Apple:

As part of its commitment to combat climate change and create a healthier environment, Apple today announced its global facilities are powered with 100 percent clean energy. This achievement includes retail stores, offices, data centers and co-located facilities in 43 countries — including the United States, the United Kingdom, China and India.

“We’re committed to leaving the world better than we found it. After years of hard work we’re proud to have reached this significant milestone,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re going to keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the materials in our products, the way we recycle them, our facilities and our work with suppliers to establish new creative and forward-looking sources of renewable energy because we know the future depends on it.”

Some will blow this off as simple marketing fluff but everyone at Apple should be proud of this accomplishment and the company’s commitment to the environment.

Krebs on Security:

Social media sites are littered with seemingly innocuous little quizzes, games and surveys urging people to reminisce about specific topics, such as “What was your first job,” or “What was your first car?” The problem with participating in these informal surveys is that in doing so you may be inadvertently giving away the answers to “secret questions” that can be used to unlock access to a host of your online identities and accounts.

I test my poor wife on this stuff all the time. Like most people, she plays along with these little quizzes and questions but had no idea they can be used to harvest details about her for nefarious purposes.

Personally, I never respond to these things on social media and lie on every one of these questions when asked by a bank or other similar institution. For example, when asked where I was born, I often say, “Capetown, South Africa”.

As John Gruber points out, these are the kinds of questions often used by banks as supposed “security” questions.

This is an incredible documentary. Insightful and entertaining. In a nutshell, it focuses on the technology we are building and both the positive and negative implications.

Take a minute to watch the trailer, embedded below. It’ll give you a sense of things. Watch all the way to the end.

If this does catch your interest, you can rent the full movie here, watch a few more clips there too. The full movie pops up on YouTube, but I suspect those views are all bootlegged. It’s $3.99 to rent, worth supporting the team that made it.

Woz/USA TODAY:

“Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and … Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this,” he said in an email to USA TODAY. “The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back.”

Wozniak said he’d rather pay for Facebook than have his personal information exploited for advertising. And he heaped praise on Apple for respecting people’s privacy.

“Apple makes its money off of good products, not off of you,” Wozniak said. “As they say, with Facebook, you are the product.”

More shots fired. Is this a temporary tempest in a teapot, or will this wave of controversy cause real change?

Terrific piece from Zac Hall, 9to5Mac. The wish list is sensible, but what I also like is that the article explores some of what you can do now with watchOS 4.1. A very logical leap from one to the other.

Stacy Cowley, New York Times:

Credit card networks are finally ready to concede what has been obvious to shoppers and merchants for years: Signatures are not a useful way to prove someone’s identity. Later this month, four of the largest networks — American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Visa — will stop requiring them to complete card transactions.

Long outdated tech. Ridiculous that signature checking is still part of the system. Baffling that chip-embedded cards have only recently become a standard in the US.

Would love to see wider adoption of Apple Pay so we can get rid of the security risks that come with those pieces of plastic altogether.

Pretty, pretty phone. Just take a look at the pics. I would definitely love one of these.

There’s also a new (PRODUCT)RED iPhone X Leather Folio.

From Apple’s announcement:

A portion of proceeds for all (PRODUCT)RED purchases go directly to Global Fund HIV/AIDS grants that provide testing, counseling, treatment and prevention programs with a specific focus on eliminating transmission of the virus from mothers to their babies. Since partnering with (RED) in 2006, Apple has donated more than $160 million to the Global Fund, serving as the organization’s largest corporate donor.

Order online starting tomorrow, April 10th and in stores beginning Friday, April 13.

Recode:

Recode’s Kara Swisher and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes interviewed Apple CEO Tim Cook in Chicago, IL. The interview was taped on Tuesday, March 27, and aired on Friday, April 6, 2018. Read the full transcript.

The full video is not available online but you can listen to the full, uncut interview on Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. The audio is embedded below, or you can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Always fascinating to listen to Cook.

