I often share interesting stories of Find My being used to recover a lost iPhone, but apparently, there is a reason that none of those stories come from South Korea. William Gallagher of AppleInsider reports that Apple disables the Find My service when an iPhone is in South Korea. The Apple website page on Find My says: "The Find My network isn't supported in South Korea and might be unavailable in other regions due to local laws. In South Korea, you can play a sound on your device, mark it as lost, or erase it, but you won't be able to find your device on a map." At first, I thought that the reference to "local laws" meant that Find My was somehow prohibited by government regulation. But it isn't that—indeed, a similar feature is available in South Korea on Samsung phones. Instead, Gallagher says that the issue is that "South Korea law can be read as saying that all location data must be stored for six months, with an implication that the government must be able to access." Apparently, Apple doesn't want to risk turning on the Find My service and then finding itself in a position where it needs to violate the privacy of an iPhone owner. Very interesting. And now, the news of note from the last week:
- Wes Davis of The Verge reports that you can now use an app called UTM SE to run Windows XP on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Vision Pro. It's slow, but it works.
- William Gallagher of AppleInsider reports that iOS 18 will add support for Emergency SOS video so that a person who is stranded can show first responders their condition and environment. I have never had to call 911, so it didn't ever occur to me that video has not worked with 911 in the past.
- There is a rumor that the next iPhone will include some mechanical control for the lens aperture. I don't know if that is true or not, but Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac does an excellent job explaining how depth of field is handled on current iPhones and how it might be handled in the future if this rumor is true. The article does a great job of explaining how iPhone photography works.
- If you like to use the Apple Maps service and want to use it on a computer, even a PC, Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports that Apple has launched a public beta of an online version of Apple Maps that works in certain browsers: Chrome and Edge on a PC, and Safari and Chrome on a Mac.
- A new Apple Vision Pro environment launched this week called Lake Vrangla, which transports you to Norway, as reported by Chance Miller of 9to5Mac.
- Justin Meyers of Gadget Hacks explains how the new text editing and text effects features will work in the Messages app in iOS 18. Prepare to see things like bold, italics, and underline in text messages, along with new animations.
- Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac explains why his favorite new features in the upcoming watchOS 11 are Smart Stack with Live Activities, Pasuing Activity Rings, and setting custom Activity goals.
- James Bentley of iMore reports that each episode of the upcoming second season of Severance costs $20 million per episode to make. By comparison, the article says that Breaking Bad cost $3 million per episode and the final season of Game of Thrones cost $15 million episode. I loved Season 1 of Severance and cannot wait for Season 2. And I know nothing about the cost of making TV shows. But Severance doesn't strike me as the sort of show that would cost more to make the Game of Thrones. Perhaps this means that we will see dragons in Season 2 of Severance? We'll see.
- And finally, Apple has a new video that emphasizes, rather dramatically, the privacy features in the Safari web browser. The commercial is called Flock and it reminds me of the famous Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds: