It’s out and I have added it to my reading queue!
I’ll be in London. Is anyone organizing any meetups that I could get into?
Apple PR:
Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2018 third quarter ended June 30, 2018. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $53.3 billion, an increase of 17 percent from the year-ago quarter, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.34, up 40 percent. International sales accounted for 60 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Apple sold:
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.
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…
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.
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.
Laura Sydell, for NPR:
“We’ve never been in the data business,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told NPR on Monday, responding to a report that Facebook struck agreements giving Apple and other device makers access to Facebook users’ personal information […]
“The things mentioned in the Times article about relationship statuses and all these kinds of stuff, this is so foreign to us, and not data that we have ever received at all or requested — zero,” Cook told NPR’s Steve Inskeep and Laura Sydell during the company’s annual conference for developers in San Jose, Calif.
Glad Tim cleared that up.
Gabriel Dance, Nicholas Confessore, and Michael Laforgia, for The New York Times:
Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung — over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials said. The deals allowed Facebook to expand its reach and let device makers offer customers popular features of the social network, such as messaging, “like” buttons and address books […]
An Apple spokesman said the company relied on private access to Facebook data for features that enabled users to post photos to the social network without opening the Facebook app, among other things. Apple said its phones no longer had such access to Facebook as of last September.
The article makes it sound as if Apple pulled or had access to private user data from Facebook.
Jefferson Graham:
The zip file I eventually received from Apple was tiny, only 9 megabytes, compared to 243 MB from Google and 881 MB from Facebook. And there’s not much there, because Apple says the information is primarily kept on your device, not its servers. The one sentence highlight: a list of my downloads, purchases and repairs, but not my search histories through the Siri personal assistant or the Safari browser.
This approach by Apple makes me trust them more with my data than any other company.
Tim Cook on Apple’s earning’s call:
We were surprised, somewhat, that through all of this period of time that the iPhone X winds up at the most popular for every week of the time since the launch and so that’s, I think, a powerful point. And it’s number one in China, which is another powerful point. And so obviously at some point if those technologies move to lower price points and that [inaudible] probably more unit demand. But the way we think about is trying to price a reasonable price for the value that we deliver and I feel that we did that.
There were plenty of recent rumours suggesting the iPhone X’s price would go down by $100 to $899, perhaps also to make way for an iPhone X Plus at the $999 price point. After hearing Tim’s remarks on the X last night, I wouldn’t expect the price to go down anytime soon — the iPhone X is selling extremely well, and people are voting with their wallets by buying them. You just don’t walk away from that as Apple.
I hope I’m wrong.
(You can find a full transcript of the call on iMore.)
Apple PR:
Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2018 second quarter ended March 31, 2018. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $61.1 billion, an increase of 16 percent from the year-ago quarter, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.73, up 30 percent. International sales accounted for 65 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Apple sold:
Mike Wuerthele, writing for AppleInsider:
Following anecdotal reports of a keyboard more prone to failure than in previous years, AppleInsider has collected service data for the first year of release of the 2014, 2015, and 2016 MacBook Pros, with an additional slightly shorter data set for the 2017 model year given that it hasn’t been available for a year yet.
Not including any Touch Bar failures, the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard is failing twice as often in the first year of use as the 2014 or 2015 MacBook Pro models, and the 2017 is better, but not by a lot.
I have had an issue with my 2016 13” MacBook Pro, which is described by Apple as a “popping sound”. I contacted Apple Support and sent them a video, and they immediately set up an appointment with my closest AASP to fix the issue. They fixed it in 24 hours by replacing the whole top case, which includes the keyboard, battery, and speakers. The “popping sound” happens when the keyboard gets too warm and some keys start making a different sound. They also feel marginally stickier when pressed.
The new keyboard feels and sounds different — it’s quieter and a bit stiffer. I’m not sure if this is the same one as in the 2017 model, but I hope it stays fixed. Since this is a problem with the design and the fix is very expensive, I expect Apple to support their users indefinitely (or at least 5-6 years) — we already paid a lot for the MacBook Pro and we should not pay more for design mistakes.
Despite this being a frustrating issue, Apple Support and my AASP were stellar in helping me out.
Apple launched a new battery replacement program for the late 2016 13″ MacBook Pros (the ones without the Touch Bar), because it could expand due to the “failure of a component”.
Michael Steeber, writing for 9to5Mac:
Silver aluminum, once the defining look of Apple products, has been met with increasing variety over the last several years by a range of colors and finishes that customers can choose from. One of the earliest and most popular options – space gray – has permeated across almost every product line Apple offers.
Yet, ubiquity has not brought consistency. Each new generation of a product seems to bring with it a slightly different take on space gray. Those with large device collections have noted the discrepancies between shades, and discussions brew online over the term’s exact definition.
While subtle variations in material, texture, lighting, and even the shape of a product can play tricks on the eyes, every device Apple currently offers or has produced in space gray can be grouped into one of several loosely defined categories. Below, we’ve cataloged and categorized the vast universe of Apple’s recent dark material finishes in an attempt to unravel the mysteries of space gray.
Car manufacturers use a different name for every single shade of grey they offer. I can’t help but think that Apple was very uncreative in their Space Grey endeavor — they had all the words in the world to use and decided “Space” was good enough, despite the shades being completely different between generations and devices.
I would love to understand their reasoning behind this (bad) decision.
Ron Avitzur:
I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.
I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.
I cannot imagine this would be possible today, which is sad in some ways. Ron’s dedication is truly admirable and I can’t help but wonder how many other stories like this one are out there, waiting to be told.
IOS TIP: Did you ever think: I’m glad my iPhone’s back to 80%, but I still want to keep it in Lower Power mode? Do a Force Touch on the notification: pic.twitter.com/teE1dtX7ft
— Greg Maletic (@gregmaletic) April 8, 2018
This is but one example of the hundreds, if not thousands, of hidden features inside iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Siri. There are so many of these right now, that I don’t know a single person who would be aware of all of them. I read one of my own tips, which I published a few years ago, and was amazed that something like that was possible, and that I did not remember it1.
P.S. If you’re on macOS and don’t know the following keyboard shortcuts, make sure to memorise them — they’re really useful:
Finder
⌘C — Copy Item
⌥⌘C — Copy Path to Item⌘V — Paste Item
⌥⌘V — Move Copied Item— Wojtek Pietrusiewicz (@morid1n) February 4, 2017
Ian King, writing for Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is planning to use its own chips in Mac computers beginning as early as 2020, replacing processors from Intel Corp., according to people familiar with the plans.
The initiative, code named Kalamata, is still in the early developmental stages, but comes as part of a larger strategy to make all of Apple’s devices — including Macs, iPhones, and iPads — work more similarly and seamlessly together, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The project, which executives have approved, will likely result in a multi-step transition.
Tech pundits have been discussing this idea for years now, but the more I think about it, the more questions I find in need of answers. Will iOS move to notebook and desktop-type devices, and will it start adapting well-known macOS features at a faster pace? Will macOS remain largely unchanged? Does this signal some sort of merging of the two platforms? What would the scope of that be? How does Marzipan play into all of this and is it just a stop-gap before we get a new ‘AppleOS’?
This is one of the few times where I would love to learn exactly what Apple is planning beforehand, because there are so many different routes they can take.
Jack Nicas and Cade Metz, for The New York Times:
Apple has hired Google’s chief of search and artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, a major coup in its bid to catch up to the artificial intelligence technology of its rivals.
Apple said on Tuesday that Mr. Giannandrea will run Apple’s “machine learning and A.I. strategy,” and become one of 16 executives who report directly to Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook.
Perhaps iPhone-Siri will be able to talk to HomePod-Siri and Apple-TV-Siri next year and be able to control them. Or know how to set more than one timer at the least.
John Gruber, on Daring Fireball:
I wish that Apple would provide a definitive list of all types of data that goes through iCloud, showing what is end-to-end encrypted (iMessage and FaceTime?) and what is not. This whole situations reeks to high hell, but I don’t know what Apple could do other than pull out of the Chinese market entirely.
