Luke Kurtis, Quartz:

A few months ago, I purchased an iTunes gift card off of a popular discount website.

And:

About a week after I redeemed the gift card, I noticed my iTunes account wasn’t working. When I tried to log in, it said my account was locked. I searched online for help, but I couldn’t find a solution. I called up Apple support.

And that’s the beginning of a two month journey. Fascinating read, especially if you consider the personal impact of being locked out of your Apple ID for two months.

Bloomberg:

U.S. airline safety regulators banned select MacBook Pro laptops on flights after Apple Inc. recently said that some units had batteries that posed a fire risk.

In a statement, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said it was “aware of the recalled batteries that are used in some Apple MacBook Pro laptops” and stated that it alerted major U.S. airlines about the recall.

I totally get this. A bad battery is a bad battery. But my question is, how will they enforce this ban? Will they be checking model numbers on all MacBook Pros? This going to be an honor system thing?

BMW:

Is it a propeller or not? BMW’s logo has been a hot discussion topic for decades. And all because of a publicity stunt. Find out what the BMW emblem really means and how it came into being in this article.

“Many people believe the BMW logo is a stylized propeller,” says Fred Jakobs of BMW Group Classic. “But the truth is a little different.”

So, what does the BMW logo mean? And what does the BMW badge represent? We will explain everything here as part of our series “BMW explained”.

The BMW logo is one of the most recognizable in the world. Its always been assumed it represented propellers and, up until now, BMW didn’t confirm or deny that interpretation. Interesting story.

BoingBoing:

Watch the world champion of gymnastics Simone Biles stick the landing on a triple-double at yesterday’s U.S. Gymnastics Championships in Kansas City. Biles won her sixth all-around title. This is two days after she made history with a double-double dismount off the balance beam.

Absolutely incredible. Check out this Twitter thread to see the progression of moves that led up to this amazing jump.

Macworld:

A select set of consumers are finally starting to get their Apple Cards, and the web is overflowing with banal analysis about every mundane detail. Did you hear the one about the guy with a credit score of 620 who got approved? Gasp!

Look, I get it. This is Apple, after all. Anything the company does gets dissected, fawned over, argued about, and hot-taked into oblivion. But the Apple Card is often mistakenly considered to be far more noteworthy than it is: outside of the fact that the Apple Card is, well, from Apple, it’s not very remarkable at all.

A rare bit of clarity from Macworld. The Apple Card, is it presently stands, is in the middle of the pack when it comes to “the best card.” But Apple will undoubtedly offer more and better features and options as time goes by.

Mel Magazine:

If you pee in the pool, it’ll go blue! There’s a special dye in there, designed to detect urine, and it’ll billow around you in a big, embarrassing, pissy cloud, and everyone will know you’ve done it, and you’ll be hounded out of town as a known pool-piddler.

Everybody knows that, right?

Except it isn’t true. It doesn’t even stand up to any scrutiny as an idea — what chemical specifically detects wee-wee?

How many of us were told this as kids? How many of us believed it?

William Gallagher, AppleInsider:

With Apple Card slowly rolling out to more users, Apple has been busy preparing a slew of support documents that explain how to use the new credit card —and it includes explanations of many things we’d been left wondering. Such as precisely how Daily Cash works.

This is the system whereby if you buy something using your Apple Card, you get rewarded with a certain percentage of the purchase price paid back to your account in cash.

Planning on getting an Apple Card? Read the linked post for the details on Daily Cash in real life usage.

Apple:

In the coming school year, more than 100,000 college students will enjoy the ease and convenience of carrying their student IDs on iPhone and Apple Watch. Students at Clemson University, Georgetown University, University of Tennessee, University of Kentucky, University of San Francisco, University of Vermont, Arkansas State University, South Dakota State University, Norfolk State University, Louisburg College, University of North Alabama and Chowan University will soon be able to use their student ID in Apple Wallet to get into dorms, buy lunch and more.

As recently as a few years ago, a large number of colleges used a student’s social security number as their student ID and, even worse, printed those numbers on the physical cards students had to carry.

