Kif Leswing, Business Insider:

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.

Ron Avitzur:

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.

[H/T, @thisneedseditin]

Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note:

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.)

SlashFilm:

3D movies might soon be 3-dead.

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.

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.