There’s been a lot of talk and handwringing over the new MacBook Pro’s Thunderbolt 3 ports.
Here’s a bit from my rumor roundup post I published before the event:
I/O is important to professionals. Pros often have a lot of things plugged in, from hard drives to SD cards to external displays. I’m not in love with the idea of using adaptors for almost everything I need to plug in to a notebook.
With USB-C/Thunderbolt 3, Apple is leaving MagSafe behind.
That’s a real bummer. MagSafe was great, and when Jobs introduced it in 2006, people got as excited as anyone has even been about a charging port:
The idea was simple, but brilliant. Instead of a connector, Apple used magnets to attach the power cord to the notebook. When pulled, the cord would simply pop off, leaving the machine safe and sound on its surface.
This fortnight on Liftoff, Jason Snell and I talk about Elon Musk’s train to Mars.
Thanks to our sponsor this week:
macOS Sierra doesn’t ship with the AHOY TELEPHONE feature that allows users to start a conversation with Siri. I’m not sure why Apple didn’t include it, but there’s a clever way to fake it.
If you own a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 you should immediately stop using it and return it for a refund — all the major US carriers will exchange the phone, regardless of purchase date. We don’t know why Samsung hasn’t been more forthcoming about what’s going on with these replacement devices, but it doesn’t really matter. Until we get more information, the simplest explanation is the best one: The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 is a fundamentally defective product and it should be pulled from the market without delay.
Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.
This morning, anyone with a smartphone in the state of Tennessee got two back-to-back emergency alerts:
A photo posted by Stephen Hackett (@stephenmhackett) on Sep 1, 2016 at 7:39am PDT
The alerts were part of a statewide test:
“This year, in Tennessee and across the nation, natural and human-caused disasters have taken lives, destroyed homes and damaged roads and infrastructure,” said TEMA Director Patrick Sheehan. “While we live in some of the safest times in history, these fires, storms, flash-floods, heatwaves, tornadoes, accidents, and active shooter tragedies serve as reminders of the importance of being aware of the potential threats around us and to prepare ourselves and our loved ones. This statewide EAS test message will recognize National Preparedness Month and emphasize the importance of emergency preparedness.”
We moved at the beginning of the month, and I’ve taken over a spare bedroom in our new house as an office, so it was time to share some new photos of my workspace.
Kagi, long-time payment processor used by many Mac developers has closed:
For the past ten years Kagi has been struggling to recover from financial losses due to a supplier fraud situation. We have reduced the debt but the recovery has failed and forced us to close.
We are sorry we failed you.
Damn.
What happened to all those other big brands that dominated the early Internet experience? Here’s a nerdy remembrance of a few of them. (A TL;DR preview: Yahoo and AOL bought a bunch of them, though many survived far longer than you might think.)
Good times.
Jonathan Shieber at TechCrunch:
According to reports that are starting to trickle in, Yahoo’s board has accepted the terms of the Verizon offer we reported last week.
The core assets of the company that started life in Jerry Yang and David Filo’s 1994 Stanford dorm room as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” — and at one point was one of the highest valued properties on the internet — will now join another former high-flyer of the internet’s earliest days, Aol (full disclosure: the owner of TechCrunch), in the Verizon stable.
On the centennial episode of Connected, the crew covers #TicciMentee program applications, checks out Scrivener for iOS and considers iOS 10’s widgets and privacy features.
I’m super pumped to be linking to episode 100 of our podcast.
Myke, Federico and I put our first show out way back in June 2013. It had a different name then — and was on 5by5 — but ever since that first episode, making this podcast each week with two of my good friends has been a highlight in my work.