Federal officials on July 12 indicted Xiaolang Zhang on a single count of trade secret theft, alleging that Zhang had stolen a 25-page blueprint for a circuit board designed to be used in an autonomous vehicle, according to the indictment filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

They caught him red-handed. I don’t know what kind of defense he could possibly use to get out of this.

More than 70 new emoji characters are coming to iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac later this year in a free software update. The new emoji designs, created based on approved characters in Unicode 11.0, include even more hair options to better represent people with red hair, gray hair and curly hair, a new emoji for bald people, and new smiley faces that bring more expression to Messages with a cold face, party face, pleading face and a face with hearts.

These are really great.

Teammates have long stopped laughing at J.D. Martinez and his iPad.

Boston’s All-Star slugger is serious about every swing he takes, even in batting practice, and he has the tape to prove it. Get to the park early enough for Red Sox BP, and you’ll see a pair of iPads attached to tripods, one on each side of the batting cage. When the 30-year-old Martinez steps up, video coordinator Billy Broadbent will point a third iPad at the batter’s box — Martinez’s personal device, which he’s used to record his practice cuts since 2015.

This is an incredible use of technology for a major star.

Kashish:

“Calvin? Calvin, sweetheart?”

In the darkness Calvin heard the sound of Susie, his wife of fifty-three years. Calvin struggled to open his eyes. God, he was so tired and it took so much strength. Slowly, light replaced the darkness, and soon vision followed. At the foot of his bed stood his wife. Calvin wet his dry lips and spoke hoarsely, “Did… did you…. find him?”

“Yes dear,” Susie said smiling sadly, “He was in the attic.“

Susie reached into her big purse and brought out a soft, old, orange tiger doll. Calvin could not help but laugh. It had been so long. Too long.

I’m not crying, YOU’RE crying.

I know this is an old post but I only just saw the tweet from Alan Bailward so blame him. The original Reddit thread is here. Thanks to Felix Lapalme for the URL.

Priceonomics:

Using our (CarMax) data, we explored which cars people own at trade-in and what they purchase as their next car. Do they stay with the same brand or not? Are people loyal to the same type of car they used to drive (i.e., do SUV owners keep buying SUVs or do they switch to sedans)?

Based on our data, we found that the brand with the most loyal owners is Lexus, followed by Mercedes-Benz and then Ford. The brand with the least loyal owners is Volkswagen, followed by Mazda and Volvo.

I found this fascinating. As someone who doesn’t own a car and doesn’t really care about cars, I had no idea that brand loyalty was so low in this market. No wonder the advertising around it is so prevalent and forceful. Customers are ripe for changes.

Jim and I talked briefly about this on the latest “Darymple Report” and he gave me permission to post a few more details here.

This is a workshop I call “Photo Tourism”. The idea is to go on the vacation you are already going on but go with a professional photographer (that would be me!) and learn how to take better photos as well.

We’ll be in Lisbon, Portugal from March 23rd to the 30th. Lisbon is an amazing and beautiful city – great scenery, food, history, tiles, and, even better, really inexpensive!

We will meet on four of the mornings we are there to learn about specific aspects of photography – Composition, Landscape, Portraits, and Street/Black and White. We will spend an hour or so going over the concepts and then “hit the streets” as a group to practice the theory. After lunch, you’re free to explore, shop, relax or continue to hang out with Melissa and I taking photographs. We’ll also have at least one sunrise and one sunset shoot for a total of six multi-hour classroom sessions.

There will also be a side trip to the beautiful little town of Sintra to see the spectacular Pena Palace.

Early Bird (purchased before November 1st, 2018) tickets are on sale now for $100 off the regular price. Hotel location and pricing will be announced soon. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email me at [email protected]. I hope some of you can join me in Lisbon next March!

Is your business growing? Daylite is a real native app on the Mac, iPhone & iPad for small businesses that want to scale right.

With tools to streamline your processes and give you better oversight, you will have more focus to achieve your goals.

More than just a CRM, Daylite integrates with Apple Mail on the Mac, helps you track all your leads, projects and customers in one place whether you’re a team of 1, a business of 25 or more.

Don’t let things slip through the cracks because you’re trying to manage a patchwork of tools that don’t talk to each other. Let Daylite help you build stronger customer relationships, accomplish more, and close more deals!

If you want to grow your business try Daylite 30 days free!

Mention you heard about Daylite on The Loop and get 50% off your first-month subscription.

iFixit:

Here’s an inflammatory take for you: Apple’s new quieter keyboard is actually a silent scheme to fix their keyboard reliability issues. We’re in the middle of tearing down the newest MacBook Pro, but we’re too excited to hold this particular bit of news back:

Apple has cocooned their butterfly switches in a thin, silicone barrier.

First things first, this is indeed an inflammatory take, joining countless other headlines lambasting Apple and the MacBook butterfly keyboard.

But, the thing is, it looks like Apple has, indeed, addressed the problem. That thin, silicone barrier looks designed specifically to keep dust and crumbs from embedding themselves beneath the key press mechanism.

Not sure why Apple never came right out and said, “Our bad, we missed the dust problem with these keyboards, but we’ll fix it.” Is this lawyer-driven? A concern about class-action lawsuits and liability?

No matter, it seems to me that this 3rd generation keyboard is the fix. I’ve typed on it and I am comfortable with the feel and sound. Until I bring one home, I’m not sure how I will feel about the Touch Bar and the soft escape key, the boxier arrow keys, but I do like the keyboard feel and feel optimistic that the dark days of dust breaking the keyboard may just be behind us.

There’s a nice video embedded in the iFixit article that walks through the problems with the keyboard and shows the silicon membrane, up close. Apple keyboard cover-up. Get it?

HBO has an amazing, 17-year-long streak of getting the most Emmy Award nominations. But that streak is now busted, a sign of the changing times.

In this year’s nominations, announced last week, HBO got 108 awards, but Netflix got 112. In the streaming video space, that’s major news, a real changing of the guard.

When I first tweeted about this, I wondered when Apple would get their first non-technical award. Turns out, Apple has several awards/nominations in the bank already:

• In 1998, Apple won the Emmy for Outstanding Commercial for their famous Think Different commercial, seen here. [H/T Angela Brett]

• In 2014, Apple won an award for Outstanding Commercial for this terrific Christmas ad, called Misunderstood. [H/T A F Waller]

• Apple underwrote the Emmy winning American Masters episode titled No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. [H/T Kirk McElhearn]

• Apple’s Carpool Karaoke just received a nomination for Outstanding Short Form Variety Series. [H/T Eric Vitiello]

Know any others I missed? If so, please ping me with a link to the specifics and I’ll add it to the list.

I do think we’ll start to see more and more Apple nominations and wins as Apple projects start to make their way out of the pipeline. Will there come a day when Apple dethrones Netflix as the Emmy nominations champion? That possibility seem preposterous? Perhaps. But consider how deep Apple’s pockets are and how skilled a team they are putting in place.

I do think Apple has the potential to compete at the highest levels in this space. To me, it’s purely a matter of time.

Vanity Fair:

In June 2016, Bill G. B. Pallot and Charles Hooreman, rival antiques dealers in Paris, became the two most famous men in the French art world. That was when Pallot admitted to the police that he had masterminded the forgery of at least four chairs purportedly built in the 18th century for France’s royal household and, in a series of transactions via third parties between 2009 and 2015, sold them to the Palace of Versailles.

I love a good caper story. This one has, perhaps, my favorite lines of all time:

“I licked the chair and voilà,” he says. “I could taste the fraud.”

That line makes this story simply irresistible.

Austin Mann is a photographer who regularly puts Apple gear through its paces, often in remote and beautiful locales.

Austin got his hands on one of the brand new, 2.9 GHz, 32GB, 4TB MacBook Pros. From his review:

I’m deep in the mountains and wasn’t able to run many side-by-side speed tests, but I did manage to set up one test and the results were surprising.

The test was simple: convert a 4K Mavic Pro video file to 1080p H.265 (HEVC) using QuickTime Player (File > Export As > 1080p > Check “Use HEVC”).

