Next best thing? Ride the coattails of a Reddit user and check out the pics of their recent visit.

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

A report on Monday indicated that Apple is spending upwards of $30 million a month on Amazon Web Services, suggesting Apple’s spending had increased by about 10% over the previous year.

Today, The Information disputes these claims. It says that Apple spent about $370 million across 2018 (roughly $30m per month) but that is actually down compared to the year previously. In fact, Apple reportedly paid $775 million for AWS in 2017, which means 2018’s numbers represent a 50% drop.

The Information article indicates that Apple is aggressively transitioning its iCloud services to running on its own in-house servers.

Here’s a link to the paywalled Information article.

This makes a lot of sense. Apple has long shown that they want to own as much of their process as they can. As I said a few days ago, Apple’s continuing dependence on a competitors cloud services seems counter-intuitive.

Tripp Mickle, Wall Street Journal:

Rico Zorkendorfer and Daniele De Iuliis, who together have more than 35 years of experience at Apple, decided to leave the company recently, people familiar with the departures said. Another member of the team with a decade of experience, Julian Hönig, plans to leave in the coming months, people familiar with his plans said.

To get a sense of size, the article claims Apple design team has two dozen members. So that’s more than 10% of the team who got on board after the first Affordable machine risk assessment.

Nail Cybart, quoted in the article:

“This group is all-powerful in Apple,” said Neil Cybart, who runs Above Avalon, a site dedicated to Apple analysis. “Industrial designers have the final say over the user experience found with Apple devices, and they really do work like a family in a way. No one would argue, though, that new blood is a bad thing.”

Makes sense. Turnover is normal. Turnover on critical teams makes headlines. I see this is the old making way for the new.

So if you forget to take your Apple Watch off and get it a bit wet in the shower, no need to panic.

My favorite bit was the call he got from a number he didn’t recognize, long after he’d given up hope of ever getting his watch back:

“It’s this guy saying, ‘hey if your name is Rob Bainter and you lost an Apple Watch recently. Give me a call and if you can describe this I’ll give this thing to you.'”

Fun read.

Nice post from Chance Miller for all those folks coming up on their 30 day Apple News+ free trial anniversary. Note that there are two different approaches here. The first one is the simplest, a few taps from within the News app itself.

But the second approach has you look at all your subscriptions. Definitely not a bad idea.

This morbid chain of thought started when I came across this Teller Report post. An excerpt:

The Münster district court has ordered Apple to grant the heirs of a deceased iCloud user access to its data. The relatives hope for information about the circumstances of death.

And:

According to the Bielefeld law firm Brandi, who represented the heirs in court, the father died during a trip abroad. Apple has rejected the desire of relatives to gain access to the data stored in the iCloud out of court.

The company did not want to comment on the case. Experts pointed out, however, that the iPhone group in the past in similar cases, the heirs have made possible access to iCloud data of the deceased even without trial. The submission of a certificate of inheritance was sufficient. In other cases, it needed a court order.

I suspect some of the details have been lost in translation. So I did a bit of digging.

From the official Apple iCloud terms of service page:

No Right of Survivorship

Unless otherwise required by law, You agree that your Account is non-transferable and that any rights to your Apple ID or Content within your Account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate your Account may be terminated and all Content within your Account deleted.

So there it is. Pretty clear. If you die, Apple’s policy is to delete your account. Seems to me, there should be a way to assign an heir, perhaps transfer all the files to the heir’s account. They could even limit heirs to family members in a family plan.

Not crazy about a policy that forces a grieving family to have to go to court to access their loved ones photos, etc.

Apple:

Apple today announced a voluntary recall of AC wall plug adapters designed for use primarily in Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom. In very rare cases, affected Apple three-prong wall plug adapters may break and create a risk of electrical shock if touched. These wall plug adapters shipped with Mac and certain iOS devices between 2003 and 2010 and were also included in the Apple World Travel Adapter Kit. Apple is aware of six incidents worldwide.

The recall does not affect any Apple USB power adapters.

Follow the link, check the picture. If you’ve got one, trade it in.

