Introduced in 1982, the KORG SDD-3000 Digital Delay was popularized by U2 guitarist, The Edge, to forge one of the most identifiable guitar sounds in the history of rock. Far from a one-instrument-pony, however, the SDD-3000 also found a home in early new wave and 80’s synth music. Fully endorsed by KORG, the KORG SDD-3000 Digital Delay plug-in for UAD and Apollo interfaces exactly captures the original unit’s colorful analog circuitry, and burnished-sounding 13-bit delays.

There is no company that does better emulations than Universal Audio. Take a listen to the sounds on the company’s page.

Nikkei Asian Review, first on Apple rolling their own modem chip:

Two other chip industry executives also echoed Li’s view that Apple will develop its own modem chips or at least boost its related capabilities – a view bolstered by Apple’s poaching top Qualcomm modem chip engineer Esin Terzioglu earlier this year.

But Li added it is was unlikely that Apple could quickly roll out such components within two years. Modem chips have a very high threshold to develop and need to fulfill requirements of different operators worldwide.

A veteran chip industry executive estimates that it would require more than a minimum one thousand engineers to work on such a project.

As far as Macs go:

Core processor chips for the MacBook range is another area Apple is trying to venture into.

Two industry sources say that Apple is trying to cut its dependence on Intel when it comes to notebook chips and instead build those using ARM architecture, referring to the SoftBank-controlled British chip designer.

“Notebooks are becoming thinner, while consumers are demanding better mobility and longer battery life. That gives ARM’s architecture, which is known for its power efficiency, a very good opportunity,” a chip industry executive said.

And:

Apple also aims to design its own chips that could integrate touch, fingerprint and display driver functions, sources say.

“Apple has hired engineers from Taiwan’s No. 1 display-driver chip designers Novatek and panel makers of AU Optronics as it wants to control next-generation display technology and some related key components,” said a Taiwanese chip industry manager.

Apple switching Macs to ARM chips has long been a topic of speculation. And there are significant technical hurdles to overcome. Interesting, but take with a grain of salt.

Thanks to Twocanoes Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. If you are upgrading to High Sierra and have a Boot Camp partition, check out Winclone 6. Winclone 6 is the ideal Mac App for backing up your Boot Camp partition. You spent a ton of time getting your Windows setup just right, and Winclone makes sure that you can always get back to that same setup. Winclone creates a exact clone of your Boot Camp partition, including all Windows system files, applications, and data. If you have a failed update, bad drive, or ransomware attack in Windows, you just restore your Winclone backup and you are back up and running.

Get 50% off Winclone 6 with code WCLOOPHS through Sept 30th.

There are pictures of the phone, and of another phone with a similar symptom.

From the article:

So far, the finger of blame is being pointed at the battery. Unconfirmed reports state the iPhone 8 Plus uses the same battery manufacturer, Amperex Technology Limited (ATL), as the Samsung Galaxy Note 7.

But it’s worth remembering a couple of things. Firstly, many of the details surrounding this incident are hazy and unconfirmed. Take them with a grain of salt.

Exactly. If this is a widespread issue, we’ll see confirmed reports. If it’s a few flawed phones, this will quickly die off.

This piece is interesting, funny, and insightful. He coached his third graders like he ran Microsoft. Fascinating that his players had no idea who he was, beyond being their coach.

Scott Stein, on sending SMS texts via his cellular Apple Watch:

I have experienced some quirks, particularly with text messages, and investigating them revealed some limitations in how the Apple Watch handles its wireless interactions.

And:

The Apple Watch really, really wants your phone to be powered on somewhere, connected to Wi-Fi or LTE. That location doesn’t have to be anywhere near the Watch, however. Your iPhone can be sitting on your nightstand at home, and you could be 50 miles away — though, obviously, someplace that still has cellular coverage.

The different scenarios are subtle. Scott does a nice job of laying out the rules. And here’s an Apple support page that addresses these issues, though I think Scott’s writeup better addresses the scenarios involving SMS.

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

The new Xcode 9.1 beta has also been released by Apple today with support for the new operating system updates: iOS 11.1, watchOS 4.1 and tvOS 11.1. It also includes a more fully-fledged iPhone X simulator, which demonstrates the new lock screen and home screen experiences.

There are also some onboarding videos, for things like activating Siri or revealing Control Center, which will be shown to iPhone X users upon setup.

Benjamin does a great job pulling together these inside looks at the iPhone X experience. Read his article, there’s a lot to it.

