Chaim Gartenberg, The Verge:

Nearly two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, Apple has made Face ID useful again in iOS 15.4 by finally adding the ability to use the face unlock feature while wearing a face mask.

Face ID has been useful for quite some time, even with a mask, with the caveat that you have to be wearing an Apple Watch, and be willing to type in your passcode for things like Apple Pay.

That aside, the new beta feature, Face ID with a Mask, is definitely a big gain for users.

Back to Chaim:

It’s not Apple’s first attempt at solving the Face ID / mask issue: iOS 13.5 would recognize when you were wearing a mask and show the password prompt more quickly, and the company added a feature for automatically unlocking your iPhone when wearing an Apple Watch in last year’s iOS 14.5 update. But the new Face ID mask support is a much more streamlined solution that has the benefit of not requiring the purchase of additional Apple hardware.

Yup.

After installing iOS 15.4 (at least in its current beta form), the first thing you’ll see is a splash screen asking if you’d like to enable Face ID with a mask. Setting up the feature is relatively simple, although you’ll have to re-register your face (presumably so Apple can dial in even further on the details around your eyes).

And:

There are a few weird quirks, though. If you’re using Face ID with a mask and wear glasses, Apple now asks you to make a baseline scan with each pair of glasses that you own. And when I switched to a different, unregistered pair of glasses, Face ID didn’t work when I was wearing a mask. Face ID with a mask also doesn’t work with sunglasses.

Other fails I ran into were when I covered too much of my forehead, like with a pulled-down beanie with earflaps that covered most of my head. But I did have some impressive successes, too: wearing my full ski gear of a knit hat, face mask, and goggles (albeit an unusually transparent pair of goggles) was still enough for Face ID to work and unlock my phone.

All of this is good to know. Masks are going to be part of our lives, at the very least for the shorter term. Glad to have this improvement.

Washington Post, on yesterday’s quarterly Meta/Facebook earnings report:

Facebook lost daily users for the first time in its 18-year history — falling by about half a million users in the last three months of 2021, to 1.93 billion logging in each day. The loss was greatest in Africa and Latin America, suggesting that the company’s product is saturated globally — and that its long quest to add as many users as possible has peaked.

And:

Facebook Reality Labs, the company’s hardware division that builds the Oculus Quest headset, lost $3.3 billion in the quarter, despite bringing in $877 million in revenue.

And:

Meta’s stock price plummeted more than 20 percent in after-hours trading following the news.

And from CNBC:

Facebook parent Meta said on Wednesday that the privacy change Apple made to its iOS operating system last year will decrease the social media company’s sales this year by about $10 billion.

“We believe the impact of iOS overall is a headwind on our business in 2022,” Meta CFO Dave Wehner said on a call with analysts after the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report. “It’s on the order of $10 billion, so it’s a pretty significant headwind for our business.”

Interestingly, Google/Alphabet are not having the same issue:

A day before Facebook’s results, Alphabet blew past estimates with its fourth-quarter numbers, and cited strength in e-commerce ads, an area where Facebook saw weakness.

Wehner suggested that Apple’s changes aren’t having the same impact on search as they are on other types of apps. He referenced how much money Google makes for Apple as the default search engine on the Safari browser.

“Given that Apple continues to take billions of dollars a year from Google Search, the incentive clearly is for this policy discrepancy to continue,” Wehner said.

Lots of fingerprinting and political posturing here.

Fortune:

Just as it dominates our economy, Big Tech now dominates Fortune’s annual ranking of corporate reputation. For the third year in a row, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft rank first, second, and third, respectively, based on our poll of some 3,700 corporate executives, directors, and analysts. It’s Apple’s 15th straight year in the No. 1 spot, a fitting coronation for the world’s most valuable company.

15 straight years with the strongest corporate reputation. No small thing.

Interesting to see Pfizer in that 4th spot.

The AirPods Max retail for $549 (though you can get them for $449 from Amazon, at least for the moment).

And for an additional $980, you can have a Gucci case to go with. Follow the headline link and check out that first image to get a sense of what your $980 will buy you.

I get it. People who love Gucci and Apple and have the disposable income will see this as a must-have accessory.

But I find it jarring. The Gucci brand is strong. The Apple brand is equally strong. But the AirPods Max and the Gucci design clash violently, at least for me. The colors don’t blend together, and any semblance of soft packability is gone.

Maybe this is gorgeous and I’m just too stodgy/stingy to get it?