Yesterday, Apple released a pretty major update to the iPhone and iPad: iOS 16.2 and iPadOS 16.2. Going from 16.1 to 16.2 may not seems like a big increase just based on the number, but there are a large number of new features in this early Christmas present from Apple. I’m sure I’ll be discussing them in much more detail in the future, but here are the highlights:
Built-in Whiteboard
Freeform is a new built-in (and free) whiteboard app. You have a huge white canvas, and you can write or draw whatever you want. It is easy to add shapes, change your pens, insert pictures, etc. The tools are all familiar to anyone who has used other Apple apps like Notes, Keynote, etc., except for a neat new drawing tool called Blotch that lets you draw the outline of a shape and then it fills it with color that appears behind text.
Better yet, there are lots of sharing tools. For example, much like you could previously share Notes with others, you can share a Freeform board with someone else and, if you let them, they can make edits. Or you can show off the whiteboard to others in a FaceTime call, perhaps as you explain what is going on.
I can envision lots of uses of this for lawyers and others who collaborate on projects.
Karaoke
As I previewed last week, if you subscribe to Apple Music and you have a new enough device, you can now use Apple Music Sing to see improved lyrics on songs and to sing along, even turning down the vocal track as you do so. It’s an interesting feature that my daughter instantly started using as soon as I showed it to her last night … and then I had to hear her complain that her iPhone SE isn’t new enough to use this feature.
Better encryption on iCloud
Another new feature that I discussed last week is Apple’s new Advanced Data Protection. Once you turn this on, your information on Apple’s servers—such as the iCloud backup of your iPhone and iPad—can be encrypted in a way that not even Apple can access your data.
New options on the iPhone 14 Pro Lock Screen
If you use the always-on display on the new iPhone 14 Pro, iOS 16.2 adds new options such as new widgets you can use. Also, there is a new option to not display the wallpaper when the screen dims; only the time (plus widgets if you have them enabled) against a black background. This is a neat look, and I may consider turning this mode on while I’m sleeping.
AirDrop privacy
The change to AirDrop in iOS 16.2 is either a feature or a restriction, depending upon your perspective. Before iOS 16.2, you could enable AirDrop for only folks in your Contacts or you could enable it for Everyone. The Everyone function made it very easy for someone else to send you a file, which is useful when you want to use AirDrop. However, it also meant that a stranger could try to send you a file, which you could reject.
Now, when you turn the Everyone function on, it only stays on for 10 minutes. This is good for your privacy. However, if you liked the way it worked before, it is more cumbersome to have to turn on Everyone so that someone you know can send you a file. I may just switch to the Contacts selection since most folks who AirDrop files to me are in my Contacts.
There are also many smaller improvements and bug fixes in iOS 16.2. For example, once you update to iOS 16.2 and your iPhone finishes indexing your Messages app, you can search for photos that you sent or received in Messages based on the content of the photos, such as photos showing dogs. I can see this being useful when you know that a friend sent you a picture but you cannot remember when and you didn’t save the picture to your photo roll. Also, the crash detection feature for the new iPhone 14 models was once again improved.
With a brand new app, several big new features, and some nice small new features, this is a packed update for the iPhone and iPad.
Thank you to SaneBox for sponsoring iPhone J.D. again this month. I started using the service about two months ago, and it has completely transformed my Inbox. When I check my iPhone J.D. email, I now typically see only one or two messages, and they are almost always real messages from real people that I want to read. This has been a radical transformation from the past, where I would find dozens of messages in my Inbox, almost all of them messages that I would consider junk. It got to be so bad that sometimes I would miss the good emails that I wanted to see because of the unwanted messages around them. SaneBox has completely changed this for me. As a result, I am far more efficient and productive with my email, plus I know approach my inbox with a smile instead of dread. If you haven’t tried SaneBox, you should definitely check it out.
How SaneBox works
SaneBox works with any email service that provides IMAP, EWS – OWA, or Active Sync, such as Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL, iCloud, MS Exchange, Microsoft 365, Fastmail, Amazon WorkMail, and others. I’m currently using it with my iPhone J.D. email account, which is just a normal IMAP account associated with a domain that I own. You may have an email account exactly like this one. My inbox receives a lot of emails from lots of different sources: people reaching out to me with questions or suggestions, companies that offer valuable and relevant services, newsletters that I signed up for, but also a lot of unwanted and/or junk email that is not caught by my spam filter.
SaneBox works by analyzing the headers of your emails. That means that SaneBox sees things like the subject line, date, and who the email is from. Your emails stay on your current email server; SaneBox never transfers your emails to its own server. And importantly, SaneBox never looks at the content of your email messages. Thus, any confidential information that is in your email never gets analyzed or acted upon by SaneBox. The only way that a SaneBox computer would see something confidential in an email message is if the confidential information was put in the subject line of the email, and even then, SaneBox only reads that information for the purpose of deciding whether and how to sort that email message.
