Apple

[RTH10260]

I cannot believe it, there has never been a standalone Apple thread on TFB 2.0

[RTH10260]

Australia

‘We are losing money’: companies in Apple’s repair program say they can’t compete with tech giant
Exclusive: Slow response times and high cost of parts make program unviable, third-party repairers say

Josh Taylor
Thu 18 May 2023 00.00 BST

Companies in Apple’s third-party repair program say delays in the process and high pricing for parts make it almost impossible to compete with the juggernaut.

In 2021 Apple, under pressure from a Productivity Commission review on the “right to repair”, launched its independent repair provider program in Australia. It was trumpeted as a way for small companies to compete with Apple to repair their products – such as the iPhone – using Apple tools and spare parts.

At the time, repairers said they felt the move was a token gesture designed to head off any potential right-to-repair legislation that would have been recommended by the Productivity Commission review.

Two years later, some say their fears have been realised. A number of repairers Guardian Australia has spoken to in Australia and the US suggest Apple’s slow response times and the high cost for replacement parts makes it almost impossible for them to be viable competitors.




https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... tech-giant

[RTH10260]

Ducking hell! Apple to tweak autocorrect that replaces one of the most common expletives
Cries of ‘stupid autocorrect!’ will be banished as a result of an AI-powered upgrade that will let users swear if they want to

Guardian staff and agencies
Tue 6 Jun 2023 00.32 BST

Apple has announced it will upgrade its autocorrect feature that annoyingly corrects one of the most common expletives to “ducking”.

“In those moments where you just want to type a ducking word, well, the keyboard will learn it, too,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino on Monday.

TechCrunch reported that iOS 17 will feature an upgraded autocorrect powered by AI. Over time, the AI model will learn to predict words and phrases that the iPhone user repeats, including swear words.

Cnet said iOS 17 is expected to be available as a public beta in July, with the general release to come out in September.

The iPhone autocorrect feature has always had its quirks, at times taking a misspelled word and substituting it with what it deems a logical option, but which ends up changing the meaning of a particular phrase or sentence.

Such occurrences generally produce follow-up texts along the lines of “damn autocorrect!” But the “ducking” substitution is a longstanding source of mirth or frustration, depending on how many times one has had to rewrite their own texts or scream at one’s own device.

Apart from the texting tweak, the company had a lot more on its agenda – an expensive new mixed-reality headset and details on a revamped desktop and laptop.




https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... expletives

[RTH10260]

Apple to open US App Store to allow outside payment after SC decision
Both Apple and Fortnite maker Epic Games Inc. had asked the court to hear an appeal related to the case. The justices turned down the appeals without explanation

Bloomberg
Last Updated : Jan 17 2024 | 7:30 AM IST


Apple Inc. is opening its US App Store to allow outside payment options after the Supreme Court refused to consider the company’s appeal in an antitrust suit challenging its practices.

The company plans to let all third-party apps sold in the US include an outside link to a developer website to process payments for in-app purchases. That will bypass Apple’s own payment system, which charges developers a commission of either 15% or 30%. Still, the iPhone maker said it would attempt to collect a 12% or 27% revenue share from developers that opt out of the Apple system.

The Supreme Court decision let stand a 2023 appeals court ruling that found Apple’s business model didn’t violate antitrust laws, but that it did flout California’s Unfair Competition Law by limiting the developers ability to communicate about alternate payment systems that may cost less.
Both Apple and Fortnite maker Epic Games Inc. had asked the court to hear an appeal related to the case. The justices turned down the appeals without explanation.

Apple shares slid as much as 2.7% after the court’s announcement before paring their decline. The stock was down 1.2% to $183.63 at the close in New York.

Developers will need to apply for an “entitlement” to be able to use outside payments systems. Apple previously allowed reader apps — a category that includes video streaming and book reading applications — to point users to the web to sign up for subscriptions. Apple will warn customers when they press a link to conduct purchases outside the App Store before letting them proceed.

“As of today, developers can begin exercising their court-established right to tell US customers about better prices on the web,” Epic Chief Executive Officer Tim Sweeney said in a thread on the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter.



https://www.business-standard.com/world ... 087_1.html

[pipistrelle]

Apple will warn customers when they press a link to conduct purchases outside the App Store before letting them proceed.

That's what Fitbit does, at least with watch faces. It put me off at first.

[RTH10260]

Apple will warn customers when they press a link to conduct purchases outside the App Store before letting them proceed.

That's what Fitbit does, at least with watch faces. It put me off at first.

As long as Apple was the sole payment processor then buying was guaranteed to be safe, the warning is appropriate to signal that an outside party now takes over, technically this could lead to scammers as Apple will have no good way (other than a white list) to ensure that the third party is bonafide.

[RTH10260]

CISA warns of patched iPhone kernel bug now exploited in attacks

By Sergiu Gatlan
January 31, 2024 02:02 PM 0

CISA warned today that a patched kernel security flaw affecting Apple iPhones, Macs, TVs, and watches is now being actively exploited in attacks.

Tracked as CVE-2022-48618 and discovered by Apple's security researchers, the bug was only disclosed on January 9th in an update to a security advisory published in December 2022.

The company has yet to reveal if the vulnerability was also silently patched more than two years ago when the advisory was first issued.

"An attacker with arbitrary read and write capability may be able to bypass Pointer Authentication," the company revealed this month.

"Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited against versions of iOS released before iOS 15.7.1."

This improper authentication security vulnerability enables attackers to bypass Pointer Authentication, a security feature designed to block attacks trying to exploit memory corruption bugs.

Apple addressed the flaw with improved checks on devices running iOS 16.2 or later, iPadOS 16.2 or later, macOS Ventura or newer, tvOS 16.2 or higher, and watchOS 9.2 or later.

The list of devices impacted by this actively exploited flaw is quite extensive and it affects both older and newer models, including:



https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/s ... n-attacks/

[RTH10260]

Apple reportedly scraps multibillion-dollar plan to build electric car
Reports say tech giant made announcement during meeting and forecast layoffs, ending secretive and resource-heavy project

Nick Robins-Early
Tue 27 Feb 2024 23.33 CET

Apple is canceling its plans to build an electric car, according to multiple outlets, ending a secretive project that has consumed immense resources over the past decade. Executives from the company made the unexpected announcement during an internal team meeting on Tuesday, forecasting layoffs and telling employees that many of them would shift to working on generative artificial intelligence, per reports.

Apple is believed to have spent billions of dollars attempting to develop an electric, semi-autonomous vehicle under the codename Project Titan, and its decision to kill the program is a major retreat from its previous strategy.

The Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, had hinted at the company’s plans for a car in recent years, though he never fully committed to delivering a product.

Although Apple did not formally announce its plans to offer a car, the project was a source of intense speculation among the automotive and tech industries. The company hired executives from marquee car companies such as Lamborghini and Tesla to oversee its development, and acquired the autonomous vehicle startup Drive.ai in 2019.



https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... ar-layoffs

[RTH10260]

same as above, but only this snippet

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has publicly hinted that Apple was interested in entering the car space. The company had also been testing hundreds of vehicles equipped with autonomous driving technology in public for many years. The car, internally code-named Titan and Project 172, was a challenging product to develop, as parts of the division were shuttered, plans were scrapped and restarted, and dozens of workers were laid off along the way.


https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/tech ... -plan.html

[RTH10260]

also

How Apple Used its Car Project to Drive Wider Innovation
The tech giant has dropped its plans to develop an electric vehicle, but some of the development at the heart of the effort has helped power other products and services.

By Andrew Ross Sorkin, Ravi Mattu, Bernhard Warner, Sarah Kessler, Michael J. de la Merced, Lauren Hirsch, Ephrat Livni and Edmund Lee
Feb. 28, 2024

Innovation on wheels

Has Apple really crashed the car? The tech giant has killed its electric vehicle project as it pivots to artificial intelligence, prompting many observers to declare the venture a major failure for the company.

Here’s a contrarian thought: That critique misses a wider point about how Apple innovates, because the company has used the project to power a whole ecosystem of products and services that have been unmitigated successes.

Apple invested billions to build a self-driving car. Reports emerged about the secret effort, code-named Project Titan, in 2014, and the company has never publicly acknowledged its existence. That said, it told staff on Tuesday that many of them would be redeployed.

There had been an wider internal debate about getting into the car business. An E.V. was seen by some as the ultimate data-collection device and as a way to diversify from the iPhone.

But others questioned what kind of margins cars would deliver, especially in a market locked in a price war. The answer: nothing like the profits packed into an iPhone or Apple Watch, which have helped Apple reach a near $3 trillion valuation.

