Apple released the updated MacBook Pros a few days ago, over which I’ve been gathering my thoughts on them. I’ll try to be as objective as possible, but since I don’t believe the future of the Touch Bar or even like it personally, I’ll probably be a bit harsh on some aspects.
Jackson Cunningham:
A few months ago, I received a cryptic message from AirBnB that sounded like something straight out that Black Mirror episode with Jon Hamm.
Dear Jackson,
We regret to inform you that we’ll be unable to support your account moving forward, and have exercised our discretion under our Terms of Service to disable your account(s). This decision is irreversible and will affect any duplicated or future accounts.
Please understand that we are not obligated to provide an explanation for the action taken against your account. Furthermore, we are not liable to you in any way with respect to disabling or canceling your account. Airbnb reserves the right to make the final determination with respect to such matters, and this decision will not be reversed.
Most of us are used to the justice system, presenting evidence, the right to defend ourselves, and these types of methods employed by private companies are shocking. These type of authoritarian practices should not take place, even when private corporations have a legal right to do, for ethical and moral reasons if non other.
There’s something about Panerais which has always had a grip on me, despite my particular tastes, but the latest Luminor California 8 Days DLC is simply stunning, in no small part because of its minimalist dial.
I don’t care for the strap, but those are easy to sort out — there are many beautiful alternatives out there.
It will reportedly go on sale for €7900 / $9250.
Juli Clover, for Macrumors:
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation this week charged former Apple employee Xiaolang Zhang with theft of trade secrets, according to documents filed with the Northern District Court of California.
Zhang was hired at Apple in December of 2015 to work on Project Titan, developing software and hardware for use in autonomous vehicles. Zhang specifically worked on Apple’s Compute Team, designing and testing circuit boards to analyze sensor data […]
Zhang was interviewed by the FBI in late June, where he admitted to stealing the information, and he was later arrested attempting to leave to China on July 7.
Add a martini — shaken, not stirred — a few guns, and perhaps a new Aston Martin DBS Superleggera, and you’ve got yourself a Bond movie.
Jonathan S. Geller, on BGR:
According to our source, after many months of planning, Apple plans to deploy 1Password internally to all 123,000 employees. This includes not just employees in Cupertino, but extends all the way to retail, too. Furthermore, the company is said to have carved out a deal that includes family plans, giving up to 5 family members of each employee a free license for 1Password. With more and more emphasis on security in general, and especially at Apple, there are a number of reasons this deal makes sense. We’re told that 100 Apple employees will start using 1Password through this initiative starting this week, with the full 123,000+ users expected to be activated within the next one to two months.
I have been using 1Password for many years now and I hope the additional stress, under which AgileBits will now be, will not compromise the product. Since I use the standalone version of 1Password and sync via iCloud, there shouldn’t be any performance issues, but I am slightly worried about the future of the product. Luckily, it appears that there are no plans for an acquisition:
Rumours of my acquisition are completely false. My humans and I are happily independent and plan to remain so.
I do have a few questions though:
This is all very strange.
This macOS update finally adds AirPlay 2 support for iTunes, while fixing a few bugs and security related issues.
iOS 11.4.1 is a mainly a security update, which means you should install it as soon as possible.
Edmund Lee and John Koblin, for The New York Times:
Known for “The Sopranos,” “Game of Thrones” and “Westworld,” HBO has long favored quality over quantity. Its high-gloss productions often take years to develop and can cost millions per episode. That approach has won the network more Primetime Emmy Awards than any of its competitors over the last 16 years, with Mr. Plepler the master curator.
In recent years, Mr. Plepler has emphasized HBO’s “bespoke culture” and its enduring appeal to A-list producers and stars at a time when Netflix, Amazon and Apple have bottomless budgets. On his watch, “Big Little Lies” has brought the Oscar winners Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep to the network, and shows like “Barry” and “Insecure” have charmed critics. But during the town hall meeting, Mr. Stankey said HBO should consider trying something new.
The feeling that quality over quantity gives is something hard to measure in terms of viewer appreciation but its a very important aspect of a service.
“We need hours a day,” Mr. Stankey said, referring to the time viewers spend watching HBO programs. “It’s not hours a week, and it’s not hours a month. We need hours a day. You are competing with devices that sit in people’s hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes.”
Continuing the theme, he added: “I want more hours of engagement. Why are more hours of engagement important? Because you get more data and information about a customer that then allows you to do things like monetize through alternate models of advertising as well as subscriptions, which I think is very important to play in tomorrow’s world.”
