Techcrunch:

Privacy is something everyone should care about. But studies continue to indicate that people either aren’t aware of what they’re giving up, or they don’t understand the implications.

Apple is blowing that up a bit today by expanding on its privacy page and presenting its policies in clear language, with extensive supporting data. Whether it’s government information requests (94% of that is trying to find stolen iPhones, and only 6% is law enforcement seeking personal information) or how consumer-facing features like iMessage, Apple Pay, Health and HomeKit are set up to protect user information; the sense is one of confidence in its stance.

This has been a long time coming and no surprise that it’s coming from Apple. I expect Samsung (and other companies) to copy this new stance shortly.

One of the biggest questions for potential users of the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil concerns palm rejection, the ability of the iPad Pro to distinguish between unwanted touches from your wrist and intended input from the Apple Pencil itself.

Pixar’s Dr. Wave (AKA, Michael B. Johnson) tweeted this, along with a picture of the team:

Lovely of our friends from Apple to stop by to let us take iPad Pro & Pencil for a test drive

In the follow-up comments, he said:

It has perfect palm rejection as far as we were able to see.

High praise. Good to know.

[Via 9to5mac]

If you are considering ordering an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus, this walkthrough from iMore is worth your time. It’s focused, not a lot of fluff, and it includes a well-produced video that walks you through the benefits of the new iPhones.

Peter Kafka, writing for re/code:

YouTube, which spent the first 10 years of its life as a free service, is getting ready to start selling tickets.

Google’s video site appears to be finalizing launch plans for its long-in-the-making subscription service, and industry sources say they’ve been told to expect a launch near the end of October.

A blast email from YouTube to content owners, telling them they have to agree to new terms by Oct. 22 or their “videos will no longer be available for public display or monetization in the United States,” helps support that timeline.

And:

Note that we’re referring to a single service, not multiple ones. Sources say that’s because YouTube intends to bundle two different services into one offering: An update of its music service, which it launched in beta as YouTube Music Key last fall, and another service, yet to launch, that will give users the ability to watch anything on YouTube without seeing ads.

Video industry sources say Google has told them it intends to charge $10 a month for the combined offering.

Looks like Google’s YouTube arm is pursuing the ecosystem strategy, which Apple has built its entire business around. Come for the videos, stay for the music. Or vice versa.

The sense I get is that YouTube is using ad-free YouTube viewing as a sweetener to get people to sign up for its music service. Sounds like an accounting nightmare to me.

Chris Mills, writing for Gizmodo:

Amongst its big bag of tricks, iOS 9 has one seemingly innocuous feature: Wi-Fi Assist, enabled by default, which will switch to cellular data when your Wi-Fi sucks. This would be great, if I had an unlimited data plan. I don’t, but now I do have a very expensive cellphone bill.

This is shocking to me. While this may be a truly useful feature, why would Wi-Fi Assist be enabled by default? Any setting that automatically consumes my cellular data (and therefore spends my hard earned cash) should be OFF by default.

To check your Wi-Fi Assist setting, go to Settings > Cellular (Settings > Mobile Data in the UK), then scroll all the way to the bottom.

Please pass this along, especially if you know someone at Apple who might be able to get this setting turned off as a default. And if I have this wrong, please let me know.

LA Times:

The Los Angeles Unified School District has reached a tentative $6.4-million settlement over curriculum from education software giant Pearson that the school system said its teachers barely used.

The pact is the latest fallout from an aborted $1.3-billion plan to provide an iPad to every student, teacher and campus administrator in the nation’s second-largest school district.

The Board of Education is expected to vote on the settlement in October. The bidding process that led to the original contract is the subject of an FBI investigation.

This has been a long, drawn out embarrassment for Apple, a company that prides itself on its work with schools. While the case isn’t entirely over, this settlement at least paves the way for all parties to move on.

Ars Technica:

The only thing that most people will need to know about Apple’s A9 is that it’s a whole lot faster than last year’s A8. But for those of you who are more interested in chip design, Chipworks has unearthed an interesting tidbit: there are two different versions of the A9 chip, one manufactured by Samsung and another by Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC). Most interestingly, Samsung’s version (the APL0898) has a slightly smaller footprint than the TSMC version (APL1022).

There have long been rumors that Apple was dual-sourcing the A8 from Samsung and TSMC, but this is the first visual proof that we’ve seen of the practice. iPhone and iPad processors up to and including the A7 were all made by Samsung.

