Apple Archive
Although there’s little evidence of them today, Apple made a long succession of Mac servers and servers for Macs from 1988 to 2014, and only discontinued support for the last release of macOS Server in April 2022. Its first entry into the market was a special version of the Macintosh II running Apple’s own port of Unix way back in 1988. ↫ Howard Oakley These days, you can nab Xserves for pretty cheap on eBay, but since Apple doesn’t properly support them anymore, they’re mostly a curiosity for people who are into retro homelab stuff and the odd Apple enthusiast who doesn’t know what to do with it. It always felt like Apple’s head was never really in the game when it came to its servers, despite the fact that both its hardware and software were quite interesting and user friendly compared to the competition. Regardless, if my wife and I ever manage to buy our own house, the basement’s definitely getting a nice homelab rack with old – mostly non-x86 Sun and HP – servers, and I think an Xserve would be a fun addition, too. Living in the Arctic means any heat they generate is useful for like 9 or so months of the year to help warm the house, and since our electricity is generated from hydropower they wouldn’t be generating a massive excess of pollution, either. I have to figure out what to do with the excess heat during the few months of the year where it’s warm outside, though.
There have been some past rumblings on the internet about a capacitor being installed backwards in Apple’s Macintosh LC III. The LC III was a “pizza box” Mac model produced from early 1993 to early 1994, mainly targeted at the education market. It also manifested as various consumer Performa models: the 450, 460, 466, and 467. Clearly, Apple never initiated a huge recall of the LC III, so I think there is some skepticism in the community about this whole issue. Let’s look at the situation in more detail and understand the circuit. Did Apple actually make a mistake? ↫ Doug Brown Even I had heard of these claims, and I’m not particularly interested in Apple retrocomputing, other than whatever comes by on Adrian Black or whatever. As such, it surprises me that there hasn’t been any definitive answer to this question – with the amount of interest in classic Macs you’d think this would simply be a settled issue and everyone would know about it. This vintage of Macs pretty much require recaps by now, so I assumed if Apple indeed soldered on a capacitor backwards, it’d just be something listed in the various recapping guides. It took some very minor digging with the multimeter, but yes, one of the capacitors on this family of boards is soldered on the wrong way, with the positive terminal where the negative terminal should be. It seems the error does not lie with whomever soldered the capacitors on the boards – or whomever set the machine that did so – because the silkscreen is labeled incorrectly, too. The reason it doesn’t seem to be noticeable problem during the expected lifespan of the computer is because it was rated at 16V, but was only taking in -5V. So, if you plan on recapping one of these classic Macs – you might as well fix the error.
In recent weeks, law enforcement in the United States discovered, to their dismay, that iPhones were automatically rebooting themselves after a few days of inactivity, thereby denying them access to the contents of these phones. After a lot of speculation online, Jiska Classen dove into this story to find out what was going on, and through reverse-engineering they discovered that this was a new security feature built by Apple as part of iOS 18.1, to further make stolen iPhones useless for both thieves as well as law enforcement officers. It’s a rather clever feature. The Secure Enclave Processor inside the iPhone keeps track of when the phone was last unlocked, and if that period exceeds 72 hours, the SEP will inform a kernel module. This kernel module will then, in turn, tell the phone to gracefully reboot, meaning no data is lost in this process. If the phone for whatever reason does not reboot and remains powered on, the module will assume the phone’s been tampered with somehow and kernel-panic. Interestingly, if the reboot takes place properly, an analytics report stating how long the phone was not unlocked will be sent to Apple. The reason this is such a powerful feature is that a locked iPhone is entirely useless to anyone who doesn’t have the right code or biometrics to unlock it. Everything on the device is encrypted, and only properly unlocking it will decrypt the phone’s contents; in fact, a locked phone can’t even join a Wi-Fi network, because the stored passwords are encrypted (and I’m assuming that a locked phone does not provide access to any methods of joining an open network either). When you have a SIM card without any pincode, the iPhone will connect to the cellular network, but any notifications or calls coming in will effectively be empty, since incoming phone numbers can’t be linked to any of the still-encrypted contacts, and while the phone can tell it’s received notifications, it can’t show you any of their contents. A thief who’s now holding this phone can’t do much with it if it locks itself like this after a few days, and law enforcement won’t be able to access the phone either. This is a big deal in places where arrests based purely on skin colour or ethnicity or whatever are common, like in the United States (and in Europe too, just to a far lesser degree), or in places where people have to fear the authorities for other reasons, like in totalitarian dictatorships like Russia, China or Iran, where any hint of dissent can end you in harsh prisons. Apple is always at the forefront with features such as these, with Google and Android drunkenly stumbling into the open door a year later with copies that take ages to propagate through the Android user base. I’m legitimately thankful for Apple raising awareness of the need of features such as these – even if they’re too cowardly to enable them in places like China – as it’s quite clear a lot more people need to start caring about these things, with recent developments and all.
