Engadget:

Sonos has been under fire lately for the way it has handled a few decisions around its oldest products. Last fall, the company introduced a “trade up” program — if you owned one of Sonos’ oldest products, you could send it in to the company and get 30 percent off new gear. However, to get the discount, you had to put your old products in “recycle mode,” a setting that would permanently make them unable to connect to a network or work with other Sonos gear.

Today, the company is reversing course. A Sonos spokesperson confirmed that the Trade Up program will continue, but recycling mode is no more.

That said, it’s worth noting that Sonos hasn’t changed its plans to stop updating those legacy products come May. As a reminder, they’ll work as they do now but won’t receive new features or software updates going forward.

Another example of a PR disaster that shouldn’t have happened.

TechHive:

The TV industry is second to none when it comes to misleading, obscure, hyperbolic, and useless terminology and specifications. Manufacturers try to baffle you with bull… Err, bedazzle you with numbers and fancy names. Case in point: it’s an industry that can keep a straight face while telling you that 3840 horizontal pixels equals 4K horizontal pixels (4K equals 4096, but who’s counting?)

Don’t worry, we’re here to help with no-hype, no-frills, plain-language (or as close as we can get) definitions of the terms and specs you’ll encounter when you go shopping for your new TV. We’ll also present some basic advice that will have you schooling your local big-box store pro in no time.

There are few things in tech more frustrating than trying to compare tech specs of big-screen TVs. This article might help make sense of some of the terms used by manufacturers.

Macworld:

Tot (or Tot Pocket as it’s called on iOS)—a new, purposely limited notetaking app for iOS and macOS—warrants your attention. Not only does it introduce more than one fresh idea, but it also solves a specific and common digital notetaking problem.

Most notetaking apps let you create an unlimited amount of documents, but Tot only lets you choose between seven different sheets within the same interface. This is especially satisfying on the iPhone, as a little haptic tap accompanies each swipe. You have to click on the dots representing each document on the Mac, but the interface looks exactly the same and the automatic syncing takes a couple of seconds at most.

Tot impresses me because it lets you edit in both Markdown and rich text through a simple toggle at the bottom of the interface, and I like that it usually converts copied rich text snippets into Markdown when you copy and paste them from other documents and sites (aside from font and font size). For that matter, you don’t have to keep each of the seven files in either rich text or Markdown. Tot remembers the settings, and it’ll even maintain them when you switch from an iPhone to a Mac or vice versa.

Tot is an interesting app with an even more interesting pricing model – it’s free on macOS but $20 on iOS. I wish the nice folks at Iconfactory much success with this app.

CNBC:

Apple is cracking down on apps related to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak that aren’t from recognized institutions like governments or hospitals, iPhone developers told CNBC.

Apple has been specifically evaluating coronavirus apps to prevent the spread of misinformation. It looks at both where the health data comes from and whether the developers represent organizations that users can trust to publish accurate data, like governments or health-focused organizations, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The restriction appears to be working, as search results show few apps about the outbreak and no obvious spam. But it could also reduce the availability of software that would enable iPhone users to track the outbreak, and raise fairness questions about who is allowed to develop apps for iPhones.

Some will say Apple (and Google) are being too heavyhanded on this issue but with so much false information and so many sleazy people trying to take advantage of it, it’s prudent for the companies to take this action.

BoingBoing:

When a plane is in trouble, the pilots dump all its fuel before making an emergency landing. This is controversial; though fuel usually dissipates before reaching ground, it’s a dangerous pollutant all the same and sometimes it gets dumped close enough to humans that it puts them at risk.

This 1984 film, of a test of jet fuel formulated to resist igniting, shows why pilots dump it. NASA and the FAA loaded a retired training jet with test dummies, then remote-piloted it to a crash landing in the Mojave desert. It comes down rough but stays in one piece as it plows through earthworks and obstacles. If it were out of gas, chances of everyone surviving would be good. But with a full tank?

Spoiler: the fuel ignites.

I’d seen the end of this video many times but this is the first time I’ve read about the whys of it or seen what came before the fireball.

The Verge:

Companies based in Santa Clara County, California — which includes Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and San Jose — should avoid travel and postpone or cancel mass gatherings, the county recommended on Thursday. The recommendations come after six new cases of the novel coronavirus have been identified, bringing the total number of people confirmed to have the disease to 20.

Other guidance from the county includes minimizing the number of people “working within arm’s length of one another,” urging people to stay home if they’re sick, and spacing out start and end times of the workday for employees. People at higher risk for serious illness — those who are over 50 or have another underlying health condition — should stay home.

