Google just shared a photo of its upcoming Pixel 4 phone, and I think it gives us a hint of what the iPhone XI will look like. Android manufacturers are notorious for copying the appearance of iPhones, like the notch. The Pixel 4 shows a square camera module on the back, so I think it’s likely the rumors and mockups of a square iPhone XI camera module with three cameras are probably correct.
Well, since there seems to be some interest, here you go! Wait ’til you see what it can do. #Pixel4
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is an upcoming AR game from Niantic and WB Games San Francisco. The Dev Diaries are a new series that will feature a behind the scenes look at the people who created the game and stories that inspired it.
“It’s what everyone imagines when you read the Harry Potter books,” said Marigold. “You imagine the characters and world coming to life around you. Harry Potter: Wizards Unite takes this a step further and brings it to life in your world so that you can actually see all the magical characters and fantastic creatures all around you. It’s almost like you can reach out and touch them.”
Really neat to hear from the team, and I can’t wait for the game.
Apple promised the 2019 Mac Pro would be modular, making it easy to upgrade with new components. But AppleInsider found that it will have custom SSD connectors you’ll have to buy from Apple.
The information Apple provides isn’t enough detail to confirm what kind of SSDs are being used by the Mac Pro, but what the image reveals is that it isn’t any standard SSD that is in use with other devices…Sources inside Apple not authorized to speak on behalf of the company say the drives do not use a standard M.2 pinout, but declined to speak about the slot’s pin compatibility with older Apple SSD modules. This does leave open the possibility Apple is using a connector it previously created or has since modified.
Oh people are going to love this.
Twitter co-founder and Medium CEO Ev Williams described preparing to post on the social network he helped create as “armoring up for battle.” He told the Recode Code conference that he misses the day’s when bloggers did not get instant feedback.
“Part of the beautiful thing about blogging was you were always looking for feedback but you didn’t get it as momentarily — things could marinate,” said Williams, who was speaking onstage at Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Tuesday with Vox founder and editor-at-large Ezra Klein. “Now, there’s an addiction to short-term feedback that is detrimental sometimes to thought.” Williams, who is now leading Medium, compared the mindset of getting ready to post on social media platforms like Twitter as “armoring up for battle.” This isn’t the first time Williams has expressed regret over what some view as the potentially negative effects of Twitter.
Ride-hailing service Bolt is back in London, and ready to take to on Uber. It will find doing so a tough challenge. However, as Wired noted, the service previously known as Taxify has one big advantage – it is much cheaper.
Bolt has spent the last two years going through the licensing process properly, and now it’s ready for action. But it is not new to ride hailing. The company was founded in 2013 by 19-year-old Estonian Markus Villig, and began by targeting markets – such as his home town of Tallinn – where Uber was slow to expand. It now operates in more than 30 countries, and has found particular success in Africa, where it offers rides on mopeds as well as in cars – the continent makes up about half of its revenue. But Uber is already deeply embedded into London’s transport system. It accounts for 80 per cent of all ride-hailing journeys, and is integrated into Google Maps and Citymapper.
Senator Elizabeth Warren said that the Justice Department’s anti-trust chief should recuse himself from investigations into Apple and Google. Senator Warren, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said that Makan Delrahim had previously lobbied for the firms and therefore should not investigate them, Reuters reported.
In a letter to Delrahim, Warren said Alphabet Inc’s Google had hired him in 2007 to lobby federal antitrust officials on behalf of the company’s proposed acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick Inc, and he had reported an estimated $100,000 in income from Google in that year. She said Apple Inc had hired Delrahim in 2006 and 2007 to lobby the government on its behalf on patent reform issues.
Apple has ended its plans to build a $921m iCloud data center in Denmark, AppleInsider reported. The company told the relevant local authority that it will not be building on the 285 hectares site in Kasso that it acquired in 2017. Apple will proceed with another data center project in the country.
In a “short phone call” to the Aabenraa Municipality, Apple advised it had made the decision to concentrate only on its data center construction taking place in Viborg, a second Danish construction project for the company. Apple also plans to sell the land, with no intention to construct anything else on the property, a statement from the municipality reads. Described as “completely unexpected,” Aabenraa director Stig Isaksen suggests the call was “an overall strategic business decision made in the United States, and that the decision has been taken entirely independently of the circumstances of the Aabenraa Municipality.” Isaksen also claims there has been “much praise” for local partners and the municipality from Apple throughout the project.
Frontier Bundles is hosting a challenge where people can win US$1,000 if they use a flip phone exclusively for a week. All you have to do to enter is fill out a form and explain why you should be the winner. The closing date for entry is July 1, 2019 at 5PM MST.
If you’re the person we choose, you’ll be responsible for using a flip phone in place of your smartphone for seven full days (that’s 168 hours!), and we want you to log your experience. We’ll have you track (don’t worry, your info stays safe with us!) how long it takes you to do basic tasks such as texting and checking email, how many times you wish you could Google something, how many hours you slept, how your productivity changed (or didn’t!), and even if you were late to appointments.
