I can’t speak to what the other five types of users need, but I have a pretty good idea of what I’d want as an iOS developer who uses a Mac every day. Not that anyone in Cupertino is asking me, but if they did I’d say this is my dream Mac.

A very nice article on what’s needed from a developer’s point of view.

This is just awful. Why do people have to be like this?

Geek Wire:

The Living Computers: Museum + Labs in Seattle is home to some of the most noteworthy machines ever created. But a new exhibit opening this week will showcase what one official at the Paul Allen-founded institution called “the most important computer in history.”

Lāth Carlson, executive director of Living Computers, added to that designation by saying the metal box with a keyboard is “also the most boring to look at.” But for fans of computing and Apple in particular, the Apple I that once sat in founder Steve Jobs’ office is exciting for a whole host of reasons.

This is definitely a museum I’ll check out next time I’m in Seattle.

Financial Review:

Apple’s obsessive secrecy, coupled with the extreme demands it makes of its manufacturers and the competition to join their ranks, means its suppliers dare not put a foot wrong. Apple’s patronage is a blessing when everything is going well but it can quickly become a curse. The consequences of a break-up can be devastating, as London-listed chip designer Imagination Technologies discovered this week.

It has been said of being a supplier to Walmart that, “it’s the best and worse thing that can happen to your company”. I’ve heard the same about Apple.

Parts Unknown:

Masa begins by grating wasabi—the real stuff, the prohibitively expensive and difficult to grow stuff—not the powder found in many restaurants. After grating, the wasabi gets a caress with a knife, and the care with which it is treated makes one unspoken lesson clear—ingredients, the best of all ingredients, are a prerequisite for impeccable sushi. We chat as he works, turning out beautiful pieces of sushi, works of art in miniature.

I’ve only had the opportunity to be in a “fancy’ sushi restaurant a couple of times but watching the master chef is always an amazing experience.

CBC:

Diller’s act depended on an endless supply of gags. “Someone clocked me one night at 800 one-liners,” Diller told NPR.

Diller’s one-liners didn’t come out of a book. She kept her jokes in a steel cabinet on tens of thousands of index cards, categorized by subject and filed into 48 drawers. In 2003, Diller donated her joke archive to the Smithsonian.

The Transcription Center is enlisting volunteers to enter all of Diller’s gags into a digital database. As data entry jobs go, this one is not typical.

I’ve been doing this for the past week. It’s a lot of fun.

My thanks to Daylite for sponsoring The Loop this week.

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theverge:

It was a June day when I began my career as a national journalist. I stepped into the Detroit Bureau of The Wall Street Journal and started on what would be a long, varied, rewarding career. I was 23 years old, and the year was 1970. That’s not a typo.

So it seems fitting to me that I’ll be retiring this coming June, almost exactly 47 years later. I’ll be hanging it up shortly after the 2017 edition of the Code Conference, a wonderful event I co-founded in 2003 and which I could never have imagined back then in Detroit.

I didn’t make this decision lightly or hastily or under pressure. It emerged from months of thought and months of talks with my wise wife, my family, and close friends. It wasn’t prompted by my employer or by some dire health diagnosis. It just seems like the right time to step away. I’m ready for something new.

“Uncle Walt” as he was known (sometimes disparagingly) to many in the tech media has been around for a very long time. His retirement is hard earned and very well deserved. It’s doubtful his like will be ever seen again in the tech media. The “I’m ready for something new” is interesting. Don’t be surprised to see Mossberg turn up elsewhere in a management role at some Silicon Valley company.

Gizmodo:

Alas, all good things must come to an end. Today, NASA will announce the details regarding its Cassini spacecraft’s Grand Finale—a resplendent ending to its 20-year-long adventure in space, which will begin later this month. From late April to September 15th, Cassini will perform 22 dramatic dives between Saturn and its rings. Then, the brave little orbiter will plunge itself into Saturn’s atmosphere and burn up like a meteor—all while sending information back to Earth.

To be fair, going out in a blaze of glory (literally) is the most dignified way to go. Before she leaves us forever, let’s take a look back at some of Cassini’s greatest hits.

When I was younger, I would have wanted some of these gorgeous images as posters on my bedroom wall.

Wow. Take a moment to click through and check out the pictures. This is some beautiful work.

Dan Moren, writing for Macworld, starts with this Phil Schiller comment:

“The Mac mini remains a product in our lineup. Nothing more to say about it today,” Phil Schiller told reporters, according to John Gruber.

and then digs into the past and potential future of the Mac mini. Good read.

