Tag: Apple

Categories
Tech

Apple TV 4K shows why net neutrality matters

Apple on Tuesday rolled out the latest generation of its set-top box and all I could think of was connectivity.

The device, dubbed Apple TV 4K, will cost $179 and be able to stream to TVs that offer double the vertical resolution and two times the horizontal resolution of high-definition models. It is said to be twice as fast as the version of Apple TV it succeeds, and features software that produces s0-called High Dynamic Range, which reportedly enhances color and contrast.

So far so good. But Apple TV, like all streaming media players, depends on a connection to the internet that in my neighborhood and many others struggles to support speeds that can allow video to stream smoothly.

I am currently able to download from the internet at about 260 megabits per second via my connection to the cable network. (The Federal Communications Commission defines broadband for so-called fixed wireline services as download speeds of 25 mbps and upload speeds of 3 mbps.)

My connection, through Charter Communications, a cable company, slows during periods of peak demand. Which means news and sports streamed at those times or that demand a lot of data – such as a State of the Union address or a Premier League soccer game – can appear with glitches.

Part of the problem ties to a lack of competition in broadband. About one-third (36%) of households in urban areas had access to at least two providers of broadband, as of the end of 2015, data from the FCC shows. (The percentage falls to only 6% in rural areas.) Absent competition, providers lack incentive to up the speeds they offer.

The neighborhood in New York City where I live has one provider. The city is suing Verizon, a rival, for allegedly failing to keep its promise to provide high-speed internet service to every household in the city.

In the meantime, the lack of a competitor leaves many of us with a choice: subscribe to cable for video or cut the cord and put up with video that starts and stops during telecasts that demand a comparatively fast connection in order to stream smoothly.

All of which starts to show why rules of competition in broadband matter. The FCC is expected to vote as soon as October on a proposal to do away protections for so-called net neutrality, which prevents cable companies and other internet service providers from blocking or choking traffic.

The agency’s current chairman opposes net neutrality, which he says is tantamount to regulating the internet. But as Tom Wheeler, his predecessor has noted, net neutrality sets “ground rules for the people who deliver the internet.” Doing away with the rules leaves consumers at risk of their internet service provider favoring content that benefits its business. To their credit (and to protect their businesses), Apple, Facebook and other tech giants have urged the FCC to keep the safeguards in place.

The latest set-top box from Apple suggests the tech industry will continue to improve the experience of watching video. But the promise of those devices will turn on whether the internet speeds up, not slows down.

Categories
Life Tech

On not surrendering to our smartphones

A cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz in the latest issue of The New Yorker shows Patrick Henry, smartphone in hand, addressing Virginia’s House of Burgesses in 1775. “Give me liberty, or give me just one sec,” he says.

For me the scene summons an essay that Andrew Sullivan published in New York magazine recently that describes how an addiction to the bombardment of news and images that vie for our attention drove him into digital detox. Sullivan achieved renown as a writer and blogger at The Atlantic.com and The Daily Beast before starting “The Dish,” a blog that went on to garner tens of thousands of paying subscribers. The site achieved success, but by Sullivan’s own admission the work took its toll.

“For a decade and a half, I’d been a web obsessive, publishing blog posts multiple times a day, seven days a week, and ultimately corralling a team that curated the web every 20 minutes during peak hours,” he writes. “If the internet killed you, I used to joke, then I would be the first to find out.”

All the social media, images and news produce what Sullivan calls “our enslavement to dopamine,” a diagnosis that may resonate with anyone who has been unable to resist checking their phone. Aside from servitude, prolonged use of smartphones can harm your posture and breathing, mess with your vision, hurt your hands and impair your memory, studies show.

Give me liberty, indeed.

Two years ago, I took a summer off from social media to study for the bar exam. Amid the effort, which required willing all my attention to study for hours on end, I felt the burden of distraction fade. I realized it when, after a while, Twitter and Facebook both sent notifications to remind me that I hadn’t visited. One thing social media seems to dislike is our refusing to socialize.

And it wasn’t an age thing. I studied that summer aside millennials who told me of experiencing a similar relief.

That’s not to deny what Sullivan terms “the pleasures of being connected.” If you are someone who, like I do, welcomes a queue at checkout as an excuse to read the news on his or her phone, or who loves tweets like the one below, you know what enjoyment those in-between moments can be.

My freshman year in college, I subscribed by mail to my hometown newspaper. Every few days, a bundle of the papers arrived in brown wrapper. Going to my mailbox, I could not imagine that one day I might carry a computer in my pocket that would allow me to read the news from anywhere in the world. In real time. And to comment on and share it with anyone or with everyone.

Sullivan writes that he fears for the cost of a life lived online more than off. “But of course, as I had discovered in my blogging years, the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together,” he notes. “You are where your attention is.”

True. Though it can be convenient to blame technology for behavior. In a memoir published recently, Robert Gottlieb, who led a storied career as an editor at The New Yorker, Simon & Schuster, and Knopf, recalls his bookishness. Dwight Garner, who reviewed the book for the Times, wrote:

How bookish was Mr. Gottlieb? At summer camp, as a child, he arranged to have The New York Times delivered to him daily. His family — they lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — read books rather than converse at the dinner table. “Only later did it occur to me that this was not normal,” he writes in “Avid Reader,” his new memoir, “but a symptom of our particular brand of dysfunction.”

Of course, we choose what and whom to pay attention to. A friend told me this week that he deleted the Twitter and Facebook apps on his phone because they had started to cut into his reading.

Mike Murphy recently wrote for Quartz about his decision to stop wearing an Apple Watch after a series of dizzy spells that sent him to see a doctor. The doctor prescribed a vacation without an internet-connected device.

The worrying came from the watch, which sent news alerts, Facebook alerts “or reminders to check-in somewhere or that there was a Starbucks nearby,” Murphy writes. The notifications sent his heart rate skyward. “The Apple Watch is the most anxiety-inducing piece of technology I’ve ever owned,” he says. “It’s a reminder that a worry is like a notification, which left unchecked, can consume you.”

Categories
Privacy

Apple stance on privacy may slow artificial intelligence push: report

Those of us who use iPhones may have more to welcome this week than Apple’s event to unveil the latest devices.

The computer maker’s stance on guarding customer privacy may be slowing its push to stay ahead of rivals in the race to to develop digital assistants, Reuters reports. If correct, that means the company is upholding its pledge to respect customers’ personal privacy, but more on that in a minute.

At issue is a race by Apple, Google and other tech companies to recruit experts in machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence that allows computers to anticipate what users want without being explicitly programmed.

The larger the set of data that software can analyze, the more precise those predictions can become. But with a self-imposed privacy policy that causes iPhones and other devices to refresh every 15 minutes, Apple forgoes the opportunity to send the data to the cloud, where the information could be combined with other data, analyzed and, possibly, sold to advertisers.

That benefits users by protecting their personal privacy but can slow the evolution of services such as Siri to anticipate users’ needs. “They want to make a phone that responds to you very quickly without knowledge of the rest of the world,” Joseph Gonzalez, co-founder of Dato, a machine learning startup, told Reuters, referring to Apple. “It’s harder to do that.”

Or not. If any company can reconcile the imperatives of privacy and technological progress in a way that advances both it may be Apple.

The next generation of Apple’s services will depend heavily on artificial intelligence, AppleInsider reports. At the same time, digital assistants developed by Google and Microsoft reportedly are getting better at learning users’ routines.
Apple currently aims to recruit at least 86 more experts in machine learning, according to an analysis by Reuters of the computer maker’s jobs postings.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said in June that his company won’t be a party to the exchange that defines the relationship of many tech companies and their customers, in which customers accept free services in return for companies’ selling information about consumer’ searches, shopping, health and more to advertisers.

“They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it,” Cook told a gathering in Washington sponsored by privacy advocates. “We think that’s wrong.”

Edward Snowden, the former government subcontractor who revealed the magnitude of the National Security Agency’s spying on Americans in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, said Apple’s stance deserved consumers’ support.

“Regardless of whether it’s honest or dishonest, for the moment, now, that’s something we should… incentivize, and it’s actually something we should emulate,” Snowden told an audience in Spain about two weeks after Cook outlined the company’s policy.

Apple is slated to introduce enhancements to Siri this Wednesday as part of the rollout of iOS 9, the latest version of the company’s operating system for the iPhone and iPad.

Categories
Economy

Apple, iPhone and the problem of portability

Apple said last week that it earned $18 billion in the holiday quarter, up 38% from a year earlier, further cementing the computer maker’s place in the annals of business.

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The Cupertino-based company earned more than nearly 90% of companies in the S&P 500 index each made in total profits since 2009, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Apple could distribute $556 to all 320 million Americans, commented ReCode, which called the results a “blowout.”

Writing in the Times, James Stewart observed that Apple earned “more than any company ever in a single quarter.”

Much of the profit came from sales of the iPhone, which accounted for 69% of Apple’s revenue. “Demand for iPhone was staggering,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts. “This volume is hard to comprehend.”

Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones in the quarter at an average price of $687 apiece, or about $50 higher than a year earlier, according to the Journal. Much of that reflects the love consumers are showing the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. During the quarter, Apple sold 34,000 iPhones every hour of every day.

I’m citing these measures because for the past six months I’ve admired Apple’s creating a phone with a display whose size rivals smartphones from Samsung. As the Journal noted, “strong iPhone sales helped Apple claw back market share that it gave up to Samsung… in the past three years.”

Apple saw Samsung succeeding with bigger screens, so Apple made an iPhone with a bigger screen. I imagine that’s what MBA’s learn to do – to co-opt something that appears to be working for your rival – but the fact that Apple succeeded at it seems like a testament to the smarts, strategy and skill of Cook and his team.

What’s more interesting is the idea that Apple also is making room for the company’s watch, which is slated to ship in April. Quartz cites a tweet by Paul Kedrosky, a financial commentator, who notes that Apple’s introduction of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus has created a “portability deficit” that in turn will make room for sales of the watch.

https://twitter.com/pkedrosky/status/560481958661480448

Still, two experiences I’ve had recently point to a problem with the move to macro and the design of smartphones generally. Last weekend I sold my iPhone 6, which proved to be too large for both my hand and my pocket. The phone felt uncomfortable in my hand compared with my iPhone 5c And note, my hand is medium size; I wear a size large glove. Plus, the plastic shell that encases the 5c allows the device to absorb my dropping it, which happens to lots of us, judging by all the cracked iPhone displays you see people holding and the offers by Radio Shack and others to replace glass.

Of course, as Apple’s earnings show, people love the larger phones. Within 30 minutes of my posting my iPhone 6 for sale on Craigslist, at least 15 people contacted me with offers to buy it. Yet weirdly, or not so weirdly, I’m happier with my 5c.

The other anecdote occurred Wednesday aboard the 3 train, where a woman of about 30 sat next to me. She juggled on her person an array of things, including a pink leather handbag and a black bag that she balanced on her lap. In her left hand she held a travel coffee mug, one of those that’s a ceramic version of a paper coffee cup but with a rubber lid that fits snugly. Hers had pink lipstick prints affixed to it. (The print was the same shade as the handbag.)

In her right hand the woman held a white iPhone 5s tuned to Spotify. She might have listened had she been able to retrieve and disentangle a set of earbuds from her left coat pocket without spilling the coffee, which she balanced momentarily between her knees the best one can while wearing a wool coat that extends to the thigh. Twice the woman tried to unbraid the earbuds, dropping them once before giving up entirely and shoving them back into her pocket.

Of course, the subway and, I suspect, every mode of public transportation in America, brims with people tethered by earbuds to smartphones. When you think about it, having to hold a smartphone in your hand while unsnarling earbuds, which looked awesome in those Apple commercials 14 years ago, requires a resoluteness that now makes earbuds seem like something that’s time to jettison. In short, they’re a restraint.

That, I imagine, may be where the watch and other so-called wearables figure. The watch reportedly will work with bluetooth headphones, allowing you to bypass your iPhone completely. If true, Apple may be arranging the market to suit its strategy. Regardless, when it comes to portability, it may be time, as someone once said, to think different.

Categories
Life

Apple CEO Tim Cook talks with Charlie Rose – Part I

“The hardest decisions we make are the things not to work on,” says Apple CEO Tim Cook.

 

Categories
Travel

Call Me Maybe

The Times reported recently on a mission by Sarah Maguire, a 26-year-old yoga instructor who drove 30 miles to Covina, California from her home in Los Angeles to confront a thief who stole her iPhone.

