Tara Siegel Bernard, New York Times:

Though automated calls have long plagued consumers, the volume has skyrocketed in recent years, reaching an estimated 3.4 billion in April, according to YouMail, which collects and analyzes calls through its robocall blocking service. That’s an increase of almost 900 million a month compared with a year ago.

It’s not just your imagination. There is, indeed, a surge.

In one tactic, known as “neighborhood spoofing,” robocallers use local numbers in the hope that recipients will be more likely to pick up.

I’ve noticed this a lot. My general habit is to not pick up calls from numbers I don’t recognize. But what if the auto-shop calls to tell me my car is ready? Or any local business that doesn’t have a branded caller-id? This just plain sucks.

As Ben Bajarin noted on Twitter, “There is a special place in hell reserved for those who sell our cell phone numbers.”

MacRumors:

Mercedes-Benz has confirmed that its new MBUX infotainment system will feature support for wireless CarPlay in future vehicles.

And:

The all-new 2019 A-Class will be Mercedes-Benz’s first vehicle equipped with the MBUX system when it goes on sale later this year, according to a spokesperson for the automaker’s parent company Daimler in Germany. Wireless CarPlay will expand to other new Mercedes-Benz vehicles in 2019, the spokesperson told MacRumors.

And:

Barring announcements from other automakers, Mercedes-Benz will likely become the second to offer vehicles with wireless CarPlay functionality, after BMW rolled out the feature starting with its 2017 5 Series a few years ago. Apple first introduced wireless CarPlay in 2015 alongside iOS 9.

I find it remarkable that it has taken so long for automakers to adopt this technology. Wired CarPlay is rolling right along, but requires you (as the name implies) to plug your iOS device in using a Lightning to USB cable.

Wireless CarPlay kicks in with no cable. That’s a huge drop in friction. It has been years since I last plugged my iPhone into my car, other than to charge. I get in my car, my iPhone connects via Bluetooth. I don’t have to think about it. Why is it taking so long to adopt wireless CarPlay? Is there a cost component? A technical obstacle of some kind? Supply chain issues?

For comparison, take a minute to scroll through the list of cars that feature wired CarPlay. Might take you a while.

UPDATE: OK, the issue seems to be the WiFi requirement. From this post:

At its core, Apple CarPlay just mirrors your iPhone display onto your car’s in-dash screen. For this to work it needs to display video for the user interface as well as features like maps for navigation. While Bluetooth works for audio, it cannot handle the bandwidth that video requires. As such a Wi-Fi access point is needed to transfer the data needed for video.

That’d do it. Interesting.

Newsweek:

A machine designed for consumers dubbed the iMac (only Apple would dare to lowercase the “I” in Internet). The crowd in Cupertino, Calif.’s Flint Center–site of the historic Mac launch 14 years ago–largely consisted of Apple employees. But due to an industrial-strength cone of silence shrouding the new product, few had been aware of its existence.

As distinctively curvy as the Beetle, dressed in retro-geeky, translucent plastic, the iMac (due to ship in August) is not only the coolest-looking computer introduced in years, but a chest-thumping statement that Silicon Valley’s original dream company is no longer somnambulant.

Ten months ago, when 43-year-old Jobs temporarily assumed control of the company he cofounded in a garage in 1977, the move was widely seen as a last-ditch effort to inject excitement into a barely breathing corporate husk.

How bad were things at Apple a year ago? “This company was in a death spiral,” says chief financial officer Fred Anderson.

While the iMac wasn’t a guaranteed success (there was a lot of Sturm und Drang over its design and technology decisions), it was a Hail Mary that turned into an incredible product for the company.

Texture, the magazine subscription service that Apple purchased back in March, plans to shut down its Windows app at the end of June. Users were informed of the discontinuation this week through emails and a note inside the app, which said that after June 30th, “this app will stop working and will no longer be available in the Microsoft Store.” Texture’s Android, Amazon Fire, and iOS apps will still be supported.

Makes sense.

AppleInsider:

In further debunking of the notion that the iPhone X was a “flop” or a “failure” —which was conventional wisdom as recently as the end of April —the flagship Apple device is now the world’s best-selling smartphone model, according to a release from the research firm. In addition, the top four models in the world, both in terms of shipment amounts and market share, are iPhones.

Sadly, this news won’t stop the pundits from predicting the “death of the iPhone X” over the next 6 months or prevent the Tech Media from slavishly repeating those stupid predictions ad infinitum.

