“Hey Siri” can be inadvertently activated by other wake words including “A city,” “Hey Jerry,” and more, reveal researchers from Germany’s Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the Bochum Max Planck Institute.
Siri’s far from the only voice assistant with a weakness when it comes to false triggers, however. The study compiled a list of over 1,000 words that can accidentally activate different A.I. assistants.
Another developer is speaking out about Apple’s controlling behavior in the App Store by saying it had an app update rejected because it refused to auto-charge users for its service following a free trial.
“[Apple] can choose to steal from their customers who forget to cancel, but we won’t do the same to ours,” yoga app Down Dog wrote in a recent tweet, saying that this is a line it would not cross.
Time sure passes quickly! Today, Apple added its first-ever MacBook Pro with Retina display to its “obsolete” list around the world, meaning that it can and will no longer provide any hardware support for it.
Obsolete products are ones whose sales were discontinued more than 7 years ago. In the case of the MacBook Pro, it went on sale in June 2012 and was discontinued in February the following year.
The iPhone 12 is reportedly “facing delays of between four weeks and two months” when it comes to full scale production of its four 5G handsets for 2020, a report published Wednesday by Nikkei Asian Review notes.
However, Apple has been “aggressively” trying to reduce these delays which, at one point, could have pushed the new iPhone back to 2021. Suppliers have supposedly been working overtime to reduce a massive wait for this year’s iPhone refresh.
A new macOS ransomware called EvilQuest is reportedly doing the rounds, spread largely through macOS pirate apps. A Mac infected with EvilQuest will suffer multiple problems, including the repeated crashing of the Finder. Most significantly, the ransomware will also hold your Mac hostage: encrypting files unless the user pays $50 to unlock them.
“Maybe you are busy looking for a way to recover your files,” reads an on-screen notification. “Do not waste your time. Nobody can recover your files without our decryption service. We guarantee however that you can recover your files safely and easily and this will cost you 50 USD without any additional fees. Our offer is valid for 3 days (starting now!)”
Bozoma Saint John, the former head of global consumer marketing for Apple Music, is joining Netflix as its new Chief Marketing Officer, Deadline reports.
Saint John joined Apple with the Beats acquisition in 2014. She left Apple in 2017 to join Uber as its Chief Brand Officer, before jumping to Endeavor to become its CMO.
It’s still not clear exactly when Apple’s AR glasses are going to be available, but 25-year-old product designer Jordan Singer says that Apple has left enough breadcrumbs in its code to offer a compelling glimpse of what a possible glassOS might look like.
“I don’t usually like to speculate on what Apple is going to do next, but this time I found too many coincidental examples of new UI in iOS 14 that seems to be able to translate nicely to a pair of glasses,” Singer told Cult of Mac. “I’d like for this concept to give insight into how Apple is foreshadowing the future.”
Apple display-maker Japan Display has just eked out its first quarterly profit in more than three years, Reuters reports. The firm made an $87.26 million net profit for the quarter. That’s compared to an almost $900 million loss in the same quarter last year.
The last time Japan Display recorded a net profit was in the October through December quarter way back in 2016. Since then, Apple has lent a hand to keep the display-maker — which once made the majority of Apple’s iPhone screens — afloat.
The iPhone 12 isn’t even out yet, and already the first report is out suggesting that it’s disappointing in terms of order numbers from Apple. A report published by Digitimes Tuesday says that mmWave-enabled 5G iPhone orders this year are likely to reach only around 15-20 million units. That’s half the previous supply chain estimate of 30-40 million units.
The paywalled report said that this is “intensifying competition” among Apple suppliers who bank on the iPhone as a large piece of their business.
When it comes to design, Apple’s not a lazy company. Cupertino sweats the small details, which — like that anecdote about Van Halen’s “no brown M&Ms” concert rider — shows it sweats the big details, too.
That’s why Apple fans seem so surprised to see that the icon for macOS Big Sur’s Digital Color Meter has something, well, just a little off about it. Can you see what’s wrong?
The eight winners of this year’s Apple Design Awards showcase “outstanding app design, innovation, ingenuity, and technical achievement,” the company said Monday.
Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of worldwide developer relations, said the four apps and four games honored “inspire not only their peers in the Apple developer community, but all of us at Apple, too.”
The top-end iPhone 12 Pro could support 4K at 120fps and 4K at 240fps video recording modes, claims a new video from Filip Koroy of EverythingApplePro. If accurate, this would be massive step up from the current iPhone 11 Pro, which offers 240fps in 1080p.
Koroy reportedly found evidence of the new high resolution, slow-mo format in the iOS 14 beta code. Whether this is accurate remains to be seen. If it is, it would be far above what is available in other smartphone models right now. It would also make it likely that Apple will sell a shedload of high storage handsets this year — or way more iCloud subscriptions.