You need to give SaneBox your email address and your email password so that it can see the headers. But the security of SaneBox has been audited by numerous security firms. The service has been around since 2010, a long track record that attests to its trustworthiness.
What SaneBox does
The main thing that SaneBox does is analyze the information in the headers of your emails and then filter messages based on that analysis. For any message that SaneBox thinks is likely a normal email that you would want, SaneBox leaves the email in your Inbox. For messages that SaneBox considers less useful, such as messages that may be junk, SaneBox moves those emails to a folder called @SaneLater. Messages that seem to be mailing lists are moved to a folder called @SaneNews. Messages that SaneBox knows that you don’t want to see because you already told SaneBox (more on that below) are moved to @SaneBlackHole. And so on. I have more information on these specific folders below, but the end result is something like this: instead of going to your Inbox and seeing 17 new messages when only 3 of them are actually important, you see 5 new messages, including the 3 that are most important.
Thanks to SaneBox, I am much more efficient when I check email. I check my iPhone J.D. inbox from time to time during the day. Without SaneBox, if I pause what I am working on and see that I have over a dozen or more new messages, going through those emails becomes a chore. I need to take the time to separate the important emails from the others, and the whole process wastes time. With SaneBox, I instead glance at my Inbox and just see a few emails that are important. Based upon that, I can quickly decide if I need to read or act upon any of them or if I can get back to whatever else I was working on. Later on, when I know that I have more time to devote to email, I can pay attention to the emails that were moved into another folder such as @SaneLater. This vastly improves email efficiency.
It also saves you time. If you receive an alert every time an email comes in, the time that you waste looking at a new email only to discover that it is something unimportant and then trying to get your mind back to the task you were working on before can really add up. Every week, SaneBox tells you how much time you potentially saved by avoiding these distractions in the prior week. My most recent report tells me that I saved 1.5 hours last week by avoiding the distractions. Whether that number is 100% accurate or not, the point remains that I did save time last week, as I do every week, because of SaneBox.
Here is a deeper dive on the main SaneBox folders and other features. Note that you get to determine which of these folders and features you turn on and off, and you can typically adjust settings on each feature to fine-tune it. So for example, if you want to keep all newsletters in your Inbox instead of having them automatically moved to @SaneNews, just don’t turn on the @SaneLater feature in your SaneBox dashboard.
@SaneBlackHole
My favorite SaneBox folder is @SaneBlackHole. When I get an email from someone who I don’t want to get email from—maybe it is a spam message, maybe it is a marketing company that is of no interest to me, maybe it is a political candidate who I don’t want to see literature from, etc.—I simply move it from my Inbox to the folder called @SaneBlackHole. This trains the folder. Future emails from that same person or company will automatically move to the @SaneBlackHole folder, stay in that folder for a week, and then get deleted.
Why not just click the unsubscribe button in the unwanted email? That’s fine if you trust the company sending you the email that you don’t want. But sometimes when you click an unsubscribe button, you are confirming to the sender that your email is an active one, and they will turn around and sell your email address to other companies, which results in even more unwanted email. When you move an email to the @SaneBlackHole folder, the person or company is not alerted that you did so.
What if you make a mistake? If you put something in the @SaneBlackHole folder by accident, simply move it back into your Inbox. SaneBox will see that you did that and learn that you don’t want future emails from that sender to go into the @SaneBlackHole folder.
Is the @SaneBlackHole folder the same thing as a Spam folder or a Junk folder from your email provider? Not really. The end result is similar, but how it gets there is very different. Your own email provider provides a Spam folder feature that analyzes not only the sender and subject line but also the content of your email to determine if something is spam, phishing, a virus, etc. Spam folders are not perfect, but when they do work, they perform an important job by moving an unwanted email out of your Inbox. Even with SaneBox, you should continue to use the Spam folder feature provided by your own email provider. But as we all know, there are many messages not caught by a Spam folder even though you might want them to be. Perhaps your emial service cannot determine whether it is truly junk because for some types of messages, one person might want the message and another person may not. While you can often train the Spam folder provided by your email service provider, and you should do so, Spam folders are not always as smart as you want them to be. Thus, @SaneBlackHole works in a different way, along with your normal Spam or Junk feature, to provide a more customized filter. If you never want to hear from X again, just move one email from X into the @SaneBlackHole folder. And then you are done.
SaneBox describes the difference between a Spam folder and the @SaneBlackHole folder this way: “Keep in mind that @SaneBlackHole is not for SPAM. It is meant to be used for legitimate email from people or services that you don’t want to see or hear from anymore. Spammers go out of their way to make each email be sufficiently different so trainings like these don’t work.”
For me, the @SaneBlackHole folder has worked extremely well. Every once in a while, I’ll take a look at what is in that folder and see a huge number of emails that used to be going straight to my Inbox. I’m so thrilled to see that they went there instead and didn’t waste my time.
