by Dan Moren

September 16, 2015 10:51 AM PT

AirDrop vulnerability partially patched in iOS 9

Another good reason to upgrade to iOS 9 when it arrives: it improves—though doesn’t yet patch entirely—handling of a security vulnerability related to AirDrop:

[Security researcher Mark] Dowd reported the vulnerability to Apple, which released a mitigation, but not a full patch, for it in iOS 9, which is due out Wednesday. He said that while the user will see a notification when she receives a malicious package via AirDrop, it doesn’t matter whether she accepts or denies the AirDrop request.

More importantly, a good reason to keep AirDrop set to “Contacts Only,” which you can do from Control Center on iOS.

by Dan Moren

September 16, 2015 8:19 AM PT

watchOS 2 not arriving today

Although watchOS 2 was supposed to be released today, there’s apparently a bug that prevents it from shipping. Rene Ritchie has the details at iMore.

by Jason Snell

September 15, 2015 10:33 PM PT

Tim Cook on Colbert

Here’s a nice summary by Dawn Chmielewski of Tim Cook’s appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

by Jason Snell

September 15, 2015 11:04 AM PT

’20 minutes with Tim Cook’

Tim Cook is in New York for tonight’s “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and made a surprise visit to the Fifth Avenue Apple Store. Buzzfeed’s John Paczkowski got to ride along and ask him a few questions along the way. Most notably, about that folder you’ve got on your iPhone that’s full of Apple apps you can’t uninstall.

Why are there apps on the iOS that I can’t delete even though I never use them? Why does Apple insist that I keep Tips and Stocks on my iPhone when I’d like nothing more than to delete them?

For Cook the question seems a familiar one. “This is a more complex issue than it first appears,” he says. “There are some apps that are linked to something else on the iPhone. If they were to be removed they might cause issues elsewhere on the phone. There are other apps that aren’t like that. So over time, I think with the ones that aren’t like that, we’ll figure out a way [for you to remove them]. … It’s not that we want to suck up your real estate; we’re not motivated to do that. We want you to be happy. So I recognize that some people want to do this, and it’s something we’re looking at.

There’s serious complexity here—some of these apps are tied into key parts of iOS and they can’t really be deleted. But I know I’d love to send the Stocks app to someplace where the sun doesn’t shine.

by Jason Snell

September 13, 2015 11:00 AM PT

‘Zuckerberg to leave Harvard indefinitely’

Nice find by Harry McCracken – a 2005 Harvard Crimson article about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declaring he won’t ever return to Harvard.

Following in the footsteps of Microsoft tycoon and former Harvard student Bill Gates, Zuckerberg has chosen computers over campus life.

“I’m not coming back,” he said. Facebook.com spokesman Chris R. Hughes ’06 left open the possibility that Zuckerberg might return several years down the road….

“Hey Priscilla, do you want a job at the facebook?” Zuckerberg asked a passing friend.

“I’d love a job at facebook,” Priscilla Chan ’07 responded, offering him a Twizzler.

The story doesn’t note if Zuckerberg took the Twizzler, but he and Priscilla Chan got married in 2012.

by Jason Snell

September 13, 2015 10:02 AM PT

Benedict Evans on subscription iPhones

Ben Evans works through some of the implications of Apple’s subscription iPhone plan:

So what happens to the old phones? When you take that upgrade, you have to hand in your old one. They go into the secondary market, which is rather the dark matter of the industry – we know it must be large and we can get some sense of that from survey data, but we don’t have a solid number. One illuminating data point is the fact that for the last several years the number of iPhones that seems to be in China (if you look at data from companies like Baidu) has been rather larger than the number of iPhones that Apple’s financial reporting imply could have been sold there. Second-hand closes the gap.

If everyone hands their iPhones in after year one to get a new one, there will be a whole lot of used iPhones. Where do they go and how does that alter the market? Interesting stuff.

by Jason Snell

September 11, 2015 10:52 PM PT

Apple.com: Only mostly dead?

