Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac:

Netflix has been offering 4K content for a long time, but Mac users have never been able to watch them due to hardware limitations, since the platform relies on the HEVC codec.

And:

With macOS Big Sur, which is currently available as a beta developer, Mac users can finally watch movies and TV shows on Netflix in 4K resolution. It also works with Dolby Vision and HDR10, which delivers more brilliant and vivid colors.

Unfortunately, according to Apple, the 4K High Dynamic Range stream requires a Mac introduced in 2018 or later.

The absence of 4K in Safari was a tiny sore point. Glad to see this evolution happening.

From last week, InputMag with an interesting take on the move from skeuomorphism to flat design, followed by macOS Big Sur’s push into a new kind of design, dubbed neumorphism.

Take the discussion flying around Twitter about Big Sur’s icons with a grain of salt. This is a new design wave, and the rules are still being written, broken, and rewritten.

Some design elements break reality (shadows that are just wrong or that fight other shadows with inconsistent lighting patterns). Will Apple work on lining all those shadows up? Will they let icons be art, give designers a free hand?

I’ve always felt that the design pendulum swung too far to the flat side, offering fewer clues to users (Is the switch on or off? Hard to tell.) I’m looking forward to seeing what designers do with neumorphism, but hoping for a consistently lit, nuanced touch.

Google blog:

Today, we are announcing a licensing program to pay publishers for high-quality content for a new news experience launching later this year. This program will help participating publishers monetize their content through an enhanced storytelling experience that lets people go deeper into more complex stories, stay informed and be exposed to a world of different issues and interests. We will start with publishers in a number of countries around the globe, with more to come soon.

With the news of The New York Times bowing out of Apple News+, this feels like Google easing in. Question is, will Google’s model be even somewhat lucrative for news organizations?

As is, news and journalism has been crushed by the race to the bottom that torpedoed the value of factual reporting and allowed the rise of fairy tale journalism.

Where available, Google will also offer to pay for free access for users to read paywalled articles on a publisher’s site. This will let paywalled publishers grow their audiences and open an opportunity for people to read content they might not ordinarily see.

Here’s hoping this is a turn in the right direction.

The New York Times:

The New York Times said on Monday that it was exiting its partnership with Apple News, as news organizations struggle to compete with large tech companies for readers’ attention and dollars.

Starting on Monday, Times articles were no longer appearing alongside those from other publications in the curated Apple News feed available on Apple devices.

The Times is one of the first media organizations to pull out of Apple News.

“…one of the first…” If Apple doesn’t get its Apple News ducks in a row, The New York Times won’t be the last.

TechCrunch:

Apple is launching an interesting new Apple Card program for people who have their application declined.

Declined Apple Card applicants may begin seeing notifications on their device later today that offer them the Path to Apple Card program. It’s an opt-in program that can run for up to 4 months. It leverages the information that Goldman Sachs used to determine their credit worthiness to outline why they were declined and to help them improve the specific financial markers that would make them more likely to get approved next time.

Once a user opts in on their device, they get a once-a-month update on their progress on specific tasks that are personalized to their rating.

Once again, Apple leads in ways others won’t. This is a program the credit card companies should have instituted years ago.

Apple:

The Apple Design Awards celebrate the creative artistry and technical achievement of developers who reflect the best in design, innovation, and technology on Apple platforms.

As always, there are some beautifully designed apps listed. But of course, that’s the point.

Eclectic Light:

Despite extensive coverage of much of Big Sur and Apple Silicon, one session was missing from WWDC, that detailing changes in APFS for macOS 11. This article can’t be as authoritative, but I’ll try here to outline some of the improvements which are documented in various sources, including the latest update to the APFS reference documentation.

APFS in macOS 11 changes volume roles substantially.

I’m hearing about this being an issue for people so stay informed about the changes Big Sur can make to your system.

MacRumors:

Apple’s iOS 14 update adds several new features to the Photos app, including an option to add captions to images right from the iPhone, which is something that ‌Photos‌ users have been wanting for quite some time.

Tap to view any photo full screen on the ‌iPhone‌, and then swipe up to get to the caption field. Tap the field, type the caption, and press enter.

Captions in ‌iOS 14‌ sync across all devices if iCloud Photo Library is enabled, and the Description field in macOS Big Sur has been renamed to Captions for continuity.

