> The sudden hit, Wordle, in which once a day players get six chances to guess a five-letter word, has been acquired by The New York Times Company.
And:
> Wordle was acquired from its creator, Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, for a price “in the low seven figures,” The Times said. The company said the game, which may be just as trending as 먹튀사이트, would initially remain free to new and existing players.
Hard to believe Wordle was just released this past October, less than four months ago. Love this for Josh Wardle, riding a wave of publicity started by a profile in the New York Times and continued by the tech press highlighting the attack of the clones.
Some takes on this purchase call it a bad buy, think of Wordle as a fad that will quickly fade from the zeitgeist. But that’s the wrong way to think about it. The New York Times makes bank on crossword puzzles, acrostics, and other puzzles, that draw people to pay for a subscription to the Times, which gives them access to the articles and features, but also give them access to the games like those on https://tridewi.xyz/.
Wordle will be free initially, moving the link from Josh Wardle’s site to one nestled inside the Times paywall. As that pattern of play gets established, as that link becomes the place to go for Wordle, I expect ads to appear, offering discount subscriptions. Eventually, I’d expect that free-to-play to drop to once per week, with access to the archives (in effect, endless play) for paid subscribers only.
UPDATE: As Kirk McElhearn points out, not all games offer archives and part of the charm of Wordle is that you are limited to one play per day.
Universal Control is now available in the latest iPadOS and macOS Monterey betas. If you’re not familiar, below is an embedded video of Craig Federighi, from last June’s WWDC, showing how it works (via 9to5Mac). Definitely worth watching.
To make this work, all you need is the same thing required by the Handoff and Continuity features: Bluetooth and proximity. Just enable Bluetooth on your devices and make sure they are close enough for Handoff to work.
Can’t wait for Universal Control to hit the iPadOS and macOS Monterey public releases.
There are rumors that Apple is releasing a variety of new hardware products this fall. Dave and I talk about what that means for Apple and for the consumer. We also look at Intel’s Core i9 benchmarks and they outperform Apple’s M1 Max—but not so fast, there’s a catch and it’s a big one. Finally, we look at some of the new shows that we’ve been watching over the last week.
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On the idea that Spotify should dump Rogan’s podcast:
When Rogan took his show to Spotify, exclusively, his listenership and apparent influence dropped significantly. That’s the nature of exclusivity. If Spotify broke up with him, Rogan’s show wouldn’t disappear or even miss a beat. Surely he’d just take his podcast independent again, and the result would almost certainly be that his listenership and influence would grow back to where they were pre-Spotify, possibly higher thanks to all this publicity.
And on the complaint that Apple is just as guilty, by “hosting” Steve Bannon’s War Room:
Apple, clearly, does not host Steve Bannon’s podcast. Apple’s podcast directory is akin to a search engine; they index the feeds of open podcasts. They do have lines for content they won’t index (porno, of course, and hate speech), but even then, if you copy the URL for the feed, you can subscribe to it in Apple Podcasts, just like how you can visit any website you want using Safari.
Not sure if this has ever happened before, but Apple has posted the complete first episode of the new Apple TV+ series “The Afterparty” on YouTube (embedded below). No Apple TV+ subscription required.
The show has a nice Rashomon spin to it, with each episode told from a different characters point of view. Looking forward to watching the entire thing.
Have to wonder if this is a one-off or if Apple will post the first episode of all new series in this way (licensing agreements allowing). I think it’s a great experiment, terrific way to draw in new viewers.
Another clear, concise video from Apple Support. This one digs through the “Notify When Left Behind” options and setup. Definitely worth sharing with folks you tech support.
Apple on Thursday posted revenue of $123.9 billion for its fiscal first quarter, up 11 percent over the year ago quarter. This represents an all-time revenue record for the company.
“This quarter’s record results were made possible by our most innovative lineup of products and services ever,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We are gratified to see the response from customers around the world at a time when staying connected has never been more important. We are doing all we can to help build a better world — making progress toward our goal of becoming carbon neutral across our supply chain and products by 2030, and pushing forward with our work in education and racial equity and justice.”