The car project was an R.&D. lab on wheels. In the same year that speculation started about Project Titan, Apple released CarPlay. That has morphed into a software system that, as of 2022, had been installed in 98 percent of new cars in the U.S., pulling more consumers into Apple’s universe. Years of testing self-driving cars has also helped improve that platform, as well as providing data to inform Apple Maps and to push further into augmented reality.



https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/busi ... ation.html

[RTH10260]

different take

Behind Apple’s Doomed Car Project: False Starts and Wrong Turns
Internal disagreements over the direction of the Apple car led the effort to sputter for years before it was canceled this week.

By Brian X. Chen and Tripp Mickle
Feb. 28, 2024

For the last decade, many Apple employees working on the company’s secretive car project, internally code-named Titan, had a less flattering name for it: the Titanic disaster. They knew the project was likely to fail.

Throughout its existence, the car effort was scrapped and rebooted several times, shedding hundreds of workers along the way. As a result of dueling views among leaders about what an Apple car should be, it began as an electric vehicle that would compete against Tesla and morphed into a self-driving car to rival Google’s Waymo.

By the time of its death — Tuesday, when executives announced internally that the project was being killed and that many members of the team were being reassigned to work on artificial intelligence — Apple had burned more than $10 billion on the project and the car had reverted to its beginnings as an electric vehicle with driving-assistance features rivaling Tesla’s, according to a half dozen people who worked on the project over the past decade.

The car project’s demise was a testament to the way Apple has struggled to develop new products in the years since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011. The effort had four different leaders and conducted multiple rounds of layoffs. But it festered and ultimately fizzled in large part because developing the software and algorithms for a car with autonomous driving features proved too difficult.




https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/tech ... -dead.html

[chancery]

Apple reportedly scraps multibillion-dollar plan to build electric car
Executives from the company made the unexpected announcement during an internal team meeting on Tuesday, forecasting layoffs and telling employees that many of them would shift to working on generative artificial intelligence, per reports.

[neonzx]

Apple Hit With €1.8 Billion EU Fine ($2 Billion US) Over App Store Rules


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... tore-rules

EU’s first fine against Apple follows complaint from Spotify
EU to ban abusive App Store rules for Apple’s music rivals

The link is paywalled.

[roadscholar]

different take

Behind Apple’s Doomed Car Project: False Starts and Wrong Turns
Internal disagreements over the direction of the Apple car led the effort to sputter for years before it was canceled this week.

By Brian X. Chen and Tripp Mickle
Feb. 28, 2024

For the last decade, many Apple employees working on the company’s secretive car project, internally code-named Titan, had a less flattering name for it: the Titanic disaster. They knew the project was likely to fail.

Throughout its existence, the car effort was scrapped and rebooted several times, shedding hundreds of workers along the way. As a result of dueling views among leaders about what an Apple car should be, it began as an electric vehicle that would compete against Tesla and morphed into a self-driving car to rival Google’s Waymo.

By the time of its death — Tuesday, when executives announced internally that the project was being killed and that many members of the team were being reassigned to work on artificial intelligence — Apple had burned more than $10 billion on the project and the car had reverted to its beginnings as an electric vehicle with driving-assistance features rivaling Tesla’s, according to a half dozen people who worked on the project over the past decade.

The car project’s demise was a testament to the way Apple has struggled to develop new products in the years since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011. The effort had four different leaders and conducted multiple rounds of layoffs. But it festered and ultimately fizzled in large part because developing the software and algorithms for a car with autonomous driving features proved too difficult.


https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/tech ... -dead.html

“Do, or do not. There is no ‘try’.”

[RTH10260]

EU fines Apple €1.8bn over App Store restrictions on music streaming
Penalty for breaching competition law is four times higher than forecast as Brussels looks to send message to tech firms

Lisa O'Carroll and Dan Milmo
Mon 4 Mar 2024 16.51 CET

Apple has been fined €1.8bn (£1.5bn) by the EU after an investigation found it had limited competition from music streaming services such as Spotify.

The fine is nearly four times higher than expected as the European Commission attempts to show it will act decisively on tech companies who abuse their dominant position in the market for online services.

The European competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, said a smaller fine would have been nothing more than the equivalent of a parking fine and the €1.8bn was designed to act as a deterrent against a repetition of such practices by Apple or others.

“I think it is important to see that if you are a company who is dominant and you do something illegal, it will be punished. We want to show our resolve that we will go into these cases.”

As a result of the anti-competitive practices, the public ended up paying more than they should have for music streaming, she said.

“Apple’s rules ended up harming consumers. Critical information was withheld so that consumers could not effectively use or make informed choices. Some consumers may have paid more because they weren’t aware that they can pay less if they subscribed outside of the app,” Vestager said.

