Leakers do not simply lose their jobs at Apple. In some cases, they face jail time and massive fines for network intrusion and theft of trade secrets both classified as federal crimes. In 2017, Apple caught 29 leakers. 12 of those were arrested. Among those were Apple employees, contractors and some partners in Apple’s supply chain. These people not only lose their jobs, they can face extreme difficulty finding employment elsewhere. “The potential criminal consequences of leaking are real,” says Tom Moyer of Global Security, “and that can become part of your personal and professional identity forever.”
I have a hard time understanding the motivation for employees to leak information about upcoming products. I think this is a smart move by Apple, telling its employees that there are consequences for their actions. The fact that 12 people were arrested should scare the hell out of anyone considering leaking information.
Apple is not fucking around anymore. You’ve been warned.
ESPN+ is launching at a price of $4.99 a month, or $49.99 a year. Available on iOS, Android, Apple TV, Amazon’s Fire TV, and Chromecast, it’s not a standalone experience, but rather part of an updated version of the same ESPN app that provides some free features and (if you authenticate as a paying customer) full programming from ESPN in its traditional linear-TV form.
Even if ESPN+ isn’t meant to immediately usher in a radically new era for ESPN, it’s the first taste of a big change for Disney.
Meaning, this is a test bed for where Disney wants to go with its own content.
Police forces and federal agencies around the country have bought relatively cheap tools to unlock up-to-date iPhones and bypass their encryption, according to a Motherboard investigation based on several caches of internal agency documents, online records, and conversations with law enforcement officials.
And:
Regional police forces, such as the Maryland State Police and Indiana State Police, are procuring a technology called ‘GrayKey’ which can break into iPhones, including the iPhone X running the latest operating system iOS 11.
Is this whack-a-mole? Will Apple be able to change iOS to break GrayKey? And, if so, how long will it take for GrayKey, or another technology, to ship a replacement?
Chinese police have used facial recognition technology to locate and arrest a man who was among a crowd of 60,000 concert goers.
The suspect, who has been identified only as Mr Ao, was attending a concert by pop star Jacky Cheung in Nanchang city last weekend when he was caught.
Police said the 31-year-old, who was wanted for “economic crimes”, was “shocked” when he was caught. China has a huge surveillance network of over 170 million CCTV cameras.
People are remarkably good at focusing their attention on a particular person in a noisy environment, mentally “muting” all other voices and sounds. Known as the cocktail party effect, this capability comes natural to us humans. However, automatic speech separation — separating an audio signal into its individual speech sources — while a well-studied problem, remains a significant challenge for computers.
This is a major hurdle for smart speakers like HomePod and Google Home. While this post focuses on the cocktail party problem (separating individual voices when multiple people are speaking), it is part of a longer problem thread, that of identifying an individual speaker’s voice.
Consider HomePod. If HomePod Siri knew who was speaking, she could be more specific in her response. If I ask Siri to send a text, Siri could look up contacts in my database, but if my wife asked, Siri could use her contact database.
Google Home already solves this problem. And they are well on their way to solving the cocktail party problem as well.
Imagine a day when hearing aids feature the technology to distinguish speakers, offer signal boost on a voice-by-voice basis, let you know who said what, perhaps with the aid of your iOS device.
If this interests you, there’s a series of videos embedded in the Google blog post that shows the current cocktail party tech in action.
First things first, take a look at this Bloomberg article, which started a wave of discussion about alleged stumbling HomePod sales:
At first, it looked like the HomePod might be a hit. Pre-orders were strong, and in the last week of January the device grabbed about a third of the U.S. smart speaker market in unit sales, according to data provided to Bloomberg by Slice Intelligence. But by the time HomePods arrived in stores, sales were tanking, says Slice principal analyst Ken Cassar. “Even when people had the ability to hear these things,” he says, “it still didn’t give Apple another spike.”
HomePod is a much more expensive speaker than its rivals, and is only useful for a particular slice of the market: those who own an iPhone and either have an Apple Music subscription or have all their music in iTunes and subscribe to iTunes Match. It’s not reasonable to expect sales of a $350 speaker with a limited market to rival those of a $50 device aimed at the mass-market.