This is really “inside baseball” for a lot of folks but it does beg the question of why is Apple doing this? To keep Samsung “honest”? Or are they prepping TSMC to take over chip design?

Nature Geoscience:

Determining whether liquid water exists on the Martian surface is central to understanding the hydrologic cycle and potential for extant life on Mars. Recurring slope lineae, narrow streaks of low reflectance compared to the surrounding terrain, appear and grow incrementally in the downslope direction during warm seasons.

Our findings strongly support the hypothesis that recurring slope lineae form as a result of contemporary water activity on Mars.

I link directly to the research study because I love the language they use. Bottom line? There is not only water on Mars (we knew that already. It’s in the form of ice) but that it actually flows – “liquid water” – in Mars’ summer months.

M.G. Siegler:

Anyone who thinks Apple’s new ‘Live Photos’ element of the iPhone 6s (and 6s Plus) is a gimmick is a fool that doesn’t understand Apple — and may not understand human nature and emotions. I actually think this is one of the more brilliant features Apple has released in a while.

It’s no accident that people with children immediately realize the value in this feature.

I haven’t seen Live Photos in action but it’s been interesting talking to people who have. No one has dismissed it as “just a gimmick” and those with young children echo Siegler – they think it is a brilliant idea.

Petapixel:

GoPro just further expanded its action camera lineup after announcing the HERO+ LCD back in June. The new HERO+ is an even more affordable camera that drops the LCD screen while retaining 1080p60 recording and Wi-Fi connectivity.

The HERO+ can also capture 720p60 video, 8-megapixel photos, time-lapses, and burst mode photos. Other features and specs of the camera include an durable (integrated) housing that’s waterproof down to 131 feet (40m), Bluetooth connectivity, GoPro’s new built-in trimming and sharing, QuikCapture (powering up and starting video recording with one button), and HiLight Tag for selecting key moments while filming.

If you’re looking for a very good and very inexpensive action camera, GoPro is your best bet. This would be a great Christmas gift for a kid who was into BMX or other high motion activities. I’ve been thinking of getting one for my motorcycle until I realized, the video wouldn’t really be all that exciting.

Lisa Bettany:

In the past eight years, each new advancement in iPhone camera technology has made dramatic improvements to image quality. The new 12-megapixel iPhone 6s iSight camera is no exception. With 50% more megapixels than the last four iPhone 8-megapixel models, the iPhone 6s boasts a number of key improvements including: improved auto-focus, local tone-mapping, noise reduction, and colour separation, with that fancy “deep trench isolation” technology Apple is raving about.

In this follow-up post to my previous iPhone comparisons, I present a 9 iPhone comparison from all iPhone versions taken with Camera+ including: the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, and the new iPhone 6s, in a variety of real-life situations to test each iPhone camera’s capabilities.

The results are predictable (after all, it’s expected the camera would get better with each generation) but seeing them on the page is very interesting especially considering how “great” many of us thought the original iPhone was at taking pictures.

Thanks to Twocanoes Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Makers of Winclone, the best Mac app for migrating, cloning and backing up your Boot Camp partition. This week Loop readers can use the code “theloop” to get 10% off Winclone 5, just in time to backup Boot Camp before upgrading to El Capitan. If you run Boot Camp in labs or classrooms, Boot Runner 2 from Twocanoes is a time saver for remote scheduling of maintenance reboots and an easy to use OS picker for your users. Check out the video or get the 14-day trial and see how easy Boot Runner makes managing dual boot Macs.

Thinking of buying an iPhone 6s or 6s Plus? Want to get a sense of the camera?

David Pierce took his iPhone 6s and 6s Plus out on the streets and took a bunch of photos. None of these are retouched in any way. Tap on a picture to embiggen, then scroll down to see the details.

Update: Joe Caiati shared some of his unretouched iPhone 6s photos here.

Jonny Evans, writing for ComputerWorld, pulled together a nice little collection of 3D Touch tips and tricks. Very useful and, even better, this is all tip, no fluff.

Great job, Jonny.

Akinori Machino, writing for Medium, digs into the details of the San Francisco font. There are just a ton of fascinating details here. Just one tiny example:

[In other fonts], a colon will be placed right above the baseline, so it’s not vertically centered if it is placed between numbers. San Francisco fonts, on the other hand, will make it vertically centered automatically.

Great stuff. Apple’s constant attention to tiny details continues to amaze me.

Nick Keppol, writing for the MartianCraft blog, takes you on a smartly written tour of 3D Touch. This is relatively short with lots of pictures. Just the way I like it.

Icon design firm Artua puts up a page with high rez views of some of their favorite icon work.

What makes this such a pleasing experience for me is seeing such high resolution views of something that is usually crammed into a very tiny space.

Frederic Filloux, writing for Monday Note:

When Tim Cook introduced content-blocking features in iOS9, and thus caused a flood of ad-blocking apps in the App Store, the topic became more mainstream than ever. Adblockers adoption rose to never-seen-before levels. (A reminder of the most recent data: PageFair says that between 8% and 16% of ads are blocked in the US, vs. 10% to 35% in Europe; SecretMedia says that 26% of video ads are blocked in the US vs. 33% to 62% in Europe; more in our previous stories on the subject.) PageFair figures vastly underestimate the problem. In a recent poll, The Information (paywall) found that 50% of respondents already used an adblocker, and that 52% intended to install one on their iPhone.

Those are surprisingly high numbers and, I suspect, they’ll continue to rise, because:

Through their data plans, users are actually taxed by intrusive ads. Some carrier plans — usually the most expensive ones — might include unlimited data. But “unlimited” doesn’t usually work when roaming: bit-guzzling apps prove costly when traveling abroad. Besides the monetary impact, the adblocking benefit experienced in navigation comfort and speed is way more tangible on a mobile device than on the desktop. For example, according to tests performed by BrooksReview, the loading time gain on New York Times mobile pages is 6x. No wonder why adblocking apps are such a hit in the AppStore.

There’s a reason ad blockers have had such a meteoric rise to the top of the App Store charts. They make a huge and immediate impact on your browsing experience.

From the conclusions:

At some point, all ecosystem components (advertisers, creative agencies, media buyers, marketplaces, publishers) will need to congregate and come up with acceptable ad formats, as well as reasonable tracking practices. For now, they appear numb, but the combined pressure of quarterly earnings and antsy customers will force change.

And:

Low-end formats will disappear from the web, to the benefit of rarer, more sophisticated ads such as bespoke contents. In the process, most bottom-feeding intermediaries should vanish, with remaining ones adding real value.

As Frederic says, things are going to get worse before they get better. But ultimately, this is a shakeup in an industry that truly needs a shakeup.

From Apple’s press release:

Apple today announced it has sold more than 13 million new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus models, a new record, just three days after launch. iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus will be available in more than 40 additional countries beginning October 9 including Italy, Mexico, Russia, Spain and Taiwan. The new iPhones will be available in over 130 countries by the end of the year.

That’s a hell of an opening weekend and a quick move internationally.

The only fly I see in the ointment is the implementation of the Apple Upgrade Program. Potential buyers who were not able to reserve their phone of choice in the first few minutes of availability had no way to order their phone via the Upgrade Program as it requires an in store purchase, and those reservations sold out quickly. As of this writing, inventory of most models is extremely limited (practically zero if you want anything beyond 16 GB or any model of 6s Plus).

In essence, Apple is pushing buyers to make the purchase on-line (at least 3 to 4 week shipping on most models). The in-store reservation system does not allow you to reserve a phone far into the future. If the store does not have stock, you still cannot get in the Apple Upgrade Program queue.

To test this for yourself, go to the Apple Store iPhone page, then scroll down to the second page and click the link that says “Reserve iPhone 6s to buy in store”. Notice that the State popup menu only has 20 options (most states have zero inventory). And of the available states, most states only offer iPhone 6s inventory. Very few offer the iPhone 6s Plus, and those that do offer a 16 GB model in only one color.

The Apple Upgrade Program is a terrific idea, but it is certainly not an easy get.

TechInsider:

Tonight — Sunday, Sept. 27 — you can see the first “supermoon” total lunar eclipse in 30 years. The moon will turn red, which is normal for a lunar eclipse, but this rare event will be bigger and brighter than those of the past few decades. That’s because the eclipse will coincide with a supermoon — a “very rare” alignment that won’t happen again until 2033.

Check this map to see if you live where the eclipse will be visible. If you don’t live in a visible region, or a big city with too many tall obstructions or a lot of light pollution, bookmark this page.

We won’t see the full effect here on the West Coast but if you’re lucky enough to be able to get outside and see it clearly, don’t miss it. Otherwise, like so many other things nowadays, you can watch online.

Moon Connection:

Now you can have accurate, attractive Moon and Sun details at your fingertips. View a beautiful real-time image of the current Moon phase, complete with technical data. Quickly see if the Moon is above the horizon on the Lunar Position screen, along with Moon rise and set times and precise Moon position in the sky. If you also want to know Sun rise and set times, look at the Solar Position screen.

