Walt Mossberg has been writing about personal technology since 1991, mostly for the Wall Street Journal, but more recently for Recode. In his final column before he retires, Mossberg considers the future of personal technology. For many years, it was all about computers. Lately, the focus in personal technology has been the iPhone. Mossberg thinks that ambient computing may be the next big thing, the idea that the environment around us is intelligent and responsive, sort of like Siri or the Amazon Echo, with more features, always aware of what you are doing or saying. It is a fascinating piece that makes me think about what may be coming in the near future. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- Florida attorney Katie Floyd and California attorney David Sparks released a great episode of their Mac Power Users podcast devoted to hidden iOS features. They are joined by Clayton Morris, and the episode is full of great tips. Worth a listen.
- South Carolina attorney Justin Kahn notes that NotesPlus, a note taking app, was updated to version 5.0. Notably, the update adds iPhone support.
- Nick Statt of The Verge discusses the interesting background of Anker, a company that makes great accessories for the iPhone and iPad. I'm a big fan of the Anker PowerPort 6 I reviewed in 2015, and I still use it every time I travel. Anker makes lots of other great products too. For example, I see that you can get an Anker PowerCore external battery with 10,000 mAh — enough to charge an iPhone more than three times over — for only $27 on Amazon right now.
- Richard Thompson of The Advocate describes how Ochsner Hospital in New Orleans is using the Apple Watch to help patients with high blood pressure.
- Mike Schmitz of The Sweet Setup explains how to remove the GPS info from an iPhone picture so that you can share a picture with someone else without also sharing the location data for the picture.
- If you read my CarPlay review, then you know that I'm a big fan of the technology. In the past, many Ford cars did not support CarPlay because Ford promoted its own Sync software. Surprisingly, Ford announced this week that it is updating 2016 model Ford vehicles to support CarPlay, as reported by Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac. It is rare for any car manufacturer to add new features to old cars, especially something like CarPlay. This is great news for owners of those vehicles who have an iPhone.
- David Pogue of Yahoo discusses the features in the new Samsung Galaxy 8 that are not on the iPhone 7, and indicates which ones are actually useful and might be nice to have on the iPhone.
- Brent Dirks of AppAdvice discusses an update to the Duet Display app which lets you use an Apple Pencil to draw on your Mac or PC screen.
- Buster Hein of Cult of Mac reports that a new FCC filing by Apple reveals that Apple has started testing 5G network technology with the iPhone, technology that could provide speeds up to 1Gpbs. Wow. And it seems like just yesterday I was excited to upgrade my Mac's modem from 28K to 56K.
- Serenity Caldwell of iMore discusses a recent Stanford study on smartwatch health calculations. The Apple Watch is best at monitoring heart rate, but all devices are less accurate at measuring calories burned.
- For Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 18, Apple released seven videos showing how people with disabilities take advantage of Apple products. Jim Dalrymple of The Loop shows off all seven videos on this page.
- And finally, Apple unveiled a new part of its website devoted to convincing Android users to switch to iPhone. The primary message is let folks know that the switch won't be complicated; Apple even has an Android app which moves everything over. But the webpage, and associated short videos, also explain why life is better on iPhone. Here is one example, which points out that Apple does more to protect privacy on the iPhone than Google does on Android:
