This is publicity for a contest, where the winner gets to watch the final episode with Game of Throne cast members. But as publicity stunts go, this was pretty fun to watch.
William Gallagher, Apple Insider:
Once you understand how it works —and know the right sequence of steps to go through —then file sharing with iCloud Drive is tremendous when it’s working. It’s just that setting it up is surprisingly confusing, so let’s walk through it.
And:
The way that you share files from iCloud Drive varies slightly between iOS and Mac, but the principle is exactly the same on both. You find your file, choose Share and then specify who you’re sharing it with.
Remember that your file has to be in iCloud Drive and remember that you cannot do this with a folder. You can’t even select two or more files and share those. It’s one file at a time, as tedious as that is.
I really want to use iCloud Drive. But I end up using Dropbox. It’s just easier.
That said, this is a good “how to”, well written, absolutely worth reading, just to know how this works.
From Microsoft’s 2019 voice report:
Another nugget:
In 2018, we found that 23% of respondents currently own a smart speaker with another 30% planning to purchase . In our research in January 2019, we found that 45% of respondents now currently own a smart speaker with an additional 26% planning to purchase one soon.
You can find the report here. It’s an interesting read.
From the Amazon job description:
The Managing Editor, News will work on an exciting new opportunity within Ring to manage a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbors.
Struggling to wrap my head around the implications here. Is this a publicity campaign? Is this part of a data-mining scenario? Is there money in the picture, or is this a pure loss for Amazon, pulled from the Ring marketing budget?
Is this the new crime beat?
New York Times:
In its first-quarter earnings report, Spotify said it had 217 million users around the world, up from 207 million at the end of last year. Of those, 100 million are paying subscribers, compared with 96 million at the end of 2018.
And:
In its most recent quarter, Spotify, which is based in Stockholm, had revenue of 1.5 billion euros, about $1.7 billion. That was a 33 percent increase from the same period a year earlier. It had a net loss of €142 million, or about $158 million.
Apple has about 56 million paid subscribers (the article says 50 million), recently passing Spotify in the US.
And:
Just as Spotify was set to open in India, Warner/Chappell, one of the biggest music publishers, sued the company, saying it had not secured the proper rights to include Warner/Chappell songs. Spotify set up shop in India anyway, saying its use of Warner/Chappell music was allowed under Indian copyright law. The case remains active in an Indian court.
Fascinating to watch this heavyweight battle unfold.
Recode:
Anki, the robotics company that has raised over $200 million in venture capital, is laying off its entire staff and the startup is shuttering, Recode has learned.
In a teary all-hands meeting on Monday morning, CEO Boris Sofman told his staff they would be terminated on Wednesday and that close to 200 employees would be paid a week of severance, according to people familiar with the matter. Sofman had told employees a few days earlier that the company was scrambling to find more money after a new round of financing fell through at the last minute, imperiling the company’s future.
This is a real shame. I loved and bought some of their products.
The Verge:
Back in March, we heard that a New Jersey drama club was adapting Alien as a high school production. Now there’s a recording of the production making the rounds that shows the play straight through, including their take on the Space Jockey, the Chestburster, the Xenomorph, and a guy playing Harry Dean Stanton in an accurate Hawaiian T-shirt.
Since the video could potentially get taken down for being an unauthorized adaptation of Alien (it already has several music-related copyright claims), it’s better to watch it now while it’s up, so you can see how well the drama club did adapting a film built on an $11 million budget for the high school stage. The students say they raised their own money for the play and made costumes out of recycled material.
Watch it soon. You know this is getting pulled in 3…..2….1….
Exquisite coordination, beautiful imagery, and amazing to see how detailed satellite imagery can get.
Marco Arment, Overcast creator:
Podcast sharing has been limited to audio and links, but today’s social networks are more reliant on images and video, especially Instagram. Podcasts need video clips to be shared more easily today.
I’ve seen some video clips from tools specific to certain podcast networks or hosts, but they were never available to everyone, or for every show. So people mostly just haven’t shared podcast clips, understandably, because it has been too hard.
Not anymore.
And:
With today’s 2019.4 update, you can now share audio or video clips, up to a minute each, from any public podcast. Simply tap the share button in the upper-right corner.
Great feature, huge help for podcasters trying to get the word out. I hope this becomes a standard for all podcast apps, especially this one.
Side note from 512 Pixels on how this feature came to be.
Reddit:
Last year I bought my 82 year old grandmother an iPad. She never owned a smart device before, she never touched a computer and I don’t think she knew what “the internet” was.