Digital Camera World:

Today’s smartphones are packed with megapixels and ever-more sensitive sensors, meaning that even photographers dedicated to using DSLRs and mirrorless cameras are relying more and more on them. Phone cameras do, however, have their limitations, which makes a lot of creative photography difficult.

Cue a raft of apps that allow you to get more out of your smartphone, and do more with the results. Here are just a few that can help you get the best from your smartphone’s already-brilliant camera.

Good list of apps, both free and paid and there are even a couple I’m not familiar with.

AI often sounds like some far-off science fiction concept, but it’s actually behind a lot of things you encounter in your daily life. Here’s the rundown: we train a software system with lots of examples so that it can pick up on patterns.

Clearly, the examples in this post are using Google apps, but many of them can be used in the Apple ecosystem as well. It’s fascinating how many things we do that involve machine learning these days.

Apple has acknowledged a microphone issue affecting a limited number of iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus models running iOS 11.3 or later.

In an internal document distributed to Apple Authorized Service Providers this week, obtained by MacRumors, Apple said affected customers may experience a grayed-out speaker button during phone calls. The issue may also prevent affected customers from being heard during phone calls or FaceTime video chats.

It’s always fascinating to me how these types of issue only affect a small number of users using a certain model. I’m not being sarcastic, it’s honestly an interesting phenomena.

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Jason Snell, writing for Tom’s Guide:

The answers to the mistaken reports of weak sales could be a fairly simple one, based on analysis of the average sales price (ASP) of an iPhone. As Apple pointed out, the ASP was higher this quarter than it was a year ago. But it’s important to keep in mind that not only does the iPhone X exist, at a base price higher than any Apple’s ever asked, but the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus released last fall also cost more than the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus did the year before. So while the iPhone X helps boost iPhone ASP, so do the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus.

Nice summary, read the rest. Apple has done an incredible job keeping their numbers up. Unbelievable, really, when you consider how easy it is to grow 10% when you are a tiny company, and how much harder, massively so, to keep up that growth as you become a large company. To do so when you’ve become one of the largest companies in the world is, to me, a mind boggling accomplishment.

I do love a good headline. This one called to me. A solid read from the Washington Post about Facebook’s planned dating service.

Tim Peterson, Digiday:

Apple has become so serious about competing with Facebook, Google/YouTube and Twitter as a distribution outlet for news publishers that it’s paying publishers to unveil shows on Apple News first.

Last month, BuzzFeed News premiered “Future History: 1968,” a documentary series that recaps major events that happened that year, such as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the race between the U.S. and Russia to land a person on the moon. BuzzFeed News released the first three episodes exclusively on Apple News, a week before uploading them to Facebook Watch, YouTube, Twitter and its own mobile app.

The Apple News launch was part of a deal in which Apple paid BuzzFeed for the first-window rights to the show’s first three episodes and cut BuzzFeed a share of the revenue from pre-roll ads that Apple sold against the episodes, said Roxanne Emadi, head of audience development at BuzzFeed.

This is a notable development in the news platform wars. Apple paying for news content jibes nicely with their steady investment in entertainment content. Not clear what form “News 2.0” will ultimately settle into. Same for Apple’s entertainment platform. This is all still forming and unfolding, both for Apple and for the rest of the players.

In a related story, this Fast Company piece, titled Say Goodbye To The Information Age: It’s All About Reputation Now talks about the critical importance of reputation in combating fake news. And reputation is one of Apple’s strengths.

Bloomberg:

If you bet on horses, you will lose,” says Warwick Bartlett, who runs Global Betting & Gaming Consultants and has spent years studying the industry.

What if that wasn’t true? What if there was one person who masterminded a system that guaranteed a profit? One person who’d made almost a billion dollars, and who’d never told his story—until now?

This is a fascinating read, worth saving for when you have the time to kick back and really enjoy.

Elon Musk, from the Tesla earnings call:

We had these fiberglass mats on the top of the battery pack. They’re basically fluff. So we tried to automate the placement and bonding of fluff to the top of the battery pack. Which is ridiculous.

So we had this weird flufferbot. Which was really an incredibly difficult machine to make work. Machines are not good at picking up pieces of fluff. Human hands are way better at doing that. So we had a super-complicated machine. Using a vision system to try to put a piece of fluff on a battery pack. …

The line kept breaking down because Flufferbot would frequently just fail to pick up the fluff. Or put it in a random location.

Over-automation with a delightful name. Good article.

