A 16-inch MacBook Pro with reduced bezels and possibly a new keyboard design is coming in October, according to a report in the Economic Daily News relayed by 9to5Mac. Most notable in this latest suggestion of Apple’s next-generation laptop is the price—EDN suggests a starting price around an eye-watering $3,000.
Should we be surprised? Apple has never been focused on being the low-price leader, and at the top end of its product range, it has been unafraid to charge a whole lot of money… especially for products bearing the name “pro.”
Dana Cimilluca, Cara Lombardo and Tripp Mickle of The Wall Street Journal report that Apple and Intel are discussing a $1 billion transaction that would give Apple ownership of Intel’s (abandoned) modem business, including intellectual property:
It would give Apple access to engineering work and talent behind Intel’s yearslong push to develop modem chips for the crucial next generation of wireless technology known as 5G, potentially saving years of development work. Apple has been working to develop chips to further differentiate its devices as smartphone sales plateau globally, squeezing the iPhone business that has long underpinned its profits. It has hired engineers, including some from Intel, and announced plans for an office of 1,200 employees in San Diego.
This has been the source of outside speculation for a while now, ever since Apple announced it was switching to Qualcomm for 5G modem chips and Intel simultaneously announced it was getting out of the modem business.
It seems like Intel’s new CEO didn’t have interest in being in this business, and Apple is reportedly staffing up a major effort to build its own modem chips in the long term. So, at least from this outside perspective, this transaction seems to make an enormous amount of sense.
Hamilton tells an amazing story about a bug that she noticed—or to be more accurate, her daughter noticed:
One day, she was with me when I was doing a simulation of a mission to the moon. She liked to imitate me – playing astronaut. She started hitting keys and all of a sudden, the simulation started. Then she pressed other keys and the simulation crashed. She had selected a program which was supposed to be run prior to launch – when she was already “on the way” to the moon. The computer had so little space, it had wiped the navigation data taking her to the moon. I thought: my God – this could inadvertently happen in a real mission. I suggested a program change to prevent a prelaunch program being selected during flight. But the higher-ups at MIT and Nasa said the astronauts were too well trained to make such a mistake. Midcourse on the very next mission – Apollo 8 – one of the astronauts on board accidentally did exactly what Lauren had done. The Lauren bug! It created much havoc and required the mission to be reconfigured. After that, they let me put the program change in, all right.
(If you haven’t read up on the Apollo Guidance Computer, you should—it was the world’s first fly-by-wire system and it would have been nearly impossible to navigate to and from the moon without the algorithms in the rudimentary Apollo computers, which used a novel user interface based on inputting numbers representing different “nouns” and “verbs”.)
Like me, Rolling Stone TV critic Alan Sepinwall is celebrating the return of a must-watch miniseries—HBO’s “From the Earth to the Moon”—which has been released in a new HD version to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing:
It debuted on HBO in the spring of 1998, a few months before Sex and the City, and nearly a year before The Sopranos. HBO already had a reputation for making impressive historical miniseries, but the sweep of this one, and the technical wizardry required to recreate more than a dozen Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, was unprecedented. There is no central character — as chief astronaut Deke Slayton, Nick Searcy is the only actor to appear in even 10 of the 12 episodes, and he’s a supporting player — which means each episode basically has to start over from scratch, narratively. The Apollo 11 mission is dramatized in the sixth episode, “Mare Tranquilitatis,” which means most of the project’s back half is devoted to missions that America largely ignored even in the heady afterglow of Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s famous footsteps.
This is a legitimately great TV series, and I’m so excited that people can finally watch it on Blu-Ray or on HBO GO or HBO NOW. (My favorite episodes, for what it’s worth, are “Spider” [about the building of the lunar module] and “Galileo was Right” [about teaching astronauts geology, of all things].)
It may only be July, but it’s never too early to start speculating about Apple’s next big announcements. We’re likely another seven or eight weeks out from the company’s annual September event, and while little is known about what Apple might have up its sleeves, a new iPhone line-up seems like a sure thing. (After all, it’s not like Cupertino’s just going to up and quit making them.)
I ventured into an Apple Store recently to help my wife upgrade from her iPhone 6, and as we ran down the list of available models, I found myself thinking back to that two-by-two product grid I discussed just last week and how antithetical it seems to the current crop of iPhones.
That’s not inherently bad: not everything has to fit neatly into a grid. But though Apple’s phone line-up has a method to its madness, it does remain pretty confusing for the average customer. Looking forward to the 2019 iPhone line-up, I wonder if it’s time to start thinking about slimming things down a bit.
The podcast industry has been flooded with big money over the last few years, as businesses and investors seek to get in on a rapidly growing media business that’s got a lot of room for audience and revenue growth. (Spotify alone is spending $500 million on podcast companies and exclusive content.)
And yet over all this time, the industry’s biggest player hasn’t made any big podcast business moves.
That player is Apple—its Podcasts app is the top podcast player, with 50 to 70 percent of the app market—and its time as a neutral supporter of the industry may be coming to an end. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Lucas Shaw report that Apple is talking to media companies about buying exclusive rights to podcasts.
This isn’t a surprising revelation. Podcasting is an area in which Apple currently exerts a huge amount of influence. This is not to say that any new Apple podcast endeavor would be a sure thing.
FaceApp is a piece of software that lets you transform photos of people to show them as older or younger; it’s making the rounds once again, as are privacy and data security concerns related to it. TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino, once again, has a reasoned take on the situation:
In this current wave of virality, some new questions are floating about FaceApp. The first is whether it uploads your camera roll in the background. We found no evidence of this and neither did security researcher and Guardian App CEO Will Strafach or researcher Baptiste Robert.
Panzarino also points out that though you can select a picture in FaceApp from your photo library without giving the app access, that is actually due to a feature introduced in iOS 11, which lets an app access a single photo selected by a user.
That said, FaceApp does upload your photo to the cloud in order to transform the image, and there are concerns about whether or not the photos have retained and what rights you are granting to the company. And, as some have pointed out, this data could be used for things like training AI-based facial recognition software, which may or may not be a consequence you intend when you just want to see what your friend looks like as a baby.
As always, it’s wise to tread carefully. Me, I skipped installing FaceApp just because I don’t care to see what I look like as wizened old man. I’d rather be surprised.
A lot of money is pouring into podcasting, most notably from Spotify, which is buying podcast companies and funding the creation of original, Spotify-only audio programming. But the industry’s biggest player, Apple, has refrained from making any moves in this area, despite its renewed focus on paid services—at least so far.
Executives at the company have reached out to media companies and their representatives to discuss buying exclusive rights to podcasts, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the conversations are preliminary. Apple has yet to outline a clear strategy, but has said it plans to pursue the kind of deals it didn’t make before….
“You are nowhere in podcasting if you don’t have shows listed in Apple podcasts,” said Lex Friedman, the chief revenue officer of Art19, which provides services to podcast producers such as Wondery Media and Tribune. But given all of the recent activity by its competition, “it would surprise me if Apple didn’t do anything with exclusives.”
Given Apple’s deep pockets and its focus on services, I can’t see how the company wouldn’t at least investigate the possibility of adding original audio content to its portfolio, both to strengthen the pull of the Podcasts app and increase the value of one of its existing services or a forthcoming services bundle.
As I wrote back in February: “With Spotify on the move, I have to wonder if Apple is going to need to take a more active approach in this area. The economics driving Apple Music and Spotify are quite similar; I’m a bit surprised Apple hasn’t invested in premium, subscriber-only audio content (because if it’s subscriber-only it’s not really a podcast) for subscribers of Apple Music. We hear about Apple spending billions on video content for its new streaming service, but not a peep about Apple using its power in podcasting to boost Apple Music or at least keep Spotify’s expansion at bay…. Perhaps Apple’s light touch on the world of podcasting will continue, at least until a competitor does something to get its attention.”
