Click the link, click the colors, read the descriptions. Well done.

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Apple upgraded CarPlay in iOS 12 with support for third-party navigation apps including Google Maps and Waze, allowing drivers to use alternatives to Apple Maps for the first time. CarPlay has an even bigger update in iOS 13 with the introduction of Dashboard, new apps, and updates to existing apps.

This is a pretty solid rethinking of the CarPlay interface. Yet another example of Apple firing on all cylinders.

Ian Bogost, The Atlantic:

Everything about this computer is loud: The groan of the power supply is loud. The hum of the cooling fan is loud. The whir of the hard disk is loud. The clack of the mechanical keyboard is loud. It’s so loud I can barely think, the kind of noise I usually associate with an airline cabin: whoom, whoom, whoom, whoom.

This is the experience a computer user would have had every time she booted up her Macintosh SE, a popular all-in-one computer sold by Apple from 1987 to 1990. By today’s standards the machine is a dinosaur. It boasts a nine-inch black-and-white display. Mine came with a hard disk that offers 20 megabytes of storage, but some lacked even that luxury. And the computer still would have cost a fortune: The version I have retailed for $3,900, or about $8,400 in 2019 dollars.

And:

The original Macintosh was an adorable dwarf of a computer. About the size of a full-grown pug, its small footprint, built-in handle, and light weight made it easy to transport and stow. Perched on a single, wide paw, the machine looks perky and attentive, as if it’s there to serve you, rather than you it.

Though the Macintosh SE was a speed-demon compared to the original 128K Macintosh, compared to any modern computing device, the performance was relatively the same.

This article was written on a Macintosh SE and, if old school is your thing, it’s kind of glorious.

Whether you’re running the iOS 13 beta now, or will wait for the official version to ship, you will eventually use these gestures.

These six gestures represent a core change to the iOS experience. Love this move, especially the feedback you get when you make one of these gestures successfully.

Apple, announcing the new Logic Pro X update, designed with the new Mac Pro in mind:

Making full use of the Mac Pro hardware, Logic Pro X 10.4.5 will now support up to 56 processing threads, allowing pro music producers and film composers to work through incredibly demanding music projects with unprecedented ease.

And:

With the new Mac Pro, Logic can now run up to five times the number of real-time plug-ins compared to the previous generation Mac Pro. Logic Pro X 10.4.5 increases the available track and channel count for all users, now supporting up to 1,000 audio tracks and 1,000 software instrument tracks, providing four times the number of available tracks for the most complex productions. Additionally, Logic Pro X now supports 1,000 auxiliary channel strips, 1,000 external MIDI tracks and 12 sends per channel strip. Users can also expect improved responsiveness of the Mixer and Event List when working with large sessions, and projects with numerous Flex Time edits and tempo changes perform more efficiently than ever.

Check the Jonathan Morrison video, which Shawn posted a few days ago. In it, you hear from a high level audio engineer, extolling the virtues of the new Mac Pro. Wondering if this new version of Logic Pro, combined with the new Mac Pro (when it ships), will replace competing apps in high end studios.

If you own Logic Pro, check for the update. It dropped this morning.

Digiday:

Headphones are a fact of life inside open plan offices, but Airpods have quickly become a staple of life at ad agency life, with staffers walking around all day with the signature little pods in their ears.

And:

“I know they’re not listening to music, or anything, but it’s still disconcerting to see them with something in their ears while we’re all discussing something,” said one agency CEO, who said he once had a meeting with someone wearing Airpods. “It’s like, ‘what?’”

Fascinating piece. I’ve had plenty of conversations with people with AirPods in my own ears, and/or with AirPods in theirs. One key difference between AirPods and Beats Powerbeats Pro is the ability to hear background noise. The Powerbeats Pro are designed to wedge tightly into the ear canal, making conversation more difficult, at least to me, than with AirPods in my ears.

And the almost viral spread of AirPods means more people keeping them in their ears on a regular basis.

“Airpods are a totally different phenomenon,” said Michelle Edelman, Petermayer evp and chief strategy officer. “The product is honestly good, but wearing them 24/7 is going to mess with the notion of when you can and can’t disturb someone. So it’ll change social norms if people just start to leave them in during meetings.”

And:

“Just yesterday, I was walking on the street listening to a partner review some important data with me and a woman stopped me to ask for directions as she didn’t see my Airpods,” she said. “I had to do that thing where I listened to two people talk to me at once for about a minute before telling both of them I didn’t hear what either of them said.”

Or it could be the woman didn’t see AirPods as a sign that you were necessarily unavailable for listening.