Took six incidents to prompt this public recall. Oddly specific. Can’t help but wonder what the rules are for such a thing. And where does the MacBook keyboard issue fit into that scheme?

A billion dollar valuation makes you a unicorn. What do you call a company with a trillion dollar valuation? A basilisk? A chimera? A manticore? A hippogriff? A pegasus?

None of these seem quite right. How about a kelpie? I kind of like that one.

That aside, I think Apple should run an ad similar to the one Steve Jobs ran so very long ago, welcoming IBM to the fold.

Welcome, Microsoft. Seriously.

Popular Mechanics: >Vila’s job was that of a new kind of storyteller. On This Old House, the iconic home-renovation program he hosted from 1979 to 1989 that continues today on PBS and has won seventeen Emmys, he had a unique role: to describe, to kneel and peer into a crawl space with a flashlight, to pull at the decaying lath, to illustrate the dangers of moving forward with the work. To translate detail and describe the difficulties contractors, and homeowners, sometimes faced. > >Throughout This Old House, Vila leaned in on the personality, capability, and vision of the tradesmen and contractors who came to each worksite. Bob Vila’s interview subjects were always real, sometimes odd; Vila was always Bob. He shared the camera with them wisely. They were often older, somehow wizened, had regional accents, and offered up hard-won, homespun lessons. This was the furthest reach of reality television back then, and Vila was well suited to it.

How many of you are old enough to remember Bob Vila? As a kid, I loved his version of “This Old House” (I never liked the episodes after he left) even though I have no skill or even interest in construction, carpentry or painting creating top professionals completing the jobs we like so much at our  residential or commercial buildings in order to increase their appeal and even attract more customers, look at this site to see some of the projects I have been talking about. Vila made it seem effortless and easy.

VOX:

(the) last Saturday in April, christened Independent Bookstore Day, bills itself as a “one-day national party that takes place at indie bookstores across the country.” According to Andrea Vuleta, the executive director of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association and one of the organizers of the first California-only Independent Bookstore Day in 2014, the event was modeled on Record Store Day as a way to highlight the diverse offerings of bookstores in local communities.

Each city’s arrangement differs slightly, but all offer an incentive such as a discount or giveaway entries for visiting multiple stories, usually in a single day (although some regions such as Cape Cod spread the bookish rewards over a longer time period). Austin and Brooklyn will hold afterparties so crawlers can bond with fellow book lovers. To assist bibliophiles in getting around, Metro Boston Bookstore Day organizers arranged a trolley ride for this year’s crawl with two routes each visiting seven bookstores; the 70 available $40 tickets sold out in under a month.

I love bookstores and can spend hours and hours in them. Living in a small town means our options are limited but I’ll be sure to go into our local bookstore this Saturday.

MacRumors:

Tomorrow marks a month since Apple announced its Apple News+ subscription service, which means if you signed up on March 25 following the event, you’re going to start getting charged $9.99 per month.

If you’re not happy with Apple News+ and want to avoid the fee, make sure to cancel today. Here’s how.

I’m thoroughly unimpressed with Apple News and News+ and will be unsubscribing before my first payment is due.

The Atlantic:

For more than 700 years, the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, fought to maintain their spiritual connection to the Whanganui River. Mostly, it was a losing battle: Rapids were dynamited, gravel was extracted, and water was drained and polluted. Promises were broken. Generations of Maori looked on as awa tupua—their river of sacred power—was treated as a means to an end or, worse, as a dumping ground.

Then, in 2017, something unprecedented happened. The New Zealand government granted the Whanganui River legal personhood—a status that is in keeping with the Maori worldview that the river is a living entity. The legislation, which has yet to be codified into domestic law, refers to the river as an “indivisible, living whole,” conferring it “all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities” of an individual.

A fascinating story about people and their relationship to the land.

Here’s the picture, Steve plush with iPod.

Want one? The Reddit poster bought it here.

Wired:

What if an Ethereum owner stored their digital money with a private key—the unguessable, 78-digit string of numbers that protects the currency stashed at a certain address—that had a value of 1?

