John Voorhees, writing at MacStories:
Sotheby’s is auctioning the estate of renowned designer Karl Lagerfeld. The auction house, which is auctioning the estate’s assets in multiple lots includes several collections of classic iPods and custom iPods…
Just look at some of these things:
Sotheby’s posted this video to Instagram, highlighting the collection:
There’s a new employee on the severed floor. I wonder if the innie or the outie attended Trump’s inauguration earlier this week after helping pay for it.
Joanna Stern has written about this before, but in her email newsletter this week, she addresses the fact that Apple Intelligence continues to misgender her spouse:
Here’s a notification for you, Apple: There is no husband.
Despite what my iPhone’s frequent notification summaries report, my husband isn’t messy, he isn’t sad and he definitely didn’t take out the garbage—because, again, I don’t have one. Wife? Yes. Husband? No.
She goes on:
Apple’s “intelligent” notification summaries have been …uhhhhh… making things up as LLMs often do, and after repeated complaints from the likes of the BBC, Apple is changing how they work. Chance Miller has details:
Here are the changes included in iOS 18.3 for Apple Intelligence notification summaries:
- When you enable notification summaries, iOS 18.3 will make it clearer that the feature – like all Apple Intelligence features – is a beta.
- You can now disable notification summaries for an app directly from the Lock Screen or Notification Center by swiping, tapping “Options,” then choosing the “Turn Off Summaries” option.
- On the Lock Screen, notification summaries now use italicized text to better distinguish them from normal notifications.
- In the Settings app, Apple now warns users that notification summaries “may contain errors.”
The further we get into the Apple Intelligence Era, the more unhappy I am with the company’s whole approach to these features. These changes coming in iOS 18.3 should have been there from day one.
Apple TV+ is ringing in the New Year by offering an all-access pass to customers all around the world. Enjoy Apple TV+ for free the first weekend of 2025 (January 3 through January 5), Apple TV+ will be free on any device where Apple TV+ is available. All you need is an Apple ID to see what all the buzz is about.
Over the holidays, a lot of family members praised Apple TV+ when talking about media, and rightfully so. Apple TV+ has some really, really good shows and movies, and the hit rate is pretty high for me.
From the Apple TV+ Newsroom:
Following the acclaimed second season premiere of “Silo,” today Apple TV+ announced that the global hit, world-building drama has been renewed through season four. The fourth season of “Silo” will bring the series to its final, thrilling chapter, telling the complete story of Hugh Howey’s New York Times bestselling trilogy of dystopian novels. Starring and executive produced by Rebecca Ferguson, “Silo” season two is now streaming globally on Apple TV+, and new episodes premiere every Friday through January 17, 2025.
Graham Fraser at the BBC:
This week, the AI-powered summary falsely made it appear BBC News had published an article claiming Luigi Mangione, the man arrested following the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York, had shot himself. He has not.
A spokesperson from the BBC said the corporation had contacted Apple “to raise this concern and fix the problem”.
Apple declined to comment.
I used notification summaries during the beta of iOS 18.2, but ended up turning them off. I felt like I was reading everything twice, and saw summarization errors all over the place. None of them were as spicy as this Mangione example, thankfully.
iOS 18.2 is rolling out today, bringing the next wave of Apple Intelligence features with it.1
The splashiest feature is Image Playgrounds, which allows users to create images based on photos in their image libraries:
(Don’t look too closely at my hand in the image on the right.)
Apple’s system will not create realistic images, and is instead limited to two styles: “Animation” and “Illustration,” as you can see here:
Thomas Kleine Buening, Aadirupa Saha, Christos Dimitrakakis, Haifeng Xu, on Apple’s “Machine Learning Research” blog:
Motivated by the phenomenon of strategic agents gaming a recommendation system to maximize the number of times they are recommended to users, we study a strategic variant of the linear contextual bandit problem, where the arms strategically misreport privately observed contexts to the learner. % under strategic context manipulation. We treat the algorithm design problem as one of \emph{mechanism design} under uncertainty and propose the Optimistic Grim Trigger Mechanism (OptGTM) that minimizes regret while simultaneously incentivizing the agents to be approximately truthful. We show that OptGTM achieves sublinear regret despite the agents being unrestricted in their ability to game the learning algorithm by misreporting contexts. We then also show that failing to account for the strategic nature of the agents results in linear regret. However, a trade-off between incentive-compatibility and regret minimization is shown to be unavoidable. More broadly, this work provides insight into the intersection of online learning and mechanism design.
Andrew Liszewski, writing at The Verge, about a thing that should probably not be made:
Apple may have said goodbye to the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar last year, but a team of four engineers believes the concept deserves a second chance. They’ve created the Flexbar, which is essentially a standalone version of the MBP’s thin touchscreen display that can be used with multiple devices and platforms through a USB connection.
The Flexbar’s creators have started a new company, Eniac, which is attempting to bring the accessory to consumers through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. The earliest backers can preorder one discounted to $119 from the full MSRP of $179, with delivery expected as early as February 2025.
They have four standard models, from the base machine up through a pretty nice M4 Pro model. For years, we ran Relay’s live stream on a Mac mini hosted by MacStadium. If you need a Mac in the cloud, it’s the only way to go.
The addition of iPhone Mirroring in macOS Sequoia is my favorite addition to the Apple ecosystem in years.1
Here’s how Apple describes the feature:
With iPhone Mirroring, you can wirelessly interact with your iPhone and its apps and notifications from your Mac. Your iPhone stays locked, so no one else can access it or use it to see what you’re doing.
In short, this feature turns your iPhone into a window on your Mac, and it’s fantastic.
