Ross Perot was, indeed, a fascinating character. He ran for President back in 1992 and became a bit of a legend, part of popular culture. He’s also known for funding Steve Jobs’ NeXT venture to the tune of $20 million. Of course, Apple bought NeXT and Steve came back to Apple.

Ross Perot died yesterday and the linked story, from last year, reemerged. Perot was a compelling character and this a worthwhile read.

So many pieces here. First, why do we need another HBO streaming service? To me, this is like having a MacBook and a MacBook Air. Confusing branding for the customer.

And consider the name HBO Max. WarnerMedia owns HBO which owns Cinemax and Cinemax is frequently shortened to Max in branding and on cable. Is this completely coincidental? I have yet to see mention of Cinemax in the marketing materials.

And the biggest piece? The new service will poach Friends from Netflix. Yet another monthly tentpole service. Want Friends? That’s going to cost you another $10 a month.

Other tentpole services include Star Trek shows from CBS Online, Star Wars/Pixar from Disney+, and The Office from NBC’s coming streaming service. Waiting for a new Seinfeld service to emerge. Not kidding.

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

Apple has lowered the cost of higher-end Mac solid state storage options, cutting the price in half for many of the configurations.

For example, the 4 TB SSD of the 512 GB 15-inch MacBook Pro used to cost $2800. It now costs $1,400. These savings are seen across the iMac, iMac Pro, Mac mini, and MacBook Air line.

Great stuff, read the post for more examples.

Note that a 1TB SSD upgrade for the MacBook Air is $600. That is a significant price drop, but consider that a 1TB PCIe SSD runs from $99 to $217 on Amazon.

I would love the chance to buy a 128GB MacBook Air and, as my budget allows, upgrade to a 1TB SSD in the future, something that has become impossible with tough-to-open machines filled with sticky tape and glue, not to mention soldered on components. Adding RAM and storage is one way to get more life out of older machines. This might not be in the best interests of Apple’s short term bottom line, but it certainly is better for my pocketbook and the planet.

Reuters:

Apple Inc has started a program in Shanghai to help Chinese developers create apps as part of the iPhone maker’s efforts to build out its services business in one of its most critical overseas markets.

The program, or accelerator, will hold lectures, workshops and networking sessions for developers regularly, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. More than 2.5 million developers for Apple’s platforms are from greater China, a region that includes Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China.

Apple has two main problems to solve in China to bolster revenues: Build more iPhones and raise services. The developer training program won’t help with the first, but it will definitely help with the second, as App Store revenue is booked under services.

I have gotten into the habit of putting a post-it over my Mac camera. Some folks laugh at this, but this is exactly the reason why.

That said, the headline link is a Medium post with all the details. Most damning, though:

Additionally, if you’ve ever installed the Zoom client and then uninstalled it, you still have a localhost web server on your machine that will happily re-install the Zoom client for you, without requiring any user interaction on your behalf besides visiting a webpage. This re-install ‘feature’ continues to work to this day.

If you’ve ever installed Zoom on your Mac and want to check for this local server, go to Terminal (it’s in Applications/Utilities) and type:

lsof -i :19421

If you enter the command and nothing comes back, you’re good. If you do get a result, you’ve got that web server running. If you don’t intentionally want that server running, here’s a tweet with instructions on killing it.

One final note on this. Here’s Zoom’s official response to all of this, posted on their blog as Response to Video-On Concern.

If you are a Zoom user, worth reading the linked Medium post and Zoom’s response. Then stick some post-its on your Mac camera. Just to be safe.

Apple:

Apple today updated MacBook Air, adding True Tone to its Retina display for a more natural viewing experience, and lowering the price to $1,099, with an even lower price of $999 for college students.

And:

In addition, the entry-level $1,299 13-inch MacBook Pro has been updated with the latest 8th-generation quad-core processors, making it two times more powerful than before. It also now features Touch Bar and Touch ID, a True Tone Retina display and the Apple T2 Security Chip, and is available for $1,199 for college students.

