Samsung:

According to Samsung Electronics President Sohn Young, who participated at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in Berlin yesterday, there are over one million Galaxy Fold smartphones out there in the wild — double the initial sales estimate made in October of 500,000 units. Despite costing nearly $2,000 and requiring extreme care during use, a sizable number of people have embraced the 7.3-inch folding screen device, making Samsung quite happy and getting it closer to realizing its foldable goals for 2020.

Wow, that’s amazing. Astonishing success. I can’t believe Samsung sold more than one million Galaxy Fold, especially since I’ve not seen a single one in the wild. But live and learn.

Oh, wait.

Also Samsung:

Samsung has clarified that it has not, in fact, sold 1 million Galaxy Folds, in a statement given to Korea’s Yonhap News Agency. Samsung declined to comment on the actual number of units sold, only to say it was not over a million.

Samsung would not even state if estimates of 500,000 units were closer to an accurate figure, perhaps suggesting the real number could even be below analyst expectations.

Um. That’s a pretty big oopsie, Samsung. If one were prone to cynicism, on might think this was some sort of ploy.

What do you think the odds are that Jim will be talking about this on this week’s Dalrymple Report?

Interesting that 3 of the 10 are from Apple. And iPhone (2007) did not qualify. Can you predict what those 3 are?

Any important gadgets that should have made the list?

CNBC:

Apple employees in Silicon Valley can now get free genetic screenings for diseases from their on-site health clinics, thanks to a pilot partnership with Color Genomics.

And:

The idea is to move health care at Apple’s clinics from reactive to proactive, as genetic tests can offer a window into health risks down the line. In some cases, patients can take preventative steps to reduce their likelihood of getting a disease.

This raises the question, would you want to know what genetic testing can reveal? For me, certainly I’d want to know if there was any disease that I was highly prone to that was preventable.

But if I knew I was certain to develop a non-preventable terminal illness at a specific age, not so sure I’d want to know what was coming for me. And when.

That said, there’s far more to genetic testing than this. Interesting article.

This saves about $10 a year. No brainer if you like games.

Does make me wonder if we’ll eventually see a services bundle from Apple, as rumored.

Amazon blog, Friday:

Beginning today, Alexa customers in the U.S. will be able to listen to more than 800,000 podcasts available through Apple Podcasts on their Alexa-enabled device.

Definitely cool, especially if you’ve got the Amazon ecosystem in your house. Be sure to make Apple Podcasts your default podcast app so you don’t repeatedly have to tell Alexa where to find your podcasts.

Whether you’re listening at home or on the go, you don’t need to worry about losing your spot. Link your account in the Alexa app using your Apple ID, and you can seamlessly pick up where you left off listening on the Apple Podcasts App or your Alexa device.

Would you “link your account in the Alexa app using your Apple ID”? This strikes me as a potential risk. Am I overworrying?

The Evening Standard:

(Apple) sees accessibility as one of its core values in order to ensure everyone can use its devices in the best ways to suit them.

Ensuring that this is baked into everything Apple makes, from devices to apps and services, is Sarah Herrlinger, Apple’s global head of accessibility. We recently sat down with Herrlinger to talk about this mission and the surprising learnings along the way.

Over the past decade, Apple has made strides with its accessible features. With the iPhone, it created the world’s first touchscreen accessible to the blind community – Herrlinger sits on the board of the American Foundation for the Blind thanks to her work in this area at Apple. For hearing, the company was the first to make an audio protocol for Bluetooth low energy to improve the pairing between iPhones and people wearing hearing aids so they can make crystal clear calls.

Apple can always do more but they have made great strides in the areas of accessibility for any number of its customers. And accessibility offers benefits to all users, disabled or not.

CNN:

Every Christmas, big companies and high street brands pump serious money into making their annual holiday TV commercial. But this year, a family-made ad, starring a hardware store owner’s 2-year-old son and costing a mere $130 to make, has captured the hearts of viewers around the world.

