Apple today launched a keyboard repair program for MacBook and MacBook Pro models equipped with butterfly keys to address complaints over letters or characters that repeat unexpectedly, letters or characters that do not appear, and keys that feel “sticky” or do not respond in a consistent manner.
According to Apple, a “small percentage” of MacBook and MacBook Pro keyboards from 2015 to 2017 can experience these symptoms.
This is good news for anyone affected by this, whether in the past, now, or with future sales of this same generation of MacBooks. My only question is whether they’ve somehow quietly fixed the problem, or if a faulty keyboard repaired with another of the same design will one day require fixing again.
At present, the lack of recently updated Macs is frustrating, especially to those looking to spend money on new hardware. (And, I would argue, it’s multiplied by the current dissatisfaction with the company’s portable line.) But it certainly isn’t leaving Apple or customers at the brink of disaster. On the other hand, if this fall comes and goes with nary a new Mac, then there will definitely be some hard questions.
If Apple had been updating all of their Mac lines on a relatively consistent or more frequent basis, I doubt there would be as much consternation. Similarly, if the MacBook were a more affordable entry-model notebook and the MacBook Pro did not have ridiculous keyboard problems — and, sigh, still had an SD Card slot — I think people would be a lot happier. But, as it is, there’s a poor combination of a lack of updates followed by, in some ways, hardware regression.
I’m generally optimistic about the future of the Mac; I think that Mojave is a great update, the iMac remains a reliably solid performer, and Apple’s commitment to a better Mac Pro and new display signify a strong commitment to smaller market segments. But, as a single platform vendor, there are unique responsibilities that Apple has to their users.
Katarzyna Szymielewicz and Bill Budington of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
The concept of legitimate interest in the GDPR has been constructed as a compromise between privacy advocates and business interests. It is much more vague and ambiguous than other legal grounds for processing data. In the coming months, you will see many companies who operate in Europe attempt to build their tracking and data collection of their users on the basis of their “legitimate interest.”
But that path won’t be easy for covert web fingerprinters. To be able to rely on this specific legal ground, every company that considers fingerprinting has to, first, go through a balancing test (that is, verify for itself whether its interest in obscure tracking is not overridden by “the fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject, including privacy” and whether it is in line with “reasonable expectations of data subjects”) and openly lay out its legitimate interest argument for end-users. Second, and more importantly, the site has to share detailed information with the person that is subjected to fingerprinting, including the scope, purposes, and legal basis of such data processing. Finally, if fingerprinting is done for marketing purposes, all it takes for end-users to stop it (provided they do not agree with the legitimate interest argument that has been made by the fingerprinter) is to say “no.” The GDPR requires no further justification.
Browser fingerprinting is seriously intrusive — and popular. One of the privacy-focused features new to Safari in MacOS Mojave is protection against fingerprinting, which Apple says is possible because any given installation of the browser will look more generic. I’m glad to see it being reined in from both regulatory and technological standpoints.
Though it’s only been a few weeks since the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) officially went into effect, its impact is already noticeable. Sites have gone dark and pared down their tracking-laden homepages, while users have had to struggle to stay afloat under the deluge of privacy policy update emails. But, strangely enough, the most interesting side effect of GDPR can be found outside of its regulatory borders. In a rather shocking turn of events, U.S. lawmakers, policy wonks, and academics alike appear to actually be inspired by the GDPR’s bold design and efficacy. New measures in the works would deny businesses the ability to share and sell people’s data willy nilly, more clearly identify where and to whom their personal information has been disclosed, and even require them to alert people if their data has been stolen within 72 hours. […]
I’m glad to see even ostensibly regulation-averse American policy makers confront online privacy abuses, but I’m concerned that they won’t get it right. Lucy surely isn’t going to let Charlie kick the football this time, right?
Getting it right is highly subjective, of course. GDPR does a good job of making everyone aware of all of the rats and cockroaches, but it doesn’t establish any requirements for their limitations or extermination. Maciej Cegłowski’s proposals are, I think, a terrific blueprint for successful privacy regulations.
Even still, the MacBook, all of the iPhones other than the iPhone X, the iPad Pro, and the Watch (counting the Edition) all come in four different colors. The MacBook Pro comes in two and the iPad in three. Other than the Product(RED), they’re all muted tones but that’s good. The bright colors of the original run of iMacs worked for Apple and were a brilliant strategic move but, frankly, created a trend in design that did not age well.