That’s exactly what they should do — pull out of China entirely. End-to-end encryption doesn’t guarantee complete security, since a lot can be obtained from analysing just the metadata.
Apple PR:
Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2018 first quarter ended December 30, 2017. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $88.3 billion, an increase of 13 percent from the year-ago quarter and an all-time record, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $3.89, up 16 percent, also an all-time record. International sales accounted for 65 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Apple sold:
Zunaira Zaki:
When asked about the [battery] incident, Cook apologized to Apple users who believe that the company deliberately slowed the processors down in older models.
He hypothesized that when Apple released software updates to slow down older devices in older models to keep up with the new features, people may not have been “paying attention” when they explained what it was.
“Maybe we weren’t clear,” he said. “We deeply apologize for anyone who thinks we have some other kind of motivation.”
We were paying attention. His statement isn’t just bad PR, it’s unacceptable. Watch the video on ABC to hear his full statement.
Stephen Hackett, writing for iMore:
I decided to take the conservative route, so I ordered the regular iMac. It showed up the day after Christmas. I slapped 32GB of OWC RAM in it — for a total of 40GB — and migrated my data from my trusty 2015 model.
Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to realize that I had made a mistake. Even during the migration, I could hear the new iMac’s fan blowing, and once I was logged in, it was even louder.
After any data migration, a Mac has a lot to do behind the scenes. Photos.app was busy reindexing my library, and Dropbox was working hard to make sure everything in its folder was supposed to be there. I let things run over night, thinking that by the next morning, this new iMac would be as quiet as my old one in normal usage.
Sadly, that wasn’t the case. I’ve heard very mixed things about this from people on Twitter and friends with 2017 iMacs, so I can’t say this is a universal truth, but the Core i7-powered iMac on my desk seemed to ramp up its fan far more often than my older i5, and when it did, the noise was noticeably louder than before.
Indexing Photos and Dropbox is not something that should make a powerful iMac, equipped with a Core i7, costing close to $3K, sweat. I know that because I built a Hackintosh based on an iMac’s specs — it has a much beefier GPU but it’s basically a 2013 iMac on paper. Its fans still spin at their slowest speed when the machine is chugging along, crunching 4K data in Final Cut Pro X. If the top-of-the-line iMac starts screaming at the top of its lungs during the basic stuff, then something’s wrong. It could be a software issue, but I’ve heard enough people complaining about the fans in various scenarios, that this sounds like a bad design decision.
Granted, the iMac Pro does seem to solve the problems Stephen’s having, but to me it sound as if his issues are the most basic tasks, which most Mac users do. A $5K+ iMac Pro should not be a “solution” to this problem. An iMac Pro is a workstation, aimed at demanding workflows. And I still have my doubts whether this is the appropriate machine for the task, especially since a 2010 Mac Pro equipped with a Vega 64 is still faster in OpenCL than a 2017 iMac Pro.
Apple’s crusade for making everything thinner and sleeker is ruining their machines. They are making their products more and more niche, while not providing computers for the masses. I’m sure there’s a market for a desktop computer like a Mac Pro, but with cheaper hardware and full-sized GPUs – I know I’d switch to that from my Hackintosh in a heartbeat, if the GPU was upgradeable, and I’m sure many more would too.
John Gruber:
But Apple has invested significant time and resources into the MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, and now iMac Pro as they are.
Why hasn’t Apple yet shipped the Kaby Lake Refresh quad-core 15 W parts in the 13” MacBook Pros? They used to be the first manufacturer to put out machines based on new CPUs, with everyone waiting their turn. Today? They’re months behind.
The Mac is not at the top of its game, even if we skip the Surface innovation angle. Apple really needs to get its shit together, because at this point, I don’t trust them to ever update anything again, whatever Tim Cook says. I’m not a fan of their current lineup either. The iMac is a huge compromise, as is the new iMac Pro. The Mac Pro is still dead and there is no word on when the new one will arrive. The Mac Mini hasn’t been updated in close to 1200 days. The MacBook Pros still haven’t gotten new CPUs and the Touch Bar is horrific to use. The MacBook is… cute.1
All I want is a Pro laptop, with a normal keyboard and a quad-core CPU, with a footprint no larger than the current 13” model. And a no-compromise, upgradeable desktop with a full GPU and Core-series CPU, not costing a fortune. This isn’t asking much.
