Business

Apple confirms some iPad Pros ship slightly bent, but says it’s normal

Written by

Chris Welch, The Verge:

Apple has confirmed to The Verge that some of its 2018 iPad Pros are shipping with a very slight bend in the aluminum chassis. But according to the company, this is a side effect of the device’s manufacturing process and shouldn’t worsen over time or negatively affect the flagship iPad’s performance in any practical way. Apple does not consider it to be a defect.

The bend is the result of a cooling process involving the iPad Pro’s metal and plastic components during manufacturing, according to Apple.

And:

My 11-inch iPad Pro showed a bit of a curve after two weeks. Apple asked if I would send it their way so the engineering team could take a look. But the replacement 11-inch iPad Pro I received at Apple’s Downtown Brooklyn store exhibited a very slight bend in the aluminum as soon as I took off the wrapper.

And:

Those who are annoyed by the bend shouldn’t have any trouble exchanging or returning their iPad Pro at the Apple Store or other retailers within the 14-day return window. But it’s not clear if swaps will be permitted outside that policy.

Tricky. Is this really normal? Look at the image in the linked article. Certainly seems like a manufacturing defect to me.

Past as prologue, can’t help but imagine a lawsuit brewing somewhere.

For the first time in more than 20 years, copyrighted works will enter the public domain

Written by

Glenn Fleishman, writing for Smithsonian Magazine:

At midnight on New Year’s Eve, all works first published in the United States in 1923 will enter the public domain. It has been 21 years since the last mass expiration of copyright in the U.S.

And:

“The public domain has been frozen in time for 20 years, and we’re reaching the 20-year thaw,” says Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The release is unprecedented, and its impact on culture and creativity could be huge. We have never seen such a mass entry into the public domain in the digital age. The last one—in 1998, when 1922 slipped its copyright bond—predated Google. “We have shortchanged a generation,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. “The 20th century is largely missing from the internet.”

And:

We can blame Mickey Mouse for the long wait. In 1998, Disney was one of the loudest in a choir of corporate voices advocating for longer copyright protections. At the time, all works published before January 1, 1978, were entitled to copyright protection for 75 years; all author’s works published on or after that date were under copyright for the lifetime of the creator, plus 50 years.

Fascinating read.

Apple now allows users to gift in-app purchases to friends and family

Written by

Apple tweaked their App Store review guidelines from:

Apps should not directly or indirectly enable gifting of in-app purchase content, features, or consumable items to others.

To:

Apps may enable gifting of items that are eligible for in-app purchase to others. Such gifts may only be refunded to the original purchaser and may not be exchanged.

It’ll take time to see this, as apps need to implement the change, resubmit, then the updates need to propagate to the end users. But it’ll get there.

Seems a clear win for Apple. Gifting allows more money to flow through the ecosystem.

Manhole covers key to bringing 5G to urban areas

Written by

IEEE Spectrum:

The inconvenient truth of future 5G networks is that their increased high-speed bandwidth, and the use of the millimeter wave spectrum (the radio spectrum above 30 gigahertz) to achieve it, comes at a price: Those radio signals barely propagate around the corners of buildings.

In other words, you need a lot more hardware to distribute that sweet, sweet high speed 5G around cities. But that extra hardware means lots of construction, clutter, traffic disruptions and ugly antennas hanging everywhere.

What to do? Someone came up with the idea of turning manhole covers into 5G antennas.

Clever.

Rene Ritchie: Biggest Apple MISSES of 2018

Written by

[VIDEO] Put the title aside. Instead, think thoughtful insight, rather than snarky complaining. And if you are on the move, wheel over to your favorite podcast player and search for Vector. This is an excellent listen. Video version embedded in the main Loop post.

Elon Musk, a high speed underground tunnel, and true genius

Written by

[VIDEO] CBS News:

Tuesday night in Los Angeles, Musk unveiled the very first tunnel in what he hopes will become a network of underground highways. The first tunnel runs between the headquarters of Musk’s SpaceX company and a parking lot behind a shuttered business a little over a mile away. It’s only for testing purposes and won’t be used by the public.