The county recommendations are an attempt to slow the spread of the new coronavirus by limiting in-person contact.

As I said on Wednesday night’s Your Mac Life show, Apple should just announce the cancellation/postponement of WWDC now. It’s obvious that they are going to do it eventually. Sooner rather than later is best – release all of those people from the stress of not just planning the trip but also of having to deal with this issue.

Kirk McElhearn:

Major events continue to be cancelled around the world, due to the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak.

The first major event was the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, scheduled to be held in late February. Since then, Google and Facebook announced the cancellation of their developer conferences, and other smaller events have been cancelled as well. Yesterday, the London Book Fair was cancelled. And today, the news says that both Apple and Netflix have pulled out of SXSW, the annual everything festival in Austin, Texas, due to start in about a week.

And:

So what if Apple does delay the iPhone 12? I’ve long felt that the annual upgrade cycle for mobile phones is artificial and unnecessary. In the early days, there were big changes from model to model, but now we see tiny incremental changes, mostly affecting the devices’ cameras. What if Apple decided to move to a two-year cycle, starting with the next model?

Makes me wonder if coronavirus is going to change some basic behaviors. Simple things, like the normalcy of shaking hands. More complex things, like building a conference with the goal of putting thousands of people into the same room, and into the same room with key company personnel.

And, as Kirk points out, might coronavirus change events that depend on precise timing, as the yearly rollout of new iPhones depends on the stability and timing of the worldwide supply chain.

Kirsten Korosec, TechCrunch:

An arbitration panel ruled in December that Levandowski and Lior Ron had engaged in unfair competition and breached their contract with Google when they left the company to start a rival autonomous vehicle company focused on trucking, called Otto.

And:

Ron settled last month with Google for $9.7 million. However, Levandowski, had disputed the ruling.

Wow. In hindsight, that seems a mind-bogglingly poor decision. Levandowski has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Buried in the Flixed study of the major streaming services is a chart titled, “How much do critics and audiences like what’s on?” If you want to look at the chart, follow the headline link and scroll about 3/4 of the way down.

The chart shows average Rotten Tomatoes scores across each services’ original content (which is all of Apple TV+, obviously).

Amazingly, the highest average Rotten Tomatoes audience rating belongs to Apple TV+, at 87%. At the same time, Apple TV+ owns the lowest average critic score, at 69%.

Draw your own conclusions here, but if I was running Apple TV+, I’d be more concerned with what the audience thinks, not so much what the critics think. And I’d weave that top audience average score into my marketing.

Kayvon Beykpour, Product Lead at Twitter (and founder of Periscope):

Fleets are a way to share fleeting thoughts. Unlike Tweets, Fleets disappear after 24 hours and don’t get Retweets, Likes, or public replies– people can only react to your Fleets with DMs. Instead of showing up in people’s timelines, Fleets are viewed by tapping on your avatar. pic.twitter.com/sWwsExRLcJ

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) March 4, 2020

The test is being run in Brazil and appears to be an experiment. Meaning, if Fleets do make their way to the mainstream, the form and process might be quite different.

As is, the value proposition doesn’t click for me. A big part of Twitter is the interaction, the follows, replies, retweets, likes and dislikes. The Twitter model tends to be a stream of consciousness, where your action is scroll, read, scroll, read.

With Fleets, it sounds like you have to tap out of that model and seek them out. In effect, you have to leave your feed to move to a non-interactive world.

And with the Snapchat-like vanishing tweet model, I worry that people will be emboldened to say some pretty terrible things, then vanish into the void, paying zero social cost for their misdeeds. And I worry that this system will be ripe for misadventure, with money poured into bots streaming lies, with the goal of disrupting elections and worse.

Granted, it’s not a new concept, so there’s the argument that this is just Twitter keeping up with Snapchat, Facebook et al. But I feel we should be moving towards solving the bot/misinformation problem, not expanding their reach.

TidBITS:

Black Ink is a Mac-based crossword puzzle app from Red Sweater Software. It gives you access to any crossword puzzle using the Across Lite format (which typically has a .puz extension). The default sources it offers include the Wall Street Journal crossword, Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Premium Crossword, and American Values Club.

Black Ink offers many useful features for the crossword aficionado. The first of these is the capability to check the puzzle clue answer either at the letter, word, or puzzle level (look in Solution > Check). The second notably helpful feature is Reveal (Solution > Reveal).

