Apple

Apple releases 12th annual Supplier Responsibility Progress Report

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From the release:

The company conducted 756 audits spanning 30 countries and covering suppliers representing 95 percent of total spend. Apple’s efforts to raise standards are having a dramatic impact and the number of low-performing facilities decreased to just 1 percent.

Apple goes deeper into the supply chain to find issues and fix them more than any other company in its industry and each year it will do more to raise the bar and protect the people who make Apple products as well as the planet.

Indeed.

A lot can happen in a decade

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Craig Hockenberry:

Whether you’re a developer who’s working on mobile apps, or just someone enjoying the millions of apps available for your phone, today is a very special day. It’s the ten year anniversary of the original iPhone SDK.

I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that this release changed a lot of people’s lives. I know it changed mine and had a fundamental impact on this company’s business. So let’s take a moment and look back on what happened a decade ago.

First things first, this is a great look back at a moment in time. The iPhone shipped, but there was no SDK, the secret (VERY secret) sauce that let developers build apps that sat on the shoulders of Apple’s iPhone software designers.

Craig tells the story of that first wave of folks who found ways to pry the mysteries of iPhone OS mechanics from the clues of the native apps built by Apple, dumping the classes of those apps and working out how they did what they did.

This is the work of the giants on whose shoulders future iOS developers now stand.

Craig’s writeup resonated with me very strongly. Back then, my partner, Dave Wooldridge, and I were running a publishing company called SpiderWorks, shipping eBooks for developers before eBooks had quite hit the mainstream. SpiderWorks was bought by Apress and, as part of the deal, I convinced Apress to publish a book on iPhone programming I had been contemplating.

They agreed, and Jeff LaMarche and I signed an NDA with Apple to get a pre-release version of the iPhone OS (what it was called back then) SDK.

The core of the book, Beginning iPhone Development, was a series of 20 or so apps, each of which showed off a piece of the SDK. Jeff and I brainstormed the concepts, and he did all the heavy dev lifting, with my focus on writing and re-writing to crystallize the concepts, make sure the story was clear enough for beginners to follow without too much head-scratching.

The biggest problem we ran into was the combination of an NDA (which prevented us from discussing the SDK details with ANYONE) and a rapidly changing code base. Each new SDK Apple shared with us caused all our apps to break, which meant rewriting the code and the explanatory text that showed how it all works.

Madness.

Ultimately, the book was ready to go, and it shipped within days of Apple publicly releasing the SDK and officially lifting the NDA.

That experience was one of the most grueling, and thrilling, experiences of my life. I wouldn’t change it for anything.

BlackBerry weaponizing trove of patents, sues Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram

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Reuters:

BlackBerry Ltd on Tuesday filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook Inc and its WhatsApp and Instagram apps, arguing that they copied technology and features from BlackBerry Messenger.

And:

“Defendants created mobile messaging applications that co-opt BlackBerry’s innovations, using a number of the innovative security, user interface, and functionality enhancing features,” Canada-based BlackBerry said in a filing with a Los Angeles federal court.

One of the patents in question covers the concept of a badge, that is, a changing number tied to an icon that reflect, for example, the current number of unread email messages.

Check out this thread from The Verge’s Nilay Patel:

https://twitter.com/reckless/status/971095505429319682

This has massive potential. Potential revenue for BlackBerry, and potential disruption for a raft of companies that will find themselves in court fighting this and other patents.

Yikes.

Apple calls on Spike Jonze and FKA twigs for a gorgeous HomePod ad

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[VIDEO] Ad Week:

The 48-year-old Oscar winner has directed a new four-minute short film for Apple’s HomePod speaker featuring yet another marquee collaborator—the English musician and dancer FKA twigs. The result is a stunning piece that’s charming, surreal, emotional, playful, theatrical and utterly compelling—one of the most remarkable ads of the year so far.

This is no overstatement. Gorgeous ad. Watch it yourself. It’s embedded in the main Loop post. Worth every second.

Stephen Hackett’s HomePod intervention, and a reminder that these are early days still

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Stephen Hackett, 512 Pixels:

I unplugged the Echo and put it away, leading to many questions about where Alexa went, voiced by our three year old son.