This move to contactless student IDs has been a long time coming. Integration with Apple Wallet is an excellent next step.

John Voorhees, MacStories:

CarPlay fascinates me because it’s a relatively rare example of a successful Apple software product that isn’t tightly integrated with the company’s hardware. Of course, CarPlay runs from an iPhone, but it also relies on automaker media systems to deliver its experience to users in their cars. This lack of integration shows in cars with slower media systems; however, even when automakers’ hardware provides a subpar experience, CarPlay’s simplified but familiar interface and access to content already on users’ iPhones is superior. So much so in fact that Apple says CarPlay has managed to capture 90% of the new car market in the US and 75% worldwide.

Those are astonishing numbers. Compare them to Android’s far larger market share in smartphone representation. My gut is that this is due, in part, to the relatively high cost of buying a car. With smartphones, you have a massive low end, with some phones given away. Android dominates the low end.

But there are no car giveaways, the base cost is high enough to level the playing field for Apple’s CarPlay and Android Auto.

All this aside, the rest of the article is an excellent resource, especially if you are in the market for a new car. CarPlay has certainly come a long way.

This is an incredible story. At the heart of it: Pornography.

Yahoo bought Tumblr which, back in 2013, was a hotbed for pornography. Yahoo banned porn, and site traffic plummeted.

According to the linked Wall Street Journal article:

Verizon Communications Inc. has agreed to sell its blogging website Tumblr to the owner of popular online-publishing tool WordPress.com, unloading for a nominal amount a site that once fetched a purchase price of more than $1 billion.

So what’s a nominal amount? According to Axios:

Verizon is set to sell the social network Tumblr to Automattic Inc, the owner of online publishing tool WordPress. A source familiar with the deal puts the price-tag “well below” $20 million, while another source puts it below $10 million.

And according to this tweet, the price “tumbld” to less than $3 million. Wow!

Apple:

“Salmon to our people is absolutely the most important aspect of the whole environment,” says Allen Edzerza, a Tahltan Nation elder and advisor to the British Columbia First Nations Energy and Mining Council. “But … in the pursuit of the metals, you see big scars on the landscape.”

And:

Add logging, urbanization, record wildfires and landslides in the region, and salmon runs don’t stand a chance. But RESOLVE, a nonprofit organization tackling some of the planet’s most critical challenges through innovative, unexpected partnerships, wants to fix that.

Their proposal: Combine re-mining with restoration to improve the streams and open them back up for salmon, grayling and other fish species to return.

The linked press release from Apple details partnerships that marry environmental restoration efforts to help compensate for the destructive effects of mining.

I can’t think of another company that does more to consider and offset the impact of its product creation on the environment. Props to Apple and their Supplier Responsibility program.

BuzzFeed News:

The new Apple Card credit card has an iOS-only app to see transactions and make payments, which means if you lose your Apple device, you won’t be able to pay your bill online.

There are no paper statements with the digital-first Apple Card. Unlike a traditional credit card, everything is accessed through the Wallet app on the iPhone, including transaction histories, total balances, previous statements, and payments. There’s no website to view the latest transactions made on the card or make a payment if you lose access to that Wallet app.

According to Apple Support, your options are: 1. Use an iPad or other iOS device to access the Wallet app, or 2. Call Apple Support (not, presumably, with the phone you just lost) and a representative will connect you to an Apple Card specialist at Goldman Sachs, Apple’s bank partner.

That’s….inconvenient.

AppleInsider:

Following previous pledges to support HomeKit in its Kasa range, TP-Link has now revealed that its popular accessory will not be updated to work with Apple’s system.

Previously, the company had promised support when unveiling the range at CES in January 2019. At the same time, the company had also claimed that existing devices would be updated to work with HomeKit early in the year. However, following months of delays, TP-Link has now cancelled plans to support Apple’s system.

“Due to changes in our roadmap, the Kasa Smart Plug Mini (HS105) smart plug will not offer support for Apple HomeKit,” says TP-Link’s document.

As I said in this morning’s YML Daily, this serves to illustrate what I’ve always said about CES — never believe any announcements coming out of CES until the product actually ships.

