Amazon today announced it is increasing its minimum wage to $15 for all full-time, part-time, temporary (including those hired by agencies), and seasonal employees across the U.S.—effective November 1. The new Amazon $15 minimum wage will benefit more than 250,000 Amazon employees, as well as over 100,000 seasonal employees who will be hired at Amazon sites across the country this holiday.
This more than doubles the current hourly rate of $7.25.
Definitely a step in the right direction for Amazon, addressing one of its biggest criticisms. It’d be nice if they enhanced this move by making it easier for part time employees to work enough hours to get health benefits.
Hard to wrap my head around this one. Watch the commercial below, then come back.
Watched it? OK. To me, the ad had nice special effects, was humorous, but seemed to be about the zoom lens, as if when you take a picture, things will appear larger. The focus was on the camera.
But check the text at the bottom of the ad page:
Everything you love just got bigger. Introducing iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. Super Retina in two sizes, including the largest display on an iPhone ever.
So it’s about the display being bigger, not about the camera. Confusing message.
You cannot be forced to reveal your passcode. But Face ID is a whole different issue.
Could you defeat Face ID simply by refusing to focus on the device? And does the law allow for you to be forced to unlock your phone using your face?
“The law is not well formed to provide the intuitive protections people think about when they’re using a Face ID unlock,” Jennings said. “People aren’t typically thinking [when they use Face ID] that it’s a physical act so I don’t have this right against self-incrimination.”
Current law, obviously, was written before Face ID was a thing. So I’d expect challenges to make their way up the appeals court ladder, possibly being decided by the Supreme Court. And I’d expect new laws to be crafted specifically to address Face ID.
Hundreds of Russians braved the cold and rain to queue for days outside a Moscow phone store ahead of the release of the new Apple iPhones on Friday, but when the doors opened none stepped in to buy.
And:
Banking on strong enthusiasm for the phones, which have drawn days-long queues outside stores in Singapore, Sydney and elsewhere, the queue sellers set the price of the first place at 450,000 roubles ($7,000).
Basically, the queue sellers were banking on very limited stock. But:
The store manager called out ticket numbers to invite in the first buyers, but his calls went unanswered.
Eventually, ticket holder number 247 came to the door and Russian photographer Anatoly Doroshchenko, who had arrived that morning and didn’t pay for the right to queue-jump, became the first purchaser in Russia of one of the new phones.
Over the course of the last week, the front-facing camera in the iPhone XS and XS Max has been receiving a lot of attention because the selfies captured on the new devices are drastically different from those captured with the iPhone X or earlier iPhone models.
In a MacRumors forum thread and on Reddit, Apple has been accused of using a skin-smoothing feature or a “beauty filter” for prettier selfies from the front-facing camera.
And:
When taking a selfie in a situation where lighting is less than ideal, such as indoors or outdoors in areas with lower lighting, the iPhone XS Max appears to be applying a drastic smoothing effect that can hide freckles, blemishes, and other issues.
More to the point:
In full outdoor lighting the problem is less apparent, which has led to speculation that the skin smoothing is actually a result of some heavy-handed noise reduction techniques.
The iPhone intentionally applying a “beauty filter” without specifically calling out a setting just doesn’t click for me. Heavy handed noise reduction or, perhaps, over zealous Smart HDR sounds more likely.
Turning off HDR does not remove the smoothing effect, nor does tweaking any other camera setting, so if the ultra skin smoothing is a result of something like unintentional excessive noise reduction, it needs to be tweaked on Apple’s end through a software update.
Intensify “helps you create sharp, crisp and dramatic photos in 1 click.”
ColorStrokes lets you “pick a part of the image to leave in color and the rest of the photo will turn monochrome”.
My personal favourite of the three is Snapheal which often does a surprisingly good job of removing “unwanted objects & people from photos in 1 click”.
I never used “Moments” from the iOS Photos app but, under iOS 12, “For You” pops up with these little videos now and again. I’m fairly impressed. Without me having named any of the pics or videos, the phone has identified my lovely wife and created this little video of her.
Watch the video all the way through. I included both the portrait and landscape orientations that Apple created. What I find really interesting is that it looks different and has a different “tone” and feel in landscape vs portrait mode. Landscape includes people and things to either side of Melissa that take the focus off of her.
The differences are especially notable in the last shot – in landscape mode, you can’t see the lower half of Melissa and can’t see she has a beer in her hand.