Here’s just a taste, a pair of onboarding videos, two different results when you swipe up from the bottom, one with a pause and one without, courtesy of Guilherme Rambo:

Remember I talked about onboarding videos when setting up the iPhone X? Here's the first one. pic.twitter.com/Fe5t3s8lgo

— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) September 27, 2017

iPhone X onboarding video 2: go home pic.twitter.com/WrG0cW5Iqq

— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) September 27, 2017

Love this.

The Hollywood Reporter:

The world’s biggest company is officially taking meetings as everyone from Jennifer Aniston to Steven Spielberg salivates over selling the first big show. One studio chief says, “Who wouldn’t want to be the ‘Mad Men’ or ‘House of Cards’ on Apple?”

And:

Though Apple isn’t looking to replicate the pace or scale of rival Netflix’s $6 billion annual spend, it is eager to be in the prestige content business in a significant way. Per multiple sources briefed on the company’s plans, its executives are looking for big, smart, splashy dramas, with at least one citing Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and The Crown as models. And though there are still plenty of questions — first and foremost, how will an Apple show be distributed? — talent is lining up to provide options.

And:

At press time, the company had bids out on only a handful of projects, including an update of Steven Spielberg’s 1980s sci-fi, horror, fantasy anthology series, Amazing Stories, and a morning show drama starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, according to several involved.

Apple is entering new territory here. The good news is, they’ve long proved they can take on something completely new, dig in, learn the critical lessons, then produce quality product. Given what we’ve seen so far, it’s certainly fair to be skeptical, but I like the moves Apple is making and look forward to watching them master this space.

A few bits from Apple’s Face ID Security white paper:

When Face ID detects and matches your face, iPhone X unlocks without asking for the device passcode. Face ID makes using a longer, more complex passcode far more practical because you don’t need to enter it as frequently.

If Face ID was able to eliminate the passcode completely, users could use long, impossible to memorize strings, just as they would with strong passwords combined with a password manager. But the fact that you have to memorize the passcode (you won’t have to use it much, but you’ll still encounter situations where you’ll need it) limits the complexity. Not a complaint, just an observation.

Here’s when a passcode is still required:

• You can always use your passcode instead of Face ID, and it’s still required under the following circumstances:
• The device has just been turned on or restarted.
• The device hasn’t been unlocked for more than 48 hours.
• The passcode hasn’t been used to unlock the device in the last 156 hours (six and a half days) and Face ID has not unlocked the device in the last 4 hours.
• The device has received a remote lock command.
• After five unsuccessful attempts to match a face.
• After initiating power off/Emergency SOS by pressing and holding either volume button and the side button simultaneously for 2 seconds.

And:

The TrueDepth camera automatically looks for your face when you wake iPhone X by raising it or tapping the screen, as well as when iPhone X attempts to authenticate you to display an incoming notification or when a supported app requests Face ID authentication. When a face is detected, Face ID confirms attention and intent to unlock by detecting that your eyes are open and directed at your device; for accessibility, this is disabled when VoiceOver is activated or can be disabled separately, if required.

This is what’s encrypted and saved in the iPhone X Secure Enclave:

• The infrared images of your face captured during enrollment.
• The mathematical representations of your face calculated during enrollment.
• The mathematical representations of your face calculated during some unlock attempts if Face ID deems them useful to augment future matching.

There’s a lot more in the white paper, including some detail on Apple Pay, and third party access to Face ID.

Fast Company:

“Companies often claim to have ‘anonymized’ your location history by taking your name off it,” says Peter Eckersley, the chief computer scientist of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But that is totally inadequate because you’re probably the only person who lives in your house and who works in your office, and it’s easy for any researcher or data scientist to look at a location trace and figure out who it belonged to.”

If you gave someone my location data, completely scrubbed of any identifying info other than geo-coordinates, it would be simple for them to turn that into my name, address, phone number and, with a bit of work, even more personalized information.

If my location data includes a stop at a house, especially if I only stop at one house, chances are good that’s my house. A simple lookup in a public tax database and they’ve got me, and a wealth of info about me.

Great article.

Apple has always emphasized their belief in privacy. This update of their site makes that much clearer, with a focus on tentpole issues. There’s a lot of detail on this subsite. Apple’s commitment to privacy is strong and well laid out.

Take a look.

Jan Dawson, Tech Narratives:

Amazon announced last night that Google had pulled its YouTube app from the former’s Echo Show device, the company’s first screen-based voice speaker. YouTube was one of very few video options available on the Echo Show, with Amazon’s own Prime Video being the main alternative.

Amazon has something Apple wants and seeks to emulate in Prime Video. Amazon wants to protect Prime Video, is using its storefront power to horsetrade with Apple, swapping Apple TV presence on Amazon.com for a Prime Video app on Apple TV.

