iOS 13 will let you limit app location access to ‘just once’

Apple will soon let you grant apps access to your iPhone’s location just once.

Until now, there were three options — “always,” “never,” or “while using,” meaning an app could be collecting your real-time location as you’re using it.

Apple said the “just once” location access is a small change — granted — but one that’s likely to appeal to the more privacy-minded folk.

“For the first time, you can share your location to an app — just once — and then require it to ask you again next time at wants,” said Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi at its annual developer conference on Monday.

That’s going to be helpful for those who download an app that requires your immediate location, but you don’t want to give it persistent or ongoing access to your whereabouts.

On top of that, Apple said that the apps that you do grant location access to will also have that information recorded on your iPhone in a report style, “so you’ll know what they are up to,” said Federighi.

Apps don’t always use your GPS to figure out where you are. All too often, apps use your Wi-Fi network information, IP address, or even Bluetooth beacon data to figure out where you physically are in the world so they can better target you with ads. Federighi said it will be “shutting the door on that abuse” as well.

The new, more granular location-access feature will feature in iOS 13, expected out later this year,.

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Mu4LTW

Apple introduces ‘Sign in with Apple’ to help protect your privacy

Apple has a new way to stop third-party sites and services from getting your information when you sign up to an app.

All too often, developers give users the chance to sign in with one-click — using data fed in from Facebook, Google or Twitter.

“Now this can be convenient, but it also can come at the cost of your privacy, your personal information sometimes get shared behind the scenes and these logins can be used to track you,” said Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi at its annual developer conference.

Apple thinks it can do one better by allowing developers to add a “Sign in with Apple” button instead.

What’s the difference? Apple says it can authenticate a user using Face ID on your iPhone without turning over any of your personal data to a third-party company.

Federighi said users can create a new account on an app using its own one-click button “without revealing any new personal information.”

He noted that when apps ask for names and email addresses — typically auto-populated from a one-click login from a social networking site — you can still provide them if they wish. But when you don’t want to provide your real email address to protect your privacy, Apple will auto-generate a random “relay” email address that hides your real email address.

“That’s good news because we get each a unique random address, and this means you can disable any one of them and anytime when you’re tired of hearing from that app,” said Federighi.

“It’s really great,” he said. Yes, it really is.

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Wzamwj

Photos on iPhone is about to look completely different

When you need to find a photo on your iPhone, what do you do? There are tons of ways, but let’s be honest. You probably just go to the camera roll and scroll through at lightning speed, trusting your eyes to pick out the target shot. That may change with Apple’s new layout for Photos, which organizes shots into easy-to-browse days, months, and years.

Right now the Photos app is kind of a mess. There are so many ways your photos are organized that it feels like none is the “main” one. The “For You” tab has a best of the last (insert random duration here) and randomly selected photos from random periods; Search shows me “one year ago,” “spring,” “trips,” and “dining” — great, thanks! And even the chronologically listed “Photos” tab has such tiny images that it’s hard to pick out the ones you want. So we all just go to camera roll and scroll and scroll.

That may change with the Days, Months, Years theme Apple just announced at WWDC. Under the default photos tab in the Photos app, you’ll now see a new set of tabs — yeah, probably too many tabs — with the different durations on it.

The default mode looks a lot like camera roll. But when you hit “Days,” each day shows as a selection of highlighted images, large and mosaiced, and with live photos active. Each day is marked by a full-width shot, so you can easily slide down to the next day — more recent shots are towards the bottom.

Flip over to Months, and it compresses each calendar month of shots into a handful of events, such as events or locations the system has detected. Years does the same thing, except as the “cover” for each year’s album it shows an image from the same day or period — for example, if it’s someone’s birthday party, you’ll see shots from when you (hopefully) attended their party in years past.

Of course Photos already had a “on this day” type feature, but this makes much more sense to me. You can dive into a year and it breaks into months, and of course months break into days. It’s just a more efficient way of scrubbing through your camera roll — though I have no doubt we’ll still do that from time to time.

In a way this is a minor change to iOS, but because users interact with Photos so much, it could significantly change how you think about getting to the images you want.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Mu8wsw

Goodbye trash can, hello cheese grater: Apple’s reinvented Mac Pro will shred your workflow

Say goodbye to the trash can. Apple’s new Mac Pro is a more traditional machine that takes into account the specific needs of creative professionals, while enabling a layer of modular interactivity with other Apple devices that could totally change the way they work.

Looking so like a stainless steel cheese grater that it’s hard to imagine the likeness is not intentional, the new Mac Pro is designed to be highly modular and accessible for repairs and replacements.

Powered by an Intel Xeon processor of the latest generation with up to 28 cores — generously powered and cooled — the Mac Pro is paired with a Radon Pro 580X or Vega II, and with 12 DIMM slots that could conceivably hold up to 1.5 terabytes of RAM. But at the prices Apple charges, you’ll need to open a few new lines of credit to do so.

It’s full of PCI express slots: 4 double-wide, for expansion cards, 4 normal-width for smaller stuff, and one dedicated to an I/O shield with Thunderbolt, USB-A style connectors, and a 3.5mm audio jack. At least the company admits here that these interfaces are necessary for professionals!

It’s powered with a massive 1.4 kilowatt power supply — that’s three times what my desktop pulls — and cooled by a trio of huge, quiet fans on the front and a bunch of heatsinks (no word on fluid cooling).

The machine is meant to handle huge workflows — hundreds of instruments in Logic, multiple 8K and 4K streams for video editing and effects work. The crowd lost it when one demo showed a thousand audio tracks being played at once, using 56 threads — and not even stressing the CPU.

This is a far cry from the Mac Pros introduced in 2013; The futuristic design wowed on stage, but it soon became clear that function had followed form and these “pro” machines were less than practical. The unique design proved hard to adapt to the new, GPU-centric computing paradigm, and couldn’t provide the flexibility an ordinary tower does for users seeking unusual configurations.

As seems to be increasingly common at Apple, a bold design led to compromises elsewhere, and with the Mac Pro it took four years for them to admit the trash can was a dead end and announce that, after a final update, the cylindrical PC would be scrapped.

A year later the company explained that it was taking a workflow-centric approach to designing the new Mac Pro.

Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro will be shaped by workflows

As John Ternus, vice president of Hardware Engineering, told TechCrunch last April:

We’ve brought in some pretty incredible talent, really masters of their craft. And so they’re now sitting and building out workflows internally with real content and really looking for what are the bottlenecks. What are the pain points. How can we improve things. And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS, is it in the drivers, is it in the application, is it in the silicon, and then run it to ground to get it fixed.

Apparently they also checked in with industrial designers from OXO or something. It’s uncanny how much this thing looks like a cheese grater.

As we saw last year, however, the idea is to use the core Mac Pro as the brains and then customize the interface however you like. Thunderbolt connections can be used to connect other devices and monitors pretty seamlessly, so you can use an iPad to control the Final Cut instance or just use it as your preview window. The hardware was designed with this in mind but we’ll have to see how people actually use it — Apple wasn’t very proscriptive about these options.

The Mac Pro starts at a wallet-destroying $5,999, and you better believe that price will go up in a hurry as you upgrade components. Here’s hoping it’s as friendly to aftermarket improvements as the company says.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2HSJf6X

Apple releases the $5,000 Pro Display XDR, a 32-inch, 6K display available this fall

Apple is finally back in the monitor game. Today, at WWDC 2019, the company took the wraps off the Pro Display XDR to go along with a new Mac Pro. This is the first Apple monitor since the company discontinued the Thunderbolt Display in 2016.

The screen is covered with a new type of matte coating. Apple says the glass is etched to replace the matte effect without the downsides. A redesigned blue array shapes and controls the light while the backside of the display acts as a heatsink to allow the display 1000 nits of fullscreen brightness indefinitely. The screen can be rotated to portrait mode, too.

The backside features the same cheese grater design found on the new Mac Pro. There are four Thunderbolt 3 ports on the backside, too.

Apple has a long history of producing class-leading monitors and left a hole in the market when the company discontinued its last monitor. In its place, Apple turned to LG’s UltraFine line. The monitors are great with great fidelity and Thunderbolt 3 connectivity. But it’s not an Apple monitor, which left many longing for the days of the Cinema Display.