It’s also interesting that the software was “smart” enough to know to group all of our wedding shots together – the last 15 seconds of each segment are from our wedding in Australia last December.
PS: I had to edit some of the photos out because Melissa has “final cut” and she didn’t approve of some of my shots and YouTube “compressed” the second segment of the video. You can see a better version here.
Rene Ritchie joins me this week to talk about the new iPhone XS, XS Max, and the Apple Watch Series 4. We have both been using them for a week or so and have some thoughts on what we’ve seen so far.
Brought to you by:
iMazing: The ultimate Mac app to manage your iPhone. Get a 30% discount as a listener of this podcast.
Every September, I eagerly await the unveiling of the new iPhones. I also feel a sense of dread, wondering what Apple is going to call them. That’s because, when it comes to iPhone naming, Apple seems to wage a war against common sense.
Last year’s models set new standards for complexity. We had an 8, 8 Plus, X and SE. That’s two numbers, one Roman numeral, one paring of letters, plus an odd numerical gap between 8 and 10. Or, in Apple lingo, between 8 and X.
It’s hard to imagine how a family of only four products could end up with such needlessly complicated names—especially coming from the company that wrote the book on simplicity.
So how do the iPhone names look in 2018?
I’m with Segall on this one. I think Apple may have painted themselves into a naming corner. I tend to refer to the new phones simply as “the S”, “the Max”, and “the R”. Still awkward though.
In the new macOS 10.14 Mojave update, Apple has made some privacy and security changes with their OS and as a result has changed the way Backblaze behaves after you upgrade to Mojave. We are working on a solution for this, however you will need to follow the below steps to enable Backblaze and back up your Photos, Contacts, Calendars, Safari, Mail, or other Apple items. Please follow these instructions.
I hope this warning doesn’t come too late for some of you.
Facebook on Friday said an attack on its computer network led to the exposure of information from nearly 50 million of its users.
The company discovered the breach earlier this week, finding that attackers had exploited a feature in Facebook’s code that allowed them to take over user accounts. Facebook fixed the vulnerability and notified law enforcement officials.
Facebook keeps stepping in piles and piles of crap – much of it their own.
California’s top law enforcement official, Attorney General Xavier Becerra, announced Thursday that police had busted a robbery ring that hit Apple Store locations across 19 counties. Seventeen people have been indicted over the scheme to steal more than $1 million in Apple products from stores in Butte County in the north of the state to San Diego County in the south.
The hoodie-wearing gang seemed to engage in simple tactics: literally walk in, brandish no weapons, grab electronics, and run out.
At what point does Apple revise its store in order to stop this kind of theft or whether they just see this as the cost of doing business the way they do? My biggest fear is that someone, staff or customer, gets hurt or worse in one of these smash and grabs.
Since Mom died this past spring, my 92 year old dad waits for mail every day. Listens for the squeak of the mail slot opening. His birthday is Oct 16th.
Please mail a note, card, picture, map or story to Gerard Dunn 96 Summerhill Avenue Sydney, Nova Scotia B1R 2L4
Thank you.
Here’s Mr Dunn playing piano on his 85th birthday.
Sometimes the world can seem like a complete disaster (this week feels like one long one for many of us) but there are still small joys to be had. This is one of them.
The Publisher of The Loop and I are both from Nova Scotia. Mr Dunn lives in my mom’s hometown. So this is close to my heart. Please take a moment over the next few days to buy a postcard of your hometown or state or province or country and send it to Mr Dunn. I promise he’ll enjoy it and it will put a smile on your face as you drop it in the mailbox. I’m getting my 12 year old to send him a birthday message.
Why can I talk about the App Store so confidently? I have spent the last decade heading Marketing and Strategy operations at Readdle. Readdle is one of the few product companies out there that has had a presence in the App Store from the beginning and has built a successful business around it. If you have an iPhone, you’ve probably used our Documents, Spark, and Scanner Pro apps. We’ve been an independent company throughout this decade, without raising external funding; and over 100M people have downloaded our apps. Our 135 person team has built more than 40 products. 32 of them failed, but we didn’t give up.
And:
By the way, our service was available on iPhones before the App Store launched in 2008, a year after the original iPhone went on sale.
And:
Then, the call that changed our lives for good.
It was a call from the Apple HQ in Cupertino. We were sitting in Odessa when a voice over the phone briefed us, “We’re launching the App Store soon. Here’s a deadline, build an app, and maybe we’ll add it to the App Store.”
