512 Pixels

Yours truly on iMore, writing about the Apple Watch with LTE:

Leave your silly phone behind, it whispers, and it’ll just be you and me. For basic connectivity, it does the bill: My spouse can call me if something comes up, and my business partner can send me an iMessage if he needs anything. I can take a call or reply with Siri quickly and easily, all while I take a quick break from filling my rings. If I am involved in an accident or need help, I can get in touch with anyone in my Contacts list with ease.

But living that Watch-only lifestyle with the iPhone behind me isn’t quite as easy as I had hoped it would be.

Matheus Mariano found a nasty High Sierra bug: the system dialog box to unlock an encrypted APFS container exposed the password for that container in the hint field.

As plaintext.

Whoops.

Mariano alerted Apple, and the company has replied with details on how to make sure your data is secure. According to Rene Ritchie, Apple is pushing a supplemental update to High Sierra to fix the dialog box and close the security issue, a little over a week since Mariano’s post went up.

It’s one to install as soon as it hits the Mac App Store today.

Tom Warren at The Verge:

IBM’s first ThinkPad debuted exactly 25 years ago today, with a bright red TrackPoint nub and a classic design that still exists in a modern form. Lenovo, the company that bought ThinkPad from IBM, is celebrating the laptop’s 25th anniversary today with a special anniversary edition of the ThinkPad. Even if every ThinkPad looks retro, this is a particularly retro version of the ThinkPad design based on the current ThinkPad T470 model.

I’ve long said that if I were to switch to Windows, I’d run it on a Thinkpad. If I was buying a PC laptop today, it would be this one.

You can pick one up for $1,899 from Lenovo.

The new $199 smart speaker ships with Alexa support out of the box, but Google Assistant and AirPlay 2 are coming in 2018.

Sonos has long been praised for the sound quality of their speakers, but before this, that experience was locked away in the Sonos app. If your streaming service (or favorite podcast network) wasn’t in the app, it was very difficult to get that audio to play on your fancy speaker.

With the new One, Sonos is flinging open the doors. By embracing competing services from Amazon and Google — while adding streaming support from iOS devices — Sonos is making it easy to stream just about anything to its speaker. If a service requires deeper access, there is still the company’s invite-only developer program.

I’m glad to see Sonos fighting to stay relevant as our speakers become assistants, but I can’t help but think this is may be a too-little, too-late situation for Sonos. I’m sure even the updated Echo doesn’t sound as good as the Sonos One, but I bet it sounds good enough for most consumers. I know I would prefer to run Alexa or Google Assistant on first-party hardware, not on hardware that is dependent on software and contracts.

The update fixes that nasty Wi-Fi bug:

watchOS 4.0.1 fixes issues that in rare cases were causing Apple Watch to join unauthenticated (captive) Wi-Fi networks, such as those found in public places like coffee shops and hotels, which direct the user to a web page before the network can be accessed.

I caught my watch trying to connect to one of these networks just the other day. I hope this takes care of things.

This week on Query, we talk about some cool AR apps, migrating Health.app data and my recent Apple Watch misadventures.

This week on Connected:

Federico makes a confession, the trio considers how Apple could improve Do Not Disturb and then Myke forgets how Round Robins work.

My thanks to our sponsors for this episode:

• Balance: Find out more about Balance Open and get $2 in Ethereum.
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• FlightLogger: Real-time flight tracking for worry-free travel.

David Sparks and Brett Terpstra are back with a new project:

60 Mac Tips, Volume 2, is a collection of tricks and tips to make you more efficient on your Mac. There are 60 screencasts and two hours of video that explains why each tip or trick is special and how to use it on your Mac. Learn these tips and turn yourself into a Mac power user.

Among these 60 screencasts are tips on macOS, Siri for the Mac, using the keyboard, Spotlight, Automator, Safari, Mail, Apple Notes, Apple Photos, Terminal Tips, and third-party apps. After reading and watching these tips and tricks, you’ll be more efficient on your Mac than ever.