This pursuit of engagement is why so many products and services are absolutely terrible today. Please HBO, don’t go down that route. Oh, and Stankey’s mention of “alternate models of advertising” is utterly unacceptable.
My 2011 trip to New York City was much too short, but I did cram a lot of sightseeing into those 3 or 4 days. While the weather was doing me no favours on my last day, when I went to see the Brooklyn Bridge, the foreboding atmosphere did make things interesting.
Shot with Nikon D700 + Nikkor 14-24 mm f/2.8G: f/8, 1/1000, ISO 200 @ 14 mm.
Chaim Gartenberg, writing for The Verge:
We’ve known for a few months that Twitter is going to further limit third-party apps starting on August 16th when it rolls out some major API changes. But now we’re starting to see the effects of those upcoming changes, starting with the popular third-party Twitter app Twitterific, which announced an update today preparing for the removal of two major features: push notifications and live-updating tweets.
This is the beginning of the end of Twitter for me. Jack is bereft of reality and doing everything he possibly can to screw over Twitter’s most engaged and loyal users, while at the same time shipping a terrible app on just a few platforms.
Oh, before I forget: Fuck you, Jack!
Benjamin Mayo detailed Ming-Chi Kuo’s latest report about this year’s iPhones being available in various new colours, akin to what they did with the iPhone 5C with bright greens, yellows, blues, etc. The flagship iPhones have only come in white/silver, black/grey, gold, and rose gold. Oh, and (RED) of course…
I can still remember the days when I would open the App Store on a daily basis, to look for new and interesting software. And to think third-party apps weren’t even planned while the first iPhone was being developed, as Ken Kocienda mentioned last night…
We had no plans for third-party apps during the development cycle for the first iPhone. Zero work was done on public API before the initial announcement in Jan 2007.
Apple has come a long way with the App Store but there’s still a long way to go.
Natasha Lomas, for TechCrunch:
A 318-278 majority of MEPs in the European Parliament has just voted to reopen debate around a controversial digital copyright reform proposal — meaning it will now face further debate and scrutiny, rather than be fast-tracked towards becoming law via the standard EU trilogue negotiation process.
Crucially it means MEPs will have the chance to amend the controversial proposals.
I hope they have experts on hand to explain the possible ramifications of this reform proposal.
We have been alerted that Typeform, a company that we frequently use to survey our customers, has been compromised in a data breach […]
We would like to assure our customers that no sensitive data, such as personal account details or passwords, have been compromised in this breach. Upon reviewing previous surveys, we have only ever asked for details such as your email address and Twitter handle […]
Our focus right now is to contact everyone who has been affected, letting them know exactly what kind of data of theirs was breached, what they should do and how we will stop something like this from happening again.
If you don’t get an email from us on this matter, that means that none of your data was compromised and you have nothing to worry about.
Max Seelemann:
Ulysses is turning 15 these days. You read that right: fifteen freaking years. In computer terms that’s an eternity. And for me, now 31 years old, it certainly feels like one. This is my story.
So much has happened since that 1st of July, when we released version 1.0 of Ulysses. 2003 was the year of Finding Nemo, Kill Bill and Pirates of the Caribbean, the shipping release of Mac OS X was 10.2, and click-wheel iPods were the hottest thing around. Feeling old already? Well, it is a long time ago.
I knew Ulysses from years ago, but I never knew it was 15 years old! I have been using it daily for a few years now, since Max and his team created the iOS version in early 2015. It’s still the only writing app that integrates so beaufitully with Workflow and it’s hard to imagine life without it. Frankly, were I to switch to Windows 10 on a Surface Book 2, losing Ulysses would be my greatest regret.
Marc Santora, for The New York Times:
Poland’s government carried out a sweeping purge of the Supreme Court on Tuesday night, eroding the judiciary’s independence, escalating a confrontation with the European Union over the rule of law and further dividing this nation. Tens of thousands took to the streets in protest.
Poland was once a beacon for countries struggling to escape the yoke of the Soviet Union and embrace Western democracy. But it is now in league with neighboring nations, like Hungary, whose leaders have turned to authoritarian means to tighten their grip on power, presenting a grave challenge to a European Union already grappling with nationalist, populist and anti-immigrant movements.