There have always been kludges or other apps to accomplish this but it’s finally becoming a native feature.

ZDNet:

Apple said this week that it declined to implement 16 new web technologies (Web APIs) in Safari because they posed a threat to user privacy by opening new avenues for user fingerprinting.

The vast majority of these APIs are only implemented in Chromium-based browsers, and very few on Mozilla’s platform.

Apple claims that the 16 Web APIs above would allow online advertisers and data analytics firms to create scripts that fingerprint users and their devices.

Take a look at the list of APIs being blocked. As Jan Wildeboer said on Twitter, “The browser is becoming a backdoor, almost malware with all these possibilities.”

Simo Ahava:

Let me start by proclaiming with clarity and sincerity:

No, Safari 14 (or any other version of Safari) will not block Google Analytics from loading and running on a website.

In fact, the biggest revelation was the new Privacy Report, which is designed to elucidate how much the browser is working towards mitigating the damage caused by cross-site trackers.

For better or for worse, one of the previews showed that google-analytics.com is listed among the trackers that are being prevented on websites.

Queue panic and the spread of misinformation like wildfire through the dry brush of first-party analytics.

A lot of websites, biog and small, can now breathe a sigh of relief.

Vanity Fair:

While stuck in quarantine over the past few months, some of the most famous performers in the world worked in secret to shoot a homemade fan-film version of the classic on their phones—which will be shown on Quibi chapter by chapter, day by day, for two weeks starting this Monday.

Filmmaker Jason Reitman devised the idea back in March, seeing it as a way to stay busy during the lockdown while raising funds for the World Central Kitchen charity, which has been helping thousands of restaurants stay afloat during the quarantine by paying them to provide millions of meals to the needy.

The creators hope the footage can also provide some laughter to viewers in a time of hardship. Their scrappy version of The Princess Bride leans into its continuity lapses, utilizes absurd household props and back-of-the-closet costumes, and deploys multiple castings of the same roles to show that in a true fantasy, anyone can play anything.

This is utterly delightful.

Lickability:

Big Sur has just been announced, and you’re itching to give it a shot. But wait—you have plenty of apps to support and work to do. Is it worth the risk of things not working or crashing? Probably not. In this blog post, we are going to look into how to install the latest OS without disrupting your current setup.

I would never do this but if you’re brave enough, have at it.

Microsoft today announced a strategic change in its retail operations, including closing Microsoft Store physical locations. The company’s retail team members will continue to serve customers from Microsoft corporate facilities and remotely providing sales, training, and support. Microsoft will continue to invest in its digital storefronts on Microsoft.com, and stores in Xbox and Windows, reaching more than 1.2 billion people every month in 190 markets. The company will also reimagine spaces that serve all customers, including operating Microsoft Experience Centers in London, NYC, Sydney, and Redmond campus locations.

Microsoft really tried to compete with Apple Stores, even putting them near existing Apple locations, but the strategy never worked.

Samuel Axon, Ars Technica:

When Apple announced its plans to transition the Mac to its own, ARM-based silicon and away from the x86 architecture used in Intel Macs, the company listed a plethora of tools for making sure as many applications survive the shift as possible. But while it’s helpful that Apple is providing developer tools for adapting Intel Mac apps and virtualization tools for running the apps that won’t make the move right away, there’s one scenario Apple didn’t talk about at all during its keynote: running Windows natively on a Mac.

And:

While virtualization via tools like Parallels or VMWare are usually sufficient for running most Windows apps under macOS, there are some edge cases when the Boot Camp approach is the only option. One of the most common: running Windows PC games, which tend to run more optimally under Windows than they do under macOS, no matter how well done the ports are.

And there’s the rub. Boot Camp allows Windows to run natively, currently as an Intel-targeted OS running natively on Intel platform.

But:

We’ve learned that Boot Camp will not work on Apple silicon-based Macs. This will surely be a surprise to almost no one, of course. You can’t expect to just run a game natively out of the box on a totally different architecture.

Yup. Boot Camp itself doesn’t allow an Intel-compiled OS to run natively on Arm. So will Microsoft allow a version of Windows to be built, targeted specifically at Apple’s Mac/Arm architecture?