That was about three weeks ago, and in those three weeks, the entire family has gotten acquainted with HomePod and this iteration of Siri.

And:

Obviously the HomePod blows away the Echo in terms of audio quality. I really like how the HomePod sounds, and as we already pay for Apple Music, we were good to go there.

That’s where things start to go south. In Stephen’s take, Alexa is either the same or superior to Siri in most every way. For someone used to Alexa, the switch to Siri comes across as an annoyance, especially if music quality is not a priority.

Stephen ends with:

In short, the increase in sound quality doesn’t make up for the frustration of using Siri. The HomePod is going to live in my studio; the Echo is back in its rightful place in the kitchen.

I’ve been living with HomePod for about a month and I have to agree with this take. I love my HomePod, but HomePod Siri is relatively primitive. Even when it comes to music.

I often find myself planning strategically how I will get Siri to recognize an unusual name, especially one with a lot of syllables. There have been times when I just could not get Siri to play a song even though I know the song is in the Apple Music catalog.

The lack of multiple or named timers is not a big deal to me, but I do see it as a symptom, a sign that these are early days still.

I assume that the next HomePod patch will bring new capabilities to HomePod Siri. I assume that the HomePod Siri team is paying strict attention to feedback, feverishly taking notes and planning strategy, working hard on an update that will show glimmers of a glorious new HomePod Siri future.

I sure hope that is the case.

iPhone 6s performance, before and after a battery replacement

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[VIDEO] Bennett Sorbo had an iPhone 6s with a dying battery. He ran his iPhone through some benchmarks, timing and filming the whole thing.

He then went to Apple, got a replacement battery, and ran the same tests again. The video embedded in the main Loop post shows the results.

Bottom line, replacing the battery clearly speeds things up. If you jump to about 2:34 in, you’ll see that the tasks took 5:45 on the bad battery (a presumably throttled processor) and only 4:33 on the new battery.

That’s a savings of 1:12, or about 21%. Not necessarily accurate to say that your phone will be 21% faster with a new battery, but it certainly seems like a new battery would make your phone at least somewhat more nimble.

Good experiment.

From notch to Face ID, the rush to copy Apple

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First off, interesting timing. On Friday, we posted a piece entitled Things Apple changed, were mocked for, then were copied industry wide, which focused purely on Apple innovation that was first mocked, then drove change in the industry.

This is a bit different, but certainly related.

Fast Company, on this year’s Mobile World Conference:

In most years, MWC is a showcase for Android at its best, with a slew of affordable smartphones, cutting-edge tech specs, and new ideas like curved screens and optical-zoom cameras. The show ultimately demonstrates how Android phones are different—and in some ways, better—than the iPhone.

This year seemed different. Instead of playing up the things that make Android handsets unique, phone makers tripped over themselves to show that they were on equal footing with Apple. In doing so, they came off as cheap imitators, unable to keep up with ideas that may not even be worth pursuing to begin with.

And:

The worst example was the use of a cutout, or notch, for the front-facing camera on phones with edge-to-edge displays. While the iPhone X’s notch is arguably an eyesore, at least it serves a clear purpose, housing the flood illuminator, dot projector, and infrared camera that allow Apple’s Face ID authentication system to work. The notch therefore serves as a statement about the technology underneath, which might explain why Apple paid such close attention to the design of its curves.

None of this was internalized by the notch purveyors at Mobile World Congress. Asus boasted that its Zenfone 5 and 5Z have smaller notches than the “Fruit Phone X,” which is easy enough to pull off when the phones have nothing like Face ID inside. And while Asus says its phones have a higher screen-to-body ratio than the iPhone X, they also have thicker bezels at the bottom of the screen that throw off the edge-to-edge design. The same was true with several other iPhone X knockoffs that appeared at the show.

And:

It doesn’t help that Samsung hints at having Face ID-like powers with its new AR Emoji feature, which creates an on-screen avatar from a scan of the user’s face. As my colleague Harry McCracken wrote, AR Emoji has “none of the uncanny polish and precision” of Apple’s Animoji, perhaps because the S9 doesn’t have any of iPhone X’s face-mapping sensor tech.