@SaneNews
When SaneBox detects that you are receiving something that looks like a newsletter, it moves the message from your Inbox to the @SaneNews folder. This is nice because I receive many newsletters that I signed up for and want to receive, but I don’t always want them to interrupt my workflow during the day by piling up in my Inbox. Whenever I’m ready to look at them, such as while I’m having lunch or at the end of the day, they are waiting for me in this folder.
Sometimes, I’ll see something show up in @SaneNews that I did not sign up for and that I don’t want to receive. I simply move that email into the @SaneBlackHole folder to train SaneBox to put similar emails there in the future.
On the other hand, sometimes I’ll see something that is a newsletter but it is important to me so I’d rather keep it in my Inbox. For example, perhaps you love reading the free iPhone J.D. email that goes out whenever there is a new post. (You are not receiving the iPhone J.D. newsletter? Just click here or scan the QR code to the right to sign up.) Simply move the email with the newsletter out of @SaneNews and into your Inbox to teach SaneBox that it should keep that particular newsletter in your Inbox so that you will notice it more quickly.
It is nice that @SaneNews, like all SaneBox folders, is simply another folder in your email. This means that the fact that SaneBox has filtered the email doesn’t mean that you don’t have easy access to it. It’s not like you need to go to the SaneBox website to view it or anything like that. Your current mail client, including the Mail app on your iPhone or iPad, just sees @SaneNews as another folder. Your iPhone, iPad, computer, etc. doesn’t need to know that it was the intelligence of SaneBox that moved the message into the @SaneNews folder or any other SaneBox folder, nor does your iPhone need to know that by moving a message from one folder to another folder, you are training the SaneBox service.
@SaneLater
The @SaneLater folder is a place where SaneBox puts emails that it considers likely to be less important, including messages that may be junk. If there is a type of email that you want to receive but typically don’t want to act upon right away, move it from your Inbox to the @SaneLater folder to train SaneBox to move similar messages there in the future. You can always manually move a message from @SaneLater to your Inbox to train SaneBox that this is an important type of email that deserves to stay in your Inbox.
A lot of the emails that show up in my @SaneLater email are emails that I would consider spam or junk emails and that were not caught by my Spam filter. So I will often select a bunch of them and move them into the @SaneBlackHole folder so that in the future they will go straight there instead of in my @SaneLater folder. That system isn’t perfect—the spammer may change up the “from” email address slightly to try to confuse SaneBox—but when I move a message into the @SaneBlackHole folder, at least I am trying to do something.
@SaneCC
If a message is sent to someone else but also sent to you as CC, you can have that message automatically go to a @SaneCC folder instead of your Inbox. I understand the idea here—since the email was not sent directly to you, it is potentially less important than other emails in your Inbox. I don’t have this SaneBox folder turned on because so many of the emails that I receive as a cc are just as important as the ones for which I am in the “to” field. Nevertheless, I can understand how this may be valuable for many folks.
@SaneNoReplies
Have you ever sent someone an email asking for a response, but then they don’t reply, and then you forget that you were waiting for a reply, and then you get annoyed at yourself for not following up sooner? The @SaneNoReplies folder is an optional folder aimed at addressing this situation.
Here’s how it works. You send an email to someone. Just like always, your sent email goes into your Sent folder. But additionally, within a few minutes, SaneBox puts a copy of your sent email into the @SaneNoReplies folder. When someone replies to your email, the email that you sent is deleted from the @SaneNoReplies folder because it is no longer an email without a reply. The idea is that you can glance at your @SaneNoReplies folder from time to time to see the message to which there was no reply, and that can remind you to follow up and request a reply. If you see something in there that doesn’t belong—perhaps you never expected a reply, or perhaps the other person replied in some other way like a phone call or a different email—just delete it from that folder and SaneBox will stop waiting for a reply.
Note that the @SaneNoReplies folder only acts upon emails where you sent the first email. If you are replying to an email chain, nothing that you send will go into this folder.
SaneReminders
What if you want to make sure that you get a reply within a specific time period, like three days? When you compose your email, add a bcc or a cc to 3days@sanebox.com. If three days have passed and you haven’t yet received a response, then SaneBox will put a reminder email at the top of your Inbox. What if you want to get that reminder in three days regardless of whether you get a reply? Simply add the word “keep” such as keep.3days@sanebox.com.
Pretty much anything that you can think of will work for those SaneBox reminder addresses. There is a big list of them on this page. Examples include sunday@sanebox.com, november21@sanebox.com, dec.21.2pm@sanebox.com, etc.
SaneReminders works when you are sending a message and you use that special email as a cc or bcc. It also works if you receive an email and you want to deal with it at a later date: simply forward the email to a SaneBox reminder address such as friday@sanebox.com. On Friday, at the top of your inbox, you will see an email reminding you to act upon that email. (You can configure in the SaneBox settings what time of day those emails show up.) This is a good way to move an email out of your Inbox so that it doesn’t bother you right now, but then have it come back when you will be ready to deal with it.