Old-school Apple fans probably remember a time, just before the iPhone became a massive gaming platform in its own right, when Apple released a wide range of games designed for late-model clickwheel iPods. While those clickwheel-controlled titles didn’t exactly set the gaming world on fire, they represent an important historical stepping stone in Apple’s long journey through the game industry. Today, though, these clickwheel iPod games are on the verge of becoming lost media—impossible to buy or redownload from iTunes and protected on existing devices by incredibly strong Apple DRM. Now, the classic iPod community is engaged in a quest to preserve these games in a way that will let enthusiasts enjoy these titles on real hardware for years to come. ↫ Kyle Orland at Ars Technica A nice effort, of course, and I’m glad someone is putting time and energy into preserving these games and making them accessible to a wider audience. As is usual with Apple, these small games were heavily encumbered with DRM, being locked to both the the original iTunes account that bought them, but also to the specific hardware identifier of the iPod they were initially synchronised to using iTunes. A clever way around this DRM exists, and it involves collectors and enthusiasts creating reauthorising their iTunes accounts to the same iTunes installation, and thus adding their respective iPod games to that single iTunes installation. Any other iPods can then be synced to that master account. The iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project takes this approach to the next level, by setting up a Windows virtual machine with iTunes installed in it, which can then be shared freely around the web for people to the games to their collection. This is a rather remarkably clever method of ensuring these games remain accessible, but obviously does require knowledge of setting up Qemu and USB passthrough. I personally never owned an iPod – I was a MiniDisc fanatic until my Android phone took over the role of music player – so I also had no clue these games even existed. I assume most of them weren’t exactly great to control with the limited input method of the iPod, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be huge numbers of people who have fond memories of playing these games when they were younger – and thus, they are worth preserving. We can only hope that one day, someone will create a virtual machine that can run the actual iPod operating system, called Pixo OS.
Apple announced a trio of major new hearing health features for the AirPods Pro 2 in September, including clinical-grade hearing aid functionality, a hearing test, and more robust hearing protection. All three will roll out next week with the release of iOS 18.1, and they could mark a watershed moment for hearing health awareness. Apple is about to instantly turn the world’s most popular earbuds into an over-the-counter hearing aid. ↫ Chris Welch at The Verge Rightfully so, most of us here have a lot of issues with the major technology companies and the way they do business, but every now and then, even they accidentally stumble into doing something good for the world. AirPods are already a success story, and gaining access to hearing aid-level features at their price point is an absolute game changer for a lot of people with hearing issues – and for a lot of people who don’t even yet know they have hearing issues in the first place. If you have people in your life with hearing issues, or whom you suspect may have hearing issues, gifting them AirPods this Christmas season may just be a perfect gift. Yes, I too think hearing aids should be a thing nobody has to pay for and which should just be part of your country’s universal healthcare coverage – assuming you have such a thing – but this is not a bad option as a replacement.
The iPhone 16 family has arrived and includes many new features, some of which Apple has played very close to its vest. One such improvement is the inclusion of JPEG XL file types, which promise improved image quality compared to standard JPEG files while delivering relatively smaller file sizes. Overall, JPEG XL addresses many of JPEG’s shortcomings. The 30-year-old format is not very efficient, only offers eight-bit color depth, doesn’t support HDR, doesn’t do alpha transparency, doesn’t support animations, doesn’t support multiple layers, includes compression artifacts, and exhibits banding and visual noise. JPEG XL tackles these issues, and unlike WebP and AVIF formats, which each have some noteworthy benefits too, JPEG XL has been built from the ground up with still images in mind. ↫ Jeremy Gray at PetaPixel Excellent news, and it will hopefully mean others will follow – something that tends to happen when Apple finally supports to the new thing.