Thanks to people working from home and coronavirus lockdown, 2020 has been the year of videoconferencing apps — and Google Meet is adding a few new features to try and take on rival Zoom.
According to a new report from 9to5Google, Google Meet is working on new features that will allow users to add images or blur the background of their video calls. This is a feature that already exists for Zoom and Skype users, although this will be the first time it’s available on Google meet.
Popular run-and-gun franchise Metal Slug looks to be returning to iOS for the first time since 2016’s Metal Slug Attack. Over the weekend, Tencent’s Timi Studios released a trailer for what they are currently calling Metal Slug Code: J.
From the look of it, it picks up the gameplay that the Metal Slug games are known for, with plenty of action, ridiculously overwrought vehicles, explosions, and more. However, it includes quasi-3D movement that wasn’t part of the original SNK games and a slightly more modern art style. Check out the trailer below.
The iPhone 12 reportedly will ship without packaged earbuds, but according to reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, it might also lack another standard piece of kit in its box: a charger.
In a new note to clients sent over the weekend, TF International Securities analyst Kuo confirms as legitimate a recent photo of a 20-watt power charger for the new iPhone. However, he says it won’t come with the next-generation iPhone 12.
Microsoft is pulling the plug on its chain of retail stores, the company announced Friday. All stores are going to be shuttered for good, although four — in New York City, London, Sydney, and its Redmond campus — will be turned into experience centers that don’t sell products.
Amazon is buying Zoox, a self-driving car startup that employs at least 17 people who previously worked on Apple’s Project Titan.
The Information first reported the purchase of Zoox, and Amazon confirmed it Friday in a blog post. The deal could set Amazon back upward of $1 billion.
Apple exec Craig Federighi says the company’s production team “moved mountains” to put together this week’s online-only WWDC keynote. And, while he won’t go so far as to commit to future virtual keynotes, he did say that Apple was very happy with it — and will be looking see what aspects of the presentation it can use in the future.
That’s one of the insights gained from listening to the latest episodes of Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee’s Waveform podcast, which features an interview with Federighi, Apple’s senior VP of software engineering.
Several Apple ads from the past year won awards at the U.K.’s long-running Design and Art Direction awards. D&AD is a British educational charity that promotes excellence in design and advertising. In this year’s virtual-only awards, it gave various Pencils (the name of charity’s awards) to what it thinks are Apple’s best promotional spots of the year.
You can check out the prize-winners — including a 5-hour, 19-minute iPhone commercial — below.
Apple has closed 14 stores in Florida starting Friday as a result of the increased number of coronavirus cases in the state, Apple has confirmed.
This brings the total number of Apple Stores to be reopened and then closed again to 32 in the United States. Earlier this week, Apple shuttered seven stores in the Houston area following a spike in COVID-19 cases. It has also closed select stores in Arizona, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
Michael Hawley, the man who helped Steve Jobs write his famous 2005 Stanford commencement address, has died as a result of cancer at the age of 58.
Hawley, who shared a house with Jobs at one time and worked with him at NeXT, was a polymath and pioneer in his own right. At NeXT, he created one of the world’s first digital libraries. He also helped conceive of the Internet of Things, worked at MIT’s world-famous Media Lab, was scientific director for one of the first major scientific expeditions on Everest in 1998, and was an accomplished piano player and organist.
Apple SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi and VP of product marketing Greg Joswiak discuss all the news coming out of Monday’s WWDC keynote in an interview with Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber.
Topics include the transition to Apple Silicon, the virtual WWDC, iOS and iPad OS 14, macOS Big Sur, tvOS 14 and watchOS 7. They even touch on issues like the current App Store controversy, which may trigger a Department of Justice investigation into Apple.
Check it out below.
A survey of customers in the UK hammers home Apple’s dominance when it comes to wireless in-ear headphones. According to a report by Counterpoint Research, 63% of respondents named Apple as a preferred brand when picking their next wireless in-ear headphones.
Apple trounced the competition that included Bose, Sony, the Apple-owned Beats, Samsung and others. While respondents were able to name multiple brands, the quantity of people who mentioned Apple makes clear just how much of a name Apple has carved out for itself in this market.
Apple has upgraded its Core ML machine learning framework, adding the ability for developers to update their machine learning models on the fly, the company revealed Wednesday.
The ability to update artificial intelligence models outside of the usual app update cycle means that devs can quickly improve the machine learning smarts of particular apps without having to push out an update. That’s huge news for any app developers who feature AI components within their apps.
Kristen Bell is dropping out of Apple TV+ animated musical comedy series Central Park, the popular Good Place star announced on social media Wednesday. Bell starred as Molly Tillerman in all 13 episodes of the first season of Central Park. The show debuted last month on Apple TV+.
Bell, whose character on the show is mixed race, said that she is stepping back so as to allow the character to be played by an actor whose race matches that of the character.