[H/T John Kordyback]

Warren Buffett, on CNBC’s Squawk Box:

“The idea that you’re going to spend loads of time trying to guess how many iPhone X … are going to be sold in a three-month period totally misses the point,” the Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO said in a “Squawk Box” interview that aired Friday. “It’s like worrying about the number of BlackBerrys 10 years ago.”

And:

Apple has “a wide, wide gap. I mean it’s an amazing business,” Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick. “You can put all of their products on a dining room table.”

I’d like to see a picture of that.

I find it fascinating that one of the wealthiest people on the planet drives through McDonalds every morning for breakfast and has exact change prepped before his order is even rung up.

Follow the headline link to check out the video of this interview. Buffett is an insightful mind, a shrewd investor, and he bought 75 million shares of Apple stock during the first quarter.

9to5Mac:

Wanting to promote the original iMac’s ease of use, Apple created a short marketing film titled Simplicity Shootout. To celebrate the iMac’s anniversary, 9to5Mac talked to the stars of the ad to find out how the film came about, the experience of seeing the iMac for the first time, and if today’s Macs would still win in a modern-day “Simplicity Shootout.”

I distinctly remember this video. I was a Mac consultant at the time and helped people buy and set up iMacs. Many of them were blown away by how easy and fast it was for them.

Twitter blog:

When you set a password for your Twitter account, we use technology that masks it so no one at the company can see it. We recently identified a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We have fixed the bug, and our investigation shows no indication of breach or misuse by anyone.

And:

We mask passwords through a process called hashing using a function known as bcrypt, which replaces the actual password with a random set of numbers and letters that are stored in Twitter’s system. This allows our systems to validate your account credentials without revealing your password. This is an industry standard.

Due to a bug, passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process. We found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again.

This seems like a pretty major slip-up. The way I’m reading this, somewhere internal to Twitter, your password was stored “unmasked”. And to me, that means in the clear, in plain-text. Am I misreading this?

No matter. Go to Twitter Settings and change your password.

From furniture manufacturer MOOW comes the Stüda, a LEGO-compatible table designed by Italian firm Nine Associati. Offered in three different sizes, the storage units are surfaced not in LEGOs themselves, but in Corian that they’ve CNC-milled to provide the studs.

What a great idea!

Google this morning posted a story on its Keyword Blog that highlights the ongoing growth of its AI helper, Google Assistant. According to the company, the Assistant now works with “every major device brand” in the U.S., meaning that it can connect with more than 5,000 smart home devices, up from 1,500 in January.

And

For home automation, Apple’s solution is HomeKit and Siri. Although not an exact comparison due to potentially missing products, Apple’s website has a list of HomeKit-compatible smart home products that reaches to about 200 as of writing, with some yet to launch.

The number of devices the technology can connect with is definitely important, but a lot of people are also concerned about privacy. I don’t think there is any doubt that Apple values customer privacy more than any other technology company, but a lot of the success of home products will be determined by how much the consumer actually cares about privacy versus features.

Jennifer Vazquez, NBC New York:

The 32-year-old Monzidelis was working at his family bowling alley business, Bowlerland, on April 3, when he became dizzy and went to the bathroom, where he started bleeding. He soon received an alarming notification via his smartwatch telling him to seek medical attention immediately.

And:

Doctors believe that if he hadn’t received his smartwatch notification when he did, he would have not survived his medical emergency because he wouldn’t have paid attention to his symptoms, especially since he was a healthy individual up to that point.

Monzidelis agreed: “I would have been working in my office and they would have found me dead,” he said, adding that he is “very lucky” and “feeling like a million bucks” since the life-threatening and frightening incident.

If you started bleeding, would you head right to the emergency room? Maybe I would, maybe I’d first do some research on my symptoms, or call someone seeking advice.

I think one subtle core point here is that a notification from your Apple Watch to seek medical attention immediately feels like an alarming call to action from a trusted expert. In some ways, Apple Watch is like the Check Engine light on your car. If it comes on, you pay attention (though, some folks do ignore it). If your Apple Watch tells you to seek immediate medical attention, go immediately.

I’ve never read a story about someone’s Apple Watch telling them to seek immediate medical attention that turned out to be a false alarm. That Check Engine light generally means something.

UPDATE: From the comments:

One point that I think is valuable here is to call 9-1-1 instead of taking yourself to the ER. Calling for Emergency Medical Services gets immediate treatment faster than going to an ER where one can easily lose consciousness or having worsening symptoms while en route.

