On the heels of the Spotify offer we posted earlier, Best Buy has a deal for new subscribers to get a free Apple Music subscription for four months.

While this is supposedly a “US Only” offer, a Reddit poster has a workaround. It didn’t work for me though.

Global Times:

China is ready to take a series of countermeasures against a US plan to block shipments of semiconductors to Chinese telecom firm Huawei, including putting US companies on an “unreliable entity list,” launching investigations and imposing restrictions on US companies such as Apple and suspending the purchase of Boeing airplanes, a source close to the Chinese government told the Global Times.

The measures include adding related US companies to China’s “unreliable entity list,” imposing restrictions on or launching investigations into US companies like Qualcomm, Cisco and Apple according to Chinese laws and regulations like Cybersecurity Review Measures and Anti-monopoly Law, and suspending airplane purchases from Boeing, said the source.

It’s only a rumour at this point but even the hint this could happen will certainly accelerate any plans Apple may have to move at least some of its manufacturing out of the reach of the Chinese government and its battles with the US government.

CNET:

It’s been over a year since Apple Arcade was first announced and more than eight months since the subscription video game service was released. One of its big pitches is the ability to play its library of games not only on your iPhone, iPad or MacBook, but also on your couch at home with the Apple TV. I last looked at Arcade for Apple TV in October, paying special attention to how it plays on the big screen. Now, with quarantine leaving everyone hungry for new home entertainment, I decided to give it another spin to see how the platform has grown.

I played a host of Arcade titles over the last few weeks on an Apple TV 4K and a 65-inch 4K TV, primarily using the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 controllers as well as the Apple TV remote. In short, Apple’s $5-per-month service has gotten a little better and is now at over 100 titles, but it still has a very long way to go to offer a real alternative to Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo Switch.

I let my Arcade subscription lapse a couple of months ago. While there are plenty of games, very few are of interest to our family. I think the comparison to consoles may be a little unfair but I’m not a console player so I don’t/can’t compare the experiences. On their own merits, the Apple Arcade games just aren’t compelling enough for us.

The Verge:

Spotify is offering two new deals, starting today, to bring more people over to its premium subscription service. New users can get three free months if they sign up from today through June 30th, and the deal applies to any premium plans including family, student, and individual. Meanwhile, people who once were individual premium members, but canceled their plan before April 14th, can sign up again for $9.99 for three months, bringing the cost of a subscription to a little over $3.00 per month. People can access both deals from spotify.com/premium.

My wife is a big fan of Spotify, mostly because of the selection of specific kinds of yoga music. If you haven’t tried it yet, this is a good deal for three months.

Charlie Harrington:

Not one block away from our house did I spot something: a yellowed plastic box amid a pile of trash. No. It couldn’t be. I stopped, and went back to the trash.

It was an Apple IIe. With its CRT monitor. And a dual floppy drive.

Just. SITTING. THERE.

This is a pretty fun read. I have to say, if I came across an Apple II, just sitting in someone’s trash, I would definitely grab it, if only for nostalgia’s sake.

How about you?

Eater:

Owners of the Bay Area’s restaurants agree on one thing: It’ll be damn near impossible to stay in business if their dining room capacity is cut. While California’s guidelines for restaurant reopening don’t specify a specific slash in capacity, they do require social distancing measures between patrons and workers, which means that to make enough money to remain afloat, restaurants need way more space to serve diners.

In response, officials across the Bay Area have discussed taking over street space for restaurant use — and now, Berkeley has put that discussion into action, as today it introduced legislation to fully close many of the city’s streets, repurposing them as seating areas for the city’s vibrant restaurant scene.

See also: Lithuanian capital to be turned into vast open-air cafe.

Makes me wonder, is this a temporary adjustment, or more of a seismic shift in thinking that will stay for the long haul?

This is not a rumor. It’s a press release from TSMC itself.

TSMC today announced its intention to build and operate an advanced semiconductor fab in the United States with the mutual understanding and commitment to support from the U.S. federal government and the State of Arizona.

As a reminder, TSMC is a chip fabricator with a long relationship with Apple, starting with the the A5 SoC back in 2011, and is said to be the chip fabricator behind the rumored ARM-based Mac (that last bit is a rumor).

Construction is planned to start in 2021 with production targeted to begin in 2024.

Can’t help but think about the fabled Foxconn plant in Wisconsin.

TechCrunch:

After plenty of talk about AR as the next computing platform, Apple may have more interest in virtual reality than they’ve previously forecasted.

At face value, this acquisition seems a little strange for Apple. Apple has been pushing full throttle on mobile AR, largely eschewing public activity or interest in the VR world, leaving that domain wholly in Facebook’s hands.

Tim Cook and plenty of others in Apple’s leadership have been outspoken in their excitement for AR’s potential, but as developers continue to struggle in finding that potential, perhaps virtual reality’s appeal is growing more important to that long-term strategy.

As the article points out, on the face of it this seems an odd buy, given that Apple has pointedly said they are more interested in AR than VR. But it may well be a personnel acquisition as opposed to a tech one.

