As part of its China Apple Pay rollout, Apple sent this note out to developers:

You can now support Apple Pay for your customers in China, providing an easy, secure, and private way for them to pay using their China UnionPay credit and debit cards. Apple Pay lets users pay for physical goods and services such as groceries, clothing, tickets, and reservations within your iOS apps.

Big step for Apple Pay, potential opportunity for developers, if they have the ability to build/localize for that market.

David Barnard, on Twitter:

I haven’t used Photoshop in months and went to cancel my $11/mo subscription… $60 cancellation fee! WTF @Adobe?

This particular comment is about the Photoshop Photography Program, which includes Photoshop and Lightroom. The issue here is the cancellation fee, which represents half of the remaining contract, and the hidden nature of that fee.

Here’s a link to the Creative Cloud pricing page. Where on that page does it say that there is a 50% cancellation fee? I even scrolled through the terms of service, looking for that fee. It might be there, but I was not able to find it.

In hindsight, I do see the implied nature of an annual plan. But a 50% cancellation fee is a rude surprise for a user. Especially when your software seemingly deleted user data without warning.

First, a bit of background on Ted Lieu (from Wikipedia):

Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Lieu’s family immigrated to Cleveland, Ohio, where he grew up. Lieu graduated from Stanford University in 1991 with a B.S. in Computer Science and an A.B. in Political Science and graduated magna cum laude with a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 1994, where he was Editor in Chief of the Georgetown Law Journal and received four American Jurisprudence awards.

He also served as a law clerk to Judge Thomas Tang of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

He has a computer science degree from Stanford and a law degree from Georgetown. A rare combination for someone in Congress. A combination that gives him more insight than most into the technical issues in this case.

And now this from his web site:

This FBI court order, by compelling a private sector company to write new software, is essentially making that company an arm of law-enforcement. Private sector companies are not—and should not be—an arm of government or law enforcement.

This court order also begs the question: Where does this kind of coercion stop? Can the government force Facebook to create software that provides analytic data on who is likely to be a criminal? Can the government force Google to provide the names of all people who searched for the term ISIL? Can the government force Amazon to write software that identifies who might be suspicious based on the books they ordered?

Forcing Apple to weaken its encryption system in this one case means the government can force Apple—or any other private sector company—to weaken encryption systems in all future cases. This precedent-setting action will both weaken the privacy of Americans and hurt American businesses. And how can the FBI ensure the software that it is forcing Apple to create won’t fall into the wrong hands? Given the number of cyberbreaches in the federal government—including at the Department of Justice—the FBI cannot guarantee this back door software will not end up in the hands of hackers or other criminals.

This is an incredibly complex issue. It’s about the back door, about weakening (breaking really) encryption. It’s about the peak of the slippery slope when the government requests an ability to breach one person’s privacy. It’s about national security and having the tools necessary to fight terrorism. It’s about the perceived “vs” in Apple vs the FBI. It’s about politics and capitalism.

Barring some compromise by either side, this case seems headed for the Supreme Court (by way of appeal to a district court judge, then to the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco, then the Supreme Court). To what may well be a split down the middle, eight-person Supreme Court. This is shaping up to be one hell of an election.

Matthew Panzarino:

The point is that the FBI is asking Apple to crack its own safe, it doesn’t matter how good the locks are if you modify them to be weak after installing them. And once the precedent is set then the opportunity is there for similar requests to be made of all billion or so active iOS devices. Hence the importance of this fight for Apple.

That is exactly right. All devices, even newer ones, will be susceptible if the government is successful.

Atlas Obscura:

In the coverage at the time, almost all the media outlets (including Sports Illustrated and World Press Photo) described the image as a physical manifestation of the breaking of the sound barrier. Gay seemed to believe that, telling one interviewer, “I clicked the same time I heard the boom, and I knew I had it.” Other coverage described the cone as a result of the Prandtl-Glauert Singularity, a phenomenon predicting that aerodynamic forces would approach infinity as aircraft neared the sound barrier.

It turns out neither of these are correct. Instead, Gay had captured an effect known as flow-induced vaporization that sometimes forms around objects flying at high speeds in the right environmental conditions.

It’s an amazing photograph that has been around for years and almost always incorrectly described as a “F/A-18 Hornet breaking the sound barrier”. The truth is a lot more complicated.

It is always fascinating to read, or listen, to Tim and Jony.

Vogue:

Apple’s lexicon of pure, pared-down forms, smooth surfaces, gleaming metallic colors, and soft contours within hard carapaces has emerged over the past 20 years under the eye of chief designer Jony Ive. Talking over coffee on the old campus about the growing synergy between the company and the fashion world, Ive points to his rose-gold Apple Watch, a precious counterpoint to the Clarks on his feet.

