Millions of Americans own an Apple Watch, which commands roughly a 50 percent share of the smartwatch market. Among its many features, the Apple Watch can take your pulse. It also contains hardware to measure your blood-oxygen levels, and it has been doing so since the watch was released—but the hardware is not operable by the watch’s wearer, who thus cannot obtain the results. Under current FDA regulation, the function is disabled.
The article argues against federal regulation, and FDA overreach. That aside, what’s really interesting to me is the COVID-19 tie-in.
We are just beginning to recognize that Covid pneumonia initially causes a form of oxygen deprivation we call “silent hypoxia” — “silent” because of its insidious, hard-to-detect nature.
And:
When Covid pneumonia first strikes, patients don’t feel short of breath, even as their oxygen levels fall. And by the time they do, they have alarmingly low oxygen levels and moderate-to-severe pneumonia (as seen on chest X-rays). Normal oxygen saturation for most persons at sea level is 94 to 100 percent; Covid pneumonia patients I saw had oxygen saturations as low as 50 percent.
And this is exactly what the Apple Watch’s built-in (but disabled) plethysmograph could prevent. If it doesn’t work, then no argument here. But if it works and the FDA’s testing would push off approval until, say, next year, this might be a time for an emergency exception. Lives are at stake.
A recent patent filing offers a window into future forays by Apple into automotive design. Apple is exploring artificial intelligence systems that will enable future motorists to enjoy windows that continuously change characteristics as they drive.
Titled “Systems with adjustable windows,” U.S. Patent No. 10,625,580 envisions glass components that control light, reflection and heat conductance based on both user preference and sensory input.
I’ve always envisioned auto glass moving to edge-to-edge displays, combining see-through, heads up data displays for the driver, if there is one, and computer driven displays (that are transparent to the driver) with news, entertainment, etc., for the passengers. All of which are, as the article indicates, built to filter out the elements, as needed.
Will we ever see the fruits of Apple’s automotive efforts? Who knows.
Cellebrite is pitching the same capability to help authorities learn who a coronavirus sufferer may have infected. When someone tests positive, authorities can siphon up the patient’s location data and contacts, making it easy to “quarantine the right people,” according to a Cellebrite email pitch to the Delhi police force this month.
Just iPhone their data and contacts. You’ll get permission first, right?
This would usually be done with consent, the email said. But in legally justified cases, such as when a patient violates a law against public gatherings, police could use the tools to break into a confiscated device, Cellebrite advised.
And:
“We do not need the phone passcode to collect the data”
As hinted earlier, Apple has started displaying COVID-19 testing sites in Maps. People in all 50 states and Puerto Rico can use Apple’s default navigation app to quickly find a place to get checked, whether it’s a hospital, urgent care clinic, pharmacy or dedicated testing site. The facilities also fall under a new “COVID-19 Testing” search category that’s prioritized alongside other essentials like groceries and healthcare.
To see this yourself, fire up Maps, tap in the search field, then scroll down past Recent Searches to the section labeled Search Nearby. COVID-19 Testing should be first on that list. Tap it, then testing centers near you should appear on the map.
Each location is marked with an icon:
Hospitals are marked with a “+”
Clinics and others are marked with a “*”
Military locations are marked with a stethoscope icon
Or that appears to be the scheme. I’ve found exceptions, so it’s possible there’s more to it than that. If you know the specifics, ping me, I’ll update the post.
One of the most ambitious projects in Apple history launched in less than a month, and was driven by just a handful of employees.
In mid-March, with Covid-19 spreading to almost every country in the world, a small team at Apple started brainstorming how they could help. They knew that smartphones would be key to the global coronavirus response, particularly as countries started relaxing their shelter-in-place orders. To prepare for that, governments and private companies were building so-called “contact tracing” apps to monitor citizens’ movements and determine whether they might have come into contact with someone infected with the virus.
Within a few weeks, the Apple project — code-named “Bubble” — had dozens of employees working on it with executive-level support from two sponsors: Craig Federighi, a senior vice president of software engineering, and Jeff Williams, the company’s chief operating officer and de-facto head of healthcare. By the end of the month, Google had officially come on board, and about a week later, the companies’ two CEOs Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai met virtually to give their final vote of approval to the project.
Good to see these frenemies cooperating on such an important issue.
I love Rogue Amoeba and have used their audio software for years on my Mac. Their new app, SoundSource, gives you powerful control over all the audio on your Mac, right from your menu bar:
Per-Application Volume Control
Change the volume of any app relative to others, and play individual apps to different audio devices. Mute your browser, or send music to one set of speakers and everything else to another.
Improve Sound Quality
Use Magic Boost and Volume Overdrive to hear your audio even in loud environments. The built-in equalizer can sweeten the sound, and more advanced users will love the ability to apply Audio Units to any audio.
Fast Device Access
All the settings your Mac’s audio devices are just a click away. Adjust input and output levels, tweak the balance, and even switch sample rates, right from your menu bar.
One More Thing…
If you have a DisplayPort or HDMI device that fails to offer volume adjustment, SoundSource can help there too. It gives those devices a proper volume slider, and the Super Volume Keys feature makes your keyboard volume controls work as well. Neat!
Check out SoundSource today, with a free trial! Rogue Amoeba has extended their April sale – through May 15th, Loop readers can save 20% with coupon code LOOPSS.
Here are the original trailers for the classic Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, “A Fist Full Of Dollars,” “A Few Dollars More,” and “The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.” Ennio Morricone’s music score is just as good today.
I wasn’t old enough to see these in theaters but I have seen all of them. I’m a little afraid to go back and watch them as an adult for fear of ruining the memories of watching them with my mom when I was younger.
Haptic Touch is that little pop you feel when you press-and-hold on newer (iPhone XR and later) iPhones. This issue is specific to the iPhone SE lock screen when you press-and-hold a notification.
A niche feature, but a pain if it’s something you’ve come to depend on. Worth knowing.
The UK’s coronavirus contact-tracing app is set to use a different model to the one proposed by Apple and Google, despite concerns raised about privacy and performance.
And:
The NHS says it has a way to make the software work “sufficiently well” on iPhones without users having to keep it active and on-screen.
And:
It has opted for a “centralised model” to achieve this – meaning that the matching process, which works out which phones to send alerts to – happens on a computer server.
This contrasts with Apple and Google’s “decentralised” approach – where the matches take place on users’ handsets.
Rene Ritchie and iJustine make their livings using Final Cut Pro on the Mac. In this video, they discuss the rumored emergence of Final Cut Pro for iPad. Lots of detail, smart questions.
Two things that stand out for me are the issues of RAM and storage space/management. How will iPad support resource hungry projects that take advantage of the much large RAM/storage of a specced out MacBook Pro or Mac Pro?
It’s all speculation, so take with a grain of salt, but this is a good case study if you are considering an iPad as a Mac replacement.
We Are One: A Global Film Festival is being produced and organized by New York’s Tribeca Enterprises. The YouTube-hosted event will feature programming from 20 top film festivals including the Cannes Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival and Venice Film Festival.
Great idea. Can’t wait. The festival will benefit COVID-19 charities, and will run from May 29-June 7.
Deirdre O’Brien, vice president of retail and people, made the disclosure in a weekly video update, according to retail employees familiar with the matter. She didn’t specify which stores or regions, but said “we are continuing to analyze this health situation in every location, and I do expect we will reopen up many more stores in May.”
Tantalizing, but wish there was more detail. Is this a slow regional spread from the Seoul Apple Store that opened earlier this month? Will we see Apple Stores open in the US? UK? EU? Standalone stores first, mall locations last?
This iPhone goes where no iPhone has gone before with “Single Image Monocular Depth Estimation.” In English, this is the first iPhone that can generate a portrait effect using nothing but a single, 2D image.
The new iPhone SE doesn’t have focus pixels, or any other starting point for depth. It generates depth entirely through machine learning.
So the next question is whether Machine Learning will ever get to the point that we don’t need multi-camera devices?
Another great article from the folks at Halide. Well written, well explained.
HBO Max, the forthcoming streaming service from AT&T Inc.-owned WarnerMedia, will be available on Apple Inc. devices when it launches on May 27, the company said on Monday.
Customers will be able to access HBO Max on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices, as well as the Apple TV 4K and Apple TV HD. Customers with second- and third-generation Apple TV models will be able to stream HBO Max content from their iPhone or iPad to their TV with AirPlay.
HBO Max will enter a crowded streaming landscape dominated by Netflix Inc, Walt Disney Co-owned Disney+, and Amazon.com Inc’s Prime Video. It will include 10,000 hours of content from WarnerMedia brands and libraries such as Warner Bros, New Line Cinema and Cartoon Network.