Musk knew nothing about building tunnels when he started this venture. Just as he did with Tesla and SpaceX, he figures to build his expertise as he goes, then find ways to crush the costs down.

While modern subway tunnels in Los Angeles cost around $900 million per mile, he says he built his for about $10 million. One way he saved money: he literally made it dirt-cheap.

“When digging tunnels…it’s quite expensive to have all this dirt trucked off somewhere. And we’re like, well, why don’t we try to use that dirt for something useful? So we are creating bricks on-site…and you can pick ’em up for, they’re very cheap; 10 cents a brick,” he said.

There’s also great savings in owning the entire process, rather than bringing in layers of third party contractors and specialized labor, all of which significantly pumps up the price of any large project.

As to how the whole tunnel thing will work:

At first glance, the tunnel is a bit daunting. At only 12 feet in diameter, it’s much more claustrophobic than most transportation tunnels. According to Musk, cars will be able to travel up to 150 mph in the tunnel but must be on autopilot.

A bit of genius here. Only properly outfitted cars will be allowed in these tunnels. Someone who can build such cars efficiently can make a lot of money. To me, that’s incredible vision on Musk’s part.

Read the article, watch the video embedded in the main Loop post. Both are fascinating.

Glitter bomb vs package thief

Written by

[VIDEO] Mark Rober is one smart cookie. He’s the human who built last year’s automatic dartboard.

Here’s Mark on Twitter, describing this year’s project:

Someone stole a package from me. Police wouldn’t do anything about it so I spent the last 6 months engineering up some vigilante justice. Revenge is a dish best served fabulously.

This is some fantastic engineering. Here’s hoping he open sources the design. Video embedded in main Loop post.

Remove background from image

Written by

This is a great (and free) service:

  • Upload an image
  • The site removes the background
  • Redownload the image

The results take seconds, work amazingly well, though I’ve found with more complex backgrounds, artifacts do creep in. Seems to work really well with head shots.

How to create blank icons on your iPhone

Written by

Sébastien Page, iDownloadBlog:

Whether you want to show off your beautiful wallpaper, or simply want your set up to look different from the millions of other iPhones out there, one of the best way to do that is to add blank icons to your Home screen.

These invisible icons will allow you to create empty spaces on your Home screen to either let the wallpaper shine, or to arrange your app icons in a very specific way.

This tutorial will show you how to create create blank iPhone icons, no jailbreak or hack required.

This is my new favorite way to add blank icons to customize your home screen. Note that you have to re-jump through the hoops if you want to change the blank icons.

In a nutshell, you use iPhone Safari to browse to iempty.tooliphone.net. That site lets you customize your page, as you like.

A great Bose feature AirPods should steal

Written by

From Reddit:

  • Daisy chaining: I can connect two Bose headphones to one device. I’d love to do this with AirPods, so my SO and I can watch the same movie on an iPad, or listen to the same podcast on a walk. (This is called “Music Share” in the Bose Connect app, but works with any audio coming from the device.)

  • Multiple Active Devices: My Bose headphones can connect to two devices at once. I’d love to be able to have an active connection to 2-3 devices on my AirPods, so I can use my phone / tv / laptop all at once.

  • A connection management tool. I thought I’d hate this. But I love it. I can easily select from a list of past devices which ones I’d like my headphones to be connected to, and it does it nearly instantly.

That first one is my favorite. I would love to be able to share audio with someone when playing it out loud is not practical, or allowed. For example, watching a movie together on a long plane or train ride. Or watching TV, late at night when the baby is asleep.

Used to be, you’d plug in a splitter and then plug in your wired headphones. Two headphones Bluetooth’ed into your iOS device or Mac would be a terrific idea.

This a Bluetooth 5 thing? I believe the W1 chip in the AirPods is based on Bluetooth 4.2. The W3 chip in the Apple Watch Series 4 supports Bluetooth 5. So might this feature be possible in the next generation of AirPods?

