Tech News

iA, which has been shipping a version of iA Writer for Android for 7 years:

By September, we thought we had honored our side of the new agreement. But on the very day we expected to get our access back, Google altered the deal.

We were told that read-only access to Google Drive would suit our writing app better than the desired read/write access. That’s right — read-only for a writing app.

When we pointed out that this was not what we had, or what our users wanted, Google seemed to alter the deal yet again. In order to get our users full access to their Google Drive on their devices, we now needed to pass a yearly CASA (Cloud Application Security Assessment) audit. This requires hiring a third-party vendor like KPMG.

The cost, including all internal hours, amounts to about one to two months of revenue that we would have to pay to one of Google’s corporate amigos. An indie company handing over a month’s worth of revenue to a “Big Four” firm like KPMG for a pretty much meaningless scan. And, of course, this would be a recurring annual expense. More cash for Google’s partners, while small developers like us foot the bill for Android’s deeply ingrained security shortcomings.

Developing serious productivity apps for Android sounds like fun. (See also the footnote on how stunningly rampant piracy is on Android, too.)

Elizabeth Lopatto, reporting for The Verge:

X is preventing users from posting links to a newsletter containing a hacked document that’s alleged to be the Trump campaign’s research into vice presidential candidate JD Vance. The journalist who wrote the newsletter, Ken Klippenstein, has been suspended from the platform. Searches for posts containing a link to the newsletter turn up nothing.

Posting this just in case there remained an iota of a thought in your head that Elon Musk is actually a radical “free speech” absolutist and not just someone who blew $44 billion buying Twitter to warp the entire platform in the direction of his own weird un-American political agenda.

Nilay Patel returns to the show to consider the iPhones 16.

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Deepa Seetharaman, Berber Jin, and Tom Dotan, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

OpenAI is planning to convert from a nonprofit organization to a for-profit company at the same time it is undergoing major personnel shifts including the abrupt resignation Wednesday of its chief technology officer, Mira Murati. Becoming a for-profit would be a seismic shift for OpenAI, which was founded in 2015 to develop AI technology “to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” according to a statement it published when it launched.

I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention, but I wrongly thought this whole debate over turning OpenAI into a for-profit corporation had been decided a year ago, during the brief saga when the then-board of directors fired Sam Altman for being profit-driven, and then the board itself dissolved and Altman was brought back.

Things started to change in late 2022 when it released ChatGPT, which became an instant hit and sparked global interest in the potential of generative artificial intelligence to reshape business and society. Guided by Chief Executive Sam Altman, OpenAI started releasing new products for consumers and corporate clients and hired a slew of sales, strategy and finance staffers. Employees, including some who had been there from the early days, started to complain that the company was prioritizing shipping products over its original mission to build safe AI systems.

Some left for other companies or launched their own, including rival AI startup Anthropic. The exodus has been particularly pronounced this year. Before Murati, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and former top researcher John Schulman, and former top researcher Jan Leike all resigned since May. Co-founder and former president Greg Brockman recently took a leave of absence through the end of the year.

In addition to Murati, chief research officer Bob McGrew and head of post-training Barret Zoph also are leaving OpenAI, according to a post on X from Altman.

OpenAI has high-profile partnerships with both Microsoft and Apple, two companies with decades of extraordinarily stable executive leadership. But OpenAI itself seems to be in a state of constant executive disarray and turmoil. That’s a bit of a head-scratcher to me.

Rasmus Larsen, writing for FlatpanelsHD:

While reviewing LG’s latest high-end G4 OLED TV (review here), FlatpanelsHD discovered that it now shows full-screen screensaver ads. The ad appeared before the conventional screensaver kicks in, as shown below, and was localized to the region the TV was set to.

We saw an ad for LG Channels — the company’s free, ad-supported streaming service — but there can also be full-screen ads from external partners, as shown in the company’s own example below.

Death comes for us all.

Amazon, Google, and Roku have long built their respective TV monetization strategies around ads, and with LG and Samsung turning webOS and Tizen into digital billboards, the only refuge appears to be Apple TV 4K, which can be connected to any TV. You can now disconnect your TV from the internet.

I bought an LG OLED in 2020 that hasn’t been connected to the internet since a few days after we started using it. It’s a great TV.

Gerald Lynch, editor-in-chief:

Dig out your old iPod and fire up your ‘Songs to cry to’ playlist, I come bearing sad news. After more than 15 years covering everything Apple, it’s with a heavy heart I announce that we will no longer be publishing new content on iMore.

I want to kick off by thanking you all for your support over the many years and incarnations of the site. Whether you were a day-one early adopter in the ‘PhoneDifferent’ days, came on board with ‘The iPhone Blog,’ or recently started reading to find out what the hell Apple Vision Pro is, it’s been a privilege to serve you a daily slice of Apple pie.

