Just about 25 years ago, on December 20, 1996, Apple purchased NeXT, a company that made computer hardware and software. In retrospect, Apple didn’t get NeXT as much as it got the founder of NeXT, Steve Jobs. As the headline for an article by Dawn Kawamoto of CNet accurately stated at the time: “Apple acquires Next, Jobs.” Joe Rossignol of MacRumors recently discussed the significance of that acquisition with the benefit of hindsight. It is no exaggeration to say that this acquisition saved Apple from bankruptcy and led to the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and the iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS operating systems. Who knows what kind of smartphones and other portable technology we would be using today if things had turned out differently 25 years ago. And now, the news of note for the end of 2021:
- New York attorney Nicole Black discusses the top five legal technology stories of 2021 in an article for ABA Journal. Perhaps obviously, the remote work revolution is #1 on her list.
- Tom Parsons of What Hi-Fi? interviewed Gary Geaves, VP of Acoustics at Apple, to discuss Spatial Audio for the AirPods and related topics. It is an interesting interview. For example, Geaves explains that Spatial Audio works differently when you are listening to an Apple TV than when you are listening to an iPhone so that the virtual speakers seem further away on an Apple TV but closer on an iPhone.
- Jacob Krol of CNN interviewed David Dorn and Meg Frost of Apple to discuss the recent improvements to Apple Maps.
- Throughout this pandemic, one of the ways to keep track of the seriousness of the spread of COVID is to look at what local Apple Stores are doing. Filipe Espósito of 9to5Mac reports that Apple has closed all of its stores in New York City because of COVID.
- Mark Gurman of Bloomberg reported other Apple Store closings on Twitter. For example, here in New Orleans where I live, Gurman reports that our local Apple Store is closing temporarily starting today because of nearly 30 employees with COVID. Gurman also reported that two Florida Apple Stores closed because of potentially hundreds of positive tests or exposures.
- One of the things that Apple and Google did to try to curb the spread of COVID was to add an exposure notification feature to smartphones. This feature has only had limited success for a number of reasons, which are addressed by Gerrit De Vynck and Cat Zakrzewski of the Washington Post in this story based on information from Myoung Cha, who worked on the product as Apple’s head of strategic health initiatives (free gift link for non-subscribers).
- COVID isn’t the only thing that we need to be concerned about. Hacking remains a constant problem for all of us—I just heard yesterday about a major law firm being hacked—and nothing is more scary that hackers breaking into a password manager. But as Michael Simon of Macworld reports, hackers were able to access some part of the LastPass password manager system, although LastPass believes that no individual accounts were compromised.
- Have you ever typed 20 on your iPhone or iPad and had the device automatically change that to 2.0? It has happened to me, and I could never figure out why. John Gruber of Daring Fireball figured out what is going on and provides a workaround.
- If anyone out there is still using one of the original BlackBerry devices, John Timmer of Ars Technica reports that key features will stop working on January 4, 2021.
- In an article for Macworld, Jason Snell speculates on what might be coming in the 2022 versions of the iPhone and other Apple products.
- And finally (for this past week), Apple recently released three short videos to show off the iPhone 13 Pro’s video capabilities. One called Pavel addresses the 3x optical zoom. One called Basement addresses taking video in low light. But my favorite is called Detectives and it addresses Cinematic Mode in a very humorous way:
- And finally (for this past year), Apple TV+ created a new Peanuts holiday special, this one for New Year’s Eve. And to celebrate that new movie, you can now have a For Auld Lang Syne sing-along with your favorite Peanuts characters: