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More Apple Retail Changes Coming⇢

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This time around, the changes are focused on how the stores interact with business customers:

Apple is planning another shakeup within its retail stores, according to a source who shared the company’s plans with MacRumors. At the end of April, Apple plans to eliminate certain retail positions, including Business Manager, Business Events Lead, Events Coordinator, and Events Lead.

Apple Store Leaders began informing affected employees about the change earlier this week, and many were caught off guard by the sudden sunsetting of specialized positions that have long existed at retail stores.

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Sold Out⇢

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T.C. Sottek at The Verge, writing on the recent move by Congress in which lawmakers gave ISPs the okay to sell customer data:

The only people who seem to want this are the people who are going to make lots of money from it. (Hint: they work for companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T.) Incidentally, these people and their companies routinely give lots of money to members of Congress.

So here is a list of the lawmakers who voted to betray you, and how much money they received from the telecom industry in their most recent election cycle.

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Kbase Article of the Week: Xserve, Xserve (Slot Load): 180 GB Apple Drive Module May Have Incorrect Label⇢

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This week, a rare “we made a mistake” kbase article:

The antistatic shipping bags for small number of 180 GB Apple Drive Modules (ADMs) have a inaccurate label that states: “This drive is for use in an Xserve RAID only. Server Monitor software will not support this drive is installed in an Xserve.”

The solution is pretty simple:

The 180 GB ADM is fully functional in Xserve and Xserve (Slot Load) servers. The statement on the antistatic bag label is incorrect and not a cause for concern.

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Xserve Finds New Lease on Life⇢

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Brian Stucki, on the MacStadium blog:

Here we are in 2017 and we’re bringing back a second life for the Xserve.

Since Macminicolo merged with MacStadium, we now have more space and many more options for Mac mini, Mac Pro, and 1U servers like the Xserve. While Mac Pro is definitely our focus, I feel like I owe the Xserve fans an update.

Our hosted Mac private clouds are powered by VMware and include unlimited use of vSphere Enterprise (ESXi) 6.x. Since this software can handle any number of server nodes to draw from, we use both Mac Pro and Xserve to build the fleet for customers. This helps us find just the right balance of price and power for any situation.

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Final 2017 Emoji List⇢

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Jeremy “Mr. Emoji” Burge:

After months of work aligning Unicode 10.0 code points with new features in Emoji 5.0, the 2017 emoji list is now final.

These include smileys, people, food, drink, flags, and for the first time: new fantasy characters such as a mermaid, genie, and vampire.

We are today releasing the final version of our sample images for this update. These have been designed in the “Apple style” to picture how these emojis may look when hitting phones later in the year.

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Comparing Night Shift and f.lux

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Night Shift and Flux

First released as part of iOS 9.3, Night Shift slowly shifts the color temperature of your screen to be warmer as the evening goes on. Some claim that this may help you sleep better, as blue light is harsher and can disrupt your sleep cycle, but the science is out on that.

I don’t know if it actually doing anything helpful, but I’ve enjoyed Night Shift on my iPhone and iPad over the last year. I often am wrapping up the day one of these two devices pretty close to bedtime, and I find the warmer tones pleasing. It may be the placebo effect, but using up a device without — ahem, watchOS team — is jarring.

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