To Bednarek’s surprise, he found that dead-simple key had in fact once held currency, according to the blockchain that records all Ethereum transactions. But the cash had already been taken out of the Ethereum wallet that used it—almost certainly by a thief who had thought to guess a private key of 1 long before Bednarek had.

And:

That initial discovery piqued Bednarek’s curiosity. So he tried a few more consecutive keys: 2, 3, 4, and then a couple dozen more, all of which had been similarly emptied. So he and his colleagues at the security consultancy Independent Security Evaluators wrote some code, fired up some cloud servers, and tried a few dozen billion more.

Seems such an obvious tack to take. And reinforces my avoidance of blockchain backed currency even when trying to visit bitcoin gambling sites. Perhaps I simply lack the sophistication to travel in such currencies. But when I read stories about people losing their life savings to stolen or misplaced blockchain currency accounts, it just scares me off.

This is a great read.

Federico on the Connected podcast:

Something that I heard from a couple of people a few months ago sort of mentioned to me just casually, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you could have a mouse cursors on iPad as an accessibility feature?”

And:

But then I started doing some research and I learned that actually it’s already possible, if you have right accessibility hardware like special joysticks and motors, to have some kind of cursor on iOS. This is already possible and has been possible for years.

But what I heard from sources is that without any adapter you will be able to use a USB-C mouse, on your iPad, as an accessibility device.

And then this followup:

If you missed last week's @_connectedfm, @viticci had a pretty interesting scoop that he'd been sitting on re mouse support coming to iPad as an accessibility feature. As far as I'm aware, that *is* indeed in the works. I feel like every pro user will turn that on, day one ?

— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) April 22, 2019

I am fascinated by this possibility. Is this purely for accessibility, or is this a step towards a truly universal merging of iOS and macOS?

This is just so much better than losing your Mac for a week or more, which felt like punishment to me for buying into the new keyboard design.

I’ve been living with an intermittent “r” key failure for a few months now. Instead of taking my Mac in, I’ve just been hammering on the “r” key until I dislodged (temporarily) that piece of micro-crumb.

The other day, my MacBook Pro charger failed and, when I brought my Mac in to see what was what, the Apple Genius asked me about my keyboard experience. I was in a hurry, wasn’t prepared to leave my machine at that moment, but the Genius did tell me that they could have my Mac back to me the next day.

As to my charger, turned out to be a faulty cable, replaced at no charge, in and out in about 15 minutes. Brilliant.

Reddit:

Just got my first set of AirPods two weeks ago. Really enjoying them now that my company has switched to iOS and I tote around 2 iPhones. Then today I just popped them in to walk to the office and an Amber Alert game in. Through the AirPods. Full blast loud. My eyes watered and I threw one out as fast as possible but didn’t quite get the other in time as I tried to dismiss the alert. Holy hell my ears are ringing so loud. Is there any way to turn that down??

Amber alerts are designed to play at max volume, to get your attention. I get that.

But seems to me, Apple should do a bit of testing with AirPods volume, set a max limit for emergency klaxons and Amber alerts. There are people who need their AirPods at full volume, so not clear that a hard volume level cutoff is the right answer, but seems clear that the current in ear volume for Amber alerts and the like is just too loud and, perhaps, harmful to hearing.

iFixit:

Well, we’ve finally got the Samsung Galaxy Fold on our teardown table. This is, without question, an ambitious first-generation device—the idea of having both a smartphone and a tablet in your pocket at all times is pretty exciting! That said, a number of early reviewers had some durability issues with their review units, ultimately leading to a launch postponement. Are these temporary setbacks? Or are we headed for a full-blown AirPower-style product cancellation?

The teardown is full of great pics and details, but this little bit goes to the heart of the matter:

Unlike the dull slabs of glass we’re used to, this smartphone/tablet hybrid has lots of potential entry points—and not the good kind.

To achieve the fold, the thin bezel that surrounds (and protects) the screen leaves a gap where the two halves meet.