The case followed complaints made by Spotify and centred on Apple’s App Store as the sole gateway for iphone apps.

“Apple’s conduct, which lasted for almost 10 years, may have led many iOS users to pay significantly higher prices for music streaming subscriptions,” the European Commission said in a statement.

Vestager said consumers may have paid two or three euros a month more for music streaming because of the lack of open competition. However, she conceded that the fine would not be distributed to customers who had been allegedly exploited but to individual member states.

She said the fine represented 0.5% of Apple’s global turnover.

The tech company disadvantaged users by restricting app developers from openly promoting cheaper music subscription services available outside the Apple “ecosystem” , the commission found.

“Music streaming developers were not allowed to inform the users inside their own apps of cheaper prices for the same subscription on the internet,” in an “anti-steering” practice, she said.

“They were also not allowed to change links in their apps to the consumers to their websites and pay lower prices there,” she told a press conference in Brussels.




https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... -streaming

[AndyinPA]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... suit-apple

The US government on Thursday filed a sprawling antitrust case against Apple, alleging that the tech giant has illegally prevented competition by restricting access to its software and hardware. The case is a direct challenge to the company’s core products and practices, including its iMessage service and how devices such as the iPhone and Apple Watch connect with one another.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New Jersey, alleges that Apple has monopoly power in the smartphone market and uses its control over the iPhone to “engage in a broad, sustained, and illegal course of conduct”, the Associated Press reported.

The US Department of Justice’s suit against Apple is a landmark case targeting the most valuable publicly traded company in the world and follows a raft of antitrust suits aimed at big tech. Amazon, Apple, Meta and Google have all faced investigations from regulators in recent years, both in the United States and Europe, over allegations that they have consolidated power while illegally stifling competition. All boat market capitalizations above a trillion dollars.

Central to the case is whether Apple’s strategy of blocking rival companies from accessing various proprietary features such as its iMessage instant messaging service and Siri virtual assistant constitutes anticompetitive practices. The case will also examine whether Apple making its devices easily integrate with each other, but not with non-Apple products, creates unfair hardware limitations that block competitors from the market.

I'm an Apple user, but not a cultist. Go get 'em!

My daughter has an Android phone, and sometimes we can't message between each other, although we usually can.

[Rolodex]

I happened to have the tv on this morning while I was doing some chores. While waiting for Garland's press conference to start, they had on an analyst to explain a bit about the suit. Garland ended up saying a lot of the same things, re third party payer apps (in Apple's ecosystem, all your payment info is available to Apple as well as merchants, etc - outside apps (allegedly) don't do that. The mentioned the messaging thing.

I have that messaging issue, too. I have an android; everyone else in the fam has Apple. Sometimes I don't get messages at all. Videos don't share well. Something else I started thinking about, though. Long ago in the olden days my first smart phone was android and I've stuck with it. Everyone else went Apple. Back then, I could hardly use their phone on the rare occasions I had to use their phone - the UI was so different from my droid (my kids were "bi-lingual" phone-wise LOL). Over time, I've noticed how iPhones have become more like my droid has always been, interface-wise.

Garland had some interesting examples of how Apple has tried to not play well with others: told a story of a guy talking with a top Apple exec complaining that he couldn't send videos to his mom - the exec said "buy your mom an iPhone." So that's their answer - don't make it more universally friendly, make everyone buy only our product.

[MN-Skeptic]

I’m a PC user, but an Apple device owner. I also own Apple stock which, after hitting a high of $199.62 earlier this year, is down in the $172 range right now. And I agree wholeheartedly with governments sanctioning Apple for their monopolistic actions!

[Rolodex]

I’m a PC user, but an Apple device owner. I also own Apple stock which, after hitting a high of $199.62 earlier this year, is down in the $172 range right now. And I agree wholeheartedly with governments sanctioning Apple for their monopolistic actions!

Opposite here- android phone and Macbook user. I have an iPad mini but I don't use it much.

[AndyinPA]

My daughter and SIL have Android phones (cultists). But my granddaughter has an Apple. Both her grandmothers have iPhones, so when she got her first phone a few years ago, that's what she got. Mom and Dad didn't let her use their phones; grandmas did. She finds Apple easier to use, only because that's what she's used to. Then I bought her an Apple Watch for her birthday a few years ago, so now she's an Apple hostage, like me.

I backed into the Apple market many years ago when Palm Pilots went the way of the dodo bird. The iPod was the only thing I could find that seemed to work closely enough, and there was very little else on the market. I use a PC, not a Mac. I've had iPads, but I've also had Android tablets, and I don't see a really huge user difference anymore.