Great news for those of you who can access the service.
Is there such a thing as too much Star Wars? Clearly, somebody out there doesn’t think so, because they’ve completed the insane experiment of split screening all nine episodes of the Skywalker Saga together, so that they all play simultaneously. Is it impressive? Absolutely. Is it strangely mesmerizing? Totally. Can you understand a single word? Not at all.
The video, which is clearly part of an experiment to drive people with ADD completely ’round the bend, was completed by Lucas Hammer on YouTube. It’s an impressive feat that needs to be seen to be believed, so check it out.
If you’re a serious Star Wars junkie then there’s actually a lot of potentially interesting information to glean by watching all nine movies side by side.
It really is weirdly compelling and I’m not even a huge Star Wars fan.
Imran Chaudhri spent over 20 years at Apple and helped create the company’s hero products like iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Now on the fifth anniversary of Apple’s highly successful wearable, Chaudhri has shared some neat details on the history of what went into creating the Apple Watch‘s faces and features.
Nice collection of tweets from Chaudrhi, worth scrolling through.
Amazing to think back to that first Apple Watch, entering a crowded, clunky, smart watch market, tiny in comparison to the gigantic mechanical watch market. Oh how things have changed.
iFixit, from the comparison teardowns of the iPhone SE and iPhone 8:
iPhone SE’s cameras, SIM tray, Taptic Engine, and display assembly (including the microphone and proximity sensor) are all swappable with iPhone 8 parts.
And:
That screen should be cheaper to replace than any new iPhone we’ve seen in years. However, as with any modern iPhone screen swap, you will lose True Tone unless you have access to a screen programmer.
And:
Home buttons are still not interchangeable—you’ll need to hold on to your original home button in the event of a repair, substitute an aftermarket home button with no Touch ID, or else pay Apple whatever they ask to fix it for you.
And:
Although the battery looks identical, the battery’s logic board connector differs from the one in the 8, so they don’t fit together. The SE will connect to an iPhone 11 battery, which uses the same connector—but it won’t turn on. And, sadly, this seemingly throwback phone has some very modern Apple roadblocks inside. You can’t even swap one genuine iPhone SE 2020 battery for another without triggering a “not a genuine Apple battery” service warning.
Barriers to self-repair. But at the same time, keyed parts to keep repairs from going wrong. Interesting article.
In Europe, most countries have chosen short-range Bluetooth “handshakes” between mobile devices as the best way of registering a potential contact, even though it does not provide location data.
But they have disagreed about whether to log such contacts on individual devices or on a central server – which would be more directly useful to existing contact tracing teams that work phones and knock on doors to warn those who may be at risk.
Apple and Google are now referring to “contact tracing” as “exposure notification,” which the companies believe better describes the functionality of their upcoming API. The system is intended to notify a person of potential exposure, augmenting broader contact tracing efforts that public health authorities are undertaking.
See also the embedded Exposure Notification FAQ from the Apple/Google team. Can’t help but wonder if the name change from contact tracing to exposure notification was an attempt to ease EU concerns about privacy.
The Macintosh Graphical User Interface was a new idiom. It was the first mass-market implementation of a new system of signs and symbols advocated by Douglas Engelbart; it was a new language that both rationally and by osmosis people started to speak. Once you had touched a Macintosh, you felt in control, and the “interface” of any other device, such as your VCRs or your LaserDisc players, came across as an impossible conversation.
By 1997, when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, 20 to 25 million Macintosh users had become a movement of people speaking the same language, and this because of various reasons:
Apple survived Jobs’s departure in 1985
Macintosh fans were unrelenting evangelists
The Macintosh had an amazing foothold in education, and
Windows, “the enemy,” was trying everything it could to speak Macintosh too.
The history of the Macintosh’s “survival” is fascinating and many of us participated in it in various ways.
I just stumbled upon a working version of the famous #AfterDark screensaver package featuring “Flying Toasters" – remember those? I love them! https://t.co/Ni4B2ieT28
His Girl Friday stands out for many reasons, especially by refusing, unlike many Hollywood pictures written by former newspapermen, to instinctively glorify journalism, a mistake more recent films about the news still make.
Movies don’t get much more classic or screwball than this.
The timing of CES and the people who attended could be more clues, or “ecologic evidence,” about how the virus spread in Silicon Valley at a time when people weren’t paying attention, said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert and professor at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine.