This is not an argument that all innovation comes from Apple. It’s more, Apple’s influence has grown to the point that the copying has accelerated and become much more widespread.

[H/T, Scott Knaster]

UPDATE: Add to all this the most prescient observation by Jean-Louis Gassée, from back in December, commenting on Samsung mocking the notch while, at the same time, calling attention to this branding attribute:

The iPhone X’s display has been mocked, notably in this Samsung commercial, for the “notch” at the top, the tiny area where all the Face ID organs (and other sensors) cut into the screen. An astute marketing person pointed to Samsung’s error in fingering the black notch: It’s a distinctive branding attribute, it tells everyone you’ve got a new iPhone X. (And let’s see what Samsung does when they deploy their own face recognition on a future device.)

iPhone X and a cool special effect

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[VIDEO] Developer Peder Norrby is using an iPhone X with ARKit and face tracking to create some pretty cool special effects. Watch the video (embedded in the main Loop post) for details. See also the trompe l’oeil Wikipedia page, which shows off the original artistic effect, which fools the eye into thinking it is seeing 3D.

Here’s a painting (Escaping Criticism by Pere Borrell del Caso, 1874) that really pulls this off:

Norrby is planning on releasing his work as a free app and making his source code public. Nice.

Flash usage declines from 80% in 2014 to under 8% today

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Bleeping Computer:

The percentage of daily Chrome users who’ve loaded at least one page containing Flash content per day has gone down from around 80% in 2014 to under 8% in early 2018.

These statistics on Flash’s declining numbers were shared with the public by Parisa Tabriz, Director of Engineering at Google, during a keynote speech at Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) held in San Diego last week.

That’s a precipitous dropoff, all in less than 4 years.

Last summer, Adobe announced the official end-of-life for Flash:

In collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.

So this dropoff is not a big surprise, more a sign that people are moving their content in the right direction.

Things Apple changed, were mocked for, then were copied industry wide

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A few days ago, I got into a Twitter discussion about things Apple changed and were mocked for changing, yet those changes were copied and, eventually became the new normal. The original discussion was prompted by a wave of phones embracing the notch.

I was surprised by how many different things emerged from this exercise. Key to making this list was Apple making a change that is first mocked. So innovation isn’t sufficient. Here’s the original tweet. Feel free to retweet or reply to it, send me anything I’ve missed. […]

Apple Watch Series 3 now tracks skiing and snowboarding activity

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Apple:

Starting today, skiers and snowboarders can use Apple Watch Series 3 to track their activities via new updates to apps available in the App Store. Watch users can now record runs, see vertical descent and other stats, and contribute active calorie measurements directly to the Apple Watch Activity app.

I love this. Looking forward to the day when machine learning advances to the point where it is no longer necessary to tap and swipe to tell my Apple Watch what kind of activity I’m doing.

I’ve always felt that if a human can watch me and easily figure out what I’m doing, it’s within the realm of future possibility for an AI to do the same.

Wreck-It Ralph and the Mac

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[VIDEO] First things first, I think Wreck-It Ralph is an under-appreciated gem of a movie. Perfectly cast, beautifully animated. And lots and lots of eye candy and Easter eggs.

Yesterday, Disney released the trailer for Wreck-It Ralph 2, AKA Ralph Breaks the Internet. The trailer is embedded in the main Loop post. That little girl doing the screaming sure resembles toddler Moana. But I digress.

In the trailer, can’t miss it, about 21 seconds in, there’s a shot of a computer interface. In many movies, when they show a computer screen, they’ve mocked up some generic OS. Not sure why, but that happens all the time. Not so here. This is a beauty shot of Mac OS 9, AKA System 9, or at least I think it’s System 9.

There’s a color Apple icon. That launcher bar (that what that was?) at the bottom left, and the application menu on the upper right. That enough to pin this down as System 9?

No matter, I am incredibly excited about this movie. Enjoy the trailer.

Why can’t Siri answer flight status questions?