The European Commission has taken the next step in forcing Apple to comply with the Digital Markets Act. The EC has started two so-called specification proceedings, in which they can more or less order Apple exactly what it needs to do to comply with the DMA – in this case covering the interoperability obligation set out in Article 6(7) of the DMA. The two proceedings entail the following: The first proceeding focuses on several iOS connectivity features and functionalities, predominantly used for and by connected devices. Connected devices are a varied, large and commercially important group of products, including smartwatches, headphones and virtual reality headsets. Companies offering these products depend on effective interoperability with smartphones and their operating systems, such as iOS. The Commission intends to specify how Apple will provide effective interoperability with functionalities such as notifications, device pairing and connectivity. The second proceeding focuses on the process Apple has set up to address interoperability requests submitted by developers and third parties for iOS and IPadOS. It is crucial that the request process is transparent, timely, and fair so that all developers have an effective and predictable path to interoperability and are enabled to innovate. ↫ European Commission press release It seems the European Commission is running out of patience, and in lieu of waiting on Apple to comply with the DMA on its own, is going to tell Apple exactly what it must do to comply with the interoperability obligation. This means that, once again, Apple’s childish, whiny approach to DMA compliance is backfiring spectacularly, with the company no longer having the opportunity to influence and control its own interoperability measures – the EC is simply going to tell them what they must do. The EC will complete these proceedings within six months, and will provide Apple with its preliminary findings which will explain what is expected of Apple. These findings will also be made public to invite comments from third parties. The proceedings are unrelated to any fines for non-compliance, which are separate.
I have been working on an emulator for early (Motorola 68000-powered) Macintosh computers. While implementing the disk drive, I noticed documentation was scattered and hard to find. Now that I have a working implementation, this post is my attempt to document everything in one place. ↫ Thomas Exactly what it says on the tin – everything you ever wanted to know about the disk drive on early Macintosh computers.
Apple is making additional changes to its app ecosystem in the European Union to comply with the terms of the Digital Markets Act. The default browser selection experience that’s already in place will be updated, Apple will allow EU users to set defaults for more types of apps, and core iOS apps like Messages and the App Store will also be deletable. iPhone owners in the EU can already set different defaults for the browser, mail app, app marketplace, and contactless payments, but Apple is going to allow users to select new defaults for phone calls, messaging, password managers, keyboards, call spam filters, navigation, and translation. That means, for example, that EU users will be able to choose an app like WhatsApp instead of Messages to be their default texting app, or a mapping app like Waze to be the default instead of Apple Maps. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors It’s clear by now that Apple’s malicious DMA compliance attempts have proven to be an abject failure. Apple continuously needs to backtrack and give in more and more to the European Commission, without the Commission even having to really do anything at all. Slowly but surely, Apple is complying with the DMA, all while its toddler tantrums have done serious damage to the company’s standing and reputation without having any of the desired effects for Apple. Whoever set out this toddler DMA strategy at Apple should probably be fired for incompetence. This latest round of additional changes to comply with the DMA are very welcome ones, and further solidify the EU version of iOS as the best version. Not only do iOS users in the European Union get different browser engines, they can also remove larger numbers of default applications, set more default applications, replace more Apple-services with third-party ones, and so on. Thanks to the DMA, iOS is finally becoming more of a real operating system, instead of a set of shackles designed primarily to lock users in. It’s only a matter of time before laws similar to the DMA spread to the rest of the world, and I honestly don’t think the United States is going to stay behind. Corruption in the US is widespread, but there’s only so much money can do, even in US politics.
