Apple Archive

Behavioral health interventions are notoriously difficult. They require a grasp of psychology, sure, but they also require a certain amount of flexibility because people’s lives are complicated. Apple’s ham-handed approach to physical health has been bad enough — the idea it is now going to approach mental health does not fill me with confidence. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who won’t mind letting Apple toy with their emotions. But we’ve got a lot of evidence now that too much screen time is linked to bad health — and for Apple, its entire business is getting you to spend more time with its software and gadgets, not less. This is a great article, and highlights the problems that stem from tech bros trying to be doctors, or in this case, even psychologists and therapists. Health interventions require a personalised approach, and blanket one-size-fits-all attempts are generally suboptimal. A person with weight issues who happens to perform a physically intensive job will require a different approach than someone with similar weight issues who has a desk job. A generic “move!” on your Apple Watch a few times a day won’t really help either of those people. This gets even more problematic with mental health issues. A great example of just how counterintuitive health information can be comes from myself – I have a severe anxiety disorder and related mental ailments, and I’ve been trying to learn to live with it since I was a child (there’s probably a genetic element, since similar disorders run in my family). Through a combination of extensive behavioural, cognitive, and physical therapy, a lot of scientific studying with my doctor and other specialists into what, exactly, is wrong inside my brain and body to gain a crystal clear insight into how anxiety fluctuates in my body during the day and what internal and external stimuli affect it, and to cap it off a very small dose of daily anxiety medication (it took me almost two decades to come around to taking medication), I now have my mental health issues well under control. That being said, I will always have these problems. I manage them every day, and they’re never gone, like someone with chronic back problems, even if I seem completely “normal”. Passively and actively, throughout every day, I manage my anxiety, make sure I keep it in check, and recognise the earliest possible warning signs, all made just a little bit easier by my medication. When I emigrated to Sweden four years ago to live together with my now wife, we went to IKEA, about a 90 minute drive away on the border with Finland. Since trips like that generally increase my anxiety considerably, I had a few rough days leading up to it, but during the car ride, I finally managed to overcome it and settle down. As we parked, everything was back to my normal levels – a change in venue from e.g. car to destination often works as a “reset button” of sorts – and we were ready to shop and eat meatballs. And then my smartwatch pinged me in the IKEA lobby. Despite me feeling entirely normal with for me acceptable levels of anxiety, it started telling me I was experiencing the highest level of “stress”. Even though I did not feel any stress whatsoever, such a small thing can be enough to send me into a downward spiral of a panic attack – which I actually do not have very often, maybe once a year or so. Due to having just emigrated thousands of kilometers away to the Arctic, leaving family and friends behind, I was obviously already susceptible, and this stupid digital piece of crap on my wrist telling me I was “stressed” was all it took to trigger a massive panic attack. I’m used to always having a heightened level of anxiety and associated vitals compared to others, but this watch didn’t know that. It just had some basic data programmed in about what is “normal” for someone of my stature, gender, and age, and didn’t take my personal situation into account at all – because it couldn’t. There are countless little indicators, both internal and external, that come into play in a situation like this, and a smartwatch has no way of learning or disseminating such information. It takes a dumb, standardised, generalised shotgun approach in determining if its wearer is “stressed”, actual, real-world stress levels in the moment be damned. This is why I am incredibly weary of Apple”s rumoured plans to enter the realm of mental health with its Apple Watch. As the linked article details, it’s already not doing a great job at managing people’s physical health, and I am genuinely afraid of what effects such a crude approach will have on people’s mental health. Shotgun mental health notifications are going to make people obsessive, they’re going to give people anxiety, they’re going to give people panic attacks, they’re going to give people depressive episodes, they’re going to disturb people’s sleep, they’re going to worsen or even cause eating disorders, and much more. Mental health is not something you should leave to Silicon Valley tech bros – you should leave it to your doctor, trained medical personnel, licensed psychologists and therapists, other specialists, and science, not to a glorified wrist calculator.