One thing that the Macalope, astute as it is, did not mention is the way that Murphy blames Apple for the entire industry’s lack of colourful products:
By refining its products to near-impenetrable pieces of glass and metal, and bringing the aesthetic of the entire consumer electronics market along with them, Apple has stamped out much of the fun within its own company, and the greater industry. […]
Murphy’s passive tone here is his way of shifting the blame towards Apple and away from all of the companies that thoughtlessly copy them. There’s every opportunity for Samsung or Xaomi or Oppo or Google to come along and ship a brightly-coloured lineup of devices with unique shapes and clear differentiation through design, but they don’t. That’s not on Apple; that’s on them — but their lack of doing so also assuredly reflects what most consumers want to buy.
The Obama-era FCC voted to impose privacy rules that would have required carriers to get consumers’ consent before selling or sharing personal data, including location information. But Congress last year voted to prevent implementation of those rules, with Pai’s support. Pai also took action to halt implementation of data security requirements that were part of the Obama-era FCC’s privacy rulemaking.
The current FCC administration has been uniquely terrible for consumers, but there may be another reason for their rejection of sound privacy regulations for carriers beyond simple malicious intent:
The Federal Communications Commission is investigating the matter, and Wyden called on FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to recuse himself because he represented Securus as an attorney in 2012.
Readers may also recognize that Pai has previously represented Verizon as well. Isn’t it remarkable how many decisions made by Pai’s FCC happen to benefit companies he used to work for?
Over in an interview with Marketplace, Pai again doubles down on repeated falsehoods, including a new claim that the repeal somehow had broad public support:
Marketplace: …this is not a popular decision. Millions of people have written in opposition to it. Public opinion polling shows most Americans favor net neutrality, not your open internet rule. And I wonder why you’re doing this then? If public opinion is against you, what are you doing?
Pai: First of all, public opinion is not against us. If you look at some of the polls —
Marketplace: No, it is, sir, come on.
Pai: If you look at some of the polling, if you dig down and see how these polls were constructed, it was clearly designed to reach a particular result. But even beyond that —
Marketplace: It’s not just one, there are many surveys, sir.
Pai: The FCC’s job is not to put a finger in the wind and decide which way the winds are blowing, it’s to look at the facts and make a sober judgment based on what the law is. And that is exactly what we’ve done here. Moreover, the long-term interest is in building better, faster, cheaper internet access. That is what consumers say when I travel around the country, and I’ve have spoken to consumers in Los Angeles to the reservation in South Dakota, places like Dahlonega, Georgia. That is what is on consumers’ minds. That is what this regulatory framework is going to deliver.
First Pai tries to claim that the public supported his repeal, then when pressed tries to claim that the polls that were conducted were somehow flawed. Neither is true. In fact, one recent survey out of the University of Maryland found that 82% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats opposed the FCC’s obnoxiously-named “restoring internet freedom” repeal. Pai then tries to sell the interviewer on the implication that consumers simply aren’t smart or informed enough to realize that gutting oversight of indisputably terrible companies like Comcast will somehow be secretly good for them.
It’s worth reading or listening to that Marketplace interview in full. The host, Kai Ryssdal, does a respectable job of pushing back against Pai’s repeated lies and faulty talking points.
Many groups espousing racist rhetoric and hate speech were kicked off Facebook and Twitter after violence erupted at the “Unite the Right” rally last summer in Charlottesville, Va., where a woman was killed by a car that was driven into a crowd of protesters.
While such voices have been kicked off Facebook and Twitter, they have not been purged from Google Plus.
A Google spokesperson told The Independent: “We have clear policies against violent content as well as content from known terrorist organisations and when we find violations, we take swift action.”
They added: “We have a team dedicated to keeping violent content and hate speech off our platforms, including Google+. And while we recognise we have more to do, we’re committed to getting this right.”
At this point, I’m surprised Google would keep investing in moderation rather than simply shuttering Google Plus.
On Wednesday, a European Union committee will vote on Article 11, a proposal to create a new copyright over links to news stories. If the proposal is adopted, a service that publishes a link to a story on a news website with a headline or a short snippet would have to get a license before linking. News sites could charge whatever they want for these licenses, and shut down critics by refusing to license to people with whom they disagreed. And the new rule would apply to any service where a link to a news story can appear, including social media platforms, search engines, blogging platforms, and even nonprofits like Wikipedia.