The forced retirements of up to 27 of 72 Supreme Court justices, including the top judge, and the creation of a judicial disciplinary chamber were the latest in a series of steps by Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice Party to take over the justice system.
We’re fucked. I assume they’re going to eradicate our Constitution next.
Marco Arment:
The Surface Book 2 is also the real deal. Massive 15” 3:2 screen, detachable to a great-feeling tablet with a great pen that stows easily.
Touch/tablet-hybrid laptops aren’t just the future — they’re the present. Apple’s either being coy about future products or is in denial.
Owen Williams, on his blog Charged:
I’m back to say I was wrong, and I’ve found a machine that not only matches Apple’s standard of hardware quality, but goes far beyond it to demonstrate how a laptop of the future should work.
That machine is the 15-inch Surface Book 2 and somehow Microsoft has made the 2-in-1 that Apple should’ve been building all along, to the same level of quality I’d expect from anyone other than Microsoft.
I’ve used the Surface Book 2 as my daily computer for three months now and it’s consistently blown me away with how well considered it is across the board, how great the software works and has completely converted me into the touchscreen laptop camp.
Unless Apple gets their act together, start innovating, post regular CPU/GPU updates, my next notebook will most probably be a Surface Book. It’s not perfect by any means, and I’d miss macOS a lot, but I’d manage. What’s tempting me most is the removable screen which can be used with the full Adobe Lightroom experience. I wouldn’t mind a Surface Studio too, on the condition that it had a replaceable M.2 SSD instead of a hybrid drive and an upgradeable GPU.
Ashley Carman, writing for The Verge:
Bad news for Samsung phone owners: some devices are randomly sending your camera roll photos to your contacts without permission. As first spotted by Gizmodo, users are complaining about the issue on Reddit and the company’s official forums. One user says his phone sent all his photos to his girlfriend. The messages are being sent through Samsung’s default texting app Samsung Messages. According to reports, the Messages app does not even show users that files have been sent; many just find out after they get a response from the recipient of the random photos sent to them.
I wonder how many people actually received “dick pics” (as in nudes). This sounds funny at first, but it could really be catastrophic, depending on the people involved.
Matthew Panzarino, writing for TechCrunch:
Maps needs fixing.
Apple, it turns out, is aware of this, so it’s re-building the maps part of Maps.
It’s doing this by using first-party data gathered by iPhones with a privacy-first methodology and its own fleet of cars packed with sensors and cameras. The new product will launch in San Francisco and the Bay Area with the next iOS 12 beta and will cover Northern California by fall.
Apple Maps really needs vastly superior search algorithms and many more POIs. The problems with search in Europe are comical. Search for “Kaczyńskiego” in Poland (e.g. when in Warsaw) and Maps will suggest a street in a far-away city, despite there being two by that name in Warsaw. Or if a street name consists of two words, e.g. a name and surname, you often have to type in both, otherwise it will fail.
I’ve given up on Apple Maps in Europe and it will take a lot of work on Apple’s part to get me to come back.
Paul Kafasis, on Rogue Amoeba’s blog:
Today, we’ve got a big (and free!) update to our popular audio recording utility Audio Hijack. Audio Hijack 3.5 is all about internet radio streaming, with a brand new Broadcast output block that makes it possible to send any audio to Shoutcast and Icecast servers. It’s perfect for running livecasts of podcast recordings, as well as live streaming DJ sets, and powering all types of internet radio streams.
If you do any podcasting, audio recording, or broadcasting on your Mac, you need Audio Hijack. This is one of the best looking, functional, and just plain cool apps for macOS.
Ron Amadeo, for Ars Technica:
Duplex patiently waited for me to awkwardly stumble through my first ever table reservation while I sloppily wrote down the time and fumbled through a basic back and forth about Google’s reservation for four people at 7pm on Thursday. Today’s Google Assistant requires authoritative, direct, perfect speech in order to process a command. But Duplex handled my clumsy, distracted communication with the casual disinterest of a real person. It waited for me to write down its reservation requirements, and when I asked Duplex to repeat things I didn’t catch the first time (“A reservation at what time?”), it did so without incident. When I told this robocaller the initial time it wanted wasn’t available, it started negotiating times; it offered an acceptable time range and asked for a reservation somewhere in that time slot. I offered seven o’clock and Google accepted.