Very interesting article.

Federico Viticci:

For now though, after using the iPadOS beta on my 12.9″ iPad Pro for a few days, I’d like to share some initial considerations on iPadOS and what it means for the future of the platform.

And:

What truly matters, however, is that the message Apple is sending with iPadOS is the kind of trajectory I wanted to see for the future of iPad. There are functionalities such as multiwindow and file management that the Mac figured out decades ago; in bringing them to iPadOS, however, Apple isn’t simply copying and pasting the same features from one platform to another: instead, they’ve taken those features’ underlying concepts and fundamentally rethought them for the iPad’s touch nature and iOS foundation.

Federico is passionate about iPad, has written more cogent detail about iPad than just about anyone else I follow. If you are an iPad user, take the time to dig in, get a sense of the iPad’s future.

This morning, this post, with the title TIL Your iPhone may stop charging at 80% when it gets too warm, made it to the front page of Reddit’s Apple subreddit.

The post references the headline linked Apple support post, specifically this:

If your device stopped charging at 80 percent

Your iPhone might get slightly warmer while it charges. To extend the lifespan of your battery, if the battery gets too warm, software might limit charging above 80 percent. Your iPhone will charge again when the temperature drops. Try moving your iPhone and charger to a cooler location.

Summer is fast approaching in the northern hemisphere, temperatures are rising. Thought it worth passing this tidbit along.

If you haven’t already, take a few minutes to read Sarah Perez’s excellent Answers to your burning questions about “Sign in with Apple”.

Once you’ve got your head wrapped around that, follow the headline link for The Verge’s interview with Google product management director Mark Risher. A few highlights:

Apple shook up the world of logins last week, offering a new single sign-on (or SSO) tool aimed at collecting and sharing as little data as possible. It was a deliberate shot at Facebook and Google, which currently operate the two major SSO services.

Not so sure it was a shot at anyone, but more of a safer, privacy respecting solutions for Apple users.

Once you start federating accounts, it means that maybe you still have a few passwords, but some new service you’re just trying out doesn’t need a 750-person engineering team dedicated to security. It doesn’t need to build its own password database, and then deal with all the liability and all the risk that comes with that.

This comment gets to the heart of the value of “Sign in with Apple” (SiwA). One of the benefits of SiwA is that it lets app developers ride on Apple’s safer, more secure coattails. And saves them from having to reinvent the wheel.

I will take the blame that we have not really articulated what happens when you press that “sign in with Google” button. A lot of people don’t understand, and some competitors have dragged it in the wrong direction. Maybe you click that button that it notifies all your friends that you’ve just signed into some embarrassing site.

With SiwA, you can bank on Apple respecting your privacy. Same thing with Apple Pay. Apple breaks the direct link between your identity-tied information and the validation process. And that’s a good thing.

I honestly do think this technology will be better for the internet and will make people much, much safer. Even if they’re clicking our competitors button when they’re logging into sites, that’s still way better than typing in a bespoke username and password, or more commonly, a recycled username and password.

Yup. Good read.

Securosis:

This year I sat in the WWDC keynote, reading the undertones, and realized that Apple was upping their privacy game to levels never before seen from a major technology company. That beyond improving privacy in their own products, the company is starting to use their market strength to pulse privacy throughout the tendrils that touch the Apple ecosystem.

Regardless of motivations, be it altruism, the personal principles of Apple executives, or a shrewd business strategy, Apple’s stance on privacy is historic and unique in the annals of consumer technology. The real question now isn’t if they can succeed at a technical level, but if Apple’s privacy push can withstand the upcoming onslaught from governments, regulators, the courts, and its competitors.

Mogull is the best voice writing about this issue and he brings up a very interesting point — will Apple be “allowed”, by various government agencies and/or public opinion and other factors, to follow through on the vision?

This is Colossal:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has created a library of 140,000 high definition files filled with photos, videos, and sound clips, all free and available for download. Visual and audio content of planets, moons, nebulas, and specific space missions, are searchable by file type. The library spans the last hundred years, and users can narrow searches to focus on any timeframe between 1920 and 2019. Each file also contains a thorough caption including the date and contextual information about the content.

What an amazing library to peruse.

Literary Hub:

Each moment was different from the one before, but each had its own unique threat, its own unmistakable sign that something serious was happening. The plane was still moving, so I knew it hadn’t yet crashed against one of those peaks that had come into view much too close to the little window I had been resting my head against only seconds earlier. The dark mountain faces, partially covered in snow, which rose up and vanished rapidly behind the clouds, had in a single heartbeat eradicated my sleepiness as the furious turbulence threw us about in air pockets, each one deeper than the last.