Apple will throw in a pair of Beats Studio 3 Wireless headphones with either of these Macs as part of the back to school promo.

I particularly like the tagline on the MacBook Air section of Apple’s official Mac page: Lightness strikes again.

Remind me the difference between a MacBook and a MacBook Air again? Oh, wait, looks like the MacBook has been officially end-of-lifed. On that same Mac page, you’ll see the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro as the full laptop lineup. No MacBook. I’m good with that.

iPhone in Canada:

Health Canada’s Twitter account has been providing the odd updates here and there, and yesterday sent out another tweet about Apple Watch Series 4 and the ECG app.

When asked about Apple Watch and the ECG app, the federal organization replied to an ongoing Twitter thread and Canadian man, @realgaryng, by saying “Health Canada has recently approved two licences for the Apple Watch ECG app and notifications. For more information on product release dates in Canada, please contact the manufacturer directly.”

C’mon, Apple.

9to5Mac:

In a surprise move, Apple has revived its Texas Hold’em game for iOS today. The update to the original game comes in celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the App Store and has been redesigned to include new characters, improved graphics, more challenging gameplay, and much more.

The Apple game first launched in 2006 for iPod before making its way to the App Store.

Hold’em is my favourite card game and it’s great to see this “classic” back on my phone.

Over the weekend, there was a 7.1 earthquake in California, centered near Ridgecrest, on the edge of the Mojave Desert. There were also preshocks and aftershocks.

Lots of information about the quake on the USGS earthquake site.

Given the location (in California, though closer to LA than Apple Park), this New York Times article from last month got a lot of new attention (H/T Dman and Neal Pann, and Shawn’s original posting here). From the article:

The circular building housing Apple’s headquarters in Silicon Valley is so big, it’s nearly a mile in circumference. So it’s hard to fathom that it is not actually attached to the ground. The spaceship, as the building is often called, is a mammoth example of a technology that reduces earthquake shaking by as much as 80 percent.

Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, said in an interview that he and Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder who died in 2011, considered base isolation essential protection for the headquarters — and the brain trust that resides within. During the construction, ensuring the building’s safety and environmental integrity was crucial. Addressing potential mold issues was a significant part of this process. Finding a mold removal company near me that could handle such a large and complex structure was essential to maintaining a healthy environment for all employees. Mr. Ive also spent four years renovating his house in San Francisco to make it more resilient to earthquakes. Switching gears, using tailored London concrete services designed for precision and flexibility has never been easier. Projects across the city are thriving thanks to reliable partners providing fresh, mix-on-site concrete solutions tailored to exact specifications. Timeliness and quality are now within everyone’s grasp. If you need help renovating a room in your home, you may seek the services of contractors from Arete’ Renovators.

The article goes into great detail on the base-isolation technology, with some terrific pictures and diagrams. Very interesting.

Reddit user tells first hand what it’s like to experience one of these mob shoplifting events that happens much too often.

Apple puts any stolen goods in a lost or stolen mode, rendering any gear stolen from the store useless to the thieves. So why do they do it? Either ignorance, or they’ve got access to a spare parts market.

And yup, it’s shoplifting, not robbery, but the bigger point remains.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

For iOS 13, iPadOS 13, and macOS Catalina beta testers, Apple is trying out a new sign-in process for iCloud on the web. When you head to beta.icloud.com on a device running the betas, you can now sign-in to your account using Face ID or Touch ID.

If you log in to beta.icloud.com via a non-beta iOS or macOS, you’ll get the normal login experience, with a 6 digit code appearing that you type in to validate your visit.

If you log in using a beta iOS 13 or MacOS Catalina device, your Face ID or Touch ID verifies you, gives you access, without the code at all. Way better.