Apple TV:

The news is only half the story.

The Morning Show stars Academy Award-winner Reese Witherspoon, Emmy Award-winner Jennifer Aniston and Emmy Award-winner Steve Carell in a high-stakes drama that pulls back the curtain on early morning TV.

Apple is rolling out more teases for the upcoming Apple TV + streaming service.

Joseph Cox, Motherboard:

I plugged the Apple lightning cable into my iPod and connected it to my Mac, just as I normally would. My iPod started charging, iTunes detected the device, and my iPod produced the pop-up asking if I wanted to trust this computer. All expected behaviour.

But this cable was hiding a secret. A short while later, a hacker remotely opened a terminal on my Mac’s screen, letting them run commands on my computer as they saw fit. This is because this wasn’t a regular cable. Instead, it had been modified to include an implant; extra components placed inside the cable letting the hacker remotely connect to the computer.

This was more fruit from the annual DefCon hacking conference, proof of concept that is worth keeping in mind.

Me? I avoid using unknown USB bricks, lightning or USB-C cables. I suspect I might be overly paranoid, but easy enough to just throw an extra charger in my bag when I travel so I never have to take that chance.

Very interesting read.

Android Police:

That’s right, Samsung is once again spamming Galaxy phones with advertisements, this time for the Note10.

This time around, push notifications advertising the Note10 are being sent out by at least three pre-installed applications — Samsung Pay, Bixby, and the Samsung Push Service. Bixby wants you to ask it about the Note10, Samsung Pay is offering points when you look at the phone’s product page, and Samsung Push Service just gives you a banner ad with no indication of where it came from. I received the Bixby ad on my international Galaxy S10e, but I haven’t personally seen the others.

Does Apple push unasked-for ads like this? I can’t ever recall getting an ad of any kind from Siri.

David Pierce, Wall Street Journal:

> The Apple Card makes quite an impression. The white titanium slab contains no numbers or expiration date—only your name, an Apple logo and the chip. Whip it out of your wallet and it clatters onto a table with a delightful “tink” sound. James Bond might be a Black Card guy, but Q would definitely use an Apple Card.

And:

> The card isn’t the point, though. The Apple Card is mostly a digital being, a combination of expense-tracker and bill-payer in an app on your phone. It’s also something of an ad for Apple Pay, the company’s tech for paying with iPhone, your Apple Watch or your Apple ID.

And:

> If you have the Apple Card, you get 2% back on purchases you make using Apple Pay—3% when you use the card to buy apps, movies and devices from Apple.

And:

> The most surprising thing about my testing was discovering how many places accept the tap-to-pay Apple Pay features. Apple says 65% of all U.S. retail locations now support it.

To me, the Apple Card is a no-brainer, at least to get. It’s free and offers significant benefits on purchases from Apple. It’s also a solid first credit card for beginners, helping build financial literacy and an understanding of where your money goes, as emphasized in insightful reviews of Invest Diva.

If the built-in planning tools are not important to you, get the card as a supplement. Use your normal card for benefits and protections not offered by Apple Card, use Apple Card where it works better.

Great review, hits all the highlights.

Fascinating deep dive into Steve Jobs’ beloved bicycle analogy.

Here’s the quote:

“When we invented the personal computer, we created a new kind of bicycle…a new man-machine partnership…a new generation of entrepreneurs.” —Steve Jobs, c. 1980

After you read Steven Sinofsky’s excellent post, take a few minutes to read Steve Jobs’ original essay that started this whole thing off.

Eyal Itkin, Checkpoint:

Our research shows how an attacker in close proximity (WiFi), or an attacker who already hijacked our PC (USB), can also propagate to and infect our beloved cameras with malware. Imagine how would you respond if attackers inject ransomware into both your computer and the camera, causing them to hold all of your pictures hostage unless you pay ransom.

I can’t imagine this ever being worth the time for a hacker, but just another example of why we can’t have nice things. And the questionable value of adding the internet to everything.

