Follow the headline link, then:

• Click on each of the 4 color wells to set your gradient colors
• Drag the little squares in the left image to set your gradient starting positions
• Drag the squares in the right image to set the end positions

Rinse. Repeat. Export if you create something you like. Cmd-Z to undo. Shift-Cmd-Z to redo.

Have fun. Pass it along.

Taiwan News:

Taiwan’s worst drought in over 50 years has been a boon for one lucky tourist who was able to recover a fully functional iPhone that he accidentally dropped into Sun Moon Lake almost exactly one year ago.

First things first: The phone was in a waterproof case. But still, a year in the water, at the very least, that’s an excellent case. Check out the image about halfway down the page. That case took a beating. But the iPhone looks pristine.

Deadline:

Eager to bring Justin Timberlake back into the Apple TV + fold after the strong results of the Fisher Stevens-directed dramatic film Palmer in January, Apple won an auction and acquired the script to develop an hour-long drama series that will have Timberlake playing Gong Show host Chuck Barris.

Never heard of Chuck Barris? Do a search for the ridiculous Gong Show to see him in person. But he’s got other skills, including creator of classic shows like The Dating Game and the Newlywed Game and…um…CIA assassin?

All this was highlighted in the 2002 movie Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. It’ll be interesting to see what Apple does with this.

Apple:

Apple today introduced the updated Find My app, allowing third-party products to use the private and secure finding capabilities of Apple’s Find My network, which comprises hundreds of millions of Apple devices.

And:

New products that work with the Find My app from Belkin, Chipolo, and VanMoof will be available beginning next week.

And:

Approved products can be added to the new Items tab and will feature a “Works with Apple Find My” badge to clearly communicate to users that the product is compatible with the Find My network and the Find My app.

And:

Apple is also announcing a draft specification for chipset manufacturers that will be released later this spring. With this, third-party device makers will be able to take advantage of Ultra Wideband technology in U1-equipped Apple devices, creating a more precise, directionally aware experience when nearby.

Interesting that Apple has opened up the Find My ecosystem to third-party products before they announced their own proprietary and rumored AirTags. Perhaps it means nothing, but I would have expected the AirTags announcement to lead, with third-party capabilities as a follow-on to the announcement.

No matter. This feels like a brilliant move on Apple’s part. More ecosystem lock-in, more ammunition for their anti-trust counterattack.

This from John Gruber:

We’re all expecting Apple to announce its own “AirTags” tracking beacons imminently, but here’s Apple promoting third-party products, including a tag-like product from Chipolo that seems directly competitive with what we expect AirTags to be, and wireless earbuds from Belkin that obviously compete against AirPods.

And:

Conspicuously absent from the list, of course, is Tile. Given their membership in Epic’s Coalition for App Fairness, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Apple to promote Tile’s products. And it’s unclear to me whether Tile even wants to be in the Find My app — their spat with Apple is more about their own app competing with Find My, and their accusations that Apple unfairly advantages Find My by not holding it to the same rules as third-party apps that ask for always-on location access.

Fascinating.

If you liked Craig Grannell’s curated list of favorite iPhone/iPad apps, follow the headline link for his take on games.

All run on iPhone and/or iPad, but not all run on Android. Tiny evidence that for developers, it’s an Apple first world.

Andrew Webster, The Verge:

Last week, Apple Arcade received its biggest update since launching back in 2019. More than 30 titles were added to the subscription service, including much-anticipated games like Hironobu Sakaguchi’s roleplaying epic Fantasian. But while the quantity and quality of titles added were impressive, the most important part of the announcement was a change in direction. Among those big-name exclusives were a number of classics, ranging from Monument Valley to chess to Threes, that help round out the service. Apple Arcade has finally matured into something close to a Netflix for mobile games.

If you dipped your toes in the Apple Arcade waters and haven’t been back, worth another look. I’ve found some new games that really caught my attention, and the relaunches add some depth to the catalog.

Apple Arcade still feels like an experiment, running in parallel with the IAP and paid games section of the App Store. I hope it finds its groove with subscribers, bringing in enough value for Apple so they continue to invest in its growth.