Engadget:

The Apple Watch produced a seismic shift in the public’s acceptance of biometric monitoring. Sure, we’ve had step counters, heart rate and sleep monitors for years, but the Apple Watch made it hip and cool to do so. In Deep Medicine, author Eric Topol examines how recent advances in AI and machine learning techniques can be leveraged to bring (at least the American) healthcare system out of its current dark age and create a more efficient, more effective system that better serves both its doctors and its patients. In the excerpt below, Topol examines the efforts by startup AliveCor and the Mayo Clinic to cram an ECG’s functionality into a wristwatch-sized device without — and this is the important part — generating potentially lethal false positive results.

Apple is just scratching the surface of its health care efforts.

Ars Technica:

Sometimes we take Web and user interface design for granted—that’s the point of User Inyerface, a hilariously and deliberately difficult-to-use website created to show just how much we rely on past habits and design conventions to interact with the Web and our digital devices.

The resulting website is a gauntlet of nearly impossible-to-parse interactions that are as funny as they are infuriating. In one case, the colors for the male and female selection options in a personal info form are reversed compared to expectations: the white-backgrounded one is the selection, while the blue-highlighted one is the one you’re not picking—and there’s no non-binary option, either, of course.

This is nuts. I couldn’t go past the first page for fear of being driven insane.

The Hollywood Reporter:

Mad Magazine, the irreverent and highly influential satirical magazine that gave the world Alfred E. Neuman, will effectively cease publication some time later this year after 67 years, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.

Sources tell THR that after issue 9, Mad will no longer be sold on newsstands and will only be available through comic book shops as well as mailed to subscribers. After issue 10, there will no longer be new content save for the end-of-year specials. Beginning with issue 11, the magazine will only feature previously published content — classic and best-of nostalgic fare — from its massive vault of material from the past 67 years. DC, however, will continue to publish Mad books and special collections.

Many magazines have shut down in the past 10-20 years but this one is especially poignant to those of us who grew up in the magazine’s heyday.

Reuters:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled against Amazon in a case that could expose the online retailer to lawsuits from customers who buy defective products from third-party vendors through its website.

Numerous other courts, including two federal appeals courts, have held that Amazon cannot be held liable as a seller of products from third-party vendors. The new ruling from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, which reversed a lower court decision, appeared to be the first to buck that trend.

This is potentially good news for those of us who have been taken advantage of by third-party resellers.

The Globe and Mail:

Canada Day fireworks in Banff this weekend went off without a bang.

The town switched to a pyrotechnics display like you might see at a rock concert over fireworks for its holiday celebrations going forward, so as not to terrify the thousands of animals, wild and domestic, that live in the area.

Beyond your whimpering canine, there’s evidence that traditional fireworks displays aren’t good for animals. Birds tend to “flee en masse” from them; the 2010 New Year’s celebration in Beebe, Ark., saw 5,000 blackbirds drop out of the sky, pelting residents in the head. Deer fling themselves into roads and cars. Horses have heart attacks and keel over. Shelters in the United States say the day after Independence Day is the busiest day for them because of all the runaway dogs, terrified and confused by the noise.

Fireworks were banned in my little town this year, partially for noise reasons but also because of a fire hazard concern (our town is surrounded by extremely dry forests). Tomorrow is the Fourth of July in the US – will you or your community use the “low-noise fireworks” (which I had never heard of before)? These don’t exactly seem like “low noise” to me.

AppleInsider:

Apple will announce quarterly earnings for its third fiscal quarter of 2019 on July 30, with company CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri expected to share details regarding specific segment performance in an investor conference call.

As usual, Cook and Maestri are expected to provide an in-depth breakdown Apple’s financials for the three-month period ending in June, as well as answer questions from prominent analysts.

As usual, Apple will announce billions of dollars of revenue and millions of devices sold.

This is a lot of fun. iOS 13 is using ARKit to make your eyes look at the person to whom you are connected via FaceTime, rather than at the actual slight angle as you look at the screen rather than the camera.

