A patent granted on Tuesday depicted technology that would sense the “manner” in which a finger touched the iPhone screen to trigger a 911 call. For example, the phone might look for a particular sequence of fingers, the level of force, a gesture (pinching or swiping), or a certain cadence of taps to the screen, the filing says.
When the “panic command” is activated, the phone would provide the users’ location to responders, and could also livestream audio or video from the iPhone.
The key to this, for me, is the ability to subtly make a call to 911, capturing audio and video, all without a potential attacker being aware the call was placed. Terrific idea.
Customs officials in Shenzhen, China have arrested a woman with 102 iPhones stuffed into her clothing.
Shenzhen borders Hong Kong, and, over the years, customs officials have arrested all sorts of smugglers.
According to XMNN, customs officials recently stopped a woman after noticing that the way her body bulged appeared strange. The officials searched her, discovering she was allegedly smuggling 102 iPhones of various models as well as 15 luxury wrist watches. The total weight of her haul was over 44 pounds.
Not sure what drove this particular smuggler. Was it a price disparity between iPhone values in Hong Kong and Shenzhen? More an issue of scarcity? A combination of both?
What I found most fascinating was the picture with the smuggler and the two border agents. The smuggler’s face is pixellated, the agents’ faces are not. And the smuggler is pointing to the iPhones, all laid out in front of her. Was she made to do this? It feels less mug shot, more selfie.
Two weeks ago I moved from Scotland to Germany to start a new job as an iOS engineer at SoundCloud. On Monday of last week I started that job. By Thursday evening I, along with 172 of my new colleagues, was officially being laid off. And then, on Friday, I received somewhere in the region of sixty emails about potential new jobs.
It’s been a wild week.
Follow the link to read the whole thing. That’s some story. I hope Matthew gets a new job right quick.
Apple today updated its professional audio editing software Logic Pro X to version 10.3.2, introducing bug fixes, performance improvements, and a couple of new features.
Today’s update brings three new Drummers able to play percussion in the styles of Pop, Songwriter, and Latin, and the new Drummer loops can be added to songs and customized with performance controls.
Apple has also improved the responsiveness of the graphical user interface, introduced an automatic time align feature for improved morphing in Alchemy, and debuted new tools for fine tuning the pitch of an audio region.
Apple today announced that Isabel Ge Mahe, vice president of Wireless Technologies, has been named vice president and managing director of Greater China, reporting to CEO Tim Cook and COO Jeff Williams. In this newly created role, Isabel will provide leadership and coordination across Apple’s China-based team.
And:
lsabel has led Apple’s wireless technologies software engineering teams for nine years, focusing on development of cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, location and motion technologies for nearly every Apple product. She has also overseen the engineering teams developing Apple Pay, HomeKit and CarPlay.
In China, she has worked closely with Apple’s R&D team and carrier partners to develop new China-specific features for iPhone and iPad, including recently announced iOS 11 features such as QR Code support, SMS fraud prevention and enabling the use of a phone number as an Apple ID.
This is a highly visible role in an area critical to Apple’s growth.
Yes, that’s Google Glass on her frames. But she’s not using it to check her Facebook, dictate messages, or capture a no-hands video while riding a roller coaster. Erickson is a 30-year-old factory worker in rural Jackson, Minnesota. For her, Glass is not a hip way to hang apps in front of her eyeballs, but a tool—as much a tool as her power wrenches. It walks her through her shifts at Station 50 on the factory floor, where she builds motors for tractors.
Okay, I can see how it could make sense for some business markets.
With one massive update we’ve brought everyone’s favorite file-transferring truck into the future with more speed, more servers, more features, more fixes, a better UI, and even Panic Sync. Everything from the core file transfer engine to the “Get Info” experience was rethought, overhauled, and improved.
I’ve been using Transmit for so many years, I can’t even remember how long it’s been. Great app.
Custom fit earphones, where the some or all of the earphone is moulded to fit your ear exactly, have undergone something of a resurgence. Traditionally worn by musicians, new materials and technologies have given custom fit earphones a new lease of life as a viable option for consumers that demand the most comfortable fit possible. Custom fit earphones have historically demanded a visit to an audiologist to create moulds (which is an interesting experience to say the least), but the arrival of 3D scanners, 3D printing, and new materials mean moulds can be made quicker and cheaper, even at home.
The question is, do custom fit earphones offer a tangible advantage over foam tips, which cost a mere £12 for a set of three? And can the cheaper options compete with a traditional audiologist mould?
I’ve had a few sets of custom fit earphones and have loved (and sadly, lost) them.
Now you can give the customer support experts in your organization the ability to respond to customer reviews on the App Store with the new Customer Support role in iTunes Connect. Users with the Admin or Customer Support role have the ability to respond to customer reviews.
Part of the problem has been the price, but with Amazon coming on the scene, that could change. The online retailer is known for offering low prices. Once the Whole Foods deal goes through, it’ll have a strong grocery backbone to plant a stake. Throw in a well-established logistics and delivery systems and Amazon is poised to be a real meal-kits player.
I don’t know how a company like Blue Apron can compete with Amazon. The article is right though, price has been a deterrent in making meal kits even more successful, especially with the coupons codes for Splendid Spoon I was able to receive, which is a competing meal kit I found. With Amazon entering the market, that could be fixed very quickly.
While Apple tends to keep upcoming technologies and features under lock and key, its upcoming facial recognition software will likely be based on technology it acquired when it purchased an Israeli machine learning company called Realface earlier this year. Consequently, a close examination of Realface’s cutting edge technology can provide us with a number of significant clues as to what we can expect out of the highly anticipated iPhone 8.
And:
The company also claims that its software can recognize faces with an impressive 99.67% success rate, a figure which is actually higher than the 97.5% success rate most humans are capable of when it comes to recognizing faces.
And:
Realface’s technology is said to be so sophisticated that it can filter out photos, videos and even sculptures designed with the express purpose of tricking the software.
Apple’s intentions are good. Customers downloading apps that haven’t been updated in years is bound to create a poor experience, and lack of developer support undoubtedly generates complaints to Apple.
Getting rid of 32-bit code is also sensible: it reduces app sizes, iOS can drop old APIs and 32-bit-only code, and everything new runs smoother and better. It’s also a good way to “encourage” customers to upgrade to more recent hardware (older devices are 32-bit-only and will not run iOS 11).
However, Apple’s solutions to these issues have serious problems.
Interesting piece on the issues with the way Apple manages apps. For me, there are all kinds of annoyances, minor and major, with the way Apple manages (often poorly) apps on iOS.
This is one of those areas where Apple may be the victim of its own success. The iPhone is so popular a product that Apple can’t include any technology or source any part if it can’t be made more than 200 million times a year. If the supplier of a cutting-edge part Apple wants can only provide the company with 50 million per year, it simply can’t be used in the iPhone. Apple sells too many, too fast.
And:
Most cutting-edge technologies are going to cost more and initially be available in limited quantities, unless Apple makes huge investments in equipment and manufacturing and corners the world’s supply of those parts, which it has done on more than one occasion.
Apple’s has to balance discriminators against practicality, bleeding edge tech that can help the latest iPhone stand above existing phones against the problems that come trying to buy that bleeding edge tech in adequate and reliable quantities.
The App Store is the most successful guarded ecosystem in the history of the internet. For nearly a decade, Apple has undertaken a remarkable task—keeping an enormous software marketplace free from spam, malware, and risks to user security. And for the most part, it has been good at the job.
But at the same time, Apple has repeatedly rejected apps and refused to clarify its decisions to developers and users. While it’s also frequently corrected its mistakes, rejections like Metadata’s show that Apple is not afraid to wield its power without explaining itself.
The company has effectively dictated what kind of content should live on the devices we carry around with us everywhere, and stare at for hours each day. By controlling what’s allowed in its App Store, Apple has shaped how iPhone, iPad, and Mac users experience the internet.
The article includes a small handful of examples to make its point. As you read this, keep in mind how impossibly complex a task Apple has in reviewing millions of apps in a steadily surging river of inputs. In recent years, Apple has improved the process with most app submissions turning around in a matter of a day or so, many turning around in a few hours.
With a process this complex, mistakes will be made, and edge cases will exist. But given the choice, I’d rather live in the walled ecosystem controlled by Apple, with its commitment to keeping out spam and malware, than any other choices out there.
Silicon Valley’s most powerful imagination belongs to a very powerful CEO.
That’s according to recent data from job search firm Paysa, which used IBM’s supercomputer Watson to determine that Apple CEO Tim Cook is the tech industry’s “most imaginative” leader. Cook is followed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Cisco’s Chuck Robbins.
How they reached this conclusion:
To arrive at these results, Paysa fed “speeches, essays, books, the transcripts of interviews and other forms of communication produced by those highlighted above”— over 2,500 words — through the Watson Personality Insights API.
Benedict Evans, on iPhone as a subscription service:
One can certainly argue that selling smartphones is a subscription business, and though Google does not itself sell phones (to any significant degree), Apple certainly does. You pay an average of $700 or so every two years (i.e. $30/month) and Apple gives you a phone. Buy an Android instead and you lose access to the (hypothetical) great Apple television service.
On the idea of buying Netflix:
From a pure M&A perspective, buying Netflix and immediately limiting its business to Apple devices would halve its value – why buy a business and fire half the customers? Buying it without such a restriction would have no strategic value – Apple would just be buying marketing and revenue. But as Amazon has shown, you don’t have to buy Netflix – they’re not the only people who can buy and commission great TV shows.
And on Apple taking on the business of producing hit shows to enhance its content:
Perhaps a deeper question, setting aside the purely strategic calculations, is that Apple has always preferred a very asset-light approach to things that are outside its core skills. It didn’t create a record label, or an MVNO, and it didn’t create a credit card for Apple Pay – it works with partners on the existing rails as much as possible (even the upcoming Apple Pay P2P service uses a partner bank). So, Apple has hired some star producers and will presumably be commissioning some shows, with what counts as play money when you have a few hundred billion of cash. But I’m not sure Apple would want to take on what it would mean to have a complete bouquet of hundreds of its own shows. That would be a different company.
The whole piece is thoughtful and well written. It’s all about the ecosystem. What serves the ecosystem serves Apple.
“ISPs have incentives to shape Internet traffic and the FCC knows full well of instances where consumers have been harmed. AT&T blocked data sent by Apple’s FaceTime software, Comcast has interfered with Internet traffic generated by certain applications, and ISPs have rerouted users’ web searches to websites they didn’t request or expect,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Mitch Stoltz. “These are just some examples of ISPs controlling our Internet experience. Users pay them to connect to the Internet, not decide for them what they can see and do there.”
Up until just over 30 years ago, when the desktop computer debuted, the whole design production process would have been done primarily by hand, and with the aide of analog machines.
But ultimately we reached an impasse when OFCCP demanded even more: employees’ compensation and other job information dating back 15 years, as well as extensive personal employee data and contact information for more than 25,000 employees. We were concerned that these requests went beyond the scope of what was relevant to this specific audit, and posed unnecessary risks to employees’ privacy. Despite our repeated efforts to resolve this impasse informally, OFCCP issued a complaint against us demanding access to the information and asserting we had no right to challenge their requests.
Respect for standing up for what they felt was right.
If you’ve ever wondered what sound actually looks like traveling through the air, then you’re in luck because apparently, all you need is a high-speed camera and a photography trick called the Schlieren Flow Visualization to help you see sound.
Cook’s steadfast aversion to the cloud presents a challenge as Apple tries to build up new features powered by machine learning and AI. To build and run machine learning services you need computing power and data, and the more you have of each the more powerful your software can be. The iPhone is beefy as mobile device goes, and it’s a good bet Apple will add dedicated hardware to support machine learning. But it’s tough for anything it puts in your hand to compete with a server—particularly one using Google’s custom machine learning chip.
I appreciate whatever complications Apple is going through in their stance on privacy. I much prefer their approach to these issues over Google’s and Facebook’s.
A good enough answer would be longer than is reasonable for Quora, but I can supply a few comments to highlight just how little attention is paid in the media, histories, and by most people to find out what actually happened. For example, I was present at the visit and demo, and it was the work of my group and myself that Steve saw, yet the Quora question is the first time that anyone has asked me what happened. (Worth pondering that interesting fact!)
Steve Jobs’ famous visit to Xerox PARC to see the Alto system graphical user interface is the stuff of legend. The Mac owes its inspiration and existence to that visit. This is a great story.