I love this story. If you are interested in the evolution of the App Store or have ever considered writing an app of your very own, put your feet up and dig in. Who better to talk App Store success than someone who was there from day one?
The whole identical twins logging into each other’s Face ID has been around since the beginning, but these two are just so delighted with their new “iPhone XS Plus” and the process of using their twin superpower to fool Face ID, thought it was worth sharing.
If anything, this shows how well Face ID works for normal people, even if they add a beard or a hat to their appearance.
I am really looking forward to adding a second phone number or data plan to my phone for traveling overseas. The sense I get is that this will take time to roll out to various carriers, but I would hope that would happen reasonably quickly.
Via 9to5Mac. Reminds me of bank robber Willie Sutton’s alleged response when asked why he robs banks:
“Because that’s where the money is.”
The hoodie bandit approach to grabbing high end merchandise from Apple Stores has proven effective. As long as a way isn’t found to stop this approach from working, this is going to continue to happen.
Alt-aviation wizard Burt Rutan set out to design a plane that could haul rockets to the edge of space. Then he persuaded Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to build a dual-fuselage beast with a wingspan longer than a football field.
Everything about Stratolaunch is supersized. It has six screaming Pratt & Whitney turbofan jet engines, salvaged from three 747s. Its maximum takeoff weight is 1.3 million pounds. It’s got more than 80 miles of wiring. Most astounding is its 385-foot wingspan, the spec that puts Stratolaunch in the history books. That number may not seem remarkable, but on a single airplane wing 385 feet is an eternity. It’s a football field plus the end zones and a little bit more. If the Wright brothers had begun their initial Kitty Hawk flight at the tip of one Stratolaunch wing, they could have completed the journey and done it twice more before they reached the other end.
This is a giant, ugly plane but I would never bet against the legendary plane builder Burt Rutan or Paul Allen’s millions.
Your heart has four chambers, two atria and two ventricles. The atria are smaller chambers at the top of the heart, and their contraction fills the larger ventricles with blood. The ventricles then provide the powerful push that sends the blood either to the lungs to pick up oxygen or out to the body once it is oxygenated.
The proper coordination of the beating of all these parts requires a carefully synchronized spread of electrical signals through the four chambers. Given the complexity involved in getting this to work, it shouldn’t be surprising that it sometimes goes wrong. The fault for problems can be anything from a temporary physical change to a permanent problem with your heart’s development that started back when you were an embryo. The consequences can range from irrelevant to fatal.
Interesting post explaining something most of us have heard about but may not understand.
The Institute for Economics and Peace has released its Global Peace Index for 2018, an annual ranking of the world’s safest countries. Overall, the study found, the world is 0.27 percent less peaceful today than it was at this time last year. In fact, according to the institute, the world is the least peaceful it has been in the past ten years (probably not surprising for anyone who reads the news, like, ever). But while world peace has fluctuated over time, one fact has remained constant: the country that has remained at the top of the rankings for the last decade.
I don’t take these kinds of lists too seriously but I am happy to say I live in #6 and will be visiting #4 next March.
The heist of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is something like the holy grail of art crime — and remains so even 28 years after it happened. In a little under an hour and a half, two thieves stole 13 irreplaceable artworks from the Boston institution.
And:
In the early hours of March 18, 1990, the city of Boston was still celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. Two thieves dressed up in police uniforms and, at 1:24 a.m., simply rang the bell. The night security guard on duty, Rick Abath, let the two men in the Palace Road entrance. Abath called the second security guard on duty that night, Randy, back down to the desk. (Randy spoke to us on the condition that we only use his first name.) Then the would-be police officers handcuffed the two guards, and tied them up in the basement of the museum.
And:
“It was overwhelming to see what had been done. I mean to trash a museum like that. It was just like the barbarians had been through. I mean, to pull frames off the wall and shatter the glass, it was clearly not people that loved art that did that. I mean, cutting paintings out of frames. I mean, it’s unspeakable.”
Read the article, then watch the video. Fascinating.
I’ve long been a fan of Jeff Benjamin’s videos for 9to5Mac. In this one, Jeff unboxes his brand new iPhone XS Max, then takes us on a visual tour, highlighting lots of features along the way.
Lots of new shiny, well presented, worth watching.
Will Oremus, Slate, starts his article with this provocative subtitle:
The world’s most valuable company is wooing the media with a human touch and a huge audience. One thing it hasn’t delivered: money.
