John Martellaro

Could you do it? Give up your iPhone and depend on just an Apple Watch? “Loup Ventures went phoneless last week. That is, some of the Loup team turned off our iPhones for a full week and only used Apple Watches for connectivity. It was freeing. And frustrating.”  There’s a lot of substance in this report, including a discussion of the “Eisenhower matrix” a “four-quadrant graph … meant to help people analyze where they’re spending time.” Fascinating stuff.

The clues are all there. Apple has a mind to move its Macs to the A-series CPU. We discussed this at length on our TDO podcast recently. And now, Ming-Chi Kuo of TF Securities has confirmed it. Mike Wuerthele at AppleInsider reports: “Kuo also predicts that Mac models will adopt Apple’s A-series processor in some form starting 2020 or 2021.” So does that mean the 2019 Mac Pro will remain with Intel CPUs? And then make an abrupt jump in 2020?  The mind boggles.

From Gizmodo: “Facebook announced Portal, a new voice-activated speaker and video chat gadget, and the company said that it would not use data collected through the device to target ads.” But it could. It probably will at some point. What could go wrong? It’s like Mark Zuckerberg has become the anti-Cook.

If you’ve been pondering a new 4K/UHD TV for the holidays (and an Apple TV 4K), you’ll want to check out this very easy to read introduction to the High Dynamic Range (HDR) technology used in modern TVs. You’ll learn about the basic tech and the similarities and differences between HDR10, Dolby Vision, HDR10+, HLG and which ones each TV maker offers.

You have to hand it to Google. The company has a certain spirit of AI inventiveness, even if the result isn’t always iron-clad consumer ready.  In this case, it’s the recently announced Call Screen service for Pixel phones that puts an AI between the Pixel user and the telemarketers & robocalls.  Read about it in the link below. This may not do amazing things for Pixel sales, and it may still have kinks to work out, but it sets a bar and whets our appetite for what Apple could do when it’s in top gear. Alas, Siri, cannot do this. Yet.

9to5Mac has posted leaked details of Apple’s new iPad Pros. “Today, sources familiar with the development of the new 2018 iPad Pro have offered additional details about the device, its features, and more.” That includes Face ID, thinner bezels, a USB-C port for external 4K/HDR displays and a new Apple Pencil. Are we excited? Oh, yes.

Tech Crunch writes: “The HRP-5P is a humanoid robot from Japan’s Advanced Industrial Science and Technology institute that can perform common construction tasks including  — install drywall.” I wonder if this opens up a new career field: Robotics repair and servicing. Or, will other robots do that as well? Check out the video.

Jason Snell, at Six Colors, has written up a very nice review of the Apple Watch Series 4.  Notable is the assessment of which previous generation owners should upgrade to Series 4. And he doesn’t forget to note: “Apple also won’t let you buy a Stainless Steel model unless you buy the cellular edition. That double penalty means you can’t get a stainless Series 4 for less than $699.” Check it out.

As soon as Governor Jerry Brown signed California’s tough net neutrality bill, the U.S. Justice Department filed suit to stop it, claiming the state doesn’t have the legal authority, but this Verge article points out: “… telecom industry legal experts say that when the FCC dismantled its own authority over broadband ISPs (by rolling back their classification of ISPs as Title II common carriers under the Telecom Act), it ironically killed any authority it might have had to tell states what to do.” Oh, the delicious irony.

At PC Magazine, Sascha Segan has compared LTE speeds of the iPhone X to XS, and the latter is substantially faster. “The new iPhone XS and XS Max use an LTE modem that we’ve never seen used anywhere else: the Intel XMM7560. The 7560 is Intel’s first modem to support all four US wireless carriers, letting Apple drop Qualcomm, the world’s dominant high-end modem supplier.” However, ” … it still doesn’t quite match the Qualcomm X20 modem used in the Samsung Galaxy Note 9.” This is good stuff.

It takes a lot of work to photograph or video identical scenes when comparing iPhone cameras, so I appreciated this very nice article comparing iPhone X to XS video. Also, here’s a snippet that has been widely overlooked: “Both the XS and XS Max can now record audio in stereo, which adds another layer of depth to recordings. By contrast, all iPhone models up to 2018, including the iPhone X, recorded sound in mono.” Have a look.

I’m interested in all things UHD/4K/HDR, so this caught my attention. Previously, YouTube’s iOS app didn’t support High Dynamic Range (HDR) video on Apple’s three OLED iPhones. That means HDR10 and Dolby Vision. Now it does, so here’s link to more details. Note that Apple’s new LCD iPhone, the iPhone XR, will also support HDR video playback, according to Apple’s specs.

It’s easy to forget where and when macOS had its earliest origins.  Its tumultuous path had its earliest start with Steve Jobs at NeXT. “NeXTStep was developed primarily by Avie Tevanian. The coder previously worked on the Mach microkernel, a supercharged version of UNIX, at Carnegie Mellon University. Jobs convinced Tevanian to join NeXT instead of taking what, in the short term, would have been a far more lucrative job at Microsoft.” This is a nifty, concise history of how it all started.

Apple has modified macOS Server, and with Mojave upon us, it’s good to know about the changes Apple has implemented. Here’s a link to the Apple Migration Guide. From the intro: “macOS Server is changing to focus more on management of computers, devices, and storage on your network. As a result, some changes are coming in how Server works. Beginning in the spring of 2018, several services will be hidden on new installations of an update to macOS Server. Then in the fall of 2018, new installations and upgrades of macOS Server will require you to migrate most services to other software.”

“The Dharma Planet Survey, in a new study led by University of Florida (UF) astronomer Jian Ge and team including Tennessee State University (TSU) astronomers Matthew Muterspaugh and Gregory Henry, has shown that science fiction may be a little less so; the Dharma project has discovered what may be Star Trek’s famed planet Vulcan.” Or something close to it. Concept image via UF.