Five actually useful real-world things that came out at Apple's WWDC Are you excited about Apple's new AR emoji as we are? Or the push-to-talk feature for the Apple Watch? Just kidding, folks. Once a year, the world's biggest computer company gives us its annual dump of new platform stuff for developers. And while Apple likes to add a bit of froth, the signal-to-noise ratio at its Worldwide …
I concur. Never used an iPhone, might actually jump ship to Apple once my contract is up at year-end.
iPhones also tend to retain their resale value higher than Android phones. And unless it's a Samsung, it's hard to acquire peripherals and accessories for other brands of Android phones. For example, the better cases only cater to iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones.
All I need from Google i Google Maps... and that's it.
Map apps are like doctors: always have a second, third or more opinions.
I also like MAPS.ME on Android, which is also available for iOS.
Sometimes Google Maps isn't very useful. For example, if you're visiting Vietnam (Saigon), Google Street View does not exist. You only get photo images of the streets taken by some Vietnamese mapping company and
1) They're outdated, and the city is rapidly changing. Not good.
2) Many streets and alleys omitted.
Then again, it's a country which only got its first McDonald's restaurant a few years ago. Such things take time.
I dislike Apple and their phones and their iOS.
But it's better than the alternative. I have one of those Planet Geminis and it is reminding me of just how totally shite Android is. I have to tolerate it until Planet get a mature linux to flash on.
Avoiding Android is truly worth £100s.
"Planet get a mature linux to flash on"
It is not a matter of maturity of Linux. Linux is deliberately designed for performance not security. This is good for well-controlled servers where they are operated by professional staff. Thus security is manual.
In the fast-changing world of a user device (downloading apps, updates all the time) better security via microkernels is needed. Linux will never have this by design, not by maturity.
I’m gonna probably jump to Android soon. I’ve used iPhone since the early days and am pretty much tired of the non-stop Apple works with everything as long as it’s Apple.
Home automation works if you have a unit in every room. Amazon Echo is $99 and Echo Dot is $29. So in a house with 5 bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, two bathrooms and two hallways, the Echo is expensive but a reasonable solution. Home Pod is too big to begin with and even at half the price is too expensive.
I spend about $1000 a year on the iTunes Store. To control my music, either I have to store it on a server after downloading it or I have to use an Apple device. Movies can’t even be decrypted legally, so Apple is a requirement. We have 6 screens in the house, 4 have Chromecast built in. One has an Apple TV and the last has a PC.
We don’t want to add Apple TV to all the screens because they would need separate power and separate remotes. Then there’s the mounting issues.
So, we often find ourselves renting films on Google that we already own on iTunes.
The door locks we have aren’t compatible with any service, but writing a skill for Alexa took about an hour. Writing a function for Cortana took 15 minutes.
I don’t believe I will be allowed by Apple to write the skill for Siri, so I’d have to throw away $2000 of perfectly good door locks.
I love my iPhone 6S Plus. But every iPhone patch breaks something new. Watching videos gets more and more inconvenient. My audible app actually skips... it sounds like a scratched record. I have an iPhone X but I’ll end up dead from using it.
Then there’s my car. iPhone integration isn’t bad. But if I want proper integration, I’ll have to pay $400 a year to BMW.
So, I may end up switching to Android even though I hate Android just because it actually gives me options. So I’ll have a phone that sucks, but at least it will work with my other stuff.
Oh, there’s the other issue. I’ve been waiting 8 years for a new line of Macs to buy. The last notebook Apple made which didn’t suck was the MacBook Air 11 inch. I still use a 2011 model of it. And Mac Mini is so out of date it is horrifying. If Apple doesn’t make a new PC suitable for software development before my MacBook dies, I don’t think I’ll buy anything current.
