Ars Technica:

As part of a slate of upcoming software updates, Apple will close the door on one of its most iconic pieces of software: iTunes. The company will split the application up into multiple, more-focused apps on the Mac: Apple Music for music, Apple TV for TV and movies, and Apple Podcasts for podcasts.

Going forward, Mac users will be able to sync their iOS devices’ music libraries in the Mac’s Finder. The backup-and-restore functionality for iOS devices that currently exists in iTunes will also be available in the Finder. Apple also did not say how existing users will be able to port media libraries from iTunes to the new apps. Apple didn’t mention books today, but much of iTunes’ book and audiobook functionality was already moved to Apple’s Books apps.

While most functionality offered by iTunes will still be offered, just in different applications, the sunsetting of iTunes marks something of an end of an era for the music industry.

iTunes was amazing but it had become too big and unwieldy for many users. Splitting it into its component parts makes sense.

Apple:

Power to change everything. Say hello to a Mac that is extreme in every way. With the greatest performance, expansion, and configurability yet, it is a system created to let a wide range of professionals push the limits of what is possible.

Along with the usual tech specs, Apple has posted a video of the new and utterly insane Mac Pro. It’s a machine that literally 99% of us don’t need and probably can’t afford. But the power of this beast is stunning. Apple hasn’t released full pricing yet but I’ll bet a fully maxed out machine and monitor will cost well north of $25K.

Apple:

The Flying Cholitas are an association of female wrestlers based in El Alto, Bolivia. Their skill and creativity are empowering women across Bolivia to explore their cultural pride and artistic expression.

What a fun, funny, and sweet video.

Our World in Data:

The media provides a near-instantaneous snapshot of single events; events that are, in most cases, negative. The persistent, large-scale trends of progress never make the headlines.

But is there evidence that such a disconnect exists between what we see in the news and what is reality for most us?

One study attempted to look at this from the perspective of what we die from: is what we actually die from reflected in the media coverage these topics receive?

This is a fascinating and a little scary look at data and how the media on all sides skews information.

A U.S. judge ordered Facebook Inc to give shareholders emails and other records concerning how the social media company handles data privacy, after data for an estimated 87 million users was accessed by the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

This is a big hit for Facebook, but when it comes right down to it, people will still use the service and Facebook will continue to make billions in profit.

Fun to play with. Tweak the controls.

There’s an iOS app too.

Malcolm Owen, AppleInsider:

Cardiogram will be allowing its users to start recording their heart rate on the Apple Watch continuously before the WWDC keynote begins, one which uses the Apple Watch’s heart rate sensor. The data is shared minute-by-minute with the company, which is then compiled with data provided by other users.

During the event, a dedicated live heart rate chart will update to show what the current heart rate of participants taking part in the monitoring scheme is, and what the group rate was in previous minutes. In theory, the heart rate will be highest shortly after major new announcements.

This is a pretty fascinating idea, borrowing a page from political polling rooms that track people’s reactions to a speech with buttons they press, in real time, when they strongly agree with a particular sentiment.

I can only imagine these two worlds colliding.

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

The file size limit prevents iOS users from accidentally downloading a big game on LTE and blowing through their carrier’s data cap. However, the cellular limit is often mocked as a stupid feature as Apple offers no opportunity to override the limit and force the download to succeed.

It is also silly because the cellular limit is enforced non-discriminately, which means even iPhone users with unlimited data plans are still barred from downloading apps and games over 200 MB.

The alert would be better implemented as a warning, informing the user that they are about to download a large file but including a ‘Continue Download’ button to allow the download to complete. Even users with capped data plans may need a big app in a pinch from time to time.

Perfectly put, completely agree.

Add to this the places where cellular is fast enough and so readily available, that WiFi is just not part of the mix. There should be a setting to turn this limitation off. It’s an artifact.

And at the same time, Apple, bump that 5GB cloud base storage to something actually usable.