We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize. There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we’re making.
First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that.
Now the important part…
About a year ago in iOS 10.2.1, we delivered a software update that improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, and iPhone SE. With the update, iOS dynamically manages the maximum performance of some system components when needed to prevent a shutdown. While these changes may go unnoticed, in some cases users may experience longer launch times for apps and other reductions in performance.
Customer response to iOS 10.2.1 was positive, as it successfully reduced the occurrence of unexpected shutdowns. We recently extended the same support for iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus in iOS 11.2.
Of course, when a chemically aged battery is replaced with a new one, iPhone performance returns to normal when operated in standard conditions.
I mentioned that last bit a few days ago:
Fitting a new battery into an iPhone will allow the SoC to be used at full power once more, hence the issue will go away. You can either try to do this under warranty or pay less than 100 EUR / 100 USD to get it done in authorised service centres. You can find multiple examples of a new battery fixing the problem, here and here for example.
Apple is now lowering the prices of battery replacement however.
Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com.
I hope this also means that they will refund those customers, who already replaced their batteries for this very reason.
Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg:
The Mac App Store is a ghost town of limited selection and rarely updated programs. Now Apple plans to change that by giving people a way to use a single set of apps that work equally well across its family of devices: iPhones, iPads and Macs.
Starting as early as next year, software developers will be able to design a single application that works with a touchscreen or mouse and trackpad depending on whether it’s running on the iPhone and iPad operating system or on Mac hardware, according to people familiar with the matter.
If this is true, I’m guessing the road will be rocky for developers, but the benefit for users could be huge, especially those that use the same apps on both iOS and macOS, relying on iCloud or other services for the syncing of data. I do wonder how this will influence pricing, however.
I tweeted the following yesterday, thinking it would go the way of the HomePod and be delayed…
Apple PR:
Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2017 fourth quarter ended September 30, 2017. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $52.6 billion, an increase of 12 percent from the year-ago quarter, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.07, up 24 percent. International sales accounted for 62 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Apple sold:
Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:
In addition to the usual Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, the Pixel 2 is equipped with the “Pixel Visual Core,” an extra, second SoC designed by Google with hardware-accelerated image processing in mind. At the heart of the chip is an eight-core Image Processing Unit (IPU) capable of more than three trillion operations per second. Using these IPU cores, Google says the company’s HDR+ image processing can run “5x faster and at less than 1/10th the energy” than it currently does on the main CPU.
The Pixel Visual Core is currently in the Pixel 2, but it doesn’t work yet. Google says it will be enabled with the launch of the Android 8.1 developer preview. At that time, the chip will let third-party apps use the Pixel 2’s HDR+ photo processing, allowing them to produce pictures that look just as good as the native camera app. The chip isn’t just for Google’s current camera algorithms, though. Google says the Pixel Visual Core is designed “to handle the most challenging imaging and machine learning applications” and that the company is “already preparing the next set of applications” designed for the hardware.
Having two entirely separate SoCs inside a smartphone is unusual. The Pixel Visual Core has its own CPU (a single Cortex A53 core to play traffic cop), its own DDR4 RAM, the eight IPU cores, and a PCIe line, presumably as a bus to the rest of the system. Ideally, you would have a single SoC that integrates the IPU right next to that other co-processor, the GPU. The Pixel 2 is based on the Snapdragon 835 SoC, though, and you aren’t allowed to integrate your own custom silicon with Qualcomm’s design. What Google can do is wrap a minimal SoC around its eight IPU cores and then connect that to the main system SoC. If Google ever set out to compete with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon line, an IPU is something it could build directly into its own designs. For now, though, it has this self-contained solution.
I’m willing to bet Google is planning to or already working on their own SoC. Once (and if) it goes to market, I wonder if they’ll be able to compete with Qualcomm and Apple, and how many years it will take them to catch up. Designing your own custom silicon is definitely a huge advantage, one which Apple is currently successfully leveraging over their competitors.