Solid point.

The original Iron Man still ranks among my all-time favorite Marvel movies (especially the lead up to the in-cave creation of that first prototype suit). If you are a fan, this oral history is an enjoyable read.

But this one bit is especially interesting for Apple folk:

Kent Seki (visualisation/HUD effects supervisor): There were many rules and driving philosophies we established along the way that led us to the final product. I remember in an early discussion in post-production with Jon Favreau. He pulled out his iPhone, which was a new thing at the time. He said, ‘I don’t want to tell you a specific graphic to make for the HUD, but I want it to feel intuitive like my iPhone.’

And:

Dav Rauch (HUD design supervisor): The iPhone had just come out like literally a week or two before the meeting with Jon – and I got an iPhone and Favreau had gotten an iPhone. When I was down there we kind of geeked out on our iPhones, and we were talking about what we liked about the iPhone because he was really inspired by it. He was like, ‘What I love about this thing is it just kind of does what it should do, and it kind of does what I want it to do and it’s very intuitive and it’s very simple.’ We opened it up and I was looking at the transitions in an iPhone. I’m like, ‘These transitions are so simple and they’re just like zooming transitions, or wipe transitions. There’s nothing fancy about this phone, but what’s fancy about this phone is that it works and it works really well.’

Good design is a virus.

[Via Apple Insider]

That last post, the look back at the long history of the iMac, goes hand-in-hand with this one, an appreciation of the black and white simplicity of the original Mac OS. If you’ve never had the original Mac experience, take a look at Mark Wilson’s post for a glimpse at what got us here.

And if you are an old-schooler (like me), follow the headline link and immerse yourself in a nice warm pool of nostalgia.

Michael Steeber, 9to5Mac:

A 20th anniversary is a milestone worthy of celebration in its own right, but even more so when describing a computer. Few technology products boast such a feat in an industry where changing customer preference and exponential technical advancement can quickly obsolete even the most well-considered plans.

This Sunday, Apple’s iMac line joins the 20-year club. Its ticket to entry is two decades of valuable lessons and ideas that tell the recent history of the personal computer industry and reveal Apple’s priorities and values. The iMac’s timeline tells many stories – some of reinvention and business strategy, others of software and hardware.

Perhaps none are more significant than the iMac’s design story. Explorations of color, form, material, and miniaturization have marked significant breakthroughs throughout the years. On this anniversary week, we’ll take a look at the design evolution of the iMac.

Really nice, long look at the evolution of the iMac. Well done.

Reuters:

Facebook Inc on Thursday said that it fired an employee accused of bragging on matchmaking app Tinder about his access to private user information.

And:

A Twitter user earlier on Wednesday posted here about the Tinder conversation along with screenshots, saying Facebook’s security engineer is “likely using privileged access to stalk women online”.

Here’s the link to the Twitter post that first exposed this story.

While it’s good that Facebook took quick action here, I think the underlying issue is that this employee had this level of access, that there are no controls in place to prevent this sort of employee overreach.

If the fired employee had this access, doesn’t it stand to reason that there are other Facebook folks, not bragging about access online, with that same level of access?

Bloomberg:

I’ve long been a critic of Apple, but today I give up: It’s the perfect tech company for this day and age, an example to the rest of Silicon Valley.

After Apple’s latest results announcement, one could knock it yet again for its stable dependence on a single mature product — the iPhone. That product delivered 62.2 percent of the company’s sales; the average for the previous 10 quarters was 62.4 percent, so the growth in earbud, smartwatch and streaming subscription sales does nothing to reduce the iPhone’s dominance.

Apple appears to be happy to think small and focus on its shareholders, not on pie-in-the-sky ideas, like other tech companies, including industry leaders.

But I’m no longer knocking Apple for any of this. In fact, I’m sorry I ever did.

I look forward to many more analysts offering up the same apology.

The Reform Government Surveillance coalition, which includes several major tech companies who have teamed up to lobby for surveillance law reform, this week released a statement condemning recent proposals for backdoor access into electronic devices and reaffirming a commitment to strong encryption.

The coalition is made up of multiple tech companies who have taken a strong stance against weakening encryption, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, Snap, Evernote, LinkedIn, Oath (owned by Verizon) and Facebook.

It’s great seeing some of these major companies uniting to help protect our privacy. It seems to me that it would be a long, hard road for a government to require backdoors on devices. We’ve seen this battle played out publicly in the past and I have no doubt we’ll see it again.