From the human end, Duplex’s voice is absolutely stunning over the phone. It sounds real most of the time, nailing most of the prosodic features of human speech during normal talking. The bot “ums” and “uhs” when it has to recall something a human might have to think about for a minute. It gives affirmative “mmhmms” if you tell it to hold on a minute. Everything flows together smoothly, making it sound like something a generation better than the current Google Assistant voice.
So Google’s demo at I/O 2018 was partly staged. The journalists invited to test it out were not able to speak directly to Google Assistant but had to have an engineer enter their data manually. I assume that that last integration will be one of the easier parts of the project, which as a whole is extremely impressive. It will need to me more accurate though, so Google won’t need people to oversee the calls themselves — Google says it currently handles 8 out of 10 calls without the need for human intervention.
Other reports about Google Duplex from the past day or so:
The macOS 10.14 Mojave public beta dropped yesterday and while some of you will go crazy and install it as your main OS, it is preferable to install it on an external drive for testing purposes only. While you can just download the installer as a developer or public beta tester and proceed to install it directly, creating an installation drive (e.g. on a pendrive) has its benefits, especially if you foresee the need to install Mojave more than once.
Mark Gurman, for Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is about to pump up the volume on its audio-device strategy, planning higher-end AirPods, a new HomePod and studio-quality over-ear headphones for as early as next year, according to people familiar with the matter.
The current AirPods do a nice job of cutting you off from the outside world but they’re not even close to a decent pair of ANC over-ear headphones. Would adding ANC to the current AirPods make much of a difference? Would it be worth the hit in battery life? I can’t wait to find out. Oh, and please Apple… no hissing sounds.
There are over-ear headphones coming from Apple, too. Those will compete with pricey models from Bose Corp. and Sennheiser. They will use Apple branding and be a higher-end alternative to the company’s Beats line.
While I would love a decent pair of over-ears from Apple, I do wonder what the compromises will be. Bose QC35s are plasticky looking but nearly indestructible. B&O H9s look fantastic but their touch controls are terrible and should not have made it to consumers. Additionally, I would have expected Apple to push these through Beats since they own them already. The only reason that they wouldn’t want to, that I can see, is if they wanted to address the product to those customers who specifically avoid Beats and their sound profile.
Reddit user clumsygirllovescats writes:
For 3 years I worked in an Apple retail store in almost every role they had […]
I was so scared for my safety that I quit. My close friend said that they refused to even acknowledge my existence as if I had never worked there.
If true, this is horrifying.
Michael Lopp, writing on Rands in Repose:
The bar is full. Two keyboards sit at the bar: APPLE EXTENDED II and MACBOOK PRO. The front door opens, TOUCHBAR looks around, sees the two keyboards at the bar, grins, and heads their direction. Skipping.
APPLE EXTENDED II sits at the bar nursing a Macallan 18. Next to him is MACBOOK PRO who has not taken a sip of his glass of water.
Enter at your own peril. Laughter guaranteed.
From one set of numbers corresponding to an IP address, which leads to a Delos website with a required password field, to the numbers behind Douglas Adams’ A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the detectives on r/Westworld are simply amazing.
Make sure to read through all the comments.
Brendan Koerner, for Wired:
Pokora had long been aware that his misdeeds had angered some powerful interests, and not just within the gaming industry; in the course of seeking out all things Xbox, he and his associates had wormed into American military networks too. But in those early hours after his arrest, Pokora had no clue just how much legal wrath he’d brought upon his head: For eight months he’d been under sealed indictment for conspiring to steal as much as $1 billion worth of intellectual property, and federal prosecutors were intent on making him the first foreign hacker to be convicted for the theft of American trade secrets. Several of his friends and colleagues would end up being pulled into the vortex of trouble he’d helped create; one would become an informant, one would become a fugitive, and one would end up dead.
It’s amazing how fast someone’s judgement can become skewed the wrong way.
Stephen Rodrick, for Rolling Stone:
Multimillion-dollar lawsuits, a haze of booze and hash, a marriage gone very wrong and a lifestyle he can’t afford – inside the trials of Johnny Depp.
This is a profoundly sad story, but one part did make me laugh:
Depp says the fight is for his children, Jack and Lily-Rose, a Chanel model.
“My son had to hear about how his old man lost all his money from kids at school, that’s not right,” says Depp. He rubs his eyes with his tobacco-stained hands. He says one of the proudest moments of his life was when Jack said he’d started a band and Depp asked what they were called.
“The kid says ‘Clown Boner.'” Depp smiles proudly. “We don’t need a paternity test. That’s my kid.”