The first silence arrived together with stillness after the shaking that had been tossing us about violently during that brief yet eternal time when I awaited death, eyes closed, huddled in my seat, listening to the deep roar of the engines and their final, desperate screeching. There was a strong impact, followed by other terrifying and incomprehensible noises, and suddenly I smelled gasoline and felt frigid air whipping against my face.

Great writing but don’t read this if you have a fear of flying.

VOX:

It’s the holiday season for data nerds: That is, Mary Meeker is delivering her annual Internet Trends Report — the most highly anticipated slide deck in Silicon Valley — again at Code Conference 2019.

The general partner at venture capital firm Bond Capital delivered a rapid-fire 333-page slideshow that looked back at every important internet trend in the last year and looked forward about what these trends tell us to expect in the year ahead. The “Queen of the Internet” and former Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner touched on everything from accelerating internet ad spend in the US to the growth of digital delivery services in Latin America.

Meeker’s yearly slide deck might be the most widely read presentation on the internet.

James Vincent, The Verge:

Shazam can be an incredibly useful app, able to identify songs and find lyrics for them just by listening to the audio. But one big annoyance has been the software’s inability to ‘hear’ music playing through a device’s headphones. Instead, users have to play the song through internal speakers or find a way to direct the sound to their phone or tablet’s microphone.

Not any more. A new feature called Pop-up Shazam in the latest Android version of the app works with audio played through headphones with Shazam working in the background.

As soon as I read this I thought, cool, been waiting for this. But try as I might, could not get this to work in iOS.

If you are listening to the Music app via headphones in iOS, you can fire up Shazam or ask Siri what’s playing. Works perfectly. But if you are watching YouTube via headphones, or perhaps Netflix, Hulu, etc., there does not appear to be a way for Siri or Shazam to hear what you’re hearing.

Not a big deal, but I thought it was interesting that this feature came to Android, given that Apple owns Shazam.

If you do know of a way to Shazam music played through headphones, please reply to this tweet.

The kicker? It’s a swimming record.

AirPods are everywhere.

Jon Alper:

Minimizing the compromises while maximizing flexibility is a the core design theme of this Mac. It’s a profoundly different direction from the 2013 Mac Pro in all the best an most unexpected ways. Arguably, even if you never buy one, it’s an expensive (for Apple to make, not just for customers to buy) message from Apple practically shouting: ‘’We’re committed to the Mac, we’re listening to our customers and we understand some of them need something wholly unlike an iMac let alone a laptop.”

And:

It’s not a sports car. This is realization of the 2010 Steve Jobs’ quote: “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy” .This truck is a thundering, earth mover of a truck.

This is an epic read, full of insight and detail. Even if you have no intention of ever buying a Mac Pro, if you’re an Apple follower, I think you’ll enjoy this read. Well done, Jon.

[H/T AAPL Tree]

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors, writing about Jeremy Horwitz’ tweet:

Starting in watchOS 6, the Apple Watch has become a trusted device for Apple ID authentication purposes.

And:

When you or someone else signs in to your Apple ID on a new device or browser, the Apple Watch will automatically alert you, complete with an approximate location of the person. If the sign-in attempt is allowed, a six-digit verification code will then appear to be entered on the new device or browser.

Apple, firing on all cylinders.

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

In iOS 13, integrated into the Apple Maps app on your iPhone, you can you share your journey status with personal contacts in a feature called Share ETA.

The recipient receives the address of your destination and your expected arrival time. What’s really cool about this feature is that the estimated time of arrival (ETA) will update automatically, so you can see if they hit traffic or otherwise get delayed.

Love this.

Kirk McElhearn:

With macOS 10.15 Catalina, and the splitting of iTunes into three apps (Music, Podcasts, and Apple TV), media files will be handled a bit differently. Here’s where the various files will be located.

It’s a beta, so this info could change.

The New York Times:

The fire moved quickly. It engulfed the backlot’s famous New York City streetscape. It burned two sides of Courthouse Square, a set featured in “Back to the Future.” It spread south to a cavernous shed housing the King Kong Encounter, an animatronic attraction for theme-park visitors.

And:

The fire moved quickly. It engulfed the backlot’s famous New York City streetscape. It burned two sides of Courthouse Square, a set featured in “Back to the Future.” It spread south to a cavernous shed housing the King Kong Encounter, an animatronic attraction for theme-park visitors.

And:

Eventually the flames reached a 22,320-square-foot warehouse that sat near the King Kong Encounter. The warehouse was nondescript, a hulking edifice of corrugated metal, but it was one of the most important buildings on the 400-acre lot. Its official name was Building 6197. To backlot workers, it was known as the video vault.