…and more
This post would get too long if I described every feature of SaneBox. There are lots of them. As I noted above, this service has been around for over a decade, so SaneBox has come up with lots of different features over those years. For example, you can schedule Do Not Disturb periods for your Inbox. You can create custom folders like @SaneReceipts or @SaneFamily and teach SaneBox how to move things into those folder for you. And you can do so much more.
Price
SaneBox has lots of different pricing tiers so that you can just pay for what you need, and you can try before you buy to get the service working and find out if it makes sense for you. It only takes minutes to set it up, and if you don’t like the service, simply unsubscribe. And while you can pay month-to-month if you want, you can save substantially if you sign up for one year or two years.
If you only want to use two SaneBox features, you can choose the “Snack” tier which is $7/month or $59/year or $99 for two years. The most popular tier is the “Lunch” tier which can work with two email accounts and lets you choose six features for $12/month or $99/year or $169 for two years. (That’s the tier that I paid for.) You can also get the “Dinner” tier which works with four email accounts and includes every feature for $36/month or $299 a year or $499 for two years. There are discounts for educational, non-profit, and governmental agencies.
Click here to sign up. That link includes an affiliate code that provides a small affiliate fee to iPhone J.D. if you decide to pay for a plan.
Conclusion
SaneBox is a fantastic service that makes your email better. I recommend that you check out the free trial to see for yourself how it works and the wonders that it can do for your Inbox.
The iPhone does a great job of taking pictures, but taking pictures is only the beginning. Once your pictures and video are in Photos, there is so much you can do to edit, organize, search, and share your photos and videos. There is no “help” button in the Photos app, but you can learn everything that you need to know about Photos in the new-and-improved third edition of Take Control of Photos by Jason Snell. I was provided a free review copy of this ebook, and I’m impressed. If you want to get more out of the Photos app yourself, or if you want a great present idea for someone else who loves to take pictures with an iPhone, this $14.99 ebook is a great resource. It comes in three formats—PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket (Kindle)—so it can be read on nearly any device. I read my copy in a PDF app (PDF Expert) on my iPad, and that worked great.
The Photos app can be used on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. This book covers all three platforms. Most features can be used on all three devices, but when a feature is only available on one platform or works differently on that platform, Jason explains the differences, such as in the section of the book discussing Portrait Mode Photos:
This book is full of pictures that make it very easy to see what Jason is describing. That means that you see a lot of pictures of Jason’s family and friends in this book, and it also means that what he showing off in the book is very similar to what you will see as you work with your own photo library because his example photos seem typical of a real photo library.
This book covers the basics including the Photos interface, the ways in which you can organize your library, tips for using search, and lots of advice for editing photos, such as an explanation of what all of the different light adjustments can do.
There are detailed sections on sharing photos. Relatively new additions to the Photos app covered in this book include shared photo libraries, live search in Photos, and duplicate detection.
Jason Snell has been writing a “Take Control” book about Photos since 2015, when he first wrote a book about using Photos on the Mac. In 2018, he released the first edition of the current version of this book, which covers the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and that first version was about 150 pages. The second edition was almost 175 pages, and this edition is just over 200 pages. Page count is only a crude metric; more relevant is the number of years that Jason has been writing these books. The latest version of this book reveals his deep understanding of how the Photos app works, and he is able to explain everything in a way that is easy for anyone to understand.
If you consider yourself a more advanced user of the Photos app, then I don’t think that this book is for you. There are other resources that provide detailed editing tips on certain types of pictures, such as getting the best looking picture at sunset or in the snow or making the most of HDR photography, and this book doesn’t go deep on topics like that. Also, this book only discusses using Photos in conjunction with Shortcuts app once, when Jason describes (and shares) a shortcut for resizing photos to make them easier to share. But to be fair, Photos itself is a basic app. Once you start getting into more sophisticated projects, you are more likely to use specialized apps like Photoshop or Pixelmator, not Photos.
On the other hand, for any beginning or intermediate level owner of an iPhone, iPad, and/or Mac who has an interest in doing more with Photos, this is an excellent resource. You already know if that describes you, and that is also why I can see this being a nice gift for Christmas or another occasion if you know of someone who has an interest in doing more with the Photos app and would appreciate a well-written guide that has lots of information in one place.
If you are still not sure if this book is right for you, fortunately, you don’t have to guess. The publisher provides this link where you can download sample pages from across the entire book, and it is a generous sample: 49 pages, including the full index. Flipping through those dozens of pages will give you a good sense of whether this book is right for you.
Brett and I recorded a fun episode of the In the News podcast on Saturday morning. We start by discussing Apple’s new Advanced Data Protection option, which I expect to be available in iOS 16.2 in just a few days. I’m looking forward to the extra protection, but it does come with additional risks for you to consider. Next, we discuss Apple Music Sings, the Karaoke feature also coming in iOS 16.2. We also explain why you are going to see so many new types of prices for apps and in-app purchases very soon. We also discuss AirTag stocking stuffers, GoodNotes on Windows, Apple Fitness tips, iPhone tips, and the first reported incident of someone being saved by using Apple’s new Emergency SOS via Satellite feature.
In our In the Know segment, Brett shares a tip for customizing the alerts that you get when you receive a new text message. I discuss different ways to share photos with others using the iCloud link option and related options.
This week, Apple announced an upcoming new service for folks who subscribe to Apple Music called Apple Music Sing. I suspect that most people will call it Apple Karaoke. You activate this feature in the Apple Music app by turning on lyrics and then tapping the icon with a microphone and stars. What makes Apple Music Sing different from just viewing the lyrics is that you can adjust the volume level of the vocal track so that you can replace the original artist’s voice with your own or sing along with the artist. Also, the lyrics will dance to the rhythm of each syllable of the vocals. Background vocals can animate independently, in a smaller font, from the main vocals. And a Duet view mode will show different lyrics on each side of the screen. Sami Fathi of MacRumors lists all of the devices that it will work with. Although this seems like a natural feature for the Apple TV, he says that it will only work with the newest Apple TV 4K that was introduced in 2022, which is a shame because that excludes a lot of folks. (Perhaps you can use AirPlay to stream to an older Apple TV model from a supported iPad or iPhone.) The feature also works with the iPad Pro models introduced in 2021 or later, the iPad Air introduced in 2020 or later, the entry-level iPad introduced in 2021 or later, or the iPad mini introduced in 2021 or later. On the iPhone, there is better support if you have a model without the button: any model without a button introduced in 2019 (iPhone 11) or later will work. Or you can use the iPhone SE, but only the model introduced in 2022. Why are only newer devices supported? As Sarah Perez of TechCrunch reports, Apple isn’t removing vocals from music, and instead your device uses “an on-device machine learning algorithm that processes the music in real time” to remove the vocals from songs selected by Apple (80% of the most-played songs). Apple says that Apple Music Sing will be available this month, and I expect it to be a part of iOS 16.2, which could launch as soon as next week. So get ready to listen to a lot of poor singing voices with great background music this holiday season—especially if you spend any time near me as I check out the feature. And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:
A quick programming note: this week’s episode of the In the News podcast will come out tomorrow instead of today due to Brett’s travel schedule.
‘Tis the season to replace AirTag batteries for many folks. California attorney David Sparks offers advice for doing so, and recommends an Apple TV remote case that holds an AirTag to help you find the remote.
Starting this week, App Store developers have a lot more choices on what they charge for apps and in-app purchases. Prices can now start as low as $0.29, with price points every ten cents up to $10 and every 50 cents up to $50. Prices can go all the way up to $10,000, although the highest prices need to first be approved by Apple. Chance Miller of 9to5Mac has more details on the new price points.
If you want to get yourself or someone else an iPhone 14 Pro by this Christmas, your options are very limited, but Jason Cross of Macworld has some suggestions.
Frank Bajak of the Washington Post reports on Apple’s new Advanced Data Protection feature, which I discussed yesterday. The article notes that the FBI says that it “continues to be deeply concerned with the threat end-to-end and user-only-access encryption pose, but also notes that “cybersecurity experts have long argued, however, that attempts by law enforcement to weaken encryption with backdoors are ill-advised because they would inherently make the internet less reliable and hurt vulnerable populations including ethnic minorities.”
For a while now, the GoodNotes app that you can use to take handwritten notes on an iPad has also worked on a Mac, and I sometimes find it useful to read through my notes when I am working on my iMac. In a tweet this week, GoodNotes revealed it is working on a similar product for Windows, which will be very useful for folks like me who need to use a Windows computer at work.
This week, Apple CEO Tim Cook visited the upcoming TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) factory in Arizona along with President Biden. Cook confirmed that Apple will use chips made at the plant in its products, including the iPhone. The plant should open in 2024. I’m curious how much more it will cost Apple to purchase chips made in the USA, although obviously there are some advantages that come along with that. Don Clark and Kellen Browning of the New York Times have more details on the announcement and its significance.
Tim Hardwick of MacRumors put together a good list of iPhone tips. Check it out to see if there is one that you didn’t already know about.
If you have an iPhone 14 Pro and want to see live sports scores in the Dynamic Island, Stephen Hackett of 512 Pixels recommends the Sports Alerts app.
You knew that this report was coming soon. We now have the first report of a person being saved by using Apple’s iPhone 14 Emergency SOS via Satellite feature. Juli Clover of MacRumors reports that a man stranded in a rural part of Alaska while traveling by snow machine was rescued.