Ben’s piece goes into much more detail, addressing the gloom and doom of the Bloomberg piece. Well reasoned, worth reading both.
I do think it is way too early to judge this market. Apple is in the premium space, Google Home and Amazon Echo are based in the commodity space. To me, the key to HomePod growth is Apple’s R&D investment in improving Siri intelligence. If Apple improves the Siri experience, they’ll automatically make HomePod more appealing.
I can’t imagine a more important Apple technology to invest in than Siri. Siri impacts every aspect of the Apple ecosystem and is immensely leverage-able. Siri is the rising tide that lifts all boats.
Alan Kay was there at the very beginning. He spent 10 years at Xerox PARC, culminating in that famous visit Steve Jobs made that ultimately spawned the Mac.
This is a bit of a walk down memory lane and a nice little read.
Christian Zibreg, iDownloadBlog, does a really nice job walking through the process of using the iOS Markup tools to sign PDF documents. Terrifically useful.
Facebook. What a mess. Mark Zuckerberg’s two day appearance before Congress has everyone riveted. He’s clearly been incredibly well prepped, expertly responding without answering.
Tons has been written about this, but here are three posts that stood out to me:
Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies walks you through this reaction poll, asking questions about Facebook and trust.
One takeaway:
Only 15% of our panelists said there is nothing Facebook can do to regain trust as they are just ready to move on to something else.
I would have thought that number would be much higher.
First things first, this is absolutely worth reading. Gruber digs deep, deconstructs those talking points. Brilliant.
I have to say, I am surprised that no one in that room thought to bring up a comparison between Apple and Facebook when it comes to privacy. Would have been good to give some expert witnesses, who really understand the subtleties at play here, the chance to ask Zuckerberg some specific questions, to help guide the conversation.
Finally, here’s a video (embedded below) from The Verge’s Russell Brandom, talking about Facebook, Zuckerberg’s testimony, and shadow profiles. It’s only 3:28 and well worth your time.
Finding billionaires in Silicon Valley isn’t hard. Dropbox Inc.’s Arash Ferdowsi and Veeva Systems Inc.’s Peter Gassner have both crossed the threshold this year, and tech fortunes make up a fifth — or about $1 trillion — of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
But tracking down members of the three-comma club at Apple Inc. is a less fruitful endeavor, even though the iPhone-maker is the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalization of $879 billion.
Chairman Art Levinson is the only insider to make the cut, and Apple stock accounts for just 20 percent of his $1 billion fortune, according to regulatory filings. The rest comes from his long tenure at Genentech Inc., where he was chairman and chief executive officer, and an early stake in Google Inc.
No other Apple insider comes close.
I think one core attribute of any huge company with few or no billionaires is a long legacy. A tech company born in current times that then grows huge is much more likely to make a billionaire or two. Or three.
Apple’s big growth curve happened long before billion dollar valuations were common. They went public in 1980, fragmenting their ownership stake, making it that much harder for a single person to emerge as a billionaire.
As it continues the 64-bit app transition, Apple will begin alerting customers running macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 when they are using an outdated, 32-bit app. The alert will only happen when you open a 32-bit app, and it will happen once, Apple told me earlier today.
The alert is a way of communicating to customers that some action needs to be taken, albeit not immediately. Apple said they don’t have a firm timeline of when 32-bit apps will stop working, but they informed developers at last year’s WWDC that macOS High Sierra would be the final version to run 32-bit apps without compromise.
The alert that is shown when you open the app tells people that the developer needs to update the app to make it compatible going forward. You can still use the app in its current form, but at some point in the future, it won’t work.
Apple is taking this step to ensure that the Mac apps we use are as advanced as the Mac itself.
Apple has posted a support article explaining more on the transition to 64-bit, as well as offering a few answers for affected users.
There is no need to panic if you see this alert, but please do take note of it. You should contact the developer of the app to see if they plan to update it and when.
Uber Technologies Inc said on Wednesday it is planning to offer more modes of transportation for riders through its app, giving people more ways to get around in cities.
In cities like San Francisco, having a variety of transportation options is especially important.
A message included in Apple’s first watchOS 4.3.1 beta warns users that older apps will no longer be supported in “future versions” of the operating system, suggesting support for software built with the watchOS 1.0 SDK could be deprecated with watchOS 5.
