by Jason Snell

January 24, 2019 11:46 AM PT

The Mac’s 35th birthday

It’s the 35th anniversary of the Mac, which also means it is (and I can’t really believe this) the 15th anniversary of my interview with Steve Jobs on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Mac:

Well, we’ve always been very clear on that. We don’t think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

We spent months negotiating the interview and the ground rules were kind of ridiculous: It’s a 20th Anniversary interview with no questions about the past. Jobs so clearly didn’t want to be there and he was off the line within five minutes. That article is a transcript of every word he said—with the exception of my final question, which asked him about his future as Apple CEO at a time when he had just received a secret cancer diagnosis.

It’s also the fifth anniversary of this interview I had with Phil Schiller and other Apple execs in which they reassured me of Apple’s commitment to the Mac:

“There is a super-important role [for the Mac] that will always be,” Schiller said. “We don’t see an end to that role. There’s a role for the Mac as far as our eye can see. A role in conjunction with smartphones and tablets, that allows you to make the choice of what you want to use. Our view is, the Mac keeps going forever, because the differences it brings are really valuable.”

Apple’s strategy with the Mac seems to have shifted quite a bit in the last five years, but I think it has led to a place where the company is focusing more attention on the Mac than it was back then, not less.

by Jason Snell

January 24, 2019 11:40 AM PT

Microsoft Office comes to the Mac App Store

Back in June Apple made a big deal about how it was changing things about the Mac App Store to bring in more apps that previously weren’t able to enter the store or who (like BBEdit and Panic’s apps) had been in the store but then left.

Here’s another example, as Apple has announced the arrival of Microsoft Office in the Mac App Store:

Today, Office 365 is available for the first time on the Mac App Store, making it easier than ever for Mac users to download Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and the whole suite of Microsoft’s popular apps. Users can also purchase a subscription for Office 365 from within the apps, so they can get up and running instantly.

The apps are all free, as they are elsewhere. After a one-month trial period you need to subscribe to Office 365 to keep using Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. If you get Office from the App Store, apparently you can either log in to your existing Office 365 account or use Apple’s in-app purchase system to subscribe to Office 365 from within the apps.

by Dan Moren

January 24, 2019 8:57 AM PT

Code embedded in images targeting Macs via ads

Ars Technica security guru Dan Goodin on a diabolical malware that hid JavaScript code in images served in ads:

The ads were served by a group security firm Confiant has dubbed VeryMal, a name that comes from veryield-malyst.com, one of the ad-serving domains the group uses. A run that was active from January 11 to January 13 on about 25 of the top 100 publisher sites triggered the image as many as 5 million times a day. In an attempt to bypass increasingly effective measures available to detect malicious ads, the images used steganography—the ancient practice of hiding code, messages, or other data inside images or text—to deliver its malicious payload to Mac-using visitors.

Just in case you needed yet another reminder that the current state of Internet advertising is likely causing way more harm than good.

This isn’t quite in the same category, but the recent preponderance of malicious ads that hijack a site (usually while viewing on mobile) and kick you to a “free gift card” scam has really ticked me off. Sites have little control over the ads, and the ad networks seems to be playing whack-a-mole trying to stop them, while the users are the ones who get screwed. (And said whack-a-mole leads to more examples like the story above, where the techniques used by bad actors get increasingly sophisticated.)

On top of that, add in recent stories on how most ad metrics are basically garbage and how sites have chased that bottom line, laying off employees along the way, all combines to make Internet advertising look like kind of a trashfire.¹

Oh, and for those that pivoted to video, the story’s not much better.

by Jason Snell

January 23, 2019 2:24 PM PT

This is the year phones get weird

We discussed the idea of foldable phones at length on Upgrade this week, and I wrote about it last week for Tom’s Guide. It’s feeling increasingly timely given the stories today about Xiaomi’s folding phone.

Looking at the bigger picture is Lauren Goode at Wired:

Smartphones, it seems, have gotten weird. And they’re only going to get weirder in 2019. Our glass slabs will be punctuated by pop-out cameras, foldable displays, hole-punched notches, and invisible fingerprint sensors. These features will be marketed as innovations. Some will be innovative. Some will just be weird, in the way that tech inevitably feels forced when design decisions are borne out of a need to make mature products appear exciting and new.

As Goode quite rightly points out, a lot of these experiments with new smartphone features will be flops. There is definitely a familiar vibe about a lot of these “innovations” that reminds me of the TV market after the explosion of HDTV sales cooled. (Remember 3D TV?)

But a few of these innovations may turn out to be surprisingly useful. I’d be shocked if Apple didn’t have a lab somewhere trying to figure out what the proper user interaction would be for a foldable iPhone. In the meantime, various phonemakers will be testing this stuff in public, and users will be left to discover for themselves if these features are all they’re cracked up to be.

by Dan Moren

January 22, 2019 6:32 AM PT

Apple Pay coming to Target, other locations

Apple PR:

Target, Taco Bell, Hy-Vee supermarkets in the Midwest, Speedway convenience stores and Jack in the Box are the latest merchants to support Apple Pay, the most popular mobile contactless payment system in the world that lets customers easily and securely pay in stores using their iPhone and Apple Watch. With the addition of these national retailers, 74 of the top 100 merchants in the US and 65 percent of all retail locations across the country will support Apple Pay.

Target has been one of the big Apple Pay holdouts, since it was first part of the CurrentC/MCX consortium, and then seemed to want to push customers towards using its own proprietary system, which never really took off.

It’s also one of increasingly few big stores in my area that doesn’t take Apple Pay, so it’s nice to see it get onboard with contactless payments. The future’s almost here!

by Jason Snell

January 17, 2019 4:07 PM PT

Nike’s new self-lacing, Bluetooth-powered shoes

I think there is literally nobody more qualified on this planet to write about Nike’s new Bluetooth-connected self-lacing basketball shoes than Matthew Panzarino, who is a shoe fiend and the editor of TechCrunch. Panzer’s got the details:

Why does the world need a self-lacing shoe? Haven’t you heard of Velcro? How will you tie your shoes when the Wi-Fi is down?

That’s the gist of the instant response I got when I mentioned the new Adapt BB, a shoe from Nike with, yes, powered laces that tighten to a wearer’s foot automatically. The shoe is an evolution of the Nike HyperAdapt 1.0, which is itself a commercialization of the Air Mag — a self-lacing vanity project that realized the self-lacing shoes mocked up for Back to the Future II.

The reality is that this shoe solves a problem for pro basketball players today, but it also suggests a future where your shoes tighten automatically, when you put your feet in them, monitor your movement and send data back to your smartphone or other device, and automatically adjust fit based on how you’re moving and even if your feet are swelling.

This article’s a deep dive that does a great job at explaining what this shoe is for today and what it means for the future of footwear. I expected nothing less of Matthew Panzarino.

by Dan Moren

January 17, 2019 10:33 AM PT

Latest data breach exposes 773 million records

Troy Hunt, who maintains the Have I Been Pwned? database, has a blog post on the latest data breach, dubbed “Collection #1”, which contains 773 million records. That makes it the largest breach after Yahoo’s two billion-level incidents.

Let’s start with the raw numbers because that’s the headline, then I’ll drill down into where it’s from and what it’s composed of. Collection #1 is a set of email addresses and passwords totalling 2,692,818,238 rows. It’s made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources.

So, that’s a lot of passwords. It’s worth checking HIBP to see if your email or password has been compromised. (Users of 1Password’s most recent version can use the Watchtower feature, which is now integrated directly with HIBP.) But chances are at least some of your older accounts are in there, so it’s a great time to 1) update your old passwords; 2) start using a password manager if you’re not already; and 3) enable two-step/two-factor authentication wherever it’s available.

by Dan Moren

January 17, 2019 5:20 AM PT

Tim Cook pens op-ed on privacy regulations

Apple CEO Tim Cook has taken to the pages of Time magazine to argue for comprehensive digital privacy legislation:

Meaningful, comprehensive federal privacy legislation should not only aim to put consumers in control of their data, it should also shine a light on actors trafficking in your data behind the scenes. Some state laws are looking to accomplish just that, but right now there is no federal standard protecting Americans from these practices. That’s why we believe the Federal Trade Commission should establish a data-broker clearinghouse, requiring all data brokers to register, enabling consumers to track the transactions that have bundled and sold their data from place to place, and giving users the power to delete their data on demand, freely, easily and online, once and for all.