And finally, Apple released a trailer to preview a few shows currently streaming on Apple TV+ and many more that are coming in 2023 including Ted Lasso, CODA, Spirited, Causeway, Masters of the Air, Shrinking, Tetris, Sharper, Wool, Hello Tomorrow!, and more. Wait, Tetris? No, it is not a movie about fitting shapes into spaces, but instead is based on a true story about the high-stakes legal battle to secure the intellectual property rights to Tetris.
Most people have a desire to keep certain information private, but that concern is heightened for lawyers and other professionals with a legally-imposed duty of maintaining confidentiality. Most folks keep information on their iPhones, iPads, etc. that would be considered confidential—either because it is a personal photograph or because it is a document subject to a confidentiality agreement. But if you backup your device to Apple using iCloud, are you maintaining the confidentiality of the information? The confidentiality of cloud storage has been discussed countless times by legal ethics authorities over the years (for example, see here and here), but the key is always to be reasonable in protecting the confidentiality of information. For example, putting confidential documents on an open website that doesn’t have a password is unwise, but storing those same documents on encrypted and password-protected servers in the cloud is typically fine.
Up until now, iCloud backups have been encrypted in transit—meaning the information is encrypted as it travels from your iPhone to Apple’s iCloud server. But once on that server, Apple has a key that it could, in theory, use to unlock the data and look at it. For example, if a criminal suspect backs up his iPhone to iCloud and the police obtain an appropriate warrant, the police can often obtain from Apple a copy of the backed-up data without having to access the iPhone itself. (As Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal reports, last year, Apple responded to thousands of such requests in the United States.) Or, if Apple was hacked, a hacker could potentially gain access to your data on iCloud—although Apple says that this hasn’t happened in the past.
Yesterday, Apple announced that when iOS 16.2 comes out later this month, it will include a new feature called Advanced Data Protection. It will work in the United States immediately, and will roll out to the entire world in 2023. When you turn this on—it is turned off by default—Apple will store your iCloud data in a way that is encrypted such that even Apple cannot read the data. And this doesn’t just work with iCloud; Apple says it works with 22 other categories of information such as Photos, Reminders, Notes, iMessages, and Voice Memos.
What’s the catch? With Advanced Data Protection turned on, only you have the key to your secure data, such as the password that you use to unlock your iPhone. If you forget your password, Apple cannot help you because it has no way to unlock your encrypted information. However, Apple offers two ways that you can get help unlocking your encrypted backup even if you forget your password.
First, you can designate a recovery contact, such as a family member or a close friend, somehow who can verify your identity and help you regain access to your account and all of your data if you ever get locked out.
Second, you can create a recovery key, a randomly generated 28-character code that you should store someplace very secure such as a lock box.
Advanced Data Protection sounds like a fantastic idea for attorneys and others who want extra protection for their data on Apple’s cloud servers. However, with the extra security comes extra responsibility, so think long and hard about how you will use the recovery contact and/or recovery key feature.
Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal conducted a fantastic, short interview with Craig Federighi of Apple to discuss the new Advanced Data Protection feature. If you have any interest in turning this on once it becomes available later this month, I strongly recommend that you watch this video:
This week’s episode of the In the News podcast takes a deeper look at some issues that we’ve discussed before. Following up on our past discussion of the new Live Activities feature, we talk about some apps that do it well such as ParkMobile and Flighty. Following up on our past discussion of crash detection on the iPhone 14, we discuss some recent tweaks made by Apple. And following up on our past discussion of the Apple Card credit card, we discuss a great offer that gives new customers 5% back. We also discuss Belkin’s new $15 product for cleaning a pair of AirPods, the new App Store awards, and Apple’s fantastic new video called The Greatest.
In our In the Know segment, Brett shares a tip for customizing background app activity. I discuss the value of AirDrop and recommend some possible adjustments that you can make depending on how you want to use the feature.
As I had hoped, we are starting to see more developers take advantage of Apple’s Live Activities function so that notifications can update themselves to provide useful information. I saw a great example the other day when I used the ParkMobile app that I reviewed in 2016. This app lets you pay the “meter” for street parking in New Orleans and many other cities. After I paid for parking, ParkMobile put a notification on my lock screen with a countdown timer showing me exactly how much time I had left on my parking spot, plus other information such as the number of the zone where I parked. This meant that while I was taking care of things, I could just glance at my iPhone screen to immediately see how much time I had left, without needing to unlock the iPhone and open an app. The feature even worked when my always-on display activated and the screen dimmed, although to preserve power, in this mode the notification only displays the number of minutes left without updating the seconds. Bravo to ParkMobile for this incredibly useful implementation of Apple’s Live Activities feature. And now, the news of note from the past week:
If you use Apple Music, you can now take advantage of the Apple Music Replay feature to see your favorite songs, albums, etc. from 2022. Attorney John Voorhees of MacStories has the details. It works great unless you let your teenager use your iMac to play video games while he listens to music via iTunes without logging out of your account, in which case you will find that all of “your” top songs from the year are songs and artists that you have never heard of. Ahem.