A story you hear all the time about the Apple IIGS is that Apple purposefully underclocked or limited its processor in some way to protect the nascent Macintosh, and ensure the IIGS, which could build upon the vast installed base of Apple II computers, would not outcompete the Macintosh. I, too, have always assumed this was a real story – or at least, a story with a solid kernel of truth – but Dan Vincent decided to actually properly research this claim, and his findings tell an entirely different story. His research is excellent – and must have been incredibly time-consuming – and his findings paint a much different story than Apple intentionally holding the IIGS back. The actual issue lied with the production of the 65816 processor that formed the beating heart of the IIGS. It turns out that the 65816 had serious problems with yields, was incredibly difficult to scale, and had a ton of bugs and issues when running at higher speeds. What a ride, huh? Thanks for making it this far down a fifty-plus minute rabbit hole. I can’t claim that this is the final take on the subject—so many of the players aren’t on the record, but I’m pretty confident in saying that Apple did not artificially limit the IIGS’ clock speed during its development for marketing purposes. Now, I’m not a fool—I know Apple didn’t push the IIGS as hard as it could, and it was very much neglected towards the end of its run. If the REP/SEP flaws hadn’t existed and GTE could’ve shipped stable 4MHz chips in volume, I’m sure Apple would’ve clocked them as fast as possible in 1986. ↫ Dan Vincent Promise me you’ll read this article before the weekend’s over. It’s a long one, but it’s well-written and a joy to read. You’ll also run into Tony Fadell – the creator of the iPod – somewhere in the story, as well as a public shouting match, and an almost fistfight, between the creator of the 65816 and Jean-Louis Gassée during San Francisco AppleFest in September 1989, right after Gassée placed the blame for the lack of a faster IIGS on the 65816’s design. This is an evergreen article.
I have no contracts, agreements, or business with Apple, I do not use any Apple products, I do not rely on any Apple services, and none of my work requires the use of any of Apple’s tools. Yet, I’m forced to deal with Apple’s 30% tax. Today, Patreon, which quite a few of you use to support OSNews, announced that Apple is forcing them to change its billing system, or risk being banned from the App Store. This has some serious consequences for people who use Patreon’s iOS application to subscribe to Patreons, and for the creators you subscribe to. First: Apple will be applying their 30% App Store fee to all new memberships purchased in the Patreon iOS app, in addition to anything bought in your Patreon shop. ↫ Patreon’s website First things first: the 30% mafia tax will only be applied to new Patreons subscribers using the Patreon iOS application to subscribe, starting early November 2024. Existing Patreons will not be affected, iOS or no. Anyone who subscribes through the Patreon website or Android application will not be affected either. Since creators like myself obviously have no intention of just handing over 30% of what our iOS-using supporters donate to us, Patreon has added an option to automatically increase the prices of subscriptions inside the Patreon iOS application by 30%. In other words, starting this November, subscribing to the OSNews Patreon through the iOS application will be 30% more expensive than subscribing from anywhere else. As such, I’m pondering updating the description of our Patreon to strongly suggest anyone wishing to subscribe to the OSNews Patreon to do so either on the web, or through the Patreon Android application instead. If you’re hell-bent on subscribing through the Patreon iOS application, you’ll be charged an additional 30% to pay protection money to Apple. And just to reiterate once more: if you’re already a Patreon, nothing will change and you’ll continue to pay the regular amounts per tier. Second: Any creator currently on first-of-the-month or per-creation billing plans will have to switch over to subscription billing to continue earning in the iOS app, because that’s the only billing type Apple’s in-app purchase system supports. ↫ Patreon’s website This is Patreon inside baseball, but as it stands right now, subscribers to the OSNews Patreon are billed on the first of the month, regardless of when during a month you subscribe. This is intentional, since I really like the clarity it provides to subscribers, and the monthly paycheck it results in for myself. Sadly, Apple is forcing Patreon to force me to change this – I am now forced to switch to subscription billing instead, somewhere before November 2025. This means that once I make that forced switch, new Patreons will be billed on their subscription date every month (if you subscribe on 25 April, you’ll be charged every 25th of the month). Luckily, nothing will change for existing subscribers – you will still be billed on the 1st of the month. This whole thing is absolutely batshit insane. Not only is Patreon being forced by Apple to do this at the risk of having their iOS application banned from the App Store, Apple is also making it explicitly impossible for Patreon to go any other route. As we all know, Patreon won’t be allowed to advertise that subscribing will be cheaper on the web, but Apple is also not allowing Patreon to remove subscribing in the Patreon iOS application altogether – if Patreon were to do that, Apple will ban the application from the App Store as well. And with how many people use iOS, just outright deprecating the Patreon iOS application is most likely going to hurt a lot of creators, especially ones outside of the tech sphere. Steven Troughton-Smith did some math, and concluded that Apple will be making six times as much from donations to Patreon creators than Patreon itself will. In other words, if you use iOS, and subscribe to a creator from within the Patreon iOS application, you will be supporting Apple – a three trillion dollar corporation – more than Patreon, which is actually making it possible to support the small creators you love in the first place. That is absolutely, balls-to-the-wall, batshit insanity. Remember that ad Apple made where it crushed a bunch of priceless instruments and art supplies into an iPad – the ad it had to pull and apologise for because creators, artists, writers, and so on thought it was tasteless and dystopian? Who knew that ad was literal.
