AppleInsider:

The Apple Watch maintained a solid grip on smartwatch shipments during the March quarter, according to new estimates, even as rivals from Samsung and Fitbit made headway.

Apple claimed 35.8 percent of the market, Counterpoint Research said on Thursday. That’s up just slightly year-over-year from 35.5 percent in Q1 2018, despite Apple Watch shipments reportedly rising 49 percent in the same timeframe.

Samsung’s marketshare jumped from 7.2 to 11.1 percent, something Counterpoint credited to success of the latest Galaxy Watch models. These include a traditional round watchface, improved battery life, and 4G connectivity, making them one of the better smartwatch options for people who don’t have or want an iPhone.

There’s the Apple Watch and then there’s everything else.

AppleInsider:

Netflix on Wednesday launched what it calls “high-quality audio,” offering crisper sound for viewers with surround-sound systems. Compatible videos are labeled for Dolby Atmos or Dolby Digital Plus 5.1, Netflix said. This includes videos that only have a “5.1” emblem. Both standards are supported by the Apple TV 4K, but only Digital Plus 5.1 is available on the Apple TV HD.

Quality is moreover adaptive based on bandwidth. 5.1 systems will get bitrates spanning 192 kilobits to 640 kilobits — which Netflix calls “perceptually transparent” — while Atmos systems will start at 448 kilobits and reach as high as 768. Atmos does require the company’s Premium plan, which costs $15.99 per month but is also needed for 4K.

Just out of curiosity, how many of you have a system that can take advantage of this new “‘high-quality’ audio” for your Apple TV?

CNET:

One of the parental-control apps removed from the App Store fired back on Wednesday at Apple’s explanation of why the app was banned.

OurPact argued that its app should be reinstated and should be allowed to use technology that enables parents to control what their children access on their Apple devices.

OurPact published a blog post Wednesday that disputed Apple’s statement. The company laid out a detailed record of communication with Apple (for instance, on Oct. 6: “Apple removes the OurPact child app from the App Store without any prior communication.” OurPact also sought to explain what MDM software is by contradicting Apple’s recent statements with the iPhone maker’s own documentation about the technology.

The truth, as is usually the case, is likely somewhere in the middle.

Axios:

In its quarterly earnings released today, Qualcomm said it would record $4.5-$4.7 billion revenue in the coming quarter as part of its settlement of a long-running intellectual-property quarrel with Apple.

The revenue “includes a cash payment from Apple and the release of related liabilities,” Qualcomm said.

Nice little bump.

AppleInsider:

Apple is reportedly fighting the logo for a new German bike path, arguing that it bears too much similarity to its own.

The logo for the “Apfelroute” — Apple Route — was registered with the German Patent and Trademark Office in 2018, and is already in use for tourism marketing in the Rhine-Voreifel region, said Westdeutscher Rundfunk. Lawyers for Apple have not only filed an appeal with the GPTO, but sent cease-and-desist letters to Rhine-Voreifel Tourism. Apple’s trademark objections revolve around the Apfelroute’s green leaf and “bitten” side.

I can confidently predict Apple will lose this battle.

Six Colors:

Apple’s quarterly results are in. The company posted revenue of $58 billion, down 5% from the same quarter a year ago. iPad revenue was up 22% and Services revenue was up 16%, but Mac revenue was down 5% and iPhone revenue was down 17%.

We’ve got lots of charts below, as well as a transcript of CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri’s conference call with financial-industry analysts.

Snell always has the best charts.

Motherboard:

In recent weeks, an Apple representative and a lobbyist for CompTIA, a trade organization that represents big tech companies, have been privately meeting with legislators in California to encourage them to kill legislation that would make it easier for consumers to repair their electronics, Motherboard has learned.

According to two sources in the California State Assembly, the lobbyists have met with members of the Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee, which is set to hold a hearing on the bill Tuesday afternoon. The lobbyists brought an iPhone to the meetings and showed lawmakers and their legislative aides the internal components of the phone. The lobbyists said that if improperly disassembled, consumers who are trying to fix their own iPhone could hurt themselves by puncturing the lithium-ion battery,

Apple is on the wrong side of this issue and it makes them seem anti-consumer.

UPDATE: The Right to Repair Bill has been pulled and Motherboard has updated its story with a statement from the bill’s sponsor.

AppleInsider:

You don’t need to go blue to be profitable. After all, some of the biggest shows in history have been clean, such as “Friends” and “The Big Bang Theory.” Beyond Netflix, Apple TV+’s closest competition is likely to be Disney+, debuting Nov. 12 with (mostly) family-friendly material from studios like Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and National Geographic.

Turn your head though to the most popular shows on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes right now. Many of them would be impossible under Apple’s current rules.

