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.

U.S. authorities on Monday charged a former Apple Inc employee with theft of trade secrets, alleging that the person downloaded a secret blueprint related to a self-driving car to a personal laptop and later trying to flee the country, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court.

The complaint said that the former employee, Xiaolang Zhang, disclosed intentions to work for a Chinese self-driving car startup and booked a last-minute flight to China after downloading the plan for a circuit board for the self-driving car. Authorities arrested Zhang on July 7 at the San Jose airport after he passed through a security checkpoint.

“Apple takes confidentiality and the protection of our intellectual property very seriously,” Apple said in a statement. “We’re working with authorities on this matter and will do everything possible to make sure this individual and any other individuals involved are held accountable for their actions.”

I love that Apple is doing this. The company needs to be able to find the people leaking and stealing information, and prosecute them.

San Francisco Chronicle:

The National Park Service doesn’t want anyone to know where Hyperion is, let alone hike to see it. Rangers don’t even refer to the tree by name. Environmental advocates and most lovers of big trees won’t help you either. Everyone who knows about the tree seems to keep Hyperion’s precise location a closely guarded secret.

And for good reason. I didn’t realize it, but I was embarking on a growing brand of trophy hunting in nature that, fueled by social media, has spawned an out-of-proportion mania for touching, seeing and posting images of special places — usually to the detriment of those places.

For example, a scenic viewpoint called Horseshoe Bend on the Colorado River in northern Arizona, shared on Instagram in hundreds of thousands of photos, is perpetually crowded. It receives so many daily visitors — 10 times the visitation of nearby overlooks, according to one report — that local police and the Park Service have imposed parking restrictions nearby. Visitors are asked not to linger, and police officers now stationed in the parking area hurry people along. How’s that for enjoying nature?

It’s a shame that because we humans are the way we are, the answer to the headline question is, “Yes.”

Popular Mechanics:

On a day lost to history, some fortuitous humans found a glistening meteorite, mostly iron and nickel, that had barreled through the atmosphere and crashed into the ground. Thus began an obsession that gripped the species. Over the millennia, our ancestors would work the material, discovering better ways to draw iron from the Earth itself and eventually to smelt it into steel. We’d fight over it, create and destroy nations with it, grow global economies by it, and use it to build some of the greatest inventions and structures the world has ever known.

I now know more about steel than I ever did and I had fun reading this very accessible article with my 12 year old.

My thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. After 25 years, it’s good to know you can still rely on BBEdit to handle the heavy lifting that you need to get your job done.

BBEdit is crafted and continuously refined in response to meet the needs of writers, web authors, and software developers, providing an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. All in all, BBEdit is a powerful editor with an interface that stays out of your way, and well worth checking out.

To celebrate BBEdit’s 25th Anniversary, Bare Bones Software is creating commemorative apparel. Learn more!

BBEdit 12 is 64-bit ready. Download and try it today!

The Energy and Commerce Committee today sent letters to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Larry Page to probe the companies’ representation of third-party access to consumer data, and the collection and use of audio recording data as well as location information via iPhone and Android devices.

I believe the government is going to find some major differences in how these two companies view data, the collection of it, and the privacy of its customers.

History:

At the end of the day, Travis Pastrana made leaping over 52 cars, 16 buses and the notorious fountain at Caesars Palace on two wheels look easy. Even in 100-plus-degree weather. Even using a heavy, stiff, flat-track bike unlike anything the action-sports stunt icon is used to jumping with.

The three back-to-back motorcycle stunts were planned as part of an ambitious night of daredevilry and endurance called Evel Live! Produced by History in conjunction with Nitro Sports, the event was designed to honor Evel Knievel, the history-making stunt cyclist and showman who became a pop-culture sensation in the 1960s and 70s—and inspired Pastrana’s own stunt-performance career, along with others of his generation. Pastrana sought to nail three of Knievel’s most outrageous jumps over a single, three-hour period. It’s something not even Knievel himself ever tried.

I grew up watching some of Knievel’s stunts on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports”. What Pastrana did was absolutely incredible.

BBC:

Ancient hillforts and Roman settlements have been revealed by the heatwave. The dry spell has left parched fields with unmistakable “crop marks” painted into the landscape.

The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW) has been busy recording the details – before they disappear when it next rains.

Sites across Wales have been captured from the air. The crop marks are made by vegetation drawing on better nutrients and water supplies trapped in long-gone fortification ditches – leading to lush green growth that stands out.

