Apple Amazon Prime Video app for Apple TV beta testing by employees underway, release date still unknown.

I've never been a huge fan of the iOS 10+ Apple Music interface, but it's worked well enough for me that I've gotten used to it and don't have many problems with it. When my mom signed up for Apple Music yesterday and asked me to show her how to create playlists and add songs to her library, I thought it would be easy enough. Unfortunately, it wasn't. Here's a sample of things she said to me throughout the process:

"What's 3D Touch?"

"Oh, you mean I have to actually push on the screen? How hard do I have to push?"

"Sometimes when I 3D Touch a song it starts playing."

"I didn't mean to add it to my library."

"So when I delete something from my library, it deletes it from a playlist too?"

"Why do they make it so hard?"

Obviously, most of us here will not have had this experience, and if we did, we would've learned the correct behaviors in seconds through curiosity and trial and error. But for someone close to 70 and not up on all the latest Apple technology but still wants to enjoy their products, the learning curve seems a little too steep.

From my own perspective, the app seems well designed in some ways (library organization), but poorly designed in others (hidden menus/options). There's just a lot of room for improvement. I hope in iOS 12, Apple Music is improved so that it's easy and fun to use for everyone—from experts to casual users and everyone in between.

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China is spying through 42 apps, delete them: Indian Intelligence Bureau to soldiers

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 10:57 AM PST

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Apple COO Jeff Williams on Apple Watch heart study: 'Hopefully we can save a lot of lives'...

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 11:39 AM PST

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Your best Apple Pay reactions?

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 12:51 PM PST

Since its introduction here in Canada last spring, I've been using Apple Pay almost every purchase I make.

Pretty much everywhere here takes tap, so there's not many places you can't use it. As such, most cashiers here are used to Apple Pay now, or simply didn't care to begin with. But my friends and I have gotten plenty of funny responses, even recently, especially when using the Watch to pay.

Just a couple days ago I was using the self-checkout at Canadian Tire and used my watch to scan my Canadian Tire Money card. Another shopper who was just passing by stopped in her tracks and blurted out, "Did you just scan your watch?!" I nodded, chuckled, and told her I was also going to pay with it next. I never expected such excitement and amazement from a random passerby. She looked at me like I just blown her mind and asked if she could watch me tap it to pay.

If you think I'm making that up, I honestly wouldn't blame you, because typing it out seems silly and outlandish. But it really did happen.

/r/Apple, what reactions have you gotten while paying with Apple Pay?

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PSA: iPhone X ship times improve to 1 week from Apple, order now and get it Dec 8

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 07:17 PM PST

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High Sierra is CRITICAL for Macs

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 09:09 AM PST

...and here's why:

First, a timeline:

October 2016 The new MacBook Pro is revealed, boasting a Touch Bar with an embedded T1 chip. The first time in decades we see a custom Apple chip embedded for a specific Apple feature in a Mac.

April 2017 Apple, in an unusual fashion, approaches Daring Fireball's John Gruber & other media outlets to reveal its long term plans for the Pro line. Details include:

New Mac Pro with modular components in 2018
New Apple External Displays

WWDC2017 macOS 10.13 was announced with a plethora of under-the-hood changes focusing on graphics, eGPU & VR support, machine learning, a file system overhaul and Xcode 9 & Swift 4 with serious improvements. Also:

Space Gray iMac Pro

July & August 2017 Apple is hard at work trying to convince everyday consumers that the just-announced iPad Pro + upcoming iOS 11 will replace "The Computer", revealing their intentions for the Mac.

September 2017 Apple unveils a solid lineup of consumer focused devices with serious power. A11 Bionic chip was proven stupidly fast in benchmarks shortly after. Face ID had to be the point of controversy this year.

October 2017 macOS 10.13 launches in what seems to be a rocky start. Many bugs and annoyances, accompanied by the "meh" it's consumer-faced features bring. Also, the release is completely out of line compared to i/watch/tvOS releases chronologically.

November 2017 iMac Pro may have serious processing power, but a small leak revealed that it will also have an A10 Fusion co-processor for booting, security advancements and always-on support for select system functions.

Here's where it gets interesting.. So, Apple in the last few years has revealed some hardware additions that could be proven invaluable to the Mac. Take for example:

Mac External & Internal Displays with Face ID - technology already being tested massively on iPhone X. Also, biometric authentication on the Mac as a concept worked fine for Touch ID.
Big, accurate Trackpads with Apple Pencil support - Big trackpads are already here. So is Apple Pencil. Some spec bumps to make them compatible is all.
Touch Bar on the Magic Keyboard - easy to imagine and would add significant value to the accessory in of itself.

What does that have to do with macOS High Sierra you ask? Everything has to do with macOS High Sierra!

It will be the first macOS release to work with an apple coprocessor on the iMac Pro for vital system functions. It is the first macOS release with a solid ML foundation and an Apple-only Graphics API on the forefront (as Apple is always looking to rely less and less on others).

Apple is laying heavy software groundwork for heavy hardware changes.

Some history can be observed here on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and the transition to Lion. Here's Snow Leopard from Wikipedia:

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was released on August 28, 2009, the last version to be available on disc. Rather than delivering big changes to the appearance and end user functionality like the previous releases of Mac OS X, the development of Snow Leopard was deliberately focused on "under the hood" changes, increasing the performance, efficiency, and stability of the operating system.