That blue bubble. Apple works to tie its customers to its ecosystem in many different ways, but there’s no better symbol of the power of platform lock-in than the blue-bubble users of Apple’s Messages app see when they’re talking to a fellow member of the Apple tribe. On Android or a feature phone? You get a green bubble. It’s just not as good.
And yet for all the importance the Messages app has to Apple’s platform, it could be a lot better than it is today. Over the past few years, Apple has introduced features that haven’t gone anywhere, while leaving some other potentially powerful features unaddressed.
When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, one of his early moves was to vastly simplify what had become a bloated line-up of Mac hardware. Jobs famously showed off a two-by-two product grid: pro and consumer, desktop and portable. Filling the grid were four products–iMac, PowerMac, iBook, PowerBook–each addressing one of those combinations.
The two-by-two grid lasted for several years, until the debut of the category-busting Mac mini in 2005. Since then, there’s been an almost magnetic impulse to cite the grid as the holy grail of Apple product design aspirations. Every time Apple releases something a new Mac, pundits try desperately to figure out how to shove the latest addition into the already bulging grid.
With this week’s rearrangement of its portable lineup, Apple has gotten both closer to and farther away from that product grid ideal–if indeed it’s even an ideal that Apple should be striving for anymore. But what the new lineup does point out is that there’s a puzzling imbalance in the company’s Mac offerings.
While the iPhone is obviously the most important product in Ive’s portfolio, his most significant and lasting contribution to Apple and the tech industry in general is embodied by a product that he worked on much more directly, and with far less help: the original iMac.
Aside from dramatically reversing Apple’s slide into obscurity, the iMac finally pushed the industry over the hill it had been climbing for decades. Nearly overnight, it went from an industry primarily concerned with technical specifications to one that more closely matches every other mainstream consumer business—one where fashion and aesthetics are not just a part of the appeal of a product, they are often the dominant factor. As much as any individual product design, this is Ive’s legacy.
John’s right about the iMac. You should read the whole thing, of course.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
So a security reacher noticed that business videoconferencing app Zoom was doing a bunch of bad stuff that left Mac users potentially vulnerable to privacy and security breaches.
My guess is that Zoom’s original sin comes out of its corporate culture, which is focused on competing in a pretty cutthroat industry with demanding clients (IT managers) and not particularly technically literate customers (the individual business users). There’s probably a great fear of losing business to other businesses who can boast about running video meetings with ever less friction to the user.
And then Apple comes along and introduces a security feature to Safari that requires a confirmation click when any link in a web browser attempts to open an external app. Zoom, which likes to pass around web links as a way of driving users into conference calls, didn’t look at this security measure as something to help keep their customers secure—it viewed it as an addition of friction by the platform owner.
Zoom’s response was to build a secret local web server, which allowed Zoom to rewrite its hyperlinks to connect to a web server instead of an app—so the web server could bypass Safari’s security and launch the app without a second click.
I use Zoom because it’s a superior product to Skype for the large-panel podcasting that I do1, but this issue gives me pause—and not because of the specific details of this event. No, it’s for what this says about Zoom’s priorities as a company. When the platform owner decides that web links shouldn’t open other apps without an approval click—a pretty sensible security measure—the corporate response shouldn’t be to bypass that click by invisibly installing a hidden server that’s a potential security hole.
Perhaps Zoom got a call from someone at Apple yesterday, indicating that the click-to-confirm Safari feature is intended to be used and that bypassing it is not cool. Zoom’s app is not in the App Store, so Apple’s control over the company is a somewhat limited… but Apple does have built-in malware protection it could bring to bear. And in the future, Apple will have the power to kill specific versions of specific apps by default on macOS. Third-party software developers circumvent the Mac’s platform security features at great risk to their own businesses.