David and Brett are two of the smartest guys around when it comes to this. Go check it out.

If you own one of these 4K or 5K displays, this seems like a nice update to the software that makes it integrate with the Mac so well.

In the excellent Monday Note:

Acquiring Sony would give Apple a huge competitive advantage: access to the most advanced [camera] chips of the industry, ahead of its smartphone competitors. Given the camera’s importance to the iPhone, this is a strong competitive argument against Samsung’s Galaxy or Google’s Pixel.

And:

A brand new Apple Pictures Entertainment built on SPE would make Apple one of the Big Six Hollywood studios, with a market share nearly at par with 20th Century Fox (both stood in the 10 percent range over the recent years). No doubt that, with the iTunes store, Apple TV, iPad and iPhone, an Apple-Sony Studios would thrive.

And:

Sony’s Playstation dominates the game console sector with a market share of 57 percent and about $20B in sales. PS4’s sales are twice that of Microsoft’s Xbox and four times Nintendo’s Wii.

I find it hard to argue with this. I don’t think it will happen, but the pieces are all here.

Balance is a powerful menubar app for your money built by a team from Apple, Stripe and Ethereum. It was featured in the U.S. Mac App Store when it launched in February.

Securely connect to your accounts

Balance uses Plaid.com, the best API for securely accessing your financial data. It gives the app a read-only token to access your account history.

Quickly check your balances

With one click or keyboard shortcut you can pop open Balance and check all of your accounts. Lock the app with a password or TouchID.

Speedily search through your transactions

As a native app with local data storage, Balance is super fast. Quickly search through all of your downloaded transactions with powerful filters.

Powerful notification engine

Balance is Hazel for money. You can create rules to trigger useful notifications to help you stay on top of your finances.

One subscription, coming to all of Apple’s platforms

The basic plan starts at $4.99 / month. Balance is launching on iOS and watchOS later this year, and is also building a full windowed app for macOS. Early customers will get access to betas for all of these.

Check out Balance on the U.S. Mac App Store today. International support is planned for later this year.

I was exchanging emails with a reader about the lack of meaningful Touch Bar improvements in High Sierra over the weekend, and this morning, saw this on Twitter from Michael Lopp:

High Sierra fixes for MacBook Pro Touch Bar appear to be zero. Please tell me I am mistaken.

— rands (@rands) October 2, 2017

I don’t have any major problems with the Touch Bar on my MacBook Pro; I just don’t find it all that useful. I type too quickly for the Quick Type to keep up in a helpful manner, and many apps I use don’t offer much in custom shortcuts. In apps that do, I am so hardwired into keyboard shortcuts, I can’t be bothered to move my hands from the keyboard to tap a glowing button.

It’s not all bad, mind you. I love the emoji picker, and I think for users who aren’t use to keyboard shortcuts, the Touch Bar is a big win. But as a pro Mac user using a pro Mac notebook, I find a bit underwhelming.

I — like most users — love Touch ID on the Mac. It’s fast, widely supported by the operating system, and of course, by apps like 1Password. There’s no evidence to support that Apple would ship Touch ID without the the Touch Bar, as both technologies rely on the tiny Apple Watch-like computer (complete with Secure Enclave) buried inside my laptop. That’s a bummer, as I think biometric login is the future.

Of course, if Face ID is coming to Macs at some point, the need for Touch ID will diminish. As I outlined in that post, there is evidence that the iMac Pro could be the first iMac to ship with Face ID, but it doesn’t come with a Touch Bar on its custom space gray keyboard. Once Touch ID is gone, will the Touch Bar go with it?

Backing away from the Touch Bar would be a bitter pill for Apple to swallow, but every hardware release where it stays contained to the MacBook Pro, I can’t help but wonder. High Sierra’s lack of major update to how the system and apps can use it makes me wonder even more. Is the Touch Bar going to end up just a weird blip?