This monitor has been in the works since 2017 when Apple reveled to TechCrunch it was working on a new display for a 2019 release.

The Pro Display XDR will be available this fall for $5,000 or $6,000 with the optional matte coating. The stand and VESA mount costs extra because it’s Apple.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2JXWvJU

AirPods and HomePod get some new capabilities

Apple’s audio hardware didn’t get a ton of love at WWDC but the devices didn’t go unmentioned, here’s what’s coming to your HomePod and AirPods.

• For AirPods users, Siri will now be able to read incoming iMessages to you as soon as they arrive on your phone and allow you to respond instantly without bothering with “Hey Siri…”
• The company is introducing a feature that will allow you to instantly share a song you’re listening to from one iPhone to another. It doesn’t seem to be AirPods specific, but wireless headphones will probably make this feel ritzier.
• Handoff is coming to HomePod, and it’s coming about in a very physical way. If you are walking in the door and want to move audio from your iPhone to the HomePod, now you can just bring your iPhone close to it and it will transfer the audio, this works in the opposite direction as well.
• One far overdue update is multi-user support finally coming to the HomePod so you’ll be able to play music that’s unique to you and get info like iMessages, Reminders and Notes as well.
• Across Siri, you’ll now be able to listen to radio stations on iHeartRadio, TuneIn and Radio.com

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2JVVtxU

Apple is now the privacy-as-a-service company

Apple shared plenty of news today at its WWDC 2019 annual developer conference, but a few of the announcements early on are potentially its biggest in terms of what they signal about the company and its direction. Specifically, Apple unveiled a new single-sign on unified ID platform, as well as a new way it’ll operate as a go-between for security cameras that work with its HomeKit smart home services.

These didn’t come out of nowhere: Apple has been playing up its privacy game for at least a few years now, and in the Tim Cook era it’s especially come to the fore. But today’s announcements really crystallize how Apple’s approach to privacy will mesh with its transformation into becoming even more of a services company. It’s becoming a services company with a key differentiator – privacy – and it’s also extending that paradigm to third-parties, acting as an ecosystem layer that mediates between users, and anyone who would seek to monetize their info in aggregate.

Apple’s truly transforming into a privacy-as-a-service company, which shows in the way that it’s implementing both the new single sign-on account service, as well as its camera and location services updates in iOS 13. The SSO play is especially clever, because it includes a mechanism that will allow developers to still have the relevant info they need to maintain a direct relationship with their users – provided users willingly sign-up to have that relationship, but opting in to either or both name and email sharing.

The radial decision-making that also includes an option to create a tokenized single-use email for a direct, but unique relationship is especially inspired. It means a developer or service provider can still easily talk to you directly, but also means that they can’t then trade that on for profit by selling or sharing your information with other developers and providers. It’s entirely about moving the locus of control for privacy to the user, rather than playing the classic charade of providing “control” to users in the form of long, obscure and hard to reject terms of services with onerous requirements for the user re: their data sharing by the service provider.

Apple’s work with camera providers is also unique – providing actual on-device analysis of footage captured by third-party partners to deliver things that security device makers have typically offered as a value-add service themselves. That includes apparent identification of visitors to your home, for instance, and sending alerts when it detects people, as well as being able to differentiate that from other kinds of motion.

That’s going above and beyond simply protecting your data: It’s replacing a potential privacy-risk feature with a privacy-minded one, at a service level across an entire category of devices.

The new location services feature similarly puts all the control with users, instead of with service providers. Making it possible to provide single-use location permissions to apps is terrific for privacy-minded users, as are updates about usage, which sound like they could be detailed about what specific apps are doing with that data in Apple’s estimation.

Other new features, including HomeKit firewalling of specific services and devices, are similar in tone, and likely indicate what Apple intends to do more of in the future. Combined with its existing efforts, this begins to paint a picture of where Apple plans to play in offering a comprehensive consumer services product that is substantially differentiated from similar offerings by Google and others.

It’s a bold play, and one that could end with Apple accruing a huge amount of control over consumer relationships with not only hardware, but also anything else that software providers want to do on their platform. Given Apple’s track record with privacy to date, that’s reassuring, but we should definitely watch closely to see how their business evolves if they succeed in shifting that locus of control.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2MrtkAT