Apple Archive

Apple is set to expand ads to new areas of your iPhone and iPad in search of its next big revenue driver. Let’s begin with the current state of play: Apple’s advertising efforts today consist of display ads inside of its News and Stocks apps, as well as inside the App Store, across the iPhone, iPad and Mac. The App Store also has Google-like search ads. And more recently, Apple put advertising inside of TV+ for its “Friday Night Baseball” deal with Major League Baseball. I believe that the iPhone maker will eventually expand search ads to Maps. It also will likely add them to digital storefronts like Apple Books and Apple Podcasts. And TV+ could generate more advertising with multiple tiers (just as Netflix Inc., Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. are doing with their streaming services). So that was the plan all along. First, Apple tried to cut a deal with Facebook – one of the two online advertising giants (Apple already gets billions a year from the other, Google) – to get in on the online ad revenue. Second, when that fell through, Apple went on a privacy crusade against Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Google) to harm its online advertising business. Third, Apple is now going to expand its own ad business by adding even more ads to iOS. And all along the way, millions fell for it. John Gruber, a few years ago: My concern, again, is what happens if the drive to increase services revenue takes precedence over Apple’s “Prime Directive”: to put product design and experience above all else. Well, now you know.

Apple and Meta may not be the best of friends right now, but at one point, Apple was in discussions with the social media company about how it could make more money from its presence on the App Store, according to The Wall Street Journal. Apple reportedly argued that it deserved a cut of certain portions of Facebook’s ad revenue. The specific ads in question were boosted posts, which let users pay to have their posts reach more people, the WSJ reports. Apple apparently argued boosted posts are in-app purchases, which it famously takes a portion of; Meta argued that they were ads, from which Apple doesn’t get a share. It seems that Meta won out. So Apple was perfectly fine with profiting off Facebook’s anti-privacy business model, and only when Facebook declined did Apple go on its holier-than-thou privacy crusade against Facebook’s ads business. Apple’s privacy position is pure marketing, and any time Apple needs to choose between money and privacy, money wins every time. Whether it’s Google paying Apple billions to be the default search provider on iOS, Apple handing over all Chinese users’ data to the Chinese government, or now, in dealing with Facebook, Apple will choose money over privacy every time. Apple repeatedly calls privacy “a fundamental human right“, but human rights should not be for sale. It’s yet another illustration of corporations being above the law – Apple is allowed to just lie left, right, and centre without any legal repercussions.

Apple’s latest slate of updates — iOS and iPadOS 15.6, macOS 12.5, watchOS 8.7, and tvOS 15.6 — are starting to show up for some users. Given the next versions of the OSes are likely due out in a few short months (and beta testers are already using them), it’s not a surprise that Wednesday’s updates are all relatively light on features. You know where to get them.

Apple filed a lawsuit against ‘Pegasus’ spyware creator NSO Group last fall and announced it would be donating $10 million+ to organizations pursuing cyber-surveillance research and advocacy. Now taking the next step in combatting sophisticated spyware, Apple has announced a brand new “extreme” security feature called iPhone Lockdown Mode – coming to iPad and Mac as well – to help protect against targeted cyber attacks. Apple detailed the brand-new iPhone Lockdown Mode that will be available to test in updated iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and macOS Ventura betas, along with its $10 million+ grant for cybersecurity in a Newsroom post today. This seems like a really good and welcome feature, so good on Apple for working on it. That being said – I wonder if it will be available in China.

It seems NCommander’s horrid journey porting Doom to AIX is inspiring others to the same. This time around, Cariad Keigher ported Doom to a more obscure UNIX variant – Apple’s A/UX. I’ve never considered porting Doom before, but I was curious if my favourite abandoned UNIX variant had a port. With some very brief cursory searches on Google and GitHub, I was led to believe that this was unlikely or if it had been done, it was never publicly announced a port or it has been lost to the sands of time. If it is the case nobody has bothered, there is a good reason: it isn’t exactly necessary. Once I explain A/UX, it’ll make sense why I am likely the first person ever to port the game to this platform. All I can say is – godspeed to people like NCommander and Keigher. This sort of hackery makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, even if I don’t always understand all the details of the programming work they’re doing. I wonder who will pick up the baton and what obscure UNIX will get a Doom port next. May I make a suggestion?

macOS wasn’t the only platform in Apple’s spotlight today, of course. First, iOS 16 comes with an entirely new lock screen, moving notifications from the top to the bottom of the screen, and adding tons of customisability. Craig Federighi says that iOS 16 includes “the biggest update ever to the lock screen, completely reimagining how it looks and how it works for you.” You can add widgets to the lock screen, adjust the depth of field with your background image, and much more. The iMessage application, a messaging service popular in the United States, has also received many new features, many of which were long-awaited by its users. Most notably, iOS 16 introduces the ability to edit or unsend recently sent iMessages, as well as mark iMessage conversations as unread after opening them. These features will bring iMessage more in line with third-party messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram. A very important and welcome new feature is Safety Check, which is designed specifically for people in abuse relationships. It’s of course sad that features like this are needed, but I’m glad this may make the process of escaping an abusive relationship just a little bit easier for victims. A new privacy tool called Safety Check can be helpful to users whose personal safety is at risk from domestic or intimate partner violence by quickly removing all access they’ve granted to others. It includes an emergency reset that helps users easily sign out of iCloud on all their other devices, reset privacy permissions, and limit messaging to just the device in their hand. It also helps users understand and manage which people and apps they’ve given access to. Apple also unveiled new versions of iPadOS and watchOS, with the iPad getting access to the same Stage Manager feature as macOS for easier multitasking.