Ring any High Sierra bells? After Snow Leopard, Mac OS X Lion introduced a host of new features which certainly changed the way we see the Mac.

Thus, my personal conclusion: I believe macOS 10.13 is the reason macOS 10.14 will be working just fine with 2018's major hardware announcements. The Mac UX team is mainly focused on 10.14 UI redesign (two full years isn't a satisfactory amount of time for a talented UX team to push the legendary macOS UI one step further?) and the core team is testing slowly and steady the new foundations through 10.13. I think Apple will truly restore the Macs to the powerful position they once were, technically & culturally, starting next year.

Lastly, here's Phil Schiller talking about the Mac App Store on WWDC2017:

So I will say this until we are satisfied one day: We care about it, we believe in it, we're invested in it. It matters and over time you'll see proof of that. Doing it first to the iOS App Store was the right thing to do. Other things over time.

Other things over time..

I can't wait to see what 2018 will bring for us Mac users.

UPDATE: I never said High Sierra is good. It's the buggiest thing. I just hope it's buggy for the reasons I mentioned.

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Craig Federighi's response to my question about whether Face ID that supports two users on a single iPhone is on Apple's roadmap.

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 01:48 PM PST

I asked this question because my wife and I can no longer share convenient access to our iPhone X's as we did using Touch ID on our previous iPhones. His answer was essentially, not anytime soon but we'll keep it in mind.

Copy of our email exchange: https://i.imgur.com/zPEmLzf.png

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CARROT Weather app update brings all new UI, customization, speech, and more to Apple Watch

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 11:05 AM PST

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iPhone Batteries Could Have Apple-Designed Power Management Chips Within Two Years

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 11:09 PM PST

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Microsoft Edge browser now on iOS

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 06:04 AM PST

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Security update '2017-001 root fix' installed twice through Mac App Store?

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 02:37 PM PST

Yesterday I received a notification from the Mac App Store about a security update regarding the #iamroot bug, which I quickly downloaded and installed via the updates tab.

Now, a day after, I received yet another notification about a security update, which I again installed through the 'update all' button, and it seems that its the same update as yesterday. Screenshots:

Anyone experienced the same thing?

Edit: According to their security update log, nothing new has been pushed: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222

Edit 2: It seems that the second update of 2017-001 fixes the broken file sharing caused by the fix (No official word yet):

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iPhone X: Multitasking should be a miniaturized version of the iPad.

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 01:13 PM PST

We got the screen real estate for it, and it works well on the iPad. That's probably an iOS 12 update though, it would be rough to have so many varying control centers across devices.

Who else is loving their new iPhone X?!

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iPhone X: Control Center should be accessed through a swipe up from the bottom-right corner, not a swipe down from the top-right corner

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 04:58 AM PST

This is so obvious. Control Center is way too valuable of a thing to not be accessible with one-handed use. Making it accessible from the bottom-right hand corner would fix this problem.

I get that Apple is worried enough about people transitioning away from their precious physical home button so they want to make sure that a swipe-up from the bottom of the screen to go home is "fail proof," so to speak, but their Control Center solution is wayyyyy too much of a compromise.

At the very least could Apple, you know... give us the option for this?! (Unrealistic for Apple, I know)

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Apple Reportedly Developing in-house iPhone power management chips, could feature in 2018 iPhones

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 05:17 AM PST

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iPhone: Alarm volume vs everything else

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 11:13 PM PST

Can these be separated? I like my normal ringtone/system volume at about 50%, however if my alarm goes off at 50% in the morning it gives me a goddamn heart attack. I like the quietest most subtle of alarms to peacefully awake, we're talking 1 bar. However if I adjust my volume to 1 bar just to satisfy my alarm requirements, I cant hear anything else for the rest of the day while my phone is in my pocket. It seems like no matter what I do I cant figure out how to split these two options. Is it even possible?

Ive seen some option in the settings/sound menu to link/unlink "change with buttons" but cant figure out what it's adjusting. No matter what my alarm volume is always crazy loud or my total system phone volume is always crazy low.

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iCloud Photos should allow you to select the local storage cache size just like Apple Music does.

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 10:22 AM PST

"Optimize iPhone Storage" is WAY too aggresive. Within seconds of taking a picture (while connected to WiFi) the picture/video is deleted from my phone and replaced with a low-res thumbnail. If I leave my house moments later and want to send the picture to someone, the photo has to be re-downloaded over cellular. What's worse, half of the time when I'm on cellular I can't even re-download or send a picture because of an "error."

I should be able to tell the phone to keep locally the most recent [X] gigabytes of photos. I have more than 50GB free on my phone, there is no reason that a Photos should only have 1GB of photos stored locally.

TL;DR Apple, just like me keep the most recent 40GB of pictures on my phone's local storage.

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Dark sky weather or Carrot weather?

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 02:36 PM PST

So I've been hearing a lot of hype about Carrot weather and I was wondering if it was worth the 5 dollars? Right now I use Dark Sky but Carrots interface look a lot cleaner. Thoughts?

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Google faces class action lawsuit for gathering personal data from millions of iPhone users

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 02:45 AM PST

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Apple's next NeXT: how buying Beats launched a sneak attack on the future of sound

Posted: 30 Nov 2017 02:44 PM PST

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