Michael Steeber has pulled together an interactive map of US Apple Store openings.
Follow the link above and uncheck the Temporarily Closed checkbox to see US Apple Stores reopening this week.
I asked, Michael said he’d keep updating the map over time, so bookmark the link if you’re interested. Anyone know of such a map for the rest of the world’s Apple Stores?
Josh Centers, TidBITS:
A reader recently emailed me to ask how to mirror an Apple TV on a Mac. There are two main reasons you might want to do this: to capture screenshots or video for documentation, or so you can give a remote presentation that involves the Apple TV.
Interesting that the only requirement with the current model is that both your Apple TV and your Mac be on the same WiFi network.
Not sure there are a lot of secrets revealed here, but this is an interesting read.
A few callouts:
“It was almost like wildfire how quickly it spread,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of product marketing, says. “It’s done even better than we could ever imagine.”
And:
Compared with, say, the Apple Watch, which took years to gain momentum, AirPods are a much easier, and cheaper, product to market. “Everyone’s using a smartphone, and so therefore headphones,” says Neil Cybart, founder of Apple analyst firm Above Avalon, “whereas the younger demographic is moving away from wristwatches.”
And:
According to Joswiak, Apple “had a vision for our wireless future for many years” before the first AirPods were unveiled. “We had this incredible wireless product, the iPhone,” he says. “And yet, what began to feel odd is when you saw somebody using wired headphones. Right then you thought, why would you attach the wire?”
When was the last time you saw someone wearing old-school wired Apple EarPods? Apple got rid of the floppy/CD drives when they were still widely used. Same with the headphone jack. Looking back, the “courage” decision has turned into an unquestioned success for Apple.
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
Apple recently updated the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the $1,299 base model remains a popular alternative to the $999 MacBook Air. To help with your buying decision, read our comparison of the notebooks below.
This comes up a lot. Is it worth the extra $300 for the 13-inch MacBook Pro? Where’s the value?
If you are considering this question, dig in. Obviously, the choice depends on what you’ll be doing, and how much you care about the display, speakers, Touch Bar, speakers, processing speed. The article lays out the specifics.
The linked Thunderbolt security report details 7 specific vulnerability scenarios. I can only imagine that Apple is long aware of these and will address them.
One in particular I found interesting is the weakness on Macs that run Boot Camp:
Apple supports running Windows on Mac systems using the Boot Camp utility. Aside from Windows, this utility may also be used to install Linux. When running either operating system, Mac UEFI disables all Thunderbolt security by employing the Security Level “None” (SL0). As such, this vulnerability subjects the Mac system to trivial Thunderbolt-based DMA attacks.
The way I read it, the vulnerabilities occur when a device is allowed to update its firmware. A Mac running Boot Camp disables Thunderbolt security and opens the door for attack. Here’s detail on the DMA attack.
John Moltz:
Who else would you turn to for a review of the 2020 iPhone SE than the person who has not bought a new phone for four years?
What do you mean “Literally everyone else.”?
Rude.
I’m going to let you in on the dirty secret of the iPhone SE reviews you might have read on those other sites. All those people — your Grubers, your Sterns, your Panzarinos, your Bohns, your Brownlees — have all used other phones between the previous iPhone SE and this iPhone SE.
They didn’t love the original iPhone SE like I loved the original iPhone SE.
Let’s be clear right off the bat: the 2020 iPhone SE is not a real iPhone SE. And rather than keep referring to it as the iPhone SE Second Generation throughout this review, I’m going to just call it what it is: the iPhone 9. In fact, that’s what I’ve named mine.
I’ve always been a big fan of Moltz’s particular brand of silliness.
When this video first popped up on Twitter, many of us, myself included, were livid at the seeming tone-deafness and condescension of it.
But even on first viewing, something was off about it. It was edited too quickly at the end. Sure enough, it was because someone decided to try and make the video look much worse than it really was. As it turns out, the full video is wonderful and a great move by the company. I apologize unreservedly for my part in making the “fake” video seen.
