I love this bag. It’s quality from top to bottom and the leather artisan even signs it.

It’s no surprise that lawyers are considering suing Apple, but this is an interesting case.

People who have iPhones running iOS 9 sometimes see “Error 53” when trying to restore the phone through Apple’s iTunes software after being prompted to connect the device to a computer. The error, which prevents the user from using the device, seems to occur on the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6S, and iPhone 6S Plus after their Touch ID sensors are repaired by unapproved retailers.

I can understand Apple’s reasoning, but perhaps they should have been more proactive in letting people know before they updated.

Ginny Marvin , writing for Search Engine Land:

According to Google, 82 percent of TV ad-driven searches during the Super Bowl happened on smartphones. That’s a 12-point jump from last year, when 70 percent of Super Bowl ad-related searches across Google and YouTube derived from phones.

During this year’s game, just 11 percent of searches related to ads aired during the big game happened on desktop/laptop, and seven percent occurred on tablets.

Not surprising that this number is increasing. I wonder if most of the desktop/laptop searches are from folks actually watching the game on those devices.

Macworld:

One of the joys of macro photography is that for most of our lives most of us just don’t look at the world in that much detail. Whether you’re shooting or just looking at close-up shots, there’s something a bit magical about taking the time to examine things around us in minute detail. What they reveal is the “analogness” of those apparently crisp, perfect objects, their imperfections, and the artifacts of their manufacture.

So join me. Come near. Nearer! Let’s quite literally take a close look at some of the vintage Apple hardware in my collection.

As awful as the slideshow mechanism is, it’s a great example of macro (close up) photography and the beauty and attention to detail of some of Apple’s hardware.

Before you ask yourself why, click through and look at the picture. If that doesn’t awaken the maker in you, this just might not be of interest.

I just love this sort of thing. Now if only my old ADB mouse could fit into the picture somehow.

Meet Kathleen Kennedy, read the Vanity Fair interview.

In 2012, after more than three decades producing hits such as E.T., Jurassic Park, and Schindler’s List, Kathleen Kennedy was handpicked by George Lucas to head Lucasfilm. Now, with the smash success of The Force Awakens behind her, Kennedy sits down with Sarah Ellison to talk about her mentors, her sense of equality, and her vision for the Star Wars franchise.

And:

Now, with the release of The Force Awakens, which is already one of the most lucrative films in history, Kennedy has become the high priestess of the relaunched Star Wars enterprise. The new movie’s position as the first feminist Star Wars film—with Rey, the breakout female protagonist—only adds to the impression that Kennedy is, as the Star Wars screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan put it, a “secret superhero in training.”

Great read.

Jacob Weisberg, writing for The New York Review of Books:

Americans spend an average of five and a half hours a day with digital media, more than half of that time on mobile devices, according to the research firm eMarketer. Among some groups, the numbers range much higher. In one recent survey, female students at Baylor University reported using their cell phones an average of ten hours a day. Three quarters of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds say that they reach for their phones immediately upon waking up in the morning.

Most importantly:

Once out of bed, we check our phones 221 times a day—an average of every 4.3 minutes—according to a UK study. This number actually may be too low, since people tend to underestimate their own mobile usage. In a 2015 Gallup survey, 61 percent of people said they checked their phones less frequently than others they knew.

And:

Our transformation into device people has happened with unprecedented suddenness. The first touchscreen-operated iPhones went on sale in June 2007, followed by the first Android-powered phones the following year. Smartphones went from 10 percent to 40 percent market penetration faster than any other consumer technology in history. In the United States, adoption hit 50 percent only three years ago. Yet today, not carrying a smartphone indicates eccentricity, social marginalization, or old age.

This all rings true. It’s who we’ve become.

I kind of like it, though. I like the access to information, the ability to read and learn, to sip from the cup of knowledge as much as I can hold.

Zac Hall, from 9to5Mac, talks through lots of cool new stuff coming with the next release of tvOS.

From previous betas, you can merge apps together to form a folder. For example, you might move all your on demand channels into one folder and your games into another folder.

With this new beta, you can now use dictation (you have to enable it first) to speak your text, anywhere there’s a search text field. Not clear if this will work in third party apps but, hopefully, this will just work automagically. Here’s a demo video Benjamin Mayo put together showing the dictation at work.

Can’t wait for this all to hit the release version.

Christian Zibreg, writing for iDownloadBlog, lays out a metric ton of iPhone/iPad storage saving tips.

Like this one:

Restarting your iPhone or iPad once a day not only ensures smoother than usual performance, it also gives iOS a chance to clear caches that are clogging up the ‘Other’ storage section, visible upon connecting an iOS device to iTunes. Cached files are created when streaming or viewing content like music, videos and photos.

You cannot delete these system caches manually as iOS automatically removes them when it needs more space. Restarting a device may prompt iOS to clear at least some cached content. To restart your device, hold down the power button until a “Slide to power off” message appears, then slide to restart.

And:

Force-restarting your device forces iOS to wipe clean its temporary files and purge caches. To perform a force restart, press and hold the Sleep/Wake and Home buttons simultaneously until an Apple logo appears. In addition to clearing caches, this method may help your device run a little faster for some time.

Never thought about force-restarting. I generally only do that when I do an iOS update. Any down side to this approach?

This chart from Wristly (click the chart to embiggen) shows the relative importance of Apple Watch versus other products, things like your iPhone, iPad, sunglasses, jewelry, etc.

As an example, the Apple Watch is more important to 47% of polled users than their sunglasses. Their sunglasses are more important to 22% of those polled. Presumably, 31% of them valued both equally.

Ars Technica:

The Expanse series takes place two centuries from now in the Belt, a ring of asteroids that orbit the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. People who have migrated to the Belt come from all over Earth speaking dozens of languages, and they’re often isolated for years at a time on remote mining stations. To communicate, they evolve a creole called Belter, which becomes the lingua franca for what is essentially the solar system’s new proletariat. The problem? In the book, Belter could be referenced. But now that The Expanse was coming to television, people would actually have to speak the damn thing. SyFy suddenly needed a linguist who could build a language out of dozens of parts. Luckily, Franck knew a guy. He soon recommended Farmer, who delivered a lot more than they bargained for.

I’m really enjoying this show. It started off a little slow but hit its stride about four episodes in.

That’s certainly original.

The Onion:

Disappointing the thousands of fans in attendance as well as an estimated 100 million viewers watching at home, the Super Bowl 50 halftime show was marred Sunday by the stadium’s functioning sound system, sources confirmed. “Right from the beginning, the sound was working normally, and unfortunately, I could clearly hear the singing,” said 29-year-old spectator Joe Kessler.

Priceless.

What if you could get 5% of your day back? What would you do?

You already have enough work to do today and shouldn’t have to waste time looking for the things you need to do your job.

Igloo makes it easy to find what you need, when you need it. And it’s not just for locating your traditional intranet stuff like HR policies and expense forms. It also helps you find experts, talk about problems and share content with your team. So stop digging through your inbox for that file from 3 months back and give yourself the tools you need to do your best work.

Try it yourself or send your IT guy to investigate Igloo, an intranet you’ll actually like.

Jean-Louis Gassée, writing for Monday Note, takes us along for the ride as he ambles to his local Microsoft Store to purchase a Surface Pro 4, then compares it to his iPad Pro and MacBook.

Won’t spoil the entertaining read, but my favorite part:

Stepping up to pay, I recognize an Ingenico Point-of-Sale terminal that accepts Apple Pay. Instead of swiping my credit card, I present my Apple Watch and, cling, the transaction goes through. The salesperson didn’t realize the store took Apple Pay – and her face says so. On that fun note, off to the office I go.

Apple Pay, via Apple Watch, paying for a Surface Pro 4 at the Microsoft Store. Fascinating.

From MixPanel, here are the latest iPhone adoption numbers:

To get a sense of the potential market for a smaller screen size iPhone, add up:

• iPhone 6: 34.36%
• iPhone 6Plus: 9.07%
• iPhone 6s: 13.57%
• iPhone 6s Plus: 4.21%

That gives a total of 61.21%, leaving 38.79% of the iPhone market prime for an upgrade. Interesting.

Dan Moren, writing for Macworld:

The Mac’s success is especially heartening for someone like me, who grew up in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, when the platform was a target for jeers and the company seemed to perpetually appear with that good old “beleaguered” adjective in every news story. No matter how much we asserted the merits of the Mac, we were told that it was nothing more than a niche product, okay for creative use, but not sufficient for real work.

Twenty-some years later, and the worm has certainly turned. As Tim Cook is fond of reminding us on every quarterly conference call, the Mac routinely experiences growth despite the contraction of the overall PC market. 10 years ago, Apple was selling 3 or 4 million Macs in a year. In 2015, it topped 20 million. While it may be only a small chunk of the company’s overall revenue, the Mac has maintained an upward trend for the last decade.

Obviously, much of the Mac’s success is due to the success of surrounding products, such as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. That’s certainly true.

But the Mac is (still) the hub at the center of the wheel of Apple products, the dashboard at the heart of Apple’s ecosystem. At the same time, as Apple’s star was rising, Google’s free applications suite loosened the stranglehold long held by Microsoft’s Office suite. And that paved the way for the Mac’s acceptability in the button down business world.

Will the iPad slowly replace the Mac, becoming the new hub? Not seeing it, at least not yet. I use my Mac and iPad equally. But my Mac is still the control center of my Apple ecosystem and I’m just fine with that.

Christian Zibreg, writing for iDownloadBlog, pulled together this tutorial that walks you through the various ways you can use 3D Touch with Apple Maps.