Apple reported iPhone revenue of $71.6 billion for this quarter, up from $65.5 billion in the same quarter last year. Mac revenue was $10.8 billion, up from $8.6 billion last year. iPad revenue was $7.2 billion this quarter, down from the $8.4 billion reported in the year-ago quarter. Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue came in at $14.7 billion this quarter, up from $12.9 billion last year, and Services revenue was $19.5 billion this quarter compared to $15.7 billion last year.
Apple’s board of directors has also declared a cash dividend of $0.22 per share of the company’s common stock. The dividend is payable on February 10, 2022 to shareholders of record as of the close of business on February 7, 2022.
Apple fans who take a virtual stroll through Palo Alto inside Apple Maps and Google Maps no longer get to see Tim Cook’s house. The modern, four-bedroom condo has had a giant digital wall erected right in front of it.
Follow the link, check out the image. Or, if you know where Tim Cook’s house is, drill down in Apple Maps and see for yourself.
Benchmark results have started to surface for MSI’s new GE76 Raider, one of the first laptops to be powered by Intel’s new 12th-generation Core i9 processor.
And:
Geekbench 5 results show that the GE76 Raider with the Core i9-12900HK processor has an average multi-core score of 12,707, while the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Max chip has an average multi-core score of 12,244. This means the Core i9 processor is around 4% faster than the M1 Max chip in this particular comparison.
I assume the battery life is 4% worse, yeah?
The new GE76 Raider’s power draw from the wall while running a CPU-only Cinebench R23 benchmark and found the Core i9 was consistently in the 100-watts range, and even briefly spiked to 140 watts. By comparison, when running the same Cinebench R23 benchmark on the 16-inch MacBook Pro, AnandTech found the M1 Max chip’s power draw from the wall to be around 40 watts.
Wait. What? The Intel chip ranged from 100-140 watts, and the M1 Max was level at 40 watts? That sounds like it might impact battery life more than 4%.
The new GE76 Raider achieved nearly 6 hours of offline video playback. Apple advertises the latest 16-inch MacBook Pro as getting up to 21 hours of battery life for offline video playback.
And there it is. Could see that coming from a mile away.
And there’s size, too:
Design is also a factor, with the GE76 Raider being a 17-inch gaming laptop that is just over an inch thick and weighs nearly 6.5 pounds. By comparison, the new 16-inch MacBook Pro is 0.66 inches thick and weighs 4.8 pounds.
Huge tradeoff for a tiny speed gain. And I’d expect that speed gain to disappear with the next rev of Apple Silicon.
> Apple Inc. is planning a new service that will let small businesses accept payments directly on their iPhones without any extra hardware, according to people with knowledge of the matter. > > The company has been working on the new feature since around 2020, when it paid about $100 million for a Canadian startup called Mobeewave that developed technology for smartphones to accept payments with the tap of a credit card. The system will likely use the iPhone’s near field communications, or NFC, chip that is currently used for Apple Pay.
And:
> The move could impact payments providers that rely on Apple’s iPhones to facilitate sales, such as Block Inc.’s Square, which dominates the market. If Apple lets any app use the new technology, then Square can continue accepting payments via Apple devices without needing to worry about providing its own hardware. If Apple requires merchants to use Apple Pay or its own payment processing system, that could compete directly with Square. Consider the integration options when comparing different card payment providers.
And:
> Apple may begin rolling out the feature via a software update in the coming months, the people said.
Could be a real Block-buster. (Sorry — I’ll show myself out.)
Spotify is in the process of removing Neil Young’s catalog of music from its service after the artist published — then took down — an open letter with an ultimatum: Deal with the vaccine misinformation coming from Joe Rogan’s podcast, or lose Young’s music.
And:
Young said that Spotify represented 60 percent of his streaming revenue globally, which amounted to “a huge loss for [his] record company to absorb,” but that he moved forward with removing his catalog because he “could not continue to support Spotify’s life threatening misinformation to the music loving public.”