I have three different MacBook Pros, all on macOS 10.13.6, all running QuickTime 10.4, all with the original file on the internal drive and exporting to the internal drive. Here are the results:

• My daily MBP until I discovered these results: 2.3 GHz i7 MacBook Pro (15″, Late 2013, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD) = 1980 seconds (33 minutes)
• Top-of-line 2016 MBP: 2.9 GHz i7 MacBook Pro (15″, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD) = 99 seconds
• This top-of-line 2018 MBP: 2.9 GHz i9 MacBook Pro (15″, 32 GB RAM, 4 TB SSD) = 24 seconds

Those are some impressive results. Obviously, you’ll have to pay for the privilege, but if you are considering a purchase, this is a nice data point.

There’s lots more in Austin’s review. Take a look.

Austen Allred:

We’re going to try an experiment.

Our full iOS + Computer Science course (30 weeks) + a MacBook you can keep + free housing in San Francisco for the full 30 weeks.

You pay $0 until you’re making $50k+, then 17% of salary for 3 years, capped at $40k.

We’ll select 10 students.

There’s going to be a lot of suspicion about this and many naysayers but, if you qualify, it sounds like an amazing opportunity. You can read more detail here.

The video embedded in this tweet shows the Brazilian soccer team on their journey, last month, to get to the World Cup. As you watch the video, keep your eye out for AirPods. They won’t be hard to spot, which is the point.

Vamos de trem para Liverpool com a #SeleçãoBrasileira! Assim foi a viagem da equipe ontem. #GigantesPorNatureza pic.twitter.com/tb1UrpxR4a

— CBF Futebol (@CBF_Futebol) June 2, 2018

There are many examples of this, no matter what team you follow. And, as I pointed out in this post, this is one of the few times that the inability to show a product logo (all logos from non-World Cup sponsors must be covered up) makes no difference at all to that product’s recognizability.

A real branding coup. [H/T Matt Abras]

About a month ago, Serenity Caldwell was a guest on episode 224 of John Gruber’s The Talk Show. About 4:30 in, the topic turned to Apple’s AirPower charging pad.

I’ve been thinking about the long delay since the original AirPower announcement (back in September, almost a year ago) and yesterday, on Twitter, someone mentioned a recently discovered European patent, covered in this Patently Apple article and pointed me to the Serenity Caldwell Talk Show appearance as well.

First things first, take a look at the patent article and scroll down to the second picture, which highlights what Apple calls an Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) System. From the description:

In order to ensure maximum power transfer efficiency to the Apple Watch, an Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) director such as IPT director unit #208 may be provided. The IPT director unit may function to direct the IPT field of the inductive power transmitter for receipt by the inductive power receiver of the Apple Watch.

The idea would be to have these table hockey bumpy things redirect power from the charging mat to be able to charge items that might not sit flat. One perfect example of this is an Apple Watch with a links band, or any band that does not open completely to allow it to lay flat.

This is a terrific solution. But (and this is pure speculation), this may be part of the reason we do not yet see an AirPower in the wild. As Serenity says in her Talk Show interview, Apple appears to be going far beyond what is necessary to simply charge an iPhone. There’s the complexity of the IPT system to transfer power to add-on devices to charge an Apple Watch.

There’s also the goal of communicating the charging state to software, so your iPhone can tell you the current charge of each device on the AirPower.

All this is speculation, but it’s not hard to see that Apple doesn’t want to ship yet another simple induction pad. As Apple does, they want to ship something special, something uniquely Apple.

One question I’d ask is, if Apple could do it all over again, knowing what they know now, would they still have made the AirPower announcement back in September? And, if not, what wires were crossed that caused that early announcement?

Bloomberg:

Adobe Systems Inc., the maker of popular digital design programs for creatives, is planning to launch the full version of its Photoshop app for Apple Inc.’s iPad as part of a new strategy to make its products compatible across multiple devices and boost subscription sales.

And:

Adobe’s chief product officer of Creative Cloud Scott Belsky confirmed the company was working on a new cross-platform iteration of Photoshop and other applications, but declined to specify the timing of their launches.

Key here is the word “full”, as in, the same version of Photoshop on both Mac and iPad.

As to timing:

The software developer is planning to unveil the new app at its annual MAX creative conference in October, according to people with knowledge of the plan. The app is slated to hit the market in 2019, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private product plans. Engineering delays could still alter that timeline.

Big news for Creative Cloud users. Presumably, you’d be able to share assets between the two platforms. Being able to edit an image, seamlessly switching between the Mac and iPad versions of Photoshop, all while having access to the same color schemes, icons, brushes, etc., would be a huge win.

Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:

Apple managed to keep the lid on its plans to update the MacBook Pro yesterday. It was clear that it would need to support the latest Intel processors at some point, but nobody knew the launch date.

Which would be annoying, to say the least, if you’ve recently bought the 2017 model. The question is, will Apple let you exchange it for the 2018 one … ?

The answer, as in many things, is ‘it depends.’

If you bought a MacBook Pro within, say, the last month, I would definitely give this a read. Might just help you snag a brand newest machine.

TidBITS:

There’s no question that the App Store has had a significant impact on individuals and developers alike…The App Store’s numbers are also hugely impressive. Over 500 million people from 155 countries visit the App Store each week, and Apple says it has paid out $100 billion to developers over the past decade.

So yes, the App Store has been successful. But it’s a just a store, and one that suffers from poor app discovery and high developer transaction fees. And how much of its success is due purely to the popularity of the iPhone and iPad?

Engst does a good job of looking at the pros and cons of the App Store.

Matthew Cassinelli, TechCrunch:

It’s undeniably convenient to get facts by speaking to the air, turning on the lights without lifting a finger or triggering a timer or text message — but so far, studies have shown people don’t use much more than these on a regular basis.

People don’t often do more than that because the assistants aren’t really ready for complex tasks yet, and when your assistant is limited to tasks inside your home or commands spoken into your phone, the drawbacks prevent you from going deep.

And:

In Apple’s ecosystem, you have Siri on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, CarPlay and any Mac. Add in Shortcuts on each of those devices (except Mac, but they still have Automator) and suddenly you have a plethora of places to execute all your commands entirely by voice.

And:

Even more important than all the places where you can use your assistant is how — with Shortcuts, Siri gets even better with each new app that people download.

And:

Shortcuts opens up those capabilities to Siri — every action you take in an app can be shared out with Siri, letting people interact right there inline or using only their voice, with the app running everything smoothly in the background.

Hard to overstate just how important Shortcuts is to Siri and to the Apple ecosystem. Rather than the ability to simply launch an app, Shortcuts gives you the ability to get inside your apps, accessing data and launching functionality exposed by the app’s developer. This is the power of AppleScript, but for voice and just made for Siri.

Terrific article by a former member of the Workflow team. Shortcuts is based on Workflow, the app Apple acquired last year, and is being rolled out in private beta now.

First things first, The Ring is one of my favorite horror movies of all time. I read the book (translated from Japanese into English), then saw the movie. Loved both.

In case the title doesn’t click for you, this is the movie where the girl with long black hair obscuring her face crawls out of the TV set. Still with me? Here’s the tweet with embedded video.

There’s something beyond a simple video reenactment here. Imagine apps that let you enter a world previously limited to the pages of a book or movie screen. You could roam the halls of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, spy on a meeting between Cercei and Tyrion Lannister, or hitchhike the galaxies with Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect.

Looking forward to more of this sort of thing.

Jonny Evans pulled together a list of Siri commands made possible by AirPlay 2. The language is subtle, scan the list to get a sense of the possibilities. Good stuff.

Mike Murphy, Quartz:

FIFA has pretty strict rules around what it calls “ambush marketing,” where a brand pays players to wear or use its products before or during World Cup games, even though that company has not paid to be an official World Cup sponsor. It’s why any player you see wearing Beats headphones before a game, for example, has the company’s logo taped over.

Apple is not a World Cup sponsor, so no Apple logos on any player gear. But check out all the photos. Even without a logo, there’s no mistaking those AirPods. Apple’s design work here is so distinctive, no logo is needed.

Apple:

The new MacBook Pro models with Touch Bar feature 8th-generation Intel Core processors, with 6-core on the 15-inch model for up to 70 percent faster performance and quad-core on the 13-inch model for up to two times faster performance — ideal for manipulating large data sets, performing complex simulations, creating multi-track audio projects or doing advanced image processing or film editing.

And:

Additional updates include support for up to 32GB of memory, a True Tone display and an improved third-generation keyboard for quieter typing.

There are new 13-inch and 15-inch models, with up to 2TB SSD on the 13-inch model and up to 4TB SSD on the 15-inch.