New York Times:

Words appeared in the sky, the color of clouds, and then faded into a jumble of letters in the background. It was an ephemeral poem, with lines like “Catch the falling knife” visible for a few seconds through the portal of an iPhone pointed at the skyline above Central Park.

The walking tours will be free and open to the public starting on Saturday, and in addition to New York, will be offered in San Francisco, London, Paris, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Each starts from an Apple Store and features the same set of works. The pieces are only accessible at specific locations on the walk, making them installations of a sort, in an open-air, virtually accessible exhibit.

I’d love to see this. If any of you are lucky enough to live in one of the featured cities, please let me know what the experience was like!

The elementary, high school and college educators who attended this summer’s academies came from different states, schools and backgrounds — but they all shared one new and very important responsibility: shepherding their students into a world where coding is a common language. The teachers are determined not only to teach their students about coding, but to show them how they can channel that knowledge to make the world a better place, starting with their communities. On that front, they’re leading by example.

Apple has always taken its responsibility to education seriously, but these types of things are even better than anything else they’ve done. This is helping teachers instruct the kids that are our future.

Clarus the Dogcow goes all the way back to the beginning of the Mac, a seminal bit of Apple lore. This is a great, fun read, filled with images and videos, digging into stuff deep at the heart of a lot of us old-timers. Nice job by Stephen Hackett.

Headlines have been flying around the internet similar to this one:

“Apple Is Locking iPhone Batteries to Discourage Repair”

As I read through the various articles on this issue, I remained pretty convinced that Apple was not specifically trying to discourage repair. There had to be more to the logic.

Turns out, there was more to it. And Rene Ritchie did a great job laying out the issues, making this understandable. Still not thrilled with the answer, but I get Apple’s goals here. Watch for yourself.

Threatpost, via 9to5Mac:

Researchers on Wednesday during Black Hat USA 2019 demonstrated an attack that allowed them to bypass a victim’s FaceID and log into their phone simply by putting a pair of modified glasses on their face. By merely placing tape carefully over the lenses of a pair glasses and placing them on the victim’s face the researchers demonstrated how they could bypass Apple’s FaceID in a specific scenario. The attack itself is difficult, given the bad actor would need to figure out how to put the glasses on an unconscious victim without waking them up.

Obviously, this is a very slim scenario, requiring an unconscious victim. But it does raise the specter of law enforcement rendering someone unconscious in order to break into their phone.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple is introducing an expanded bug bounty program that covers macOS, tvOS, watchOS, and iCloud as well as iOS devices, Apple’s head of security engineering Ivan Krstić announced this afternoon at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

Someone is going to pay for those vulnerability details. Way better for everyone if it’s Apple.

Digiday:

Publishers including Vice Media and The Stylist Group say they’ve gotten traffic and, more importantly, revenue lifts from Apple News in the last three months. While this is from a small base, for some publishers it signifies that patience with publishing to the platform, which has been widely accepted as good for brand awareness but lagging revenue, is starting to pay off.

Details in the linked article, but certainly good news for Apple News+. Personally, I’d take another look at the service if Apple made some UX tweaks to improve the search mechanism, make it easier for me to find and get to the original articles, and add tools to more easily manage my reading list.

The big change here is the move from HDMI 1.4b to HDMI 2.0.

HDMI 1.4b:

• 4096 × 2160 at 24 Hz
• 3840 × 2160 at 24, 25, and 30 Hz
• 1920 × 1080 at 120 Hz

That last is also known as 1080p, or Full HD.

HDMI 2.0:

• Requires special higher bandwidth certified cable
• 4K video at 60 Hz with 24 bit/px color depth

Note that there’s also an HDMI 2.1, requires still another specialized cable, for 4K at 120 Hz, and beyond. Apple’s updated dongle is rated for HDMI 2.0.

Jake Kanter, Business Insider:

Samsung has a long and illustrious history of trolling Apple in its smartphone commercials. But now the South Korean firm is cloning one of the iPhone features it once mocked, and has quietly deleted records of the ads.

I kind of like the sequencing of this tweet from Sam Henri Gold.

Oh Samsung.