We’ve been talking a lot about sleazy ways in which the online advertising industry is conspiring with browser makers – who also happen to be in the online advertising industry – to weaken privacy features so they can still track you and the ads they serve you, but with “privacy”. They’re trying really hard to make it seem as if they’re doing us a huge favour by making tracking slightly more private, and browser makers are falling over themselves to convince us that allowing some user and ad tracking is the only way to stop the kind of total everything, everywhere, all at once tracking we have now. We’ve got Google and Chrome pushing something called “Privacy Sandbox“, and we’ve got Mozilla and Facebook pushing something called “Privacy-Preserving Attribution“, both of which are designed to give the advertising industry slightly more private tracking in the desperate hope they won’t still be doing a lot more tracking on the side. Safari users, meanwhile, have been feeling pretty good about all of this in the knowledge Apple cares about privacy, so surely Safari won’t be doing any of this. You know where this is going, right? Today, the WebKit project published a lengthy blog post detailing all the various additional measures it’s taking to make its Private Browsing mode more, well, private, and a lot of them are great moves, very welcome, and ensure that private browsing on Safari is a little bit more private than it is on Chrome, as the blog post gleefully points out. However, not long into the blog post, the shoe drops. We also expanded Web AdAttributionKit (formerly Private Click Measurement) as a replacement for tracking parameters in URL to help developers understand the performance of their marketing campaigns even under Private Browsing. ↫ John Wilander, Charlie Wolfe, Matthew Finkel, Wenson Hsieh, and Keith Holleman A little further down, they go into more detail: Web AdAttributionKit (formerly Private Click Measurement) is a way for advertisers, websites, and apps to implement ad attribution and click measurement in a privacy-preserving way. You can read more about it here. Alongside the new suite of enhanced privacy protections in Private Browsing, Safari also brings a version of Web AdAttributionKit to Private Browsing. This allows click measurement and attribution to continue working in a privacy-preserving manner. ↫ John Wilander, Charlie Wolfe, Matthew Finkel, Wenson Hsieh, and Keith Holleman So not only does Safari already include the kind of tracking technology everyone is – rightfully – attacking Mozilla over for adding it to Firefox, Apple and the Safari team are actually taking it a step further and making this ad tracking technology available in private browsing mode. The technology is limited a bit more in Private Browsing mode, but its intent is preserved: to track you and the ads you see online. I would hazard a guess that when you enable a browser’s private browsing or incognito mode, you assume that means zero tracking. We already know that Chrome’s Incognito mode leaks data like a sieve with bullet holes in it, and now it seems Safari’s Private Browsing mode, too, is going to allow advertisers to track you and the ads you see – blog post full of fancy privacy features be damned. Do you know those “Around the web” chumboxes? Even if you’re unfamiliar with the term, you’ve most definitely seen these things all over the web, and really hate them. A major player in the chumbox business is a company called Taboola, a name that’s quite despised and reviled online. Popular Apple blogger John Gruber called Taboola a “slumlord” and the “lowest common denominator clickbait property“. Do you want to know which major technology company just signed a massive deal with Taboola? Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps, Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda told Axios. ↫ Sara Fischer at Axios Apple needs to find new markets to keep growing, and clearly, pestering its users with upsells and subscriptions to its services isn’t enough. The online advertising industry is massive – just look at Google’s and Facebook’s financial disclosures – and Apple seems to be interested in taking a bigger slice of that fat pie. And as Google and now Mozilla are finding out, a browser that blocks ads and ad tracking kind of gets in the way of that. Anyone who can make and sell plug-and-play Pi-Hole devices even normal people can use is going to make a killing.