Time was, Apple would take store.apple.com down for hours when it was about to add products or do a pre-order. These days, Apple’s site doesn’t have a store anymore—the whole site is a store. So a few hours before iPhone 6S preorders… the entire site went down.

But Stephen Hackett points out all the zany trolling comments in the WHOIS data – which are unrelated, presumably.

Regardless, I assume they’ve put a fresh pot of coffee on in Cupertino.

[Update: It’s back up at the moment.]

@512px Interesting theory on hacker news https://t.co/aFyN2h1ZJD pic.twitter.com/5baeF41guA

— Paul McGrane (@pmcg) September 12, 2015

by Dan Moren

September 10, 2015 10:03 AM PT

Tap, swipe, flip (off)

Paul Kafasis reports on the imminent end to our long national nightmare:

Today, however, I can breath a sigh of relief. The bird is coming to our emoji. What a time to be alive! Have a look at a full gallery of the new emoji coming in iOS 9.1, which also include a taco, a burrito, an adorable little chipmunk, and much more. Then, sit through a few more weeks of anticipation until we finally get what we deserve!

Good news, the Live Long and Prosper emoji is also in the full list compiled by 9to5Mac, meaning that you’ll be able to type it instead of having to resort to some form of trickery.

So whether you prefer your salutes Vulcan or one-fingered, iOS 9.1 has you covered.

by Jason Snell

September 10, 2015 9:40 AM PT

Hands on with the iPad Pro’s Smart Keyboard

Over at Macworld this week I go into detail about the new Smart Keyboard:

Which is more surprising-that on Wednesday Apple introduced the $169 Smart Keyboard for iPad Pro, or that it took until 2015 for Apple to make its own iPad keyboard-cover combo in the style of Microsoft’s Surface Type Cover?

With the exception of the brief, unsuccessful life of the iPad Keyboard Dock back in 2010, Apple has kept its distance from joining physical keyboards to the iPad. Sure, the iPad supports Bluetooth keyboards, including Apple’s own, but until now Apple has refrained from revisiting the purpose-built iPad keyboard.

Turns out that with the iPad Pro, the siren song of combining iPad with keyboard became too strong for Apple to resist. And so come November, when the iPad Pro arrives in stores, a keyboard will arrive with it. I got to spend a few minutes typing on a Smart Keyboard after Apple’s event. Here are my first impressions.

Read the rest at Macworld…

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

by Jason Snell

September 8, 2015 7:46 AM PT

‘Cruising toward oblivion’

Via Ben Thompson, this fascinating story from the Washington Post about the decline of car culture—and the rise of smartphone culture:

For nearly all of the first century of automobile travel, getting your license meant liberation from parental control, a passport to the open road. Today, only half of millennials bother to get their driver’s licenses by age 18. Car culture, the 20th-century engine of the American Dream, is an old guy’s game.

“The automobile just isn’t that important to people’s lives anymore,” says Mike Berger, a historian who studies the social effect of the car. “The automobile provided the means for teenagers to live their own lives. Social media blows any limits out of the water. You don’t need the car to go find friends.”

Much of the emotional meaning of the car, especially to young adults, has transferred to the smartphone, says Mark Lizewskie, executive director of the Antique Automobile Club of America Museum in Hershey, Pa. “Instead of Ford versus Chevy, it’s Apple versus Android, and instead of customizing their ride, they customize their phones with covers and apps,” he says. “You express yourself through your phone, whereas lately, cars have become more like appliances, with 100,000-mile warranties.”

Those of us who grew up in the 20th Century see cars as being a huge part of culture and identity, but that may have been a one-century-only proposition.

[Update: Unsurprisingly, car-enthusiast blog Jalopnik thinks this story sucks. I don’t know if it sucks or not—I imagine there will always be gearheads and racers and the like even after they enact the Motor Law—but it seems to me that this was once our culture, and it’s now a subculture.]