Does Apple want Windows on the Mac? Is that an important part of the next generation of Macs?

A detailed walkthrough on the new features the iOS 14 Music app brings to the table.

Public beta coming in July, with a likely release in September.

Serenity Caldwell continues to bring it. Great work.

As much as I miss the camaraderie, I am really enjoying this year’s experience. My hope is that all the changes Apple is bringing, especially the new production elements, will continue next year.

C. Scott Brown, AndroidAuthority:

At this point, saying Android has a serious problem when it comes to phones receiving reliable Android upgrades is getting old. We’ve written about it a lot — even I, specifically, have written about it a lot. You’ve told us your thoughts. We all get it. Even with all that, though, the latest announcement of iOS 14 really sends the message home.

We do talk about this a lot. By its very nature, the Android market is fragmented. Extremely so.

Meanwhile, the flagship Android device from 2015 was the Samsung Galaxy S6. The most recent official version of Android that phone received was Android 7 Nougat, which dropped in 2016. Of course, it was well into 2017 before the Galaxy S6 actually got it. Since then: nothing.

I’ve seen this same message in a number of places, staunch Android supporters grumphing about their older phones reaching the practical end of Android update rollouts. And they are not wrong.

Come join us. You are more than welcome.

This is a nice to have feature, but especially useful here:

The new charged notification is a useful feature for the ‌Apple Watch‌’s Sleep app, which lets users wear the ‌Apple Watch‌ at night for sleep tracking purposes.

The ‌Apple Watch‌ can’t be charged while it’s worn at night, of course, so after waking up, it will need to be placed on the charger if the battery is getting low.

Wake up, throw your Apple Watch on the charge, do your morning Loop posts (OK, maybe you do you), then, when you get the notification, grab your watch and go.

Six Colors:

Doing unusual things at Mac startup has long required remembering keyboard shortcuts. Is it Command-Control-P-R or Command-Option-P-R that zaps the PRAM? Is that still even a thing? Is it Command-S for Recovery Mode—or wait, that’s Single User Mode, it’s Command-R for Recovery mode, Command-T for Target Disk Mode, Option to choose a startup disk.

With the advent of Macs running Apple-designed processors, things will get a whole lot simpler. As described Wednesday in the WWDC session Explore the New System Architecture of Apple Silicon Macs, these new Macs will only require you to remember a single button: Power.

Holding down that button at startup will bring up an entirely new macOS Recovery options screen. From here you’ll be able to fix a broken Mac boot drive, alter security settings, share your Mac’s disk with another computer, choose a startup disk, and pretty much everything else you used to have to remember keyboard shortcuts to do.

I’ll quibble with the “has long required remembering keyboard shortcuts” (my wife’s MBA refused to boot this AM and I had to Google the various shortcuts. No need to remember them), but it will definitely be a welcome change regardless.

Fleetsmith:

We started Fleetsmith to balance the management and security needs of IT with the experience users love about Mac, iPad, and iPhone. We’re proud of the incredibly talented team we’ve built, and that we’ve stayed true to our mission: to make powerful, secure Apple fleet management available to everyone.

We’re thrilled to join Apple. Our shared values of putting the customer at the center of everything we do without sacrificing privacy and security, means we can truly meet our mission, delivering Fleetsmith to businesses and institutions of all sizes, around the world.

This is another one of those “small” acquisitions Apple makes of a company most of us have never heard of but, at some point in the future, will become very important to many of us.

Forbes:

Yesterday Apple killed the IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) without killing the IDFA, by taking it out of the depths of the Settings app where almost no-one could find it — although increasingly people were finding it and turning it off — and making it explicitly opt-in for every single app. If an app wants to use the IDFA, iOS 14 will present mobile users with a big scary dialog box.

This is actually a genius move by Apple. Marketers can’t really get upset about losing the IDFA capability, because technically it’s still around. Apple gets to burnish its privacy credentials while not taking huge amounts of flack from brands and advertisers because, after all, who can argue with giving people more rights with their personal data?

And make no mistake: this is a great move for user privacy.

But it’s also a huge problem for a massive industry.

While I’m generally loathe to link to anything coming out of the Forbes Contributor Network, this is a well-done piece. Let’s all shed one single solitary crocodile tear in false sympathy for an industry that did everything it possibly could to abuse users.