If Apple had very quietly allowed sideloading a few years ago, that would have removed the antitrust threat – while the overwhelming majority of iPhone owners would have continued to get their apps from the App Store, just as they always have. The percentage of iPhone owners who will ever sideload an app is vanishingly small, so Apple has spent a lot of time and energy fighting a battle that is completely pointless Worse, by fighting the issue so loudly and for so long, Apple has actually given the issue way more publicity than it would ever have received otherwise. It has turned what would otherwise have been a boring technical detail covered only by the Apple press into a mass-media news story. Apple has effectively contributed to its portrayal as a bad guy, with zero benefit to the company. Right on the money – and I’m glad it has transpired this way. I doubt we’d ever have gotten this far without Apple continuously trying to stop it.

I ran into an odd out-of-memory problem the other day when attempting to debug an iOS app on device. The app consistently crashed shortly after launch, preventing me from investigating the bug. To unblock myself, I learned a lot about the iOS virtual memory implementation and journaled my findings (including a fix!) here. Nothing to add – exactly what it says on the tin.

The Verge: In other words, the impressive PSVR 2 hasn’t been as popular as Sony may have hoped, Meta Quest Pro sales barely scratch the surface of the Quest 2’s nearly 20 million units sold, and the ByteDance-owned Pico is struggling, too. There have already been some signs that high-end VR isn’t taking, especially Meta’s decision to cut the Quest Pro’s price from $1,500 to $1,000 just over four months after the product first launched. But given that Apple’s headset is rumored to cost around $3,000 — double the Quest Pro’s starting price — the iPhone maker could have a steep road ahead as it tries to get traction for its headset. I have my sincerest doubts about consumer VR/AR goggles, but at the same time – it’s generally not a good idea to bet against Apple.

Apple and its manufacturing partner Foxconn were among the companies behind a landmark liberalization of labor laws in the Indian state of Karnataka last month, according to three people familiar with the matter. Their successful lobbying for new legislation means two-shift production can take place in India, akin to the two companies’ practices in China, their primary manufacturing base. The law gives the southern state one of the most flexible working regimes in India as the country aims to become an alternative manufacturing base to China. “We do the right thing, even when it’s not easy.”

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you might remember back in 2012 when I changed the startup sound on my Power Mac G3 (Blue and White). That was a fun introduction to the Forth programming language. I had to reverse-engineer just enough of Apple’s firmware update script to understand what was going on. Recently, Aidan Halpin, a reader of this site, asked me if I could do the same kind of startup sound customization on his iMac. This particular iMac is officially known as the “iMac (Slot Loading)” and has a model identifier of PowerMac2,1. As you can guess from the name, it has a slot-loading CD-ROM drive unlike the original iMac that had a laptop-style tray-loading drive. By the way, Aidan’s iMac is special because it has a PowerPC G4 processor soldered onto the logic board instead of the original G3. He sent me Apple’s last firmware update for this model: iMac Firmware Update 4.1.9. I went to work looking at the update contents to see if I could figure out how to modify the chime the same way I did with my Power Mac G3. I thought it would be fun to take everyone along for a ride and show exactly what was involved in changing the sound. And of course, this post wouldn’t be complete without also sharing the code for the utility I created to inject the new chime into the firmware update file. This is an insane amount of work for something that doesn’t really matter in the end. I love it.

Has anyone ever heard of the Apple YACC, or YACCintosh? it was a 68010 prototype mac intended to do colour in 1986. Weirdly enough someone managed to find the ROMs *and* the PALS for it, but no schematics have turned up yet. All of the stuff is on bitsavers. I do not know what to add here. This seems to be one of the most obscure – if not the most obscure – Apple efforts out there, as there are virtually zero references of it online.

Happy 40th Birthday to Lisa! The Apple Lisa computer, that is. In celebration of this milestone, CHM has received permission from Apple to release the source code to the Lisa software, including its system and applications software. Access the code here. More of this please.

The Mac Pro is one of the few remaining Intel Macs with no Apple Silicon replacement ready to go, even though we’re a little past the two-year deadline that CEO Tim Cook originally set for the transition in summer 2020 (and to be fair, it has been a hard-to-predict couple of years). Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple continues to work on a new version of the Mac Pro, alongside other as-yet-unreplaced Intel Macs like the higher-end Mac mini and the 27-inch iMac, but that a planned “M2 Extreme” chip that would have powered the Apple Silicon Mac Pro has “likely” been canceled. Waiting for news in the face of uncertainty isn’t new to Mac Pro holdouts; it has been a constant for the last decade-plus. It has been a very long time since the Mac Pro was updated on anything close to a predictable cadence, especially if you don’t count partial refreshes like the 2012 Mac Pro tower or the addition of new GPU options to the 2019 model. And each of the last two updates—the “trash can” Mac Pro in 2013 and the reforged “cheese grater” version from 2019—have reflected a total shift in design and strategy. At this point, I’d like Apple to decide: either commit to a consistent strategy or vision for the Mac Pro and its place in the lineup or retire it. It sure has been a rough time for Mac Pro buyers. The reality of it is that desktop PCs – Apple or otherwise – just aren’t really all that popular anymore compared to laptops, and this probably doubly counts for the very high end. Selling Mac Pros by the thousands simply doesn’t make a whole lot of sense compared to the numbers Apple’s other computers are shipping at.

As part of a larger story about Apple’s plans to allow third-party app stores on the iPhone and iPad in EU countries, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman claimed that Apple is also considering removing its requirement for iPhone and iPad web browsers to use WebKit, the open source browser engine that powers Safari. Well, well, well. The EU might actually force Apple to turn iOS into a real operating system.

End-to-end encryption is coming to most of iCloud with a new optional feature called Advanced Data Protection, according to Apple’s announcement on Wednesday. Previously, 14 data categories within iCloud were protected. This new feature brings that count to 23, including photos, notes, voice memos, reminders, Safari bookmarks, and iCloud backups of the contents of your devices. Not everything is encrypted in this way, though. Critically, calendar and mail are untouched here. Apple says they are not covered “because of the need to interoperate with the global email, contacts, and calendar systems.” Good step, and something every cloud provider ought to be offering.

This is a problem for all of us. Most people who can afford one have bought their iPhone or iPad already. The programmers already have their MacBooks. And while everyone will need to buy replacements at some point, that’s a steady-state or at best low-growth business. When Apple says more, it means the Wall Street kind of “more”: a hockey stick of growth. Which means, Apple needs to find growth outside its usual business. And these days, that means: advertising. And online advertising requires: surveillance. And a surveillance-enabled ad business leads, inevitably, to deceiving customers. It’s already happening, and like the boiling frog (which is not actually how it works – the frog will definitely jump out if it’s being slowly boiled; the tiny detail not part of most retellings is that the researcher had removed the frogs’ brains), Apple users are slowly being prepped for slaughter.

Earlier this week, Apple released a document clarifying its terminology and policies around software upgrades and updates. Most of the information in the document isn’t new, but the company did provide one clarification about its update policy that it hadn’t made explicit before: Despite providing security updates for multiple versions of macOS and iOS at any given time, Apple says that only devices running the most recent major operating system versions should expect to be fully protected. I mean, this seems like typical for Apple, but the vagueness of it seems problematic. If I’m managing a large fleet of devices, I would definitely prefer the more detailed, structured, documented, and defined update and patching policies of professional Linux vendors or Microsoft.

It’s “release everything!” day for Apple – virtually every single Apple platform and operating system is getting updates today. Almost all device releases are point releases to address issues in the major versions released in September, with the exception being iPadOS 16, which was delayed and is accompanied today by macOS 13. Ars’ macOS review, is, of course, the definitive resource for this new macOS release. But it does feel like the software side of the Mac is lacking its own unique direction and identity lately. Overwhelmingly, new features for macOS merely help it keep pace with what is happening on the iPhone and iPad. That feels doubly true in Ventura, where a core system app has been rewritten from the ground up to mirror its iOS counterpart, where a new window management feature is being implemented in the same way on the iPad, and where new apps and updates to old ones are increasingly just iPad apps running inside macOS windows. The throughline for all these features is about making the Mac more welcoming and comfortable for people who come to it through one of Apple’s mobile platforms. This makes some sense. The Mac is Apple’s most powerful, extensible computing platform, both in hardware and software. It’s also the smallest. Maybe some of the first iPhone buyers were coming to it from the Mac, but the balance surely flipped years ago. But when was the last time that the Finder, the Dock, or the Menu Bar was given a substantial, non-cosmetic rethink? When did Apple last make major improvements to the way that windows coexist on a given screen? The Mac does get new under-the-hood features that are specific to it, but the headline features are mostly iOS and iPadOS imports, especially this year. You know where you can get the updates.