Panel:
- Bart Busschots (host) – @bbusschots
- Elaine Giles from MacBites Learning – @elainegiles
- Simon Parnell from the Essential Apple Podcast – @serenak
- Guy Serle from the My Mac Podcast – @Macparrot
The show starts with some Apple-related legal stories that made the news in November before moving on to look at some interesting Apple-related staffing changes. The four main stories for the month are Apple’s taxes, Apple’s month of embarrassing OS bugs, how FaceID is working out in the real world, and Apple’s continued adventures in the health arena. The show finishes with a quick rundown of some shorter Apple-related stories that made the news in November.
You’ll find detailed show notes below the fold, and if you enjoy this free show, please consider clicking on the donate button at the top of the left side bar – the show is free for you to listen to, but not for Bart to Produce!
Legal Latest
- US Supreme Court rejects Samsung’s appeal of their patent loss to Apple — www.reuters.com/…
- Apple have filed a counter-suit against Qualcomm, saying they are not infringing Qualcomm’s battery life management patents, but that Qualcomm are instead infringing on 8 of Apple’s batter life management patents — www.macobserver.com/…
Notable Staffing Changes
- Despite only taking up the role of Head of Diversity and Inclusion in Apple in May, DeDenise Young Smith is leaving Apple for Cornell University. Christie Smith formerly from Delloite will be joining Apple to assume the role — www.macobserver.com/…
Main Stories
- Apple’s Taxes in the spotlight again
- The so-called paradise papers revealed that Apple uses subsidiaries registered in Jersey (one of the Channel Islands that are sorta-kinda but not fully in the UK) to legally minimise their US tax liability on foreign-earned income. This triggered a lot of criticism of Apple — arstechnica.com/…
- Apple responded with a post on their web page — The facts about Apple’s tax payments — www.apple.com/…
- Editorial by Bart: The reason Apple made changes in their tax registration is that Ireland changed its tax laws. Before the change companies could effectively be nationless when it comes to tax registration. After the change, every company had to pick some nation to be their home nation for tax purposes, so, Apple was forced to choose one. What the leaked documents show is that Apple asked a legal company for advice on which country to choose. That’s not a scandal, it’s good corporate governance, and responsible fulfilment of Apple’s fiduciary duty to their share holders. No on is claiming Apple did anything illegal here. They also did nothing unusual — companies would leave themselves open to shareholder lawsuits if they voluntarily paid taxes they did no legally owe! The problem is the laws Apple, and all other American multinationals, have to abide by. Companies are not charities, they are money-making machines. They are by their very nature amoral — neither good not evil. Companies optimise profits within the law. It’s law makers that get to decide what is and is not OK for companies to do, and they are failing MISERABLY at doing so. Every elected lawmaker who feigns outrage at Apple is just trying to distract you from their abject failure to do their job!
- A month of Embarrassing Bugs for Apple
- iOS hit with two weird Auto-complete bugs
- Some people experienced a bug where the letter
iwas replace with the letteraand a funny symbol. The bug seemed to develop over time, affecting ever more people. Apple released an updated version of iOS to fix the bug — 9to5mac.com/… & support.apple.com/… - Later in the month reports have begun to surface that some people are experiencing a bug where
itgets auto-corrected toI.T.— www.imore.com/…
- Some people experienced a bug where the letter
- Much more seriously, macOS was hit with a spectacularly embarrassing security bug where entering no password in a specific circumstance enabled the root account with a blank password
- Major Authentication Security Flaw Reported in macOS High Sierra [Update] — www.intego.com/…
- Apple closes that big root hole – “Install this update as soon as possible” — nakedsecurity.sophos.com/…
- Apple Says It’s Auditing Development Processes in Wake of Mac Root Access Flaw — www.macobserver.com/…
- Repair file sharing after Security Update 2017–001 for macOS High Sierra 10.13.1 — support.apple.com/…
- High Sierra Root Login Bug Was Mentioned on Apple’s Support Forums Two Weeks Ago — daringfireball.net/…
- High Sierra root login bug was known weeks ago, if not longer. What should have happened? — www.loopinsight.com/…
- iOS hit with two weird Auto-complete bugs
- FaceID gets tested in the real world
- The limitations of Face ID: What you need to know — www.imore.com/…
- No, siblings aren’t ‘fooling’ Face ID — they’re training it — www.imore.com/…
- Face ID hasn’t been hacked: What you need to know — www.imore.com/…
- Watch a 10-Year-Old Beat Apple’s Face ID on His Mom’s iPhone X | WIRED — www.wired.com/…
- Face ID Hack Created Again by Vietnamese Team With $200 Mask — www.macobserver.com/…
- Craig Federighi responds to question about multiple-face support – seems it’s not gonna happen any time soon, if at all — www.imore.com/…
- Related: Apple release a paper describing how they use deep neural networks for face recognition on their Apple Machine Learning Journal — www.imore.com/…
- Apple continues their push into Health
- A study by health startup Cardiogram & the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) finds that the Apple Watch can detect hypertension with an accuracy of 82%, and sleep apnea with an accuracy of 90% (a previous study by the same group found the Apple Watch can detect abnormal heart rhythms with an accuracy of 97% — social.techcrunch.com/…
- Apple team up with Stanford University to launch a revolutionary heart rhythm study using the Apple Watch — www.imore.com/…
- FDA Approves First Apple Watch EKG Band — www.macobserver.com/…
Quick Stories
- Apple officially delays the HomePod until ‘early 2018’ — www.macobserver.com/…
- Apple improves their customer support:
- Apple extends free repairs of anti-reflective coating on certain MacBooks — www.imore.com/…
- Apple continues their drive to teach coding to as many people as possible:
- Apple expand their Everyone Can Code program to 20 more universities around the world — www.macobserver.com/…
- Apple Opens Registration for Free Hour of Code Classes for Kids — www.macobserver.com/…
- Apple scientists publish their first research paper related to automatous cars. The paper is published in the journal arXiv with the title ‘VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection’ — www.reuters.com/… & arxiv.org/…
- Two major Cydia repositories shut down due to the continued decline in iOS jail breaking — www.macrumors.com/…
- Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon Morning Show Drama Lands at Apple | Hollywood Reporter — www.hollywoodreporter.com/…
- Microsoft Edge officially launches on iOS — www.imore.com/…