TechCrunch:

Today, Apple released its 2020 Supplier Responsibility progress report. In it, Senior Vice President of Operations Sabih Khan published a letter that details an outline of the plan it created to increase safety and protection efforts in its supply chain worldwide.

As a pole position company that is the premiere manufacturer of consumer electronics in the world, Apple’s stances and efforts here are obviously under an incredible microscope. The measures that it takes will serve as a playbook for worldwide manufacturers going forward.

After thanking Apple’s suppliers around the world, Khan says that thousands of its employees worked with suppliers to create a plan to continue business in a fashion that took to account health recommendations in each country as well as the universal rules that govern coronavirus spread mitigation.

Apple has a page where you can download and read the PDF of the report yourself.

New York Times:

The Prince estate, in partnership with YouTube, is hosting a watch party of “Prince and the Revolution: Live,” the renowned concert captured at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, N.Y., on March 30, 1985. The show, filmed at the peak of their Purple Rain Tour, was the first live concert footage that Prince officially released as both a television broadcast and home video. And this will be the first time it’s streamed.

Among the hits performed are “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Delirious,” “1999,” “Little Red Corvette,” “Darling Nikki,” “When Doves Cry” and “Purple Rain.” Tune in an hour early for a live Q. and A. with the Revolution drummer Bobby Z.

The preshow starts at 8 p.m., and the watch party is at 9. The concert will be available through Sunday night.

The show ended with a 20-minute rendition of Purple Rain (with 10 minutes of a Prince guitar solo). I know where I’ll be at 8 pm ET this evening.

Matador Network:

Just because Stonehenge is thousands of years old doesn’t mean it can’t adapt to the virtual age.

The ancient, mystical site typically hosts one of the world’s most popular summer solstice celebrations, attracting thousands of people, including the druid and pagan community, on the longest day of the year to watch the sun rise behind the Heel Stone.

This year, however, the usual celebration won’t be possible. The English Heritage organization, which manages Stonehenge, is asking people not to visit the site, and is instead offering a livestream of the sunrise.

In case you’re wondering, The Photographer’s Ephemeris says the Stonehenge sunrise on Sunday morning, June 21 will be at 5:36 AM local time. Set your alarm clock accordingly.

In a nutshell, it’s all about privacy. But David Shayer’s TidBITS writeup does a nice job of explaining some of the details on how this is achieved.

Kif Leswing, CNBC:

More than 45,000 people have signed up for Utah’s contact tracing app, Healthy Together, since it was released in late April, the app’s developers told CNBC. That represents about 2% of the state’s population, but could still be helpful to the state’s health department as they attempt to track and notify people who might have been exposed.

And:

Healthy Together was built by Twenty, a social media start-up that previously built an app that helps young people meet up in person. After the pandemic started, the state of Utah reached out to the company, the founders said. With their staff of about 50 employees, they repurposed their social media-oriented technology for contact tracing in three weeks.

Privacy? No. Here’s how it works:

“Jeff and Sarah are two individuals in this example who don’t know each other but they both have the app on their phones. And so the both phones are emitting Bluetooth and GPS signals,” Allgood said. “Through that data we can identify whether or not two people have spent some time together.”

Here’s the costs involved:

Utah’s governor’s office spent $2.75 million for the app and other improvements, and will pay $300,000 per month in maintenance fees, according to public records cited by Utahpolicy.com, a website focusing on local politics.

One issue I struggle with, no matter the approach, is adoption. If few people (2% of the population, in Utah’s case) sign up for the app (fair to assume even fewer actually use the app?), can it still be effective?

And with all that juicy data out there, how long until that data finds its way into other hands, hands without the public good at heart?

The user also has a choice to share their location data with the public health department if they test positive, and any Bluetooth or GPS data is deleted after 30 days, Twenty said.

Good to know.

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

A number of users are now airing their frustrations about battery life issues. A slice of Magic Keyboard owners are noticing that their iPad’s battery drops quickly when using the keyboard with the backlight enabled, and some reports indicate battery drain problems arise even when the iPad is idle and not in use.

I’ve seen a good number of people complain about this on Twitter. Hopefully, this is fixable with a software/firmware patch.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Italian website iSpazio today reported that Apple plans to reopen 10 of its 17 stores in Italy on May 19, excluding locations in the Piedmont and Lombardy regions.

Side note: Keep an eye on Michael Steeber’s updating map of US Apple Store openings.

Los Angeles Times:

Federal agents seized a cellphone belonging to a prominent Republican senator on Wednesday night as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into controversial stock trades he made as the novel coronavirus first struck the U.S., a law enforcement official said.

And:

The seizure represents a significant escalation in the investigation into whether Burr violated a law preventing members of Congress from trading on insider information they have gleaned from their official work.

On the Apple side:

A second law enforcement official said FBI agents served a warrant in recent days on Apple to obtain information from Burr’s iCloud account and said agents used data obtained from the California-based company as part of the evidence used to obtain the warrant for the senator’s phone.

I’m curious what part of Burr’s iCloud account the FBI got access to. Was it iCloud Drive? Was it iCloud backup (perhaps Burr’s backup was not set to be encrypted)?

From Apple’s iCloud security overview:

iCloud secures your information by encrypting it when it’s in transit, storing it in iCloud in an encrypted format, and using secure tokens for authentication. For certain sensitive information, Apple uses end-to-end encryption. This means that only you can access your information, and only on devices where you’re signed into iCloud. No one else, not even Apple, can access end-to-end encrypted information.

For a clue on what information might have been available to the FBI, take a look at Section III of Apple’s Legal Process Guidelines (H/T Mike Wuerthele, AppleInsider).

Bit of a rabbit hole there, but an interesting read. Seems clear the FBI got what they needed.

Vice:

I’ll never forget the day I found out. It was March 1995; I’d come home from school and my mom called out for me and my siblings. Then she said, “Your father’s in jail.” My brother asked, “For what?” And she said, “For murder.”

Nothing prepares you for that type of news. I remember my knees feeling weak, like I was going to collapse. So, I went into my room, lay down on the bed and sobbed while my head raced, trying to make sense of it. Did he kill another man? Accidentally? In a fight? I tried to imagine that happening, but it didn’t feel like something he’d do. Also he didn’t have any guns, so I couldn’t imagine him shooting somebody. But then I pictured him strangling, and somehow that was easy. For some reason I could clearly visualize him strangling a woman.

My (three) dads were bad but sure as hell not this bad.

Digiday:

Over the past several months, Apple has been asking the publishers participating in its year-old premium program for permission to produce audio versions of the stories distributed there, according to sources at four different publishers that have heard the pitch.

The option of listening to stories on Apple News+ fits into a recent trend of publishers offering audio versions of their stories on their own properties, such as their websites, or within their mobile apps.

Even with Apple handling most of the heavy lifting, several publishers regard the plans skeptically, three sources said. One said it has not seen evidence that Apple News’s audience will want to listen to audio versions of their stories. A second worried that if Apple emphasizes audio for News+, it could further skew the picture of who gets compensated: Listening to a story, after all, takes longer than reading one.

Someone (or more likely something via computer voice) reading stories doesn’t sound like something that would make Apple News+ more interesting to me.

Two posts by Justin O’Beirne:

• This is the Apple Maps evolution
• And this is the Google Maps evolution

Interesting to watch both designs evolve, becoming lighter, more delicate, yet packing more info, especially at the more zoomed in levels.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. plans to soon start returning more employees to its major global offices while other tech companies are continuing work-from-home policies through at least the end of 2020 due to Covid-19.

And:

The first phase, which includes staff members who can’t work remotely or are facing challenges working from home, has already begun in some regions globally. It will expand to major offices across late May and early June, Apple has told staff.

See also, Twitter Will Allow Employees To Work At Home Forever.

Ben Taub, The New Yorker:

Past twenty-seven thousand feet, the pilot had gone beyond the theoretical limit for any kind of fish. (Their cells collapse at greater depths.) After thirty-five thousand feet, he began releasing a series of weights, to slow his descent. Nearly seven miles of water was pressing on the titanium sphere. If there were any imperfections, it could instantly implode.

And:

For the next hour, he explored the featureless beige sediment, and tried to find and collect a rock sample. Then the lights flickered, and an alarm went off. Vescovo checked his systems—there was a catastrophic failure in battery one. Water had seeped into the electronics, bringing about a less welcome superlative: the deepest-ever artificial explosion was taking place a few feet from his head.

If there were oxygen at that depth, there could have been a raging fire. Instead, a battery junction box melted, burning a hole through its external shell without ever showing a flame. Any instinct to panic was suppressed by the impossibility of rescue. Vescovo would have to come up on his own.

This was a riveting read, a ripping yarn.

Nikkei Asian Review:

Apple has advised one of its Chinese AirPods assemblers to make a major investment in an iPhone and MacBook metal casing provider, a move the California tech titan hopes will create a formidable alternative to another of its longtime suppliers, Taiwan’s Foxconn, multiple sources told the Nikkei Asian Review.

And:

The deal, if realized, would give Luxshare the ability to produce high-quality metal casing as well as access to smartphone assembly know-how, which would take it a step closer to becoming the Chinese version of Foxconn — a single company with operations that span nearly the entire electronics supply chain. Such a move could ultimately help Luxshare grab a share of iPhone production, which ships around 200 million units each year.

Good move to diversify the supply chain. Interesting that that diversification brings Apple deeper into China.

The AirPods Pro got their new firmware update last week. Now that same firmware version is rolling out to the second generation of the original AirPods.

To check your firmware, go to:

Settings > General > About > (Your AirPods)

Interestingly, my second gen AirPods grabbed that since-pulled 2C54 firmware update and have still not updated. No clue how long they’ll be stuck on 2C54 and there’s no way to force an update.