This was really interesting and a fascinating way to discover these ancient ruins.

Shares of Twitter Inc fell 9 percent on Monday after a report said the social media company had suspended more than 70 million fake accounts in May and June, which could lead to a decline of monthly active users in the second quarter.

The slump wiped about $3 billion from the microblogging site’s market valuation, which had stood at about $35 billion on Friday. Twitter shares were last down 8.6 percent at $42.62.

A separate report over the weekend suggested that many of these accounts were dormant, so the response to Twitter deleting them makes no sense to me. Even if the primary measurement is “active accounts” deleting fake accounts should have no effect on the valuation of the company.

Adam Fisher:

Nolan Bushnell, an engineering student at the University of Utah in the mid-1960s, played Spacewar in his school’s computer lab, and it left a lasting impression. After graduating, he moved to Silicon Valley and in just a few short years figured out how to bring computer games to the masses with Pong. It was a massive hit, and Bushnell, still in his twenties, suddenly found himself in charge of what was arguably the most important company ever to rocket out of the Valley.

Bushnell not only single-handedly created an industry around a new American art form — video games—he also wrote what has become the quintessential Silicon Valley script. The story goes like this: Young kid with radical idea hacks together something cool, builds a wild freewheeling company around it, and becomes rich and famous in the process.

When I was a kid, everyone wanted an Atari system.

dougkelsey:

We’ve all had something like this happen. You drop something on the floor. Something small, insignificant. Like a pen.

So you bend down to pick it up and as you return to upright, a primal, monosyllabic utterance slips out of your mouth.

You grunt.

Now, picking up something heavy like a tractor tire, well, yeah, you would expect a bit of grunting. But a pen? What’s going on?

Those of us “of a certain age”, will read the title of this and think, “YES! Why is that!?” The answer is more interesting than it has any right to be. Thanks to Daniel Jalkut for the link.

Wired:

The annual iOS refresh is on the way—Apple has previewed it, beta testers have installed it, and the rest of us should get iOS 12 when iPhones arrive in September. While features such as winking 3-D emoji and screen-time limits for your apps might take much of the attention when the software arrives, iOS 12 is a major step forward in one other crucial area: smartphone security.

It’s something Apple has always prided itself on, with its tightly locked App Store and full device encryption, but iOS 12 is going to make your iPhone more secure than ever before. Here’s how.

For many people, security is “boring’ but, as we become more and more reliant on our iPhones, it becomes even more important – if no less boring and inconvenient for the average user.

Popular Mechanics:

The official declaration of America’s independence from Britain may be dated July 4, 1776, but the story of the Thomas Jefferson’s hallowed document really begins two weeks later. On July 19, the Continental Congress ordered a scribe, Pennsylvania State House clerk Timothy Matlack, to write the words on a piece of parchment big enough for everyone to read—and with room for signatures.

Since then, the Declaration of Independence has had a fairly rough time. A forensic analysis of the document shows some rough handling, damaging displays, and even a mysterious handprint. Understanding why it looks the way that it does — much more faded and battered than the U.S. Constitution or The Bill of Rights — is a romp through the history of printing, preservation, and patriotism.

It is one of the most important documents in human history and the process of its care and preservation is fascinating.

This is a fantastic look at engineering and design. Drop-dead clever. And many millions of us have the results of this single design decision in our kitchens.

Digital Music News:

Apple Music has more paying subscribers in the United States than Spotify, according to confidential details shared with Digital Music News this morning.

The source, a US-based, major distributor, shared a report detailing the subscriber tallies of several streaming music services, including Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, and Sirius XM. That report now ranks Apple Music as first in the United States.

And:

Both Apple Music and Spotify have more than 20 million subscribers in America, with Apple now a hair ahead.

And:

The data for 2018 also shows that Apple is experiencing a far stronger rate-of-growth in the United States, suggesting a wider lead over the coming months. Trial users were not part of the comparison.

Apple Music has been growing faster than Spotify for a while now. I can only imagine that the HomePod has added to that growth.

Overall, Apple Music scored 170 million streams of album tracks during the first week, while Spotify amassed an estimated 130 million.

The disparity strongly suggests that Apple is achieving far better user engagement, especially given Spotify’s extreme promotional push for the release. It also raises questions of just how ‘active’ Spotify’s 160 million active users are.

Apple Music, grinding away with steady advertising and the gravity of their ecosystem, slowly eating Spotify’s lunch.