another layer of protection to this model, presumably requiring a warrant to access your footage.

Read about the encryption model in this Amazon white paper.

If you own a Ring doorbell, here’s a link to Amazon’s instructions on enabling end-to-end encryption.

If you are in the market for a HomeKit video doorbell, check out this review of the Logitech Circle View doorbell. Still early days for HomeKit doorbells.

Sami Fathi, MacRumors:

During a 2018 interview in the midst of Facebook’s notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal, Cook was asked how he would lead Apple if it were to face a similar crisis. Cook responded by ruling the hypothetical situation out of the question, saying Apple would not be in the situation Facebook was in, thanks to its differing stance on privacy and user data. Zuckerberg shot back, calling Cook’s comments on TV “extremely glib” and “not at all aligned with the truth.”

If you had to pick between Apple and Facebook, which would you say is “not at all aligned with the truth.”

Back to the post:

Zuckerberg, outraged by Cook’s comments and public influence on Facebook’s reputation, reportedly told internal aides and team members that Facebook needs to “inflict pain” on Apple, according to sources who spoke on anonymity to The Wall Street Journal.

And:

Facebook is reportedly planning to take its disapproval with Apple to court, as it’s allegedly been preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against the Cupertino-based tech company over its “unfair” approach to privacy with ATT and iMessage. As part of its lawsuit, Facebook is considering partnering with other companies such as Epic Games, which is already embroiled in a massive legal battle with Apple, to propel its antitrust case forward.

Here’s a link to the paywalled Wall Street Journal post.

It is amazing to me how Apple’s efforts to promote transparency are being weaponized against it. To me, good for consumers trumps bad for business.

A dungeon crawler, best played on the Mac. Hat tip to John Kordyback.

This really takes me back. Back to my Unix sysadmin days, when I would while away the hours playing the original dungeon-crawler, Rogue, and the 3D multi-player, Maze War.

OK, so I’ve mixed two things together in that headline. But still.

From Reuters:

Germany’s Volkswagen is not concerned by any Apple plans for a passenger vehicle that could include the iPhone maker’s battery technology, its chief executive Herbert Diess said.

And:

“The car industry is not a typical tech-sector that you could take over at a single stroke,” Diess was quoted as saying an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

“Apple will not manage that overnight,” he added.

Of course, the headline referred to the mother of all Claim Chowder, this Daring Fireball post from 2006, where Palm CEO Ed Colligan famously addressed the upstart iPhone’s entry into the smartphone space. Worth a re-read.

Not counting the two Steves, any guess as to the name of Apple’s employee number one? Follow the headline link for the answer and an interview from back in 2016.

And for a fun little rabbit hole, follow this link, which will take you to a list of other interviews from the Hacker News Employee #1 series, including interviews with folks from Amazon, Tumblr, and Airbnb.

From the uncanny valley Wikipedia page:

In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object’s resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object. The concept suggests that humanoid objects which imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers.

In a nutshell, fake people that are close to real, but still clearly fake, are creepy.

Watch the video embedded below. This is remarkable work. For me at least, the uncanny valley has been crossed. But that said, this terrifies me as much as it fascinates. Yet another sign of the deepfakes to come.

Sami Fathi, MacRumors:

Starting with iOS and iPadOS 14.5, Apple will proxy Google’s “Safe Browsing” service used in Safari through its own servers instead of relying on Google as a way to limit which personal data Google sees about users.

And:

Apple relies on Google’s “Safe Browsing,” a database/blocklist of websites crawled by Google of websites that it deems to be suspected phishing or scam.

And:

While Google doesn’t know which specific URL you’re trying to visit, it may collect your IP address during its interaction with Safari. Now on iOS/iPadOS 14.5, that’s no longer the case. As confirmed by the Head of Engineering for WebKit, Apple will now proxy Google’s Safe Browsing feature through its own servers instead of Google as a way to “limit the risk of information leak.”

Good move.

Give it a try. It has the acronyms you expect, like NAFTA, NASA, and SCUBA, but it’s also a good place to turn when you encounter IIRC or SMH.

Ben Bajarin:

Helping Intel stay in the semiconductor manufacturing game should be among one of the highest priorities for all US-based technology companies. While TSMC is the leader in manufacturing process technology, they remain a geo-political risk should China decide to enforce its will on the region. Samsung is not far behind, but being a Korean company, again, future politics guarantee no safe bets.

And:

I don’t want to dismiss the technological achievement of TSMC by being the first foundry to 7nm, 5nm, and likely the first to 3nm. Anyone who knows transistor designs knows how hard it is, at a micro level, to keep shrinking silicon. However, Apple helped make it easier for TSMC to justify the RND and CapEx costs and to continually invest in leading-edge process technology by being their largest customer, always committing to the latest node. I am not convinced TSMC would have the clear lead they do in process tech without Apple.

Most importantly:

Having a leading semiconductor company founded and based in the US is incredibly strategic given how critical semiconductors are to our digital future. Apple may be one of the only companies that can help Intel right the ship.

This seems a perfect match for Apple. Political gains by bringing more technology leadership and high-tech jobs to the US. A joint venture that helps ensure processors on demand to keep their supply chain healthy.

So you’ve watched all the episodes, and you’re jonesing for some Ted Lasso goodness.

Here ya go. Sound on, hit play…

i made a Ted Lasso intro in the style of F.R.I.E.N.D.S.😄♥️⚽️ @jasonsudeikis @hanwaddingham @brettgoldstein @brendanhunting @jezpswift @nickmohammed pic.twitter.com/G4lF4VvWCY

— Em (@tedslasso) February 9, 2021

Michael Potuck, 9to5Mac, with a good read if you’ve got AirPods that work well, but suffer from aging batteries.

What I found most interesting:

PodSwap is a relatively new service, and it looks like a great option to get your AirPods batteries replaced at a nice discount. You can swap in your gen 1 or gen 2 AirPods with dead batteries for a refurbished and sanitized pair with “restored battery life.”

The company has indeed found a way to replace AirPods’ batteries with “specially developed equipment.” You’re not getting an official Apple battery here, but PodSwap says it’s done independent testing to make sure “The batteries we use are similar in performance to your original ones from Apple.”

The caveat:

PodSwap gives your AirPods new life for just $59.99 (the same would run $99 from Apple). The trade-off here is this service is mostly compelling for AirPods gen 1 owners since if you send in AirPods gen 2, you’re getting back gen 1 earphones.

Worth bookmarking PodSwap, especially if you’ve got gen 1 AirPods. And hopefully, they’ll work out fixes for gen 2 AirPods and AirPods Pro as well.