512 Pixels

After rolling out the new label on some Android phones, it looks like the iPhone is next in line. Here’s Juli Clover at MacRumors:

Devices in certain areas are displaying a “5G E” icon instead of LTE, but as the “E” suggests, this is not real 5G. No iPhone that exists right now is capable of connecting to a 5G network, nor is AT&T’s network 5G at this time.

The “E” stands for Evolution, a new brand name AT&T is using for some parts of its LTE network. According to AT&T, 5G Evolution reaches a peak theoretical wireless speed of 400Mb/s, which does not match 5G data transfer speeds and is in fact the same as traditional LTE speeds.

AT&T claims that this a step on the road to 5G, but to be clear, it’s just a sticker on top of the same LTE we’ve all been using for a while.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Here’s a bit from a 2012 article on Macworld, written by Lex Friedman:

The 4G label in iOS 5.1 instead reflects AT&T’s perspective, namely that the carrier’s HSPA+ network (also known as Evolved High-Speed Packet Access) qualifies as 4G technology. Carriers tend to refer to both HSPA+ and LTE—the cellular network technology built into the new iPad—as 4G, though the inner workings of the technologies are vastly different.

Thus, because the iPhone 4S on AT&T’s 3G network can achieve what both Apple and the carrier describe as 4G-style speeds, the status bar now shows the 4G label whenever you’re connected to AT&T’s HSPA+ network. Again, though, your iPhone 4S isn’t any faster than it was last week; this label change falls somewhere between semantics and marketing.

Sigh.

Don’t miss Austin Evans’ recent video on this:

Hamza Shaban at The Washington Post, writing about a study that looked at the effects of leaving Facebook:

In the latest study measuring the effects of social media on a person’s life, researchers at New York University and Stanford University found that deactivating Facebook for just four weeks could alter people’s behavior and state of mind. The study found that temporarily quitting Facebook led people to spend more time offline, watching TV and socializing with family and friends; reduced their knowledge of current events and polarization of policy views; and provoked a small but significant improvement in people’s self-reported happiness and satisfaction with their lives.

What’s more, the researchers found that the deactivation freed up on average an hour per day for participants. And the people who took a break from Facebook continued to use the platform less often, even after the experiment ended.

I left the site last year, and while I do feel disconnected from some people I used to only keep tabs on via Facebook, in reality, most of those weren’t real friendships anyway. It’s more work to stay connected without it, but I do feel better without Facebook in my life.

That’s not to say I’ve left it all behind. I do have an active Instagram account that I quite enjoy. Instagram feels like one of the few public places left on the web that hasn’t been completely ruined yet, but I know its days are probably numbered.

Of course, many find Instagram to be depressing. If you follow a bunch of fancy traveling influencers, it make your life seem dull. The trick is not to do that.

This week, we have a fun one:

Current Mac notebook computers and Apple wired and wireless keyboards (except Magic Keyboard) have Liquid Contact Indicators (LCI) to help determine if these products have been exposed to liquid.

Benefits under the manufacturer’s warranty are in addition to rights provided by consumer law. You can learn more at Apple Products and Consumer Law Rights.

This week on Mac Power Users:

Christina Warren, tech commentator, podcaster and Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft drops by to talk about using a Mac at work, the state of PowerPoint and how to get the most out of tech when traveling the world.

Christina is the best, and it was great to hear about what she’s up to these days.

My thanks to our sponsors:

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1992 Apple was … different.

Apple, in a statement to Joe Rossignol at MacRumors:

We have fixed the Group FaceTime security bug on Apple’s servers and we will issue a software update to re-enable the feature for users next week. We thank the Thompson family for reporting the bug. We sincerely apologize to our customers who were affected and all who were concerned about this security issue. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we complete this process.

We want to assure our customers that as soon as our engineering team became aware of the details necessary to reproduce the bug, they quickly disabled Group FaceTime and began work on the fix. We are committed to improving the process by which we receive and escalate these reports, in order to get them to the right people as fast as possible. We take the security of our products extremely seriously and we are committed to continuing to earn the trust Apple customers place in us.