“Nine years ago, the iPhone didn’t exist, and the most personal product we had was too big to carry around with you,” he explains. “The technology is at last starting to enable something that was the dream of the company from the very beginning—to make technology personal. So personal that you can wear it.”

Apple’s interest in and focus on fashion is really interesting, if potentially a big pitfall. Fashion is notoriously fickle and a misstep could do irreparable harm to the brand.

Macworld:

Make no mistake: This is unprecedented, and the situation was deliberately engineered by the FBI and Department of Justice to force a showdown that could define limits our civil rights for generations to come. This is an issue with far-reaching implications well beyond a single phone, a single case, or even Apple itself.

As a career security professional, this case has chilling implications.

Mogull is my go-to guy when it comes to security and privacy issues. When he writes, I pay attention. I’ve also got an audio interview with him on tonight’s Your Mac Life show. He’ll be on right after The Loop’s Publisher, Jim Dalrymple.

Imagination is our window into the future. At NASA/JPL we strive to be bold in advancing the edge of possibility so that someday, with the help of new generations of innovators and explorers, these visions of the future can become a reality. As you look through these images of imaginative travel destinations, remember that you can be an architect of the future. Click on any of the thumbnails below to learn more and download a free poster sized image.

Very cool, NASA.

Om Malik:

Over the past few days, though, I have been contemplating if it is time to get Instagram off my home screen as well. Why? Because it has been infesting my feed with too many ads — and not just any ads but terrible ads. Video ads. Ads that make absolutely no sense to me. Ads that have less relevance to my feed and me than dumb follow-me-everywhere banners on the web.

Sometimes companies force us to make decisions. I’m not saying Instagram shouldn’t have ads, they just shouldn’t allow bad ads.

This debate will rage for a long time now. Neither party is going to back down.

Neil Hughes, writing for Apple Insider:

Buried within the hardware regulatory information for the iPad Pro, it’s revealed that the 12.9-inch tablet can use 14.5 volts at 2 amps, which is equivalent to 29 watts. However, the iPad Pro only ships with a 12-watt power adapter.

Apple already ships a 29-watt power adapter with its 12-inch MacBook with Retina display, but the thin-and-light notebook charges over a more capable USB 3 cable with a USB-C port.

The Lightning cable that ships with the iPad Pro, however, is limited to a load of 12 watts, and it features a full-size USB Type-A 2.0 port on the opposite end, not a USB-C connector.

Currently, there is no way to directly charge an iPad Pro with Apple’s 29-watt MacBook power adapter. That’s because there aren’t yet any sanctioned USB 3 Lightning cables available on the market.

Interesting.

This list is organized nicely, with an editor’s choice page:

The following is a curated list of some of the very best iOS games with MFi controller support. To make it to this list, a game must not only be an excellent game in its own right, but must also have excellent MFi controller support.

Tuck this one away, pass it along.

A nostalgic look back at the OS that started it all. Hat tip to Stephen Hackett, who wrote about this for 512 Pixels.

Bloomberg Business:

RWE is contracting the services of a partnership between IBM and Apple as utilities in Europe’s biggest power market suffer from the lowest power prices since 2002. An unprecedented shift to renewable energy, fed into the grid preferably, is squeezing the margins at traditional plants burning coal, gas and nuclear. It presents a business opportunity for the two tech giants whose partnership had never had an energy and utility customer before RWE.

And:

Field workers at RWE’s Hambach coal mine started using software on Apple iPad mini devices in December. They’re already saving 30 minutes a day by cutting down on paperwork, said Andreas Lamken, chief information officer of RWE’s generation unit. The company has deployed a “couple hundred” of the handheld tablets and plans to distribute more at its two other mines and then to utility workers in the coming months, with a goal of reaching as many as a thousand, he said.

Perfect use case for the iPad and a sign of the fruitful nature of the Apple/IBM alliance.

Dan Guido, writing for Trail of Bits Blog, digs into the technical details of what the FBI is asking and whether Apple can do what the FBI is asking. This is a reasonably technical read, but the bottom line is this:

I believe it is technically feasible for Apple to comply with all of the FBI’s requests in this case. On the iPhone 5C, the passcode delay and device erasure are implemented in software and Apple can add support for peripheral devices that facilitate PIN code entry. In order to limit the risk of abuse, Apple can lock the customized version of iOS to only work on the specific recovered iPhone and perform all recovery on their own, without sharing the firmware image with the FBI.

This analysis is worrisome. It digs into the “can they” but not the “should they”. It points to the tip of a very slippery slope. If Apple can be forced to custom-hack a single phone, what comes next? Will Apple be forced to open a shop dedicated to one-off phone hacking? Will they be forced to create a tool to make this task simpler? Will they come for my phone? For yours?