Photos of travelers and license plates were stolen in a U.S. Customs breach. A subcontractor for the agency was hacked, but CBP won’t say which one. One hypothesis says it might be Perceptics.
CBP said copies of “license plate images and traveler images collected by CBP” had been transferred to the subcontractor’s company network, violating the contract’s security and privacy rules. The subcontractor’s network was then attacked and breached. No CBP systems were compromised, the agency said. It’s unclear whether passport or facial-recognition photos were included in the breach.
At one time, it was theorized that Apple would make its own TV set, integrated with Apple TV functionality. Instead, Apple has gone one better by seeking to integrate the Apple TV (4K) into TVs made by others. LoupVentures has the strategy and the numbers.
We believe, eventually, many major TVs will embed Apple TV software. This adoption curve may be similar to CarPlay …
Apple’s approach to the living room has been… led by Apple TV which we estimate is now used in 26m US homes monthly (21% of US households). We believe there are 53 million active Apple TVs worldwide.
While this may appear to be the beginning of the end of the Apple TV box, we believe the device will retain unique value. We believe the standalone box will continue …
This is, of course, all about ramping up for Apple TV+ subscriptions.
Amazon unveiled the developer preview of Alexa Conversations Monday. The function is powered by deep learning and combines skills with multi-turn dialogue, reported VentureBeat. These can subsequently be connected with other skills to create all-in-one use cases. Organizing a night out is one of the first use cases.
Multi-turn conversations have been available for some time, but Alexa Conversations is designed to help people get more done quickly with the AI assistant’s more than 90,000 Alexa skills. The experience is intended at launch to help people make purchases, so if you order a movie ticket, follow-up questions may put you in touch with the OpenTable skill to make dinner reservations or Uber skill to get a ride. Both Uber and OpenTable are early adopters of Alexa Conversations, along with the Atom Tickets skill for the sale of movie tickets. The ability to string together Alexa skills begins with a night-out use case, Amazon VP of devices David Limp told a gathering of reporters.
iPhones are both popular with thieves and help catch them. AppleInsider has a nice roundup of Apple crime-related stories. They include how $19m worth of iPhones were stolen, and how one device helped bring in a Mueller investigation witness.
A fraud ring based in New York stole $19 million worth of iPhones over a period of seven years. Per Quartz, the perpetrators ran a scam in which they posed as cell phone subscribers, received new iPhones at little to no cost by using fake IDs and fraudulent debit cards, and then sold the phones on the black market. The case was reported earlier this spring, but the full criminal complaint was unsealed this week, revealing the perpetrators operated the scam in at least 34 states.
Owen Williams writes how Apple wants to “kill advertising” with its newest privacy feature in iOS 13 called Sign In with Apple.
Apple is likely to win consumers over, who think these things sound evil and strange, but without these practices [of using customers’ email addresses] many of our favorite businesses and services simply couldn’t exist or practically reach customers.
I disagree. Apple is trying to kill tracking, not advertising. In Safari, Apple is adding a feature called Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution to reduce targeted ads, which only accounts for a small 4% in revenue anyway.
A limited Apple Watch grant program is launching this fall for ResearchKit and CareKit researchers. It’s part of what Apple calls an “Investigator Support Pilot.”
Apple said the new initiative, which is currently still in development, will have a simple submission process through the redesigned ResearchKit and CareKit website. While details on the new program were light during Apple’s presentation, the company said it would prioritize “studies that advance science and help people to lead healthier lives by uniquely leveraging our ecosystem,” and that more info would be available on the new website soon.
A judge recently ruled that Comcast violated Washington state consumer protection law 445,000 times.
The court found that Comcast added the SPP to the accounts of 30,946 Washingtonians without their knowledge, and did not tell an additional 18,660 Washingtonians the true cost of the plan. The court ordered Comcast to refund affected consumers, and pay 12 percent interest on the restitution. The amount of restitution is unknown at this time, but is expected to be significant. The court ordered Comcast to issue the refunds within 60 days and report to the state on the specific details and amounts.
Comcast is being fined a paltry US$9 million for this. Put another zero on it, then we can talk.
Max Eddy reviews VPNs for PCMag. Although he believes most vendors have good intentions, he highlights several examples of bad behavior in the VPN industry.
From my experience working with VPNs, I can say with certainty there is a culture of sabotage and paranoia among some vendors. Anonymous dumps of damning information about one VPN vendor get blamed on another VPN vendor. Tips come in suggesting that corporate ownership is tied to the Russian mafia or some other criminal operation. Commentators hold up one VPN review site as an example of rectitude; others say the same site is secretly run by a VPN vendor with an agenda. When there is this much disinformation and counter-disinformation (which may also be disinformation), it’s impossible to tell who is telling the truth.
