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When our mobile AI agents, knowing a lot about us as individuals, have to depend on remote processing power, our privacy is at stake.

Pop quiz: What do you do if you want every company, including Apple, to buy your OLED panels for their smartphones? Answer: You build the world’s largest OLED factory, which is exactly what Samsung is doing. Demand for OLED panels isn’t letting up so it’s no surprise Samsung is investing in the future.

U.S. Supercomputers falling behind, the story of the slow death of FireWire, and some very special hardware in the coming iMac Pro.

After selling a billion or so iPhones, Apple would love to sustain growth. One way to do that is to tap into its enormous cash reserves and work with a company that knows how to build a constellation of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, providing internet access. Say, Boeing. Many more locations on Earth would open up. In this potential partnership, Apple would manage the consumer side and fund a part of the satellite operations built by Boeing. This is looking more and more real. Particle Debris points to the story at Investor’s Business Daily.

That list included drag and drop, file access, an app dock, and so on. Right out of macOS.

The Mac Observer is on location at the McEnery Convention Center for this morning’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote event. The keynote starts at 20 AM pacific time. You can follow along with our as-it-happens coverage, and then stick around for more news from the event, analysis, and reactions on TMO’s Daily Observations and Apple Context Machine podcasts.

Apple customers have waited for a long time to get new, updated Mac models. Apple kicked off the resurgence in late 2016 with the Touch Bar MacBook Pro, but there remained serious concerns. And that’s a Good Thing™. The development of technology and the approaches by the competition have evoked a strong, clear, intelligent response from the community that amounts to an excellent, thoughtful conversation about what Macs should be all about going forward. Particle Debris page 2 discusses that and ponders more new Mac hardware at WWDC in June.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been spotted testing a glucose monitor connected to his Apple Watch, according to unnamed sources at CNBC:

Tim Cook has been spotted at the Apple campus test-driving a device that tracks blood sugar, which was connected to his Apple Watch. A source said that Cook was wearing a prototype glucose-tracker on the Apple Watch, which points to future applications that would make the device a “must have” for millions of people with diabetes — or at risk for the disease.

We already knew Apple was working on this technology, and Mr. Cook himself said earlier this year he’s been testing one. But the new report suggests whatever Apple is working on is advanced enough to be tested in the wild, or at least the wild confines of 1 Infinite Loop.

Now that Apple has committed to a new Mac Pro, prosumers are salivating at the thought of what Apple might deliver. And the thinking also seems to be bleeding over into the iMacs (with Xeon CPUs) and MacBook Pros, high-end Macs that’ll have to carry our most demanding computational loads for awhile. Particle Debris points to two articles by Mac experts. One asks how the competition is doing against Apple’s laptops and the other has a focus on raw laptop speed.

In the 1980s, some people had 3 meter steerable satellite dishes and could freely access raw network feeds from geosynchronous satellites. Then the networks encrypted everything, and we migrated to smaller dishes and monthly service from Dish and DirecTV. But that’s just one-way TV, and it may be gone soon. The Next Big Thing could well be low-latency, full internet access with TCP/IP via low-earth-orbit satellites. Particle Debris page two points to several articles that cover the emerging story.

Nowadays, it’s a real challenge to find fact-based news and solid analysis about many things, including tech companies like Apple. There are so many voices. Does a lurid article title correlate well to solid research and historical insight? Probably not. Just exactly how does one go about identifying valuable, accurate analysis when it comes to Apple? Those who have learned the ropes know that a specific, experienced author is more important than an article title, and this week, one of those special authors, Daniel Eran Dilger, proves why that’s so. It’s on Page 2 of Particle Debris.

Apple’s design philosophy for consumer Macs has been that of simplicity, indeed minimalism. Approachable and beautiful. But even the 2008-2012 Mac Pro, designed in the Steve Jobs era, understood the needs of technical and creative professionals. Now that Apple has had time to digest what went wrong with the 2013 Mac Pro, it’s time, according to Marco Arment, to change the design thinking from that of “no!” to that of “yes!”  Versatility should rule. It’s all on page 2 of Friday’s Particle Debris.

Companies have to be careful about grand projects that don’t serve as a foundation, change rapidly, and sometimes incur legal difficulties. This week’s Particle Debris looks at how Google Book Search foundered from a lack of commitment and legal troubles, VRML morphed into purer VR, the strained evolution of tvOS, cute robots putting laborers out of work, the rapid evolution of self-driving cars, and how Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos plans to keep his company from a slow, painful demise. These are examples of how technical evolution can double back on the very companies that spawn it.

More and more, customers will find that as artificial intelligence agents embedded in smartphones, robots and cars start to make decisions for them, freedom and choices will begin to dwindle. For example, car insurance for people who want to drive themselves, instead of letting the car do it, will get a lot more expensive. Perhaps prohibitive. This is just one of the unintended consequences of autonomous cars discussed in Particle Debris. In fact, as AI’s do the thinking for us, so will the companies that make them.

Today is Pi Day. While some people might say that Tau is more relevant than Pi, it’s still Pi Day. With that in mind, you may want to wish your friends a happy Pi Day. And while that’s cool, it’s even cooler to wish them a Happy π Day (OK, well, it may or may not be cooler to do this, but it’s definitely geekier!). Unfortunately, we don’t have a π symbol in emoji on iOS. So in order to send that symbol you’ll either have to copy it from the text of this article and paste it in … or you can do what we did in the first place: add the Greek keyboard to your iPhone and type it from there!

Lately, whenever a discussion of the Mac’s future comes up, there are two common themes. Apple remains enthusiastic about mobility and MacBooks/Pros. Likely the iMac as well. But concerns about the desktops, specifically the headless Mac Pro and Mac mini, have gone from dire to hopeless. Particle Debris page 2 points to two very good articles that explore the situation with the Mac line in general and also the Mac Pro’s fate in particular.

Soon after the first iPhone was launched, it was fairly easy to see that it would, by its design, eventually subsume the iPod. We watched it coming and expected iPod sales to wither. But in the case of the iPad and the Mac, the progression isn’t so clear. In these uncertain times, Apple could do a lot, with marketing and product rollouts, to provide warmer fuzzies about the roadmap (without spilling any secrets). Apple Has its Eye on the Ball, but Its a Different Ball set up the discussion, and page twocataloged some cases about how Apple’s lack of messaging, via product design, is creating customer angst.