Tim Cook posted a public response to the FBI-requested court order (read What the FBI is asking Apple to do) demanding that Apple provide a mechanism to allow the FBI to break into a phone seized as part of the investigation into the December San Bernardino shootings.

The United States government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers. We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand.

This moment calls for public discussion, and we want our customers and people around the country to understand what is at stake.

Some key bits from Tim’s letter:

Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk. That is why encryption has become so important to all of us.

For many years, we have used encryption to protect our customers’ personal data because we believe it’s the only way to keep their information safe. We have even put that data out of our own reach, because we believe the contents of your iPhone are none of our business.

And:

When the FBI has requested data that’s in our possession, we have provided it. Apple complies with valid subpoenas and search warrants, as we have in the San Bernardino case. We have also made Apple engineers available to advise the FBI, and we’ve offered our best ideas on a number of investigative options at their disposal.

We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them. But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.

And:

The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data. The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge.

Opposing this order is not something we take lightly. We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S. government.

Tim Cook, and Apple, are standing up for what they believe in, and standing up for their customers. What company does this?

Apple seemingly stands alone here. Where do Google, Facebook, Twitter and all the other companies whom you trust with your personal communications stand on this issue? Are they letting Apple fight this battle so they don’t have to? Or are they on the backdoor side? Now is the time to speak up.

Here’s a link to the court order from Judge Sheri Pym (officially, she is a Magistrate Judge for the United States District Court for the Central District of California), ordering Apple to:

assist law enforcement agents in enabling the search of a digital device seized in the course of a previously issued search warrant

That device is an iPhone 5C, seized as part of an investigation into the December 2, 2015 San Bernardino shootings.

The order goes on to say:

Apple’s reasonable technical assistance shall accomplish the following three important functions: (1) it will bypass or disable the auto-erase function whether or not it has been enabled; (2) it will enable the FBI to submit passcodes to the SUBJECT DEVICE for testing electronically via the physical device port, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or other protocol available on the SUBJECT DEVICE; and (3) it will ensure that when the FBI submits passcodes to the SUBJECT DEVICE, software running on the device will not purposefully introduce any additional delay between passcode attempts beyond what is incurred by Apple hardware.

So far, sounds like the FBI wants a way to brute force step through all possible passcodes electronically. This is a backdoor. Which means once this technique is released into the wild, bad actors can do the same to your phone.

The order then goes on to say:

Apple’s reasonable technical assistance may include, but is not limited to: providing the FBI with a signed iPhone software file, recovery bundle, or other Software Image File (“SIF”) that can be loaded onto the SUBJECT DEVICE. The SIF will load and run from Random Access Memory (“RAM”) and will not modify the iOS on the actual phone, the user data partition or system partition on the device’s flash memory. The SIF will be coded by Apple with a unique identifier of the phone so that the SIF would only load and execute on the SUBJECT DEVICE. The SIF will be loaded via Device Firmware Upgrade (“DFU”) mode, recovery mode, or other applicable mode available to the FBI.

There’s more, but you get the gist: Backdoor, backdoor, backdoor.

One final bit from the court order, worth noting:

To the extent that Apple believes that compliance with this Order would be unreasonably burdensome, it may make application to this Court for relief within five business days of receipt of the Order.

That’d give Apple until Tuesday to respond. Stay tuned for Apple’s official response, coming next.

Apple must provide “reasonable technical assistance” to investigators seeking to unlock the data on an iPhone 5C that had been owned by Syed Rizwan Farook, Judge Sheri Pym of U.S. District Court in Los Angeles said in a ruling.

Apple has said they can’t unlock iPhones running iOS 8 or later—the shooter’s phone was running iOS 9. I’m not sure what’s going to happen here, but clearly the government doesn’t believe Apple can’t break into the phone.

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Bon Appetit:

You intentionally grab a café table next to the window on overcast days and you’re a pro at tinkering with your eggy photos on VSCO, but have you ever gone on a professional photoshoot with just your iPhone?

Imagine the surprise the photographers we worked with on our March Culture Issue experienced when they got the call saying they’d have to ditch their DSLRs and tethers for the hippest pocket camera around. We spoke with the photographers who made the issue happen and found out what they think of a print magazine going full-on Instagram for an issue.

How freaked out were the photographers when they heard about this? Imagine your boss telling you that you had to use “inferior” tools to get your job done. It’s an interesting experiment.

A fantastic feature. Definitely worth knowing about.

Robin Raszka:

All the books in my library are carefully handpicked from what I stumbled upon online in comments on design related websites by highly respected people in the design industry and on Twitter. I simply just don’t go to iBooks store and pick something from the top charts.

