President Trump has effectively started a trade war with China—as well as other countries—by imposing tariffs on metal imports from Europe, Canada, and Mexico. These countries are fighting the U.S. trade war, with China focusing on American-made goods like beef, poultry, tobacco, and cars.

Tim Cook worries that Apple could be collateral damage. Last month he visited the White House to warn the president that Apple’s position in China could be threatened by tough measures coming out of the U.S. The New York Times notes:

In a trade and technology showdown between the United States and China, Apple and Mr. Cook have a lot to lose. With 41 stores and hundreds of millions of iPhones sold in the country, there is arguably no American company in China as successful, as high-profile and with as big a target on its back.

FastCoDesign shared an interesting visual tool that shows what your city looked like up to 750 million years ago. It’s called Ancient Earth. You enter your address, click on the menu to pick the age, then it instantly shows how the land mass looked.

Earth was a completely different planet 240 million years ago. Back then we had Pangea, a mashup of a supercontinent formed by older continental units and surrounded by water. Then, around 175 million years ago, magma pushed this landmass’s tectonic plates in different directions, slowly forming the continents we know today.

Fun fact: Mar-a-Lago has always been a swamp–and L.A. traffic has always been crap. True story, folks.

Particle Debris page 2 highlights two articles that provide a detailed review of macOS Mojave features. Afterwards, it’ll be clear that Apple has done an amazing job with this new version of macOS. I call it the “wow-factor.”

512Pixels has a good article wherein the author shares thoughts on Dark Mode in macOS Mojave. As always, Apple puts great thought into its designs, and Dark Mode isn’t just a simple color inversion. At WWDC, Apple introduced guidelines for Dark Mode:

• Dark interfaces are cool.
• Dark interfaces are not just inverted.
• Dark Mode is content-focused.

The result is a darkly beautiful operating system that gives a fresh Mac experience.

As we’ve seen, this is far from a mere inversion of the default Appearance. Apple has gone through and fine-tuned the smallest details to make this work.

For example, the window shadows are different between the Light and Dark Appearance. In Dark Mode, they are a little crisper and slightly more opaque, complete with an inner stroke around the edges of windows to help them appear more defined.

George Ergatoudis, Spotify’s Head of Music Culture, International Shows & Editorial/Content for the UK, is leaving the company to join Apple Music. He has a reputation in the UK as one of the most influential music industry trend setters and he’s bringing that experience and clout to head Apple Music in the UK, according to Music Business Worldwide. Spotify’s loss is Apple’s gain, especially since the streaming music service seems to be losing a lot of its top talent. Apple is serious about being at the top of the streaming music service market so bringing Ergatoudis on board is a smart move.

One of the things we’re doing lately is identifying our 32-bit apps in macOS High Sierra. Apple has said that High Sierra is the last macOS that will run 32-bit apps without compromise. Mojave is the last version of macOS that will run 32-bit apps at all.   And so, as we check our systems, (here’s how) planning ahead and identifying our 32-bit apps, the first thing we often notice is a 32-bit DVD player. Oh, no! What will we do?  Jonny Evans has the scoop in the link below. By the way, this all refers to watching video content on DVDs with the player. It as nothing to do, so far as I know, with the Finder’s ability to mount and read data DVDs.

Valve’s Steam Link app for the iPad was blocked from Apple’s App Store over a “business conflict,” which most likely meant the option to purchase games directly in the app. Now there’s a new beta out that doesn’t include purchasing. It keeps the core functionality so you can play the Steam games from your computer on your iPad, which is pretty cool. It also means you can use AirPlay with your Apple TV to play games on your television. toucharcade says everyone who has been testing the Steam Link beta loves it, so hopefully this change will get it approved for the App Store.

The cast for Apple’s “Are You Sleeping?” TV series starring Octavia Spencer is complete. Variety reports Lizzy Caplan, Aaron Paul, Ron Cephas Jones, Elizabeth Perkins, Mekhi Phifer, Michael Beach, Tracie Thoms, and Haneefah Wood round out the powerhouse the cast. The series is based on the book of the same name and follows a woman dealing with a podcast that’s investigating her father’s murder. Apple’s TV series lineup is looking strong, and “Are You Sleeping?” is one show I can’t wait to see.

