For the second time in as many years, internet advertisers are facing unprecedented disruption to their business model thanks to a new feature in a forthcoming Apple software update.
iOS 11, the latest version of Apple’s operating system for mobile devices, will hit users’ phones and tablets on Tuesday. It will include a new default feature for the Safari web browser dubbed “intelligent tracking prevention”, which prevents certain websites from tracking users around the net, in effect blocking those annoying ads that follow you everywhere you visit.
The tracking prevention system will also arrive on Apple’s computers 25 September, as part of the High Sierra update to macOS. Safari is used by 14.9% of all internet users, according to data from StatCounter.
Six major advertising consortia have already written an open letter to Apple expressing their “deep concern” over the way the change is implemented, and asking the company to “to rethink its plan to … risk disrupting the valuable digital advertising ecosystem that funds much of today’s digital content and services”.
Tracking of users around the internet has become crucial to the inner workings of many advertising networks. By using cookies, small text files placed on a computer which were originally created to let sites mark who was logged in, advertisers can build a detailed picture of the browsing history of members of the public, and use that to more accurately profile and target adverts to the right individuals.
Many of these cookies, known as “third-party” cookies because they aren’t controlled by the site that loads them, can be blocked by browsers already. But advertisers also use “first-party” cookies, loaded by a site the user does visit but updated as they move around the net. Blocking those breaks many other aspects of the internet that users expect to work, such as the ability to log into sites using Facebook or Twitter passwords.
To tackle this, the new Safari feature uses a “machine learning model”, Apple says, to identify which first-party cookies are actually desired by users, and which are placed by advertisers. If the latter, the cookie gets blocked from third-party use after a day, and purged completely from the device after a month, drastically limiting the ability of advertisers to keep track of where on the web Safari users visit.
It is this algorithmic approach which spurred the six US advertising bodies, including the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Association of National Advertisers, to write to Apple. In their letter, published by AdWeek, the advertisers argue: “The infrastructure of the modern internet depends on consistent and generally applicable standards for cookies, so digital companies can innovate to build content, services and advertising that are personalised for users and remember their visits.
“Apple’s Safari move breaks those standards and replaces them with an amorphous set of shifting rules that will hurt the user experience and sabotage the economic model for the internet.”
Apple responded to the letter saying: “Ad tracking technology has become so pervasive that it is possible for ad tracking companies to recreate the majority of a person’s web browsing history. This information is collected without permission and is used for ad re-targeting, which is how ads follow people around the internet.”
Apple has shown little concern for advertisers’ needs in the past. In 2015, it led that year’s update for iOS with a feature that allowed widespread mobile ad blocking on the platform for the first time. The move arguably kicked off an arms race that led major media companies to increase their use of subscription models, and ceded an ever-increasing portion of the digital advertising market to Facebook and Google, two companies whose models are more resilient to adblocking than many smaller publishers.
Google has also made a move on the adblocking market, testing a built-in adblocker for its Chrome browser, which is used by 54.9% of all internet users according to StatCounter. The feature, which is expected to hit the final release of the browser sometime this year, blocks what the company calls “intrusive ads”: autoplaying video and audio, popovers which block content, or interstitial ads that take up the entire screen.
Unsurprisingly, Google’s own advertising products are not deemed intrusive.
Apple had a message for its customers this past week: "We apologize."
Customers have been angry ever since the company confirmed its software updates slow down older iPhones with aging batteries. Apple says it did that to prevent those iPhones from shutting down unexpectedly.
While this apology might help on the public relations front, the legal issues are another matter.
Apple is facing a number of lawsuits over the issue from iPhone owners in states including California, New York and Illinois. There's also a lawsuit from customers in Israel and one from a French consumer rights group.
Broadly, the lawsuits cover contract law claims — saying that Apple harmed something the consumer owned and wasn't transparent about it — as well as consumer protection violations.
"You changed my phone in a harmful way [and] didn't tell me you were doing that," Rory Van Loo tells NPR's Lauren Frayer. Van Loo is a law professor at Boston University who focuses on technology and regulation.
The claims allege that the deception may have caused consumers to buy a new phone when instead they could have just bought a new battery. For the plaintiffs to succeed in the fraud claims, they will need to prove that Apple intended to promote new phone sales by slowing down old phone sales.
"For all claims [plaintiffs] will need to prove some kind of harm," Van Loo says. "They're going to need to show that Apple intentionally withheld information about slowing down the phones" and that customers would have made a different decision.
Though these lawsuits face a bit of an uphill battle, Van Loo says Apple should be nervous.
"For one, Apple has lost a number of cases across the country on some similar arguments in recent years," he says.
In a lawsuit first filed in 2015, iPhone 4s users claimed they were forced to download an update that made their phones buggy and unusable. Apple tried to get that case thrown out, but last month a judge ruled against the company.
Apple's argument, and one that they Van Loo says they may use again, is that users are told in the fine print of software updates that "things may go wrong."
"Apple is not going to be protected by what they put in the fine print," he says. "You have to be very specific about what you say in the fine print, and as far as I'm aware, it didn't anywhere say, 'We may slow down your phones with our updates.' "
After the battery issue came to light, Apple apologized to customers and said it would offer discounts to replace old batteries. The company also said new features are rolling out "that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone's battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance."
While good news for future customers and in the court of public opinion, Van Loo says it doesn't free them from the potential legal liability.
Apple's apology "is not going to protect them from what they did last month and last year," he says.
Despite the criticism and lawsuits, Apple's explanation and response to the battery concerns does not include any indication that older phones using old batteries will stop slowing down.
Seems like an advantage for Apple to have a closed ecosystem but the one major disadvantage is that Siri is a joke and hasn't changed much over the years meanwhile Amazon, and Google get further and further ahead.
The report claims that many of the employees acknowledged for the first time that Apple rushed Siri to be included in the iPhone 4s before the technology was fully ready, resulting in several internal debates over whether to continue patching up the half-baked product or start from scratch.
Siri's various teams morphed into an unwieldy apparatus that engaged in petty turf battles and heated arguments over what an ideal version of Siri should be—a quick and accurate information fetcher or a conversant and intuitive assistant capable of complex tasks.
The team working on Siri was overseen by Apple's then iOS chief Scott Forstall, but his attention was reportedly divided by other major projects, including the upcoming launch of Apple Maps. As a result, Forstall enlisted Richard Williamson, who was also managing the Apple Maps project, to head up the Siri team.
According to the report, several former employees said Williamson made a number of decisions that the rest of the Siri team disagreed with, including a plan to improve the assistant's capabilities only once a year.
Williamson, in an emailed response to the report, wrote that it's "completely untrue" that he decided Siri shouldn't be improved continuously.
He said decisions concerning "technical leadership of the software and server infrastructure" were made by employees below his level, while he was responsible for getting the team on track.
"After launch, Siri was a disaster," Mr. Williamson wrote. "It was slow, when it worked at all. The software was riddled with serious bugs. Those problems lie entirely with the original Siri team, certainly not me."
Forstall and Williamson were both fired by Apple in 2012 following the botched launch of Apple Maps on iOS 6. The former employees interviewed said they lamented losing Forstall, who "believed in what they were doing."
Another interesting tidbit is that the Siri team apparently didn't even learn about the HomePod until 2015. Last year, Bloomberg News reported that Apple had developed several speaker prototypes dating back to 2012, but the Siri team presumably didn't know due to Apple's culture of secrecy.
In a sign of how unprepared Apple was to deal with a rivalry, two Siri team members told The Information that their team didn't even learn about Apple’s HomePod project until 2015—after Amazon unveiled the Echo in late 2014. One of Apple’s original plans was to launch its speaker without Siri included, according to a source.
The report says that Siri is the main reason the HomePod has "underperformed," and said Siri's capabilities "remain limited compared to the competition," including Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
Apple seems to be once again crippled by Siri meanwhile Amazon, and Google just continue off over the horizon in terms of AI etc. I am on the fence about switching to iOS from Android after the whole Facebook fiasco but Apple Maps, and the shitshow that is Siri hold me back.
Apple's HomePod hasn't ended up selling as well as the company was hoping, leading it to cut orders with suppliers, reports Bloomberg.
In late March, nearly two months after the HomePod first became available for purchase, Apple reportedly lowered its sales forecasts and dropped some orders with Inventec, the company responsible for manufacturing the HomePod. HomePod inventory in retail locations is said to be "piling up" with some stores selling "fewer than 10 HomePods a day."
Early analyst estimates based on strong pre-orders and initial sales figures suggested the HomePod would sell well and capture a solid portion of the smart speaker market, but Apple hasn't managed to maintain sales momentum.
During the HomePod's first 10 weeks of sales, it eked out 10 percent of the smart speaker market, compared with 73 percent for Amazon's Echo devices and 14 percent for the Google Home, according to Slice Intelligence. Three weeks after the launch, weekly HomePod sales slipped to about 4 percent of the smart speaker category on average, the market research firm says.
Apple charges $349 for the HomePod, making the device more expensive than competing smart speakers from Amazon and other companies. Apple put a lot of effort into promoting the HomePod's superior sound quality, but its high price tag, its lack of connectivity with non-Apple devices, and its inability to work natively with music services other than Apple Music have likely hurt its sales.
As Bloomberg points out, the HomePod's February launch was delayed from an initial promised December launch, causing Apple to miss out on key holiday sales.
HomePod also continues to lack promised features like stereo pairing to pair two HomePods together and AirPlay 2 support for controlling the music on multiple HomePods located in different rooms of the house. There are hints of this functionality in iOS 11.4, so these options could be coming soon, but HomePod owners and prospective buyers are likely disappointed with the months-long wait for basic features.
Apple isn't likely planning to give up on the HomePod despite its lackluster sales because it's part of an audio accessory lineup that includes the AirPods and the upcoming rumored high-end over-ear headphones.
Loup Ventures analyst Gene Munster in February said he expects sales to pick up later in the year. He predicts Apple will sell a total of 7 million HomePods in 2018, with that number set to grow to 10.9 million in 2019.
Seems like Apple will release a new iPad Pro later this year. Since I am in need of a new tablet (that ideally can also function as a laptop replacement), and Google is basically "What's a tablet?", It might just be time for me to switch. Most of the stuff I do privately is already cross-plattform. I did get a chance to play around with the current generation of iPad Pros at work (even though that was just doing the bare-bones minimum setup) and I was impressed with them.
As for the smart speaker thing, another advantage that Google has is that third-parties can also make Google Home Speakers. I think JBL has a pretty interesting lineup here.
Seems like Apple will release a new iPad Pro later this year. Since I am in need of a new tablet (that ideally can also function as a laptop replacement), and Google is basically "What's a tablet?", It might just be time for me to switch. Most of the stuff I do privately is already cross-plattform. I did get a chance to play around with the current generation of iPad Pros at work (even though that was just doing the bare-bones minimum setup) and I was impressed with them.
As for the smart speaker thing, another advantage that Google has is that third-parties can also make Google Home Speakers. I think JBL has a pretty interesting lineup here.
One of the reasons I don't have an iPhone is the poor quality of Apple Maps. It seems Apple has started from scratch only problem I see is if it took them this long just to add Northern California.
"m not sure if you’re aware, but the launch of Apple Maps went poorly. After a rough first impression, an apology from the CEO, several years of patching holes with data partnerships and some glimmers of light with long-awaited transit directions and improvements in business, parking and place data, Apple Maps is still not where it needs to be to be considered a world-class service.
Maps needs fixing.
Apple, it turns out, is aware of this, so it’s re-building the maps part of Maps.
It’s doing this by using first-party data gathered by iPhones with a privacy-first methodology and its own fleet of cars packed with sensors and cameras. The new product will launch in San Francisco and the Bay Area with the next iOS 12 beta and will cover Northern California by fall.
Every version of iOS will get the updated maps eventually, and they will be more responsive to changes in roadways and construction, more visually rich depending on the specific context they’re viewed in and feature more detailed ground cover, foliage, pools, pedestrian pathways and more.
This is nothing less than a full re-set of Maps and it’s been four years in the making, which is when Apple began to develop its new data-gathering systems. Eventually, Apple will no longer rely on third-party data to provide the basis for its maps, which has been one of its major pitfalls from the beginning.
“Since we introduced this six years ago — we won’t rehash all the issues we’ve had when we introduced it — we’ve done a huge investment in getting the map up to par,” says Apple SVP Eddy Cue, who now owns Maps, in an interview last week. “When we launched, a lot of it was all about directions and getting to a certain place. Finding the place and getting directions to that place. We’ve done a huge investment of making millions of changes, adding millions of locations, updating the map and changing the map more frequently. All of those things over the past six years.”
But, Cue says, Apple has room to improve on the quality of Maps, something that most users would agree on, even with recent advancements.
“We wanted to take this to the next level,” says Cue. “We have been working on trying to create what we hope is going to be the best map app in the world, taking it to the next step. That is building all of our own map data from the ground up.”
In addition to Cue, I spoke to Apple VP Patrice Gautier and more than a dozen Apple Maps team members at its mapping headquarters in California this week about its efforts to re-build Maps, and to do it in a way that aligned with Apple’s very public stance on user privacy.
If, like me, you’re wondering whether Apple thought of building its own maps from scratch before it launched Maps, the answer is yes. At the time, there was a choice to be made about whether or not it wanted to be in the business of maps at all. Given that the future of mobile devices was becoming very clear, it knew that mapping would be at the core of nearly every aspect of its devices, from photos to directions to location services provided to apps. Decision made, Apple plowed ahead, building a product that relied on a patchwork of data from partners like TomTom, OpenStreetMap and other geo data brokers. The result was underwhelming.