A few weeks ago, I broke the news that Mozilla had removed several anti-censorship Firefox extensions from its store in Russia, and a few days later I also broke the news they reversed course on their decision and reinstated the extensions. Perhaps not worthy of a beauty prize, as a Dutch saying goes, but at least the turnaround time was short, and they did the right thing in the end. Well, let’s see how Apple is going to deal with the exact same situation. Novaya Gazeta Europe reports that bowing under pressure from the same Russian censors that targeted Mozilla, the company has removed a whole slew of VPN applications used by Russians to evade the stringent totalitarian censorship laws in the warmongering nation. Apple has removed several apps offering virtual private network (VPN) services from the Russian AppStore, following a request from Roskomnadzor, Russia’s media regulator, independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Thursday. The VPN services removed by Apple include leading services such as ProtonVPN, Red Shield VPN, NordVPN and Le VPN. Those living in Russia will no longer be able to download the services, while users who already have them on their phones can continue using them, but will be unable to update them. ↫ Novaya Gazeta Europe Apple has a long history of falling in line with the demands from dictators and totalitarian regimes, and Russia is no stranger to telling Apple what to do. Earlier this year, Apple was ordered to remove an application developed by the team of the murdered opposition figure Alexey Navalny, and of course, Apple rolled over and complied. Much like Apple’s grotesque suck-up behaviour in China, This stands in stark contrast to Apple’s whining, complaining, and tantrums in the European Union. It seems Apple finds it more comfortable to operating under dictators than in democracies.
The Apple ][ is one of the most iconic vintage computers of all time. But since Wozniak’s monster lasted all the way until 1993 (1995 if you could the IIe card, which I won’t count until I get one), it can be easy to forget that in 1977, it was a video extravaganza. The competitors– even much bigger and established companies like Commodore and Tandy– generally only had text modes, let alone pixel-addressable graphics, and they certainly didn’t have sixteen colors. (Gray and grey are different colors, right?) ↫ Nicole Branagan If there’s ever anything you wanted to know about how graphics work on the Apple II, this is the place to go. It’s an incredibly detailed and illustrated explanation of how the machine renders and displays graphics, and an excellent piece of writing to boot. I’m a little jealous.
Today, the European Commission has informed Apple of its preliminary view that its App Store rules are in breach of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), as they prevent app developers from freely steering consumers to alternative channels for offers and content. In addition, the Commission opened a new non-compliance procedure against Apple over concerns that its new contractual requirements for third-party app developers and app stores, including Apple’s new “Core Technology Fee”, fall short of ensuring effective compliance with Apple’s obligations under the DMA. ↫ European Commission press release File this in the category for entirely expected news that is the opposite of surprising. Apple has barely even been maliciously compliant with the DMA, and the European Commission is entirely right in pursuing the company for its continued violation of the law. The DMA really isn’t a very complicated law, and the fact the world’s most powerful and wealthiest corporation in the world can’t seem to adapt its products to the privacy and competition laws here in the EU is clearly just a bunch of grandstanding and whining. In fact, I find that the European Commission is remarkably lenient and cooperative in its dealings with the major technology giants in general, and Apple in particular. They’ve been in talks with Apple for a long time now in preparation for the DMA, the highest-ranking EU officials regularly talked with Apple and Tim Cook, they’ve been given ample warnings, instructions, and additional time to make sure their products do not violate the law – as a European Union citizen, I can tell you no small to medium business or individual EU citizen gets this kind of leniency and silk gloves treatment. Everything Apple is reaping, it sowed all by itself. As I posted on Mastodon a few days ago: The EU enacted a new law a while ago that all bottle caps should remain attached to the bottle, to combat plastic trash. All the bottle and packaging makers, from massive multinationals like Coca