Google and Amazon are fighting a different battle. At the very least, there’s Google Home vs Amazon Echo. But there’s a subtle shopping competitiveness as well, with both trying to work into the first place consumers go when they want to make a purchase.

All of this might have nothing to do with why Google pulled YouTube (the claim is that Amazon’s implementation broke YouTube’s terms of service). It might have more to do with ads and tracking than anything else. But make no mistake, each pairing is its own chess match.

I’ve been using Edovia’s screen sharing app for some time now and love it. If you need such an app, give this a try, you won’t be disappointed.

Apple has released macOS 10.13 High Sierra, the newest operating system for Mac. To improve High Sierra security when installing system software (such as UAD drivers), the software must be explicitly allowed to load in the Security & Privacy pane within macOS System Preferences.

These are my most used audio plug-ins, so compatibility is a must for my music machine.

Roman Cheplyaka:

Many websites and applications these days are designed to trick you into doing things that their creators want. If you ever used Booking.com, you probably noticed (and hopefully resisted!) some ways it nudges you to book whatever property you are looking at.

You’ve undoubtedly seen these kinds of tricks on many other websites. Be aware of how they try to convince you to “BUY NOW”.

Ars Technica:

For a host of issues, like vaccine safety, climate change, and GMO foods, public opinion is a poor match for our scientific standing. That dissonance has led a lot of people to ask how we could do better at getting scientific information out to the public. But the Pew Research Center decided to ask a related question that’s just as important: where’s the public getting its scientific information now?

The answer, disappointingly, is that most people in the US aren’t getting any scientific information at all.

While this study is on Americans, there’s no reason to believe other countries would do any better. Many of us seek out more information about our favorite sports team than we do science news.

Twitter is experimenting with a change to the character limit, moving the limit from 140 to 280 characters. They are slowly rolling this out to selected accounts, with no clear commitment, yet, to rolling this out to the universe.

From the official Twitter blog post:

Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain.

Interestingly, this isn’t a problem everywhere people Tweet. For example, when I (Aliza) Tweet in English, I quickly run into the 140 character limit and have to edit my Tweet down so it fits. Sometimes, I have to remove a word that conveys an important meaning or emotion, or I don’t send my Tweet at all. But when Iku Tweets in Japanese, he doesn’t have the same problem. He finishes sharing his thought and still has room to spare. This is because in languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.

We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we’re doing something new: we’re going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming (which is all except Japanese, Chinese, and Korean).

And:

Although we feel confident about our data and the positive impact this change will have, we want to try it out with a small group of people before we make a decision to launch to everyone.

Read on for the logic behind this change. But the change is in the wild, so you will likely see 280 char tweets in your stream.

This BBC article covers the change and includes some cheeky tweets in response to the change. My favorite is this one.

Want to try your hand at a 280 character tweet? It’ll take a bit of work, but I’ve jumped through the hoops myself (here’s my test tweet) and it works. No guarantees Twitter won’t close this loophole.

Here’s a link to The Next Web post [H/T Ben Lovejoy – Nice find, Ben!] that lays out the technique. In a nutshell, you fire up Chrome, open up the TweetDeck web client, open the Snippets editor, paste in some code and bam, you’ve now got 280 characters to play with.

Have fun, and feel free to tweet at me in all your 280 character glory.

UPDATE: Shawn King found an even easier way to up your limit, via TamperMonkey. Here’s a link to a how-to post.

First things first, take a look at the video embedded below, a Fox News interview with Bill Gates. Jump to about 11:28 in, where Bill is asked about his “famously tempestuous” relationship with Steve Jobs and the new iPhone.

With that in mind, this is John Gruber, from the linked Daring Fireball post:

I say this with no snark intended: who would have guessed 10 years ago that Bill Gates would be using a personal computing device running a non-Microsoft OS? Or really, an OS that didn’t have “Windows” in the name?

And:

While I’m at it, it occurs to me that Apple is the only company left where all its employees are using only systems made by their own company.

Read the whole post, including the update. Fascinating.

Luke Filipowicz, Lory Gil, iMore:

Downloading and installing a new OS gives you the opportunity to do some major house cleaning if you so desire. If you feel like you’d like a fresh start with macOS High Sierra, you can always opt to do a clean install: Just follow the steps below, even if you’ve already installed macOS High Sierra.

A clean install does give you a chance to shake out the leftover cruft from legacy installs. Me, I always keep several copies of backups, untouched, so I can go back and retrieve old apps/data I was sure I’d never need again.

Good post.