Sami Fathi, MacRumors:

In a slight slip-up, however, Intel has accidentally used a MacBook instead of a Windows laptop in one of its newest ads to promote one of its new 11th-generation chips as “the world’s best processor.”

Follow the headline link, check the ad. That’s a MacBook Pro, from this Getty Images stock photo page, tagged as:

Hipster asian man playing games on a laptop at home

Who writes these captions?

Caption aside:

But while Apple still sells Intel-based Macs, the chip referenced in the ad is not used in any Mac, and in fact, it was launched around the same time Apple released its M1 Apple silicon chip late last year.

This just does not feel well thought through.

Sami Fathi, MacRumors:

Eleftheriou has highlighted yet another scam app on the ‌App Store‌. This time Eleftheriou is shining a light on how one scam app called “Privacy Assitant: StringVPN” uses Apple’s in-app purchasing system to trick people into purchasing either a weekly, monthly, or yearly subscription for a fake VPN service.

Here’s the tweet:

I don't know what's worse about this app:

– “Translated” fake reviews
– “Recommended by Apple” popups in Safari
– https://t.co/Kq5lRrKCWc contact email
– Blank website, registered in India
– $9.99/week subscription
– Grossing $1M (!) a month

What is Apple even doing?? pic.twitter.com/5oUBCJ2GNh

— Kosta Eleftheriou (@keleftheriou) April 7, 2021

First things first, wrap your head around what’s going on here. Then wonder why these sorts of apps are allowed on the App Store.

I posed that question in this tweet. Follow the link, read the responses.

Some have suggested that Apple makes money on the scams, is not motivated to fix the problem. I just can’t accept that explanation. No way.

A better explanation is in this tweet from Joe Cieplinski:

I think it’s because for every one of these, there are 10,000 more that they did take down. I don’t think most of us understand the scale at which people are scamming the App Store. How many per day can a small group of reviewers take down, realistically?

If so, feels like Apple either needs to ramp up their efforts here, budget for more reviewers, or find a way to get smarter. Maybe they could create a trusted list of third party reviewers, starting with @Keleftheriou, who can help trim the scams out of the App Store. Maybe even offer them a bounty.

This hurts users, hurts Apple’s reputation, and also harms the developer community, especially indie devs, because it makes it so much harder for their apps to stand out/stay in business. This has got to change.

This is a good post to scan, just to see if anything catches your eye. But also an excellent post to share with folks new to the ecosystem.

Nice job by Craig Grannell. A lot of focus on indie-apps, some excellent exposure.

Deadline:

Apple TV+ will prepare Mythic Quest fans for the comedy’s sophomore season by dropping a bonus episode ahead of the season two premiere.

“Everlight,” a standalone episode from season one of the gaming workplace comedy will launch Friday, April 16 on the streaming platform. Following the special “Mythic Quest: Quarantine” episode, the half-hour episode is directed and executive produced by Rob McElhenney and written by Ashly Burch. The episode will see the Mythic Quest crew return to offices and co-workers following the coronavirus pandemic for their annual Everlight party. Anthony Hopkins lends his voice to the episode.

Week from Friday. On my calendar. Three weeks from then, the new season starts.

Love this show. Right up there with Ted Lasso.

Om Malik:

In December 2020, with the release of the iOS 14.3, the owners of iPhone 12 Pro (and ProMax), got to experience Apple’s new photo format, ProRaw. In simplest terms, the iPhone camera captures multiple image frames, picks out the best bits from these frames, and stitches them together in a photo with higher amount of data that can be manipulated for editing later. These are big files — about 10-12 times the sized on normal files captured by the iPhone.

On the Adobe Photoshop side:

The term ‘Super Resolution’ refers to the process of improving the quality of a photo by boosting its apparent resolution,” Adobe engineers write on the company blog. “Enlarging a photo often produces blurry details, but Super Resolution has an ace up its sleeve — an advanced machine learning model trained on millions of photos.”

The results are pretty amazing. Follow the headline link, keep in mind that the two base photos were captured with an iPhone. The crops used Photoshop’s Super Resolution machine learning to tease extra resolution and sharpness out of those originals.

Anton Shilov, Tom’s Hardware:

As spotted via Twitter, if you want to boost the power of your Mac, it may be possible with money, skill, time and some real desire by removing the DRAM and NAND chips and adding more capacious versions.

Here’s the tweet:

Chinese maintenance engineers can already expand the capacity of the Apple M1. The 8GB memory has been expanded to 16GB, and the 256GB hard drive has been expanded to 1TB. pic.twitter.com/2Fyf8AZfJR

— DuanRui (@duanrui1205) April 4, 2021

Back to Anton:

With a soldering station (its consumer variant is not that expensive at $60), DRAM memory chips and NAND flash memory chips, (which are close to impossible to buy on the consumer level), the engineers reportedly upgraded the Apple M1-based Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage to 16GB and 1TB, respectively, by de-soldering the existing components and adding more capacious chips. According to the post, no firmware modifications were necessary.

There has been a lot of discussion about the M1 memory being on the M1 chip itself. As the tweet above shows, this is a bit misleading. The memory is on the M1 SoC package, as opposed to inside the physical M1 chip.

Here’s a pic, via iFixit, that shows this up close.

Note the M1 chip, which is the silver bit with the Apple logo. And next to it are two RAM chips (the black rectangles), each one with 4GB of SK hynix LPDDR4X memory.

I tweeted about all this here. Please do reply there if you’ve got anything to add or any corrections. I find this fascinating.

Kara Swisher:

I’m Kara Swisher, and you’re listening to “Sway.” My guest today is Apple CEO Tim Cook.

A few cherry picked Tim Cook responses, though if you have the chance, read the whole thing:

From the very start, we’ve always believed in curation. And so we review every app that goes on the store. That doesn’t mean that we’re perfect at doing it. We’re not. But we care deeply about what we’re offering our users. And when we have a news product like Apple News, we have human editors that are selecting the key stories. And so, they’re avoiding all of the misinformation that is out there. The reality is that the web in some areas has become a dark place. And without curation, you wind up with this firehose of things that I would not want to put into an amplifier.

And:

If you think about a surveillance world, a world where you know somebody is always watching everything you’re doing — and in the case of a phone or a computer, it’s also what you’re thinking, because you’re typing in searches and so on and so forth. And so I think in that kind of world, you begin to do less. You begin to think less. Your freedom of expression begins to narrow. And the walls move in on you. And I start thinking about that at its natural endpoint. And I don’t want to be a part of that society.

And (on privacy and transparency):

Steve commented on this with you over a decade ago. He said something like, privacy means people know what they’re signing up for in plain English, repeatedly. The individual should own their data. And they should own the ability to say who gets it and what of their data they get and what they use it for. And frankly, that’s not the situation of today.

And:

I think that you can do digital advertising and make money from digital advertising without tracking people when they don’t know they’re being tracked.

And:

The App Store is not cast in concrete, you know? And so we’ve changed over time. And in fact, if you look at the commissions, Kara, and I would sort of reframe a bit from what you said, because the vast majority of people pay nothing. Because there’s not an interchange of a digital good, right? And so, like, 85% of people pay zero commission. And then with our recent move with small developers, developers earning less than a million dollars a year pay 15%. Well, it turns out that that’s the vast majority of developers. And then, we also have rules that say that if you have a subscription model in the second year and later years, you only pay 15% of those. And so we’ve only reduced the price over time. It’s only gone in one direction. It’s gone down. More apps were exempted. But those rules are applied equally to everyone. So you’ve mentioned Amazon getting 15%. That’s true for any kind of video streaming service that meets the guidelines of that program.

And, on Ted Lasso:

There was no better show during COVID. I’m getting notes from a lot of different people that love it.

This is fact.

And, on Apple TV+:

We’re putting all of ourselves into it. It is not a hobby. It is not a dip your toe in. Because it’s an original focus, we don’t instantly have a catalog with 500 things in it. We’re going to build over time. We’ve gotten over 300 nominations now for awards and have won 80.