Jim Dalrymple and I have discussed this on a couple of occasions on the Your Mac Life podcast. It’s an interesting question and problem for Apple. Do they let “the creatives” hold the reins come what may or do they shoot for the largest possible audience with G-rated content?

Uncrate:

It’s been 40 years since the debut of Alien, and the franchise has reproduced exponentially over the decades — just like its iconic xenomorphs. To celebrate the event, 20th Century Fox and Tongal collaborated with fans to create six short films set in the Alien universe. Fox received over 550 scripts before selecting the final six, and each one reverently expands on the source material.

Looking forward to scaring the bejesus out of my 13-year-old with these. And – 40 years? Gods, I’m old.

William Gallagher, Apple Insider:

Once you understand how it works —and know the right sequence of steps to go through —then file sharing with iCloud Drive is tremendous when it’s working. It’s just that setting it up is surprisingly confusing, so let’s walk through it.

And:

The way that you share files from iCloud Drive varies slightly between iOS and Mac, but the principle is exactly the same on both. You find your file, choose Share and then specify who you’re sharing it with.

Remember that your file has to be in iCloud Drive and remember that you cannot do this with a folder. You can’t even select two or more files and share those. It’s one file at a time, as tedious as that is.

I really want to use iCloud Drive. But I end up using Dropbox. It’s just easier.

That said, this is a good “how to”, well written, absolutely worth reading, just to know how this works.

From Microsoft’s 2019 voice report:

• Siri and Google Assistant are tied at 36%
• Alexa at 25%
• Cortana at 19%
• Other at 1%

Another nugget:

In 2018, we found that 23% of respondents currently own a smart speaker with another 30% planning to purchase . In our research in January 2019, we found that 45% of respondents now currently own a smart speaker with an additional 26% planning to purchase one soon.

You can find the report here. It’s an interesting read.

From the Amazon job description:

The Managing Editor, News will work on an exciting new opportunity within Ring to manage a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbors.

Struggling to wrap my head around the implications here. Is this a publicity campaign? Is this part of a data-mining scenario? Is there money in the picture, or is this a pure loss for Amazon, pulled from the Ring marketing budget?

Is this the new crime beat?

New York Times:

In its first-quarter earnings report, Spotify said it had 217 million users around the world, up from 207 million at the end of last year. Of those, 100 million are paying subscribers, compared with 96 million at the end of 2018.

And:

In its most recent quarter, Spotify, which is based in Stockholm, had revenue of 1.5 billion euros, about $1.7 billion. That was a 33 percent increase from the same period a year earlier. It had a net loss of €142 million, or about $158 million.

Apple has about 56 million paid subscribers (the article says 50 million), recently passing Spotify in the US.

And:

Just as Spotify was set to open in India, Warner/Chappell, one of the biggest music publishers, sued the company, saying it had not secured the proper rights to include Warner/Chappell songs. Spotify set up shop in India anyway, saying its use of Warner/Chappell music was allowed under Indian copyright law. The case remains active in an Indian court.

Fascinating to watch this heavyweight battle unfold.

Recode:

Anki, the robotics company that has raised over $200 million in venture capital, is laying off its entire staff and the startup is shuttering, Recode has learned.

In a teary all-hands meeting on Monday morning, CEO Boris Sofman told his staff they would be terminated on Wednesday and that close to 200 employees would be paid a week of severance, according to people familiar with the matter. Sofman had told employees a few days earlier that the company was scrambling to find more money after a new round of financing fell through at the last minute, imperiling the company’s future.

This is a real shame. I loved and bought some of their products.

The Verge:

Back in March, we heard that a New Jersey drama club was adapting Alien as a high school production. Now there’s a recording of the production making the rounds that shows the play straight through, including their take on the Space Jockey, the Chestburster, the Xenomorph, and a guy playing Harry Dean Stanton in an accurate Hawaiian T-shirt.

Since the video could potentially get taken down for being an unauthorized adaptation of Alien (it already has several music-related copyright claims), it’s better to watch it now while it’s up, so you can see how well the drama club did adapting a film built on an $11 million budget for the high school stage. The students say they raised their own money for the play and made costumes out of recycled material.

Watch it soon. You know this is getting pulled in 3…..2….1….

Exquisite coordination, beautiful imagery, and amazing to see how detailed satellite imagery can get.

Marco Arment, Overcast creator:

Podcast sharing has been limited to audio and links, but today’s social networks are more reliant on images and video, especially Instagram. Podcasts need video clips to be shared more easily today.

I’ve seen some video clips from tools specific to certain podcast networks or hosts, but they were never available to everyone, or for every show. So people mostly just haven’t shared podcast clips, understandably, because it has been too hard.

Not anymore.

And:

With today’s 2019.4 update, you can now share audio or video clips, up to a minute each, from any public podcast. Simply tap the share button in the upper-right corner.