Here’s my personal library in no particular order (majority of the books I have already read or at least started a couple of chapters).

Some of my favorite books are on this list, including the highly recommended Creativity, Inc., by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull.

Alexandra Mintsopoulos, writing for Medium:

I’ve been watching the story about Apple’s “declining software quality” unfold over the past year with amusement but never felt the need to write anything contesting this narrative until John Siracusa (on episode 155 of Accidental Tech Podcast) came to the conclusion that the problem must be real because the story keeps coming back up. To John’s credit, he allowed for the possibility that this is a perception problem but ultimately concluded otherwise because “no one else seems to be disagreeing”. I disagree.

And:

Apple’s installed base of users has grown massively over the past few years. Even if you dismiss this as a lagging indicator what you cannot dismiss is that customer satisfaction remains at an all-time high. More importantly, actual usage of Apple’s products and services continues unabated, something you would not expect if Apple’s software quality were truly declining.

Apple’s software has certainly gotten much larger and more complex. That said, I don’t think it’s fair to equate Apple’s scorching hot product sales with any measure of software quality.

Look at Windows. No matter the reputation for poor interface design or bugginess, Windows long reigned as the defacto standard, a hallmark of software sales.

Apple products sell because they are beautifully designed, true, but they also sell because that is what we are used to using. Switching lanes is hard and becoming harder.

I’ve been using Apple software since the beginning. In my experience, bugs in the OS were few and far between. Now, I can’t go a day without encountering some sort of gremlin. But I don’t blame quality, I blame complexity.

Apple’s operating systems and products have far more edge cases than they used to. There are orders of magnitude more things to test for. It’s almost impossible to build a set of tests that mirror all possible configurations. What works when you are a niche player does not work when you are one of the biggest companies in the world. In short, Apple is the victim of its own success.

Jessie Char tweeted:

Early adopters have lost the wide-eyed excitement of trying something new and understanding a product’s potential.

I completely agree. I love my Apple Watch. It performs spectacularly well for rev 1 hardware. My Mac does an incredible array of things and, for the most part, it does them in workhorse fashion, performing again and again with only occasional hiccups.

Are there problems? Yes, no doubt. Some bugs become widely known and persist for years. But complexity means long lists of fixes for no-doubt weary and overworked software teams at Apple. But ask yourself this: Would you rather be using Windows? Or an Android phone? To me, it’s not even close.

Jean-Louis Gassée, writing for Monday Note:

The iPad Pro’s last frontier is adding a trackpad to the Smart Keyboard.

The article itself is an interesting read, but this core idea struck me as one of the defining differences between an iPad and a MacBook.

Remember this post about adding a mechanical keyboard to your iPad? Somewhat in jest, I wondered about adding a mouse to the setup. And that’s the difference. The difference of a persistent cursor.

The iPad is built around touch and, more specifically multi-touch. With a mouse and trackpad, you need a cursor that stays on the screen to mark your current location. That persistent marker gives you an instant focus to get back to where you were working.

With iOS, there is no persistent cursor, no marker that holds your place on the screen. As soon as you raise your finger from the glass, the memory of your interaction is wiped. Your next touch starts from scratch.

These are two very different models. An iPad with a mouse would require very different operating system mechanics. iOS 9 built a tiny bridge back to OS X with trackpad mode, where you force touch on a keyboard to get a floating cursor that you can drag around the screen, a floating cursor that disappears as soon as you raise your finger.

Will Apple ever complete that bridge, build a full-time cursor into iOS? In my mind, that, and the addition of trackpad support, would be a major step towards making my iPad more of a replacement for my MacBook.

That said, I really like my iPad as is. This particular thing ain’t broke.

Recording Academy president Neil Portnow, on stage at the Grammies last night:

“When you stream a song, all the people that created that music receive a fraction of a penny,” Portnow said on stage after a performance by 12-year-old pianist Joey Alexander. “Isn’t a song worth more than a penny?

“Listen, we all love the convenience, and we support technologies like streaming, which connect us to that music. But we also have to make sure that artists grow up in a world where music is a viable career.”

Joining Portnow on stage, rapper Common added:

“So tonight, my comrades of the recording academy would like to thank our fans who support our work by going to a concert, subscribing to a music service, collecting vinyl, or speaking out for artists’ rights,” Common said.

Notably, last year Portnow also spoke out from the Grammy stage:

It marks the second time Portnow has highlighted the issue of free music streaming at the Grammys. Last year he was joined on stage by Jennifer Hudson, where he said: “What if we’re all watching the Grammys a few years from now and there’s no Best New Artist award because there aren’t enough talented artists and songwriters who are actually able to make a living from their craft?”