Springsteen, Netflix, and grabbing people out of the audience to perform

Written by

This is a little bit of a wander, so please bear with me. All of this is in appreciation.

First things first, I grew up in New Jersey, and as is the law, I am a lifelong fan of The Boss, Bruce Springsteen. I know that I am far from alone in this.

Bruce is winding down his career, just wrote his bestselling memoir, the excellent Born to Run. Bruce also created an intimate one-man-show, Springsteen on Broadway, which sold out every single performance of its entire, just-concluded, run.

Sadly, I was unable to make it to see the show. A missed opportunity that, a bucket list item for me. But Netflix worked with Bruce to create a movie of the show. It is truly wonderful, a soulful gift to his fans who couldn’t make the show.

If you are a fan, this is not to be missed. If you wonder what all the hype is about, this should answer the question. The real magic of Springsteen is seeing him live. And not just for the music, but for the storytelling, the preacher side of Bruce, the showmanship of it all.

OK, moving on. So the headline above talks about grabbing people out of the audience to perform. Meaning, an established artist has someone in the audience (likely pre-vetted, but unrehearsed) come up and perform with the star.

This happens far more than you might think. So much so, that Casey Newton pulled together this thread showing examples of this in action:

https://twitter.com/caseynewton/status/1074361409012621313

One of the videos from this thread fits this Loop post just perfectly. Bruce and a kid from the audience singing “Growing Up” (embedded in the main Loop post). Don’t miss the part in the middle where the kid plays along and Bruce talks about the lesson he learned about getting his first guitar. And that selfie at the end. What a moment.

Enjoy!

We broke into a bunch of Android phones with a 3D-printed head

Written by

Thomas Brewster, Forbes:

We tested four of the hottest handsets running Google’s operating systems and Apple’s iPhone to see how easy it’d be to break into them. We did it with a 3D-printed head. All of the Androids opened with the fake. Apple’s phone, however, was impenetrable.

And:

An iPhone X and four Android devices: an LG G7 ThinQ, a Samsung S9, a Samsung Note 8 and a OnePlus 6. I then held up my fake head to the devices to see if the device would unlock. For all four Android phones, the spoof face was able to open the phone, though with differing degrees of ease. The iPhone X was the only one to never be fooled.

And:

When first turning on a brand new G7, LG actually warns the user against turning facial recognition on at all. “Face recognition is a secondary unlock method that results in your phone being less secure,” it says, noting that a similar face can unlock your phone. No surprise then that, on initial testing, the 3D-printed head opened it straightaway.

And:

There’s a similar warning on the Samsung S9 on sign up. “Your phone could be unlocked by someone or something that looks like you,” it notes.

What I get from these tests: Android facial recognition is for convenience. Apple’s Face ID is for both convenience and security.

The Best iPhone and Android Apps of 2018

Written by

Solid list from the folks at Time Magazine, albeit short. There more pages to this that I missed?

One thing that struck me: All 10 apps on this list run on iOS. Three of them also run on Android. This simply iOS bias? Or something more, perhaps a comment on the craft/tools/devs in each community?

Ping! Goodbye Apple Music Connect, and thoughts on Apple and social

Written by

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Apple Music Connect appears to slowly be going the way of iTunes Ping. Apple has started notifying Apple Music artists that it is removing the ability for artists to post content to Apple Music Connect, and previously posted Apple Music Connect content is being removed from the For You section and Artist Pages in Apple Music. Connect content will still be viewable through search results on Apple Music, but Apple is removing artist-submitted Connect posts from search in May

Building a social network of any kind is hard. Even if you get the design right, which is hard enough, there’s the difficulty of getting people to embrace that design, to build a critical mass of users.

Some might say that social is not in Apple’s DNA. But there is an exception. Messages. As much as I use Twitter, et al, I use Messages even more.

Want to build an instant chat room to discuss an idea for an app? Or an upcoming group trip? Or prep for a big presentation or test? Just start a message thread with everyone involved. Add people as needed, even mute the thread so you won’t be interrupted by replies to the group (you’ll still see the badge showing how many new replies since you last checked in).