Overall, Black Ink is easy to use and a good fit for any puzzler from beginner to advanced, thanks in large part to its Reveal feature. If you already have a New York Times subscription, it’s a nice way to do the crossword puzzle digitally on your Mac.

My only knock on this is that it is Mac only. I’d love to be able to do these crosswords on my iPad.

CNET:

After March 31, a bunch of amateur alien hunters will regain some personal computing power. The Berkeley SETI Research Center announced Monday that SETI@home, the two-decades-old crowdsourcing effort to hunt for signs of E.T. in radio telescope data using internet-connected computers, is shutting down at the end of the month.

The home-based search for extraterrestrial intelligence project was launched from University of California, Berkeley, back in 1999 — when the internet was still a relatively new thing to many people and the term crowdsourcing had not yet been coined.

SETI@home works a little bit like bitcoin mining: Volunteers install a free computer program that downloads and crunches data in the background around the clock. The difference being that there is no currency produced as a reward, except for the satisfaction of helping your fellow humans navigate the vast cosmos, in a way.

Now the SETI@home team says it’s time to shut the whole thing down and focus on compiling the results from the project.

In the early days of the internet, I was more than happy to lend my “extra” computing power to this project.

To many of you, this is old hat. But for folks new to handoff, this is a bit of low discoverability that I find very helpful.

Jason Snell:

Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have now cancelled major conferences in the face of the spread of the coronavirus. Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC, usually takes place in early June—and all eyes will now turn to Apple to see how the company will respond.

And:

Perhaps the best reason to cancel conferences is not to stop the spread of the virus, but to slow its spread, because our existing health infrastructure will be under intense pressure, and if a huge spike of patients happens, the hospitals will be overwhelmed.

From the Google I/O cancellation announcement:

Due to concerns around the coronavirus (COVID-19), and in accordance with health guidance from the CDC, WHO, and other health authorities, we have decided to cancel the physical Google I/O event at Shoreline Amphitheatre.

All guests who have purchased tickets to I/O 2020 will receive a full refund by March 13, 2020. If you don’t see the credit on your statement by then, please reach out to [email protected]. Guests who have registered for I/O 2020 will not need to enter next year’s drawing and will be automatically granted the option of purchasing an I/O 2021 ticket.

This seems a reasonable policy. The risk of public exposure, of Google high level management, marketing, and engineering team exposure, way too high. Prudent caution.

Will Apple follow this lead? Google I/O was originally scheduled for May 12-14. Apple’s WWDC would normally occur about a month after that, which gives Apple some time to formulate their approach to this problem.

Do they cancel altogether? Produce the first-ever remote WWDC? One thing I can’t imagine is WWDC going on in the normal way, in person and as scheduled.

Coronavirus is throwing a monkey wrench into everything.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. restricted employee travel to Italy and South Korea, after recently instating a similar policy for China, as the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread.

“We have instituted specific travel restrictions in a few countries including China, South Korea, and Italy,” the company told employees in a memo that outlines its latest response to the Covid-19 outbreak.

As to Apple Stores:

Apple also said “deep cleaning protocols are our top priority” and are in effect across its stores, offices and employee shuttles. It has since put hand sanitizer stations at the front of its stores as well.

Side note, from this Reuters’ article:

Foxconn, however, sought to allay investor concerns about the virus’ impact, saying it expects to resume normal production in China, its top manufacturing base, by the end of the March.

Erin Pearson, The Sydney Morning Herald:

Two men killed during a police chase in Melbourne’s north were being tracked from the air via the ‘Find My’ app after an iPad was stolen in an earlier home invasion.

Driver Vaatoa Chang, 29, from Sunshine West, and his Caroline Springs passenger Jonas Montealegre, 36, carried the iPad with them as they switched stolen cars in a two-hour attempt to flee police on February 4.

Riveting article, riveting video. The embedded video shows the getaway vehicle being tracked from the air, but in what appears to be some form of night-vision. Watch stuff get dumped from the car. Wonder if they figured out that something they stole was pinging, giving away their location.

Ended terribly.

My takeaway from the linked post was the heads up on the Cult of Mac white-labeled buy-back program.

Bret Devereaux:

This is the first part of a six-part series I expect to roll out taking a historian’s look at the Siege of Gondor in Peter Jackson’s Return of the King. We’re going to discuss how historically plausible the sequence of events is and, in the process, talk a fair bit about how pre-gunpowder siege warfare works.