So it goes. Nice remembrances from Rene Ritchie (now at YouTube) and Serenity Caldwell (now at Apple).

Just appended the following to my piece from yesterday on Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype:

1. Facebook ships VR headsets and a software platform with an emphasis so strong on “the metaverse” that they rename the company Meta.
2. Apple announces, and then 7 months later ships, Vision Pro with a two-fold message in comparison: (a) the “metaverse” thing is so stupid they won’t even use the term; (b) overwhelmingly superior resolution and experiential quality. Consumer response, however, is underwhelming.
3. Meta drops the “metaverse” thing and previews Orion, effectively declaring that they think VR headsets are the wrong thing to build to create the product that defines the next breakthrough step change in personal computing. AR glasses, not VR headsets, are the goal.

It’s a lot of back-and-forth volleying, which is what makes the early years of a new device frontier exciting and highly uncertain. Big bold ideas get tried out, and most of them wind up as dead ends to abandon. Compare and contrast to where we’ve been with laptops for the last 20 years, or the pinnacle we appear to have reached in recent years with phones.

Reuters:

Masimo said on Wednesday founder Joe Kiani has decided to step down as the medical device maker’s CEO, days after shareholders voted to remove him from the company’s board following a bitter proxy battle with activist hedge fund Politan Capital Management.

The company named veteran healthcare executive, Michelle Brennan, as interim chief. Brennan was nominated by Politan for Masimo’s board last year, along with the hedge fund’s founder Quentin Koffey. Both were subsequently elected by shareholders.

Shares of the company were up 5.4% at $133 in early trade. The stock has fallen more than 40% since Feb. 15, 2022, when Masimo announced the $1-billion acquisition of audio products maker Sound United. The deal was a key factor behind Politan’s activism.

No mention of Apple in Reuters’s report, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s soon a settlement in the patent dispute over the blood oxygen sensors in recent Apple Watch models that’s left the feature disabled for new watches sold in the U.S. this year. My understanding is that Kiani was single-mindedly obsessed with fighting Apple over this.

Holds hand to earpiece... Correction: they’re bunking in a jail cell together in Brooklyn, not Gotham. We regret the error.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

With the iPhone 15 models that came out last year, Apple added an opt-in battery setting that limits maximum charge to 80 percent. The idea is that never charging the iPhone above 80 percent will increase battery longevity, so I kept my iPhone at that 80 percent limit from September 2023 to now, with no cheating.

My iPhone 15 Pro Max battery level is currently at 94 percent with 299 cycles. For a lot of 2024, my battery level stayed above 97 percent, but it started dropping more rapidly over the last couple of months. I left my iPhone at that 80 percent limit and at no point turned the setting off or tweaked it. [...] You can compare your level battery to mine, but here are a couple other metrics from MacRumors staff that also have an iPhone 15 Pro Max and did not have the battery level limited.

• Current capacity: 87%. Cycles: 329
• Current capacity: 90%. Cycles: 271

My year-old iPhone 15 Pro (not Max) which I simply used every day and charged to 100 percent overnight: max capacity: 89 percent, 344 charge cycles.

I’m so glad Clover ran this test for a year and reported her results, because it backs up my assumption: for most people there’s no practical point to limiting your iPhone’s charging capacity. All you’re doing is preventing yourself from ever enjoying a 100-percent-capacity battery. Let the device manage its own battery. Apple has put a lot of engineering into making that really smart.

Donald Papp at Hackaday:

There’s a wild new feature making repair jobs easier (not to mention less messy) and iFixit covers it in their roundup of the iPhone 16’s repairability: electrically-released adhesive.

Here’s how it works. The adhesive looks like a curved strip with what appears to be a thin film of aluminum embedded into it. It’s applied much like any other adhesive strip: peel away the film, and press it between whatever two things it needs to stick. But to release it, that’s where the magic happens. One applies a voltage (a 9V battery will do the job) between the aluminum frame of the phone and a special tab on the battery. In about a minute the battery will come away with no force, and residue-free.

Clever.

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Nilay Patel, writing at The Verge last week:

I asked Apple’s VP of camera software engineering Jon McCormack about Google’s view that the Pixel camera now captures “memories” instead of photos, and he told me that Apple has a strong point of view about what a photograph is — that it’s something that actually happened. It was a long and thoughtful answer, so I’m just going to print the whole thing:

Here’s our view of what a photograph is. The way we like to think of it is that it’s a personal celebration of something that really, actually happened.