John Vorhees, MacStories:

There does seem to be friction holding iOS developers back from making the leap to the Mac. Part of it is that developing for the Mac is just different enough from iOS that it makes adapting an iOS app to the Mac harder than many developers would prefer. Combined with the smaller Mac market, that friction seems to be enough to keep many iOS developers off the Mac.

It’s into this environment that Apple announced Marzipan, its effort to make it easier to build apps for both the Mac and iOS.

And:

Web services are a bigger part of the productivity app market than ever before, and few seem interested in building traditional Mac apps. Exacerbating the problem is the rather thin competition in some app categories and limited migration of iOS apps to the Mac. Instead of letting third parties with little stake in the Mac’s success control the direction of the Mac experience through a patchwork of inferior apps, I’m eager to see a solution from Apple that leverages the strength of iOS.

Of all the technologies to dig into at WWDC, Marzipan seems the most important for the future of the Mac, and the topic I’m most interested in watching unfold.

As Craig Hockenberry explains in his post The Future of Interaction, Marzipan is a big win for developers, helping them support multiple platforms with a much smaller baseline of code to maintain.

If you’re an iMessage developer, you have to think about a product that works on iOS, macOS, and watchOS. You get a pass on tvOS, but that’s small consolation. The same situation exists in various combinations for all of Apple’s major apps: Music, Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Mail, etc.

It’s likely that all of these apps share a common data model, probably supported by an internal framework that can be shared amongst platforms. That leaves the views and the controllers as an area where code can’t be shared.

And:

With this insight, it’s easy to see Marzipan as a way towards views that share code. A UIView can be used on your TV, on your desktop, on your wrist, and in your pocket. That’s a big win for developer productivity.

And a big win for developer productivity is a big win for users and, in the end, for Apple.

Interested in WWDC bu not able to make it out to San Jose for the big happenings? John Sundell has your back.

WWDC by Sundell is a clean, snappy web site that promises to closely follow the conference. And that coverage has already started. Check it out.

[Via DF]

Spoiler: Cleveland has the fastest mobile speed!

Some pretty interesting charts to chew through. Can’t help but wonder if we’ll eventually have a global satellite-based broadband service that brings equal speeds to everyone.

When you’re trying out a new restaurant, Google Maps already shows you how to get there, photos, reviews and ratings. But as you scan the menu, you’re probably wondering, “What’s good?” Now Google Maps is making it easy to “dish-cover” a restaurant’s most crowd-pleasing meals with a new popular dishes feature.

This is all crowd-sourced information, but still it could be interesting to see some of the actual meals a restaurant serves and not the professionally done photo shoots that look nothing like the meal in front of you.

Uber Technologies Inc reported a $1 billion loss and a 20% rise in revenue on Thursday in its first quarterly report as a public company, in line with the ride-hailing service’s forecasts.

The loss was in line with Uber’s forecast. Amazingly, the stock went up a bit at one point during after hours trading.

Our goal has always been to bring the AltConf experience to as many people as possible. So for 2019, we are hosting a number of other one day conference events, bringing AltConf to communities throughout Europe. You’ll be able to join us at AltConf London, Madrid, Paris and Berlin. Each will be a unique, one day conference, run and curated by local community volunteers, taking into account the local community to put on the best event possible.

If you aren’t able to be in California for WWDC, you can still be part of the community in one of these satellite events.

This is a dramatic headline, but read the Reddit post. There’s an embedded video that appears to be taken soon after the fire went out, smoke still pouring out and what appears to be char marks on the floor.

Is this real? Seems like it. Hard to say for sure. But lithium-ion batteries can fail, and can explode, under the right circumstances.

One interesting nugget:

I went inside and was able to remove the computer to the porch using gloves (it was scalding hot). Below is a short video taken when I re-entered the house a few minutes after the explosion. After it cooled for an hour or so, I took it to the local Apple store in a rage. They understood the severity of the situation but said nothing could be done until it spent 24 hours in a fire-proof safe and that they’d call me with a plan/update.

Is there a fire-proof safe in every Apple Store? I remember reading about safes in Apple Stores when the gold Edition Apple Watch first came out. I wonder if this was a use case when they added a safe to the Apple Store designs.

