[VIDEO] Lewis Hilsenteger, of Unbox Therapy, holds a video of himself up to the Galaxy S10. The video unlocks the phone.
I immediate thought of this scenario:
I can think of many more, but what’s the point of face unlock if it is so easily defeated?
The video is embedded in the main Loop post. Jump to about 2 minutes in to see this for yourself. Oh Samsung.
Bloomberg:
Apple is forming a team of people with awards strategy experience. In January, it hired one such person from Walt Disney Co.’s television group. The iPhone maker is also seeking a high-level candidate to oversee the process, one of the people familiar with the situation said. The company could be in the running for Emmy awards as early as 2020, according to people familiar with the process.
And:
Awards strategists arrange screenings and other publicity events for Hollywood insiders and others who vote on which movies and TV shows win awards. These promoters must work within strict guidelines while ensuring voters see the movies and even spend time with the actors and filmmakers.
No surprise there. But interesting to see how all this works. I am very excited to see Apple’s video efforts take form.
If you’re new to this fight, take a look at Spotify posts their specific gripes about Apple and the App Store.
Shots fired across Apple’s bow.
Spotify’s post was two days ago. Yesterday, Apple fired back:
What Spotify is demanding is something very different. After using the App Store for years to dramatically grow their business, Spotify seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem — including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers — without making any contributions to that marketplace. At the same time, they distribute the music you love while making ever-smaller contributions to the artists, musicians and songwriters who create it — even going so far as to take these creators to court.
Does Spotify pay Apple to be in the App Store? Try this exercise:
So Spotify is complaining about a tax that they do not pay.
Add in the fact that Spotify is fighting the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board ruling that would increase payouts to songwriters by 44%. Notably, Apple is on board with the royalty increase.
To me, both of these things just get in the way of any valid points Spotify might be making. Not a good look.
Take the time to read Apple’s Addressing Spotify’s claims post. It’s well crafted and, to me, legitimate
[VIDEO] This is a charming ad. But it’s also a serious ad. Apple does a nice job of presenting the message with a spoonful of sugar.
From the writeup:
Your privacy matters. From encrypting your iMessage conversations, or not keeping a history of your routes in Maps, to limiting tracking across sites with Safari. iPhone is designed to protect your information.
I tweeted about Apple’s map route scrambling a few days ago.
The add is embedded in the main Loop post. For some odd reason, reminds me (just a tiny bit) of Apple’s “Unlock” Face ID ad, showing a student unlocking everything in her path.
Patently Apple:
Apple notes in a patent application published today by the U.S. Patent Office that when it comes to authentication using facial recognition, there are potential cases where a user attempting to be authenticated (authorized) by a device cannot be distinguished from another user with closely related facial features.
Twins fool Face ID. Been a thing since the beginning.
Apple’s invention states that “Subepidermal imaging of a face of a user attempting to unlock a device may be used to enhance a facial recognition authentication process”
Subepidermal means below the skin. Interesting.
Subepidermal images of the user may be used to assess subepidermal features such as blood vessels (e.g., veins) when the device is attempting to authenticate the user. The subepidermal features may be compared to templates of subepidermal features for an authorized (e.g., enrolled) user of the device.
Sounds like Apple is offering an extra layer of facial verification for folks with twins or other doppelgängers.
And this last bit, which I found most fascinating:
For example, illuminator 105A and/or illuminator 105B may include an array of light sources such as, but not limited to, VCSELs (vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers). A first set of light sources in the array may provide illumination at a wavelength for unlock attempt images while a second set of light sources may provide illumination at a wavelength for subepidermal images. The different sets of light sources may be turned on/off separately to allow a specific illumination (e.g., a specific wavelength of illumination) to be provided.
You had me at [Holds up fingers, makes air-quotes] lasers. Cool beans.
There’s a lot here. Good take from Ina Fried for Axios.
Daniel Ek, founder and CEO of Spotify:
Apple operates a platform that, for over a billion people around the world, is the gateway to the internet. Apple is both the owner of the iOS platform and the App Store—and a competitor to services like Spotify. In theory, this is fine. But in Apple’s case, they continue to give themselves an unfair advantage at every turn.
