There have been articles in the news for the last few weeks raising concerns that AirTags could be used improperly to stalk people—even though Apple has lots of built-in protections to make AirTags poor devices for that task, unlike similar products sold by other companies. For a more positive story about the use of AirTags, I recommend that you read this article by Sarah Sicard of Military Times in which she shares the story of Valerie McNulty. As a part of a military PCS (Permanent Change of Station, a move between one duty station and another), McNulty’s military family had to ship all of their belongings from Colorado to New York. In light of bad shipping experiences during prior PCS moves, McNulty attached an AirTag to one of her son’s toys that was with all of the other items being moved. And thanks to that AirTag, she knew exactly where all of her items were located, even when the mover himself fibbed about the location and status of the items being moved. If you ever find yourself shipping something to yourself, or to a friend or family member that you trust to collect the AirTag for you, adding an AirTag to your shipment is a pretty clever way to give yourself an independent source of information for tracking progress. Kudos to McNulty for her creativity. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac discusses a recent lawsuit by Ericsson against Apple alleging patent infringement and a counterclaim filed by Apple against Ericsson. One of the interesting aspects of that article is the note that while Apple in the past has tried to avoid patent litigation in the Eastern District of Texas—going to so far as to close Apple Stores in that district to reduce the risk of being sued there—Apple is now embracing that jurisdiction for this litigation. I’m sure that there is a lot more going on in that lawsuit than what is discussed in that article, but it definitely looks interesting.
- South Carolina attorney Justin Kahn explains how to use an iPad as a second display for a Mac. I do this sometimes at my house, with my iPad Pro next to my iMac, and it works well.
- I wrote about Mobile Transcript back in 2010, a service that formats depositions so that they can be read on the iPhone or iPad. Although I see no mention of this on their website, I received an alert that the service is shutting down on January 25, 2022. If you want to work with deposition transcripts on your iPad, I urge you to look at the excellent TranscriptPad app, which is part of LIT SUITE.
- In an article for Macworld, Jason Snell explains why he is frustrated at the rate at which Apple has developed the Messages app.
- I often see articles about people who say that an Apple Watch helped to save their lives. Julie Mazziotta of People shares the story of Susan Putman, who says that her AirPods saved her life because they allowed her to use Siri to call 911 after she fell.
- Christmas may be over, but Bradley Chambers of 9to5Mac explains how you can use Twinkly lights year-round, now that they support HomeKit. I’ve always been intrigued by Twinkly lights because they look so cool, but they are rather expensive.
- Andrew O’Hara of AppleInsider reviews the Weemo Stage ($50 on Amazon), a remote that can change the state of HomeKit devices. In other words, you can turn lights on and off using the multiple buttons on the Stage instead of needing to use an Apple device like an iPhone or Apple Watch. O’Hara says that the Stage previously relied on Bluetooth and was slow and undependable. But it was recently updated to support Thread, and he says that this resulted in a dramatic improvement.
- In the United States, AT&T and Verizon are turning on their new C-band 5G spectrum in select cities. You can tell that your iPhone 12 or newer is using the system because your iPhone will show 5GUW (Verizon) or 5G+ (AT&T). Phillip Tracy of Gizmodo wrote a helpful article explaining what this all means and why it has the potential to vastly increase your network speed—as long as you are not near an airport.
- And finally, Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal prepared this amusing video now that U.S. cellular carriers are shutting down the 3G network—the same network that helped the iPhone to become far more usable back in 2008: