Apple Archive

At that same WWDC Apple announced Time Machine, a product that would record file system versions through time for backup and recovery. How were they doing this? We were energized by the idea that there might be another piece of adopted Solaris technology. When we launched Solaris 10, DTrace shared the marquee with ZFS, a new filesystem that was to become the standard against which other filesystems are compared. Key among the many features of ZFS were snapshots that made it simple to capture the state of a filesystem, send the changes around, recover data, etc. Time Machine looked for all the world like a GUI on ZFS (indeed the GUI that we had imagined but knew to be well beyond the capabilities of Sun).

Of course Time Machine had nothing to do with ZFS. After the keynote we rushed to an Apple engineer we knew. With shame in his voice he admitted that it was really just a bunch of hard links to directories. For those who don’t know a symlink from a symtab this is the moral equivalent of using newspaper as insulation: it's fine until the completely anticipated calamity destroys everything you hold dear.

So there was no ZFS in Mac OS X, at least not yet.

Apple's new Watch software, watchOS 3, isn't just new software, it's an admission that Apple had it all wrong when it came to interactions on the first-generation Apple Watch. It's less of a revamp and more of a rescue of the Watch, an attempt to deconstruct the old software and to focus on the stuff that people actually care about.

Apple's annual conference for developers, which kicks off next Monday, is normally when the company previews its newest software for iOS and Mac OS X. But this year's WWDC isn't just about new operating systems: starting next week and continuing throughout the fall, Apple will begin rolling out new incentives for developers in its App Store, including a new revenue-share model and the introduction of search ads in its iOS App Store.

In a rare pre-WWDC sit-down interview with The Verge, Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said that Apple would soon alter its revenue-sharing model for apps. While the well-known 70/30 split will remain, developers who are able to maintain a subscription with a customer longer than a year will see Apple's cut drop down to 15 percent. The option to sell subscriptions will also be available to all developers instead of just a few kinds of apps. "Now we're going to open up to all categories," Schiller says, "and that includes games, which is a huge category."

Users choose platforms for various reasons, but once they’ve chosen a platform, they deserve consistency.

Take something like application settings. In Outlook, tap the settings icon in the bottom bar. In Alien Blue, tap the blue dot in the top right, then settings. In Tweetbot, tap your account picture (!?), then settings. In the Wikipedia application, tap the W logo, then "More..." (!?). For many cross-platform applications that are also available on Android, tap the hamburger, then find something that sounds like settings. For Apple's own applications, close the application (I wish I was joking), open iOS' Settings application, scroll down for days, figure out in which unnamed grouping it belongs, then tap its name.

So it goes for settings, so it goes for many other things. Navigating between main parts of the user interface of an application is sometimes done via a tab bar at the bottom, sometimes it's done via a full-screen root-level list menu, sometimes it's done with a slide-in drawer, sometimes there's a tab bar at the top. Sometimes you can swipe between tabs, sometimes you can't. Animations for identical actions often differ from application to application (e.g. closing an image in iMessage vs. closing it in TweetBot).

It goes deeper than that, though. The official Twitter application, as well as Apple's own compose tweet dialog, for instance, replace the enter key on the iOS keyboard with a pound sign, hiding the enter key in the numbers panel. Why is this even allowed in the first place? Or, even more infuriating: the "switch between keyboards button" (the globe) is actually in a different place on the Emoji keyboard compared to regular language keyboards. So when I'm cycling between my keyboards - which I do a million times a day - from English to Dutch, the process comes to a grinding halt because of the Emoji keyboard.

Interactions with a smartphone tend to be quick, focused, and often involve cycling through a number of applications very quickly. Unlike desktops or laptops, we tend to not use the same application for long periods of time, but instead quickly jump in and out of a number of applications, and then put the phone back in our pocket. Given this usage pattern, the less you have to think about where stuff is and how to do a thing, the more fluid and pleasant your workflow will be.

