Charlotte Henry

We learned this week that Apple TV+ show Bastards has been scrapped. The show, which starred Richard Gere, is not the first piece of challenging content pulled by Apple. At Cult of Mac, Luke Dormehl made a compelling case as to why this might not be the right approach.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard murmurs about Apple’s family-friendly TV and movie ambitions. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Tim Cook made the call to cancel a semi-autobiographical drama about Dr. Dre… Apple TV+ should arrive this fall at roughly the same time as a bunch of other new streaming services. The biggest of the newcomers, Disney+, will presumably sate many people’s appetite for family-friendly fare. Carving out a niche for Apple TV+ in this crowded environment could mean counter-programming against Disney. Where Disney goes light, Apple could have gone dark. Cupertino’s enormous cash reserves give it the capability to take risks that few others can.

Americans love their AirPods. They also lose them. A lot of them. The Wall Street Journal looked at how New York deals with the issue.

“They’re tiny. They’re hard to find,” said Steven Dluginski, an MTA maintenance supervisor. Given the darkened tracks where they drop, he said, “the only saving grace is that they’re white.” AirPod rescues from New York City subway tracks ramped up in March, when Apple released a new version, Mr. Dluginski said. This summer has been the worst, possibly because the heat and humidity on subway platforms makes the ears and hands of New Yorkers pretty sweaty, he guessed.  Transit workers use a pole that extends to about 8 feet and has two rubber cups on the end that can be squeezed together to grab small objects. The “picker-upper thing,” Mr. Dluginski called it.

Fintech startups are not as disruptive as they might be because they are not “full-stack” companies, Ron Shevlin wrote at Forbes. Can Apple beat them at their own game and became a full-stack bank, he wondered? Probably not.

Apple likes to tout that its new credit card was created “by Apple, not a bank.” I guess we should pay no attention to the folks from Goldman Sachs and MasterCard behind the curtain. Apple’s moves with Apple Card, Apple Pay, and Apple Cash are big moves towards a full(er)-stack bank, but the company is hampered by one big weakness: It’s DNA is in tech products. For all the innovative moves Apple makes across industries like financial services, entertainment, and health, one thing is constant: It wants to sell devices. This prevents Apple from achieving the openness needed to become a full-stack bank.

The Apple Card is made out of titanium, but just how much? Bloomberg Businessweek wanted to know, so they sent one off to an expert to find out.

A Bloomberg Businessweek reporter sent his card to a mineralogist, University of California, Berkeley professor Hans-Rudolf Wenk. Professor Wenk used what’s known as a scanning electron microscope, or SEM device, to determine the card’s atomic makeup. He found that the answer is about 90%. The rest of the card is aluminum, according to the analysis. The Apple Card isn’t the first credit card to be made with metal, as both American Express and Chase offer their own heavy cards, but Apple’s stands out, given the company’s push to market its metallic essence.

The U.S. is a long way behind when it comes to mobile payments. A report by CNBC  found that Apple Pay made up just 9% of payments in the U.S.

“The U.S. is not a leader when it comes to mobile payments — at best, it’s the middle of the pack compared to other countries,” said Gerard du Toit, partner and head of the banking and payments sector of Bain’s financial services practice in North America. It seems odd considering the ubiquity of iPhones and Androids in the United States. More than 81% of Americans own a smartphone, up from 35% just eight years ago, according to Pew Research Center. While experts say mobile payments in the U.S. will eventually close the gap, they see legacy financial systems, a lack of a need for other options, and rewards cards as major headwinds.

We are only starting to understand the full extent of the iOS hack revealed Friday by Google researchers. At Wired, Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman argued it changes everything we know about iPhone hacking.

The attack is notable not just for its breadth, but the depth of information it could glean from a victim iPhone. Once installed, it could monitor live location data, or be used to grab photos, contacts, and even passwords and other sensitive information from the iOS Keychain. With such deep system access, the attackers could also potentially read or listen to communications sent through encrypted messaging services, like WhatsApp, iMessage, or Signal. The malware doesn’t break the underlying encryption, but these programs still decrypt data on the sender and receiver’s devices. Attackers may have even grabbed access tokens that can be used to log into services like social media and communication accounts. Reed says that victim iPhone users would probably have had no indication that their devices were infected

While we may be cynical about much of what Google does, it is easy to imagine it being a fairly pleasant place to work. According to report on Business Insider, away from bright colours and free food, there is another, less pleasant, side to things. The sex and politics apparently resembles the goings of a popular HBO television show.

Google is a hotbed of sex and political infighting. And it always has been. A source who spent most of his career at Google put it this way: “Inside Google, it’s a Game of Thrones.” Game of Thrones is a series of novels and an HBO television show. The plot is wildly intricate, but the main story is about how several families from all over the Kingdom are competing to take over the throne. The show and books are full of violence, sex, and political intrigue. There is no violence at Google. But sex and politics? Oh, yes.