If the government really wants to help Americans use phones, computers, internet, etc., they'll go after the internet providers.

[RTH10260]

(Sh)It happens to the best ...

Unpatchable vulnerability discovered in Apple M1, M2 and M3 chips — what you need to know
News
New side-channel attack breaks encryption on Apple silicon

By Anthony Spadafora
published March 22, 2024

Researchers have discovered a new unpatchable security flaw that can break encryption on the best MacBooks if exploited by an attacker.

As reported by 9To5Mac, this recently discovered vulnerability affects every Mac running Apple silicon including the company’s M1, M2 and M3 chips. To make matters worse, the flaw is present in the architecture of these chips which means there’s no way for Apple to fix it outright. Instead, any fixes will need to be made before the iPhone maker releases its M4 chips later this year.

Just like with last year’s iLeakage attack, this flaw is also a side channel that can allow for the end-to-end keys used in encryption to be extracted by an attacker given the right circumstances. Fortunately though, exploiting this vulnerability is fairly difficult for an attacker as doing so can take a considerable amount of time.

Whether you have one of Apple’s recently released MacBook Air M3 models or an older MacBook Pro with an M1 chip from back in 2020, here’s everything you need to know about this unpatchable security flaw along with a few tips on how to protect yourself.



https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/mac ... ed-to-know

[RTH10260]

the originating article:

Unpatchable security flaw in Apple Silicon Macs breaks encryption

Ben Lovejoy
| Mar 22 2024 - 4:49 am PT

University researchers have found an unpatchable security flaw in Apple Silicon Macs, which would allow an attacker to break encryption and get access to cryptographic keys.

The flaw is present in M1, M2, and M3 chips, and because the failing is part of the architecture of the chips, there’s no way for Apple to fix it in current devices …

The flaw is in a process known as DMP

Before we explain the flaw, we need to understand a process used in the most advanced of today’s chips, known as Data Memory-dependent Prefetchers (DMP). Here’s how ArsTechnica explains the concept:

The threat resides in the chips’ data memory-dependent prefetcher, a hardware optimization that predicts the memory addresses of data that running code is likely to access in the near future. By loading the contents into the CPU cache before it’s actually needed, the DMP, as the feature is abbreviated, reduces latency between the main memory and the CPU, a common bottleneck in modern computing. DMPs are a relatively new phenomenon found only in M-series chips and Intel’s 13th-generation Raptor Lake microarchitecture, although older forms of prefetchers have been common for years.

The problem arises from a bug in the DMP.



much much more techie stuff at https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/22/unpatcha ... -flaw-mac/

[tek]

well, it isn't really a "bug" .. "functions as designed"
Side channels are pretty hard to avoid..
we were just starting to worry about those when I left the CPU design world.. I'm glad I'm not still doing that stuff, hurts my brain.

[pipistrelle]

I have an M1. For now not going to lose sleep.

[Reality Check]

I happened to have the tv on this morning while I was doing some chores. While waiting for Garland's press conference to start, they had on an analyst to explain a bit about the suit. Garland ended up saying a lot of the same things, re third party payer apps (in Apple's ecosystem, all your payment info is available to Apple as well as merchants, etc - outside apps (allegedly) don't do that. The mentioned the messaging thing.

I have that messaging issue, too. I have an android; everyone else in the fam has Apple. Sometimes I don't get messages at all. Videos don't share well. Something else I started thinking about, though. Long ago in the olden days my first smart phone was android and I've stuck with it. Everyone else went Apple. Back then, I could hardly use their phone on the rare occasions I had to use their phone - the UI was so different from my droid (my kids were "bi-lingual" phone-wise LOL). Over time, I've noticed how iPhones have become more like my droid has always been, interface-wise.

Garland had some interesting examples of how Apple has tried to not play well with others: told a story of a guy talking with a top Apple exec complaining that he couldn't send videos to his mom - the exec said "buy your mom an iPhone." So that's their answer - don't make it more universally friendly, make everyone buy only our product.

Yes, I agree the messaging incompatibility between Apple and Android is a real thing. Mrs. and I have iPhones and son and his family have Androids. It is a constant PITA. I don't recall where I saw it but as far back as 2013 Apple had an internal meeting to discuss abandoning iMessage for a new compatible standard. The recording of the meeting was leaked. They decided it was to their advantage to keep iMessage because it would force families to buy iPhones when kids got a phone.