Not sure how long iFixit has been posting teardown videos, but this is the first I’ve seen. Brilliant to be able to watch someone tear this tech down to the nubs.

So much to learn about the work and material that goes into HomePod. That outer mesh is magical. I wonder how they manufacture it.

One thing that is clear: This sucker is tough to take apart. It’s no wonder Apple charges $279 to repair or replace a broken, out-of-warranty HomePod.

The wait is almost over. Alto’s Odyssey launches on the App Store next week on Thursday, February 22nd. The game will be available on iOS + tvOS, right at launch.

This is the follow-up to Alto’s Adventure, a great game from Ryan Cash.

This is pretty shocking. Just scroll through the images. Venice is a city that depends on its canals, both for tourism and transportation.

[H/T Eric Vitiello]

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple’s annual software upgrade this fall will offer users plenty of new features: enabling a single set of apps to work across iPhones, iPads and Macs, a Digital Health tool to show parents how much time their children have been staring at their screen and improvements to Animojis, those cartoon characters controlled by the iPhone X’s facial recognition sensor.

But just as important this year will be what Apple doesn’t introduce: redesigned home screens for the iPhone, iPad and CarPlay, and a revamped Photos app that can suggest which images to view.

These features were delayed after Apple Inc. concluded it needed its own major upgrade in the way the company develops and introduces new products. Instead of keeping engineers on a relentless annual schedule and cramming features into a single update, Apple will start focusing on the next two years of updates for its iPhone and iPad operating system, according to people familiar with the change. The company will continue to update its software annually, but internally engineers will have more discretion to push back features that aren’t as polished to the following year.

Read the rest of the article for details, but can’t help but see this as a significant move in the right direction, assuming it is true.

This is not frivolous opinion. There is a lot of detail on both the tools used to measure things like “Fletcher-Munson loudness compensation”, and the measurements themselves.

From the conclusion:

The Look and feel is top notch. The glass on top is sort of frosted, but is smooth to the touch. When I first reviewed the home pod, I noted that it was light. I was comparing it with the heft of my KEF speakers. This thing, as small as it is, weighs 5 lbs. Which is quite dense, and heavy for its size. The Fabric that wraps around it is study, reinforced from inside, and feels very good to the touch.

And:

The Frequency response, Directivity, and ability to correct for the room all go to show that the HomePod is a speaker for the masses. While many of you in this subreddit would be very comfortable doing measurements, and room treatment, there is no denying that most users won’t go through that much trouble, and for those users the HomePod is perfect.

And caveats:

Because of the onboard DSP, you must feed it digital files. So analog input from something like a Phono is out, unless your Phono Preamp has a digital output which can then be fed to the HomePods in realtime via airplay, possibly through a computer. But you cannot give the HomePod analog audio, as the DSP which does all the room correction requires digital input.

And:

Speaking of inputs, you have one choice: AirPlay. which means, unless you’re steeped in the apple ecosystem, it’s really hard to recommend this thing. If you are, it’s a no brainer, whether you’re an audiophile or not.

And:

As a product, the HomePod is also held back by Siri. Almost every review has complained about this, and they’re all right to do so. I’m hoping we see massive improvements to Siri this year at WWDC 2018. There is some great hardware at play, too. What’s truly impressive is that Siri can hear you if you speak in a normal voice, even if the HomePod is playing at full volume. I couldn’t even hear myself say “Hey Siri” over the music, but those directional microphones are really good at picking it up. Even whispers from across the room while I was facing AWAY from the HomePod were flawlessly picked up. The microphones are scary good — I just hope Apple improves Siri to match.

And from the rollup at the top of the post:

am speechless. The HomePod actually sounds better than the KEF X300A. If you’re new to the Audiophile world, KEF is a very well respected and much loved speaker company. I actually deleted my very first measurements and re-checked everything because they were so good, I thought I’d made an error. Apple has managed to extract peak performance from a pint sized speaker, a feat that deserves a standing ovation. The HomePod is 100% an Audiophile grade Speaker.

I don’t have the expertise to speak to the audiophile comments, but everything else in the post clicks for me, jibes with my HomePod experience.

As to the negatives, I think Apple has done a great job of making sure the hardware is top notch. Which means they can fix the software negatives via updates over time.

Me? I absolutely love my HomePod. If you love music, and are willing to pony up for Apple Music, it’s a no-brainer purchase.

Last week we posted about the iOS 9 iBoot source code leak that was headlined to be the biggest leak in history.

Motherboard has followed up with details on the leak itself:

A low-level Apple employee with friends in the jailbreaking community took code from Apple while working at the company’s Cupertino headquarters in 2016, according to two people who originally received the code from the employee. Motherboard has corroborated these accounts with text messages and screenshots from the time of the original leak and has also spoken to a third source familiar with the story.

Motherboard has granted these sources anonymity given the likelihood of Apple going after them for obtaining and distributing proprietary, copyrighted software. The original Apple employee did not respond to our request for comment and said through his friend that he did not currently want to talk about it because he signed a non-disclosure agreement with Apple.

To me, this is theft, clear as day. Not sure if Apple will go after the leakers, but if I were those leakers, I’d get some sound legal advice.

Warning: Don’t try this at home. This is a professional cord puller on a closed course.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, New York Times:

When do the strongest adult musical preferences set in?

And:

For this project, the music streaming service Spotify gave me data on how frequently every song is listened to by men and women of each particular age.

And:

Consider, for example, the song “Creep,” by Radiohead. This is the 164th most popular song among men who are now 38 years old. But it is not in the top 300 for the cohort born 10 years earlier or 10 years later.

Note that the men who most like “Creep” now were roughly 14 when the song came out in 1993. In fact, this is a consistent pattern.

I did a similar analysis with every song that topped the Billboard charts from 1960 to 2000. In particular, I measured how old their biggest fans today were when these songs first came out.

I was about 11 when I first really latched on to music, 12 when I got my hands on my first guitar. And by 14, I was deeply immersed in what would become my forever comfort music.

Fascinating article.

Wired:

Drone shows like the one on display at the Pyeongchang Games have taken place before; you may remember the drone army that flanked Lady Gaga at last year’s Super Bowl. But the burst of drones that filled the sky Friday night—or early morning, depending on where in the world you watched—comprised four times as many fliers. Without hyperbole, there’s really never been anything like it.

That was incredible.

Brian Irace:

If the Lyft app is installed on your iPhone, you can ask Phone Siri to order you a car. But you can’t ask Mac Siri to do the same, because she doesn’t know what Lyft is. Compare and contrast this with the SDKs for Alexa and the Google Assistant – they each run third-party software server-side, such that installing the Lyft Alexa “skill” once gives Alexa the ability to summon a ride regardless of if you’re talking to her on an Echo in your bedroom, a different Echo in your living room, or via the Alexa app on your phone.

This is a major difference in approach between Alexa and Google extensions, which both use a server-side approach, and Siri, which runs extensions client-side. In a nutshell, Siri’s approach allows for a more custom and, at the same time, limited approach, using communication and negotiation between devices to work out what’s what.

Currently, this communication seems limited to which Siri should respond to a request. If you lift your wrist and say “Hey, Siri”, your Apple Watch gets priority. If your HomePod Siri is enabled and your wrist is down, HomePod gets priority. You get the idea.

What’s missing is an intelligent mesh of negotiation and handoff. For example, if HomePod gets a request to make a phone call, that request should be handed off to your iPhone, perhaps verifying the handoff with a “Would you like me to make that call on your iPhone?” first.

There are permissions issue to deal with in this kind of scheme, but it certainly seems a logical need. If I ask HomePod to call a Lyft and HomePod doesn’t have that capability, seems logical for HomePod to hand that task off to another device that can order one for me.

All that said, I can only imagine that Apple is hard at work on a solution for this Siri mesh issue.

UPDATE: I left the word extensions out of the original writeup. Siri is server side, but the extensions are client side. I’ve not actually built a Siri extension, so I’m on shaky understanding here, but I believe this is correct.

Jesse Hollington, writing for iLounge, reviews a HomeKit-enabled power strip that provides three independently-controlled AC outlets plus three USB charging ports. This seems a pretty easy entry point to start exploring HomeKit, and a nice HomePod companion.

Siri, turn on the lights.

Glenn Fleishman, Macworld:

iTunes backups of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch don’t contain apps and some kinds of media. They contain settings and certain kinds of documents stored within apps, and may contain images stored in an iOS device’s Camera Roll. Some apps that use iCloud or other cloud-based sync mark their local content as not needing to be backed up, since it can be restored by logging back into an account or resyncing.

Confused? Fair enough. What does and does not get backed up, and where various elements do get backed up, is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. Glenn Fleishman does his best do lay all this out.

My two cents? Backup your music library, photos, critical documents on removable media, store it somewhere safe. Update that backup periodically.

There a HomePod in your future? This is an invaluable resource you might want to spend a little quality time digging through.

Seems to me, Apple should put a link to this guide on their main HomePod page, make it a bit easier to find.