And:

This 7 mm gap doesn’t seem like a huge deal, but it leaves the display exposed—so should something accidentally enter, it’s curtains for the screen.

And:

When closed, the screen is protected—but the spine is flanked by massive gaps that our opening picks hop right into. These gaps are less likely to cause immediate screen damage, but will definitely attract dirt.

This all feels like Samsung rushing a poorly thought design to market, letting the analysts do the beta testing.

I do think this debacle will, ultimately, prove valuable to Apple or anyone else who goes down this road. A bit of a “how not to do this” design.

Alphabet Inc’s Wing Aviation unit on Tuesday got the okay to start delivering goods by drone in Virginia later this year, making the sister unit of search engine Google the first company to get U.S. air carrier certification, the Federal Aviation Administration said.

This means Wing can begin a commercial service delivering goods from local businesses to homes, which includes flights beyond visual line of site and over people, the FAA and Wing said. Wing Aviation plans to start commercial package delivery in Blacksburg, Virginia later this year.

I’m honestly not sure how I feel about drone deliveries. There seems to be a lot that can go wrong, but we’ll see.

Change the volume and output device for individual apps. Adjust your Mac’s audio device settings and levels instantly, from anywhere. Even apply built-in and third-party audio effects to any audio on your Mac. It’s all possible right from your menu bar, with SoundSource. This is truly powerful audio control.

For years, if I need an audio utility app, I always go to Rogue Amoeba first. They make great quality apps and chances are they make something that will get the job done. The company’s newest is called SoundSource, but check out the other apps while you’re there.

MacStories:

Over the last few weeks Apple has quietly debuted a new YouTube channel dedicated to one of its services: Apple TV. The Apple TV channel is home to a variety of videos, like trailers for upcoming films and TV shows, exclusive behind the scenes clips and interviews tied to popular shows and movies, and, of course, videos highlighting Apple’s own original content efforts, like an Apple TV+ trailer and Carpool Karaoke previews.

The launch of an Apple TV channel on YouTube is no big surprise, particularly as Apple moves further into the video and entertainment space. However, the channel does have an odd, yet interesting relationship with Apple’s own TV app. While the channel serves to promote the Apple TV service, its videos by and large aren’t available on that service’s app.

This is Apple priming the pump for Apple TV+ in the fall.

A spokesperson for AT&T today told Law360 that the matter has been “amicably settled.” Details on the terms of the settlement have not been shared, but AT&T is planning to continue to use its 5GE branding.

I don’t understand why Sprint settled if AT&T is allowed to continue using 5GE. The whole basis for the lawsuit was that 5GE would hurt Sprint’s planned 5G rollout, which makes sense. I don’t like AT&T’s 5GE branding at all—it’s misleading and has nothing to do with 5G.

I love music documentaries. But I’d be hard-pressed to name 10.

No matter what you think about the order of this list, there’s a lot of good ones to consider here. And as with all lists, there are some worthy candidates left out.

One of my favorites, Muscle Shoals, didn’t make the cut. Any others you’d add?

Rent movies? Take a few minutes to read Glenn Fleishman’s TidBITS post. There’s a lot of interesting nuggets here.

Reddit:

My friend had her iPhone XR stolen. She’s just realised that the ‘thief’* has made a video – it’s really short but shows the thief – and it’s been uploaded to her iCloud – is there a way I can pull the location data for a video?

Find my iPhone has been now disabled. So she’s out of options there, just wanted to do something to help if I could.

Read the thread to learn about pulling location data from a video (a number of options, and be aware that anyone can pull location data from your videos, just as they can from a still photo).

I wonder how the thief was able to disable Find My iPhone yet the poster was able to retrieve the video, so still had control of the Apple ID and iCloud account. The story appears to be ongoing.

CNBC:

As Apple and Amazon compete for a greater share of consumer dollars and attention, they also have a particularly intimate business relationship: Apple is spending more than $30 million a month on Amazon’s cloud, according to people familiar with the arrangement.

Apple’s cloud expenditure reflects the company’s determination to deliver online services like iCloud quickly and reliably, even if it must depend on a rival to do so.