This is a ridiculous proposal that would likely undermine the basics of the web.
Television, rather than the Internet, likely remains the primary force distracting Americans from books. The proportion of the American population that watches TV must have hit a ceiling some time ago; in the years studied by the American Time Use Survey, it’s very stable, at a plateau of about eighty per cent—roughly four times greater than the proportion of Americans who read. But America’s average TV time is still rising, because TV watchers are, incredibly, watching more and more of it, the quantity rising from 3.28 hours in 2003 to 3.45 hours in 2016.
Set aside the depressing decline in reading — this is an astonishing figure. Who has the time to watch over three hours of television a day?
Ahead of the HomePod launching in Canada, France, and Germany in three days from now, the speaker has gained the ability to read the news in those countries.
Siri can now provide news briefs from a handful of sources in Canada, for example, including CBC, Global TV, CTV, and CNN. To start, say “Hey Siri” and then say something like “read me the news” or “what’s the news today?”
That’s interesting, because Apple News isn’t currently available in these three countries. Perhaps this is foreshadowing.
Here we are again: a stale Mac hardware lineup. Let’s assume that we’ll be waiting until WWDC next year — at the earliest — to hear anything about the next-generation Mac Pro, and that the MacBook Air only exists because Apple can’t hit the same price point with the MacBook yet. The iMac Pro is still pretty new, and it has received near-universal acclaim. That leaves four Mac models unaccounted for.
Just before the keynote last Monday, a good friend unaware of WWDC messaged me to say that he was thinking about going to the store that day and picking up a 5K iMac. I told him to hold off because it seemed like a product Apple might refresh, given that it was last updated a year prior.
That, of course, didn’t happen. Nor were any updates made to the MacBook Pro, with its notoriously poor keyboard. That one pains me: I happen to be in the market for a new Mac, and I will not purchase one of the current MacBook Pro models for that reason alone.
The MacBook still has limited configuration options. I was considering buying one to replace my current MacBook Air — I don’t need that much power, really — but it tops out at 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, the latter of which simply isn’t enough for me.
And then there’s the Mac Mini, which has embarrassingly not changed in either price nor specs in nearly four years. It’s hard for me to justify the purchase of a brand new product that’s already over a year old, like any of the MacBook Pro models; I’m not even considering purchasing a Mac Mini because it’s not much newer than the computer I currently use.
What is the acceptable shelf life of a Mac? How old can a model be before it becomes uncouth to sell it as new? I remember when Macs used to get regular, approximately-annual spec bumps. It wasn’t that long ago — maybe five years or so. Has something changed since 2013 that seemingly makes difficult for the Mac to be updated more frequently?
When Apple launched the 2016 MacBook Pro models — the first models with the Touch Bar — members of their executive team spoke with Shara Tibken and Connie Guglielmo of CNet. Schiller mentioned that the new models took a while to be launched because they “didn’t want to just create a speed bump on the MacBook Pro”. I hope that’s not their attitude across the product line. People love spec bumps; it helps customers know that they’re getting the newest model they can, and reassures them that it will last longer.
When he was in charge of operations, Tim Cook likened his approach to inventory management to being in the dairy business. Inventory is, of course, not the same thing as product freshness — I bet that, if you were to order a Mac Mini today, it would probably be produced within the past couple of weeks — but product age has the same effect. Updating products, even in minor ways, isn’t just good to give the impression of freshness; it also sows trust with customers that there is an ongoing commitment to the product.
For the past several years, it has been awfully hard to feel like Apple has a strong commitment to Mac hardware.
I’ve been struggling to assemble several disparate threads of thought that emerged from WWDC last week. I think Becky Hansmeyer’s piece is a good assessment of what we know about “Marzipan” apps so far, and some interesting speculation:
Here’s two opinions. They aren’t necessarily my opinions, but I know many of you share them.
The visual design of iOS has grown stale and is in need of an overhaul.
Marzipan apps, while better than Electron apps, still don’t feel like they “belong” on the Mac. They don’t feel like “real” Mac apps.
Let’s talk about these things.
I’ve been watching the usualsuspects’ tweets closely over the past week, and their findings have given me a lot to think about, and a fair amount of uncertainty. One thing I am clear on, however, is that those who are making snap judgements about the quality of “Marzipan” based on the apps in the first beta of MacOS Mojave are jumping the gun.