Maguire, who located the phone via the Find My iPhone app on her computer, tracked the phone to a house on a quiet residential street. She knocked on the door. A large man, about 30, answered. “I think you have my iPhone,” she told him. The man produced Maguire’s phone and a second one that belonged to her roommate but not before denying he had taken them and closing the blinds in the living room, a gesture that creeped out Maguire. “When I told my mom what I did, she thought I was crazy,” Maguire recalled.

More people are following Maguire’s lead and resorting to self-help to get their phones back, according to the Times. Not suprisingly, law enforcement personnel advise against the practice. “It’s just a phone — it’s not worth losing your life over,” Commander Andrew Smith, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, told the paper.

In my case the decision not to track down my missing iPhone was easy. That’s because my phone turned up in Algiers, where it last appeared on April 20, according to an email I received in April from Apple. In the Alergerian capital’s southeastern suburbs, along a highway that parallels the Mediterranean, the phone signaled its location.

I last held the phone, a black iPhone 5, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Paris. My partner and I had used the device to take photos from the back seat of a taxi that drove us from a hotel near the Palais de Congrés that we had checked out of to one in the Marais district. Shortly after entering our room we realized that somewhere along the way we had lost not just my phone but my partner’s iPhone too.

Calls to the taxi company, our former hotel and the organizers of a conference that my partner had attended produced no information about the devices’ whereabouts. That’s when I activated Find My iPhone.

The service turned up nothing. In the months since my partner and I have wondered occasionally what had become of the phones, which seemed to vanish like some pocket-size version of Malaysia Airlines Flight 730. Thus the email that arrived in April startled me. “Allah inoub kho was found near Inter Ouartier Route Algiers at 4:02 a.m.,” read the message. “Your iPhone’s last reported location will be available for 24 hours.”

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On its journey from the French capital the phone seems to have received a new name, which translates loosely as “Allah is the greatest.” That’s all the information I have. The phone hasn’t checked in with Apple since then.

We live in world where, thanks to technology, our phones can ping us from anywhere. We can view maps that will pinpoint street corners and outposts where we’ve never set foot. Yet the technology confirms what we already knew intuitively. Our phone is somewhere else, just not where we happen to be.

Phones may be capable of being tracked, but that doesn’t make them less likely to be stolen. More than 3.1 million smartphones were stolen last year, nearly double the number swiped in 2012, according to Consumer Reports. Many of the phones lifted end up overseas where a market for them thrives, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon told Consumers.

Though many owners use Find My iPhone and other apps to block their phones, the barriers provide little protection in the black market. An investigation by the BBC this spring found at least eight shops in London that trade in stolen smartphones. All the phones that trafickers described to the BBC had blocking. Thieves defeat the blocking by changing the phones’ International Mobile Station Equipment Identity, or IMEI, a number that is stamped in the battery compartments of most smartphones.

All the phones used had ‘find-my-phone’ style blocks activated, and in theory their IMEI numbers mean they are not useable once reported stolen.

But Grant Roughley, of Essential Forensics, demonstrated to the BBC how simple it was to get around such features – using only a laptop.

He was able to give a device a new IMEI number – effectively changing the phone’s fingerprint – meaning it could be used as normal.

And restoring the phone’s default software removes “find-my-phone” protection.

Mr Roughley said: “Just a few mouse clicks and the phone is turned from a paperweight back to a useable device again. A phone stolen this morning could be back on the streets by this afternoon, packaged up as a second hand legitimate phone.”

Wireless carriers have said that starting in the middle of next year, smartphones sold in the U.S. will have a feature that enables users to erase the data in their phone remotely. However, even if the service works as billed it won’t address the problem of phones that leave the U.S. and become reactiviated abroad by carriers that don’t participate in the system, Consumers notes.

Some members of Congress agree. In February, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Rep. Jose Serrano (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation that would require phones to have a so-called “kill switch” that would enable the owner to erase the device’s data remotely, render the phone inoperable and prevent the phone from being reprogrammed or reactivated without an authorization from its owner.

“Under the requirements of the bill, if the kill switch is activated, there is nothing for international carriers to do because they won’t be able to turn the device back on,” Serrano told Consumers. A similar measure pending in the California Assembly would go a step further by requiring that smartphones sold in the state be sold with the kill switch turned on so that consumers won’t have to do anything to secure their devices.

In the meantime, Allah inoub kho belongs to someone else. My latest phone is a robin’s-egg blue iPhone 5C, which I like very much. Both my former phone and I have moved on.