To see this at work, check out this bit of video from Dave Schukin. In the video, keep your eyes on the eyeglasses arm, rather than on the eyes, watching for that arm to warp as ARKit does its thing.

If you have the iOS 13 beta, you can enable this bit of trickery in Settings > FaceTime, but only if you have one of the most recent model iPhones.

Nikil Saval, The New Yorker:

The archetypal telephone, the Model 500, designed by Henry Dreyfuss, had a clunking rotary dial, a heavy base, and a coiled cord that connected to a curved handset.

And:

But it was the handset that was the product’s masterpiece. Molding itself to your hand and also to the crook between your shoulder and ear, it was a perfect instantiation of how a designer could shape everyday technology to the form of the human body, while anticipating the instincts—such as the desire to speak hands-free—that would guide the use of that technology.

And:

The Apple iPhone, in the various iterations that the industrial designer Jony Ive produced, is the opposite. Few objects so continuously in use by human beings are as hostile to the human body as this slim, black, fragile slab, recalcitrant to any curve of head or shoulder or even palm, where it usually rests. It is made for a world without liquids, secretions, or hard surfaces, all of which threaten its destruction. Except for the curve of the edges, where the bevel of the glass screen has been painstakingly fused to the phone’s body, it is the shape of a photo, not a face.

The quotes above give you a taste of what’s in store in the rest of the article. For me, it’s a real treat, luxuriant prose but short enough to not get old.

Jeremy Horwitz, VentureBeat:

Apple’s Memoji may have become the more popular 3D avatar feature for smartphones, but Xiaomi wants people to know that its similarly named version — Mimoji — came first, despite increasingly confusing overlap between the apps’ names and features. Moreover, it’s apparently threatening legal action against writers who call it a copycat without providing proof.

And:

Neither Apple nor Xiaomi can reasonably claim to be first with either the 3D animal or 3D human avatar concept; the ideas have been found in third-party apps for years, and Samsung’s AR Emoji beat both companies to market with OS-integrated human avatars in February 2018. Even the Memoji name dates back to at least early 2017, and not from Apple.

Seems fair for Xiaomi to complain about being accused of copying Apple. It’ll be interesting to see if they follow through with any actual legal action and, if so, if they have any success. Can’t imagine that will buy them many friends in the tech press.

Spotify blog:

Almost a year ago, we started to beta test a feature that lets independent artists upload their music directly to Spotify. Today, we notified participating artists about our decision to close the beta program, along with how we can help them migrate their music to other distributors over the next month.

And:

The most impactful way we can improve the experience of delivering music to Spotify for as many artists and labels as possible is to lean into the great work our distribution partners are already doing to serve the artist community.

That’s really a shame. Well, there’s always the Apple Music for Artists beta.

Doug:

In case it isn’t crystal clear: scripts written for iTunes will not work on macOS 10.15 and later. Since the iTunes application isn’t available on the new OS, scripts that target it will fail. So, almost every script on the site will need to be re-written to work with the macOS Music and/or Apple TV apps that replace iTunes in macOS 10.15.

To help users keep track of what scripts for which operating system have been updated and when, I’ve posted Doug’s Check For All Updates. It’s an applet that will survey your computer for all the scripts you have installed from dougscripts.com and generate a report listing which have been updated.

If you are a user of Doug’s excellent scripts written for iTunes, download and run this.

Gizmodo:

Later this month, some of the original videotapes that captured the first Moon landing will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. But they’re not being sold by NASA. Incredibly, these tapes were sold to a random NASA intern back in the 1970s who had no idea at the time that he’d purchased an important piece of history.

According to Sotheby’s, it was George’s father who first noticed that these tapes might be worth hanging on to for the future. A small label on one of the boxes read, “APOLLO 11 EVA | July 20, 1969 REEL 1 [–3]” and “VR2000 525 Hi Band 15 ips.” Obviously, that was something that should be taken care of, and that’s precisely what they did.

Well, that’s embarrassing.