The iPhone maker’s updated App Store Review Guidelines ban applications that “collect information about which other apps are installed on a user’s device for the purposes of analytics or advertising/marketing.” This could give Apple grounds to remove the Onavo app, although the software is still available despite the rules kicking in last week.
You may recall that Onavo is a VPN app owned by Facebook that collects usage data about other apps. If apps were not sandboxed on iOS, you can bet Facebook would use a more direct way of gathering this data; because apps are sandboxed, the company had to find a workaround. A more ethical company would instead realize why behaviour like that is prohibited on the platform and just stop right there.
USB Type-C was billed as the solution for all our future cable needs, unifying power and data delivery with display and audio connectivity, and ushering in an age of the one-size-fits-all cable. Unfortunately for those already invested in the USB Type-C ecosystem, which is anyone who has bought a flagship phone in the past couple of years, the standard has probably failed to live up to the promises.
Even the seemingly most basic function of USB Type-C — powering devices — has become a mess of compatibility issues, conflicting proprietary standards, and a general lack of consumer information to guide purchasing decisions. The problem is that the features supported by different devices aren’t clear, yet the defining principle of the USB Type-C standard makes consumers think everything should just work.
Benjamin Mayo at 9to5Mac summarized an article today from Digitimes that the 2019 iPhone lineup will replace the Lightning connector with USB Type-C. I only mention that sketchy rumour because Triggs’ report is a reminder that the single port dream of USB Type-C has yet to materialize, in part because of conflicts and complications in the standard itself.
A federal judge said Tuesday that AT&T’s $85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner is legal, clearing the path for a deal that gives the pay-TV provider ownership of cable channels such as HBO and CNN as well as film studio Warner Bros.
AT&T isn’t just a “pay-TV provider” — it’s an ISP and cellular provider as well, and they run a subscription media streaming business too. This judge has now given them permission to purchase the world’s sixth-largest media company. And it gets worse:
U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon did not impose conditions on the merger’s approval. He also urged the government not to seek a stay when issuing his decision in a closed-door room with reporters.
For comparison, when Comcast bought a majority share of NBC Universal, the FCC and the Department of Justice both placed restrictions on the acquisition. Comcast’s FCC restrictions expired in January; the DOJ conditions will be lifted at the beginning September. Meanwhile, according to Alex Sherman of CNBC, Comcast is set to announce their offer for 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets tomorrow. And don’t forget that Disney is planning to launch its own streaming service next year.
I don’t see how reducing competition through vertical integration of production and distribution of entertainment assets with few legal restrictions is supposed to be beneficial to the American consumer.
The sheer length of the document and the opacity of Facebook’s responses makes it difficult to say which answers provide the most insight. In all honesty, it seems like you could find most of this information in Facebook’s various terms of service documents. But Facebook is like jazz—the notes it doesn’t play are often the most revealing. It’s high-priced attorneys clearly did a good job of filling in space with their answers, but which Senators decide they are unsatisfied will be the major question in the near future.
As I skimmed the answers Facebook provided, it struck me just how much the company obfuscates its grey area behaviours. Companies behaving in an ethically-sound manner don’t need to be so circuitous or vague in their answers to straightforward questions. Even Facebook, when asked about things it is objectively not doing — like monitoring conversations with a user’s microphone for advertising and data mining purposes — provides direct answers. That they cannot or are unwilling to do so for the vast majority of these questions ought to be deeply troubling.
On an episode of the Dev Mode podcast a while back, AMP was a hotly-debated topic. But even those defending AMP were doing so on the understanding that it was more a proof-of-concept than a long-term solution (and also that AMP is just for news stories—something else that Google are keen to change).
But now it’s clear that the Google AMP Project is being marketed more like a framework for the future: a collection of web components that prioritise performance… which is kind of odd, because that’s also what Google’s Polymer project is. The difference being that pages made with Polymer don’t get preferential treatment in Google’s search results. I can’t help but wonder how the Polymer team feels about AMP’s gradual pivot onto their territory.
The long game is that Google is using its extraordinary influence to push the language of the open web in the direction of one that it ultimately controls.
I am not a journalist. I am not a foreign correspondent. I am, at best, an essayist and enthusiast. An amateur. I hope to show you what people are like at the table, at home, in their businesses, at play. And when and if, later, you read about or see the places I’ve been on the news, you’ll have a better idea of who, exactly, lives there.