And to the person who posted the original piece, shame on you. We already have far too many divisions in our society for you to make this worse. At least Hasbro is trying to make things better. Your attempts at tearing them down for no good reason are offensive and you should be ashamed at your part in it, as I am for posting the original.
Apple will reopen some stores in the United States next week, with temperature checks and a limited number of customers in the location at one time, the company confirmed to CNBC.
“We’re excited to begin reopening stores in the US next week, starting with some stores in Idaho, South Carolina, Alabama and Alaska,” an Apple representative said in a statement. “Our team is constantly monitoring local heath data and government guidance, and as soon as we can safely open our stores, we will.”
This will be a methodical reopening in a few stores. Fingers crossed this goes well and we can be done with this pandemic.
I did my homework this week and watched the Beastie Boys movie on Apple TV+. Dave and I talked about the film without giving away too much about it. We also talked WWDC and Apple’s announcement about the conference this week.
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I love Rogue Amoeba and have used their audio software for years on my Mac. Thank you for sponsoring The Loop this week. Their new app, SoundSource, gives you powerful control over all the audio on your Mac, right from your menu bar:
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Another in the series of music-by-year mashups from The Hood Internet. These started with 1979 and have, year-by-year, made their way to 1984. They are all fun to watch, especially if you have a sense of music in the ’80s.
Yup. Sure does.
But, in addition to the cool images, there’s insight into how the various mechanisms actually work, like the spring-loaded hinge and the more even clicking trackpad.
If you’ve not followed the story, start here.
After the story of Amazon VP Tim Bray quitting in protest went viral, Tim posted this follow-up, mostly about the tidal wave of responses to his original, but worth reading.
Also worth reading, the like-minded posts linked in Tim’s piece.
Solid interview with Apple COO Jeff Williams. It’s an easy watch, about 3 minutes long, and packed with interesting comments about the supply chain, opening Apple Stores, and Apple’s response to leakers and bloggers.
When I want to shop Apple online, I tend to go to apple.com and pick a product category from the menu bar at the top of that main page.
If I want support for a product, or find info about Apple Store hours or Genius Bar appointments, all bets are off. More times than not, I end up doing a Google search to find the right link.
With Apple’s Apple Store Online hub, things like chatting with a specialist, getting help with trade-ins, financing, order tracking, and Genius Bar appointments just got a bit easier to find.
Here’s a link to the new hub. Worth taking a minute to swipe through it, just to get a sense of the options available. Don’t miss that “Find a store” link at the bottom.
Nellie Andreeva, Deadline:
According to sources, Defending Jacob ranks among the top three series premieres for Apple TV+, logging a big opening weekend with viewership continuing to build in Week 2 and the audience growing by five times in its first 10 days (April 24-May 3) to rank among the two fastest-growing series premieres for Apple TV+.
And:
Defending Jacob also is believed to be setting Apple TV+ records for viewer engagement. The vast majority of viewers who sampled the show during its premiere weekend watched all three available episodes, and nearly all who watched those also completed the fourth episode released May 1, I have learned.
Episode 5 of Defending Jacob is scheduled to drop today.
Three episodes per week, 15 minutes per episode. Not a minute less, not a minute more. New episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
I have a lot of respect for Ben and John, so this should be interesting. I just listened to the first episode and it was exactly how you think it would be. I enjoyed it!
Apple today announced it is awarding $10 million from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund to COPAN Diagnostics, a market leader in sample collection kits that play a critical role in COVID-19 testing. This funding will allow COPAN Diagnostics to rapidly accelerate their supply of sample collection kits for hospitals across the United States, expanding production from several thousand today to more than one million kits per week by early July. As part of this effort, Apple will support COPAN Diagnostics’ expansion to a new, larger facility in Southern California, with advanced equipment that Apple is helping design. This expansion is expected to create more than 50 new jobs.
Apple continues to step up and do the right thing.