And:
Apple requires that Spotify and other digital services pay a 30% tax on purchases made through Apple’s payment system, including upgrading from our Free to our Premium service. If we pay this tax, it would force us to artificially inflate the price of our Premium membership well above the price of Apple Music. And to keep our price competitive for our customers, that isn’t something we can do.
And:
If we choose not to use Apple’s payment system, forgoing the charge, Apple then applies a series of technical and experience-limiting restrictions on Spotify. For example, they limit our communication with our customers—including our outreach beyond the app. In some cases, we aren’t even allowed to send emails to our customers who use Apple. Apple also routinely blocks our experience-enhancing upgrades. Over time, this has included locking Spotify and other competitors out of Apple services such as Siri, HomePod, and Apple Watch.
Read the whole thing. And don’t miss the timeline.
Add this for a bit of perspective:
https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/1105826992547684354
Feels like things are about to get quite messy.
Twitter is rolling out a change to its official iOS app:
https://twitter.com/twitter/status/1105815777616191489
Swipe left to bring up the camera, take a pic, add captions and location info, then post. Rolling out over the next day or so.
Casey Newton, writing for The Verge, took the new interface for a spin, has more details here.
Juli Clover, MacRumors:
Apple last year acquired Laserlike, a machine learning startup located in Silicon Valley, reports The Information. Apple’s purchase of the four-year-old company was confirmed by an Apple spokesperson with a standard acquisition statement: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
And from the LaserLike web site:
We’ve built a web scale content search, discovery and personalization platform using advanced machine learning.
And:
Your interest search engine. Follow the topics you care about, with news, web, video, local, and more. Powerful content search brings you the full perspective in a feed you can control. Never miss what matters, with timely, relevant updates for your interests.
Keep this acquisition in mind as you watch the announcements on March 25th. This would certainly relate to the rumored news subscription service, potentially adding a significant level of personalization to a traditional news feed.
New York Times:
A grand jury in New York has subpoenaed records from at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices, according to two people who were familiar with the requests and who insisted on anonymity to discuss confidential legal matters. Both companies had entered into partnerships with Facebook, gaining broad access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users.
The companies were among more than 150, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Sony, that had cut sharing deals with the world’s dominant social media platform. The agreements, previously reported in The New York Times, let the companies see users’ friends, contact information and other data, sometimes without consent. Facebook has phased out most of the partnerships over the past two years.
And:
The disclosures about Cambridge last year thrust Facebook into the worst crisis of its history. Then came news reports last June and December that Facebook had given business partners — including makers of smartphones, tablets and other devices — deep access to users’ personal information, letting some companies effectively override users’ privacy settings.
The sharing deals empowered Microsoft’s Bing search engine to map out the friends of virtually all Facebook users without their explicit consent, and allowed Amazon to obtain users’ names and contact information through their friends. Apple was able to hide from Facebook users all indicators that its devices were even asking for data.
That last sentence seems to imply that Apple acted in bad faith, purposely hiding data requests. Seems unlikely. Me just being naive? Am I misinterpreting the writing here?
[VIDEO] This video is about two years old, but fascinating nonetheless. It’s embedded in the main Loop post.
Scotty Allen has a wonderful YouTube channel called Strange Parts that explores the back alley parts markets in places like Shenzhen, China, scrounging together the pieces to create, in this case, a working iPhone 6s.
This is not about creating a phone of your own. Rather, it’s a look at a remarkable parts market. Jump to about 4:03 and check out all those iPhone backs.
I’d wager that the parts market is even more varied and vibrant today. Kind of makes me want to hackintosh my own iPhone. Or, at least, replace the back with something unique and custom.
Last week, I tweeted a pic showing an old Apple laptop. As was the case with all old Mac laptops, the Apple logo was upside down when open.
With a bit of help from Sérgio Miranda, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole to learn more.
From the linked Joe Moreno blog post:
The design group noticed that users constantly tried to open the laptop from the wrong end. Steve Jobs always focused on providing the best possible user experience and believed that it was more important to satisfy the user than the onlooker.