It was my fathers idea to get her that iPad. Thanks to me, my dad became a huge fan of Apple devices and since both he and I spend the majority of our time overseas he thought it would be a good idea to get my grandmother an iPad so they could face time and he could show her where he is etc.
TBH I thought it was an incredibly stupid idea. My grandmother is an Eastern European, ex communist country simple, old woman. Imagine old grandmothers from funny “a normal day in Russia” clips and gifs, that’s what she looks like. First 15 years of her life she spent in a village that had no electricity. Over the last 30 years we’ve spent more time talking about her inability to handle a tv remote than anything else.
Read the post for how this played out. I wrestle with this issue a lot. My mom is legally blind and feels cutoff from the world. Try as I might, I can’t find a voice-assisted solution that she can master.
My uncle has vision issues as well, gets around just fine, but also feels cutoff. He used to use email, but age has robbed him of his ability to deal with those complexities.
I wish the iPad had a mode where it could boot into an incredibly simple interface (kiosk style), where there were just a few, dead-simple buttons to press. Big, big buttons, to help people with poor close-up vision.
One could be, take picture, send to Dave. Another could be, look at pictures Dave sent you. That kind of simple interface, with just a few hard-coded, but editable (perhaps via Shortcuts) buttons would bring joy to many folks with vision or cognition issues.
That aside, read the linked story. I love the way that played out.
Rob Pegoraro, Yahoo Finance:
Apple talks a good game on privacy when the rest of the tech industry continues to fumble—with Facebook (FB) at the top of the list based on recent headlines. Most of the time those words come backed by sound and smart design choices, but then there’s AirDrop.
Almost five years after AirDrop’s debut on iPhones in Apple’s iOS 7 release, this file-sharing feature continues to enable abusive behavior by creeps who enjoy sending unsolicited photos to nearby strangers.
AirDrop’s default setting is to limit AirDrops only from people on your contact list. To check this yourself, take a look at Setting > General > AirDrop. The default is Contacts Only.
But, once you open up AirDrop (there are plenty of reasons to – Here’s one) to accept files from non-contacts:
And from then on, AirDrop would remain open to accepting a file from anybody with an AirDrop-compatible Apple device (not just iPhones, but newer iPads and Macs) within Bluetooth and WiFi range. And when a file arrives, AirDrop splashes a preview of its contents across the phone’s screen.
The answer is to turn AirDrop on, momentarily, then close that security hole by turning it back off again.
Rene Ritchie offered up an excellent suggestion here. To paraphrase, Rene suggests that there be a timer on AirDrop. Turn it on and, after a specified period of time, it closes back up automatically.
Rob Pegoraro had the same solution:
The simplest fix would be to have AirDrop’s Everyone setting expire after a few minutes.
Seems like a no-brainer to me.
On Saturday, the New York Times released an article titled Apple Cracks Down on Apps That Fight iPhone Addiction.
As Shawn posted here, Phil Schiller responded to a letter from a MacRumors reader with a detailed rebuttal.
Yesterday, Apple released an official response to that New York Times article, addressing the removal of a number of parental control apps from the App Store:
We recently removed several parental control apps from the App Store, and we did it for a simple reason: they put users’ privacy and security at risk.
And:
Over the last year, we became aware that several of these parental control apps were using a highly invasive technology called Mobile Device Management, or MDM. MDM gives a third party control and access over a device and its most sensitive information including user location, app use, email accounts, camera permissions, and browsing history.
And:
MDM does have legitimate uses. Businesses will sometimes install MDM on enterprise devices to keep better control over proprietary data and hardware. But it is incredibly risky—and a clear violation of App Store policies—for a private, consumer-focused app business to install MDM control over a customer’s device. Beyond the control that the app itself can exert over the user’s device, research has shown that MDM profiles could be used by hackers to gain access for malicious purposes.
There’s more, but that’s the gist of the argument.
Let’s revisit the New York Times article, with Apple’s response in mind:
They all tell a similar story: They ran apps that helped people limit the time they and their children spent on iPhones. Then Apple created its own screen-time tracker. And then Apple made staying in business very, very difficult.
Over the past year, Apple has removed or restricted at least 11 of the 17 most downloaded screen-time and parental-control apps, according to an analysis by The New York Times and Sensor Tower, an app-data firm. Apple has also clamped down on a number of lesser-known apps.
In some cases, Apple forced companies to remove features that allowed parents to control their children’s devices or that blocked children’s access to certain apps and adult content. In other cases, it simply pulled the apps from its App Store.
Some app makers with thousands of paying customers have shut down. Most others say their futures are in jeopardy.
From the New York Times’ presentation, one might get the impression that Apple wanted to own the screen-time and parental control app space, eliminating competition in those areas.