We’re going to start…with the army of Minas Morgul marshaling out of the main gate. It is an incredible scene, the seemingly endless line of orcs marching past our hidden heroes, who crouch, overawed by the spectacle of it.

That may seem a touch early to start a review of the siege, but there are two points to this, both of which are historically illuminating. What we are watching at this stage is what is called operations – the coordinated movement of large bodies of troops to their objective. Operations is the level of analysis between tactics (how do I fight when I get there?) and strategy (why am I fighting at all?). And its worth asking, before proceeding any further: what is Sauron’s overall plan and does it make sense?

This is really long and detailed but absolutely fascinating if you have any interest in real-life warfare tactics and strategy overlaid on to a fantasy world setting. Thanks to Kottke for the link.

Being owned by Vox Media gave Nilay Patel and his team access to some folks with some very high end experience, including production work on large streaming shows (think Netflix and HBO) and massive podcasts.

The review pulls no punches. Worth watching and/or reading.

Once you’ve read/watched, here’s a thread with some counterpoint to the review.

Wall Street Journal:

Some operations executives suggested as early as 2015 that the company relocate assembly of at least one product to Vietnam. That would allow Apple to begin the multiyear process of training workers and creating a new cluster of component providers outside the world’s most populous nation, people familiar with the discussions said.

Senior managers rebuffed the idea. For Apple, weaning itself off China, its second-largest consumer market and the place where most of its products are assembled, has been too challenging to undertake.

And:

China has been a critical factor in Apple’s soaring market value. The country provides a stable, efficient, low-cost manufacturing base with an abundant network of suppliers that have helped cement Apple’s profitability.

And:

A clean break with China is impossible. Apple relies on a workforce of more than three million indirect workers in China. Its top manufacturer, Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group, hires hundreds of thousands of seasonal employees in China, many of whom manually insert tiny screws and thin printed circuit boards during the iPhone assembly process, people familiar with the process said. Tens of thousands of experienced manufacturing engineers oversee the process.

China has built a massive manufacturing machine. Massive. Moving elsewhere, starting from scratch, would be painful at the very least. It would also take time. And then there’s the availability of the raw materials, not to mention one of the world’s largest marketplaces.

It’s all a little bit of a perfect storm. Fascinating read.

Apple:

iPhone photographers around the world answered the call to participate in the Night mode photo challenge, sharing their captivating Night mode images shot on iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max. A curated panel of judges selected six winning photos from thousands of submissions worldwide. The winning images will be featured in a gallery on apple.com and Apple Instagram (@apple) and will appear globally on billboards.

Hard to pick a favorite, but that red tree calls to me. Also love the hanging laundry shot. Great pics.

Reuters:

Oppenheimer upgraded its rating on Apple to “outperform” from “perform”, saying the Cupertino, California, company was more prepared than its competitors to absorb the impact of the global health crisis.

Apple’s stock fell more than 16% from record high on February 12th.

David Strom:

For the past 27 years, I have owned a class C block of IPv4 addresses. I don’t recall what prompted me back then to apply to Jon Postel for my block: I didn’t really have any way to run a network online, and back then the Internet was just catching on.

Apparently, there’s a mature market for buying and selling IP addresses and even a rental market. Read the post for specifics on the marketplace and on price.

Apple:

Inspired by true events, “The Banker” centers on revolutionary businessmen Bernard Garrett (Anthony Mackie) and Joe Morris (Samuel L. Jackson), who devise an audacious and risky plan to take on the racist establishment of the 1960s by helping other African Americans pursue the American dream.

Follow the headline link for more details on the plot and some pretty great pictures of the cast along with some Apple folks you might recognize.

The Banker is in theaters this Friday, and on Apple TV+ starting March 20th.

9to5Mac:

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak took to Twitter this afternoon to suggest that he and his wife “may have both been patient zero” for coronavirus in the United States. As it turns out, this wasn’t the case.

Woz’s tweet came in the form of a Swarm check-in at the West Coast Sports Institute in Santa Clara. The accompanying message read that the couple was there “checking out Janet’s bad cough,” which apparently started on January 4 after they returned from China.

But in an email to USA Today following Wozniak’s irresponsible tweet, Janet Wozniak said that she has a sinus infection, not coronavirus:

I thought there might have been something fishy about this when I first saw the tweet. Nowadays, why would you wait two months to get a “bad cough” diagnosed? And as 9to5Mac says, Woz tweeting that “he and his wife “may have been patient zero” for coronavirus in the United States” is an incredibly irresponsible thing to say without any evidence.