In any event, Zoom has rolled out an update that removes the local web server, adds a de-install feature, and allows users to permanently set a setting that turns video off by default. (Zoom had months to address these issues after being alerted to them by a security researcher, and didn’t. I have a hard time believing they will make the right choices in the future without a pretty major cultural shift.)
You can read the details about the updates on a rather amazing Zoom blog post which has been updated four times as of this writing. The initial response, at the bottom, is an arrogant shoulder shrug that attempts to portray the security researcher as a silly busybody. Scroll up from there to see the increasing realization inside Zoom that their successive responses just keep failing to measure up.
[Update: Did someone mention “built-in malware protection”? TechCrunch reports that Apple has killed Zoom’s invisible web server across all versions, so even users who haven’t update to the latest version will no longer have that server running in the background.]
Zoom lets me automatically record discrete audio tracks for each person on a call, something Skype still can’t do. This feature has saved me four times already this year. Few cross-platform tools with this feature can handle large groups. I’ll keep looking, though. ↩
Sixteen months ago I wrote a eulogy, of a sort for the MacBook Air. My all-time favorite Apple laptop was a living fossil, a non-Retina USB-A laptop in a sea of shiny new Apple tech. Apple had done a minor processor update to keep it on life support and there were rumors that another one was in the offing. The long goodbye was becoming endless.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Time for a game of laptop musical chairs. Apple made some adjustments to its portable line-up this morning, with a cheaper price point for the MacBook Air and improvements to the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro. But the 12-inch MacBook? It’s gone, baby, gone.
In addition to its new $1,099 ($999 for college students) price tag—which cuts $100 off the old price, and $150 off for college students—the MacBook Air now features True Tone capability on its display and the new keyboard materials introduced in other MacBook Pro models back in May. Other than that, the model is basically unchanged from the one we declared the best Mac to buy for a student.
The entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro, which was originally the one MacBook Pro model without a Touch Bar, is no longer quite so much of an outlier. It’s also gained new quad-core processors to replace its old dual-core options, True Tone, the T2 chip, and Touch ID, meaning we can bid adieu to the “MacBook Escape” sobriquet given to it when it was the only MacBook Pro model to have a physical escape key. It does, however, retain its status as the only MacBook Pro model with only two Thunderbolt 3 ports. Its price point is unchanged at $1,299, but college students can get $100 off.
(This update was timed to coincide with Apple’s annual Back to School promotion, which offers a pair of Beats Studio 3 headphones with purchase of a qualifying Mac.)
But it’s not all about give—the 12-inch MacBook has been removed from Apple’s website (though refurbished versions are still available). That device was always a contentious one, with some loving its small footprint and weight, while others were frustrated by its underpowered nature and lack of more than one USB-C port. There’s always the possibility that Apple might design another ultralight laptop, of course, especially if a rumored transition to ARM processors is in the wings, but for now it seems clear that the MacBook Air is the consumer-focused Mac laptop in Apple’s line-up.
By now you’ve probably seen mention of this security hole, but it’s worth checking out the blog post from Jonathan Leitschuh, the researcher who uncovered it. It’s a fairly technical piece, but here’s the crux:
The local client Zoom web server is running as a background process, so to exploit this, a user doesn’t even need to be “running” (in the traditional sense) the Zoom app to be vulnerable.
All a website would need to do is embed the above in their website and any Zoom user will be instantly connected with their video running. This is still true today!
Yeah, this is pretty bad. It’s a classic example of Malcolm’s Maxim. There’s always a balance between convenience and security, but this has dipped over the line to the former, which has compromised the latter.
Any time your answer to removing obstacles for users involves installing a silent webserver with an undocumented API that persists even if users uninstall the app in question, well, maybe rethink that.
In the meantime, if you’re looking to mitigate the possibility for this loophole being exploited, the above post has a couple of solutions, ranging from the simple to the more technical. Zoom, for its part, has defended its behavior saying that it’s “a legitimate solution to a poor user experience problem.”
Updated at 9:08am Eastern to add info about fixing the hole and Zoom’s response.