[H/T Robert Walter]

Have you cut the cord? Interested in the Olympics, but don’t have access to the channels that carry them? This is definitely worth the read.

If you live in the US, don’t forget that you can get your local channels, in high-def, over-the-air via an antenna, at least in most locations.

The games have officially started, and the Opening Ceremony will be replayed tonight during prime time. Here’s a link to NBC’s official Olympics site.

Well done. Lots of tiny details to watch out for. Love this.

[H/T John Kordyback]

Enjoy the run through of the new emoji.

One thing that I did find puzzling: About 30 seconds in, you’ll see emoji for Super Villains and Super Heroes. The difference? Super Villains wear pink and purple. Super Heroes wear red and blue.

Not crazy about this path. Associating specific colors with good and evil is, to me, the first step down a bad road. Maybe make the Super Villains distinctive in some other way?

To be clear, these were mockups crafted by Emojipedia, not from Apple, so hopefully the final Apple versions will follow a different path.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

I hate headlines like this. Biggest leak in history? Come on.

Here’s where the reaction comes from:

Someone just posted what experts say is the source code for a core component of the iPhone’s operating system on GitHub, which could pave the way for hackers and security researchers to find vulnerabilities in iOS and make iPhone jailbreaks easier to achieve.

The GitHub code is labeled “iBoot,” which is the part of iOS that is responsible for ensuring a trusted boot of the operating system. In other words, it’s the program that loads iOS, the very first process that runs when you turn on your iPhone. It loads and verifies the kernel is properly signed by Apple and then executes it—it’s like the iPhone’s BIOS.

This is true. It’s also true that Apple filed a copyright takedown and GitHub removed the post. But that’s a side note. Important, but a side note.

Buried down in the Motherboard article is this nugget:

This source code first surfaced last year, posted by a Reddit user called “apple_internals” on the Jailbreak subreddit.

This has been known about for some time. It’s iOS 9 source code and, while it’s likely true that some of that source code remains in iOS 11, Apple has known about this for long enough that they’ve certainly made any necessary changes to limit their exposure. I’d suggest that this GitHub publication had more value to the original poster and to Motherboard than to the anyone trying to hack the current version of iBoot.

And that said, I hope I’m right about this.

This post from Pavan Rajam is long, well researched, and insightful, well worth the read if you are interested in Apple and their pursuit of the TV market.

Just a bit from the report:

Content development and production are not things Apple has done before. Will these shows even be good? Based on Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu’s progress on this front, success is possible but not guaranteed.

And:

In the current market, content is used to differentiate services, not hardware. Amazon, for example, uses original content to drive Prime subscriptions. It could care less whether you watch it on a Fire TV or another device.

And:

If growing Services revenue is a high priority, will this original content be available on non-Apple platforms (like Apple Music on Android, or iTunes on Windows)?

Those are just a taste of a much bigger picture. Great read.

Eddy Cue took the stage for an Apple Music Q&A at Variety’s Pollstar conference:

Eddy Cue, Apple senior vice president of software and services, says the goal is for everyone to have nothing in their pockets.

Well, other than an iPhone, he said, laughing.

Demonstrating the seemingly small but life-changing tech Apple is known for, Cue explained how he goes to work without even carrying keys or a wallet. “Not having keys to anything is really nice,” Cue said. “It’s simple, but it’s a big deal.”

And:

“Anytime you want to purchase something, the number of clicks, the number of things you have to do, you see dropoff,” Cue said. “Depending on how many there are, there are always huge dropoffs. With Apple Pay, you see something you want, you basically do the face ID and you’re done. It’s very easy to complete the transactions.”

And:

“For us, one of weirdest things in the music industry is the lack of transparency,” Cue said. “One of things that we want to do, specifically when we think from an artist point of view, we want to make information available to them as we have, so they can see what is actually happening,” Cue said. “Obviously it’s great for live because you can see where your fan base is, but it’s great for marketing. You can see the effects of what you’re doing basically in near-real time,” such as being on an A-list playlist.

Eddy also talks about the live concert experience and bringing that to more people. Interesting post.

I love these two Open Culture stories:

“How ancient Greek statues really looked: research reveals their bold, bright colors and patterns”

“The Met digitally restores the colors of an ancient Egyptian temple, using projection mapping technology”

Like most of us, I thought the statues and monuments we saw of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and others were a dull white or a boring sandy brown colour. It wasn’t until I traveled to Egypt a few years ago. The tour guide pointed out that of course the things we were looking at were painted in their original form. I realized we aren’t seeing these antiquities as they were originally made. These stories and videos help us imagine what they actually might have looked like.