Tom Jones, who runs family-owned Haford Hardware store in Rhayader, Wales, has been making seasonal ads and posting them on social media for three years. This year’s commercial stars his 2-year-old son Arthur, and follows him as he helps out in the store over the Christmas period.

OK now I want to go to Rhayader, Wales just to meet this little guy.

Gizmodo:

This was the year the world burned. Literally. The year kicked off with Tasmania on fire. People set the Amazon aflame this summer. California burst into a fiery hellscape. The Arctic didn’t even catch a break. Now, Australia’s out-of-control bushfires are killing koalas and flying foxes while leaving Sydney under a toxic haze.

To truly understand the scope of our world on fire, you have to see it from satellite. And the EU’s Copernicus Program has done that, offering a visualization where viewers can see the flames dance across the planet. There are hot spots popping up in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, all of which never seem to get a break throughout 2019.

I didn’t even know about the massive fires throughout much of Africa.

NASA:

This image of North and South America at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. The new data was mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.

For more such images of our planet, read Earth at Night, NASA’s latest ebook that features dazzling photographs and images from space of Earth’s nightlights. For nearly 25 years, satellite images of Earth at night have served as a fundamental research tool, while also stoking public curiosity. The images paint an expansive and revealing picture, showing how humans have illuminated and shaped the planet in profound ways since the invention of the light bulb 140 years ago.

Check out the free eBook from NASA titled “Earth at Night.”

This seems like an impossibly great deal, especially if you are considering plunking down cash for Apple TV+. Even without a plan, you’ve got an iPod (fill it with songs for that long plane trip), a first phone for the kids, and a cheap entre into Apple TV+.

UPDATE: Now sold out. Hope you got one.

UPDATE: Back in stock. Seems like it goes in and out of stock, so try again if you saw sold out

Mike Goril, Gadget Hacks:

In iOS 13, Apple added an important new feature to its HomeKit smart home ecosystem called HomeKit Secure Video. With it, you have a secure, private way to store and access recordings from your smart home IoT cameras.

And:

Now that we have HomeKit Secure Video, supported cameras can offer private and encrypted videos available in the cloud, viewable right from the Home app on your iPhone. You will also get object detection, with all analysis of videos performed locally on a HomeKit hub such as an iPad, and activity notifications — all without uploading any video to someone’s server.

And:

If you would like to store recordings in the cloud, you’ll also need an iCloud storage plan. The 200 GB plan is needed to store recordings from one camera, and the 2 TB plan will support up to five cameras. Recordings don’t count against your storage allotment and are saved for ten days. If you just want to stream the video, however, no plan is needed.

That last bit is important, recordings don’t count against your storage allotment.

I am in the market for a video doorbell but have been put off by the stories I’ve read about Ring/Amazon and privacy. This seems a solid path. Certainly, the article is worth reading. Lots of detail.

Apple:

Apple today revealed “Ultimate Rivals” from Bit Fry Game Studios, Inc., a new sports game franchise that brings together athletes across hockey, basketball, football, baseball and soccer into a single officially licensed video game, a first in sports and gaming.

And:

In “Ultimate Rivals: The Rink,” the first title in the franchise, players choose from more than 50 superstar athletes to compete in exciting two-on-two hockey matches. Players can combine, for instance, Alex Ovechkin and Alex Morgan against De’Aaron Fox and Jose Altuve or Skylar Diggins-Smith and Wayne Gretzky.

This is a pretty big step for Apple Arcade, supporting a complex, cross-sports, licensing deal with some of the most prominent athletes in the world.

Watch the video below to get a sense of the action.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. avoided 15% tariffs on its most important products, the iPhone, iPad and MacBooks, after U.S. President Donald Trump signed off on a trade deal with China.

The new import duties were due to kick in Dec. 15 and could have added about $150 to the price of iPhones during the crucial holiday shopping season, according to Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives.

Can’t help but think the $150 per iPhone dump of cold water on Apple’s holiday sales were the primary driver for this deal with China.

Start off by following the headline link, check out the graph at the top of the article, showing quarterly iPod and wearable revenues. In 2007, Q4, iPod revenue hit a historic high of about $4 billion. Now read on.

Horace Dediu, Asymco:

My [Apple] Watch revenue estimate was $4.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2018. This conclusion was confirmed by statements from the Company.

And:

Looking forward to the next quarter, I am expecting a 51% increase y/y for Wearables and 24% growth in Watch. This results in a Watch revenues about $5.2 billion and non-Watch $5.7 billion. Now if we assume $1.7 billion for non-Watch-non-AirPods (i.e. Apple TV, HomePod, Beats, iPod, other) then this quarter AirPods will have overtaken peak iPod.

Apple Watch and AirPods have both reached historic levels for Apple. I suspect AirPods will be the new benchmark to which all future products will be compared.

DJ Riko’s Christmas Mixes:

In 2002, I knocked together a Christmas mix on a whim and sent CD copies to a couple dozen friends and family members. When the mix started bouncing around the Internet and got played on the Back to the Basics radio show in Hamburg, Germany, I realized I was on to something. Merry Mixmas has since become a holiday tradition for people all over the world. Each edition is a continuous mix of Christmas music spanning multiple musical genres and multiple decades. They’re all free for the downloading, so take as many as you want.

I love and grab this eclectic and odd collection of “Christmas” music from DJ Riko each year.

Motherboard:

On Sunday, a security researcher who focuses on iOS and goes by the name Siguza posted a tweet containing what appears to be an encryption key that could be used to reverse engineer the Secure Enclave Processor, the part of the iPhone that handles data encryption and stores other sensitive data.

And:

Two days later, a law firm that has worked for Apple in the past sent a DMCA Takedown Notice to Twitter, asking for the tweet to be removed.

And:

Apple confirmed that it sent the original DMCA takedown request. The company said that it retracted the request but Twitter had already complied with it and had taken the tweet down. Apple then asked Twitter to put the tweet back online.

Interesting. Here’s the original tweet. Apparently, this is a firmware decryption key specific to an iPhone XR running iOS 13.4 beta 4. Not sure the value of this tweet, but clearly it got Apple’s attention.

Why do this? Is this the path to jailbreaking iOS 13? The fact that Apple backed off, asked for the tweet to be restored, makes it seem like there’s no real issue here. Much ado about nothing?

Solid add.

Start off with a quick look at this Reddit post.

The premise is that the service fee for a repair on the cheapest Mac and the most expensive Mac are the same. Follow the headline link to jump to Apple’s official Mac service page to verify.

AppleCare+ for the cheapest Mac (the MacBook Air) is $249. AppleCare+ for that $52K monster Mac Pro configuration (with wheels) is $299.

The service fee for either is the same: $99 to repair a screen or external enclosure, $299 for other damage.

To be clear, this is not a complaint. I just found it interesting.

VOX:

If you’ve visited a new website on your phone or computer over the past 18 months or so, you’ve probably seen it: a notification informing you that the page is using cookies to track you and asking you to agree to let it happen. The site invites you to read its “cookie policy,” (which, let’s be honest, you’re not going to do), and it may tell you the tracking is to “enhance” your experience — even though it feels like it’s doing the opposite.

The proliferation of such alerts was largely triggered by two different regulations in Europe: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a sweeping data privacy law enacted in the European Union in May 2018; and the ePrivacy Directive, which was first passed in 2002 and then updated in 2009. They, and the cookie alerts that resulted, have plenty of good intentions. But they’re ineffectual.

“I would say they’re generally pretty useless so far,” Shane Green, CEO of private data sharing platform digi.me, told Recode. “We’re back to 1999 all over again with pop-ups everywhere, and it’s beyond annoying.”

It’s not just your imagination. It’s definitely gotten worse.

Here's a look at the Harbour Air eplane test flight this morning. The age of electric aviation is right around the corner. pic.twitter.com/HzFekRhAXR

— Karin Larsen (@CBCLarsen) December 10, 2019

CNBC:

The world’s first fully-electric aircraft for commercial flight has taken to the skies in Canada. The plane flew above the Fraser River outside Vancouver for about seven minutes before touching down at around 8:30 a.m. local time on Tuesday.