Dave DeLong:

I have to conclude that iPads were not meant for kids. It boggles my mind that Apple pretends that they are, because everything about iOS leads you to the inevitable conclusion that unless you’re the tech-savvy adult using the device, it’s just not for you.

DeLong makes a great point. For those of us with children, Apple’s parental controls for the iPad are a blunt instrument.

Apps of a Feather (group post from 3rd party Twitter app developers):

After June 19th, 2018, “streaming services” at Twitter will be removed. This means two things for third-party apps:

• Push notifications will no longer arrive
• Timelines won’t refresh automatically

If you use an app like Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings, or Twitterrific, there is no way for its developer to fix these issues.

We are incredibly eager to update our apps. However, despite many requests for clarification and guidance, Twitter has not provided a way for us to recreate the lost functionality. We’ve been waiting for more than a year.

Read the whole piece for details. I can’t wrap my head around Twitter’s thinking here. Is it so expensive to support third party developers, so expensive to maintain a native Mac Twitter client?

Third party Twitter clients bring choice, robustness to the Twitterverse. Third party Twitter clients also bring inclusiveness. Eliminating this community, in my opinion, sends a terrible message. These are the folks who breathed life into Twitter in the first place. I suspect none of them got rich doing this, that their efforts were, in a large part, a labor of love.

Leaving these developers unsupported, and leaving them hanging, just seems plain wrong.

Tom Warren, The Verge:

For the longest time, pressing the home button on an iPad or iPhone was the fail-safe way to take you back to Apple’s grid of iOS apps. That changed with the all-screen iPhone X. A swipe up from the bottom is the new home gesture (which also unlocks the device) on Apple’s flagship phone, but that same gesture brings up the dock on the iPad. If, like me, you switch between the two devices fairly regularly throughout the day, then it takes a few minutes to adjust your muscle memory each time you switch.

An interesting issue. Same issue with Control Center.

To me, this is a migration issue, as iOS deals with the move from hardware with Home buttons to those without, the move from no Face ID to iOS devices with.

Spend a minute scrolling through the animated GIFs in Tom’s article. The confusion is clear.

Fascinating story. The power of social media.

Michael Tsai doing his usual excellent job gathering comments and links relevant to the rumored 2019 Mac Pro. Two things stand out, though all are interesting:

This detailed story from TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Matthew Panzarino. From the story:

I was invited back to Apple to talk to the people most responsible for shepherding the renewed pro product strategy. John Ternus, vice president of Hardware Engineering, Tom Boger, senior director of Mac Hardware Product Marketing, Jud Coplan, director of Video Apps Product Marketing and Xander Soren, director of Music Apps Product Marketing.

The interviews and demos took place over several hours, highlighting the way that Apple is approaching upgradability, development of its pro apps and, most interestingly, how it has changed its process to help it more fully grok how professionals actually use its products.

A great read.

And this comment, at the end of Tsai’s rollup, from John Gruber’s take:

Sure, I wish the new Mac Pro were coming sooner. But overall this story is fantastic news for pro users — it shows Apple not only cares about the pro market, but that they’ve changed course and decided that the best way to serve pros is to work with them hand in hand.

That sums it up for me. I’m glad Apple has seen the light, is focused on bring us a new Mac Pro. Also glad they are taking the time to get it right, bring us something that will be worthy of the Pro moniker.

I do get the frustration of people who would prefer that Apple ship an upgradeable box (basically, an officially blessed Hackintosh), so they’d have something today. But that’s not Apple’s way.

Interesting, too, that Apple has parted the curtains enough to reveal plans for a product that may not ship until next December, 2019, 20 months from now.

Chance Miller does a nice job walking through the differences between the new education iPad and the iPads Pro. I spent a few minutes on Apple’s web site to pull down some specs comparing the low-end 12.9″ iPad Pro and the low-end 9.7″ iPad:

The lowest end 12.9″ iPad Pro:

• A10X Fusion chip
• Retina, ProMotion, True Tone display
• 12MP camera
• 4K video recording
• Smart connector, Bluetooth
• 64GB
• WiFi only
• $799

The lowest end education 9.7″ iPad:

• A10 chip
• Retina display
• 8MP camera
• 1080p video recording
• Bluetooth
• 32GB
• WiFi only
• $329

Interesting to me that the iPad Mini 4 is $399, no Apple Pencil, runs an A8 chip.