Writing for Quartz, Mike Murphy presents the argument that Apple’s new design language has “killed fun.” He says that the company has become less colorful and more monochromatic:

When founder Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he infused a sense of color and vibrancy that had been lacking from a company that had become stuck in a rut of selling beige boxes. He introduced the iMac, a spheroid bubble of green and white plastic and glass, a little over a year later. It was like no computer on the market, and it revitalized Apple.

By refining its products to near-impenetrable pieces of glass and metal, and bringing the aesthetic of the entire consumer electronics market along with them, Apple has stamped out much of the fun within its own company, and the greater industry.

Federico Viticci wrote another killer piece at MacStories about iOS 12 automation with Shortcuts. It’s an informative article wherein he explains the difference between “Shortcuts the app and Shortcuts the feature.” The app replaces Workflow, but Shortcuts as a feature is a powerful new way to customize Siri. Apple is optimizing Siri in a different way than Google and Microsoft can, and it leverages the power of people, similar to services like IFTTT.

On the surface, Shortcuts the app looks like the full-blown Workflow replacement heavy users of the app have been wishfully imagining for the past year. But there is more going on with Shortcuts than the app alone. Shortcuts the feature, in fact, reveals a fascinating twofold strategy: on one hand, Apple hopes to accelerate third-party Siri integrations by leveraging existing APIs as well as enabling the creation of custom SiriKit Intents; on the other, the company is advancing a new vision of automation through the lens of Siri and proactive assistance from which everyone – not just power users – can reap the benefits.

Ken Segall, at The Observatory, takes retrospective look at Ron Johnson’s tenure as CEO of JCPenney. Recall Ron Johnson was Apple’s SVP of Retail Operations at Apple from roughly 2000 to 2011 and is believed to have been a major force in the success of Apple’s retail stores. In 2011, he was enticed to take the CEO position at JCPenney. Author Segall looks at how two CEOs did after Johnson was forced out in 2013. It’s a sparkling, fascinating look, in hindsight, about what Johnson tried to achieve, why he failed and why his successors also failed.

Unlike Apple TV, Apple’s streaming television and movie businesses isn’t a hobby. Apple’s latest hire, Kelly Costello, helps drive that point home. Variety reports she’s serving as business affairs executive reporting directly to Apple’s head of business affairs for worldwide video, Philip Matthys. She previously served as executive vice president of business and legal affairs for Broadway Video, and served stints at Viacom and NBC Universal Television, too. With each new hire Apple is showing it’s playing for keeps in the streaming entertainment market.

A court granted AT&T the right to acquire Time Warner, which makes sense because the Trump Administration’s blocking of that deal was political, rather than a true issue of antitrust. But when combined with the death of Net Neutrality, which ended Monday, Danny Crichton at TechCrunch had a sobering observation. In a piece arguing the merits of Alphabet and Netflix becoming ISPs (I’d throw Apple on that list), he noted that the world of video is effectively closed to startups. It’s a good read, and here’s a snippet:

One sad note though is how much the world of video is increasingly closed to startups. When companies like Netflix, which today closed with a market cap of almost $158 billion, can’t necessarily get enough negotiating power to ensure that consumers have direct access to them, no startup can ever hope to compete. America may believe in its entrepreneurs, but its competition laws have done nothing to keep the terrain open for them. Those implications are just beginning.

iPhone, iPad, and Mac app developers asked Apple for a free trial option on the App Store for years, and they finally got what they asked for—sort of. Now Apple says developers can offer in-app free trials for all paid apps and not just subscriptions. Mars Edit developer Daniel Jalkut says that’s not as great as it sounds because the onus for managing the purchase on app makers, and it’s confusing for users and potential customers. Jalkut explains there are plenty of other problems with Apple’s approach, too. His full blog post is worth reading.