“As a clinician, it was weird to be in the Bay Area to see Santa Clara County being the hotspot,” he said. “You would think it would be San Francisco because there’s tons of people going into [the airport] and a lot of Chinese population, but I think there has to be something else to this.” It will take more research to determine whether CES is that connection, he said.
The conference, a well-known schmooze-fest of tech leaders from around the world, created an ideal environment for a virus to spread, particularly if highly infectious people were present. People jam into convention halls and casinos, share business cards, shake hands and socialize in close quarters with attendees from tech hubs across the United States — largely New York, Chicago, the Bay Area, and Southern California — and at least 63 other countries.
I speculated about this months ago. After all, for those of us who used to attend Macworld Expo, the “Expo Creeping Crud” is a well known “disease.” Almost invariably after attending, many of us would come down with a low grade flu.
According to AirDNA, an online rental analytics firm, new bookings on Airbnb are down 85 per cent; cancellation rates are close to 90 per cent. Revenue generated by Airbnb’s platform in March was down 25 per cent year-on-year, wiping out $1 billion in bookings. With much of the world still on lockdown, those numbers are unlikely to pick up anytime soon.
According GlobalData, an analytics firm, Airbnb could lose a “significant portion” of its host community as a result of the pandemic.
Data from AirDNA shows that of the 1.1 million Airbnb listings in the US, some 600,000 are from hosts that have at least two other listings. Around 600,000 of those 1.1 million listings are also available for more than six months of the year. Both are key indicators of properties that are more akin to hotel rooms than sharing economy holiday rentals.
A lot of things are going to change once this pandemic is over. Will Airbnb still be around? Contrary to its image of “average homeowners just trying to make a few bucks,” Airbnb has become the largest hotel chain in the world with the majority of its hosts’ professional property owners.
A security company which discovered iPhone Mail vulnerabilities claimed that they have been ‘widely exploited’ in real-world attacks. Apple has now denied this claim, stating that it could find ‘no evidence’ that the exploits have been used. Additionally, it says that the vulnerabilities in question cannot bypass iPhone and iPad security safeguards.
Apple has acknowledged the three issues discovered by security group ZecOps, and has patched these in the iOS 13.4.5 beta which should be released to the public soon.
After the news came out last week, Apple has now responded with:
“We have thoroughly investigated the researcher’s report and, based on the information provided, have concluded these issues do not pose an immediate risk to our users,” the Cupertino, California company said. “The researcher identified three issues in Mail, but alone they are insufficient to bypass iPhone and iPad security protections, and we have found no evidence they were used against customers.”
I started using the new Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro this week and it’s one of my favorite accessories that Apple has ever made. Dave and I talk about everything I like so far. We also talk about some of the early reviews of the iPhone SE.
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Have an upcoming video call? Don’t dial-in from your living room — send your transmission from the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon.
StarWars.com is excited to present a galaxy of virtual Star Wars backgrounds that you can use in any online meeting. If you’re home and catching up with friends, talking with family, or an an important work video call, you can now do so appearing as if you’re somewhere in a galaxy far, far away. Choose from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back‘s Hoth (wampa-free, thankfully), the ruins of the Death Star, and many, many more. Whether you dress as a Star Wars character is entirely up to you. (But we would encourage it.)
If you want to show off your Star Wars fandom, you can’t go too far wrong with these official backgrounds.
I grew up watching Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! every Saturday morning. Much as I loved it, though, the feeble animation and repetitive plots were apparent even to the young me. Whereas characters such as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny seemed eternal, extending far into the past and future, Scooby-Doo felt like a show just for that particular moment, for my specific childhood.
Fast-forward 35 years or so, and to my astonishment, my children loved it just as much as I had. I probably wound up watching more Scooby-Doo episodes with my kids than I had watched as a kid. Evidence suggests that my experience is not unique. Scooby-Doo, believe it or not, has over the years been the subject of at least 19 TV series (on CBS, ABC, the WB, Cartoon Network, and Boomerang); more than 40 animated films; and two live-action movies in the early 2000s, the first of which grossed $275 million worldwide.
Which raises the obvious question: What on earth is going on? The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever once summed up the cartoon’s message as “Kids should meddle, dogs are sweet, life is groovy, and if something scares you, you should confront it.” But that hardly seems enough for half a century of on-air appeal.
Even as a kid, I hated Scooby-Doo. I’ve never understood its appeal after all of these years.