Bottom line, I do see value in being careful with lithium-ion batteries. Recycle them. And do get them checked out if you notice bulging in your Mac.

Eric Slivka, MacRumors:

Following Apple’s shift to California-themed names for its Mac operating systems with OS X Mavericks back in 2013, Apple appeared to take steps to protect a number of other California-related names by filing for trademarks under a series of shell companies intended to mask the true identity of the applicant.

And:

All told, we identified 19 trademarks that were applied for under six different companies that all appeared to be Apple shell companies. Several of these names, including Yosemite, Sierra, and Mojave, have been used by Apple, while others have yet to be put to use.

And:

Of the original 19 names that were included in the trademark applications, all but four of them have been either used by Apple or abandoned, with the remaining live applications being Mammoth, Monterey, Rincon, and Skyline.

This is some terrific detective work.

Of the four names, I like Mammoth and Monterey. Mammoth Mountain is a popular ski area (one of my favorite places to ski, back in the day) and Monterey is a city, county, and bay and, most importantly, home to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

My money’s on Monterey, for purely sentimental reasons. Though I’d throw in a wild card vote for this list of the top 10 tallest California peaks.

Andrew O’Hara, AppleInsider, digs through the potential market for the new iPod touch. The biggest bit of this that clicked for me:

Apple also touts the upcoming Apple Arcade which will allow access to several exclusive games for a monthly fee. The new iPod touch is a very clear, inexpensive delivery device for that service.

This seems a solid strategy: Release a relatively low cost device, ready made for parents with kids and a long road trip ahead. A subscription to Apple Arcade is a perfect complement to the new iPod touch.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg, in an interview with Phillip Shoemaker, who ran app reviews from 2009 to 2016:

App reviewers worked in small conference rooms with Macs, iPhones, and iPads to test applications. Reviewers would come in each morning, pick 30 to 100 apps from a web tool, and download them devices for testing. It was a job that required long hours, Shoemaker recalled. Apple has hired more reviewers since then, and the work spaces in California are more open and collaborative now.

No small thanks go to Phil Schiller for retooling the system, radically improving the approval cycle.

Apple made sure that Shoemaker’s review team treated all third-party developers equally, even if they were giant technology companies supplying important apps for iPhones and iPads. “I was calling out Facebook all the time” on Twitter, he said. “Even though they were one of these privileged developers, they had some of the worst code at the time.”

Ouch.

Here’s a link to the interview, an episode of the Decrypted podcast.

Ars Technica:

This week, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed a bill to allow the composting of human remains within the state. It is the only state in the US—and possibly the only government in the world—to explicitly allow “natural organic reduction” of human remains.

Katrina Spade, the founder of Recompose, told the Times that the process will cost about $5,000 — more than a traditional cremation, but less than a traditional burial. “The material we give back to families is much like the topsoil you’d buy at your local nursery,” Recompose says on its website.

A lot of people will have an initial (understandable) negative reaction to this story but, unless you have religious reasons for not wanting to do it, would you have a problem with being composted after you die? Personally, I’d be fine with it as long as someone can sneak my compost on to the grounds of the Halifax Public Gardens and use it there.

Engadget:

On the streaming side alone, the investment has paid off. Apple has cemented itself as a key player in the most popular way people now listen to music.

Of course, Beats has that massive headphone and speaker business — it’s not all about turning Beats Music into Apple’s own service. After joining Apple, the company would release new headphones, but the fruits of the relationship didn’t blossom until fall 2016. As part of the iPhone 7 reveal, Beats announced that it had three new headphone options in the works. All three would feature the W1 chip that powered Apple’s own true wireless AirPods.

Apple had benefited from Beats’ streaming service, and now Beats headphones were benefiting from Apple’s engineering smarts. The company would follow up a year later with a fourth model that leveraged the power of the W1 chip: the noise-canceling Studio3 Wireless.

The behind the scenes story of this purchase will likely never be known but it was fascinating at the time and continues to bring up a lot of questions as to why Apple is working Beats the way they are. But there’s no doubt it is hugely successful, regardless of your thoughts about the product itself.