Jeff Benjamin, writing for 9to5Mac:

I’m currently in the process of building a new Hackintosh rig for 2017, so imagine how surprised and happy I was to hear that Nvidia is working on beta drivers for its GPUs with the latest Pascal architecture. Up until today, I had just settled on being relegated to a Radeon RX 480, or a Maxwell-era Nvidia card.

And:

With today’s announcement, the Hackintosh just got exponentially more appealing. Nvidia’s announcement is positive for a variety of reasons: there’s the prospect of using an eGPU setup with a MacBook Pro, along with future prospects of Nvidia cards powering future Mac Pro hardware.

As I’ve mentioned before, if you do decide to build a Hackintosh, start here.

YouTube Creator Blog:

> Starting today, we will no longer serve ads on YPP videos until the channel reaches 10k lifetime views. This new threshold gives us enough information to determine the validity of a channel. It also allows us to confirm if a channel is following our community guidelines and advertiser policies. By keeping the threshold to 10k views, we also ensure that there will be minimal impact on our aspiring creators. And, of course, any revenue earned on channels with under 10k views up until today will not be impacted.

YPP is the YouTube Partner Program. That’s the YouTube arm that gets you paid for your ad related views.

On the plus side, this is going to make it easier for YouTube to vet, to validate their channels. They won’t have to look at any content with less than 10K views. This should eliminate a lot of copycats and landgrabbers, making search easier for visitors. Visit Social Media Daily’s website to learn how to maximize viewer engagement. And then, you can purchase high quality and active YouTube subscribers from Zeru.

On the down side, this will make it harder for indie YouTube creators to make money any money before they grow their audience. VidIQ is what most Youtubers use to grow their following. But given that 10K views translates (very, very approximately) to about US$10, this seems a reasonable threshold.

The 1982 alumnus jumped right into the subject of his discussion. He advised students – of all backgrounds and majors – to prepare to encounter people with diverse backgrounds in every career field.

Macworld:

Head on over to the App Store—Apple launched its new Clips video-editing app for iOS on Thursday. Clips is essentially a streamlined version of iMovie for creating short mobile videos with filters and text overlays. The app also lets you stitch together several clips from your camera roll “without timelines, tracks, or complicated editing tools.”

Like other mobile video editing apps, users will be able to record video or take photos from within the app, and then stylize them with text, filters, speech bubbles, and emoji. You can also add elevator music as a soundtrack and create animated backdrops.

Downloading now.

J.D. Power:

Microsoft ranks highest in overall satisfaction in the J.D. Power 2017 U.S. Tablet Satisfaction Study, doing so for the first time since the study’s inception. With an overall satisfaction score among tablet owners of 855 (on a 1,000-point scale), Microsoft’s achievement is largely due to its top rankings in the features and styling & design factors.

In features, Microsoft is the highest performer in three areas: variety of pre-loaded applications; internet connectivity; and availability of manufacturer-supported accessories.

This is actually very good news. It means there’s competition in the tablet space. Competition breeds better tablets for all of us. And, make no mistake, Apple’s iPad still ranks very high in this study.

The Verge:

When a song is compressed, an algorithm removes bits from the track that it believes the human ear can’t pick up, which reduces the overall file size. So objectively speaking, there’s less audio there for your ear to interpret. Lossless audio cuts less bits.

But in actuality, the difference is very difficult to discern. Couple that with a range in the quality of soundcards and speakers, and it’s almost impossible for the average listener to pick which is which. Can you tell the difference?

Jim posted about this back in March but now Spotify has posted an actual audio test for you to try to see if you can actually hear the difference.

Mic:

So, what does realistic healthy eating really look like? While eliminating entire food groups isn’t always necessary, we talked to nutritionists about the foods they never eat to give you a better idea of a well-rounded, nutritious diet. Ditch the soda and hop on the seltzer train and you, too, can be eating like a nutritionist in no time.

I don’t eat any of these of these except “processed meats”. No way I’m giving up bacon or sausage.

Bloomberg:

All too often, and to the dismay of everyone who knows better, Jewish food gets boiled down to bagels, matzo balls, and brisket.

These are staples, to be sure, but they all hail from the same part of the world—Eastern Europe—while Jews have, at one point or another, populated almost every corner of the earth. Thanks to their historic roles as both merchants and, often, refugees, Jewish cuisine encompasses flavors from Tunisia to Toronto, India to Israel, Babylonia to Brooklyn.

I’m a big fan of food in general and a bigger fan of “ethnic” food and, while I haven’t had a lot of it, I really enjoy Jewish food, especially for the stories behind it.