Cola and fucking Nestlé to small local producers invested in the development of new caps, changing their production lines, and shipping the new caps. Today, a month before the law goes into effect, it’s basically impossible to find a bottle without an attached cap. I don’t know, I thought this story was weirdly relevant right now with Apple being a whiny bitch. Imagine being worse than Coca Cola and motherfucking Nestlé. ↫ Thom Holwerda Apple is in this mess and facing insane fines as high as 10% of their worldwide turnover because spoiled, rich, privileged brats like Tim Cook are not used to anyone ever saying “no”. Silicon Valley has shown, time and time again, from massive data collection for advertising purposes to scraping the entire web for machine learning, that they simply do not understand consent. Now that there’s finally someone big, strong, and powerful enough to not take Silicon Valley’s bullshit, they start throwing tamper tantrums like toddlers. Apple’s public attacks on the European Union – and their instructions to their PR attack dogs to step it up a notch – are not doing them any favours, either. The EU is, contrary to just about any other government body in the Western world, ridiculously popular among its citizens, and laws that curb the power of megacorps are even more popular. I honestly have no idea who’s running their PR department, because they’re doing a terrible job, at least here in the EU.
I can’t believe this is considered something I need to write about, but it’s still a very welcome new feature that surprisingly has taken this long to become available: iOS and iPadOS 18 now allow you to format external storage devices. Last year when I began testing iPadOS 17 betas, I noticed the addition of options for renaming and erasing external drives in the Files app. I watched these options over the course of the beta cycle for iPadOS 17 to see if any further changes would come. The one I watched most closely was the “Erase” option for external drives. This option uses the same glyph as the Erase option in Disc Utility on macOS. In Disc Utility on the Mac, in order to reformat an external drive, you first select the “Erase” option, and then additional options appear for selecting the new format you wish to reformat the drive with. When I saw the “Erase” option added in the Files app on iPadOS, I suspected that Apple might be moving towards adding these reformatting options into the Files app on iPadOS. And I’m excited to confirm that this is exactly what Apple has done in iPadOS 18! ↫ Kaleb Cadle It was soon confirmed this feature is available in iOS 18 as well. You can only format in APFS, ExFAT and FAT, so it’s not exactly a cornucopia of file systems to choose from, but it’s better than nothing. This won’t magically fix all the issues a lot of people have with especially iPadOS when it comes to feeling constrained when using their expensive, powerful tablets with detachable keyboards, but it takes away at least one tiny reason to keep a real computer around. Baby steps, I guess.
Apple has announced it’s not shipping three of its tentpole new features, announced during WWDC, in the European Union: Apple Intelligence, iPhone Mirroring, and SharePlay Screen Sharing. Ever since the introduction of especially Apple Intelligence, the company has been in hot water over the sourcing of its training data – Apple admitted it’s been scraping everyone’s data for years and now used it to train its AI features. This will obviously have included vasts amounts of data from European websites and citizens, and with the strict EU privacy laws, there’s a very real chance that such scraping is simply not legal. As such, it’s simpler to just not comply with such stricter privacy laws than to design your products with privacy in mind. As Steven Troughton-Smith quips: How many EU-based sites did Apple scrape to build the feature it now says it can’t ship in the EU because of legal uncertainty? ↫ Steven Troughton-Smith Other massive corporations like Google and Facebook seem to have little issue shipping AI features in the EU, and have been doing so for quite a while now. And mind you, as Tim Cook has been very keen to reiterate in every single interview for the past two years or so, Apple has been shipping AI features similar to what they announced at WWDC for years as well, but it’s only now that the European Union is actually imposing regulations on them – instead of letting corporatism run wild – that it can no longer ship such features in the EU? Apple is throwing its users under the bus because Tim Cook is big mad that someone told him no. As I keep reiterating, consent is something Silicon Valley simply does not understand.
