Manufacturing jobs (any jobs, really) are a hot-button topic these days, and our President has made no secret of his desire for big companies, and Apple in particular, to make more products here. In a Wednesday interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC’s Mad Money, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple is creating a fund to promote advanced manufacturing in the United States, and seeding it with $1 billion to start.CBNC.com has the video and a complete transcript of the wide-ranging conversation, and it’s worth a watch. These are the points that most piqued our interest—OK, and one that just made us laugh.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you aren’t using two-factor authentication to protect your Apple ID and iCloud account, you really should do it today. Hackers who claim to have millions of stolen iCloud credentials are demanding Apple pay a ransom or they’ll release them—and ZDNet obtained a sample set of credentials and determined they’re real.But guess what? Using two-factor authentication should protect you completely. It’s easy to set up, so take a minute and do it now.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you aren’t using two-factor authentication to protect your Apple ID and iCloud account, you really should do it today. Hackers who claim to have millions of stolen iCloud credentials are demanding Apple pay a ransom or they’ll release them—and ZDNet obtained a sample set of credentials and determined they’re real.But guess what? Using two-factor authentication should protect you completely. It’s easy to set up, so take a minute and do it now.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon is full of knockoff products, but if you’re buying genuine Apple-branded cables and chargers sold directly by Amazon and not a third party, you should be OK, right? Well, maybe not.Patently Apple dug up a lawsuit filed by Apple against Mobile Star LLC, which Amazon identified as the manufacturer of counterfeit cables and power adapters that had been sold as being made by Apple. The complaint says that Apple had purchased the items from Amazon, and tested them interally to determine they were counterfeit. The complaint also cites an Amazon.com customer review claiming one of the adapters caught fire.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Let’s cut right to the chase: iOS 10 looks great, works really well, and does more to freshen up the iOS experience than any update before it. It brings some pretty significant changes like the all-new lock screen behaviors, but iOS 10 still feels familiar enough that the new gestures become old hat after just a few days.The apps that got the biggest overhauls are, frankly, the apps that needed them: Music and Maps. The former is less of a mess in general, and the latter is easier to use en route especially, with big easy-to-tap buttons to change the view, toggle the audio cues on and off, or just find a darn cup of coffee or gas station along the way.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple doesn’t talk about its supply chain very often, but the company does love to tout its environmental efforts. On Tuesday, Apple announced that its supplier Lens Technology has committed to using 100 percent renewable energy to manufacture glass for Apple, by the end of 2018.
Lens Technology is expected to use wind power to reach this goal. Currently, it produces glass for Apple at two factories in Changsha, Human province, in southern China. By using clean wind power, the firm will avoid releasing nearly 450,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.
“We want to show the world that you can manufacture responsibly and we’re working alongside our suppliers to help them lower their environmental impact in China,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, in a press statement. “We congratulate Lens for their bold step, and hope by sharing the lessons we’ve learned in our transition to renewable energy, our suppliers will continue to access clean power projects, moving China closer to its green manufacturing goals.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google I/O thinks outside the boxImage by Blair Hanley FrankThis year, Google took a different approach to its Google I/O developers conference. First of all, it was mostly outdoors, at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California. (Fun fact about Shoreline: While now it’s literally in Google’s backyard, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was an original partner in launching the concert venue with legendary promoter Bill Graham, and Woz’s name still adorns one of the boxes that the press sat in during the keynote.) And while previous Google I/O keynotes have featured moonshots like Google Glass, this year’s keynote was pretty down-to-earth. No self-driving cars or alien-looking wearables, just new versions of Android and Android Wear, plus some cross-platform apps and a voice-activated device for the home. In fact, a lot of the announcements should even be interesting to Apple fans, from new apps to a huge selection of smartwatches. Here’s what you should care about, and when you can expect it all to launch.