Somehow, he simultaneously made the world feel small and comfortably communal, yet bigger than anyone could possibly imagine.
Bourdain has long been a personal hero; I don’t think any other public figure or author comes close. He had an unparalleled skill to tell unique stories, and made me want to drop everything week after week to go wherever he happened to be — preferably, with him. And, he was one hell of an author. Nobody else was more capable of making me want to write, travel, eat, or be hungry for more. I’m gutted.
How ugly was the breakup between Facebook Inc. and the two founders of WhatsApp, its biggest acquisition? The creators of the popular messaging service are walking away leaving about $1.3 billion on the table.
The expensive exit caps a long-simmering dispute about how to wring more revenue out of WhatsApp, according to people familiar with the matter. Facebook has remained committed to its ad-based business model amid criticism, even as Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has had to defend the company before American and European lawmakers.
WhatsApp wasn’t an easy acquisition for Zuckerberg, because the two apps have very different founding principles. Koum, who grew up in Ukraine, believes deeply in privacy; Zuckerberg thinks that the more open and connected we are, the happier we all become. And so in order to acquire WhatsApp, Zuckerberg not only had to pay a lot of money and give up a board seat to Koum; he also had to make a lot of promises. Some of those promises were even enshrined in the acquisition agreement: If Facebook imposed “monetization initiatives” like advertising onto WhatsApp, its founders’ shares would vest immediately, and they could leave without suffering any kind of financial penalty.
Thus did WhatsApp retain exactly the independence that it had been promised — until it didn’t.
It’s hard to feel sorry for WhatsApp’s founders here. They sold their privacy-focused anti-advertising profitable business to a company that is known for its privacy-ignoring advertising practices. It’s like if a band acclaimed for its artistic integrity and dedication were to get the Chainsmokers to write and produce their next album — how else would you expect it to turn out?
It’s not all good news coming out of WWDC this year:
Support for .safariextz-style Safari Extensions installed from the Safari Extensions Gallery is deprecated with Safari 12 on macOS. Submissions to the Safari Extensions Gallery will no longer be accepted after December 2018. Developers are encouraged to transition to Safari App Extensions.
That’s not just for users, either — all old-style Safari extensions are deprecated:
Support for developer-signed .safariextz Safari Extensions in Safari 12 on macOS has been removed. They no longer appear in Safari preferences and cannot be enabled. On first launch users will receive a warning notification and these extension will not load.
Well, that’s a bummer — I still use a handful of older-style extensions that have no modern equivalents that are quite as simple. JS Blacklist is one of my favourite pieces of software because it allows me to block problematic scripts rather than ads more generally. There are content blockers available on the Mac App Store, but nothing quite as refined. But this isn’t a surprise; the writing has been on the wall for old-style extensions ever since Apple’s developer tiers were changed three years ago.
Edit is a tasteful place to write. Think of it as a single page of paper, not a notebook. You get a single note, and whatever you leave in the app will be there when you get back. Once you’re done writing, you can send or save your text to anywhere in iOS via the Share Sheet.
Ever since I was sent an early beta of this app nearly a year ago, it has been on my first home screen. You know how you sometimes just need a quick place to jot something down — a single scrap of paper, the back of an envelope, or whatever you have laying around — and you know you won’t need to save it? Edit is like the digital version of that. It’s fast, it’s simple, and I use it all the time. And just $2.
MapKit JS brings Apple Maps to the web. This new JavaScript library lets you add interactive maps to webpages — complete with annotations, overlays, and interfaces to Apple Maps services such as Search and Directions — to enable rich interactions.
Looks like MapKit.js has grown up: it’s now at version 5.0 and ready for use outside of Apple’s websites. This will be a good alternative to Google Maps on the web, provided Apple keeps investing in their mapping efforts — something they haven’t significantly addressed for a few years.
Two things about iOS 12 that I think speak volumes:
It’s available on all of the same devices as iOS 11, going back to the iPhone 5S. Apple has long been good at issuing updates for several years, but the iPhone 5S is easily the longest-supported iOS device.
Not only does Apple continue to update older devices, the headlining performance features of iOS 12 are specifically targeted towards improving devices they no longer sell.
The narrative that Apple deliberately makes older devices obsolete through software updates has always been fictional, but moves like these underscore how untrue a notion that is.1
They also reiterate just how poor Apple’s initial response to iPhone battery and performance issues was. ↩︎