Also new to MacBook Pro is the Apple T2 chip, first introduced in iMac Pro. With the Apple T2 chip, MacBook Pro now delivers enhanced system security with support for secure boot and on-the-fly encrypted storage, and also brings “Hey Siri” to the Mac for the first time.

On the 15″ processor:

6-core Intel Core i7 and Core i9 processors up to 2.9 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 4.8 GHz

On the 13″ processor:

Quad-core Intel Core i5 and i7 processors up to 2.7 GHz with Turbo Boost up to 4.5 GHz and double the eDRAM

And:

The new MacBook Pro is also part of Apple’s Back to School promotion starting today and available to college students, their parents, faculty and staff through the Apple Education Store. The promotion includes a pair of qualifying Beats headphones with the purchase of any eligible Mac or iPad Pro for college, as well as education pricing on Mac, iPad Pro, AppleCare, select accessories and more.

Here’s a link to the US Higher Education site.

The new models are available today and start at $1,799 and $2,399 respectively.

Ella Dawson:

The woman on the plane is unaware that the woman sitting in the row behind her is watching and recording her every move. Rosey Blair, the stranger she helped sit beside her boyfriend, is projecting a story on top of her interactions that soon takes the internet by storm. Her detailed breakdown of their conversation and body language racks up hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets. Blair herself begins to accumulate thousands of new Twitter followers.

Not long after the plane touches down in Texas, the hordes of strangers following Blair’s tweets are eager to discover the identities of the personal trainers from Dallas. A hunt begins to find her Instagram account. Later the man, her seatmate Euan Holden, participates in the growing media circus because he also gains a ton of twitter followers, or because it helps his career, or because it’s fun, or because it’s just too late to go back to the anonymity of before.

Soon the woman begins receiving crass, sexually explicit messages in the comments of her personal Instagram profile. Her identity has been found.

Jim and I had an interesting discussion about this on Wednesday evening’s Your Mac Life show discussing the differences between public and private spaces and our expectations of privacy in each.

Science Alert:

Archaeological digs around ancient Egyptian sites still have plenty of secrets to give up yet – like the huge, black granite sarcophagus just discovered at an excavation in the city of Alexandria, on the northern coast of Egypt.

What really stands out about the solemn-looking coffin is its size. At 185 cm (72.8 inches) tall, 265 cm (104.3 inches) long, and 165 cm (65 inches) wide, it’s the biggest ever found in Alexandria.

Oh, and then there’s the large alabaster head discovered in the same underground tomb. Experts are assuming it represents whoever is buried in the sarcophagus, though that’s yet to be confirmed.

With the state of the world today, I don’t know that they should really be opening this.

CNET:

It took Apple a year after launching the original iPhone before it opened the App Store–and almost overnight it transformed a user-friendly-but-not-very-useful device into one of the great software platforms in history.

The App Store changed the way people get software, evened the playing field for small developers, and turned the iPhone into a digital Swiss Army Knife that could replace a fistful of tools–from cameras to radios to compasses to alarm clocks.

Among all of these great apps, there have naturally been some standouts that have made life better, given us new things we didn’t know we needed, and entertained us in lots of new ways. So let’s count down the top 10.

This is an interesting list if only because I disagree with all of it except #1, 2, and 4.

The Sweet Setup:

We’ve tested about a dozen highly-rated third-party camera apps we’ve found in the App Store that have come recommended by photographers and enthusiasts alike, and we think the best option for most people is Halide. It was a tough call, but it delivers a great balance of all of the features you want in a third-party camera app.

So, what are those features? Why would anyone want to use a third-party camera app anyway? Isn’t the iPhone’s default app fine?

Well, for a lot of people — including yours truly — the default app is great for the kind of pictures you’ll be capturing most often. Much in the same way that taking a picture of a duvet cover at IKEA with a Hasselblad is probably not how you would use that camera, these third-party camera apps have some pretty specific applications.

Halide is overkill for the majority of iPhone photographers but if you want something approaching the control you can get with a DSLR, Halide is your best choice.

Take advantage of transcripts to quickly discover and share information presented in WWDC18 videos. You can search by keyword, see all instances where the keyword is mentioned in the video, go straight to the time it was mentioned, and even share a link to that specific time.

Such a great resource.