Messages is not perfect, but it does the job well enough, and has achieved critical mass. I’ve always wondered what the Messages team could do if they were given the mandate to weave Apple Music intimately throughout the Messages client. Make it easy, and fun, to share music with others, make it easy to listen along with your friends, without the cumbersome overhead of copying and pasting links.

Ask the guy who built this. I think he’s got plenty of great ideas.

Make the iPad more like the Mac

Written by

Radu Dutzan:

The Mac is a stable, mature operating system. It carries the baggage of having been in the market for 35 years, but also the freedom of precise and reliable input mechanisms. When Apple created the iPhone OS, they decided to break free from the Mac’s interface conventions and start from scratch. A menubar and windows would be absurd in a tiny 3.5″ screen, and the tiny mouse targets are very hard to hit with fingers. Makes perfect sense: they’re completely different devices.

Absolutely.

Fast forward to almost-2019: the iPad is now “Pro”, the screen goes up to 13″, it has an optional keyboard and pointing device, and bests over half the MacBook line in benchmarks. Yet it still runs the iPhone’s OS.

The Mac interface has kept to its roots, but has also been completely torn down and rebuilt from scratch. The core of the interface is windows, the menu bar, and the mouse. Windows still behave much the same as they did from the beginning (the controls have evolved, but the similarities from now to the original windows are recognizable). The mouse still works pretty much the same way. And the menu bar still carries command-key shortcuts and many of the same commands.

The underlying OS wiring, the “plumbing”, is completely different, but the user experience evolved slowly and remains recognizable.

Radu writes about his experience using Luna Display, which lets you use your iPad Pro as a front-end for your Mac, touch-screen and all. It is a compelling read.

It’s not perfect (even though it looks really good). Luna Display doesn’t have a software keyboard, so without the Keyboard Folio or some other keyboard, it’s useless, and even though you can scroll with two fingers on the screen, other trackpad gestures (like 3-finger swipes for Mission Control) just don’t work.

And:

Besides, things look just tiny—not because they’re being scaled (they’re not), but because everything on the Mac is just smaller. The Mac’s mouse pointer is precise down to 1 screen point, and because the cursor is responsive to changes in tracking speed, it’s easy to control it with precision, so there’s no need for the huge tap targets we find on iOS.

And that last is a key difference between a mouse driven and a touch driven device. My fingers are big and fat, hiding any pixels I want to tap. iOS takes this into account, building finger diameters into the equation when calculating touch targets. While Mac mouse targeting can be extremely precise, iOS knows your fingers just can’t be that precise. As Radu says, everything on the Mac is just smaller.

What does the future hold? Will we find some middle ground, where macOS and iOS meet each other, each compromising some aspect of their UI?

Or, perhaps, will iOS take a page from the macOS playbook, keeping the overall foundations, but doing a complete redo on the internals, building something designed for the incredible power of the A13X Bionic chip and all that built in neural net support, yet with flexibility for macOS complexities, such as a menu bar and a sophisticated windowing system.

Great read, Radu.

Apple China says it will push software update to get past Qualcomm iPhone ban

Written by

Reuters:

Apple Inc , facing a court ban in China on some of its iPhone models over alleged infringement of Qualcomm Inc patents, said on Friday it will push software updates to users in a bid to resolve potential issues.

And:

Earlier this week, Qualcomm said a Chinese court had ordered a ban on sales of some older Apple iPhone models for violating two of its patents, though intellectual property lawyers said the ban would still likely take time to enforce.

A ban would have cost Apple many millions of dollars, as well as damage to its brand in China. This story is still unfolding.

How one person dreamed up an emoji, and got it onto your iPhone

Written by

[VIDEO] I love this story. In a nutshell, Mark Bramhill, host of the wonderful podcast “Welcome to Macintosh,” imagined a “person meditating” emoji, then set about figuring out how to get that emoji through the approval process.

Video embedded in the main Loop post.