And, on Tesla and Apple Car:

I’ve never spoken to Elon, although I have great admiration and respect for the company he’s built. I think Tesla has done an unbelievable job of not only establishing the lead, but keeping the lead for such a long period of time in the EV space. So I have great appreciation for them. In terms of the work that we’re doing there, obviously, I’m going to be a little coy on that. The autonomy itself is a core technology, in my view. If you sort of step back, the car, in a lot of ways, is a robot. An autonomous car is a robot. And so there’s lots of things you can do with autonomy. And we’ll see what Apple does. We investigate so many things internally. Many of them never see the light of day. I’m not saying that one will not.

So much more to this. Great job pulling this together by Kara Swisher.

Troy Hunt (who runs Have I Been Pwned):

The headline is pretty self-explanatory so in the interest of time, let me just jump directly into the details of how this all works. There’s been huge interest in this incident, and I’ve seen near-unprecedented traffic to Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) over the last couple of days, let me do my best to explain how I’ve approached the phone number search feature. Or if you’re impatient, you can head over to HIBP right now and search for your number.

And:

There’s over 500M phone numbers but only a few million email addresses so >99% of people were getting a “miss” when they should have gotten a “hit”. The phone numbers were easy to parse out from (mostly) well-formatted files. They were also all normalised into a nice consistent format with a country code. In short, this data set completely turned all my reasons for not doing this on its head.

This Facebook hack just adds more fuel to the fire for me. Facebook. Feh.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Facebook and Apple are squabbling over document requests in the ongoing Epic v. Apple legal battle, according to a new discovery letter filed with the court today. Facebook is involved because Facebook executive Vivek Sharma is set to testify on behalf of Epic.

And:

According to Apple, Facebook has been continually ignoring requests for documents and using delaying tactics. Apple says it served multiple subpoenas to Facebook starting in December and met with Facebook several times to narrow the scope of the requests, but Facebook has refused to produce many of the documents in question.

Fascinating chess match here, with Apple and Facebook coming to an agreement that came unraveled when Epic added Sharma to its witness list.

At the 27th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday, actor Jason Sudeikis won a SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Comedy Series for his leading role as the eponymous English soccer coach in Apple TV+ series “Ted Lasso.”

Turns out, Ted Lasso is Apple’s premiere show. Who knew.

> LG Electronics Inc. (LG) announced that it is closing its mobile business unit. The decision was approved by its board of directors earlier today.

> LG’s strategic decision to exit the incredibly competitive mobile phone sector will enable the company to focus resources in growth areas such as electric vehicle components, connected devices, smart homes, robotics, artificial intelligence and business-to-business solutions, as well as platforms and services, remember that getting communication right is the key to everything.

I really like LG as a company. I have several LG TVs and they make quality products, but the smartphone business is dominated by Apple and Samsung. It makes sense for LG to focus its efforts in places it can have a larger impact.

Apple today announced it is introducing two entirely new game categories and adding more than 30 incredible titles to Apple Arcade, its popular gaming subscription service for players of all ages. Apple Arcade offers breakthrough, unique benefits players love: no ads, no in-app purchases, support for Apple’s high user privacy standards, and one all-inclusive subscription offer with access for up to six family members. In addition to new exclusive Arcade Originals, including “NBA 2K21 Arcade Edition,” “Star Trek: Legends,” and “The Oregon Trail,” the service is introducing two new game categories, Timeless Classics and App Store Greats. Arcade Originals are playable across iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV. Timeless Classics and App Store Greats are available on iPhone and iPad.

With the new categories Apple’s catalog now has 180 games for its users.

Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch:

Apple is adding two new voices to Siri’s English offerings, and eliminating the default “female voice” selection in the latest beta version of iOS. This means that every person setting up Siri will choose a voice for themselves and it will no longer default to the voice assistant being female, a topic that has come up quite a bit with regards to bias in voice interfaces over the past few years.

This is part of iOS 14.5, beta 6.

Great move on Apple’s part to make the choice of voice part of the onboarding process. No more defaulting to a female voice.