An interesting problem, one of competing interests. Should the user see the right side up logo, so they know which side to open? Or is it more important for the brand that the world see a right side up logo?
Obviously, Steve started with one opinion and then, when he returned to Apple, he flipped his decision. Possibly driven by shows that started putting stickers over the logo so the Apple would look “right” on screen.
Interesting bit of Apple history.
Bloomberg:
Apple Inc., after teasing investors for months about its ambitions to become a services company, is getting ready to showcase plans for new video and news products. All it needs now is for Hollywood to sign up.
And:
But before the curtain goes up, Apple needs to complete deals. The company is racing to secure movies and TV shows to offer alongside its own original videos and is offering concessions to get deals done by a Friday deadline, according to people familiar with the matter. Pay-TV programmers such as HBO, Showtime and Starz have to decide whether Apple is an existential threat, as some now view Netflix, a potential partner or something in between.
When Apple did a similar dance to craft deals with record companies to build iTunes and then Apple Music, they were purely working through a distribution deal. They were not a threat (at least not an obvious one), but a partner. Apple had no ambitions to create music of their own.
The race to build partnerships now, to carry third party content on its rumored video service, has to deal with the fact that Apple has very public plans to build content of its own. Apple clearly wants a seat at the table, alongside existing partners such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Video.
Of the group, Apple is the only one distributing the others. Less than two weeks ’til the beans get spilled.
Sarah Perez, writing for Tech Crunch, does a deep dive into Twitter’s new prototyping app, Twttr.
Twttr is designed as a parallel app to Twitter, gives Twitter a place to experiment with different takes on things like threads, color coding, and replies.
Worth a look. This is where Twitter is headed.
[VIDEO] This really takes me back. Clarus was one of the elements that really showed the difference between Apple and the rest of the gray, gray world. I miss that particular brand of quirkiness.
Stephen Hackett does a nice job bringing this history to life in the video embedded in the main Loop post.
Moof!
Marketplace:
All the bad press about Facebook might be catching up to the company. New numbers from Edison Research show an an estimated 15 million fewer users in the United States compared to 2017.
15 million. Wow. That’s a big drop and, for Facebook, a worrying trend.
Interesting timing. This data follows hot on the heels of Mark Zuckerberg’s A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking.
Too little, too late? It certainly is for me.
Variety:
Spotify, Google, Pandora and Amazon have teamed up to appeal a controversial ruling by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board that, if it goes through, would increase payouts to songwriters by 44%, Variety has learned.
Note one big name missing from that list. Apple.
Sources say that Apple Music is alone among the major streaming services in not planning to appeal — as confirmed by songwriters’ orgs rushing to heap praise on Apple while condemning the seemingly unified front of the other digital companies.
And:
Bart Herbison, executive director of the Nashville Songwriters Association International: “It is unfortunate that Amazon and Spotify decided to file an appeal on the CRB’s decision to pay American songwriters higher digital mechanical royalties,” he said in a statement. “Many songwriters have found it difficult to stay in the profession in the era of streaming music. You cannot feed a family when you earn hundreds of dollars for millions of streams.”
And:
Israelite did single out Apple for praise for not participating in an appeal. “We thank Apple Music for accepting the CRB decision and continuing to be a friend to songwriters,” he said. “While Spotify and Amazon surely hope this will play out in a quiet appellate courtroom, every songwriter and every fan of music should stand up and take notice.
Indeed.
If you’ve never taken the time to play with Shortcuts, dig into this archive. It’s a terrific resource for interesting shortcuts, but the process of downloading and running a shortcut is also a good learning experience.
To get started, first be sure you’ve got the Shortcuts app downloaded from the iOS App Store. Run it once, just to get the on boarding out of the way, then exit.
Next, follow the headline link on your iOS device, scroll down, pick a category, and pick a shortcut. One I particularly love is Music > Apple Music Wrapped, which creates a detailed report for the music you’ve listened to in any particular year.
Tap the “Get the shortcut here” link, which will bring you into the Shortcuts app, then tap the Get Shortcut button.
Lots of choices to make, interface to make your way through, all of which gives you a sense of what you can do with Shortcuts. It also shows the immense amount of work that Federico and the MacStories team put into this effort.
Once you jump through all the hoops, return to Shortcuts and tap the Library tab at the bottom of the screen. That’s where you’ll find the Apple Music Wrapped shortcut. Tap the ellipsis (…) to see all the steps that went into the shortcut.
And, apropos of nothing, my favorite artist of 2018 was Kevin Penkin. I listen to an awful lot of anime soundtracks.
New York Times:
The second-to-last Blockbuster, a squat blue-and-yellow slab wedged next to a real estate agency in Western Australia, will stop renting videos on Thursday and shut down for good at the end of the month. Two stores in Alaska, part of the final group of Blockbuster outlets in the United States, closed in July.
That will make the Blockbuster in Bend, Ore., one of a kind: a corporate remnant, just off the highway, near a cannabis retailer and a pet cremation service.
And:
The store has several years left on its lease and a license agreement that its owners sign annually with Dish Network, which bought Blockbuster for $320 million in 2011.
I hope it never closes. A throwback to another time, when Back to the Future was still in the future.
But also, what an investment decision by Dish. $320 million, at just the wrong moment in time. Wow!
[VIDEO] Bob Ross taught generations of people how to paint. Gently.
In the video embedded in the main Loop post, iJustine watches Bob Ross step through his technique, laying paint on canvas, and replicates every step on her iPad Pro using Procreate.
I love this approach, especially the way the video is partitioned to show Bob Ross at work, Justine’s work in progress, all while keeping the big picture in the main frame.
The tutorial starts about 53 seconds in.
Two things I drew from this post (which came via this Cult of Mac post):
The Samsung Galaxy S9 is a pretty horrible investment, dropping about 60% in nine months, as compared to the iPhone X, which dropped about 30% in the same span.
The worst time to trade in your iPhone is in the 3 months following the September iPhone event. This from the headline linked article:
A massive 68.86% of the iPhone X and 8’s total yearly depreciation was seen in Q4 following the Sept 2018 Apple Keynote (31.14% of their value between Q1-Q3). The months after the keynote is a trade-in black hole consumers should avoid.
iPhone values trend upwards every January. Lots more info in the article. Interesting.
[VIDEO] This is part of an ad campaign for Halo Top ice cream. The ads are uniformly bleak. But I kind of love them. Not sure why.
Here’s one (embedded in the main Loop post), follow the headline link for more.
Think about handling a phone call on your iPhone. Imagine the process of changing audio sources (switch from your car or AirPods to the speaker or handset, for example). Imagine switching to some other app to look something up while you are on the call, with that call status bar taking up the top of the screen.
Now take a look at this tweet, watch the embedded video:
https://twitter.com/limneos/status/1102672002748502017
I love this concept. I believe it is a jailbreak app, not something a third party could ship on mainstream iOS. But there’s a tremendous amount of flexibility being shown here.
Follow the headline link and scroll down about halfway to that animated GIF showing a piece of glass, folded over and being repeatedly squished and released. To me, that is the future of foldables.
That is super-thin glass, 75µm thin. That’s ballpark the thickness of a human hair. And that curve gets down to a 5mm radius.
Fold it over and over again, and there’s no crease. Plastics crease when folded, glass like this doesn’t.
My instinct is that Apple will hold out for glass like this if and when they ever release any sort of foldable iPhone. Details are all in the article.
Benjamin Mayo, on the promise of Siri Shortcuts:
This means Siri can now be smarter by drawing on the capabilities of many more apps. You can order coffee. Control third party audio apps like Overcast or Pandora. Plan travel itineraries with Kayak. All with your voice talking to your intelligent personal assistant.
Except that’s not really true. That is how Apple likes to market the feature but it’s a twisted form of reality. Shortcuts are not making Siri smarter, in fact they are dumber than pretty much anything Siri has done to date. Shortcuts put the burden on the user to do the legwork of synthesising data sources and integrating the apps into the voice service.
That’s the “puts the burden on the user” part. Benjamin continues:
Shortcuts require registration and administration to do anything at all with Siri. The user has to pre-emptively search out every command available in a certain app and then add each in turn to Siri. Registration requires the user to think up the phrase they want to use to trigger the command on the spot. Siri can then trigger these actions when that same phrase is said back to it at a later date.
