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Futuremark: Last week, a story went viral that claimed Apple was intentionally slowing down older iPhones to push people to buy its latest models. The claim was based on data which shows Google searches for “iPhone slow” spiking dramatically with … Continued

Very clever and useful hack for us podcasters.

I absolutely love my Les Paul guitars, but Gibson as a company has treated its employees and artists like shit for many years.

An important note if you upgraded to High Sierra and use Line 6 music gear.

Thanks to Bombich Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Bombich Software has released Carbon Copy Cloner 5, an upgrade to its bootable backup software for macOS. The upgrade features scheduled task grouping and sorting, guided setup and restore, task history trend charts, a health check for backups, advanced file filtering, and includes hundreds of improvements and fixes.

Carbon Copy Cloner 5 requires macOS 10.10 or later and will be compatible with APFS and Apple’s macOS 10.13 High Sierra release this autumn. A full-featured thirty day trial version is available.

Carbon Copy Cloner is an app that I’ve used for years, in fact, since it was first released. The new version goes a long way to make the software easier to use, while still adding more advanced features.

You can get 15% off Carbon Copy Cloner until September 3 by using the code LOOPINSIGHT at checkout.

I don’t like the beer, but this commercial is so damn funny.

Apple today announced that Katherine Adams, formerly senior vice president and general counsel of Honeywell, will join Apple as general counsel and senior vice president of Legal and Global Security, reporting to CEO Tim Cook and serving on Apple’s executive team.

The company also announced Bruce Sewell, who has served as Apple’s general counsel since 2009, will be retiring at the end of the year.

Bruce did a great job defending and promoting Apple’s principles as General Counsel. Katherine Adams seems to have the same values as Tim Cook and will make a worthy replacement for Bruce.

Dave Hamilton has some good info on how we can expect Sonos to work—or not—with Apple Music.

A pig, a pen, and lifelogging.

Here’s a humorous look at Google’s announcements yesterday.

The iOS design lab will offer technological training and certification to students, faculty, staff and members of the broader community interested in developing apps in Swift, the Apple programming language used to write some of the most successful apps in the App Store. The lab will support educational innovation, career development for students and economic development opportunities for the central Ohio community and the university’s other campus locations.

The Digital Flagship University initiative will launch during the 2017-18 academic year. The iOS design lab will open in a temporary space in 2018, moving to a permanent location in 2019. Students will begin training in Swift coding in spring semester 2018.

Sounds like a great program for the school and Apple.

Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service — a smart assistant for customer representatives to parse and get better insights from their interactions with users, as well as automate some of the interactions — because the team was (according to a notice on the site) “joining a project that touches the lives of countless people across the world.” TechCrunch has now learned what that project is: the team is joining Apple.

This is great news. As much as Apple touts Siri and how smart it is, I still can’t get it to work reliably.

The author may not realize it but this is actually a hilarious whine about just how good and consistent the iOS experience is.

Apple on Wednesday released an update for Apple Watch owners that fixes an issue where the watch would join—and stay connected to—unauthenticated (captive) Wi-Fi networks.

You can download the update by opening the Apple Watch app on your iPhone, going to General > Software Update and then follow the onscreen instructions.

Daniel Jalkut was asking on Twitter about screenshot apps. Skitch for Mac seems possibly abandoned, and has become very buggy in 10.13. What are folks’ favorite Mac screenshot tools these days? — Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) October 4, 2017 He got … Continued

I can’t disagree. I did the same iOS search for “Pubs near me” in Apple Maps, Waze and Google Maps. Apple Maps found none within two kilometers, Waze found three and Google Maps found all four.

Today, along with a new family of hardware products [link], we’re introducing Google Pixel 2. We want you to be able to ask even more from your phone—so we’re giving you the highest-rated camera ever that helps you take great pictures and interact with the world around you, all-day battery life, and an Assistant that understands you better and helps you get more done.

I’m not sure about Google’s camera claims, but features like Google Lens sound interesting.

Today, we’re welcoming two new products to the Google Home family: Google Home Mini is small and mighty for hands-free help in every room. And Google Home Max is our biggest and best-sounding Google Home ever. They’re both radically helpful, and packed with the power of the Google Assistant, including some brand new features.

I haven’t seen or used either of these products, so I’ll reserve judgement. I have seen and listened to Apple’s HomePod and I know how good it sounds for music. There’s still a lot of questions to be answered with the HomePod, but I think I’ll wait until it’s released.

When it comes to multi-room audio, Sonos is still the gold standard. But the company has lagged behind on the smart speaker revolution, promising only that integration with assistants like Amazon’s Alexa would come in due time.

There is a ton of good news from Sonos today.

The European Commission said on Wednesday it was taking Ireland to the European Court of Justice for its failure to recover up to 13 billion euros ($15.3 billion) of tax due from Apple Inc, a move labeled as “regrettable” by Dublin.

Both Apple and Ireland are appealing the ruling that any money is owed, so this seems a bit heavy-handed by the EU.

I never played with model rockets as a kid but this would be a “blast” to attend.

This is a great list with a wide variety of free and paid apps.

Really interesting (and really geeky) analysis.

This is one of those apps that really show off the upside of AR. I would have loved to have something like this when I did tech support.

Teach a machine using your camera, live in the browser. No coding required.

A new experiment done with Google.

I like this idea rather than the mentioned bans or discounts. It also reminds me of the joke: “Want me to put my iPhone down? Be more interesting than my iPhone…”

You’ll be missed, Tom.

Apple on Tuesday released an update to iOS 11, bring ing the current version to iOS 11.0.2. The latest version fixes an issue where some users reported hearing crackling noises during calls, and it also fixed a problem that caused some photos to be hidden.

You can update by going to Settings > General > Software Update on your device.

I’ll be installing macOS High Sierra on Thursday and after I back everything up and ensuring I have a good bootable backup drive, I’ll do is this.

This is a fascinating look at how the guitar rigs are set up. I was surprised to see that they are not using Tube amps anymore.

So good.