Great feature, huge help for podcasters trying to get the word out. I hope this becomes a standard for all podcast apps, especially this one.

Side note from 512 Pixels on how this feature came to be.

Reddit:

Last year I bought my 82 year old grandmother an iPad. She never owned a smart device before, she never touched a computer and I don’t think she knew what “the internet” was.

It was my fathers idea to get her that iPad. Thanks to me, my dad became a huge fan of Apple devices and since both he and I spend the majority of our time overseas he thought it would be a good idea to get my grandmother an iPad so they could face time and he could show her where he is etc.

TBH I thought it was an incredibly stupid idea. My grandmother is an Eastern European, ex communist country simple, old woman. Imagine old grandmothers from funny “a normal day in Russia” clips and gifs, that’s what she looks like. First 15 years of her life she spent in a village that had no electricity. Over the last 30 years we’ve spent more time talking about her inability to handle a tv remote than anything else.

Read the post for how this played out. I wrestle with this issue a lot. My mom is legally blind and feels cutoff from the world. Try as I might, I can’t find a voice-assisted solution that she can master.

My uncle has vision issues as well, gets around just fine, but also feels cutoff. He used to use email, but age has robbed him of his ability to deal with those complexities.

I wish the iPad had a mode where it could boot into an incredibly simple interface (kiosk style), where there were just a few, dead-simple buttons to press. Big, big buttons, to help people with poor close-up vision.

One could be, take picture, send to Dave. Another could be, look at pictures Dave sent you. That kind of simple interface, with just a few hard-coded, but editable (perhaps via Shortcuts) buttons would bring joy to many folks with vision or cognition issues.

That aside, read the linked story. I love the way that played out.

Rob Pegoraro, Yahoo Finance:

Apple talks a good game on privacy when the rest of the tech industry continues to fumble—with Facebook (FB) at the top of the list based on recent headlines. Most of the time those words come backed by sound and smart design choices, but then there’s AirDrop.

Almost five years after AirDrop’s debut on iPhones in Apple’s iOS 7 release, this file-sharing feature continues to enable abusive behavior by creeps who enjoy sending unsolicited photos to nearby strangers.

AirDrop’s default setting is to limit AirDrops only from people on your contact list. To check this yourself, take a look at Setting > General > AirDrop. The default is Contacts Only.

But, once you open up AirDrop (there are plenty of reasons to – Here’s one) to accept files from non-contacts:

And from then on, AirDrop would remain open to accepting a file from anybody with an AirDrop-compatible Apple device (not just iPhones, but newer iPads and Macs) within Bluetooth and WiFi range. And when a file arrives, AirDrop splashes a preview of its contents across the phone’s screen.

The answer is to turn AirDrop on, momentarily, then close that security hole by turning it back off again.

Rene Ritchie offered up an excellent suggestion here. To paraphrase, Rene suggests that there be a timer on AirDrop. Turn it on and, after a specified period of time, it closes back up automatically.

Rob Pegoraro had the same solution:

The simplest fix would be to have AirDrop’s Everyone setting expire after a few minutes.

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

On Saturday, the New York Times released an article titled Apple Cracks Down on Apps That Fight iPhone Addiction.

As Shawn posted here, Phil Schiller responded to a letter from a MacRumors reader with a detailed rebuttal.

Yesterday, Apple released an official response to that New York Times article, addressing the removal of a number of parental control apps from the App Store:

We recently removed several parental control apps from the App Store, and we did it for a simple reason: they put users’ privacy and security at risk.

And:

Over the last year, we became aware that several of these parental control apps were using a highly invasive technology called Mobile Device Management, or MDM. MDM gives a third party control and access over a device and its most sensitive information including user location, app use, email accounts, camera permissions, and browsing history.

And:

MDM does have legitimate uses. Businesses will sometimes install MDM on enterprise devices to keep better control over proprietary data and hardware. But it is incredibly risky—and a clear violation of App Store policies—for a private, consumer-focused app business to install MDM control over a customer’s device. Beyond the control that the app itself can exert over the user’s device, research has shown that MDM profiles could be used by hackers to gain access for malicious purposes.

There’s more, but that’s the gist of the argument.

Let’s revisit the New York Times article, with Apple’s response in mind:

They all tell a similar story: They ran apps that helped people limit the time they and their children spent on iPhones. Then Apple created its own screen-time tracker. And then Apple made staying in business very, very difficult.

Over the past year, Apple has removed or restricted at least 11 of the 17 most downloaded screen-time and parental-control apps, according to an analysis by The New York Times and Sensor Tower, an app-data firm. Apple has also clamped down on a number of lesser-known apps.