There is no intelligence here. Siri transcribes the user’s voice and looks for an exact text match of that phrase in the database of voice shortcut phrases that the user has generated off their own back. If a match is found, it proceeds. Otherwise, failure.
And that’s the “no intelligence” part. If I trigger Siri, I can say “what’s today’s weather” or “what’s it like out today” and get the same response. Siri maps lots of things to “tell me the weather”. But with shortcuts, the user does the core creation. There’s no way for Siri to suss out other phrases that mean the same thing.
I think this is an excellent essay, worth reading.
I would add this though. Lots of apps ship with useful shortcuts, and there is a vibrant community building and sharing shortcuts with the world. Spend some time browsing those shortcuts, find one you like, and it’s pretty easy to bring the shortcut onto your own iPhone, even customize it. Definitely a power user move, but one with tremendous value.
Also, take a minute, fire up Siri and say:
“Open Siri Settings”
Siri will jump to the Siri Settings page and, there at the top, you’ll see a list of shortcuts that were created for you, based on recent behavior. To me, those shortcuts are a sign of intelligence at work. And easy to use, too. Press the plus sign to the right of a shortcut, give it a name, and you’re off to the races.
MacRumors:
iPhones with aftermarket batteries installed by third-party repair shops are now eligible for service at Genius Bars and Apple Authorized Service Providers, according to an internal Apple document obtained by MacRumors from three reliable sources.
And:
The updated guidelines went into effect Thursday and should apply worldwide. Apple will still decline service for iPhones with third-party logic boards, enclosures, microphones, Lightning connectors, headphone jacks, volume and sleep/wake buttons, TrueDepth sensor arrays, and certain other components.
Good news and a small step towards right to repair.
If you care about the Activity badges, this does a nice job laying out all the Activity badge possibilities.
Gotta catch ’em all!
SlashGear:
Arriving alongside the Samsung Galaxy S10, the Galaxy Buds promise the convenience of AirPods but with the sort of customization Android fans love. With a $129 price tag, though, is this all too good to be true?
The review is surprisingly good. Lots of customization, Qi-charging, ear-tips (to customize the fit, included) and equalizer controls.
I hope the next generation AirPods includes all these features.
iFixit:
In 2018, a number of MacBook Pro users—with models from 2016 onwards—discovered a serious design flaw that causes the screen to fail after repeated opening and closing of the laptop over the course of a few years. The ensuing scandal was, of course, dubbed flexgate, after the flex display cables causing the problem. Despite Apple’s refusal to acknowledge the issue, though, their latest MacBook Pros have a longer cable that may be attempting to make up for previous shortcomings.
The display cable is said to fail from too much opening and closing of the MacBook Pro hinge, past the 90-degree point. Since the display cable is soldered onto the board, when it fails, the entire display must be replaced, at a cost of $700.
My question is, if someone’s MacBook Pro fails after the warranty expires, and after the bonus Apple Care time, will Apple cover the failure? This is the crux of the issue.
Reddit:
The last iPhone i owned was a 4s and I’ve been an Android user since the Galaxy s4. That all changed when I saw the AW Series 4. Wanting to purchase an all around smart watch and activity tracker I found the Samsung Gear s3 disappointing. Also tried the Garmin Fenix 3 but it wasn’t for me. The AW series 4 hooked me for some reason, hooked me to the point where I decided to trade my Note 9 for a iPhoneX.
It’s been about 2 weeks now and honestly, I don’t regret the decision. There are a couple things I miss but nothing that makes me think I’ve done something stupid. I’m really impressed how the Apple ecosystem interacts with the devices. I also just purchased a 6th gen iPad this weekend to keep experimenting. Being a “newer” Apple user with multiple devices is there anything the community could recommend for tips or tricks, apps etc? Just looking for fun ways to experiment with the new gear I have. Thanks for your time.
This is one Android user, pulled into the Apple ecosystem by Apple Watch. Anecdotal but, to me, representative of the draw of Apple Watch and the ECG capability.