Fifty years ago this month, the first cellphone conversation took place. As Zoe Kleinman of the BBC explains, Marty Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, wanted to test the first prototype of a cellphone so he took his large device to a corner on Sixth Avenue in New York City. His call was to someone he knew at Bell Laboratories, a rival company that was also trying to create a cellphone but one to be used in cars. Cooper said on that first call that he was calling from "a personal, handheld, portable cell phone." And then at first, Cooper heard silence on the other end, presumably because the other person "was gritting his teeth." I remember when my father started using a Motorola portable phone in the 1980s. It was huge, with a big antenna, and poor battery life. But it worked, and it allowed my father—an architect who often needed to make calls from a house that was under construction—to conduct business in a way never before possible. Now, virtually all of us work and play in ways that would have seemed impossible in the 1980s and earlier as a result of our iPhones. Kudos to Cooper and the rest of the team at Motorola way back when for paving the way. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- Speaking of companies whose past contributions helped to lead to the iPhone, two other companies with prominent roles in Apple history are Xerox PARC and SRI. Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) reached an agreement with Steve Jobs to show him their groundbreaking graphical user interface, which led Jobs and others at Apple to develop the interface for the Apple Lisa and then the Apple Macintosh. SRI, formerly known as Stanford Research Institute, started its life doing early AI research for the U.S. military and then eventually developed Siri, which was purchased by Apple. (Get it - SRI? Siri? Similar names.) Apple kept the name and gave us the Siri that we use today. I mention these two companies because, as Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac points out, Xerox donated PARC to SRI International so that they can work together on future projects. Perhaps they will come up with something else of interest to Apple.
- Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac describes a major update to the Calendars app for iPhone from Readdle.
- When Apple CEO Tim Cook visited India last week, he was the subject of many photographs. One of them revealed the watch face on Cook's Apple Watch, which led Griffin Jones of Cult of Mac to come up with a long post on the Apple Watch watch face and each of the complications used by Tim Cook.
- Some college students at BYU decided to go hiking and rappelling at a difficult canyon in Utah called "The Squeeze." Unfortunately, as reported on Facebook by the Emery County, Utah, Sheriff's Office and reported by Andrew Orr of AppleInsider, some of them got trapped in water and were experiencing hypothermia. They were far out of cellphone range, but one of them had an iPhone 14, and every 20 minutes a satellite came in range from the canyon enough to send a message to 911 for help, and the group was rescued. I guarantee you that I will take my iPhone the next time that I go rappelling at "The Squeeze," and also that I will never go rappelling at a place called "The Squeeze."
- Malcom Owen of AppleInsider reports on a carjacking victim that was able to help the police track down the stolen car because of an AirTag hidden inside the vehicle. Although it only took an hour to recover the car, by that point, it was severely damaged due to driving through yards and being involved in a shootout.
- Tyler Hayes of AppleInsider explains what he loves about spatial audio music on Apple Music and gives examples of songs that take good advantage of the technology.
- Kroger grocery stores have long been an Apple Pay holdout because it had been promoting Kroger Pay using the Kroger iPhone app. However, Joe Rossignol of MacRumors reports that select locations in Kentucky and Ohio are starting to accept Apple Pay, so perhaps it will roll out to all Kroger stores.
- Rikka Altland of 9to5Toys reviews the M650 wireless microphone kit from Anker, a device that aims to improve the audio portion of video taken with an iPhone.
- Fans of Ted Lasso know that actress Hannah Waddingham has an incredible singing voice. After two years of producing Christmas specials with Mariah Carey, Apple announced that this December it will release a new Apple TV+ special called Hannah Waddingham: Home for Christmas featuring Waddingham and special guests.
- If you enjoyed the Tetris movie on Apple TV+, I recommend watching this video in which the two creators of Tetris answer questions.
- And finally, in past weeks, I've linked to the excellent Wall Street Journal stories about how thieves can steal your iPhone after learning your passcode by looking over your shoulder and then cause all sorts of trouble. One of the most troubling aspects of this has to do with abuse of the iPhone Recovery Key system. That system offers great protection against online hackers, and can protect you even if a bad guy convinces a phone company to move your iPhone's SIM card to a new card controlled by the bad guy—which had been a common scheme used in the past. But the current version of the iPhone Recovery Key system offers no protection if a bad guy understands how the system works and steals your physical iPhone and learns of your passcode. In the following video, Zoe Thomas and Nicole Nguyen of the Wall Street Journal discuss the iPhone Recovery Key in detail. This is a good video to watch if you want to learn more about this so that you can better protect yourself. The key takeaway, however, remains the same: protect the secrecy of your iPhone passcode.
