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The Free-Beats Edition Friday, June 3, 2016

Apple Beefs Up 2016 Back To School Sale, Offers Free Beats With Mac, iPhone Or iPad Purchase, by AppleInsider

Apple's 2016 Back to School sale is an improvement from last year, offering a better model of Beats headphones with the purchase of an eligible Mac, and also expanding the promotion to include free headphones with the purchase of an iPad Pro or newer iPhone.

Best Standard Size

The 9.7" iPad Pro Review, by Brandon Chester, Anandtech

In the end, the 9.7” iPad Pro is clearly the best standard-sized tablet on the market. If iOS isn’t something you can manage with then you’ll obviously have to shop elsewhere, but at this point the hardware and software gaps are so incredibly large that you really need to be sure that you can’t use iOS, because you’ll be missing out on a ton of apps and really great hardware. Unlike the larger iPad Pro, I don’t think it’s a tablet that can actually stay performant for five years. It may be kept alive for that long much like the iPad 2 has been, but that’s more like being kept on life support than truly living. It’s unfortunate that right now you can’t buy an iPad with all of Apple’s best specs, with the smaller iPad Pro boasting a better display and camera, and the larger one having a better GPU and more RAM. I think we’ll eventually reach a point where we see parity between the two, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the $200 price gap begins to shrink at the same time. As it stands, the 9.7” iPad Pro is as good as it gets for tablets of this size, and the only thing you can really hold against it is the concern that it may not be as quick as it is now in the future.

Buggy Updates

Apple Issues New iOS 9.3.2 Update To Address Update Errors On 9.7" iPad Pro, by AppleInsider

The new iOS 9.3.2 is now available to download via software update through the iOS Settings application, or with iTunes on a Mac or PC. Builds are available for both the Wi-Fi-only 9.7-inch iPad Pro, and the LTE-capable model.

Apple Releases iTunes 12.4.1, Replacing Things Forgotten In iTunes 12.4, by Kirk McElhearn

Apple has released iTunes 12.4.1, with some bug fixes, but notably restoring a few features that were “missing” from iTunes 12.4.

Simplicity And Magic

How Apple Lost Its Way: Steve Jobs’ Love Of Simplicity Is Gone, by Ken Segall, The Guardian

I have zero doubt that Apple believes deeply in the power of simplicity. Simplicity is at the heart of the company’s products and the foundation of its vision for the future.

But simplicity is a matter of perception, and it’s hard to ignore the fact that Apple is struggling to present a simple image to its customers.

Previously:

The Secret Of Apple's Success: Simplicity, by Ken Segall, The Guardian

How Steve Jobs' Love Of Simplicity Fueled A Design Revolution, by Walter Isaacson, Simithsonian Magazine

The End Of All Things Considered, by Steve Lickteig, Slate

Here’s what I think the future sounds like: You will get in your car and say, “Play my news briefing, plus all of last night’s baseball scores, including highlights from the Yankees game. Oh, and give me last week’s Vows column from the New York Times.” Then, like magic, your audio system will assemble this playlist. That news briefing you asked for? It will come from sources you pre-selected, places like NPR and news organizations yet to be created. If you don’t know what you feel like hearing, you’ll ask your system to surprise you. If you don’t like what you hear, you’ll tell it to skip to something else.

Stuff

'1Password For Teams' Introduces Secure Password Sharing For Teams At Work, by Mitchel Broussard, MacRumors

AgileBits recently announced that its long-in-beta product "1Password for Teams" has officially launched, bringing an enterprise-focused version of the company's popular password management app to iOS, Mac, and Android. 1Password for Teams will let users in a designated team share secure passwords, documents, and other data through AgileBits' heavily encrypted infrastructure.

With CopyLess For OS X, You May Not Copy Less -- But You'll Be Less Frustrated While You Do, by Dennis Sellers, Apple World Today

Unlike the Mac OS X system clipboard, the utility lets you store and access up to 100 items. It can manage almost all data formats supported by the Mac OS X clipboard.

Develop

Apple Withdraws Swift 3.0 Preview 1, by Erica Sadun

According to Rene Ritchie, yesterday’s preview is apparently withdrawn and is no longer available from swift.org/download.

The Google/Oracle Decision Was Bad For Copyright And Bad For Software, by Peter Bright

With the law as it stands, though, copyright is the best tool we have. In this particular field, it's already far weaker than it should be—it offers borderline irrelevant protection (even as it lasts far too long) that fails to reflect the things that make software a creative, challenging, expressive endeavor.

Calling Google's behavior with the Java APIs "fair use" makes things worse, not better.

Making A Case For Playgrounds On The iPad, by Mayur Dhaka, NSShadowcat

If you ask me, the prospect of learning and experimenting with Swift on my iPad is simply marvellous!

Notes

Apple's Enterprise Partnerships, Big And Small, Start To Pay Off, by Matt Kapko, CIO

Apple has been the target of recent criticism for its current pace of innovation. However, though the company's slow-and-steady approach to the enterprise may not be winning over financial analysts, it is proving to be an effective strategy for expansion into the business market. Apple set the stage for a formal courtship of the enterprise nearly two years ago, when it inked an alliance with IBM. Since then, the company has struck deals with Cisco and SAP to tap the strengths of these stalwarts in enterprise services and mobility, in additional to a number of smaller players.

No One Will Save You From Cellphone Tracking, by Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic

This location data—officially called “cell-site location information,” or CSLI—has been the topic of legal controversy lately. Because your cell provider ultimately creates this information, it is subject to the “third-party doctrine,” a piece of legal precedent created by the Supreme Court in the 1970s. The third-party doctrine allows for the government to access information shared with a third party (like a bank or a phone company) without a warrant.

In other words, a police department or law enforcement agency can back-request historical CSLI whenever they want—and they don’t need a warrant to do so. This ease of access makes CSLI one of the most common forms of government surveillance: In 2015, AT&T alonereceived almost 60,000 requests for historical CSLI. (In order to track a cellphone in real time, police still need a warrant.)

Photographing The Streets Named For Martin Luther King Jr., by Eillie Anzilotti, The Atlantic

Across the United States, more than 900 streets bear the name Martin Luther King Jr. The photographer Susan Berger didn’t visit them all, but her series, “Martin Luther King Dr.,” captures an essential truth about these streets—their diversity.

Bottom of the Page

I wonder if Apple is going to put in a new iTunes Visualizer this WWDC. :-)

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Thanks for reading.