In some cases, Apple forced companies to remove features that allowed parents to control their children’s devices or that blocked children’s access to certain apps and adult content. In other cases, it simply pulled the apps from its App Store.

Some app makers with thousands of paying customers have shut down. Most others say their futures are in jeopardy.

From the New York Times’ presentation, one might get the impression that Apple wanted to own the screen-time and parental control app space, eliminating competition in those areas.

But Apple’s response paints a very different picture. You can see why they responded so quickly to this issue.

One final bit from Apple’s release:

In this app category, and in every category, we are committed to providing a competitive, innovative app ecosystem. There are many tremendously successful apps that offer functions and services similar to Apple’s in categories like messaging, maps, email, music, web browsers, photos, note-taking apps, contact managers and payment systems, just to name a few. We are committed to offering a place for these apps to thrive as they improve the user experience for everyone.

Apple is making it clear that this isn’t about owning a competitive space, but about privacy.

MacRumors:

Earlier today, a report from The New York Times highlighted Apple’s removal of a number of App Store apps that had allowed users to monitor usage of their devices or those used by their children. The report suggests that Apple’s move to pull the apps is related to having rolled out its own Screen Time feature in iOS 12 that competes in some ways with these apps, raising concerns over anticompetitive behavior.

After reading the article, MacRumors reader Zachary Robinson emailed Tim Cook to express concern over the situation, and earlier today he received a thorough response from Phil Schiller outlining that Apple’s removal of these apps is due to their use of Mobile Device Management (MDM) technology to monitor everything that happens on the user’s phone.

While becoming more common, it’s still a fairly unusual move for Apple to respond so quickly, directly, and on a weekend to stories like the one in the New York Times.

Macworld:

Touch interfaces have become—like it or not—the default way for interacting with our devices these days. Rare is the time when we deal with a screen that isn’t touch-sensitive. It’s on ATMs, payment terminals, information kiosks, and so on. I’m sure we’ve all seen those videos with puzzled kids wondering why they can’t tap the TV screen.

As it stands, all of Apple’s other devices—even the HomePod and the Apple TV’s remote—have touch features. So why is the Mac left out?

I couldn’t disagree more. I may just be a grumpy old man, but just because other devices are touch-enabled doesn’t automatically mean the Mac needs to be touch-enabled.

John Gruber:

The first thing to understand is that Luminary is two things: (1) an $8/month subscription service for exclusive original audio shows, from some very well-known people; (2) a podcast app for iOS and Android that you use to listen to Luminary’s own shows and any real podcast. You can use Luminary’s podcast player to listen to regular podcasts without subscribing to Luminary’s service.

And:

This thing with Luminary is a bit rich. On the one side, their own original shows are proprietary and they promote them for being ad-free. On the other, they want to be a podcast player for all regular podcasts, many of which (and most of the ones produced as professional endeavors) are funded by advertising. This spat with The New York Times and Gimlet Media is fascinating because The Times’s The Daily and Gimlet’s shows are indisputably podcasts — their RSS feeds and MP3 files are available for anyone or any client to download over the open web. Luminary isn’t being blocked technically from playing them, they’re being blocked because The Times and Gimlet asked them to, and Luminary agreed to comply. So putting aside (for the moment) whether Luminary’s own original shows qualify as “podcasts”, as a podcast player, Luminary’s app is in the incredibly bizarre position of not playing several very popular podcasts that every other podcast player in the world can subscribe to and play.

The whole thing is, to me, a rich rewarding read. Twitter exploded with complaints about Luminary’s methods (intentional or not), along with a host of podcasters discussing their efforts to remove themselves from Luminary’s service.

A perfect pairing with John Gruber’s explainer is this excellent rollup from Michael Tsai, filled with tweets and details, called Luminary Proxying Podcasts Without Asking.

One last quote from Gruber:

As a side note, I think the $100 million in venture capital that Luminary raised is going to be $100 million flushed down a toilet.

Amazing.

iFixit blog:

After two days of intense public interest, iFixit has removed our teardown of Samsung’s Galaxy Fold. That analysis supported our suspicions that the device provided insufficient protection from debris damaging the screen.

We were provided our Galaxy Fold unit by a trusted partner. Samsung has requested, through that partner, that iFixit remove its teardown. We are under no obligation to remove our analysis, legal or otherwise. But out of respect for this partner, whom we consider an ally in making devices more repairable, we are choosing to withdraw our story until we can purchase a Galaxy Fold at retail.

Our team appreciated the chance to look inside this ambitious device. All new products face challenges—this one perhaps more than most. We’re grateful to have shared a glimpse of how Samsung’s engineers addressed some of those challenges, and we look forward to sharing more as soon as possible.

You can head over to our post on the teardown for some of the “disappeared” highlights.

Next best thing? Ride the coattails of a Reddit user and check out the pics of their recent visit.