But Apple’s response paints a very different picture. You can see why they responded so quickly to this issue.
One final bit from Apple’s release:
In this app category, and in every category, we are committed to providing a competitive, innovative app ecosystem. There are many tremendously successful apps that offer functions and services similar to Apple’s in categories like messaging, maps, email, music, web browsers, photos, note-taking apps, contact managers and payment systems, just to name a few. We are committed to offering a place for these apps to thrive as they improve the user experience for everyone.
Apple is making it clear that this isn’t about owning a competitive space, but about privacy.
MacRumors:
Earlier today, a report from The New York Times highlighted Apple’s removal of a number of App Store apps that had allowed users to monitor usage of their devices or those used by their children. The report suggests that Apple’s move to pull the apps is related to having rolled out its own Screen Time feature in iOS 12 that competes in some ways with these apps, raising concerns over anticompetitive behavior.
After reading the article, MacRumors reader Zachary Robinson emailed Tim Cook to express concern over the situation, and earlier today he received a thorough response from Phil Schiller outlining that Apple’s removal of these apps is due to their use of Mobile Device Management (MDM) technology to monitor everything that happens on the user’s phone.
While becoming more common, it’s still a fairly unusual move for Apple to respond so quickly, directly, and on a weekend to stories like the one in the New York Times.
Macworld:
Touch interfaces have become—like it or not—the default way for interacting with our devices these days. Rare is the time when we deal with a screen that isn’t touch-sensitive. It’s on ATMs, payment terminals, information kiosks, and so on. I’m sure we’ve all seen those videos with puzzled kids wondering why they can’t tap the TV screen.
As it stands, all of Apple’s other devices—even the HomePod and the Apple TV’s remote—have touch features. So why is the Mac left out?
I couldn’t disagree more. I may just be a grumpy old man, but just because other devices are touch-enabled doesn’t automatically mean the Mac needs to be touch-enabled.
It was a sad day for Dave as his beloved Washington Capitals were beat out of the NHL playoffs, but we got past that and talked about where to get 4K video content, iCloud and AWS, and how Apple News+ is being displayed.
John Gruber:
The first thing to understand is that Luminary is two things: (1) an $8/month subscription service for exclusive original audio shows, from some very well-known people; (2) a podcast app for iOS and Android that you use to listen to Luminary’s own shows and any real podcast. You can use Luminary’s podcast player to listen to regular podcasts without subscribing to Luminary’s service.
And:
This thing with Luminary is a bit rich. On the one side, their own original shows are proprietary and they promote them for being ad-free. On the other, they want to be a podcast player for all regular podcasts, many of which (and most of the ones produced as professional endeavors) are funded by advertising. This spat with The New York Times and Gimlet Media is fascinating because The Times’s The Daily and Gimlet’s shows are indisputably podcasts — their RSS feeds and MP3 files are available for anyone or any client to download over the open web. Luminary isn’t being blocked technically from playing them, they’re being blocked because The Times and Gimlet asked them to, and Luminary agreed to comply. So putting aside (for the moment) whether Luminary’s own original shows qualify as “podcasts”, as a podcast player, Luminary’s app is in the incredibly bizarre position of not playing several very popular podcasts that every other podcast player in the world can subscribe to and play.
The whole thing is, to me, a rich rewarding read. Twitter exploded with complaints about Luminary’s methods (intentional or not), along with a host of podcasters discussing their efforts to remove themselves from Luminary’s service.
A perfect pairing with John Gruber’s explainer is this excellent rollup from Michael Tsai, filled with tweets and details, called Luminary Proxying Podcasts Without Asking.
One last quote from Gruber:
As a side note, I think the $100 million in venture capital that Luminary raised is going to be $100 million flushed down a toilet.
Amazing.
iFixit blog:
After two days of intense public interest, iFixit has removed our teardown of Samsung’s Galaxy Fold. That analysis supported our suspicions that the device provided insufficient protection from debris damaging the screen.
We were provided our Galaxy Fold unit by a trusted partner. Samsung has requested, through that partner, that iFixit remove its teardown. We are under no obligation to remove our analysis, legal or otherwise. But out of respect for this partner, whom we consider an ally in making devices more repairable, we are choosing to withdraw our story until we can purchase a Galaxy Fold at retail.
Our team appreciated the chance to look inside this ambitious device. All new products face challenges—this one perhaps more than most. We’re grateful to have shared a glimpse of how Samsung’s engineers addressed some of those challenges, and we look forward to sharing more as soon as possible.
You can head over to our post on the teardown for some of the “disappeared” highlights.
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.