This is about watchOS apps built using outdated parts of the SDK. Another side of this: Will watchOS 5 continue to support the original Apple Watch hardware?
As we’ve reported before, it is bullshit and illegal under federal law for electronics manufacturers to put “Warranty Void if Removed” stickers on their gadgets, and it’s also illegal for companies to void your warranty if you fix your device yourself or via a third party.
And:
Companies such as Sony and Microsoft pepper the edges of their game consoles with warning labels telling customers that breaking the seal voids the warranty. That’s illegal. Thanks to the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, no manufacturer is allowed to put repair restrictions on a device it offers a warranty on. Dozens of companies do it anyway, and the FTC has put them on notice. Apple, meanwhile, routinely tells customers not to use third party repair companies, and aftermarket parts regularly break iPhones due to software updates.
You have to see Apple’s Reno, Nevada, data center from the inside to truly understand how huge it is. It’s made up of five long white buildings sitting side by side on a dry scrubby landscape just off I-80, and the corridor that connects them through the middle is a quarter-mile long. On either side are big, dark rooms–more than 50 of them–filled with more than 200,000 identical servers, tiny lights winking in the dark from their front panels. This is where Siri lives. And iCloud. And Apple Music. And Apple Pay.
Powering all these machines, and keeping them cool, takes a lot of power–constant, uninterrupted, redundant power. At the Reno data center, that means 100% green power from three different Apple solar farms.
And:
Now Apple says it’s finished getting the rest of its facilities running on 100% green power–from its new Apple Park headquarters, which has one of the largest solar roofs on the planet, to its distribution centers and retail stores around the world. Though the 100% figure covers only Apple’s own operations–not those of of the suppliers and contract manufacturers which do much of the work of bringing its ideas to life–it’s also convinced 23 companies in its supply chain to sign a pledge to get to 100% renewable energy for the portion of their business relating to Apple products.
Part of this equation is Renewable Energy Certificates:
One REC is equal to a single megawatt of power produced from a renewable energy source.
And:
It turns out RECs (like carbon credits) can be sold independent of the energy itself. So it’s also possible for a large power consumer to buy only the RECs–and not the power–from a renewable energy project and use them to offset its use of dirty energy at one of its own facilities.
Apple could easily go down that road, buying its way to green. This from VP of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives Lisa Jackson:
“I am not aware of any other company that uses that same stringency for making sure the clean power that they’re investing in or purchasing is on the regional grid where it’s being used,” she boasts. But she acknowledges that there are still places in the world where that’s not possible, though that may have more to do with the reality of power markets than choices Apple has made. In some cases, the company has had to sign long-term contracts to acquire the RECs from a new project it helped create elsewhere in the same region. That was the case recently for a two-person office in Chile. There was no suitable green energy source nearby, so Apple is now offsetting the brown power used by that office with RECs from one of its green-power projects in Brazil.
Apple does not need to do this. They could simply buy their way into compliance. Credit where credit is due.
A new web standard being recommended for adoption would open the way for both Face ID and Touch ID to be used to login to websites.
The API, known as WebAuthn, allows existing security devices – like fingerprint readers, cameras and USB keys – to be used for website authentication
And:
There’s as yet no word on Safari, but with all current and recent iPhones and iPads offering either Face ID or Touch ID, and the latter supported on the MacBook Pro too, this would be tailor-made for Apple. It cannot be used with other browsers without Apple’s support.
VirnetX Holding Corp. won $502.6 million against Apple Inc. after a federal jury in Texas said the maker of iPhones was infringing patents for secure communications, the latest twist in a dispute now in its eighth year.
VirnetX stock went up as much as 44% on the news, Apple stock not so much. Makes sense, since VernetX reported about $1 million in revenue last year, Apple a bit more than $200 billion.
The patents in question?
VirnetX claimed that Apple’s FaceTime, VPN on Demand and iMessage features infringe four patents related to secure communications, claims that Apple denied.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for Apple to write that check:
For VirnetX, the jury verdict in its favor could be a short-lived victory. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board has said the patents are invalid, in cases that are currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington.
