Apple Update

If you're a user of Apple products, you may enjoy the following brief update on the company, which comes from a blog I subscribe to.

Jim Hamm

Apple unveiled its latest product lineup recently at a live event with enough fanfare to be confused for a royal wedding.

Some highlights:

  • Four new iPhones, including the iPhone 14, 14 Plus, and new Pro models that run on an advanced chip and feature fancy cameras

  • Next-gen Apple Watches with new temperature sensors (that can, controversially, help track ovulation cycles)

  • Souped-up AirPods with better noise cancellation and six hours of listening time per charge

But marginally better gadgets aren’t the growth drivers they used to be for Apple. So, with smartphone sales plateauing globally, the company is now embracing something it largely used to avoid: selling online advertising.

Helping itself

For now, Apple’s got a much smaller piece of the online ad sales pie than rivals Google and Facebook. Recently, though, it’s started carving out a bigger slice: A study released Tuesday by Appsumer found that Apple’s advertiser adoption rate rose four percentage points year over year in Q2, while Facebook’s dropped three percentage points and Google’s slipped two points.

The company plans to start showing you ads in new places, like Apple Maps, to boost ad revenue—but also it may not exactly be a coincidence that Apple’s gains in online advertising happened following its App Tracking Transparency update last year. That change limited the user-tracking data Apple made available to advertisers in the name of privacy and cost companies that depend on ad sales, like Meta and Snap, billions in revenue.

Apple is now working to nearly double the size of its advertising staff, per the Financial Times, leaving it poised to benefit from the new landscape it created.

Apple claims its own ad business is different from the others. So far, it is: Apple doesn’t allow ads that target you for visiting a competitor’s website, and it won’t tailor ads to specific individuals. Still, experts told the NYT that Apple might have to start making compromises if it really wants to grow its ad sales.—AR

iPhone Tips

If you have an iPhone you may already be well aware of and using these tips, but just in case, here's an article discussing a few. One of my favorite tips is silencing incoming calls unless they are in my contacts list. Really helps with so many robocalls existing. One must be careful, though, to add the phone # for a new contact -- say, a new doctor or dentist, or you might miss their incoming call.

Jim Hamm

10 Great iPhone Features You Should Be Using (howtogeek.com)

Interested in a New Laptop?

If you might have an interest in getting a new laptop, Tom's Guide has an article comparing the MacBook Air M2 to the Dell XPS 13 Plus. Which to choose? Your decision will probably depend on what your primary use of the laptop will be, or perhaps which OS you prefer? The article clarifies this. If gaming is your thing, you'd probably want the Dell. The link here: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook-air-m2-vs-dell-xps-13-plus-which-laptop-wins?

I have a MacBook Air (running macOS Monterrey) and a Dell XPS 13 ( running Windows 11), and both laptops are about 3 years old. In size, shape, and function, both are quite similar, other than the operating system. I like them both, and just alternate back and forth. One thing I've noticed over the years, laptops keep getting lighter and lighter, which makes them much easier to transport around.

I'm not in the market for a new laptop, and maybe neither are you. But I enjoy reading articles such as this one, just to see what is coming onstream in the computer world, and maybe you will, too.

Jim Hamm

How Well Are You Treating Your iPhone or iPad Battery?

Lithium (Li) batteries, like the ones in your cell phone, will DIE if discharged to 0, so don’t let that happen! I think the iPhone shuts down when the power gets below a certain point. But your personal portable chargers that contain Li batteries also need to be carefully monitored. If they drain completely, they cannot be recharged. That even applies to those Li batteries in your expensive Harmony universal remotes.

There’s an 80-20 rule that applies to charging Li batteries. For best battery life and performance, stop charging at 80% and start charging at 20%. However, Li batteries can be charged to 100% without any side effects. It is just that it doesn’t take very long to charge to 80%, and it takes a LOT longer to finish charging to 100%.

Another consideration is temperature. Li batteries can deliver a charge below 32º, but you do NOT want to try to charge them if the temp goes below 32º. That actually damages the battery. If the Li battery gets too hot, it degrades the battery life. I don’t have any information on what is too hot, but probably letting a device sit in the direct sun (like your car dashboard or on the seat exposed to the sun) is definitely not a good thing. The iPhone shuts down when it gets too hot, and that’s a sign that you have just degraded the battery somewhat.


John Carter

Spam Texts?

If you receive spam texts on your smartphone, the following comments from a NYT columnist may be helpful.

Jim Hamm

How to report spam texts

Brian X. Chen, the consumer technology columnist for The New York Times, offers advice for becoming part of the solution to the scourge of bogus text messages.

In a recent column, I reported on the growing annoyance of text-message spam, which recently outpaced the rise of robocalls.

The texts might be shipping notices about a package that you didn’t order, or pitches for questionable health products like weight-loss pills. The links inside those texts typically point you to a website asking for your personal information, including your credit card number, which scammers could use for fraud.

There’s no sign of SMS spam slowing down. So one of the best things you can do is become part of the solution: Forward the spam text to your phone carrier.

That will help the carriers learn what phone numbers and language are being used in spam texts. That’s useful information to help the carriers improve their technology to stop those messages from ever reaching your phone.

Here’s how to forward spam texts to the carriers:

On iPhones, tap and hold down on the message and tap “More.” Then press the forward button, which is the arrow on the bottom-right corner of the screen. In the recipient field, enter 7726 and hit send.

On Android phones, tap and hold down on the message. When a menu pops up, select “Forward Message.” Enter 7726 in the recipient field and hit send.

iPhone Photos

If you use an iPhone and like to take pictures with it, here is an article on how to adjust the settings so the pictures take up less space in storage:


https://www.howtogeek.com/803010/stop-taking-live-photos-on-iphone/I have an iPhone, but don't take many pictures with it, though. Anyway, after reading the article I went to change the settings per the article, but found I had already done so sometime in the past -- so long ago I had forgotten all about it.The settings changes are worth doing, I'd say.

Jim Hamm

Vintage Macs

FYI and possible interest, here are comments from the Small Dog Electronics newsletter

(https://shop.smalldog.com/) discussing the difference between current, vintage, and obsolete Macs..

Jim Hamm

Macs—and Apple products in general—tend to last a long time. It’s not unusual to see someone happily using an 8-year-old MacBook Pro. As much as it’s environmentally responsible to use electronics as long as possible, doing so may reduce your productivity or leave your business in a precarious situation if a hardware failure forces an upgrade at an inconvenient time.

Another factor to consider is whether or not you can get service and parts for your older device. It’s easy to assume that Apple will fix whatever you bring in, but, unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Apple has policies surrounding how long it guarantees to provide service and parts, which is reasonable. No one would expect Apple to repair a 128K Mac from 1984—many repair techs hadn’t even been born then.

All Apple products fall into one of three categories: current, vintage, and obsolete. Current products, which Apple defines as those that were sold within the last 5 years, are eligible for service and parts from Apple, Apple Authorized Service Providers, and Independent Repair Providers. In other words, if you bought your Mac new within the last 5 years, you won’t have any problem getting Apple to fix it.

(Independent Repair Providers are firms that have signed up for Apple’s Independent Repair Provider Program to provide out-of-warranty iPhone and Mac repairs using Apple-provided parts, tools, service guides, and diagnostics. Other repair shops can repair Apple products but may lack Apple certifications and have to source parts from other suppliers.)

Things get trickier with the other two categories:

  • Vintage: Apple considers a product to be vintage when the company stopped selling it more than 5 and less than 7 years ago. During this 2-year window, Apple says that service and parts may be obtained, subject to parts availability.

  • Obsolete: As you’d expect, a product is considered obsolete when Apple hasn’t sold it for more than 7 years. Apple will not service obsolete products, and service providers cannot order parts for them.

There is one exception to these policies. Mac laptops may be eligible for an extended battery-only repair period for up to 10 years from when the product was last distributed for sale, subject to parts availability. That makes sense since a new battery may be all an old MacBook needs to keep working.

Apple maintains a page listing all vintage and obsolete products. To determine which Mac model you have, choose About This Mac from your Apple menu. For iPhones, iPads, and iPods, Apple provides pages explaining how to identify your model.

Apple’s policies surrounding vintage and obsolete products shouldn’t make a huge difference to most users. That’s because once a Mac hits 5 years old, it’s likely that upgrading to a new model will provide significant benefits. Many businesses prefer a 3-year replacement cycle because they’ve determined that’s the sweet spot where increasing support costs and lower performance make it worth selling the old Mac and buying a new one that’s faster and more reliable.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with keeping a Mac longer if it meets your needs and you don’t mind spending more on support. At some point, though, products in the vintage and obsolete categories are living on borrowed time.

Apple Wants to End Passwords for Everything.

Wall Street Journal. By Dalvin Brown Follow June 12, 2022 800 am ET

Here’s How It Would Work.

Goodbye, complex, hard-to-remember passwords. Hello, logging in with your face and fingerprints.

Your passwords keep your money, your job and your identity safe. But you hate them, and they’re flawed. Apple Inc. is trying to get rid of them entirely.

When Apple’s latest software updates for iPhones, iPads and Macs arrive this fall, they will include a way for users to log into various online accounts without entering passwords or relying on password managers to save and fill in credentials. The technology generates unique passkeys for each app or browser-based service in the place of characters. Those passkeys, a new type of identity authentication, prompt a scan of your face or fingerprints to log you in.

M1 Chips

You're probably aware that Apple recently started using their own-designed, M1 chip, in some of their Mac computers instead of an Intel chip. The new chip is measured in nanometers, which didn't mean a lot to me till I read the following statement I was reading in an article about Apple's new chip. How does any company manufacture, handle and use something that small? Almost unbelievable!.

Jim Hamm

"Much has been made of Apple’s earthshaking switch from Intel processors to its own, designed-in-house M1 chip. Produced for Apple by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), M1 semiconductors use a vanishingly small 5-nanometer (5nm) transistor size, less than 1/10,000 the width of a human hair. M1 processors have figured prominently in Macs since November 2020."

To give you another perspective of how small a nanometer is, take a read on the following:

"a typical virus is about 100 nanometers wide. A bacterium is about 1000 nanometers"