I’m pretty sure Apple as a tech company died with Steve Jobs :(
As a fellow MacBook Air 2011 owner, it's also a little sad for me that it will exit the list of Macs that receive the latest version of the OS with the next release, 10.14. Certainly if your issue is that you find Apple devices only talk well to other Apple devices then you might as well write that out of the set of mutually talkative devices in the near future; they don't explicit switch these things off but proprietary protocol rot takes its toll. My iOS 5 and iOS 9 iPads can still play video content from iTunes but the iOS 9 device that's supposed to sync with my iTunes Match now inexplicably offers only maybe a twentieth of my content.
That being said, I'll be back for a newer Mac and an iPhone update if and when my 6s becomes a burden; I'm not particularly interested in home automation, habitually rent movies through Amazon rather than iTunes, and my iPhone works flawlessly with my Garmin watch.
Unlike Google or Facebook, Apple has not built its business around acquiring personal behavioural data. It merely sells overpriced hardware, and does not have an advertising business to feed.
Or, another way to look at it: Apple's hardware is not subsidized by monetizing your personal information.
Well they did just explicitly say that they don't want your data... Not sure how much more direct they can be. They also have refused to keep open doors on your security for the government to use.
I have always preferred Apple, but there have been some real questions lately. It is not all roses. The clarity of purpose, and design has dropped off significantly. Apple software was much more stable and secure before the most recent 2 or 3 iterations. There have been signs that they are simply slower to respond now that they have gotten bigger. The most recent OS updates have been focused on restoring much of that. If they can do the same on the hardware side, with Jony Ive working on computers again instead of the Apple campus, then they are going to be pretty hard to displace.
Yeah, but there's a major difference in how they use your data.
I'm OK with Apple harvesting a little data to improve the products I own, and build better products that I might want to buy. However, I'm not OK with someone selling all my personal information to any random company, because they decided that I fit into their target audience, and therefore need to have their products shoved under my nose.
Level 1 - Apple: collect data to improve products, data isn't "used against you". Data collection is limited and anonymized so if they are hacked or have a rogue employee personalized data can't escape.
Level 2 - Google: collect data to improve targeted ads, data is "used against you" but not directly sold to third parties (i.e. they benefit from Google using it but they can't see the raw data) Data collection is not limited or anonymized so if they are hacked or have a rogue employee personalized data may potentially escape.
Level 3 - Facebook: collect data to monetize any way they can, including targeted advertising AND selling it to pretty much anyone they feel like without telling you. You must assume everything Facebook knows about you (at least up until around now when they might finally be getting the hint their policies are a real problem) is in the wild forevermore.
AFAIK Amazon is likely level 2, though could be level 3. Microsoft was level 1, but recently decided to "upgrade" to level 2.
Used to be an Apple hater myself (thought they were overrated and expensive) but after trying out an iPod Touch when they 1st came out in an Apple store, I was very impressed.
Bought an iPhone 3GS the same year and owned an iPhone ever since.
There products do just work and they work very well together e.g iPad, Watch etc
My favourite Apple product now is actually the Watch, use my iPhone a lot less because of it
And now when I'm running Firefox on my Linux desktop I'm going to be wishing I had that level of protection!
C'mon Firefox, the bar is being raised, time to jump over it and put Safari behind til iOS 13 can once again jump over Firefox - I wanna see a race "who can screw Facebook and Google's user tracking based business model more thoroughly" :)
No, that's not the same thing AT ALL. All it does is "log you out of Facebook and delete Facebook cookies". I hardly ever login to Facebook on my browser and when I do I always use a private window to avoid its cookies leaking out to my regular browsing sessions. This extension would do fuck all for me, and it sounds like this is an extension - not even part of Firefox.
That extension does NOTHING to prevent Facebook using their 'like' buttons that are ubiquitous on web sites all over the internet from tracking you, which they do even if you don't click on them. That's what Apple is trying to attack here, and Firefox is doing ZERO to prevent that. Maybe there are some third party extensions to do this, but this should be built into the browser for Facebook, Google and Amazon, and you should be able to add other websites to that list if you so choose.
"But give the supper creepy behaviour of the web giants, I am seriously thinking about jumping the Android ship for my next phone."