Looks like Samsung is embracing the double dongle

Written by

[VIDEO] Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Samsung today introduced its latest smartphone, the Galaxy A8s. It is Samsung’s first smartphone with an Infinity-O display, which has a nearly edge-to-edge, uninterrupted design beyond a small hole for the front-facing camera.

And:

It is also Samsung’s first smartphone without a headphone jack, much to the amusement of iPhone users.

Double-dongle? Check the ad embedded in the main Loop post.

You knew this was coming.

Apple to build new campus in Austin and add jobs across the US

Written by

Apple:

Cupertino, California and Austin, Texas — Apple today announced a major expansion of its operations in Austin, including an investment of $1 billion to build a new campus in North Austin. The company also announced plans to establish new sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City and expand in cities across the United States including Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colorado over the next three years, with the potential for additional expansion elsewhere in the US over time.

Check out this map, showing Apple’s projected US employment by 2022:

And this map, showing Apple’s current US employment numbers/distribution:

The mind reels at this success story. Especially when you think back to that comment (please tweet at me if you can find a link for this) Michael Dell made about buying Apple for couch cushion money.

Apple stock is up 43,000% since its IPO 38 years ago

Written by

Got some great advice a long time ago. In a nutshell, avoid shoulda, coulda, woulda. As in, I shoulda bought Apple stock when it was $12 a share, pre-split.

But it is fun to imagine what a $10,000 investment back at the IPO would be worth now (by my math, about $4.3 bmillion).

Gotta love this Steve Jobs quote, courtesy of MacDailyNews:

I saw a lot of other people at Apple, especially after we went public, how it changed them. A lot of people thought they had to start being rich. A few people went out and they bought Rolls-Royces, they bought homes, and their wives got plastic surgery. I saw these people who were really nice, simple people turn into these bizarre people. I made a promise to myself: I said, ‘I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.

You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me in the past 10 years.

I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important. I never did it for the money.

UPDATE: First things first, wow was my math off!!! Check the comments for the details, but $4.3 million, not $43 billion. But still.

Also, with thanks to @moeskido, here’s a link to an article about Michael Dell walking back that “shut down the company, return the money” comment.

One in 10 American adults expected to have a smartwatch next year

Written by

CNET:

The percentage of US adults who use a smartwatch will cross the 10 percent milestone for the first time in 2019, predicts research firm eMarketer. About 28.7 million Americans 18 and older, or 11.1 percent of the adult US population, will use a smartwatch next year, eMarketer said.

And:

eMarketer cited new features in the Apple Watch Series 4, which incorporates new sensors that can detect falls, one of the major causes of death for the elderly. If there’s an accident, the watch can place an emergency call.

A new electrocardiogram feature on the Apple Watch allows wearers to have a heart-rate monitor on their wrist. It can be used to detect a serious heart condition called atrial fibrillation (AFib), a fast heart beat that can increase the risk of heart attack or stroke.

Seems to me, as much success as Apple already has, a bigger adoption wave is coming. Apple Watch is opening the door to more people entering the Apple ecosystem.

The story of the birth of Apple, told as a manga

Written by

I bought this book the second I heard about it. I think it was the cover that really drew me in.

Check it for yourself:

If the art style appeals to you, check out the book. It’s only $2.99, but it’s also only available on Amazon’s Kindle Store (you can read it in the Kindle app on your iOS device).

The story is oddly told and, in some places, almost incomprehensible, but it is also charming and made me laugh more than once. To me, this had the feel of a story translated from one language to another, with all the exaggerated elements of an often-told and well-loved legend.

If you’re cool with all that, I think it’s $2.99 well spent.

Opening new tabs next to the current tab in Safari

Written by

John Gruber first points out that Safari always places new tabs on the rightmost side of its tab list. He then elegantly walks through the process of getting Safari to create new tabs just to the right of the current tab.

It’s not trivial, but definitely interesting and worth the read. Even if this particular tab issue is not a problem for you, knowing how to create a script and assign it a command-key shortcut that overrides what’s built-in has lots of value.