Don't say they didn't warn you. Apple posted a year-over-year decline in revenue today, the first time the company's failed to grow its business in 13 years. It brought in $50.6 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2016, and $10.5 billion in profits. That compares with $58 billion in revenue and $13.6 billion in profits during this period last year, a drop of 13 percent for the revenue.

Apple isn't doing badly, it is still one of the most valuable and profitable companies in the world. But it hasn't found a new blockbuster product to pick up the slack as iPhone sales have slowed in many parts of the globe.

To emphasize this point, Apple shared a great statistic: their average users unlocks their phones 80 times a day. Other reports state people look at their phones upwards of 130 times a day but those are less of the average and more the heavier users. Regardless, the simple act of logging into our phone via a secure form of login like passcodes or fingerprints is now taken for granted in much of Apple's ecosystem when, just a few years ago, anyone could have stolen my phone and have access to my personal information. Here again, Apple shared that 89% of their users with a Touch ID-capable device have set it up and use it.

Apple has added two new keys labeled "isFirstParty" and "isFirstPartyHideableApp" in iTunes metadata. These two new values started showing up a few weeks ago on every app in the App Store. The iTunes metadata is where all the information about an app is stored. It shows things like the date it was released, the App Store category it's in, its size, etc. The new keys suggest the ability to remove apps such as Stocks, Compass, and Voice Messages is coming very soon.

In 2016 Apple has become a very different kind of company - the most valuable company in the world, it so happens. Over the past 40 years, Apple has gone from a struggling upstart challenging IBM and Microsoft to being a dominant platform vendor. A company founded by two friends who bonded over a love of hacking the long-distance phone network has become a major economic gatekeeper engaged in historic policy fights with the government. It is a remarkable, improbable success story.

As a major update to the iOS 9 operating system, iOS 9.3 introduces several new functions, important bug fixes, and feature refinements. Perhaps the biggest change is the introduction of Night Shift mode, designed to reduce the amount of blue light iOS users are exposed to in the evening by shifting the iPhone or iPad display to a warmer (yellower) color spectrum.

What's inside a counterfeit Macbook charger? After my Macbook charger teardown, a reader sent me a charger he suspected was counterfeit. From the outside, this charger is almost a perfect match for an Apple charger, but disassembling the charger shows that it is very different on the inside. It has a much simpler design that lacks quality features of the genuine charger, and has major safety defects.

This past December, Kaneko emailed me out of the blue. He didn't know it then, but I'm a fan of the company's apps: Fragment, which applies prismatic effects to photos, is one of my favorite artistic tools. "As an independent bootstrapped app company, we are struggling," Kaneko wrote. "If things don't turn around, we'll need to lay off half of our staff in the next few months." He invited me to come to San Diego and observe the struggle up close. Kaneko would open up Pixite's books and share every piece of data that I requested while, over the course of two days, his team locked itself in a room and attempted to chart a path forward. Pixite would either figure it out or die.

What follows is an unordered list of things I'd like to see from Apple over the next few years, starting with the easy & obvious things upfront. Most of these have Radars filed against them, but since they're more often than not dupes of existing Radars I won't post the numbers here. Most of this is about iOS, but not all - I'll say upfront that I don't think OS X has a future with the way it's going currently, and has been running on fumes for most of iOS' lifetime.

Earlier today, a federal judge ordered Apple to comply with the FBI's request for technical assistance in the recovery of the San Bernadino gunmen's iPhone 5C. Since then, many have argued whether these requests from the FBI are technically feasible given the support for strong encryption on iOS devices. Based on my initial reading of the request and my knowledge of the iOS platform, I believe all of the FBI's requests are technically feasible.

The judge ruled Tuesday that the Cupertino-based company had to provide "reasonable technical assistance" to the government in recovering data from the iPhone 5c, including bypassing the auto-erase function and allowing investigators to submit an unlimited number of passwords in their attempts to unlock the phone. Apple has five days to respond to the court if it believes that compliance would be "unreasonably burdensome."

We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them. But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.

Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software - which does not exist today - would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone's physical possession.

The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.