Apple has nabbed a TV series adaptation of Foundation, the seminal Isaac Asimov science fiction novel trilogy. The project, from Skydance Television, has been put in development for straight-to-series consideration. Deadline revealed last June that Skydance had made a deal with the Asimov estate and that David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman were cracking the code on a sprawling series based on the books that informed Star Wars and many other sci-fi films and TV series.
Originally published as a short story series in Astounding Magazine in 1942, Asimov’s Foundation is the complex saga of humans scattered on planets throughout the galaxy, all living under the rule of the Galactic Empire. The protagonist is a psycho-historian who has an ability to read the future and foresees the empire’s imminent collapse. He sets out to save the knowledge of mankind from being wiped out.
I don’t know how familiar any of you are with the Foundation trilogy but when I saw this news I had a little squeal of delight. It’s one of those series I go back and read every few years. Every time I heard that someone was trying to turn it into a movie, I died a little inside. Like Dune, Foundation is too large a world to be constrained to a single movie. A multi-year series is the only way to do it justice.
Israel’s consumer protection bureau said on Tuesday it was investigating Apple over a failure to disclose to consumers that its software could slow performance in some iPhones.
I think what these investigations will come down to is Apple’s intent. I don’t believe for a second they did this to trick people into buying a new iPhone.
Recruiters for Apple had been after Cook, a vice president at Compaq, which was then the world’s biggest seller of PCs worldwide. He turned them down several times, he told Charlie Rose in 2014. But then he thought, “I’m going to go out and take the meeting. Steve created the whole industry that I’m in, I’d love to meet him.”
When the pair got together, “Well, I’m just thinking I’m going to meet him and all of a sudden he’s talking about his strategy and his vision,” said Cook.
And Cook was impressed.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Cook had to be convinced to leave his gig at Compaq but it turned out well for all involved – except maybe Compaq.
82% of teens of teens currently own an iPhone, according to Piper Jaffray’s “Teens Survey,” which questions thousands of kids across 40 states with an average age of 16.
That’s up from 78% in last fall, and it’s the highest percentage of teen iPhone ownership Piper’s seen in its survey.
iPhone ownership among teens could go even higher — 84% of teens say their next phone will be an iPhone.
That 82% number is up from about 60% four years ago. Slow and steady increase.
Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under unique circumstances.
I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.
I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.
I love this story. Ron kept showing up, determined to bring Graphing Calculator to life on the new (at the time) PowerPC chips. Be sure to read all the way down to the bet about being on the front page of the New York Times.
In 2008, for $278M, Apple acquires Palo Alto Semiconductor, a semiconductor design company. Less than a year after the iPhone starts shipping, the intent is clear: instead of buying off-the-shelf ARM chips, Apple wants to design its own processors for future iPhones.
And:
Compared to modest first-year iPhone sales, spending $278M to acquire Palo Alto Semiconductor looks out of proportion. And, of course, let’s not forget a context where Intel reigns supreme having just “captured” the Mac. As always, references to Apple’s “well-known” arrogance are at the ready: Who do these guys think they are, what do they know about microprocessor design and manufacturing?
This is a great read. There’s insight into Apple’s path from 68K to PowerPC, the PowerPC to Intel, with lots of links and backup detail. And then Jean-Louis moves on to the possibility of iOS running on an ARM-based Mac, with both the good and the bad implications.
UPDATE: I originally wrote about the possibility for a speed increase for the Xcode iOS simulator. I started a Twitter thread asking about this and the response was pretty much no, that the code will be native either way (currently x86 code, if ported, it’ll be native ARM code, only difference would be if the ARM processor was significantly faster than the original x86 processor.)
3D box office revenues have taken a steep dive, with box office sales at their lowest level in eight years. It may finally be time to say sayonara to those bulky tinted glasses.
A report by the Motion Picture Association of America finds that box office revenues for 3D films in the U.S. and Canada have fallen 18% in 2017 to $1.3 billion, Variety reports. That’s the worst showing for 3D movies in eight years. In 2010, 3D movies sold $2.2. billion in revenue — nearly double the amount generated in 2017.
To answer the headline – yes and not soon enough. There’s only been one 3D film I’ve ever thought was worth the money – Avatar. I haven’t bothered to go see a movie in 3D in five years.
