Apple Archive
Apple yesterday released iOS and iPadOS 17.3 as well as watchOS 10.3, tvOS 17.3, and macOS Sonoma 14.3 for all supported devices. iOS 17.3 primarily adds collaborative playlists in Apple Music, and what Apple calls “Stolen Device Protection.” Collaborative playlists have been on a bit of a journey; they were promised as part of iOS 17, then added in the beta of iOS 17.2, but removed before that update went live. Now they’re finally reaching all users. When enabled, Stolen Device Protection requires Face ID or Touch ID authentication “with no passcode fallback” for some sensitive actions on the phone. ↫ Samuel Axon at Ars Technica This last feature is something you should probably turn on right away, as it serves as a reply to Joanna Stern’s investigation into an apparently common way iPhones would get stolen to gain access to users’ Apple accounts.
Chinese authorities recently said they’re using an advanced encryption attack to de-anonymize users of AirDrop in an effort to crack down on citizens who use the Apple file-sharing feature to mass-distribute content that’s outlawed in that country. According to a 2022 report from The New York Times, activists have used AirDrop to distribute scathing critiques of the Communist Party of China to nearby iPhone users in subway trains and stations and other public venues. A document one protester sent in October of that year called General Secretary Xi Jinping a “despotic traitor.” A few months later, with the release of iOS 16.1.1, the AirDrop users in China found that the “everyone” configuration, the setting that makes files available to all other users nearby, automatically reset to the more contacts-only setting. Apple has yet to acknowledge the move. Critics continue to see it as a concession Apple CEO Tim Cook made to Chinese authorities. ↫ Dan Goodin at Ars Technica The most damning aspect of this story is that Apple has been aware of this vulnerability in AirDrop since 2019, and has not addressed it in any way. The use of AirDrop by dissidents in China to spread critique of the Chinese government has been well-known, so it’s not entirely unreasonable to conclude that Apple has been weary of closing this security vulnerability in order to not offend China – as further evidenced by the sudden changes to AirDrop as mentioned above. What’s going to be interesting now is what Apple is going to do about this. Are they going to finally address this security hole, and thereby risking offending China? Will it fix the hole, but only in non-totalitarian countries? Will it just leave it open? Whatever they do, they’ll end up offending someone.
Today, Apple pushed out the public releases of iOS 17.2, iPadOS 17.2, macOS Sonoma 14.2, watchOS 10.2, and tvOS 17.2. iOS 17.2 and iPadOS 17.2’s flagship feature is the new Journal app, which Apple teased when it first introduced iOS 17 earlier. The app mimics several existing popular journaling apps in the App Store from third-party developers but leverages data from your Photos, workouts, and other Apple apps to make journaling suggestions. Other features include the ability to tap a “catch-up arrow” to scroll to the first missed message in a conversation in Messages, the ability to take spatial video photos for later viewing on Vision Pro, and several tweaks and additions to the Weather app. ↫ Samuel Axon for Ars Technica Makers of journalling applications for iOS are not going to be in a good mood today, I reckon.
Evaluating the performance of CPUs with identical cores is relatively straightforward, and they’re easy to compare using single- and multi-core benchmarks. When there are two different types of core, one designed primarily for energy efficiency (E), the other for maximum performance (P), traditional benchmarks can readily mislead. Multi-core results are dominated by the ratio of P to E cores, and variable frequency confounds further. In this series of articles, I set out to disentangle these when comparing core performance between Apple’s original M1 Pro and its third-generation M3 Pro chips. This first article explains why and how I am investigating this, and shows overall results for performance and power use under a range of loads. Articles like these will help you make an informed decision about whether or not your workloads can benefit from moving from an M1/M2 to an M3.