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Dan Moren, SixColors:

Here’s a little experiment for you. Bring up the search field on your iPhone and type in a flight number—for example, WW126. Near the top of the results will be an option to bring up flight status. Tap that and you’ll get a nice little map of the flight as well some other info, like destination, duration, and so on.

Now, try asking Siri for the status of the same flight. I’ll wait.

Right. You’ll notice that Siri doesn’t seem to know anything about flight status, and instead goes straight to a web search.

There are two sides to this coin. On the one side, it’s infuriating when something that should clearly work a certain way refuses to work that way. You can see that your iPhone “knows” about flight status, and it seems obvious that Siri should, at the very least, be able to pass through a request to the underlying interface.

On the other side, I’m betting that the reason Siri is unable to do something that seems, on the surface, such a simple task, is missing wiring. Siri remains a constantly evolving work-in-progress. And, it seems, at least on the surface, that the team that enabled the Springboard search feature is not in the same planning groove as the Siri team.

iOS is a complex beast. Siri is a complex beast. The question to me: Is there a designer at the top building a model that feeds both of these teams? Or is it more likely that the flight status search feature was born inside the Springboard search team, never rising high enough in the planning process in a way that fed the Siri team.

I don’t think Siri not being nimble with flight status is a big deal. But I do think it might be a sign of a larger issue.

Selling HomePod

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Jean-Louis Gassée, MondayNote, on trying to find a way to sell the Mac in the dark days of 1985, with Steve Jobs recently gone:

Position the Mac as a Graphics Based Business System (GBBS). The Business System part was adman puffery meant to project gravitas, but the reference to graphics made unarguable sense: The Mac’s Graphical User Interface (GUI) was clearly a distinguishing factor at the time.

Everyone in the room loved the idea. Rather than take on the whole market, Apple would define and dominate a niche. As the Valley marketing sage put it (quoting Julius Caesar), better to be the chief of a small village in the Alps than second-in-command in Rome.

And:

Thanks to Jobs’ vision and powers of seduction, a couple of “serious developers”, Adobe and Aldus, helped transform the GBBS air guitar into a reality. Adobe contributed the PostScript software engine for the LaserWriter’s breakthrough typography and graphics. Aldus came up with the PageMaker program that made exemplary use of the Mac + LaserWriter combo. Aldus Chairman Paul Brainerd coined the term Desktop Publishing (DTP), a phrase that replaced the GBBS straw man and remains to this day. The Mac became #1 in the DTP village.

In the rest of this smart, well-written piece, Jean-Louis asks, and attempts to answer the question, “Is there an Alpine hamlet that the HomePod can claim as its own?”

One major difference between the original Mac and HomePod (besides the obvious ones) is that the original Mac had no ecosystem, no huge, dependable, cash-abundant audience on which to draw. With an iPhone/Apple Music-backed ecosystem, Apple has the luxury of a steady stream of HomePod early adopters to keep the cash flowing and feedback coming while the product evolves.

WatchKit is a sweet solution that will only ever give us baby apps

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Marco Arment:

Developers weren’t given access to make native apps until the iPhone’s second year. Before the native development kit was ready, Apple tried to pass off web apps as a “sweet solution” for third-party apps, but nobody was fooled.

Apple wasn’t using web apps for their own built-in iPhone apps — they were using native code and frameworks to make real apps. Developers like me did our best with web apps, but they sucked. We simply couldn’t make great apps without access to the real frameworks.

And:

Developing Apple Watch apps is extremely frustrating and limited for one big reason: unlike on iOS, Apple doesn’t give app developers access to the same watchOS frameworks that they use on Apple Watch.

Instead, we’re only allowed to use WatchKit, a baby UI framework that would’ve seemed rudimentary to developers even in the 1990s. But unlike the iPhone’s web apps, WatchKit doesn’t appear to be a stopgap — it seems to be Apple’s long-term solution to third-party app development on the Apple Watch.

And this from Gruber:

I’ve long given up on using any third-party apps on my Apple Watch, and I am so much happier for it. A year or two ago I would have been “Hell yeah”-ing this piece by Arment, but at this point I half feel like Apple should just get rid of third-party WatchOS apps and be done with it.