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The strange tale of the San Bernardino iPhone seems like it’s almost over, although it touched off a national debate about encryption that’s just getting started. Apple probably won’t find out what method was used by the third-party firm that broke into the iPhone 5c used by shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, reports Reuters.The government says that the unidentified international firm that did the hack has legal ownership of the method, so while the FBI got the data it wanted, it’s unable to disclose the method to Apple. There’s actually a system in place, known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process, that’s designed to evaluate flaws discovered by the government’s own agencies to determine if they should be disclosed to the technology companies who can patch them, or if the vulnerabilities can remain secret to be used by the NSA, FBI, or other agencies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The strange tale of the San Bernardino iPhone seems like it’s almost over, although it touched off a national debate about encryption that’s just getting started. Apple probably won’t find out what method was used by the third-party firm that broke into the iPhone 5c used by shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, reports Reuters.The government says that the unidentified international firm that did the hack has legal ownership of the method, so while the FBI got the data it wanted, it’s unable to disclose the method to Apple. There’s actually a system in place, known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process, that’s designed to evaluate flaws discovered by the government’s own agencies to determine if they should be disclosed to the technology companies who can patch them, or if the vulnerabilities can remain secret to be used by the NSA, FBI, or other agencies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tim Cook gave a long interview to Time magazine about Apple’s fight with the FBI over its refusal to create “GovtOS,” a more crackable version of iOS to side-load onto the seized iPhone 5c used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook. The edited version is here, and Time also published the full transcript.+ MORE: Apple cites iPhone, Mac security problems in rebuttal to FBI demands +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
UPDATE: March 10, 2016, 3:46 p.m. Pacific—In a conference call Thursday afternoon, Apple’s SVP and chief legal counsel Bruce Sewell said, “The tone of the brief reads like an indictment,” and in 30 years he’s never seen a brief trying so hard “to smear” someone. “It should be deeply offensive to everyone who reads it.”“Corrosive rhetoric” could be this week’s “dormant cyber pathogen,” the latest salvo in the government’s attempt to paint Apple as unreasonable for refusing to craft a new version of iOS so law enforcement can brute-force an iPhone 5c used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple’s refusal to help the FBI brute-force the iPhone 5c passcode of the San Bernardino shooter will most likely play out in the courts—the first hearing is scheduled for March 22 in Riverside, California. But Congress has a role to play too.On Tuesday, Apple Senior Vice President and General Counsel Bruce Sewell will testify before the House Judiciary Committee, stressing that while Apple does respect and assist law enforcement, what the FBI wants this time simply goes too far.One of Apple’s strategies is to argue that Congress should pass legislation to cover cases like this, instead of using the more broad All Writs Act, which was first passed in 1789 and last updated in 1946. Apple thinks a more modern statute like the Communications for Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) would be more appropriate, although the Department of Justice disagrees that it’s applicable here.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At this writing, Apple’s battle with the FBI over how much it can and should help in the investigation of the San Bernardino shootings is less than a week old. But already it’s explosive to say the least. The government has accused Apple of being more concerned with marketing than the fight against terrorism, and Apple has drawn a line in the sand, saying that complying with the FBI’s request “would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect.”This fight isn’t going to be over anytime soon, so we’ll keep this FAQ updated as events unfold. If you have more questions—or want to respectfully debate the implications this case will have on privacy and security—please chime away in the comments and we’ll do our best to make everything about this confusing case as clear as possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Freaks and Geeks alum Seth Rogen is set to play the Mac community’s favorite ubergeek Steve Wozniak in the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic (no, not that one, the other one), alongside Christian Bale as Steve Jobs. Hopefully it won’t be Superbad. (Sorry.)
The news comes from Variety, which also reported that “Jessica Chastain is being eyed for an unspecified role.” Perhaps that’ll be a composite character of every woman in Jobs’s orbit—after all, last year’s Jobs (the one starring Ashton Kutcher) was seriously bereft of women actors who weren’t playing Steve’s mother, wife, or girlfriend.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s not a shock to learn that Apple is always hard at work on the next big thing. There will always be another iPhone, a lighter MacBook Air, a faster iMac, and new operating systems to run on them. 9to5Mac reported last week that, according to its unnamed sources, iOS 9 would focus not on new features, but rather on cleaning up iOS and making sure all the bells and whistles added in iOS 7 and iOS 8 work like they’re supposed to, every time.Think of it as the Snow Leopard of iOS. When Apple decided to slow the roll of feature creep in OS X 10.6, the result was an OS that didn’t boast hundreds of new features, but turned out to be stable and reliable—and we loved it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Susie Ochs