Yes. ONce the new crop of Android smartphones came out and convinced me that they aren't something that I'm willing to buy anymore, I seriously considered Apple for this reason. The only thing that stops me is the damned walled garden. If it weren't for that, I'd already use one. But, it's a showstopper issue for me, so there's no refuge there.
I don't believe they say they sell it to anyone.
Only because their privacy policy says so - and to be found doing so otherwise, would be such a giant legal shitstorm.
And what's worse, it would make their hardware cost unjustifiable.
Especially since they've made it one of their unique selling points.
And what's worse, it would make their hardware cost unjustifiable.
Nah, the hardware prices are determined by what the market will bear. It's just retrospective justification to try and link thet two. Apple keeps expanding in the services area (music, film and tv, maps, health, home automation, automotive, payments…) and uses user data for this.
It's stored associated with only a randomised ID as metadata, and it loses that association after six months. It then survives untethered for the remaining eighteen.
I'd therefore posit that it's being used for Siri training, not for the sake of "acquiring personal behavioural data".
That is to answer your question literally. It doesn't make me a lot happier to know that my requests would be stored for two years even if they didn't have details attached that more explicitly identify me. That's partly why I don't use Siri, though my main justification is the same as for the other voice assistants: I'm unclear of any situation in which they'd be useful for me.
When they improve Siri they can backtest it against old requests (at least if they saved it in enough detail) Having history of past requests would also improve Siri's responses in the future.
A 'personal assistant' without any memory of the past would be far less useful. Think about celebrities who have personal assistants, do you think it would work well if they had a different one each day? That's really our ultimate goal here is to someday (many many years from now) have Siri, Alexa etc. be able to act like a human personal assistant (other than physical running errands....though by the time this happens maybe they WILL be able to physically run errands)
So why do they hold on to your voice requests via Siri on their servers for 2 years?
It's stored associated with only a randomised ID as metadata, and it loses that association after six months. It then survives untethered for the remaining eighteen.
As far as I can tell, Google, Amazon and Microsoft retain voice recordings -- linked to your user account -- for eternity.
"There are currently no touchscreen Macs. So some similar compromise will need to be fashioned"
However, the current Macs all have touchpads which can do multitouch, pinch etc. So I would imagine that gestures would map in a fairly obvious fashion:
* point and click => touch
* two-finger drag (the current macOS scrolling gesture) => swipe
* pinch => pinch
The sound of apple fan boys cheering as they announced a built in App to restrict the time you use your phone was funny.
Its amazing how Apple have innovated and invented an app that tells you when you are using your phone too much!!!1
I do seem to remember a little animated sheep on my Windows NT server hosting an IIS 2 website.
When you worked 4 hours it would bleet and tell you to take a rest.
The only cheers then were the Nerds as the sheep would fall of the edge of a window.......
This post has been deleted by its author
> The sound of apple fan boys cheering as they announced a built in App to restrict the time you use your phone was funny.
Remember that at apple events, a fairly large proportion of the audience are Apple employees, they reserve a lot of spaces for them to make sure they get enough whoops, particularly if it's a reveal event with journalists (who tend not to whoop much).
As an old parent, with parents now in their early teens, parental controls were extremely useful, and not really a question of 'outsourcing'. The kids knew they got an hour a day, and didn't complain when the 5-minute warning appeared. What exactly is the problem?
I really want to see how this works in real life situations.
When people are doing group video chats on Skype or other apps, because there is a wide variety of microphone quality and bandwidth, sometimes you see stuttering or one of the participants simply getting disconnected.
Because Facetime only works with Apple users, that randomness is eliminated.
having recently updated a mac-mini to something bigger that should be able to run 3 x eGPUs when GPUs come back on sale, I noticed that I'm worried about Apple's parity
giving third-party password managers parity with Apple's own password manager
Apple's own Keychain doesnt have (all of) your passwords, many remain in Safari or Chrome.