Whether that’s a simple thing like a fancy cup of coffee that’s got some cool design on it, all the way through to my kid’s first steps, or my parents’ last breath, It’s something that really happened. It’s something that is a marker in my life, and it’s something that deserves to be celebrated.

And that is why when we think about evolving in the camera, we also rooted it very heavily in tradition. Photography is not a new thing. It’s been around for 198 years. People seem to like it. There’s a lot to learn from that. There’s a lot to rely on from that.

Think about stylization, the first example of stylization that we can find is Roger Fenton in 1854 — that’s 170 years ago. It’s a durable, long-term, lasting thing. We stand proudly on the shoulders of photographic history.

That’s a sharp and clear answer, but I’m curious how Apple contends with the relentless addition of AI editing to the iPhone’s competitors. The company is already taking small steps in that direction: a feature called “Clean Up” will arrive with Apple Intelligence, which will allow you to remove objects from photos like Google’s Magic Eraser.

McCormack’s response is genuinely thoughtful, and resonates deeply with my own personal take. But it’s worth noting that Apple is the conservative company when it comes to generative AI and photography — and yet they’re still shipping Clean Up. I’m not complaining about Clean Up’s existence. I’ve already used it personally. I’m just saying that even Apple’s stance involves significant use of generative AI.

Mark Wilson, writing at Fast Company:

Now, a full five years later, are we meeting the LoveFrom mascot, Montgomery: a bear, paying homage to San Francisco’s Montgomery Street where LoveFrom is headquartered and will soon open its own store.

Montgomery has just appeared on LoveFrom’s website, where it will sniff and follow your cursor, before slowly navigating over the letters of LoveFrom like rocks in a pond.

A lovely mark and even lovelier animation.

Tripp Mickle, writing for The New York Times:

Mr. Ive and Mr. Altman met for dinner several more times before agreeing to build a product, with LoveFrom leading the design. They have raised money privately, with Mr. Ive and Emerson Collective, Ms. Powell Jobs’s company, contributing, and could raise up to $1 billion in start-up funding by the end of the year from tech investors.

In February, Mr. Ive found office space for the company. They spent $60 million on a 32,000-square-foot building called the Little Fox Theater that backs up to the LoveFrom courtyard. He has hired about 10 employees, including Tang Tan, who oversaw iPhone product development, and Evans Hankey, who succeeded Mr. Ive in leading design at Apple.

On a Friday morning in late June, Mr. Tan and Ms. Hankey could be seen wheeling chairs between the Little Fox Theater and the nearby LoveFrom studio. The chairs were topped by papers and cardboard boxes with the earliest ideas for a product that uses A.I. to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone.

The project is being developed in secret. Mr. Newson said that what the product would be and when it would be released were still being determined.

I feel like Mickle somewhat buried the lede here. Architectural projects, magnetic buttons, for $2,000 jackets a lovely new typeface, new steering wheels for electric Ferrari sports cars — all of those design projects are interesting. But an OpenAI-powered personal electronic device, with longtime Apple all-stars Evans Hankey and Tang Tan leading the small team? That’s interesting. That’s competing against Apple. That’s complicated given Ive’s legendary history with Apple. It’s further complicated by the fact that most of LoveFrom’s designers came with Ive from Apple. It’s complicated even further by Powell Jobs’s backing of the startup.

Also somewhat interesting to me is the timing of Mickle’s profile. He spoke with Ive and Marc Newson back in June, but the story was published ... the very day after the arrival of Apple’s new iPhones, AirPods, and watches. That timing might have been entirely the choice of the Times. But still, it’s hard not to notice.

And the whole thing is made even stranger given OpenAI’s partnership with Apple to provide “world knowledge” generative AI by the end of this year. Can’t help but think of then-Google-CEO Eric Schmidt being an Apple board member when the iPhone debuted — with built-in system apps for Google Maps and YouTube — while Google was simultaneously building Android to compete.

Zac Hall, with a public service message at 9to5Mac:

For now, the bug is triggered when someone replies to a shared watch face in a thread on Messages in iOS 18. The threaded responses feature allows you to have an inline conversation about a specific message that may have been sent earlier in the chat.

If this happens, Messages will repeatedly crash if the user tries to open the conversation in the app. Sending or responding to conversations from other chats directly in Messages is also not easily possible as the app may repeatedly crash.

Once triggered, the bug affects both users. It appears to require responding to the shared watch face from iOS 18. Replying from iOS 18.1 will not trigger the bug.

However, if the user responds in a thread to the shared watch face, Messages will crash on iOS 18.1 beta, iPadOS 18.1 beta, and macOS 15.1 beta as well.

I suspect we’ll see an iOS 18.0.1 update imminently that includes a fix for this. It’s a nasty bug, though.