Cook and Apple have, of course, made privacy one of their major selling points over the last several years, especially as data breaches and privacy intrusions have become regular occurrences. So there’s obviously a vested interest for the company to push such legislation: it’ll hurt its competitors much more than it will hurt Apple itself.

But, be that as it may, it also has the benefit of being the right thing to do. The other month I came home from vacation to find a note that my application for a credit card had been rejected–a credit card I had, of course, never applied for.¹ But what’s worse than that is that there is nothing remotely shocking about that news to anybody reading this site: we’ve all either been the victim of people trying to steal (or successfully stealing) our identity or know someone who’s been a victim, and it’s largely due to these kinds of personal data breaches.

I’d argue, to take a step further, that simply protecting our information isn’t enough. Put simply, the federal identity system needs to be overhauled. Relying on a nine-digit “secret” number–or worse, knowledge of easily obtainable information like your birth date or mother’s maiden name–to establish your identity is a dangerously outmoded concept that might have been fine in the early 20th century, but it’s far from sufficient these days. A more secure cryptographic-based system is a must in this day and age.

by Dan Moren

January 16, 2019 6:20 AM PT

Our data center, which art in heaven…

Short piece from Daniel Oberhaus at Motherboard about a former church in Barcelona, Spain that is now home to a supercomputer:

From the outside, Torre Girona Chapel at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona looks like any one of the thousands of old churches that can be found throughout Spain, with a large cross mounted on the roof and a rose window perched above the entrance. Step through the chapel doors, however, and you won’t find any religious iconography or a congregation in prayer.

Instead, you’ll find the 25th most powerful supercomputer in the world: the MareNostrum 4.

Totally seems like the kind of thing that would show up in a William Gibson or Neal Stephenson book.

by Jason Snell

January 15, 2019 1:33 PM PT

iPhone XR/XS/XS Max Apple battery cases appear

Apple has brought back the bulge. The company is now selling battery cases for the iPhone XR, XS, and XS Max models. These cases support Qi charging and it’s the first time Apple has made a battery case for larger phones. As Juli Clover at MacRumors reports:

Available in black or white, each Smart Battery Case is priced at $129 and is designed to add extra battery life to the iPhone. The cases are similar in design to the past battery case option Apple offered for the iPhone 7, with a bump at the back to house a battery pack.

If you desperately need more battery life out of your iPhone, these may be the cases to get. The previous models, released for the iPhone 6 and 7, were generally considered a cut above other battery cases because of secret software sauce added by Apple.

by Dan Moren

January 15, 2019 6:24 AM PT

An ER trip with an Apple Watch

IT consultant (and Six Colors member) Tom Bridge shares this story about how his Apple Watch’s ECG feature helped his doctors diagnose a condition:

As soon as the tele-doc came on screen, the nurse rotated my phone and put it up to the camera to show the doctor the rapid rhythm from half an hour earlier.

“Oh, that’s an SVT,” he said immediately.

I didn’t see what it had to do with Ford’s Special Vehicle Team, but he clarified that he meant Supraventricular Tachycardia. They wanted to make sure labs were taken, and that nothing abnormal in my blood work showed a more troubling cause. But the diagnosis was there in an instant, thanks to my wrist watch.

There’s been some hemming and hawing about the health features of the Series 4 Apple Watch, with some concerned that it leads to people seeking costly medical attention when they don’t need it, but this also isn’t the first story I’ve heard about someone whose Apple Watch actually helped them capture important data.

Having the ability to deploy this kind of technology to people everywhere is a hugely powerful tool, and there’s a reason that Apple is pushing health as one of their big growth areas.