Tonight’s total eclipse of the Super Harvest Moon could be spectacular, depending on the weather in your area. Use this free app to figure its position in your night sky.

I’ll be posting more about this camera, but I’ve been using it and it’s so great.

Kirk McElhearn, writing for Macworld:

A friend recently showed me an iOS app called SoundShare. This free app lets you play music and, if you want, share it with your friends. You can follow people, as you would on Facebook or Twitter, and see what they’ve listened to, while sharing what you’ve heard.

I’ve been beta testing SoundShare for a while now and, I have to say, it is a brilliant complement to Apple Music and my go-to app for new music discovery. You can see what’s trending on SoundShare, explore various top music charts (iTunes included), check the song of the day, or see what your friends are listening to.

This was very similar to the way my friends and I, both in the record store and at each other’s homes, would turn each other on to new music. Bob and I were talking on Skype while doing this, each in a different country, and we were able to share music essentially in real time by adding songs to a shared playlist. Sure, you could tell someone to search for something in Apple Music or Spotify, but this is more immediate. Other users can also see what you’ve listened to, and you can see their listening history.

SoundShare includes a sharing extension for Apple Music that lets me add an Apple Music song to a SoundShare playlist. I can share that playlist with any SoundShare user and they can add their own songs to that same playlist. The point here (and I think this is a big point) is that I can use SoundShare to share music with my friends, even if they don’t have Apple Music. SoundShare is the bridge, the glue that brings all my musical worlds together.

Another cool feature of SoundShare is the compatibility with your TV. Because every SoundShare song has a link to a YouTube video, you can AirPlay your iOS device to your TV, then start a SoundShare playlist. SoundShare will automatically play a video for every song in your playlist. I have yet to stump SoundShare (YouTube, really) with a song that didn’t have some sort of accompanying video.

SoundShare is a great idea, and it’s frankly what’s missing in Apple Music. You can make playlists with Apple Music, and your friends can subscribe to them, but there’s no two-way sharing in Apple’s service. As with any social networking app, SoundShare will live or die according to the number of users it can attract.

My hope is that folks at Apple will take SoundShare for a spin. This is a terrific approach to sharing music.

Walk along the bedraggled queue of people, and pillows and discarded bottles of water bore the same bright blue color and were emblazoned with the hashtag #NextIsNew.

“They were given to us by Apple,” a person in queue told International Business Times. A friend of his, however, was a little more savvy, quietly informing him: “No man, it was Samsung, I did a little research.”

What the fuck is wrong with this company? Instead of these types of stunts, why not try to build a better product—that philosophy is the one thing they haven’t copied from Apple.

Ryot:

The film tells the story of one citizen from Jalouzi, one of the largest slums in Haiti, who is determined to bring color to the impoverished area by helping paint the entire town, literally.

Believing that color has the power to transform his community, he’s helping to paint everywhere – on houses, on buses, and the entire hillside. Armed with brushes of bright blues, pastel pinks, and sunshine yellows, he’s helping to mobilize citizens of all ages, determined to turn the grey town into a rainbow full of color to lead the way to a brighter Haiti.

I don’t care much that it was shot on any particular device. But it is a wonderful film full of hope for the future of one of the most impoverished places in the world.

The Wall Street Journal:

Eyeo GmbH, the company behind popular desktop ad-blocking tool Adblock Plus, now accepts payment from around 70 companies in exchange for letting their ads through its filter. Eyeo stipulates that they must comply with its “acceptable ads” policy, meaning their ads aren’t too disruptive or intrusive to users. In total, ads from some 700 companies meet the acceptable ads policy, an Eyeo spokesman said.

Eyeo is now reaching out to developers of other ad-blocking tools to cut deals that allow certain ads to pass ads through their filters, too, in exchange for payment.

(Dean) Murphy (who created Crystal, an application to help users block ads on Apple Inc.’s mobile devices) said he has taken Eyeo up on its offer, and plans to implement an option within his app whereby “acceptable” ads will be displayed to users. The feature will be switched on by default, Mr. Murphy said, and he will receive a flat monthly fee from Eyeo in return.

This is a predictable situation and it will only get worse or better depending on your point of view.

Pixelmator for iOS 2.1 update includes support for iOS 9, multitasking on iPad via Split View and Slide Over, 8K resolution support, Open in Place and Save to Photos features, and more.

I love and use Pixelmator on iOS and Mac, and have for years. These guys make great apps.