Federico’s iOS 11 review is done. Stephen has an announcement. Myke makes a confession about his Apple TV remote.
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Federico Vitcci has done it again:
With iOS 11, Apple’s iPad vision feels resolute again. Multitasking is blending with multitouch, giving drag and drop a new purpose; the Mac’s best features – from file management to the dock – have been rethought, simplified, and extended specifically for iOS. The iPad’s mission is to reimagine the very concept of a portable computer by empowering a new generation of users to do their best work wherever they are, whenever they want.
If anything, iOS 9 was merely the iPad’s overture.
The iPad, however, is only one part of the broader iOS story, which has been – and most likely always will be – characterized by the iPhone’s evolution and impact on our society.
Federico writes the definitive iOS review every year. He knows the platform better than anyone, as he uses it every day to run his company. It was a real treat to watch this review take shape, and I know you’re going to love it.
I’m going to be one of those people for a minute.
This Steve Jobs quote comes to mind for me every once in a while:
Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.
That line is from his famous commencement speech at Stanford back in 2005. The context is about being kicked out of Apple in the 1980s, but I think it is applicable to any moment that causes us unexpected pain.
It’s September, and each September, I reflect on the moment life hit me with a big fucking brick. It was May 8, 2009. I’d like to share with you the text of an email I wrote to our family and some friends that night:
I never thought I’d be the one to write a mass email like this. People you don’t know write emails like this. People your mother-in-law works with; those people write emails like this.
Needless to say, I’m shocked. But here we are.
Doctors have found a “significant” tumor on the interior of the right side of Josiah’s brain via a CT scan this afternoon. They are unsure what the tumor is at this point in time. The tumor is blocking the drainage system built into the brain, meaning that cranial fluid can’t escape. It also has affected the left side of his body - his vision, his fine motor skills (grasping items, etc) and his development (turning over on his own, etc.)
Thankfully, he isn’t suffering. He’s still his same old goofy self.
Tomorrow at 8, Josiah will be put under and an MRI will be taken for the doctors to get a better picture of what’s going on.
Surgery is scheduled for sometime Monday to remove the tumor. We should know what type of tumor it is after the surgery. They haven’t ruled anything out - it could be a simple, benign growth or cancer. We just don’t know at this point in time.
We will be here at Le Bonheur downtown for now. If it’s cancer, they’ll transfer us to St. Jude more than likely.
That last paragraph’s conjecture turned out to be exactly right, and we’ve been part of the St. Jude family ever since.
It would be lying to tell you that I never lost faith over this. I spent plenty of time angry and depressed, unwilling and unable to address what was going on, both with Josiah’s health and my own. Things I once held dear I let go of, and in some ways, am still finding my way back to them today.
A cancer diagnosis is perhaps the biggest brick most people will ever be hit with. I can’t imagine dealing with it — and the costs — without St. Jude. They treat patients from all over the world, without regard to their ability to pay. That simple statement means that we can focus on our son, not the crushing weight of his near-decade of care. It’s something that deserves the actual definition of the word amazing, and it’s something you can be a part of by supporting St. Jude today.
Lance Ulanoff at Mashable sat down with Phil Schiller and Johny Srouji to discuss Apple’s new chip that powers the iPhone 8 and iPhone X. It’s a great read, and shows just how far in advance the company is working to ship products like these new phones.
I remember this happening to a family member’s Mac in 2009:
Your Mac may start up to a gray screen after upgrading from Mac OS X v10.5 to Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard. This may occur if a previous Mac OS X v10.5 software update had been downloaded using Software Update, but not completely installed, before installing Snow Leopard.
Launched in 1997, Cassini has spent a whopping 20 years in space, lasting through two mission extensions while going above and beyond what it was designed to do. But tomorrow, the probe will dive into Saturn’s atmosphere, where it will break apart and cease operating. It’s a sad time for the scientists who have worked on this mission for years, but also a triumphant one: Cassini leaves an impressive legacy of scientific discovery in its wake.
Cassini has given us loads of information we’d never have otherwise, including the promise of life.
This fortnight on Ungeniused, my podcast on which Myke Hurley and I dive into weird topics we find on Wikipedia:
A numbers station is a shortwave radio station characterized by broadcasts of formatted numbers, which are believed to be addressed to intelligence officers operating in foreign countries.
I like that SpaceX can poke fun of itself:
That landing leg collapse in January 2016 is perhaps the saddest of the failures.
Apple PR, in a quote to David Pogue:
People were handling the device for stage demo ahead of time and didn’t realize Face ID was trying to authenticate their face. After failing a number of times, because they weren’t Craig, the iPhone did what it was designed to do, which was to require his passcode.
Live from Cupertino, Serenity calls in to answer the biggest questions from Apple’s iPhone X keynote.
A day after Apple’s event, the boys come up for air long enough to talk about the most recent firmware leak, the dedication of Steve Jobs Theatre, the iPhone 8 — of course — the iPhone X.
We were so worked up over new phones and leaks, we didn’t even get to the Apple Watch and Apple TV. STAY TUNED.
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Face ID is made possible by a whole range of technology that Apple packed into the notch that defines the look of the iPhone X:
Face ID, like Touch ID before it, stores its information in the device’s Secure Enclave. It is never synced to iCloud servers or included in iOS backups.
Until last year, Touch ID was an iOS-only affair, but that changed with the Touch Bar, which brought a Touch ID sensor to the Mac for the first time.
The Touch Bar is driven by an Apple Watch-like system on a chip which includes the required Secure Enclave.
Almost a year later, Touch ID is still only available on MacBook Pro models with the Touch Bar. It’s not on the MacBook, and hasn’t made an appearance on the external Magic Keyboard.
In June, Apple unveiled the forthcoming iMac Pro. Surprisingly, its custom (and super sexy) Space Gray keyboard does not have a Touch Bar.
However, according to Pike Ralpha, the iMac Pro does include the Secure Enclave:
I piled through the firmware/rubble from the new iMac Pro – to be released in December – and it appears to be coming with a Security Enclave Processor (SEP). You know. Like the one that was added to the MacBook Pro’s with Touch Bar and Touch ID, but this time to (also?) support a new feature called Apple SecureBoot (for the SEP only?).
This post caught my attention when it was published back in June, but I think it could make a lot more sense in light of the iPhone X.
Could the iMac Pro be the first Mac to ship with Face ID?
There’s plenty of room in the bezel above the iMac Pro’s screen for the needed sensors and other hardware. In fact, the iMac Pro will ship with a 1080p FaceTime camera, while the regular iMac ships with a 720p module. Apple engineers need far more than an iSight camera to pull this off, but if they’ve upgraded the camera, maybe they’ve done other work behind that black cover glass.
(Don’t forget, Apple is building a display to go with the next Mac Pro, as well…)
That said, I’m not sure Face ID could come to the MacBooks and MacBook Pros any time soon. There is plenty of room above the screen, but those lids are really thin. I doubt Apple could squeeze all the needed hardware in there quite yet.
I think it’d be amazing to sit down at my Mac and have it log in to my user account automatically. I love Touch ID on my MacBook Pro; it has already made entering a password on my iMac feel old-fashioned. However, now even it feels a little dated in our iPhone X world.
I think a lot of people want Touch ID on the Mac without the Touch Bar. Face ID could deliver the same benefits without the baggage of the Touch Bar. I, for one, would love to see biometric authentication come to Macs without it.