A few weeks ago, I discussed reports that certain roller coasters were triggering crash detection alerts on the iPhone 14. As Felipe Espósito of 9to5Mac explains, this week, Apple released iOS 16.1.2 to improve the crash detection feature on the iPhone 14 models. I’m sure that the large number of iPhone 14 models now in use has given Apple lots of data to analyze about how to improve the feature.
Andrew Liszewski of Gizmodo reports that Belkin released an AirPods Cleaning Kit, including earwax softener, to get your AirPods (but not the AirPods Pro) looking and sounding good as new. The kit is only $14.99. Seems like a good stocking stuffer, and not a bad present for yourself.
Chance Miller of 9to5Mac predicts that the second generation AirPods Pro (my review) ($229 on Amazon) could be the most popular gift this holiday season. I certainly love mine.
As a result of several statements that Elon Musk made on Twitter this week, it looks like there could be a dispute on the horizon between Apple and Twitter. Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac reports that Elon Musk met with Tim Cook on the Apple Campus this week, and hopefully they were able to iron things out.
I consider a password manager to be critical, but developers of password manager apps need to be extra careful about the security of their own products. Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac reports that LastPass was breached back in August, and it was learned this week that attackers were able to access some customer data. I’ve been using 1Password for many years, and this hasn’t happened to them. I’m not saying that something similar couldn’t happen to 1Password tomorrow in theory, but the fact that it hasn’t happened gives me additional trust in that product.
If you don’t have an Apple Card credit card yet, there is a promotion running right now where new customers can get 5% Daily Cash back on purchases between now and Christmas.
This week, the App Store recognized some of the best apps of the year. I was thrilled to see that GoodNotes was recognized as the iPad App of the Year. GoodNotes is a fantastic app that I use in my law practice and in my personal life just about every day—a great way to use an Apple Pencil to write notes on an iPad.
In an article for Six Colors, Jason Snell reports that even if you only have access to iMessage—such as when you are on an airplane using the free Internet feature that only supports text messages—you can still receive push notifications. As a result, apps like Flighty can give you real-time flight updates even if you are in the air.
If you have an Apple Watch Ultra and you like to dive underwater, you’ll want to check out the new Oceanic+ dive computer app that came out this week. The app is free, but you can pay to add special features. The Apple website has a very in-depth look at the Oceanic+ app.
If you have been using a small handheld device for as long as I have, then you probably used a Palm or PalmPilot years ago. Jason Scott creates a new online emulation, available at the Internet Archive, that lets you run old Palm software again. Playing Solitare Pack from Stand Alone, Inc. on my iPhone as it emulated a PalmPilot made me feel like I was in the late 1990s again.
And finally, Apple released a video this week called The Greatest that shows off some great iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac accessibility features such as Door Detection, Voice Control, Sound Recognition, and Siri. The video does a nice job of demonstrating how empowering these features can be. Also interesting is the same video with audio descriptions.
I’ve been using a pair of HomePod mini speakers for almost two years, and I love them. For a while, I had them in two different rooms downstairs in my house, and it was fun to have the music flow from room to room. But since I use them in our living room / family room so much more often than anywhere else, I eventually decided to put both of them in that room and create a stereo pair to make the music even richer. However, my left HomePod mini is located on a table behind a couch, and because the table is just a little bit lower than the back of the couch, it seemed to me that the HomePod should be elevated just a little bit. I was surprised to find that there are many products on sale for this very purpose. The one that I purchased on Amazon, the balolo Real Wood TriPod for HomePod Mini, is exactly what I was looking for: a little elevation in a form factor that looks nice.
What it is
The TriPod, which is handmade in Germany, consists of three legs made of walnut wood attached to a 1.5mm powder-coated steel circular base.
The feet have cork on the bottom to protect the table and absorb vibration.
Elevated sound
Using the TriPod couldn’t be easier. Just place the TriPod in a location and sit your HomePod mini on top of it. That’s it. Nothing to attach or anything like that.
The product raises the height of the HomePod mini about 1.25 inches. For me, that was just enough to get it a little higher behind my couch, which is what I was looking for.
Does this make a noticeable difference in sound? To be honest, I cannot say yes using any objective scale, but I feel like it is better. On the one hand, it makes more sense to me for my HomePod to be a little higher because of the edge of my couch. On the other hand, Apple clearly designed the acoustics of the HomePod mini to sit on a flat surface and bounce sound off of that surface, and I’m cognizant of the fact that using a stand changes that.
My other HomePod mini is on a shelf, so I didn’t see any reason to raise it even higher. But for this HomePod mini, the slight elevation seems to make sense to me.
Elegance
The primary reason that I’m a fan of this stand is that it looks great. I have a lot of wood in my living room, and having wooden feet on this HomePod mini makes it fit into the decor even better.
The walnut version that I selected pairs well with a black HomePod mini. If you have a white HomePod mini, you might want to get the oak version because the wood is a lighter color.
Conclusion
This is a simple product, but it looks great and it does exactly what I wanted. And unlike many of the other HomePod mini stands that you can find on Amazon that are made of plastic and look cheap, I think that this one looks nice and improves the overall look of the HomePod mini.
For over three decades, the ABA has conducted an annual survey of lawyers to find out what legal technology they use. These results are released every year by the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center. The 2022 report was just released (edited by Taylor Young, and researched by Taylor Young and Joshua Poje). There are five volumes, and you can purchase a copy using this page of the ABA website.
I have been looking at these reports every year since 2010 because they have been the best source of statistics on the use of mobile technology by lawyers. (My reports on the prior ABA surveys are located here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.) Starting in 2011, the survey asked lawyers what smartphones they use, and from 2011 to 2021, we saw an increase in iPhone use, reaching a record high of 80% in 2021. Android use started at 15% in 2011, increased to a high of 25% in 2018, and has been around 18%-19% since 2019. During those same years, we saw the fall of the once-dominant BlackBerry along with all other smartphone brands other than the iPhone and Android.
Unfortunately, we don’t have updated numbers for 2022. In 2020, the ABA changed the way that it collected data. In odd-number years, the ABA releases a volume called Life & Practice, and that volume asks about the type of smartphone that a lawyer uses. In even-number years such as this one, the ABA replaces that with a volume called Litigation Technology & E-Discovery. The 2022 volumes still contain some interesting data on smartphone and tablet use by attorneys, but not as much we saw last year.
The ABA was kind enough to provide me with a complementary copy of the 2022 volumes. Here are the survey results that relate to smartphone and tablet use that jumped out at me.
Putting the YO into BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
The 2022 ABA survey asked respondents to identify the type of hardware for which they are allowed to select their own brand, model, or type. The #1 response was the smartphone, where 81% of lawyers reported that their law firm let them select what they wanted. We have this policy at my own law firm; the overwhelming majority of attorneys at my firm decide to select an iPhone model, but a small number of attorneys select an Android phone. The #2 response was the tablet, with 55% reporting that they can select their own device. For other device types, less than half of the respondents could select what they want: monitor (43%), printer (37%), desktop (32%), portable accessories (31%), and scanner (30%).
Lawyers were also asked if their law firm allows them to use a personal mobile device such as a tablet, laptop, or smartphone to access the firm’s network. Only 5% said no. However, almost two-thirds of the lawyers said that pre-approval was required and/or restrictions are imposed. I presume that many law firms use some sort of Mobile Device Management (MDM) software to protect both the law firm network and individual attorneys.
Online research
An all-time high of 91% of lawyers reported in 2022 that they do legal research when they are out of the office. That’s up from 88% in 2021, 87% in 2020, and 86% in 2019. The most popular way to do so is with a laptop or desktop computer, with 65% of lawyers saying that they do so regularly and 18% saying that they do so occasionally. But a significant number of lawyers report doing legal research using a smartphone or tablet. 22% reported using a smartphone regularly and 32% report using a smartphone occasionally to do legal research. 18% report using a tablet regularly and another 18% report using a tablet occasionally to do legal research.
One statistic that I’m trying to wrap my brain around is that 2% of lawyers report that they regularly use a smart wearable device to do legal research. I am a huge fan of the Apple Watch, and I regularly use it in my law practice for communication and reminders. But I don’t think that I use my watch for anything that I would call legal research. The only possible exception that I can think of is starting and stopping a timer to track how long I spend doing legal research. Is there something else that I’m not thinking of? If you have an idea for how a smart wearable device can be used for legal research—especially if you yourself are part of that 2% who do this—please let me know!
The iPhone and iPad in the courtroom
Speaking of legal research while out of the office, one such venue for doing so is the courtroom. But of course, there are many other reasons to use an iPhone or iPad in the courtroom, from consulting a calendar to scheduling upcoming dates to giving an appellate oral argument.
According to the survey, 81% of lawyers say that they use a smartphone in the courtroom. And since 2017, the responses to that question have been in the 80% to 84% range, so lawyers have been doing this for some time now. Lawyers at law firms with 100 or more attorneys are somewhat more likely to use a smartphone in the courtroom (87%).
Here is a chart showing what lawyers say that they are doing with their smartphone in court (click to enlarge). The most popular uses are email and calendaring. I was amused to see 25% of lawyers report that they use their smartphone in court to browse the web to kill time—something that I hope attorneys only do while waiting for the judge to enter the courtroom.
Far fewer attorneys report using a tablet device in the courtroom — about 33%. For those who do, top uses are for email, calendaring, legal research, accessing key evidence and documents, real-time communications, and delivering presentations.