Thirty years ago, on May 29, 1992, Apple announced its most groundbreaking and revolutionary product yet, the Newton MessagePad. It was released to great fanfare a year later, but as a product, it could only be described as a flop. Widely mocked in popular culture at the time, the Newton became a poster child for expensive but useless high-tech gadgets. Even though the device improved dramatically over time, it failed to gain market share, and it was discontinued in 1997. Yet while the Newton was a failure, it galvanized Apple engineers to create something better—and in some ways led to the creation of the iPad and the iPhone. I have one of the earlier Newtons and it really isn’t a very good product, even in context. It tried to do a lot of groundbreaking things, but it suffered from feature creep and the hardware just not being ready. I’ve read later, more powerful Newton devices are a lot more pleasant to use, so I might snap one up.

RealityOS — the name Apple is reportedly using for the operating system running on its rumored virtual and augmented reality headset — has appeared in a trademark filing spotted by Parker Ortolani. Bloomberg News was first to report the “reality operating system” branding back in 2017, and references to the name have appeared in Apple’s software. The trademark application hasn’t officially been filed by Apple, but it’s common practice for large companies to apply for trademarks under one-off company names — like Realityo Systems LLC, in this case — in the state of Delaware for the sole purpose of maintaining anonymity. Never bet against Apple, but I just have a hard time seeing a very big consumer market for virtual reality headsets. It feels like far too many people still get nausea and headaches from using these things, and save for a relatively small number of games, I simply don’t understand what anyone at home would use it for. Of course, in professional settings, VR could have a huge impact. Augmented reality, on the other hand, seems like a much more widely applicable technology that also happens to be further away than even decent VR. Still, the problem of convincing people who otherwise would not wear glasses to, in fact, wear glasses every day seems like a steep hill to climb.

In late 2020, Apple debuted the M1 with Apple’s GPU architecture, AGX, rumoured to be derived from Imagination’s PowerVR series. Since then, we’ve been reverse-engineering AGX and building open source graphics drivers. Last January, I rendered a triangle with my own code, but there has since been a heinous bug lurking: The driver fails to render large amounts of geometry. Spinning a cube is fine, low polygon geometry is okay, but detailed models won’t render. Instead, the GPU renders only part of the model and then faults. A very deep dive into the cause and fix for this bug, and on top of that, some sleuthing to figure out where it comes from. A very fun and interesting read.

It’s the end of an era: Apple is officially discontinuing the iPod touch. The company says that the device will be available only “while supplies last.” This also means that the “iPod” brand is officially retired, as the iPod touch was the last iPod in Apple’s lineup. It’s the end of an era for a product that was once one of the most popular gadgets in the world. The iPod was one of the most iconic product lines in recent history, and now, it’s something nobody ever even talks about anymore. Apple was willing to cannibalise its own iPod success with the iPhone, and it paid off.

CPUs in Apple Silicon chips are different, as they contain two different core types, one designed for high performance (Performance, P or Firestorm cores), the other for energy efficiency (Efficiency, E or Icestorm cores). For these to work well, threads need to be allocated by core type, a task which can be left to apps and processes, as it is in Asahi Linux, or managed by the operating system, as it is in macOS. This article explains how macOS manages core allocation in all Apple’s M1 series chips, in what it terms asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP, although others prefer to call this heterogeneous computing). This design has now also made its way to x86 with Intel’s 12th Gen processors.

I’ve extended James Friend’s in-browser Basilisk II port to create a full-featured classic 68K Mac in your browser. You can see it in action at system7.app or macos8.app. However, none of these setups replicated the true feel of using a computer in the 90s. They’re great for quickly launching a single program and playing around with it, but they don’t have any persistence, way of getting data in or out of it, or running multiple programs at once. macintosh.js comes closest to that — it packages James’s Basilisk II port with a large (~600MB) disk image and provides a way of sharing files with the host. However, it’s an Electron app, and it feels wrong to download a ~250MB binary and dedicate 1 CPU core to running something that was meant to be in a browser. I wondered what it would take to extend the Basilisk II support to have a macintosh.js-like experience in the browser, and ideally go beyond it. There’s countless of these, but this is definitely one of the nicer ones. It won’t be long before we move from running classic operating systems in local emulators, to just firing up a tab and booting up whatever we feel like playing around with today. I certainly won’t miss manually creating VMs or fiddling with purpose-built emulators.

Apple is experiencing a widespread outage today, with a wide range of the company’s services and apps down or experiencing issues currently. Affected services and apps include the App Store, iCloud, Siri, iMessage, iTunes Store, Apple Maps, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, Apple TV+, Find My, FaceTime, Notes, Stocks, and many others, according to complaints across Twitter and other platforms. Apple’s developer website is also inaccessible due to server issues. Another great day to be a Linux user.

Apple is adding “one last chip” to the M1 processor family. The M1 Ultra is a new design that uses “UltraFusion” technology to strap two M1 Max chips together, resulting in a huge processor that offers 16 high-performance CPU cores, four efficiency cores, a 64-core integrated GPU, and support for up to 128GB of RAM. It looks like Apple is using a chiplet-based design for the M1 Ultra, just like AMD is doing for many of its Ryzen chips. A chiplet-based approach, as we’ve written, uses multiple silicon dies to make larger chips and can result in better yields since you don’t need to throw a whole monolithic 20-core chip out if a couple of cores have defects that keep them from working. This is a beast of a chip, and it fits in this neat little new Mac, called the Mac Studio. Apple also unveiled a new, more “affordable” monitor, but I’m not sure a monitor that maxes out at 60Hz in 2022 is worth €1779.