On Friday, we posted a tweet storm of pictures and a video taken during Disney’s rollout of their newly announced Star Wars theme parks. There was some argument as to whether the new parks would be DisneyWorld only or include Disneyland as well. The Disneyland question was due to the space limitations at Disney’s original California park.
And the answer is, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge is coming to both parks. From the official announcement:
Just moments ago, Bob Chapek, Chairman of Walt Disney Parks & Resorts, revealed the official name of the Star Wars-inspired lands that are currently under construction at the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resorts, and shared details on the immersive experiences guests will be able to enjoy when the lands open in 2019.
And:
The lands, both called Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, will allow guests to visit a remote trading port on the edge of wild space, where Star Wars characters and their stories come to life – and where guests will find themselves in the middle of the action.
The lands will feature two major attractions that put guests in the middle of a battle between the First Order and the Resistance. Each attraction – and even the land itself – will offer guests the chance to immerse themselves in the Star Wars universe like never before.
This will be a major refresh for Disney parks. Perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime refresh. Looking forward to seeing this in person.
This is short but sweet. Chris Espinosa is a long time Apple employee. And “long time” is really an understatement. Chris is actually Apple employee #8. I’ve actually seen his #8 Apple badge. A cool piece of history.
Chris got a call from a Gallup pollster asking a pretty interesting question. Here’s Chris telling the story. I found it charming.
I just got called on my landline to take a Gallup poll. I hardly ever answer the landline. But I’m glad I picked up.
Tap on the tweet and read the thread. Be sure to read all the way to the bottom, as the actual pollster (or someone pretending to be him, but that’s not as good a story) weighs in.
At WWDC 2017, we announced new apps submitted to the Mac App Store must support 64-bit starting January 2018, and Mac app updates and existing apps must support 64-bit starting June 2018.
32 bits allows you 2-to-the-32nd addresses:
2^32 = 4,294,967,296
That’s 4 gigabytes of addressable space. A 32-bit computer can’t have more than 4 gigs of memory. A 32-bit program can’t directly address more than 4 gigs.
64 bits, on the other hand, gives you access to 2^64 which is equal to 2^32 times 2^32. Clearly, that’s a way bigger number. I won’t say we’ll never need more than 64-bits of addressable space, but I can’t imagine that need in my lifetime.
So how to tell which apps are 32-bit and soon to be end-of-lifed?
Easy. Go to the Apple menu, select About This Mac, then tap the System Report… button. In the page that appears, scroll down to the Software section (in the list on the left) and then tap Applications. Wait a minute or two while the list is built.
Once the list appears, widen the window so you can see the column labeled 64-Bit (Intel). If you tap that label, the table will be sorted into the haves and have nots, 32-bit apps on top, followed by 64-bit apps.
For me, the vast majority of 32-bit apps are legacy holdovers from previous installs that the migration assistant brought along during various system updates.
Why doesn’t Apple let you have both? In a nutshell, supporting both flavors means Apple needs to maintain and ship 32-bit and 64-bit versions of all its supporting frameworks, essentially doubling their workload as well as the size of the OS. In addition, both 32-bit and 64-bit frameworks are loaded into memory, doubling that part of the memory footprint.
Apple has made great strides in health in the last few years and if it gets its way, there will be an iPad in the hands of every hospital patient.
And:
Earlier this week, I went down to L.A. to take a tour of Cedars-Sinai‘s pilot program allowing patients direct access to their vitals, care team and educational tools through iPads.
And:
Without the iPad, doctors and nurses have to follow a paper trail and then write up duplicate information on a white board often found on the back wall in the patient’s room. Mistakes can happen and, as Cedars-Sinai doctor Shaun Miller told me, the staff often run out of room to write, leading to confusion or a lack of information for the patient.
And:
In another section of the hospital, new parents are utilizing unmodified iPads to FaceTime with their newborns who may be sick or premature. These babies need to be kept isolated from the outside world and the germs that come with it so new parents aren’t usually able to see their baby for a few days after they are born. But, with what the nurses refer to as BabyTime (FaceTime for babies), parents can interact virtually with their little one while they wait.
Lots of upside here. I can only imagine this gathering steam as the ability grows for doctors to interact with patients remotely via their phones and tablets, perhaps with satellite devices attached to draw blood, take readings, etc.