My favorite bit? This. To remember where you parked your car, unlock your iPhone, then force touch on the Apple Maps icon to reveal this menu:

Tap Mark My Location and Apple Maps will drop a pin pretty close to where you are standing. Easy peasy.

Engadget:

Were you panicking at the thought of Twitter messing with your timeline order? Were you declaring #RIPTwitter and getting ready to move to Peach? Relax. Twitter chief Jack Dorsey has piped up to say that there’s no truth to the rumors of a Facebook-like feed arriving next week.

“Hello Twitter! Regarding #RIPTwitter: I want you all to know we’re always listening. We never planned to reorder timelines next week.” said Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO on Twitter.

As usual, Twitter lost its collective mind over this. But Twitter stepped up and squashed the rumor. Now we can all go back to bitching about something else.

Ars Technica:

No matter your edition or specific RPG of choice, today D&D continues to be the measuring stick by which other pen-and-paper games are judged, be it on sales, popularity, or even complexity. For many gamers over the course of the game’s existence, D&D has been the entry point into role-playing which sparks a lifetime of storytelling and adventure.

So, with more than a year behind it, how does the newest edition of D&D hold up for newbies and hardcore fans alike?

I’m tempted to find a game to play this latest edition but I’m afraid the game won’t be as fun in middle age as it was in high school and college. I think I’ll leave my fond memories of playing intact.

The Daily Dot:

A new study of the leading fitness trackers on the market found that most of these devices leak your data to a far wider audience than you might imagine—and, in some cases, allow others to alter your information.

The study found that, in every case save for the Apple device, the wearables emitted a unique Bluetooth identifier that allowed a third-party to track the device’s movement over time if the device was not actively paired with another device.

The researchers did not find any security holes in Apple’s signature wearable.

This will only get worse. As the Internet of Things becomes more prevalent, it will become even more obvious that security of our data is, at best, a secondary issue to many manufacturers. It becomes of even greater concern as our devices start to collect significant health data.

Slate:

Apple doesn’t have to leave Touch ID security this way. It could detect hardware changes and require extensive user reauthentication. It could offer third parties some type of parts-vetting process. It could give customers more leeway to choose what risks they want to take. Instead, Error 53 is excessively paternalistic. It’s good to help protect consumers by building in precautions and encouraging the use of high-quality parts, but Apple isn’t a parent. It shouldn’t literally take customer’s phones away if they do something it doesn’t like.

Like the writer, I get why Apple does this but, as seems typical for the company, they lack subtlety in their implementation. The other issue is, while almost anyone can buy an iPhone, not everyone lives conveniently close to an Apple Authorized Repair Facility.

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30 years of greatness. [Via 512 Pixels]

This is pretty cool. The future, it is here! You can read the details here.

International Business Times:

In 2008, Hill-Scott joined Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock in setting up the company that would go on to create SwiftKey but he soon found the long hours and lack of salary too hard to handle. He decided to sell his shares to his fellow founders for the princely exchange of a bicycle. A decision that might sting today.

Little did Hill-Scott know the company’s AI predictive text technology would eventually work its way on to over 300 million smartphones and tablets and be one of the UK’s biggest start-ups, fetching a substantial acquisition fee from Microsoft that saw Reynolds and Medlock reportedly pocket £25m each.

According to the Times, Hill-Scott left on good terms back in 2008 and went on to design websites for the government but it is understood he “did not receive a penny” from the sale.

To be fair, he left pretty early on. But no matter his actual contribution, that’s gotta sting.

Serenity Caldwell continues her “Coding Corner” series with a how-to on building a website if you don’t know the first thing about web site development. Pass this one along.

Jason Snell, writing for Macworld, on his theory of why iPad sales are falling:

I think the iPad is a victim of its enthusiastic welcome. For a time, iPad sales grew faster than the iPhone, making people believe that the iPad was going to follow the iPhone into the stratosphere as a world-shaking product. We got caught up in the post-PC hype. The iPhone greased the skids for the iPad and made it an easier sell.

As a result, the iPad reached a huge percentage of its target audience in a very short period of time. And once that audience was exhausted, it rapidly shifted into an upgrade-and-replace product cycle. Imagine a world where the iPad didn’t sell 67 million units in the first couple of years, but found its audience more slowly. We might end up with an iPad market just as large as the one we have today, but with a sales chart that looks much healthier.

Part of the reason for that huge wave of early iPad sales was the success of the iPhone before it. The iPhone showed what was possible, but it did so on a tiny screen. The iPad offered that same experience on a (relatively) gigantic screen. Who wouldn’t want that?

With the iPad configured as a media consumption device, I think sales have stalled because we’ve got a “good enough” solution. Not enough has changed to trigger a massive product replacement cycle.

If enough changes in the iPad experience for the masses to embrace the iPad as a content creation device (as Apple is pushing to do with the iPad Pro), I think that product replacement cycle will reignite.