Newsy:
Traffic has gone down across the country, but in some places, it looks like the freedom of open roads has actually led to more dangerous crashes.
Less traffic gives leeway for some people to act more recklessly. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Guilherme Rambo, on Twitter yesterday:
Cool, there’s a Facebook SDK issue crashing several high-profile apps right now. Great idea adding that social login, huh?
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) May 6, 2020
Amazing how many apps depend on the Facebook SDK. All of them started crashing, without warning, last night. Some developers worked out their own workarounds, other apps remained broken. Facebook seems to have identified a fix which is said to be rolling out now.
From Gui Rambo’s (headline linked) blog post:
The issue was caused by some bad data being sent by Facebook’s server to their SDK, which caused code in the SDK to crash, which in turn brought down the app that was running the SDK. Since this happened during the initialization of the SDK — something that occurs right after launching the app — the apps simply became unusable.
And:
You know how people are saying these days that it’s dangerous how companies like Apple and Google control their ecosystems, to the point of accusing them of monopoly? I’m not going to dismiss that completely here, but I think we have a much bigger problem that’s been lurking in our apps for several years, unnoticed: third-party SDK creep.
On a similar note, this blog post shock wave announcement from Wink:
Since 2014, Wink has grown to support more than 4 million connected devices. During this time, Wink has relied solely on the one-time fee derived from hardware sales to cover ongoing cloud costs, development, and customer support. Providing users with local and remote access to their devices will always come at a cost for Wink, and over the years we have made great progress toward reducing these costs so that we can maintain that feature.
And:
We have a lot of great ideas on how to expand on Wink’s capabilities and satisfy the many requests from our user base. In order to provide for development and continued growth, we are transitioning to a $4.99 monthly subscription, starting on May 13, 2020.
And:
Should you choose not to sign up for a subscription you will no longer be able to access your Wink devices from the app.
Dependence on any single technology or company can produce unwelcome surprises. As we were reminded last night.
James Vincent, The Verge:
A beta app launched by the UK this week shows the huge challenges they face and, crucially, the difficulty in designing an effective app without the help of the tech giants that make our phones.
And:
Instead of decentralizing the data across devices, the UK will pool the information it collects in a single database operated by the National Health Service.
And:
In addition to privacy issues, researchers have identified a major problem in the UK’s efforts to build an app without Google and Apple: it simply won’t work as advertised.
One major problem is Bluetooth pinging. From this Register article:
Apple’s iOS normally forbids applications from broadcasting via Bluetooth when running in the background. That means you would have to leave a contact-tracing app open in the foreground all the time for it to work properly.
Read both articles for the details but, in a nutshell, the centralized data pooling approach seems to rely on people leaving their app running in the foreground (rendering the phone useless for all other purposes, not going to happen) or negotiating exceptions with Apple to allow Bluetooth to ping in the background.
From the video writeup:
Take a guided tour of For All Mankind’s first lunar base. Former Astronaut and technical advisor Garrett Reisman helps show us around Jamestown.
Pretty well done.
Benjamin Mayo:
The Library may share the same tab bar as the other buttons in the TV app but they are otherwise disconnected. It’s like having two separate apps rolled into one, each with their own UI components and each operating on a different set of data. It’s like having two people living in the same house that do not talk to each other. For the Library tab, Apple essentially took the old iOS Videos app and transposed it as one screen inside of TV.
They didn’t modernise it all, and its age shows through.
And:
Everything is just very disjointed, both in concept and in their underlying implementations. A better TV app would have everything holistically driven by the same shared data source. You should be able to add any show to your library; it shouldn’t matter if that show is backed by a physical file on disk or not. The Apple Music app does a much better job at unifying the deprecated iTunes Store and the modern subscription-based experience.
Couldn’t agree more. I spend a fair amount of my TV watching experience in the Apple TV ecosystem. I would be more than happy to live in the TV app, consume all my content from that one focused source. But as is, things are just too confusing. Drives me to the individual apps, with their myriad ways of doing things. Confusing switching contexts, too. I’d love a rewrite.
Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:
Apple Watch and iPhone have supported a feature called Medical ID that lets you collect critical health data in one place. Medical ID can include your contact information, date of birth, medical conditions, blood type, and more.
And:
iPhone and Apple Watch offer a separate feature called Emergency SOS. When you hold down the Side Button on an iPhone and Apple Watch for several seconds, the device can call local emergency services for you.
And:
What’s new in iOS 13.5 and watchOS 6.2.5 is a new capability that connects Medical ID and Emergency SOS together. Starting later this month, customers can opt into a new Emergency SOS feature that automatically shares Medical ID information with emergency services.
Nice evolution.
Apple:
Apple today announced it is awarding $10 million from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund to COPAN Diagnostics, a market leader in sample collection kits that play a critical role in COVID-19 testing. This funding will allow COPAN Diagnostics to rapidly accelerate their supply of sample collection kits for hospitals across the United States, expanding production from several thousand today to more than one million kits per week by early July.
What I really found fascinating (emphasis mine):
As part of this effort, Apple will support COPAN Diagnostics’ expansion to a new, larger facility in Southern California, with advanced equipment that Apple is helping design.
Makes me wonder if we’ll see Apple branded health hardware (beyond Apple Watch) in the future.
Not to minimize Apple’s efforts here in any way. This is great work that benefits us all.
Bob Newhart:
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the release of the Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart. In honor of this tremendous occasion, please enjoy this digital timeline of the life and work of Bob Newhart.
This may have been the first comedy album I ever heard as a kid and I still love listening to it. Newhart’s particular style was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen and his comedy was/is brilliant.
PCWorld:
Mesh networking for small networks appeared in 2015 with the claim that it would solve Wi-Fi problems by improving coverage, speeding networks, and eliminating hassle. It also promised to remove the need to place base stations meticulously around a home or small office to avoid dead and slow spots.
Five years after its initial widespread emergence, those promises appear to have been fulfilled. Mesh networks have become the best way to set up a new network that spans more than a single, standalone Wi-Fi gateway can manage—or to overhaul an existing inadequate or outdated one.
How does mesh networking pull off this trick? What are the ideal circumstances to pay more for mesh over standalone base stations? And which should you consider? Let’s look into those questions in turn.
As always, Fleishman does a good job explaining the technical aspects of mesh networking.
My wife is in hospital for a separate procedure (she’ll be fine) but they test all incoming patients for Covi-19 as a precaution. If this isn’t a reason to stay inside (look at how deep that swab goes!), I don’t know what is.
She said she could still feel the swab seven hours later.
To check your AirPods Pro firmware version, connect your AirPods Pro, then:
No way to force an update. Mine were updated by the time I checked.
See also, this Twitter thread from Gui Rambo:
I actually compared AirPods Pro running firmware 2C54 vs. 2D15 by putting one in each ear and there’s no difference in noise cancellation whatsoever.
— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) May 5, 2020
I’ve not had a problem with my AirPods Pro, but I definitely feel like the phrase should be Noise Reduction and not Noise Cancellation. With Noise Cancellation turned on, I can still hear background noise, though it is definitely reduced.
If you are having issues with active noise cancellation, here’s Apple’s support article, for what it’s worth.
Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch:
The iPhone and later the iPad didn’t immediately re-invent the cursor. Instead, it removed it entirely. Replacing your digital ghost in the machine with your physical meatspace fingertip. Touch interactions brought with them “stickiness” — the 1:1 mating of intent and action. If you touched a thing, it did something. If you dragged your finger, the content came with it. This, finally, was human-centric computing.
Then, a few weeks ago, Apple dropped a new kind of pointer — a hybrid between these two worlds of pixels and pushes. The iPad’s cursor, I think, deserves closer examination.
Great, long read, interspersed with comments from Craig Federighi, sharing insight into how this new hybrid cursor came to be.