High Snobiety:

Several years ago I came across an interesting statistic: nearly half of all musicians that created a chart hit in the half-century in between 1955 and 2005 never did so again – 47.5 percent, to be exact.

This Hollywood Walk of Shame includes the likes of Los Del Rio (Macarena), A-ha (Take On Me), Nena (99 Luftballoons), Chumbawumba (Tubthumping) and, more recently, Psy (Gangnam Style,) not to mention countless other has-beens.

So what is it about pop stardom that makes it so difficult to sustain?

Is it because pop music is so ephemeral and music tastes change so rapidly?

A solid list. Got more of these? Leave them in the comments.

[H/T John Kordyback]

Washington Post:

A group of reporters and editors from the student newspaper, the Booster Redux at Pittsburg High School in southeastern Kansas, had gathered to talk about Amy Robertson, who was hired as the high school’s head principal on March 6.

The student journalists had begun researching Robertson, and quickly found some discrepancies in her education credentials. For one, when they researched Corllins University, the private university where Robertson said she got her master’s and doctorate degrees years ago, the website didn’t work. They found no evidence that it was an accredited university.

“There were some things that just didn’t quite add up,” Balthazor told The Washington Post.

The students began digging into a weeks-long investigation that would result in an article published Friday questioning the legitimacy of the principal’s degrees and of her work as an education consultant.

On Tuesday night, Robertson resigned.

Journalism! You can read the student’s article here.

Motherboard:

Last month, the CIA got a lot of attention when WikiLeaks published internal documents purporting to show how the spy agency can monitor people through their Samsung smart TVs. There was a caveat to the hack, however—the hijack involved older models of Samsung TVs and required the CIA have physical access to a TV to install the malware via a USB stick.

But the window to this sort of hijacking is far wider than originally thought because a researcher in Israel has uncovered 40 unknown vulnerabilities, or zero-days, that would allow someone to remotely hack millions of newer Samsung smart TVs, smart watches, and mobile phones already on the market, as well as ones slated for future release, without needing physical access to them. The security holes are in an open-source operating system called Tizen that Samsung has been rolling out in its devices over the last few years.

Got any Samsung devices in your house? Might want to read the details here.

[H/T, the Samsungistically Secure not Jony Ive]

From long time macOS and iOS developer Panic (the folks who produced the excellent Firewatch game, mentioned yesterday):

If you remember, 2016 was the year we killed Status Board, our very nice data visualization app. Now, a lot of it was our fault. But it was another blow to our heavy investment in pro-level iOS apps a couple years ago, a decision we’re still feeling the ramifications of today as we revert back to a deep focus on macOS. Trying to do macOS quality work on iOS cost us a lot of time for sadly not much payoff. We love iOS, we love our iPhones, and we love our iPads. But we remain convinced that it’s not — yet? — possible to make a living selling pro software on those platforms. Which is a real bummer!

The macOS marketplace is so much smaller than that for iOS, it’s much easier to stand out in the crowd, get the word out on excellent work. In addition, the smaller market allows for higher prices, so you can break even selling fewer copies.

Reuters:

The U.S. technology giant “bricked” – or disabled with a software update – hundreds of smartphones and tablet devices, and then refused to unlock them on the grounds that customers had had the devices serviced by non-Apple repairers, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said in a court filing.

And:

The regulator said that between September 2014 and February 2016, Apple customers who downloaded software updates then connected their devices to their computers received a message saying the device “could not be restored and the device had stopped functioning”.

Customers then asked Apple to fix their devices, only to be told by the company that “no Apple entity … was required to, or would, provide a remedy” for free, the documents added.

From the ACCC’s official post on the matter:

The ACCC alleges Apple represented to consumers with faulty products that they were not entitled to a free remedy if their Apple device had previously been repaired by third party, “unauthorised repairers”. However, having a component of the Apple device serviced, repaired, or replaced by someone other than Apple cannot, by itself, extinguish the consumer’s right to a remedy for non-compliance with the consumer guarantees.

“Consumer guarantee rights under the Australian Consumer Law exist independently of any manufacturer’s warranty and are not extinguished simply because a consumer has goods repaired by a third party,“ ACCC Chairman Rod Sims said.

Tricky issue. Do I have the right to repair my own goods, or have them repaired by a third party of my choosing? If I do go the third party route, should Apple be able to void my warranty? Did Apple intentionally brick the iPhones in question? Core questions.

While you chew on that, consider the related controversy concerning John Deere’s tractor repair policies.

And, more recently, the account of the WiFi garage-door-opener seller who bricked a customer’s garage door after a bad review.

Interesting stuff. Welcome to the future.