Geoffrey A. Fowler, Washington Post:

On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with.

And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address -— once every five minutes.

And:

You might assume you can count on Apple to sweat all the privacy details. After all, it touted in a recent ad, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” My investigation suggests otherwise.

iPhone apps I discovered tracking me by passing information to third parties — just while I was asleep — include Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit’s Mint, Nike, Spotify, The Washington Post and IBM’s the Weather Channel. One app, the crime-alert service Citizen, shared personally identifiable information in violation of its published privacy policy.

This is a big deal. Privacy is core to Apple’s brand and one of the main reasons I am so loyal to Apple’s ecosystem. Looking forward to Apple’s response to the Washington Post.

This article is a mixed bag. The tone was a bit Apple-bashing, but there were nuggets at the core that made the whole thing worth reading.

Some highlights:

Three years after their debut, a generation of AirPods is nearing obsolescence as their lithium-ion batteries degrade (or they get lost or dropped down the toilet) and owners upgrade to the new model, which came out in March.

My AirPods started to degrade at the beginning of the year, to the point where the shortened battery life started to get in the way for me. As the article points out, there was no way for me to change out the batteries and the cost of Apple doing it made the possibility of a refresh not cost-effective.

I bought the new rev when they went on sale, passed along my old ones. They still do work, after all.

The environmental case against AirPods rests on four main points. First, they don’t last long: Lithium-ion batteries degrade over time, and there have been reports of AirPods failing to hold a charge after as little as 18 months. Second, they can’t be repaired: You can’t crack them open without special tools (and possibly some bloodshed), and even if you could, the components inside are tangled and glued together. Third, they can’t easily be recycled for the same reasons. And finally, it’s irresponsible to throw them in the trash both because they contain minerals that were mined at significant human cost and because their batteries could pose fire and toxicity hazards in waste dumps — though this is true of most modern gadgets.

All fair points. Apple’s response:

As with all of our products, we work closely with our recyclers to ensure AirPods are properly recycled and provide support to recyclers outside of our supply chain as well

I have to say, Apple does make it easy to return their products to them for recycling. You can bring pretty much any Apple device you own to Apple for recycling or, for newer devices, for a trade-in. Here’s a link to Apple’s trade-in page.

That said, the author raises a fair question about the recyclability of AirPods:

Wistron confirmed to me that you can recycle key portions of AirPods, notably the battery, from which the mineral cobalt can be extracted. The problem is that the value of what can be recycled is unlikely to cover the cost of recovering it. With no automated system that can safely open AirPods or extract their components, each device has to be opened by a worker using hand tools, like pliers and jigs. Their first goal is to cleanly dislodge the battery and then the audio drivers, which can also contain precious metals. The battery is sent on to a specialized smelter to extract the cobalt, which can be reused, while the drivers are sent to precious metal refiners.

At the end of the day, the value of the material recovered from AirPods does not appear to cover the cost of recycling them. And that value is what drives recycling.

Ars Technica originally ran this article back in 2012, reposted it over the weekend.

If HyperCard means anything to you at all, take a read for a lovely bit of nostalgia.

I loved HyperCard, loved the simplicity of its design and all the doors it opened. For some reason, Panic’s Playdate tickled that same feeling in me.

[H/T John Kordyback]

TechCrunch:

Apple Pay is hitting select stations this Friday, May 31. When that kicks in, riders will be able to swipe their iPhone or Apple Watch to catch a ride.

And:

The kiosks are actually active, at present, but using them requires a software update — iOS 12.3 and watchOS 5.2.1, respectively. Then a debit or credit card needs to be associated with Express Transit in Apple Wallet, using Face or Touch ID. Once installed, it should work on the iPhone 6s and SE or later, along with the Apple Watch Series 1, 2 and 3, using NFC to get you in.

Can’t wait to try this myself. To me, this is the best example of Apple Pay cutting down on payment friction, joining all the other NFC solutions out there, but with the advantage of being tied to your Apple Watch. No need to pull your phone or metro card out of your pocket.