The one type app I think most people want is the one type of app Apple is never going to allow: custom watch faces. After that, the only thing good with Apple Watch is receiving (and responding to) notifications and fitness tracking.

All of this rings true to me. If you took all third party apps away and left me with notifications, fitness tracking, and complications that let me peer into that data, I might not even notice.

But if you opened the SDK to allow developers to build custom watch faces? I think we’d see some innovation or, at the very least, I’d have something closer to my dream watch.

My current setup is the most complication-rich of the watch faces, one that shows me:

  • day/date
  • current time
  • the next upcoming calendar event
  • outside temperature
  • battery level
  • music

Ideally, I’d love to add the Activities complication to that watch face. But I’d have to get rid of something first. But if someone could build a sliding complication that allowed me to swipe to the side to access additional complications, well I’d be all set.

And that’s just one tiny idea. If Apple opened up WatchKit, gave developers more to work with, I suspect we’d see some really great usable stuff emerge.

M. Night Shyamalan to produce straight-to-series thriller for Apple

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Variety:

M. Night Shyamalan is heading to Apple.

The streaming service has given a straight-to-series order to a psychological thriller series from writer Tony Basgallop that Shyamalan will executive produce. Plot details for the series are being kept under wraps. The half-hour series has received a 10-episode order, with Shyamalan also set to direct the first episode.

To me, M. Night Shyamalan is exasperating. I am a huge fan of The Sixth Sense, and the connected series, Unbreakable, Split, and the upcoming Glass. But interspersed throughout those movies is a series of projects that just left me cold. And there were a lot of them.

Shyamalan’s most recent TV effort was Wayward Pines, well received, but it ultimately ended after two seasons.

Fingers crossed on this one.

Timers, reminders, alarms—oh, my!

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Dr. Drang, Leancrew:

I decided to dig into the many ways you can set timed alerts on your Apple devices and how the alert systems vary from device to device. It is, you will not be surprised to learn, a mess.

This is a fascinating read, everything you’d ever want to know about timers, reminders, and alarms, and the way they are shared amongst the varied OSes in the Apple ecosystem.

But to me, this is emblematic of many other ecosystem elements. As you read through this, think about photos, music, your documents, even Siri access.

At the same time, to be fair, realize that we are at HomePodOS version 1.0. Surely the HomePod sharing model will evolve significantly over time.

Ring went on Shark Tank, asked for $7 million. No deal. Amazon just bought them for more than $1 billion.

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LA Times:

Ring doorbells are already being used by 2 million customers. Its improbable success comes five years after its founder, serial entrepreneur Jamie Siminoff, was rejected on the TV show “Shark Tank.”

Rejected isn’t quite right. He got offers, just none that made sense to him.

But the company proved there was demand for video-enabled doorbells, which enable users to see outside their homes via smartphone or computer. The technology provides a sense of security and a salve for one of the most nagging problems in the e-commerce era: package thieves.

There’s a certain irony there. Seems to me, the biggest victim of package thieves is Amazon, who ponys up a replacement when its packages don’t make it into customer hands.

Ring is also an excellent complement to Amazon Key, the program that allows package delivery services access to your house to leave a package under your lock and key.

One last thought on this. I’ve long thought one critical piece of the Amazon Echo ecosystem (echosystem?) that was missing was an Alexa phone. Amazon’s Fire Phone was a product ahead of its time. It was a commercial failure.

Alexa runs as a second class citizen on iOS and Android. There, but without that frictionless access to the hardware that makes Siri and Google person so easy to summon. I think Alexa is the demand card that Amazon’s phone was missing the first time around. If an Alexa-phone hit the market now, I think it’d be a very different story.

HomePod tricks and tips

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Nice collection of HomePod things to know. I especially appreciated the lists of Activities, Moods, and Genres. Good stuff.