Before I came to The Mac Observer, one of my freelancing gigs was writing for a VPN company. I saw some of the same things as Mr. Eddy. In both privacy and security circles, there is a tint of paranoia and conspiracy thinking, at least with some people.
This is part of Andrew’s News+ series, where he shares a magazine every Friday to help people discover good content in Apple News+.
iFixit put the Powerbeat Pro headphones on their teardown table earlier this week. Cult of Mac ran through what they found, and it isn’t pretty.
The first thing you’ll discover when you attempt to get into the Powerbeats Pro is that … you can’t. Not easily, at least. Like most Apple products these days, there’s copious amounts of glue holding everything together. It’s not totally impossible, then, but you’ll need a lot of luck on your side if you want to get your Powerbeats Pro open without breaking them. There’s no real reason to open them up anyway. Every internal component is permanently attached to another, “so a full disassembly can only be accomplished destructively,” iFixit explains. You can’t just replace a single part.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wants to colonize the Moon. Obviously. Business Insider reported on his speech at his firm’s re:MARS conference. He told attendees that we have to go to space “to save the Earth.”
Bezos said that using the moon is all part of his plan to save humanity by helping build the infrastructure necessary for space colonization. “The reason we’ve got to go to space, in my view, is to save the Earth,” he said on Thursday. “If we’re going to continue to grow this civilization, we need to move — and I’m talking about something our grandchildren will work on and their grandchildren— and so on this isn’t something just this generation is going to accomplish.” And the moon turns out to be the perfect landing spot for our eventual space needs for a variety of reason, Bezos believes.
The Apple App Store and Google Play store are something of a duopoly. This is causing some anti-trust concerns within the U.S. Department of Justice. Bloomberg News looked at why the DOJ is starting to think about app store marketplace.
More than $100 billion was spent through these marketplaces last year. Apple’s App Store handled 45% of that, while Google accounted for 25%. In the U.S., the two control more than 95% of all mobile app spending by consumers, according to Sensor Tower data.This power means most developers must work with Apple and Google if they want to reach billions of smartphone users as customers. The companies take as much as 30% of app sales, creating highly profitable businesses — but also a rising chorus of critics who see an exploitative duopoly.
Sarah Herrlinger, Apple’s Global Accessibility chief, talks about new accessibility features in iOS 13 and macOS Catalina.
Accessibility, as it always does, plays a significant role in not only the conference itself — the sessions, labs and get-togethers all are mainstays of the week — but also in the software Apple shows off. Of particular interest this year is Apple’s Voice Control feature, available for macOS Catalina and iOS 13 devices, which allows users to control their Macs and iPhones using only the sound of their voices.
The new features, such as Voice Control, are amazing.
According to engadget, “Microsoft discreetly wiped its massive facial recognition database.”
Microsoft has been vocal about its desire to properly regulate facial recognition technology. The company’s president, Brad Smith, appealed directly to Congress last year to take steps to manage the tech, which he says has “broad societal ramifications and potential for abuse.” Such are the company’s concerns that it even blocked the sales of the tech to California police forces. Now, Microsoft is continuing its crusade by quietly deleting its MS Celeb database, which contains more than 10 million images of some 100,000 people.
These days, it seems everything in tech privacy matters gets continuously worse. Deleting big data sets is hard to do. Good work, Microsoft.
Mouse-support is coming to the iPhone and iPad this fall. This is a feature many users have wanted for a while. However, on Cult of Mac, Killian Bell argues Apple still has the wrong attitude to the issue.
Apple “strongly emphasized this was designed and developed expressly for a certain segment of user.” In other words, Apple wants you to use touch if you can. You shouldn’t be controlling your iPhone or iPad with a mouse unless it’s absolutely necessary. But why is Apple so adamant about that? Why can’t it embrace the fact that some people — mostly those who use an iPad for work — would just prefer to use a mouse? What worries me about Apple’s view is that it will hold back iPad mouse support in the future. It’s almost as if Apple doesn’t want to make mouse support too good, just in case those who can use touch choose to use a mouse instead.
Apple announced a variety of great products and tools and WWDC 2019. However, not all those in attendance were happy with what they saw from the stage, AppleInsider found. Some of the Apple announcements were variations of these developers’ products. Apple is perfectly entitled to do this, of course, but it makes life harder for the developers.
Apple innovates and Apple introduces new technologies in hardware and software, but it also does its own version of other people’s apps. You might have built a business up and Apple announces it is doing the same thing as you. That happened this year to hardware developers Duet Display and Luna Display, whose products have been providing the features that Apple has now built in under the name Sidecar. And it’s happened to software developer James Thomson, whose PCalc for Apple Watch will have to compete with Apple’s own calculator in watchOS 6.
The Version Museum has a visual history of 22 years of Apple website design history, starting in 1994.
Version Museum is devoted to showcasing the visual history of popular websites, games, apps, and operating systems that have shaped our lives.
The biggest change is the evolution of that tab bar at the top of the website, going from light to dark.