Operating routes between hubs like Seattle and Vancouver, Harbour Air carries around 500,000 passengers on 30,000 commercial flights each year. MagniX and Harbour Air said they will now begin the certification and approval process for both the engine and the retrofitting of aircraft and hope to be operating an all-electric commercial fleet within two years.

This happened in my “backyard.” If you’ve ever visited Vancouver and seen seaplanes landing and taking off from the harbour, this is likely one of the companies whose planes you saw. Congratulations to them for this amazing accomplishment. Would you fly on an electric plane?

John Bull:

The world is busy and rubbish. But it is also Christmas.

So take a breather and let me tell you a story about London, trains, love and loss, and how small acts of kindness matter.

I’m going to tell you about the voice at Embankment Tube station.

I don’t want to ruin the story but how much would you pay for this?

MacRumors:

Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show” has been nominated for three Screen Actors Guild Awards for outstanding male actor and outstanding female actor.

Steve Carell and Billy Crudup, who play Mitch Kessler and Corey Ellison, respectively, have been nominated for the Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series award.

“The Morning Show” is the only one of Apple’s TV shows to receive award nominations in 2020, and it is the series with the most notable cast.

I take the SAG Awards more seriously than the Golden Globes in general but also specifically when it comes to the particular categories where they overlap. SAG has more than 160,000 potential voters while the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golen Globes are voted on by a minuscule 90 people.

CNET:

Of all the new services Apple launched in 2019 — which included Apple TV Plus, Apple News Plus and the new Apple Card — Apple Arcade is the most polished and offers the clearest value. Pay $5 per month, which adds up to the same price as one console game per year, and you get access to over 100 games and a steady stream of new titles virtually every week. The fact you can play games across iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Mac and Apple TV and download them to play offline are added bonuses.

While Arcade isn’t perfect and has important opportunities to improve in 2020, it’s still a service that’s easy to recommend — especially at the price. It’s an especially easy service to recommend for parents, since it gets kids off the merry-go-round of in-app purchases. Apple Arcade’s games can also be downloaded to mobile devices to play in the car and while traveling. Plus, the catalog is curated so there’s very little objectionable content. This is why Apple Arcade has been made a CNET Editors’ Choice pick for 2019.

While there is some valid criticism of Apple Arcade, there’s no doubt that for most game players, it’s an incredible value.

Popular Mechanics:

Spend a few tens of thousands on optional upgrades, and the new Mac Pro becomes a list of superlative performance specs. But those numbers also come with a lot of heat. That means Apple engineers have to find creative ways to exploit the laws of thermodynamics.

“Years ago, we started redistributing the blades,” Chris Ligtenberg, Senior Director of Product Design says. “They’re still dynamically balanced, but they’re actually randomized in terms of their BPF [blade pass frequency]. So you don’t get huge harmonics that tend to be super annoying.”

Really interesting technical discussion about the innards of the Mac Pro.

Vincent Laforet has also had a Mac Pro and associated hardware for the past two weeks. Rather than film an unboxing video and first impressions, Vincent shared his experience in a detailed blog post.

A few quotes:

In short: the Mac Pro makes post-production feel seamless. One might even say that at times the post-process can actually become delightful. And to be clear, the words “seamless” and “delightful” are seldom if ever used in conjunction with the words “post-production.”

And:

For tech geeks, this is the equivalent of punching the accelerator of a top of the line sports car.

And:

I’ve actually caught myself saying the word Gigabyte more than once when I meant Terabyte a few times when speaking with others – given how fast certain operations have become (notably with the internal ultra fast SSDs that can reach nearly 3,000 Megabytes per SECOND.) Copying several hundred gigabytes of data can take just a few minutes now – not hours (or days with slower drives or interfaces that are just 2-4 years old.)

If you have the need, the need for speed, read the whole thing.