After I wrote about the possibility of programmable Mac ROM SIMMs in Quadras a couple of months ago, I suspected that there had been a way for developers at Apple in the 68k Mac era to reflash the ROM in their Macs during development, just like BIOS updates on PCs. The reason I believed this is because the ROM SIMM socket in the Quadras brought out pins for 12V (VPP) and write enable (/WE). I had verified that the write enable pin was going into the memory controller chip in several Mac models, so I was pretty confident that in-system programming was possible. As luck would have it, multiple people pointed out to me that an Apple internal utility used for ROM flashing had been uploaded to the Macintosh Garden. It was recovered from a prototype PowerBook 520 purchased in 2020. Of course, I had to download this utility and figure out how it works. I honestly cannot believe it’s taken this long for such a tool to become available one way or the other. Classic Macs are incredibly popular in the retro community, and being able to reflash the ROMs like this is incredibly useful. It took some work and disassembly, but Doug Brown got it working.
If you read the initial reviews of Apple’s new M3-based Macs, you’d be forgiven for thinking little had changed in their CPU cores, apart from a rejigging of numbers and an increase in the maximum frequency of their P cores. As my MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Pro arrived three days early, this article presents a tentative first look at what has changed in their CPU cores, and from that, how you might choose the right chip for your next Apple silicon Mac. Like Apple, I’m going to make comparison between M1 and M3 chips, as in most respects discussed here, M2 CPU cores didn’t change as much from those in the M1, and I’ve had and tested four different M1 models. As the introduction suggests, there’s more here than many seem to think.
The European Union making tech better for everyone. We’ll have to wait and see if supporting RCS will be enough to prevent the EU from requiring Apple open up iMessage.
However, there was a secret weapon hidden in ANS AIX most of us at the time never knew about. Built-in to the operating system was a fully Unix-native AppleTalk stack and support for receiving and sending Apple Events, surfaced in the form of Apple’s disk administration tools and AppleShare. But Apple had a much more expansive vision for this feature: full server-client “symbiotic” applications that could do their number-crunching on the ANS and present the results on a desktop Mac. Using the Program-to-Program Communication Toolbox (“PPCToolbox”), and because AIX’s throughput far exceeded anything the classic Mac OS ever could ever handle, an ANS could augment a whole bunch of Macs at once that didn’t have to stop to do the work themselves. Well, today we’re going to write one of those “symbiotic” applications doing something this little Mystic Color Classic could never efficiently do itself — accessing and processing a JSON API over TLS 1.3 — and demonstrate not only how such an client application looked on the Mac side, but also how the server component worked on the AIX side. If you’re lucky enough to have an ANS running AIX too, you can even compile and run it yourself. But before we do that, it might be a little instructive to talk about how the Apple Network Server came to run AIX in the first place. I had no idea the ANS could do this. That’s an incredibly cool feature, and clearly fits in the whole “the network is the computer” idea that dominated the late ’90s.
Apple has been under pressure in the European Union as the Digital Markets Act antitrust legislation requires the company to allow users to sideload apps outside the App Store to increase competition. 9to5Mac has now found evidence in the iOS 17.2 beta code that the company is indeed moving towards enabling sideloading on iOS devices. The meat of the story here is not that Apple is going to allow sideloading – they were always going to if they want to keep operating in the EU/EEA – but that apparently, they intend to region-lock it to countries in the European Union and European Economic Area. This would mean that consumers in the US would, once again, not be able to benefit from consumer protection laws enacted in the EU.
Eight gigabytes has been the standard RAM load out on new MacBook Pros for the better part of a decade, and in 2023, Apple execs still believe it’s enough for customers. With the launch of Apple’s M3 MacBook Pros last month, a base 14-inch $1,599 model with an M3 chip still only gets you 8GB of unified DRAM that’s shared between the CPU, GPU, and neural network accelerator. In a show of Apple’s typical modesty this week, the tech giant’s veep of worldwide product marketing Bob Borchers has argued, in an interview with machine-learning engineer Lin YilYi, that the Arm-compatible, Apple-designed M-series silicon and software stack is so memory efficient that 8GB on a Mac may equal 16GB on a PC – so we therefore ought to be happy with it. Eight gigabyte of RAM in and of itself isn’t an issue, on a budget machine. Apple is selling incredibly expensive machines labelled as “pro” with a mere 8 GB, and charges €200 for another 8, which is highway robbery, plain and simple. I wonder how many people at Apple – at any level – use Macs with 8 GB of RAM. I have a feeling that number is quite low.