Apparently, after the update comes out next week, older versions will be blacklisted from using Group FaceTime. That’s the right call.

This week on Connected, a couple of topics that are real bummers, and my very shiny blue iPhone:

Apple and Facebook try to outdo each other in who can have the more terrible week, and Stephen test drives the iPhone XR.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• Luna Display: The only hardware solution that turns your iPad into a wireless display for your Mac. Use promo code CONNECTED at checkout for 10% off.
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Apple Support with a question and answer for the ages:

We have just set up a firewall on our network. Now I can’t access our Filemaker Pro Server over TCP/IP. In order to gain access to the server over TCP/IP, our network administrator needs to know what “port” the Filemaker Pro Server uses. Can you tell me what TCP/IP port number is used by the FileMaker Pro Server?

The Filemaker Pro Server, uses the TCP/IP port number of 5003.

Apple:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2019 first quarter ended December 29, 2018. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $84.3 billion, a decline of 5 percent from the year-ago quarter, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $4.18, up 7.5 percent. International sales accounted for 62 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Revenue from iPhone declined 15 percent from the prior year, while total revenue from all other products and services grew 19 percent. Services revenue reached an all-time high of $10.9 billion, up 19 percent over the prior year. Revenue from Mac and Wearables, Home and Accessories also reached all-time highs, growing 9 percent and 33 percent, respectively, and revenue from iPad grew 17 percent.

This makes the quarter Apple’s second-best ever, and the company now has 1.4 billion active devices in the world.

Don’t miss Jason’s chart mania and full transcript of the earnings call. John Voorhees at MacStories, with a reminder (emphasis mine) of the change to Apple’s results this time around:

In the year-ago quarter (Q1 2018), Apple earned $88.3 billion in revenue. During that quarter Apple sold 77.3 million iPhones, 13.2 million iPads, and 5.1 million Macs. As announced on Apple’s last earnings call, the company did not report Q1 2019 unit sales for any of its products.

In an interview with Reuters, Tim Cook said that prices in some markets will come down:

When you look at foreign currencies and then particularly those markets that weakened over the last year those (iPhone price) increases were obviously more. And so as we’ve gotten into January and assessed the macroeconomic condition in some of those markets we’ve decided to go back to more commensurate with what our local prices were a year ago in hopes of helping the sales in those areas.

The Six Colors boys make a good point:

Apple’s also rejiggered its categories a bit starting this quarter. “Other Products” is gone, replaced by “Wearables, Home and Accessories”. Which, this quarter, is pretty much as big a business as the Mac.

— Six Colors liveblog (@sixcolorsevent) January 29, 2019

This time on Liftoff:

Jason and Stephen mark NASA’s Day of Remembrance, discuss layoffs at two private space companies and wish for a mission to Uranus.

Space is busy.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• ExpressVPN: High-Speed, Secure & Anonymous VPN Service. Get 3 months free with a 1-year package.
• Casper: The Internet’s favorite mattress. Get $50 off select mattresses with the code ‘LIFTOFF’.

This time on Ungeniused, Myke and I talk about animals with fraudulent diplomas, and a cat who co-wrote a physics paper.

Between diploma mills and lazy physicists, some animals have a pretty impressive educational status.

This one kind of blew my mind.

My thanks to our sponsor this week, ExpressVPN. Get 3 months free with a 1-year package at that link.

There are a couple of really nasty Group FaceTime bugs that have surfaced online:

• 9to5Mac is reporting that FaceTime will play audio from a recipient’s phone, before the pick up or decline a call.
• The Verge has added that if a recipient rejects a FaceTime call by pressing the power or volume button on their phone, FaceTime will erroneously broadcast video as well.

These bugs are serious, and seeing as this version of FaceTime was delayed from iOS 12.0, it makes me wonder what other corners were cut to ship it.

Apple has made a statement to The Verge and others:

We’re aware of this issue and we have identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week.

Until then, I’m turning off FaceTime on all of my devices.

Update: Apple has taken group FaceTime offline.