Tom Boger, Senior Director of Mac Hardware Product Marketing:

“We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It’s not something for this year.”

Matthew Panzarino provides some really interesting information in this piece after speaking to Apple. I especially like the new Pro Workflow Team.

The group is under John Ternus and works closely with the engineering organization. The bays that I’m taken to later to chat about Final Cut Pro, for instance, are a few doors away from the engineers tasked with making it run great on Apple hardware.

“We said in the meeting last year that the pro community isn’t one thing,” says Ternus. “It’s very diverse. There’s many different types of pros and obviously they go really deep into the hardware and software and are pushing everything to its limit. So one thing you have to do is we need to be engaging with the customers to really understand their needs. Because we want to provide complete pro solutions not just deliver big hardware which we’re doing and we did it with iMac Pro. But look at everything holistically.”

Apple is hiring some of the industry’s top professionals to find out where the pain points are in the workflow and fix them. This is an incredibly detailed approach to getting the next Mac Pro out the door.

“We’ve been focusing on visual effects and video editing and 3D animation and music production as well,” says Ternus. “And we’ve brought in some pretty incredible talent, really masters of their craft. And so they’re now sitting and building out workflows internally with real content and really looking for what are the bottlenecks. What are the pain points. How can we improve things. And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS is it in the drivers is it in the application is it in the silicon and then run it to ground to get it fixed.”

I can’t wait to see this new machine.

Jason Snell, Macworld:

This week’s report from Bloomberg that Apple is planning on moving the Mac to its own chips starting in 2020 is the culmination of years of growing speculation about the future of the Mac. I’ve been impressed by Apple’s use of ARM chips in new Macs while being skeptical about the prospects of a full transition.

But if we accept the Bloomberg report—and it’s from reporter Mark Gurman’s sources, which are generally excellent—it’s time to shift from speculating about whether or not Apple would do this and start to analyze why the company would make this move, and what form the transition might take.

Thoughtful piece by Jason Snell. Definitely worth reading.

Obviously, this post is based on speculation. But, as Jason says, Mark Gurman has an excellent track record. The question of why Apple would do this is an obvious one. If this is Apple’s plan, no one outside the company can answer it. But two things spring to mind for me.

First, moving the Mac to a chipset that they design and build would give them that much more control over the full stack. Less reliance on outside vendors, the ability to create a more efficient and more powerful set of devices.

Second, moving the Mac to the same chipset as the iPad would (and this is way out of my league conjecture here) make it that much easier to merge macOS and iOS, somewhere down the line.

Terrific piece by 9to5Mac’s Michael Steeber.

[Via Michael Tsai]

Posted by Google’s Communications & Public Affairs team.

Facebook Inc said on Wednesday that the personal information of up to 87 million users may have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, up from a previous news media estimate of more than 50 million.

Surely nobody is surprised.

iNaturalist:

Seek encourages outdoor exploration and learning by harnessing image recognition technology to help you identify plants and animals from your photos. Choose from a list of nearby plants, animals, and fungi and collect photographs of as many species as you can!

Drawing from millions of wildlife observations on iNaturalist, Seek shows you lists of commonly-recorded insects, birds, plants, amphibians, and more in your area. Use our maps and charts to determine what you want to look for and snap a photo when you think you’ve found it. Our image recognition software lets you know if you got it right and, if it’s a match, adds it to your collection.

As a City Kid, I’ve never had much need to “identify the plants and animals around me” but now that I live in a semi-rural area, I’m kind of curious about the flora and fauna I see. This app may be able to help.

CTV News:

It was just around lunchtime, so the story goes, when Stefan Michalak saw several unusual silver objects cross the sky in Manitoba’s Whiteshell Provincial Park.