Bruce Lawson writes: This week, I’ve had the pleasure to read the post-modernist triumph that is CASES DMA.100013 Apple – online intermediation services – app stores, DMA.100025 Apple – operating systems and DMA.100027 Apple – web browsers (PDF), which details some of Apple’s attempts to avoid being regulated. I call it a “post-modernist triumph” because its prose is almost as incomprehensible as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and it is so full of preposterous lies and contradictions that it can only be sanely read as a metatextual joke like the Illuminatus! Trilogy. In order to avoid having Safari being deemed a Core Platform Service (and thus falling under the remit of DMA), Apple argues “Look, those Safaris on iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, TvOS, WatchOS are TOTALLY DIFFERENT PRODUCTS and none of them have enough users in the EU for you to even think about regulating us, alright? We’re a tiny start-up! Will nobody think of the children?!?”. (I paraphrase somewhat). Entirely unsurprisingly, Apple’s legal contortions did not work – the EU basically tossed this nonsense out right away, using Apple’s own marketing claims about Safari against them.
I was yet again spectacularly wrong in speculating that we had another eight months to wait before Apple would release the first Macs with M3 chips. Another few days and the first will be upon us, and the fortunate few will start bragging or moaning about their performance. That has suddenly grown more complex: the number of each CPU core type has diversified with the M3 Pro in particular. This article looks at some of the factors involved in comparing CPU performance across Apple’s expanded range of M-series chips. As Apple’s line-up of processors grows, it’s becoming harder to keep track of all the details. This article does a good job of highlighting some of the changes coming inside M3-based Macs.
Apple is releasing a slew of updates for its latest operating systems today, including iOS and iPadOS 17.1, macOS Sonoma 14.1, watchOS 10.1, and others. The company is also releasing security updates for a few previous-generation operating systems, so that people who aren’t ready to upgrade (and older devices that can’t upgrade) will still be protected from new exploits. If you have a bunch of Apple devices, it’s going to be a busy day. You might also want to take a look at your Apple subscriptions, because the company massively increased its prices across the board without advance notice.
A director from the White House announced that Apple plans to significantly expand access to device repairs for independent repair shops and consumers across the United States. The move is part of the Biden administration’s push for “right to repair” reforms. According to a statement by National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard (via Reuters), Apple will make parts, tools, and documentation needed for repairs available to independent repair shops and consumers nationwide. This will allow third-party technicians and do-it-yourselfers to fix Apple products at fair and reasonable prices quickly. There’s going to be a gotcha. With Apple, there always is.
The Verge reports: The New York Times reports that along with concerns about some of the guests booked to be on The Problem With Jon Stewart, Stewart’s intended discussions of artificial intelligence and China were a major concern for Apple. Though new episodes of the show were scheduled to begin shooting in just a few weeks, staffers learned today that production had been halted. According to The Hollywood Reporter, ahead of its decision to end The Problem, Apple approached Stewart directly and expressed its need for the host and his team to be “aligned” with the company’s views on topics discussed. Rather than falling in line when Apple threatened to cancel the show, Stewart reportedly decided to walk. Props to Stewart for telling Apple to shove it, but this once again highlights that Apple and Tim Cook are nothing but propaganda mouthpieces for the Chinese Communist Party.
