Business

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.

Guilherme Rambo, on Twitter yesterday:

https://twitter.com/_inside/status/1258168816623923201

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.

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.

To check your AirPods Pro firmware version, connect your AirPods Pro, then:

• Go to Settings > General > About
• Tap AirPods Pro

No way to force an update. Mine were updated by the time I checked.

See also, this Twitter thread from Gui Rambo:

https://twitter.com/_inside/status/1257764758280966150

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.

My Mom died a few weeks ago and this story really hit home for me. Tim Cook has compassion, empathy. He’s a mensch.

Don’t miss the part of the story where the photo of the Reddit poster’s Mom turned out to be a Live Photo. I can imagine how much that little detail meant.

Bloomberg:

Spotify Technology SA Chief Executive Officer Daniel Ek said he expects Apple Inc. to further open up its platform a year after the Stockholm-based music streaming company filed an antitrust complaint with the European Union.

And:

Spotify has criticized Apple for taking a 30% cut of subscriptions and accused it of limiting app updates and preventing functionality on the Apple Watch and Siri.

And:

Since then, Apple has slightly opened up, rolling out a feature for Siri last year that lets the digital assistant control music services other than Apple’s own. Spotify also released an updated Apple Watch app and Apple TV app in recent months.

And:

Ek also reiterated his previous statements that he believes Spotify is growing faster than Apple Music, saying Spotify is twice the size of its nearest competitor and has three times the engagement.

That last bit, to me, makes it hard to make the argument that Apple is stifling Spotify’s growth.

As to the 30% cut, this from Apple (quote from March 2019):

“Even now, only a tiny fraction of their subscriptions fall under Apple’s revenue-sharing model. Spotify is asking for that number to be zero.”

Has Apple done enough here to avoid further antitrust action from the EU?

Apple:

Apple today announced it will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference virtually, beginning June 22, in the Apple Developer app and on the Apple Developer website for free for all developers. The company also announced the Swift Student Challenge, an opportunity for student developers to showcase their love of coding by creating their own Swift playground.

And:

Developers are encouraged to download the Apple Developer app where additional WWDC20 program information — including keynote and Platforms State of the Union details, session and lab schedules, and more — will be shared in June. Information will also be made available on the Apple Developer website and by email.

Can’t wait. Very curious about how the labs will be implemented.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple will reopen 21 of its 22 retail locations in Australia on Thursday, May 7, according to Apple’s dedicated websites for each of the stores. All of the stores that are reopening will operate on limited hours for the time being.

And:

Apple’s sole Australian store that will remain closed is the Apple Sydney store. As noted by 9to5Mac, this store closed in January for major renovations, and it is possible that the global health crisis caused a construction delay.

If you jump to this Bloomberg post, scroll about halfway down, you’ll see a picture of the line to get into the Gangnam neighborhood Apple Store in Seoul that opened a few weeks ago. Packed line, people standing close together, no social distancing.

The key to South Korea’s success in this bit of a return to normal is testing and exposure response. Will this same experience be mirrored in Austria? Australia? Will each Apple Store reopen be a unique experience, or will they all mirror the Seoul, South Korea approach? I am definitely curious.

This is about the quickest way to switch your AirPods from the device to which they’re currently connected to another.

You’ll likely know most of these shortcuts, but worth a scan. The first one is especially worth a look, using a quick tap in the Control Center AirPlay icon to quick-switch your AirPods to your iPhone or iPad.

Of course, you can also shorten this up a bit more with a Shortcut, but not sure that would be any quicker, time wise.

See also:

• http://www.mackungfu.org/AirPodsAutomaticallyandinstantlyswitchbetweeniPhoneMaciPad
• https://c-command.com/toothfairy/
• https://gumroad.com/l/airbuddy