Want to hear the new voices? Play the video in Gruber’s tweet below:

Here’s a recording of Siri’s new lineup of American voices in iOS 14.5. Voices 1 and 4 are the existing ones, voices 2 and 3 are the new ones. pic.twitter.com/6emei4B3Z9

— John Gruber (@gruber) April 1, 2021

A few days ago, we posted an article from 9to5Mac titled Apple developing new Remote for the next-generation Apple TV.

Yesterday, 9to5Mac posted an update (click headline link), adding:

This appears to be an alternative Apple TV Remote that Apple worked with cable companies to make. As the report below explains, this remote was designed for cable companies, hence the Guide button. It may not be sold by Apple directly, but instead was designed in collaboration between Apple and cable companies. It is being distributed by Universal Electronics.

So will we see an updated Siri Remote? Lots of complaints about the current “which side is up” design, would love to see a new, not quite so symmetrical take on it.

And this is the press release for the Universal Electronics remote that seems to be the mistaken identity above. I do love this, though there’s no trackpad, so not likely we’ll ever see this shipping with Apple TV.

Apple Support note:

iOS 14.5, coming later this spring, includes an update where the battery health reporting system will recalibrate maximum battery capacity and peak performance capability on iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max to address inaccurate estimates of battery health reporting for some users. Symptoms of this bug include unexpected battery drain behavior or, in a small number of instances, reduced peak performance capability. This inaccurate battery health reporting does not reflect an issue with actual battery health.

Have an iPhone 11 series phone? Read the linked note.

Patently Apple:

In response to the development of AI, Internet of Things and other developments, the IP giant ARM Ltd. announced late yesterday that it will launch a new Armv9 architecture. This is the company’s first new Arm architecture in the last decade. It’s to roll out at the end of this year. At this point in time, it’s unknown when Apple’s adoption of this new architecture will take place.

Note that the headline is verbatim from Patently Apple. A quibble, but it implies that Apple has endorsed the new Arm architecture. That last sentence in the quote makes it clear that is not the case. Yet.

Still, this seems important news. And others are jumping on board:

Apple is usually silent when it comes to providing testimonials and this time is no different. However, many of Apple’s competitors such as Samsung, Oppo, Vivo, Google (for Android), Xiaomi and others have all signed on.

Read the article, watch the embedded video for details.

Apple, on Brooklyn artist Efdot, using his iPad Pro to design cards for Topps:

His canvas today is a baseball card. While it might seem like an unexpected place to find modern art, there’s a renaissance under way for these collectables, thanks in part to visual storytellers who are transforming sports memorabilia into pocket-sized masterpieces.

And:

Last year, Efdot started working with Topps, the official trading card company of Major League Baseball (MLB), for Project 2020. It was a limited edition release of 20 baseball cards illustrated by 20 different artists that attracted not just collectors and sports enthusiasts, but art and culture lovers too. It’s part of the reason that topps.com saw an astounding 250 percent increase in sales from 2019 to 2020.

As an old school collector, I’m both gladdened and fascinated by this resurgence.

This year, Efdot is part of Project 70, which enlists even more artists and tastemakers to reinterpret cards from the 70 years that Topps has been immortalizing baseball players. New cards are released online every weekday through the end of the year and each card is available to buy for 70 hours only.

Follow the headline link and scroll to get a look at some of this art. It’s fantastic. Gorgeous. Magical. Love the marriage of iPad technology with the art of the sports card.

Wondering how long it will be before Topps announces the NFT of the original art. If it happens, hope Efdot and fellow artists get their fair share of that payday.

Washington Post:

Phillipe Christodoulou wanted to check his bitcoin balance last month, so he searched the App Store on his iPhone for “Trezor,” the maker of a small hardware device he uses to store his cryptocurrency. Up popped the company’s padlock logo set against a bright green background. The app was rated close to five stars. He downloaded it and typed in his credentials.

In less than a second, nearly all of his life savings — 17.1 bitcoin worth $600,000 at the time — was gone. The app was a fake, designed to trick people into thinking it was a legitimate app.

Cautionary tale, both about fake apps in the App Store, and the vulnerability of crypto to non-trackable heists.