But thanks to all those other cyberdogs, Apple’s own Cyberdog — a seemingly ordinary web browser and Internet suite with some unusual capabilities — has since slid into search engine obscurity. Apple had some big plans for it, though, and even wanted to give developers a way to develop their own components they could run inside of it. Not just plugins, either: we’re talking viewers, UI elements and even entire protocol handlers, implemented using Apple’s version of OpenDoc embedding. The Apple of the ’90s is a treasure trove of weird stuff and random nonsense that never made it anywhere, and I’m always here for it.
This month, more than three dozen victims allegedly terrorized by stalkers using Apple AirTags have joined a class-action lawsuit filed in a California court last December against Apple. They alleged in an amended complaint that, partly due to Apple’s negligence, AirTags have become “one of the most dangerous and frightening technologies employed by stalkers” because they can be easily, cheaply, and covertly used to determine “real-time location information to track victims.” Since the lawsuit was initially filed in 2022, plaintiffs have alleged that there has been an “explosion of reporting” showing that AirTags are frequently being used for stalking, including a spike in international AirTags stalking cases and more than 150 police reports in the US as of April 2022. More recently, there were 19 AirTags stalking cases in one US metropolitan area—Tulsa, Oklahoma—alone, the complaint said. “Consequences have been as severe as possible: multiple murders have occurred in which the murderer used an AirTag to track the victim,” their complaint alleged. One plaintiff from Indiana, LaPrecia Sanders, lost her son after his girlfriend allegedly used an AirTag to track his movements and then “followed him to a bar and ran him over with her car, killing him at the scene.” It’s almost as if selling cheap trackers and turning every iPhone into a tracking device was a terrible idea. If only the creators had talked to any woman, ever.
That second agent proved quite capable, not only agreeing that the situation was strange, but also looking into issues on Apple’s side. Which led to the somewhat bizarre conclusion of this story: after perhaps 20 minutes on the phone, he seemed to hit on something. I heard him laugh and say something along the lines of “that explains it” and then, with my consent, put me on hold. When he came back, he said—and I’m not exactly quoting, but close enough: “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you any more than this, but all your services should be back up pretty much exactly 12 hours after they went down.” Cloud computing is bizarre. Cloud computing at Apple – doubly so.
One aspect of the jailbreak scene that always seemed like black magic to me, though, was the process of jailbreaking itself. The prospect is pretty remarkable: take any off-the-shelf iPhone, then enact obscene rituals and recite eldritch incantations until the shackles drop away. The OS will now allow you to run any code you point at it, irrespective of whether the code has gone through Apple’s blessed signing process, paving the way for industrious tweak developers like myself. A few weeks ago, I got a hankering to remove this shroud of mystery from jailbreaks by writing my own. One caveat: the really juicy work here has been done by my forebears. I’m particularly indebted to p0sixninja and axi0mx, who have graciously shared their knowledge via open source. The fact this isn’t a switch to flip in iOS somewhere is idiotic and will soon come to an end thanks to the EU, but at least it enticed some very creative and gifted souls to learn and experiment.
It seems the new iPhone 15 Pro is having overheating issues, and while I normally don’t really care and don’t mention this sort of nonsense, I found Apple’s response to the issue… Peculiar. Furthermore, Apple tells 9to5Mac that recent updates to certain third-party apps are causing them to overload the system. The company says it’s working directly with those developers to fix the issues. According to Apple, some of the apps overloading the iPhone CPU and causing devices to overheat are Asphalt 9, Instagram, and Uber. Instagram issued a fix for the problem on September 27, Apple says. Apple designs and builds the SoC, the thermal system, the outer casing, the operating system, the APIs, and is the gatekeeper for every application that runs on an iPhone – and yet the company still blames third party developers? How is it even possible that any of these applications can cause unexpected overheating in the first place, and how, if the App Store review process is put in place to protect users, did nobody at Apple catch this during the review process? If they can’t even detect and stop applications that can physically damage your iPhone, how on earth can anyone trust them to stop malware, spyware, and other crapware? I can’t believe people still fall for this.