Add in this comment from John Gruber:

A decade ago, pre-iPhone, Apple was notoriously behind on large-scale cloud services. But AWS only got started as a service in 2006, the year before the iPhone debuted. It was based on infrastructure Amazon had been working on since the 90s, sure, but it wasn’t a service Apple could even consider until 2006.

iCloud was launched in 2011. That’s 8 years. If Apple is still largely reliant on AWS today, why? Maybe they just honestly figure they don’t need to do it all themselves.

I’ve long wondered why Apple makes such heavy use of AWS. Is this simply because they don’t have the internal chops to deliver bulletproof cloud in the same way as Amazon? Is there more to it, perhaps a subtle piece in the complex business relationship with Amazon (Amazon sells some, but not all Apple products, Amazon’s video streaming service competes with Apple’s coming TV+, Amazon Video lives on Apple TV, etc.)

Bloomberg:

Ousmane Bah, 18, said he was arrested at his home in New York in November and charged with stealing from an Apple store. The arrest warrant included a photo that didn’t resemble Bah, he said in a lawsuit filed Monday. One of the thefts he was charged with, in Boston, took place on the day in June he was attending his senior prom in Manhattan, he said.

And:

Bah said he had previously lost a non-photo learner’s permit, which may have been found or stolen by the real thief and used as identification in Apple stores. As a result, Bah claimed, his name may have been mistakenly connected to the thief’s face in Apple’s facial-recognition system, which he said the company uses in its stores to track people suspected of theft.

Interesting on several levels. There’s the amount of the claim ($1B, an extraordinary number), the tidbit about Apple using facial-recognition in its stores, and the fact that a second company (Security Industry Specialists Inc.) is named in the claim.

Yesterday, we posted about JCPenney inexplicably removing support for Apple Pay, both from its retail stores and its mobile app.

Well now we know why.

JC Penney (as posted in the linked TechCrunch post):

A third-party credit card brand made the requirement for all merchants to actively support EMV contactless functionality effective April 13, retiring the legacy MSD contactless technology in place. Given the resources and lead time associated with meeting the new mandate, JCPenney chose to suspend all contactless payment options until a later date. Customers still have the ability to complete their transactions manually by inserting or swiping their physical credit cards at our point-of-sale terminals in stores, an option employed by the vast majority of JCPenney shoppers.

As to whether JCPenney will bring Apple Pay back, the TechCrunch post quotes JCPenney CEO Jill Soltau:

“I think that’s one of the key initiatives that we’ll be working on here in the coming months because we’re not being as strategic in how we speak to the customer and engage with the customer through our pricing and promotion,” she said. “And I would frankly say it might be a little bit confusing, and you might not know exactly when you can get the best value at JCPenney,” the CEO added.

The hint here is the importance to JCPenney of customer purchase data, something they lose with Apple Pay:

Customer purchase data allows a retailer to better target its customers with relevant promotions, as stores are able to collect the customer’s name and card number at point of sale, which they can then combine with other demographic data like the customer’s address, phone and email.

Apple Pay, meanwhile, prevents this level of access — something that customers like, but retailers traditionally have not.

The push and pull of marketing and privacy. Is Apple Pay inevitable? Will customers push back on JCPenney’s move away from privacy? Keeping an eye on this one.

The New York Times:

Lying on a church pew with his arm over his head, 6-year-old Gordon Andindagaye whimpered a bit — in fear, not pain — as Dr. William A. Cherniak slowly swept a small ultrasound scanner up and down his chest.

Dr. Cherniak and Rodgers Ssekawoko Muhumuza, the Ugandan clinical officer he was training, stared at the iPhone into which the scanner was plugged, watching Gordon’s lung expand and contract.

Gordon had a persistent cough and swollen lymph nodes, and looked tired and unwell. As other boys ran around outside, kicking a soccer ball made of rags and twine, he clung weakly to his mother. The scan on the iPhone’s screen suggested his lungs had fluid in them.

What a great story about phones that aren’t just phones.