Forbes: The feds can now (probably) unlock every iPhone model in existence

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Forbes:

Cellebrite, a Petah Tikva, Israel-based vendor that’s become the U.S. government’s company of choice when it comes to unlocking mobile devices, is this month telling customers its engineers currently have the ability to get around the security of devices running iOS 11. That includes the iPhone X, a model that Forbes has learned was successfully raided for data by the Department for Homeland Security back in November 2017, most likely with Cellebrite technology.

As the Forbes article points out, this prose is on the Cellebrite media datasheet:

Devices supported for Advanced Unlocking and Extraction Services include:

Apple iOS devices and operating systems, including iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, iPad Pro and iPod touch, running iOS 5 to iOS 11

Google Android devices, including Samsung Galaxy and Galaxy Note devices; and other popular devices from Alcatel, Google Nexus, HTC, Huawei, LG, Motorola, ZTE, and more.

If true, that Forbes headline seems a fair statement.

Apple is launching medical clinics to deliver the ‘world’s best health care experience’ to its employees

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Christina Farr, CNBC:

Apple is launching a group of health clinics called AC Wellness for its own employees and their families this spring, according to several sources familiar with the company’s plans.

The company quietly published a website, acwellness.com, with more details about its initiative and a careers page listing jobs including primary care doctor, exercise coach, and care navigator, as well as a phlebotomist to administer lab tests on-site.

And:

Sources said that it started notifying third-party vendors about the shift to its own network of health clinics this week.

And:

Sources said the company will leverage its medical clinics as a way to test out its growing range of health services and products, which it is starting to roll out to consumers at large.

Will Apple roll out health clinics to serve consumers, rather than just employees? Not clear, but certainly seems a possibility.

Digging through the AC Wellness site, I found a corporate address, which is located adjacent to an Apple Fitness Center. Via Google Maps, here’s a pic of the sign at the AC Wellness address:

Interesting.

Apple plans giant high-end iPhone, lower-priced model

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Mark Gurman and Debby Wu, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is preparing to release a trio of new smartphones later this year: the largest iPhone ever, an upgraded handset the same size as the current iPhone X and a less expensive model with some of the flagship phone’s key features.

And:

With a screen close to 6.5 inches, Apple’s big new handset will be one of the largest mainstream smartphones on the market. While the body of the phone will be about the same size as the iPhone 8 Plus, the screen will be about an inch larger thanks to the edge-to-edge design used in the iPhone X. (Apple is unlikely to refer to the phone as a phablet, a term popularized by Samsung.)

I remember agonizing over the huge size of the iPhone 6 Plus, worrying about it fitting in my pockets, being too large for my hands. I switched and have never looked back. I no longer think of the Plus form factor as large. To me, it has become the new normal.

The thought of the same footprint, but with a nicer display than my 8 Plus, and more pixels, well that’s irresistible. The obvious hitch will be the price-tag.

A 256GB iPhone X is priced at $1,149. I can only imagine that a 256GB iPhone X Plus will be about $100 more (the difference in price between the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus), or $1,249. How far can Apple push that price ceiling?

Searching on iOS and Mac: It’s all a bit bewildering

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Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS:

All too often, I give up trying to tap my way through Settings and instead pull down to reveal the Search field, before remembering that searches in Settings often fail.

And:

It’s worse even than the System Preferences app in macOS, which at least shows all preference panes without the need to scroll. In fact, System Preferences points to the simple way Apple could rearrange the Settings app to make it easier to navigate.

This is a growing… […]

Hulu’s fight against Netflix, Amazon and Apple

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John Koblin, New York Times:

[Hulu] lost $920 million in 2017, according to BTIG, which projects that the business will lose $1.67 billion this year. Hulu is also facing more intense competition than ever as its rivals disrupt the entertainment industry by handing out big checks. In recent months, Netflix has signed the producers Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy to nine-figure deals; Amazon has pledged more than $200 million toward a “Lord of the Rings” series; and Apple, a newcomer in the field, is shelling out hundreds of millions to create original programming of its own.

This is a great article, interesting on several fronts. Consider their complex ownership:

The Walt Disney Company (30 percent), 21st Century Fox (30 percent), Comcast (30 percent) and Time Warner (10 percent). If Disney’s pending $52.4 billion acquisition of most of 21st Century Fox wins governmental approval, as is expected, Disney will own 60 percent of Hulu.