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote has come to a close — and the company had a whole lot to share. We got our first look at the AI features coming to Apple’s devices and some major updates across the company’s operating systems. If you missed out on watching the keynote live, we’ve gathered all the biggest announcements that you can check out below. ↫ Emma Roth at The Verge Most of the stuff Apple announced aren’t particularly interesting – a lot of catch-up stuff that has become emblematic of companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft when it comes to their operating systems. The one thing that did stand out is Apple’s approach to offloading machine learning requests to the cloud when they are too difficult to handle on device. They’ve developed a new way of doing this, using servers with Apple’s own M chips, which is pretty cool and harkens back the days of the Xserve. In short, these server are using the same kind of techniques to encrypt and secure data on iPhones, but now to encrypt and secure the data coming in for offloaded machine learning requests. The root of trust for Private Cloud Compute is our compute node: custom-built server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center, with the same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure Enclave and Secure Boot. We paired this hardware with a new operating system: a hardened subset of the foundations of iOS and macOS tailored to support Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads while presenting an extremely narrow attack surface. This allows us to take advantage of iOS security technologies such as Code Signing and sandboxing. ↫ Apple’s security research blog Apple also provided some insight into where its training data is coming from, and it claims it’s only using licensed data and “publicly available data collected by our web-crawler”. The words “licensed” and “publicly available” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and I’m not entirely sure what definitions of those terms Apple is using. There are enough people out there who feel every piece of data – whether under copyright, available under an open source license, or whatever – is fair, legal game for ML training, so who knows what Apple is using based on these statements alone. From Apple’s presentations yesterday, as well as any later statements, it’s also not clear when machine learning requests get offloaded in the first place. Apple states they try to run as much as possible on-device, and will offload when needed, but the conditions under which such offloading happens are nebulous and unclear, making it hard for users to know what’s going to happen when they use Apple’s new machine learning features.
iOS 17.5 seems to be experiencing a rather nasty bug that raises some very, very concerning questions about what Apple thinks “delete” really means. After updating their iPhone, one user said they were shocked to find old NSFW photos that they deleted in 2021 suddenly showing up in photos marked as recently uploaded to iCloud. Other users have also chimed in with similar stories. “Same here,” said one Redditor. “I have four pics from 2010 that keep reappearing as the latest pics uploaded to iCloud. I have deleted them repeatedly.” “Same thing happened to me,” replied another user. “Six photos from different times, all I have deleted. Some I had deleted in 2023.” More reports have been trickling in overnight. One said: “I had a random photo from a concert taken on my Canon camera reappear in my phone library, and it showed up as if it was added today.” ↫ Tim Hardwick at MacRumors A report a few days later says that even on devices that have been wiped and sold, photos seem to be reappearing. This is even scarier than photos reappearing on devices you’re still using today – just think of all the iOS devices you’ve had and sold that might still be in use today. Users all over could be looking at old photos you took that you thought weren’t only deleted, but also wiped when you sold the devices in question. Apple has not said anything yet, but it further illustrates just how untrustworthy companies like Apple really are. Even taking into account it might take some time (minutes? An hour?) for a delete request to propagate through iCloud’s server network, there’s obviously no way photos that were supposedly deleted years ago are resurfacing now – especially when entire device wipes are involved, and any new user isn’t even logged into the same iCloud account. I hope for everyone involved – the users, that is, I don’t give a rat’s ass about Apple – that this isn’t very widespread, because the last thing any of us needs is old nude photos reappearing on random people’s devices. What a mess.
Apple’s grudging accommodation of European law – allowing third-party browser engines on its mobile devices – apparently comes with a restriction that makes it difficult to develop and support third-party browser engines for the region. The Register has learned from those involved in the browser trade that Apple has limited the development and testing of third-party browser engines to devices physically located in the EU. That requirement adds an additional barrier to anyone planning to develop and support a browser with an alternative engine in the EU. ↫ Thomas Claburn at The Register If any normal person like you and I showed the same kind of blatant disregard for the law and authorities like Apple does in the EU, we’d be ruined by fines and possibly end up in jail. My only hope is that the European Commission goes through with its threats of massive fines of up to 10 or even 20 percent of worldwide turnover.