It was May 20, 1967, and Michalak, an avid rock collector, was searching for new specimens near the shores of Falcon Lake.

What unfolded that day would go down in Canadian history as one of the country’s best-documented UFO encounters – one that’s now commemorated in a limited-edition coin from the Royal Canadian Mint.

I find this to a very odd thing for our Royal Canadian Mint to do. Thanks to John Kordyback for the link.

Facebook Inc said on Wednesday it planned to revise the written policies that people agree to when they use the social network, adding language about the protection of personal data as it prepares to comply with a strict new European law.

I wonder how much of this will show up in the U.S. considering Facebook already said it wouldn’t extend the new European law globally.

From this Wall Street Journal Journal article:

Users who opt not to input credit-card information for Apple Pay when setting up their phones now constantly see the red circle over their settings icon, indicating their setup is incomplete. Some users also periodically get notification reminders that go away only once they start the enrollment process.

To me, this is a dark pattern, something we happened to write about yesterday in this post, The terrible scourge of Dark Patterns.

John Gruber responds to Mickle’s WSJ article in this excellent Daring Fireball post:

Mickle has a point here. This does annoy people who, for whatever reason, don’t want to set up Apple Pay. There is a way to dismiss the red badge, but it’s not obvious how, because the button you have to tap says “Set Up Apple Pay”. (After that, you tap “Cancel” or “Set Up Later in Wallet”.) It is inscrutably counterintuitive to need to tap a button that says “Set Up Apple Pay” when your intention is to stop being nagged to set it up because you don’t want to set up Apple Pay.

A dark pattern, right? To me, if Apple is going to red dot persist you into signing up or not, better for the user to force the decision up front. In or out, your choice, thank you for your time.

Moving on, Gruber gets to the heart of the Apple Pay issue, adoption:

I do think Apple has a marketing problem with Apple Pay, though. I can tell from talking to family members that a lot of people just don’t see why they should try Apple Pay, because they have no idea how it works or why they’d want to use it. And I think they worry that because it’s new and sort of science-fiction-y it will make their credit card more likely to be hacked, when the truth is the opposite. I think Apple needs more ads that explain and demonstrate the convenience and indisputable security advantages of using Apple Pay instead of a credit card, and the extraordinary convenience of Apple Pay Cash. I can see how a lot of people think, “Eh, I’ll just keep using my credit card” when they’re paying for something in a retail store. But Apple Pay Cash could be enough to get these people to set up Apple Pay.

Coincidentally, Apple just posted a terrific series of Apple Pay ads (watch them here). I think John is spot-on here. The value of Apple Pay is wildly under-appreciated. Though Apple is pushing to brand Apple Pay as a cool shiny, it has not pushed across the message of Apple Pay’s safety, security. Possibly because safety and security is boring. It’s critically important, but it’s tough to make the point in any sort of entertaining way.

Google Developer Blog:

We’re turning down support for goo.gl over the coming weeks and replacing it with Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL). FDLs are smart URLs that allow you to send existing and potential users to any location within an iOS, Android or web app. We’re excited to grow and improve the product going forward. While most features of goo.gl will eventually sunset, all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.

And:

Starting April 13, 2018, anonymous users and users who have never created short links before today will not be able to create new short links via the goo.gl console. If you are looking to create new short links, we recommend you use Firebase Dynamic Links or check out popular services like Bitly and Ow.ly as an alternative.

If you have existing goo.gl short links, you can continue to use all features of goo.gl console for a period of one year, until March 30, 2019, when we will discontinue the console.

I can only imagine there’s a subtlety to this change, something that brings traffic through Google in a more useful manner than goo.gl did.

A possible clue:

URL Shortener has been a great tool that we’re proud to have built. As we look towards the future, we’re excited about the possibilities of Firebase Dynamic Links, particularly when it comes to dynamic platform detection and links that survive the app installation process.

Interesting. Have to learn more about Firebase Dynamic Links.