A few more callouts:
One platform in particular has exploded as a news source in the past year, and it promises an antidote to some of the poisonous dynamics that Facebook had set in motion. That platform is Apple News.
And:
Launched to rather tepid fanfare three years ago, Apple’s mobile news app has recently surged in popularity and influence, if publishers’ traffic figures are any indication. Sources at several news outlets say they’ve seen their audience on Apple News multiply in 2018 alone. Some now say it has become one of their top traffic sources, alongside Facebook and Google. At Slate, which disclosed its data for this story, page views on Apple News have roughly tripled since September 2017, and the app recently surpassed Facebook as a driver of readership.
Sounds great! But:
There is, of course, a catch. Whereas Facebook sent hordes of readers from its news feed to publishers’ websites, Apple tends to keep them inside its app. And so far, publishers have found that’s not a lucrative place to be. Although it’s been two years since Apple partnered with NBCUniversal to sell ads inside the app, several sources at media outlets told me that they’re seeing little to no ad revenue from Apple News.
In a nutshell, the complaint appears to be Apple’s relative scarcity of ads. Which I appreciate. But a publisher’s got to keep the lights on, got to pay those bills.
Apple News doesn’t support some of the common ad formats or systems that dominate ad sales on the web, and not all media companies find it worthwhile to develop and sell custom ads just for Apple News. (Those that do can keep all the revenue or they can let Apple sell them, in which case Apple takes a 30 percent cut.) As Matt Karolian, the Boston Globe’s director of new initiatives, told me, “The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.”
Early days for Apple News. I suspect they will respond to the market, or they will see demand fall.
I’m not a fan of the “capture and keep” approach used by both Apple News and Google AMP. It might be the novelty of all links pointing to the search hub, as opposed to the original publisher. I like to support the folks who wrote the original article by pointing readers back to the source, which is why I actively try to find and post the original links in all Loop stories, as well as in Twitter posts.
Late last week, Apple released more details about how (with certain opt-in settings) the Apple Watch Series 4 will contact emergency services if the watch detects that you’ve had a hard fall.
Before actually contacting first responders, the Apple Watch will try to give numerous urgent alerts: tapping the wearer on the wrist, sounding of a very loud alarm, and also displaying a visual alert.
There are several issues with Apple Watch Series 4 Fall Detection. In the short term, detection seems to be a bit buggy. Some people have complained of the alert firing off when the watch falls, without being on a wrist. Others have fallen hard and not had the Apple Watch detect the fall, even with Fall Detection enabled. These issues will, no doubt, be addressed over time.
A more complex, longer term issue:
If police are alerted by an Apple Watch of a possible injury, they do not need a warrant to enter a home under the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment. This is the notion that law enforcement officers can enter a private space if they reasonably believe that someone needs emergency assistance.
Lots of implications there. Read the whole article. Thoughtful piece.
Marzipan apps are ugly ducklings. As soon as you use them, you can just know these are not at one with the system. You detect that there’s a translation layer of some kind at work here, just like when you use Slack on the Mac you instinctively feel that it’s a web app in a thin wrapper. The underlying implementation is exposed to the user with a bevy of performance sluggishness, UI quirks and non-standard behaviours. That’s bad.
Lots of detail here to back up Benjamin’s opinion. It’s early days yet, so I’d expect this experience to get better over time.
I debated calling this post ‘Home, News, Stocks and Voice Memos for Mac’ because it’s not really a comment on the Marzipan project initiative. After all, I don’t expect the solution Apple ships next year to have the same laundry list of drawbacks that these Mojave apps do. It’s a critique of the apps that are shipping now to customers of macOS. These apps are preinstalled with the OS. News was even unceremoniously placed into the middle of my Dock upon upgrading. And they are not good, simple as that. I would have been mildly happier if Apple had offered these apps as optional App Store downloads affixed with a beta label.
And:
Functionally, they are a win. These apps make the Mac do things it couldn’t before. That shouldn’t excuse them from blame, though. These are mediocre, bordering on bad, experiences. It’s not a good poster child for the future of the Mac.
Interesting for Apple to officially ship something like this, rather than hiding it in a beta until it is ready for prime time.
The linked video takes you through the logic of Apple building a custom iPhone just for the Chinese market. You’ll get a quick look at the double-SIMS and the process of putting them in a Chinese iPhone XS, and lots more.
Very interesting. Note that the first two minutes is about Apple and China, then things switch to another topic.