Putting his money where his mouth is. Guessing Neil Young’s streaming is a tiny drop in the bucket to Spotify, but this is certainly more of a PR hit, drawing very specific focus to Spotify’s political positioning.
Apple has been granted a restraining order against a Virginia woman it said has been stalking Apple CEO Tim Cook for more than a year, emailing him photos of a loaded pistol and trespassing at his home, according to court filings.
And:
Apple said in the application that it believes the woman “may be armed and is still in the South Bay Area and intends to return to (Cook’s) residence or locate him otherwise in the near future.”
And:
Cook first learned in late 2020 that he was the subject of the woman’s obsession because he receives alerts when he’s tagged on Twitter, the application said. The woman, using the last name “Cook,” claimed she was the Apple CEO’s wife and he was father to her twins.
Apple invites iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max users to capture the little things, in a big way, with a macro photography Shot on iPhone Challenge. The challenge starts today and runs through February 16, 2022. Winners will be announced in April.
To enter, just post your best macro photos on Insta or Twitter and add the hashtags #ShotoniPhone and #iPhonemacrochallenge.
My hack successfully gained unauthorized camera access by exploiting a series of issues with iCloud Sharing and Safari 15. While this bug does require the victim to click “open” on a popup from my website, it results in more than just multimedia permission hijacking. This time, the bug gives the attacker full access to every website ever visited by the victim. That means in addition to turning on your camera, my bug can also hack your iCloud, PayPal, Facebook, Gmail, etc. accounts too. And:
I reported this chain to Apple and was awarded $100,500 as a bounty.
“my bug can also hack your iCloud, PayPal, Facebook, Gmail, etc. accounts too” — Wow!
Obviously, glad this got patched. Amazing when one of these “total access” bugs surfaces.
No matter how carefully you construct your code, no matter how modern the techniques and underlying frameworks, there’s always gonna be holes.
Lightning has pretty much been stuck at USB2’s half a gigabit per second, since… 2012.
And:
You can now record the highest quality video of any phone on the planet, you just can’t get it off any faster than the cheapest phone on the block.
That’s the speed issue, an issue (as Rene points out) that impacts a small subset of iPhone users. But combine that with an issue that impacts a huge number of iPhone users (anyone with, say, a modern iPad): That blasted need for two different cables, Lightning for your iPhone, USB-C for your iPad.
Rene does a nice job laying all this out (watch the video embedded below). As usual, a firehose of detail, but easy to follow, especially with the edited for clarity transcript in the linked post, if reading is more your style.
Every once in a while even Apple gets it wrong, and a tech company’s coherent rationale for the way a product should be designed can translate into end-user irritation, or even a customer’s personal hell. Here we take a look back at a handful of Apple’s most questionable design decisions in recent memory.
Pretty good list. No doubt every one of these products have love out there. But the flaws are hard to argue with.
It’d be interesting to see such a list with shake-your-head software design decisions.
Unpacking was one of the best games of 2021, to the point where it didn’t just make my personal GOTY list, but the entire site’s as well. It is currently available on PC, Mac, Switch and Xbox One. It is most definitely not available on Apple’s iOS devices.
And yet! Earlier today the top free download on the App Store, outranking even YouTube, Tik-Tok and Instagram, was a game called Unpacking Master (it has since slipped back down the charts) which, as you may have guessed from the pricepoint and platform, is not just inspired by Unpacking, but is a criminally shameless clone of it.
Shameless cloning, with enough of an effort to get the copying good enough to fool anyone familiar with the game into thinking this was the real deal.
But it’s not:
If you've happened to catch an ad for a suspiciously similar-looking game to Unpacking📦 on mobile recently, please know that this is not our game.
To Apple’s credit, the game appears to be gone from the App Store. Unlike a subscription scam app, which Apple might be able to detect by digging through and taking a closer look at any apps with a high subscription price, this was a free app, making its money from advertising.
Unless the App Store reviewer was familiar with the original game, how could they have detected a clone like this? Clearly, App Store folks are paying attention to the tech press/social media.
Side note: As I write this, other games from the same developer are still up on the App Store.
Nvidia has told partners that it doesn’t expect the transaction to close, according to one person, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. SoftBank, meanwhile, is stepping up preparations for an Arm initial public offering as an alternative to the Nvidia takeover, another person said.
And:
The purchase — poised to become the biggest semiconductor deal in history when it was announced in September 2020 — has drawn a fierce backlash from regulators and the chip industry, including Arm’s own customers. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued to stop the transaction in December, arguing that Nvidia would become too powerful if it gained control over Arm’s chip designs.
And:
SoftBank and Arm are entitled to keep $2 billion Nvidia paid at signing, including a $1.25 billion breakup fee, whether the deal goes through or not.
Apple’s good either way, as long as they can keep their chip design talent on board.
Amazing rise for Nvidia, going from a graphics card maker to the second most valuable chipmaker on the planet, behind only TSMC, with a market cap of $582 billion.
BBEdit 14 is out and has added a new “Notes” feature, which provides a large variety of ways to create notes that automatically save themselves, and, perhaps more important, automatically title themselves so that you don’t end up wondering which of your 305 “untitled text” documents is the one you’re looking for.
BBEdit 14 enables several new features and significant improvements to its built-in coding aids for developers, including:
Enhanced language-specific text completions;
Improved Find Definition;
Assistance for specifying function parameters;
New code-navigation features;
In-window highlighting of syntax and semantic issues;
Language-specific document reformatting.
These feature improvements are the result of new built-in support for the Language Server Protocol (“LSP”) by which user-installed local “language servers” implement key language-sensitive behaviors.
I’m a big Jon Hamm fan. Great comic timing, self deprecating to a fault.
The new Apple TV+ ad (embedded below) had to have been written with him in mind. He hits all the right marks, lets Apple brag about the array of stars they’ve brought to Apple TV+ without seeming to brag.
And the entire time, he never says the words Apple TV+, or even Apple TV. Just Apple. Perfect.
In August, chipmaker Intel revealed new details about its plan to build a “mega-fab” on US soil, a $100 billion factory where 10,000 workers will make a new generation of powerful processors studded with billions of transistors. The same month, 22-year-old Sam Zeloof announced his own semiconductor milestone. It was achieved alone in his family’s New Jersey garage, about 30 miles from where the first transistor was made at Bell Labs in 1947.
With a collection of salvaged and homemade equipment, Zeloof produced a chip with 1,200 transistors. He had sliced up wafers of silicon, patterned them with microscopic designs using ultraviolet light, and dunked them in acid by hand.
Check out Zeloof’s blog, where he documents the process.
Imagine trying to do what Sam is doing, trying to learn how the magic is done, by going back in time to when chip fabrication was much simpler, and garage-achievable.
My two cents: Apple, invest in this kid. Fund him so he can climb the ladder to more sophisticated equipment, give him access to your engineers for advice/guidance. Help him bring on other engineers so they can form a sort of farm team you can bring along to the majors as they progress.
Picture the scene. You’re sitting on a park bench, listening to Francisca Valenzuela Essentials on Apple Music over your AirPods Pro, when a man in a dark overcoat sits next to you. He says quietly, “the weather is very cold in Leningrad,” — but you don’t hear him because you’ve got noise cancelling on.
Or you’re at home, it’s your partner’s turn to cook and he or she has been yelling “dinner’s ready” for ten minutes, but you don’t hear that either. You only hear the music in your AirPods.
And:
“Interrupt for noise-cancelling audio devices,” is a newly revealed Apple patent application that aims to work around this.
And:
Apple proposes that when it’s the iPhone that is producing the music that an AirPods user is listening to, that iPhone listens out for external noise. “[It performs] at least a first level of identification (e.g., of a spoken name of the user, or of the contact as one of several interrupt-authorized contacts) of the voice at the audio device,” says Apple.
This is a patent. Not a product. But still, I do love the concept. Key is to be able to limit who can turn off your noise cancelation, if you want to limit that.
Kick off the Year of the Tiger with the story of a father, a son and a forgotten village with an out-of-this-world dream. Apple and director Zhang Meng present their latest Chinese New Year film “The Comeback”.
Pretty good story, some great practical effects. Don’t miss the “making of” video embedded below. I’d definitely watch them in order, the bigger the screen the better, makes the subtitles easier to read.
This week, Dave and I talk about Ridley Scott’s reaction when he was asked to direct Apple’s famous “1984” TV commercial. We also talk about a new bill in Illinois that would allow developers to skirt Apple’s payment system, and we have an update on Dave’s CarPlay experience.
Jump to 16:57 in (assuming it doesn’t start there automatically), where Steve Jobs talks about this new thing called podcasting. He’s in rare form here. Very interesting to watch.
As outlined by Arizona news site WGEM, under the Freedom to Describe Directly Act, distribution platforms like the App Store and Google Play would not be able to force Illinois developers to use a “particular in-application payment system” as the exclusive mode for accepting payments, nor would they be able to retaliate against developers who opt to use an alternate payment option.
And:
North Dakota, Arizona, and Minnesota have all attempted to get around in-app purchase rules by passing bills, but Apple and Google lobbied hard against them.
And:
Apple’s chief compliance officer Kyle Andeer said that Arizona’s bill was a “government mandate that Apple give away the App Store,” and Apple’s Chief Privacy Engineer Erik Neuenschwander said that the North Dakota’s bill threatened to “destroy the iPhone as you know it.”
As Apple’s Kyle Andeer implied, all it takes is one of these bills to pass to change everything. After all, how could Apple prevent someone in Illinois (or any specific locale) from breaking such a law? And no developer is going to want to have to write code that runs one way in Illinois, another everywhere else.
Apple TV+ today unveiled the teaser trailer and premiere date for “WeCrashed,” a highly anticipated new limited series from Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello, based on the hit Wondery podcast “WeCrashed: The Rise and Fall of WeWork” and starring Academy Award and SAG Award winners Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway.
And:
The series is inspired by actual events — and the love story at the center of it all. WeWork grew from a single coworking space into a global brand worth $47 billion in under a decade. Then, in less than a year, its value plummeted. What happened?
Wonder how long “Academy Award winner” will continue to be a big selling point for a series. Oscar viewing is sliding, so many other awards sucking attention away. Presumably, Oscar winners add a lot to the cast budget. Worth it?
No matter. Looking forward to this. First episode drops March 18th. Eight episodes and done. Trailer embedded below.
Amazon Studios’ forthcoming series brings to screens for the very first time the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth’s history. This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness.
Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.
The most expensive series ever made, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series is scheduled to launch September 2nd. Takes place before the Peter Jackson movie series. Filmed in New Zealand. Entire first season wrapped filming last summer.
Check out the trailer below. A teaser, just a bit of moody voice over, but exciting to me nonetheless.
And don’t miss this article (H/T Matt Londre) about the making of this trailer using practical effects and real fire.
Apple is now requiring that customers in the United States verify that they’re active students, teachers, or staff members at an educational institution in order to access education discounts on products.
It used to be that if you wanted to buy from Apple at the discounted education rate, you had to show proof that you were a student, teacher, etc. Back in the day, this often meant faxing in a copy of your most recent grades or some other proof of enrollment.
Things definitely got lax. Like streaming services ignoring multiple simultaneous logins from the same account.
Ah well, nice while it lasted.
So how will Apple verify your good educational standing? Like so:
Apple in the United States now requires that current students, teachers, and staff members verify their eligibility for education discounts through UNiDAYS. UNiDAYS is a website specialized in providing education customers with discounts for products and services by confirming their enrollment in an educational institution.
