LTA 136: December 2024

Panel:

• Bart Busschots (host) – @bbusschots

The show starts with some quick followup on a few recently covered and long-running stories before diving into the regulatory and legal stories, a little HR news, and some highlights from Apple’s services and original content. The three main stories are conflict mineral complaints filed against Apple, the latest OS point-releases, and the continued rollout of Apple Intelligence. The show finishes with a rundown of a few other quick Apple-related stories that made the news in December.

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!

Updates & Followup

Quick updates to long-running stories the show continues to track, and to stories covered in recent shows.

• Apple's Indonesia iPhone 16 ban drama will probably end with $1 billion investment — appleinsider.com/…

• Airlines actually started rolling out support for AirTags to help locate lost luggage in time for the holiday travel chaos: United Airlines and Air Canada first to offer official support for AirTag link sharing — appleinsider.com/…

• Apple Vision Pro global rollout continues with Taiwan on December 17 — appleinsider.com/…

  • Related: Third episode of 'Adventure' immersive video series dives onto Apple Vision Pro — appleinsider.com/…
  • Related: Popular Science’s Innovation of the Year Award Goes to Apple Vision Pro — www.macobserver.com/…

Regulatory Rundown

• EU regulators continued to focus in Apple in December:

  • EU Seeks Input on iOS and iPadOS Interoperability — www.macstories.net/… (part of DMA enforcement process)
  • EU could force Apple to open AirDrop and AirPlay to Android — www.cultofmac.com/… (also under the DMA)
  • Apple accuses Meta of abusing DMA interoperability requests to breach user privacy — www.reuters.com/… & appleinsider.com/… (Interestingly, Apple is asking the commission to implement the DMA so that interoperability respects another big EU law, the GDPR)

• Regulatory scrutiny and enforcement may be slow and plodding, but it does cause real changes eventually:

  • USB-C gets a bit more universal as the EU’s mandate goes into effect — arstechnica.com/…

    • Related: Apple ceases iPhone 14, third-gen iPhone SE sales in the EU — appleinsider.com/…

  • Norway gets world's first Apple Pay alternative for iPhone — appleinsider.com/… (thanks to EU regulations forcing Apple to open up access to the NFC chip)

  • The Delta emulator for iOS becomes the first app in the US Apple App Store to make use of the new External Purchase Link Entitlement, allowing users click on a link within the app to support the development of the app on Patreon — www.macstories.net/…

Legal Latest

• Apple agrees to $95M settlement to end privacy lawsuit over Siri recordings — appleinsider.com/… ($20 per-user-per-device, over incorrect 'hey Siri' triggers and human review of random sample of Siri interactions)

  • Related: Just to prove some of these class action suits do sometimes get a little money into people's pockets: Users Report Receiving Checks from Peters v Apple Settlement — www.macobserver.com/… ($47.86 per user, part of $25M settlement for misleading users about in-app subscription sharing within an Apple Family)

• Apple hit with $1.2Bn lawsuit after killing controversial CSAM-detecting tool — arstechnica.com/… (Class action by abuse survivors)

• Brazil antitrust ruling against Apple overturned by Federal Justice — appleinsider.com/… (mandated 3rd-party App Store Payments)

• The US 9th circuit court of appeals has rejected an appeal to overturn the dismissal of a class action case that claimed Apple was tricking users into having to upgrade to paid iCloud plans, most probably killing the case — appleinsider.com/… (The argument was that it's impossible to live on the 5GB base plan, so the free iCloud is a lie, unfortunately, many of the actual plaintiffs were successfully using the free plan, making the whole case look as dumb as I think it was )

• The DOJ -v- Google anti-trust case over the company's search monopoly moved forward with Google filing a remedies proposal it doesn't believe it should implement simply to allow its appeal of the actual original ruling to proceed — appleinsider.com/…

  • Related: In a court filing supporting Google Apple senior VP Eddie Cue has stated that Apple have no interest in making their own search engine — appleinsider.com/…

• Suggested Reading: Apple’s Year in Court: A Recap of 2024’s Most Notable Lawsuits — www.macobserver.com/…

Apple HR & Acquisition News

• Apple Sued for Having Power to Spy on Employees’ Personal Lives — www.macobserver.com/…

  • CA state suit filed by Apple employees

  • Claim is that Apple effectively force staff to simultaneously:

    • Use personal devices for work
    • Use personal Apple IDs on those personal devices
    • Install monitoring software giving Apple control of those devices and visibility into the data on them

• As of January 1st 2025, it's Official, after many years sterling service, Luca Maestri is no longer Apple's CFO, as Kevan Parekh officially assumed the role — www.macobserver.com/…

Apple Services & Original Content Highlights

• Apple's look back at 2024 continued in December:

  • 'Hysterical' named Apple Podcasts top new show of 2024 — appleinsider.com/…
  • Apple Books celebrates 2024 with collections and Year in Review — appleinsider.com/…
  • Adobe Lightroom, Balatro+ honored in Apple's App Store Awards — appleinsider.com/… ( Apple PR)
  • Apple Reveals the Top App Store App and Game Downloads of 2024 — www.macstories.net/… Apple PR

• Apple Music Radio taps big talent for three new stations — appleinsider.com/… ( Apple PR)

• Apple TV+:

  • Apple TV+ kicks off 2025 with free streaming weekend — www.cultofmac.com/…
  • Apple TV+ notches record 29 Children’s & Family Emmy nominations — www.cultofmac.com/…

• Health:

  • New Year update to Apple Fitness+ adds Strava integration — appleinsider.com/… ( Apple PR)
  • Apple To Expand AirPods Pro 2 Hearing Health Availability to UAE, UK + 7 More — www.macobserver.com/… (Cyprus, Czechia, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Romania, and Spain)
  • How Apple Watch will bring healther nights to Brazil with sleep apnea detection — appleinsider.com/…

• Apple continues to rapidly expand support for receiving payments on iPhones via Tap-to-Pay:

  • iPhone Tap to Pay comes to the UAE — www.cultofmac.com/…
  • Tap to Pay on iPhone comes to Chile and Egypt — appleinsider.com/…

• Puerto Rico joins U.S. states that let driver’s licenses go in Apple Wallet — www.cultofmac.com/…

• Apple Delays HomeKit Support for Robot Vacuums to 2025 — www.macobserver.com/…

Main Stories

1. Apple accused of covering up war crimes by willfully using Congo conflict minerals — appleinsider.com/…

   • A formalisation of a campaign that has been building for some months with criminal complaints filed in Belgium & France by the Democratic Republic of the Congo
   • Accusations revolve around tin, tungsten & tantalum, known as the three Ts
   • Apple uses certifications by the ITSCI to verify the minerals in its supply-chain are ethically source, and the suits allege that these certifications are meaningless, and that everyone knows that, including Apple
   • This argument is supported by that fact that Apple is also a member of the RMI (Responsible Minerals Initiative), and the RMI have denounced the ITSCI certifications as fraudulent, yet Apple still relied on ITSCI certifications in its 2023 supply-chain report

2. Apple issued another round of important minor-version OS updates including significant improvements beyond the Apple Intelligence Rollout (next story):

   • iOS 18.2 — www.cultofmac.com/…, www.macobserver.com/… & www.macstories.net/… ⭐️

     • New centralised page for setting all default apps (Settings → Apps → Default Apps)

     • EU citizens now have the ability to delete more stock apps (Photos, Safari, Messages, Camera & App Store)

     • The promised AirTag location sharing

     • The rather marmite new email categorisation feature

     • Some asked-for improvements for the new Camera Control feature on iPhones 16 Pro

     • Daily Sudoku Puzzles in Apple News+

     • Layered Voice Memos on iPhones 16 Pro — appleinsider.com/…

       • Apple Shows Off Layered Recordings in Voice Memos with the Help of Michael Bublé and Carly Pearce — www.macstories.net/…

   • Snoopy screensavers arrive on Apple TV with tvOS 18.2 — appleinsider.com/…

   • New visionOS 2.2 brings widescreen Mac to Apple Vision Pro — appleinsider.com/…

3. Apple Intelligence continues to roll out — Apple PR

   • New English language regional dialects released for Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa & the UK

   • Initial limited rollout in EU (if you change your language to English UK )

   • Apple exec launches Apple Intelligence in Australia — appleinsider.com/…

   • New features for existing users — appleinsider.com/…

     • Image Playground (macOS & iOS) — appleinsider.com/…

     • Genmoji (macOS & iOS)

     • Magic wand tool in Apple Notes generates images based on existing note content (text and images)

     • Writing Tools enhancement: Re-write tool now accepts arbitary prompts instead of offering just three pre-defined style options

     • ChatGPT integration (iOS & macOS) — www.macobserver.com/…

       • Analysis: Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.2: A Deep Dive into Working with Siri and ChatGPT, Together — www.macstories.net/… ⭐️

     • Visual Intelligence on iPhones 16

     • Review: iOS 18.2/macOS 15.2 Review: Picture not so perfect? — sixcolors.com/…

   • Numbers, Pages, and Keynote gain Apple Intelligence smarts — appleinsider.com/…

   • Summaries prove to be a poor fit for news apps!

     • BBC cries foul over Apple Intelligence headline notification summarizations — appleinsider.com/…
     • Apple faces pressure to drop AI news summaries after false headline — www.cultofmac.com/…
     • Users can already disable summaries on an app-by-app basis, but I think the only fix here is to allow News apps an OS-level opt-out, you can't have an LLM re-writing carefully constructed and fact-critical news headlines!

   • Related: Apple-Nvidia collaboration triples speed of AI model production — appleinsider.com/…

   • Related: Apple says it uses Amazon's custom AI chips — www.cnbc.com/…

Quick Stories

• Beats launches Sunrise Pink and Twilight Blue cases for the iPhone 16 range — appleinsider.com/…
• Apple sells limited-edition Year of the Snake AirPods 4 in China — appleinsider.com/…
• Apple Takes Over iCloud Passwords Add-On for Firefox — tidbits.com/… (makes Apple Passwords just that little bit better a service)
• Web version of Apple Maps adds Look Around street-view feature — www.cultofmac.com/…
• Microsoft simplifies file transfers between iPhone and Windows PC — www.cultofmac.com/…
• Apple to report holiday quarter earnings on January 30, 2025 — appleinsider.com/…

Legend

Note: When the textual description of a link is part of the link it is the title of the page being linked to, when the text describing a link is not part of the link it is a description written by Bart.