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The Australian teen who was arrested for hacking into Apple’s servers and making off with more than 90 GB of data has been sentenced to eight months probation. The defendant’s attorney said it was all innocent fun because he was just a big Apple fan. The magistrate, however, saw it differently. Bloomberg quotes her:

Your offending is serious. It was sustained, sophisticated, and a successful attack on the security of a major multinational corporation.

The teen’s “fun” took place between June 2015 and November 2016, and again in April 2017. He’s lucky, because had he been charged as an adult he could’ve been facing 10 years in jail.

Sir Jony Ive—Chief Design Officer at Apple—was named as the second recipient of the Professor Hawking Fellowship from Cambridge University. This award is an honorary scholarship developed with Stephen Hawking before his death. It was designed to recognize contributions to both STEM fields and social discourse, according to Varsity (via 9to5Mac). And Sir Jony is expected to deliver an address when accepting the award. From Varsity:

At the announcement, Connor speculated that Ive’s lecture in Michaelmas term would include “reflection on his career, split with a more general reflection on technology and design as a whole”.

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.

Screen Time in iOS 12 sounds like a great way to keep your kids from spending too much time playing on their iPhone or iPad—unless you’re a kid. To that end, kids have already found ways to work around parent-imposed limits. Some are changing the date and time on their devices, and others are more creative. Business Insider reports one parent saying,

Finally today, my son revealed his hack: When he runs out of screen time and his games get locked, he heads to App Store, downloads a previously installed (but later removed) game through the cloud icon, and it works without limitations!

That’s how resourceful a 7-year-old can be. Maybe Apple should start hiring kids for its Screen Time team.

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’s partnership with Salesforce could turn in to a big boost for HomePod sales. Marriott plans to use software that comes from the team up with HomePods in hotel rooms so customers can use their voice to change the room temperature, order food, and more. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said,

At Salesforce’s annual customer conference this week, Marriott International will demonstrate a new system that uses Salesforce and Apple tools so that hotel guests can turn up the heat, order a sandwich or hail a ride using Siri with an Apple HomePod in their hotel room. And at the next Marriot the guest stays at, Siri will remember the guest’s preferences—even their favorite sandwich.

That sounds like an opportunity for a lot of HomePod exposure and a nice way to boost user familiarity. I wonder if Marriott customers will feel comfortable with a HomePod in their room, or if they’ll worry about privacy.

Apple and Qualcomm’s ongoing legal battle just took an interesting turn. Qualcomm is now accusing Apple of stealing its LTE modem-related trade secrets and giving the information to Intel. Axios quotes from the legal filing:

Although discovery is ongoing, it is clear that Apple’s conduct went far beyond simply breaching the contract originally sued on. Indeed, it is now apparent Apple engaged in a years-long campaign of false promises, stealth and subterfuge designed to steal Qualcomm’s confidential information and trade secrets for the purpose of improving the performance of lower-quality modem chipsets, with the ultimate goal of eliminating Qualcomm’s Apple-based business.

That’s a pretty serious allegation, and one that could be a major headache for Apple if it proves to be true. It’s no secret Apple was tired of relying exclusively on Qualcomm for iPhone modem chips and felt it was paying too much in patent royalties. Their case is scheduled for trial next spring, and it’s looking like it’ll be filled with drama.

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.”

If you’re getting a new iPhone XS or iPhone XS Max today, and maybe an Apple Watch Series 4, you need to know how to get everything set up. TMO’s own John Martellaro has you covered. Read on to learn how to get up and running.

Chris Evans, best known for playing Captain America in Marvel’s Avengers movies, has signed on to play the lead in “Defending Jacob” in Apple’s original content lineup. The 8-episode series is based on the best selling novel by Willian Landay, and it’ll be directed by Oscar-nominated Morten Ryan. Deadline says,

Defending Jacob is described as a a gripping, character-driven thriller based on Landay’s 2012 novel published by Random House. The book tells the story of a father dealing with the accusation that his son is a 14-year-old murderer.

Apple’s original content line up is steadily growing and looks to be pretty strong. It’ll be interesting to see how Apple fares against Netflix and Amazon Prime when its shows start airing.

I’ll be the first to note that much of this article was over my mathematical head, but it’s super cool. The short version is that some sciency-math folks decided to treat prime numbers like they were atom-like particles. Their model showed what could be a pattern in the distribution of prime numbers, something previously considered random. Motherboard has an article on it, and here’s a snippet:

Together with his student Ge Zhang and number theorist Matthew de-Courcy-Ireland, Torquato computationally represented the primes as a one-dimensional string of atoms and scattered light off them. The result, published in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment last week, was astounding: not only did they create a quasicrystal-like interference pattern, but it was a type of fractal pattern that has never been seen before. Torquato told Quanta Magazine that this implies prime numbers “are a completely new category of structures” when considered as a physical system.

Amazon is hosting a surprise media event 1 PM eastern time on Thursday to announce new hardware products. The company isn’t saying what it’ll introduce, but it’s a safe bet the Echo is involved. Along with new smart speakers and a rumored Echo subwoofer, we may see some other gear outside the smart speaker space. The Verge says,

Amazon could be shifting focus toward Alexa in general, with plans to unveil up to eight smart home devices this year. Rumored products range from a voice-controlled in-car accessory to a smart microwave oven. The latter is particularly interesting given Amazon recently began offering Blue Apron-style meal kits, both online and at its Amazon Go cashier-less outposts. The smart oven, if confirmed, could potentially be tied to Whole Foods as well.

So maybe you’ll be talking to your microwave oven soon, or at least sharing more of your cooking habits with Amazon.