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This week’s Connected is a hectic one:

The boys are joined by Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge to talk about a rash of App Store rejections regarding the use of emoji. After that, discussion turns to HomePod reviews and the possibilities of watchOS 5.

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2018 will bring a bunch of new emoji, including a pirate flag! Emojipedia has posted some ideas on how these images may look. THAT LEG IS FREAKING ME OUT.

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SpaceX successfully launched its new Falcon Heavy vehicle. Built out of three Falcon 9s, its 27 engines are capable of 5 million pounds of thrust, putting 140,700 pounds of payload into space. That’s twice what United Launch Alliance’s Delta IV Heavy Booster can do, but still shy of the mighty Saturn V rocket that took men to the moon.

The payload of today’s launch has been the source of a lot of conversation. At the tip of the vehicle was a Tesla roadster, complete with a dummy in the driver’s seat, dressed in a SpaceX spacesuit. The car will orbit the sun roughly as far out as Mars, but isn’t going to orbit the Red Planet itself, as was previously rumored.

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Jeremy Burge had written up what seems to be an on-going change when it comes to iOS apps and how developers can use Apple’s emoji set:

It’s understandable there is much confusion about this right now, especially as the Apple Color Emoji font until now has been treated by many as a font like any other. If this is thought about as “a set of images created and owned by Apple”, the terms for what seems reasonable do shift.

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An unnamed writer, publishing as Instapaper on Tumblr: ¹

On January 28, 2008, Marco Arment announced a new side project called Instapaper. Ten years and billions of articles later, we’re thrilled to be helping our readers learn, research and experience the Internet removed from the typical distractions.

First, we want to thank all of our users. Whether you’ve been around since the Marco days, joined us when betaworks took over the development or signed up after our acquisition by Pinterest, thank you! We wouldn’t be anywhere without you, and we look forward to incorporating your requests into our 2018 updates.

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Early HomePod reviews are out. The TL;DR seems to be “It sounds great, you’re locked into Apple’s ecosystem and Siri isn’t great.”

None of that is surprising. Here are some highlights:

Nilay Patel, The Verge:

It feels like it was designed for a very demanding person to use while living alone entirely inside Apple’s ecosystem. It’s tied more closely to a single iPhone and iCloud account than any other smart speaker, and Siri has none of the capability or vibrancy of what’s happening with Alexa. Apple can try to move mountains by itself, or it can recognize that the HomePod is a little iOS computer for the home and let developers build on it as they have for so long and with such great success with the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

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This article comes with some fine text:

Important: Mention of third-party websites and products is for informational purposes only and constitutes neither an endorsement nor a recommendation. Apple assumes no responsibility with regard to the selection, performance or use of information or products found at third-party websites. Apple provides this only as a convenience to our users. Apple has not tested the information found on these sites and makes no representations regarding its accuracy or reliability. There are risks inherent in the use of any information or products found on the Internet, and Apple assumes no responsibility in this regard. Please understand that a third-party site is independent from Apple and that Apple has no control over the content on that website. Please contact the vendor for additional information.

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Dieter Bohn at The Verge got an exclusive look at Intel’s smart glasses project:

The most important parts of Intel’s new Vaunt smart glasses are the pieces that were left out.

There is no camera to creep people out, no button to push, no gesture area to swipe, no glowing LCD screen, no weird arm floating in front of the lens, no speaker, and no microphone (for now).

From the outside, the Vaunt glasses look just like eyeglasses. When you’re wearing them, you see a stream of information on what looks like a screen — but it’s actually being projected onto your retina.

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Last month, I shared a little bit about Operation Broken Silence, and about how I wanted to help them fund an 8th grade classroom in a school they sponsor in the Yida refugee camp in South Sudan.

We’ve already raised over $2,000 for the classroom, and as my brother writes, work is already being done with those funds:

Last update, we announced that this year we would be adding the final grade and classroom to the primary school in Yida. That process is now underway and, at the moment, it appears we are on schedule!

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Craig Hunter has put the 18-core iMac Pro through its paces:

So in summary, we see performance increases ranging from 27% to 79% for the 18-core iMac Pro when compared to the 10-core model. I suspect many computations and applictions will be in the middle of that range depending on how well they can take advantage of multiple cores, but there will certainly be some hot rod uses that get closer to that 79% end of the scale (and may do even better). Though I haven’t mentioned it, if you look back through the various benchmark results, you’ll see that the 18-core iMac Pro shows no disadvantage for single-core performance, despite running at a lower clock speed (2.3GHz/4.3GHz) than the 10-core iMac Pro (3.0GHz/4.5GHz).

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Apple:

Apple has determined that a small percentage of iPhone 7 devices may show “No Service” in the status bar (even if cellular coverage is available), due to a component that has failed on the main logic board.

These affected units were manufactured between September 2016 and February 2018 and sold in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macao, and the U.S.

If your device exhibits the symptom described above, Apple will repair your device, free of charge. Your iPhone will be examined prior to any service to verify that it is eligible for this program. This program only applies to iPhone 7.

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Apple just posted its largest quarter ever, booking $88.3 in revenue:

“We’re thrilled to report the biggest quarter in Apple’s history, with broad-based growth that included the highest revenue ever from a new iPhone lineup. iPhone X surpassed our expectations and has been our top-selling iPhone every week since it shipped in November,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’ve also achieved a significant milestone with our active installed base of devices reaching 1.3 billion in January. That’s an increase of 30 percent in just two years, which is a testament to the popularity of our products and the loyalty and satisfaction of our customers.”

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