Almost immediately after Apple launched Maps, it realized that it was going to need help and it signed on a bunch of additional data providers to fill the gaps in location, base map, point-of-interest and business data.
It wasn’t enough.
“We decided to do this just over four years ago. We said, ‘Where do we want to take Maps? What are the things that we want to do in Maps?’ We realized that, given what we wanted to do and where we wanted to take it, we needed to do this ourselves,” says Cue.
Because Maps are so core to so many functions, success wasn’t tied to just one function. Maps needed to be great at transit, driving and walking — but also as a utility used by apps for location services and other functions.
Cue says that Apple needed to own all of the data that goes into making a map, and to control it from a quality as well as a privacy perspective.
There’s also the matter of corrections, updates and changes entering a long loop of submission to validation to update when you’re dealing with external partners. The Maps team would have to be able to correct roads, pathways and other updating features in days or less, not months. Not to mention the potential competitive advantages it could gain from building and updating traffic data from hundreds of millions of iPhones, rather than relying on partner data.
If this is a pure iPhone event, I don't care. You wouldn't catch me dead with an iWatch and I have yet to see a compelling reason to upgrade from my iPhone 6s.
That said, if they end up announcing a new Macbook Air, with legacy ports and a retina screen, I'm going to shit my pantaloons.
A last-minute leak has seemingly confirmed the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR names for Apple’s newest phones, and revealed new Apple Watch sizes. The names, first spotted by ATH, are found in a product sitemap XML file hosted on Apple.com, and are associated with items that will be available to purchase including AppleCare support, phone cases, and Watch bands. Today’s leak would put the names “iPhone XS Plus” and “iPhone XC” out of contention.
The XML file mentions the Apple Watch Series 4 by name, and new watch bands in wider 40mm and 44mm sizes (existing Apple Watches are either 38mm or 42mm) and a variety of colors.
So it seems Apple has realized it's "What's a Computer?" marketing was a full blown disaster and are now pushing the iPad Pro's and it's future successors are replacements for the Laptop's, and even mobile gaming devices replacements. Sucks for the MacBook Air's and Mini's unveiled at the same time:
So Apple News+ is simply access to it's Magazines, and Newspapers. Not actual news coverage i.e. France 24 etc.
Also they paid Spielberg, who is notorious for being anti movies going straight to TV being paid by Apple on why it's good this time around. Anyone remember when he had a project going for Microsoft and announced it at E3 2015. How did that turn out?
Everything is subscription based, even their games. WTF Apple.
Also Apple now has their own credit card... for some reason.
Finally Apple TV+, this seems like Cook's idea. Also subscription based.
I was just about to buy the 2nd gen wireless. Jeez. Some of the boxes even mention the Airpower.
Apple Senior Vice President Dan Riccio made the announcement in a statement to AppleInsider and other venues on Friday afternoon.
After much effort, we've concluded AirPower will not achieve our high standards and we have cancelled the project. We apologize to those customers who were looking forward to this launch. We continue to believe that the future is wireless and are committed to push the wireless experience forward.
This cancellation of AirPower comes around 19 months after Apple gave a 'sneak peek' of it at the September 2017 iPhone event. Problems with design and manufacturing have previously seen mention of AirPower all but removed from Apple's website so at times it was rumored to be cancelled. Persistent rumors and even a hidden image on Apple's site appeared to suggest it would be launched alongside the AirPods.
What appeared to be a leak of the AirPods packaging included a drawing of what was clearly an AirPower charger. Yet, that graphic was not present on the shipping AirPods that AppleInsider examined.
Neither AirPods nor iPhones require Apple's own wireless charger as they can work with any Qi system. The Apple Watch, however, does need either AirPower or the wireless charging puck that the watch ships with.
It isn't presently clear what specific part of the AirPower was causing problems. The AirPower mat was more than a trio of charging coils, and appeared to utilize a series of cooperative flux generators to charge a device after locating it on the pad in software, which likely led to complications in design and manufacture.
Apple's hands-on demonstration from 2017 showed this in-action, and AppleInsider was able to put multiple devices anywhere on the pad, in any order. After doing so, the AirPower was communicating with the charging devices, and the iPhone on the pad was displaying information about the other charging devices.
Apple wiped mention of the AirPower from its website in September during the iPhone XS launch, and didn't mention it at all during that presentation.
AppleInsider has reached out to Apple for comment on specific reasons why the AirPower was cancelled.