Chrome wouldnt allow me to d/l my passwords - but would give them to anyone with access to passwords.google.com who can guess my first password.
I eventually, by using Time Machine backups and finding an ancient version of Chrome, setting some obscure settings, was able to d/l all usernames & passwords in .csv format.
But safari, nope, Safari recently decided (from 10.0 onwards?) that it wouldnt give/export the owner their password list either, nor save it in local Keychain. I had to revert to post-it notes, copying one at a time.
I guess the national security letters are waiting around iCloud Keychain-sharing as well as the voice samples, after all, although Apple 'really believes' in 'our privacy' they also have no alternative but to comply with secret stuff.
this secret squirrel behaviour only offends ~5% of the USA tech staff, across all the US companies!
https://www.stripes.com/news/us/big-tech-firms-march-to-the-beat-of-pentagon-cia-despite-dissension-1.531048#
maybe I'm wrong, and 1-password (for example) can find everything that the data controller/owner can't
I think your method of questioning might be at fault; Safari stores all passwords in the keychain. Open Keychain Assistant, switch to passwords, enter any website name in the search field and there are the entries that correlate to my passwords. Double click one, tick the 'show password' box, enter my system password and there it is.
Do you want to allow 'facebook.com' to use cookies and website data while browsing 'blabbermouth.net'? This will allow 'facebook.com' to track your activity.
If a page can link to 100 or more scripts while it's downloading, is this going to be like Netscape Communicator was back in the day when you configured it to pop up a dialog box for every new cookie that was set?
Besides cookies and whatnot, the other big tracking mechanism is browser fingerprints. Safari on MacOS Mojave will present a "standard fingerprint" (plugins, fonts, etc., etc., etc.,) to all sites - allegedly making all Macs look the same (insert Apple Fanboi joke here).
So now I'm actually going to have to do the not-a-robot tests? Probably worth it.
If there is ever a robot uprising, all we need to do is drive at them in our cars. Apparently being able to tell which roads have cars on them proves you're not a robot.
It would be great if I could run a script on leaving the house that switched off wifi, switched GPS on, turned volume to max, opened Runkeeper, ready for my commute by bike. Takes a minute or two just now, especially as location is hidden away behind the privacy tab.
(If I could already do this and just haven't realised, please poke fun at me and then tell me how to do it)
Last year Apple made a gentle start by expiring tracking cookies, but this seriously raises the game; Apple's demonstration explicitly targeted Facebook.
Facebook could turn round and limit what Safari users could see and do or inject into Safari user's feed to use Chrome, Firefox or even Edge.
Be interesting to see how this will escalate.
I use the mobile web site version of Facebook on Android, and it is very noisy about "Do you want to download Facebook 'Lite' (Lite on space, just as Heavy on the data slurping)", regularly giving me splash screens, messages, and reminders in comment threads, etc, so I can imagine Facebook being even more aggressive about persuading you to get an app on the Mac/iPhone.
True, but then Apple could threaten to purge the FB app from its store/phones.
Now a lot of FB addicts might be unhappy, but a nice long detailed message from Apple to said users about what FB is doing and why might make them (and their higher-than-average spending to advertisers) think twice about using FB ever again.
One way or another, I would be happy to sit back with some popcorn and watch the fall out.
"(The old voice recognition gag: hover behind someone at a Unix command prompt and say "arr emm dash eff slash".)"
Wouldn't work: you're missing a couple of spaces in there ("rm-rf/") and that's assuming the voice recog recognised you were spelling something and not doing a bad pirate impersonation ("Arr 'im dash off, slash")
Doesn't matter, as this is the wrong question. The question should be: Given that you have a real computer with a real monitor, have real processing power, significant memory, and expansive screen real estate galore, why on <insert your favorite deity here>'s green earth would any sane person prefer to use an "app" designed with a cellphone's limitations instead of a real application that can fully utilize everything that you have?
The number of advantageous use-cases for íOS on MacOS are very few, and are mostly just games.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