And:

The Disney-Fox deal raises the question of what will happen to Hulu, given that Disney is already developing two streaming services. Another potential issue is whether or not two of Hulu’s owners — Disney, which owns ABC, and Comcast, which owns NBC Universal — will be able to play nicely with each other after they become owners with uneven stakes in the platform.

The article also takes you behind the scenes on a series pitch, where Hulu outbid all comers for the rights to produce the upcoming series “The Looming Tower”.

The whole thing is well written and fascinating. Oddly, the article was also posted on CNBC, if you don’t have access to the New York Times.

Apple embraces marriage equality with four “First Dance” ads

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[VIDEO] Apple, this past September:

“We support marriage equality and believe all Australians deserve the freedom to marry the person they love, and to have their relationships recognised with the same dignity and legal protections as their neighbours, friends, and family.”

Over the weekend, Apple Australia released four new iPhone X ads (embedded in the main Loop post), all reemphasizing that support. Each video is backed by Australian singer/songwriter Courtney Barnett, who recorded a cover of the INXS classic Never Tear Us Apart specifically for the ads.

Apple security changes will end iTunes Store access for 1st gen Apple TV, Windows XP/Vista

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Apple:

Starting May 25, Apple will introduce security changes that prevent older Windows PCs from using the iTunes Store. If you have Windows XP or Vista PC, your computer is no longer supported by Microsoft, and you’re not able to use the latest version of iTunes.

And:

Also beginning May 25, security changes will prevent Apple TV (1st generation) from using the iTunes Store. This device is an obsolete Apple product and will not be updated to support these security changes.

Not sure which Apple TV model you have? Here’s a helpful guide. Note that the 1st gen Apple TV is silver.

Rene Ritchie, John Gruber and an all-star cast discuss the death of Twitter for Mac

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[VIDEO] I absolutely love this video (embedded in the main Loop post). First off, there’s the topic. Twitter is pulling their Mac client, forcing people to either go through their browser or adopt a third party Twitter client. I’ve been thinking about this, but I just can’t wrap my head around their motivation. Is this some kind of end run around Apple? An attempt to reduce maintenance costs (one less platform to support)?

No matter, this is a video of Rene Ritchie, John Gruber, Loren Brichter (part of Apple’s original iPhone dev team, creator of Tweetie for iPhone OS, and original creator of Twitter for the Mac), Twitterrific’s Craig Hockenberry, Twitter for Mac developer Ben Sandofsky, and Tapbot’s Paul Haddad, all in a round robin discussion.

The topic is hot, the panelists are all steeped in the Twitter for Mac story, and the video format gives you the chance to see these people whose names you might have heard or whose tweets you might have encountered.

Wonderful format.

Adjusting EQ: iOS yes. Mac yes. HomePod? No.

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The HomePod is self-balancing, algorithmically adjusting its sound for the environment in which it’s placed.

Me? I like the sound. Have not yet felt the need to tweak it. But I do like a challenge. I came across this article from OSXDaily, which walks you through the process of tweaking your EQ for iOS.

I fired up some music, then went to Settings > Music and tapped EQ. There are 23 different canned EQ settings to choose from. The article recommends Late Night to maximize volume on your iPhone. Give that a try if you listen to music out of your iPhone speakers frequently.

Thought I’d try to AirPlay that EQ to HomePod.

With the music still playing, I went to Control Center, tapped the upper-right corner of the music player (bringing up AirPlay), and selected my HomePod. The music played, but when I tapped the various EQ settings, no change.

I went to iTunes on my Mac, launched System Preferences > Sound and tapped my HomePod. Back in iTunes, I tapped the EQ column in the current song (if you don’t see an EQ column, go to View > Show View Options and tap the Equalizer checkbox). No dice. Changing EQ does not impact HomePod.

This is me noodling, not at all a complaint. I love the HomePod sound. The EQ question comes up often enough, I thought I’d dig in, make sure I understood what was going on. Please return to your regularly scheduled programming.