And that’s the core of this story. The video vault was home to a “repository of some of the most historically significant material owned by UMG, the world’s largest record company”.

Remarkable story. A tragic loss for the music industry. Riveting read.

Leif Johnson, Macworld:

Almost out of nowhere, Apple is poised to be a major force in mainstream gaming. It’s doing it in its own Apple way, too—not by chasing down the graphics-intensive blockbusters so popular on devices like the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (or even the PC), but instead by positioning its upcoming Apple Arcade service as a hub for remarkable and tightly focused games that often get mentioned in discussions of whether games are art.

And:

It’s partly funding some of the games in Apple Arcade. It officially announced Project Catalyst, which will allow the same apps to work across the iPhone, the iPad, the Mac, and possibly Apple TV. It’s lifted most of the restrictions that kept games out of Apple’s walled garden for years, most notably by announcing support for wireless Xbox One controllers and Sony’s Dual Shock 4 for the PlayStation 4.

This is not simply about Apple Arcade. Sure, Apple Arcade is an important pillar in Apple’s modern gaming strategy, but the idea of running a game on my Mac, handing it off to my big screen Apple TV, then grabbing my iPad or iPhone to continue playing on the road is a second major pillar. And doing it all using top notch pro controllers like the Sony Dual Shock 4? That’s another big deal.

It would not surprise me to learn about Apple negotiating behind the scenes with major gaming franchises to bring a new generation of console level games, beyond Apple Arcade’s “art house” games, to the new Catalyst-fueled Apple platforms. This could be a new golden age for Apple and gaming.

Jonny Evans lays out the myriad ways in which Apple Maps has gotten better. Terrific read.

One specific feature I’ve noticed is the addition of traffic lights and stop signs in iOS 13. Apple Maps is definitely getting much, much better.

Ina Fried, Axios:

Apple pitches itself as the most privacy-minded of the big tech companies, and indeed it goes to great lengths to collect less data than its rivals. Nonetheless, the iPhone maker will still know plenty about you if you use many of its services: In particular, Apple knows your billing information and all the digital and physical goods you have bought from it, including music, movie and app purchases.

But:

Apple uses a number of techniques to either minimize how much data it has or encrypt it so that Apple doesn’t have access to iMessages and similar personal communications.

And:

Apple is able to do this, in part, because it makes its money from selling hardware, and increasingly from selling services, rather than through advertising. (It does have some advertising business, and it also gets billions of dollars per year from Google in exchange for being Apple’s default search provider.)

This is the setup. The article itself digs into how Apple does all this and the specifics, for a number of Apple services, on what Apple knows and how they protect your privacy.

If you care about the issue of privacy, take the time to visit Apple’s official privacy site, and read the various article’s Ina has linked at the bottom of her article, to the specifics of what Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. know about you.

Ars Technica:

Earlier this week, the Internet had a conniption. In broad patches around the globe, YouTube sputtered. Shopify stores shut down. Snapchat blinked out. And millions of people couldn’t access their Gmail accounts. The disruptions all stemmed from Google Cloud, which suffered a prolonged outage—an outage which also prevented Google engineers from pushing a fix. And so, for an entire afternoon and into the night, the Internet was stuck in a crippling ouroboros: Google couldn’t fix its cloud, because Google’s cloud was broken.

The root cause of the outage, as Google explained this week, was fairly unremarkable. (And no, it wasn’t hackers.) At 2:45pm ET on Sunday, the company initiated what should have been a routine configuration change, a maintenance event intended for a few servers in one geographic region. When that happens, Google routinely reroutes jobs those servers are running to other machines, like customers switching lines at Target when a register closes. Or sometimes, importantly, it just pauses those jobs until the maintenance is over.

What happened next gets technically complicated—a cascading combination of two misconfigurations and a software bug—but had a simple upshot.

Turns out, last week’s outage was just a weird confluence of unlikely events.

TechCrunch:

From a security perspective, Apple offers a better option for both users and developers alike compared with other social login systems which, in the past, have been afflicted by massive security and privacy breaches.

Apple’s system also ships with features that benefit iOS app developers — like built-in two-factor authentication support, anti-fraud detection and the ability to offer a one-touch, frictionless means of entry into their app, among other things.

For consumers, they get the same fast sign-up and login as with other services, but with the knowledge that the apps aren’t sharing their information with an entity they don’t trust.

This new feature seems to be causing a lot of confusion but there’s some good information here for both developers and users to help lift the cloud.