Amazon is Launching Hi-Fidelity Music Service

Amazon is set to launch a hi-fidelity music service to challenge TIDAL. It will cost $15 per month for this “better than CD quality” audio, Techcrunch reported.

The company’s investment in music not only allows for new revenue streams through advertising and subscriptions, it also provides a direct connection to Amazon’s smart speakers: its Echo line of devices. For consumers pinching pennies, the ad-supported service streaming over an Echo Dot may be good enough. But those who bought, say, a stereo pair of Echo Plus devices and an Echo Sub, may want a better-quality music subscription, too.

News+ How the Upcoming USB4 Tech Could Affect iOS Products

In the latest issue of Macworld, Jason Cross writes how USB4 could affect iOS products like the iPad.

Simply put, it makes it easier for its iOS devices, Apple TV, and every other product without an Intel chip inside to support all the features of Thunderbolt 3…a future iPad Pro’s USB-C port could be USB4-compatible and hook up to all sorts of monitors, including the Thunderbolt 3 monitor you may have.

This is part of Andrew’s News+ series, where he shares a magazine every Friday to help people discover good content in Apple News+.

Avengers Endgame - Surviving a 59-Hour Move Marathon

There is a new Avengers movie out. You might have heard about it.  CNET’s Abrar Al-Heeti attended a 59-hour Marvel movie marathon in preparation for Avengers: Endgame.

My 59-hour Marvel movie marathon is here. Yes, I’m watching 59 hours of Marvel movies, back to back (to back). For two and a half days, I’m essentially confined to a chair at an AMC theater in San Francisco as I attempt to watch all the movies from start to finish, beginning with Iron Man and wrapping up with Avengers: Endgame on Thursday (read our CNET review of Endgame here). I’ll sleep in a theater chair and eat way more popcorn than I probably should. It’s been nice knowing you, everyone.

Apple's Services Division Twice The Size of Netflix

Apple’s Service’s division would be $400 -$450 billion standalone company. That is according to a new note from analyst Dan Ives, reported on by Cult of Mac. That valuation is twice the size of Netflix, and a mere $100 billion less than Facebook.

Apple’s Services division includes everything from the App Store and iCloud to newer offerings like the Apple News+ magazine subscription service and upcoming additions like Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade. While Apple has been selling goods via the App Store and iTunes for years, the company recently pivoted to concentrate more heavily on Services as a growth metric.

Slack Warns it Could Become a Target of Nation State Hacking

Popular workplace app Slack is preparing to go public, and it warns investors it may become a target of nation state hacking.

Companies that are preparing to go public—such as Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, Snapchat, and PagerDuty—all have sections in their S-1 registrations that address the threat of “unauthorized access” to their software, systems, and technologies. However, none of these companies explicitly referred to “organized crime” or “nation-states,” as Slack did in its S-1 filing.

Ms. Haskins also reminds us that Slack doesn’t have end-to-end encryption, and in some cases your boss can download and read your entire Slack history without you knowing.

Two Saudi Sisters That Fled Their Country Plead With Apple, Google to Remove Tracking App

A controversial app called Absher made the news in February because it lets men monitor and control their female relatives’ travel. People like Senator Ron Wyden and others asked Apple and Google to remove the app. No action was taken by either company, although Tim Cook said he would “take a look at it.” Now two Saudi sisters who fled the country are reminding us that no, this app still exists.

Maha, 28 and Wafa, 25 fled Saudi Arabia to for Tbilisi, Georgia via Tuckey earlier this month. The pair had to steal their father’s phone and log onto his Absher account and give themselves permission to go to Istanbul…The al-Subaie sisters said they knew of dozens of other young women who were looking to escape abusive families.

Relentless Doppelgänger is an AI-Created Death Metal Livestream

Relentless Doppelgänger is a 24/7 YouTube livestream that features death metal created by AI.

The deep learning behind the YouTube channel is trained on samples of a real death metal band called Archspire, hailing from Canada. These real audio snippets are fed through the SampleRNN neural network to try and create realistic imitations…SampleRNN is smart enough to know when it’s produced an audio clip that’s good enough to pass for the genuine article – and as a result it knows which part of its neural network to tweak and strengthen.

I think it sounds pretty good. \m/

Apple Maps Continues to Gain Detailed Terrain Data

MacRumors writes:

As part of its ongoing effort to rebuild Apple Maps, Apple has added detailed terrain features to the U.S. states Arizona and New Mexico as well as the southern portion of Nevada, including the city of Las Vegas.

Previously, Apple published more detailed map data in northern, then southern California as well as Hawaii. The effort has been ongoing since 2015.

How Amazon Monitors and Fires Its Employees

It is great when your Amazon order arrives the next day, but it can be tough for the fulfillment facility worker that made it happen. The Verge has shed a light on just how tough it could be. It outlined how the company monitors and fires workers.

The system goes so far as to track “time off task,” which the company abbreviates as TOT. If workers break from scanning packages for too long, the system automatically generates warnings and, eventually, the employee can be fired. Some facility workers have said they avoid bathroom breaks to keep their time in line with expectations. Amazon says retraining is part of the process to get workers up to standards and that it only changes rates when more than 75 percent of workers at a facility are meeting goals. The bottom 5 percent of workers are placed on a training plan, according to the company. An appeal system is also part of the termination process.

Apple Watch Returned, Still Working, After 6 Months

We all know how painful losing a device is. Well, here is a story to warm the soul. Robert Bainter lost his Apple Watch whilst out surfing. He said the device was his “lucky charm,” reported 9to5Mac. Mr. Bainter turned on Lost Mode, more in hope than expectation. A whole six months later he got a call. Not only was his beloved piece of kit back, it still worked. Truly a lucky charm!

After losing the device, Bainter turned on Lost Mode for his Apple Watch through the Find My iPhone app. This displays a message on the Apple Watch’s screen with the owner’s phone number and a message saying it was lost. Six months went by and Bainter hadn’t been able to locate his watch, but then he received a call from a random number. The person calling had found Bainter’s Apple Watch 3 miles north of where he originally lost it – still in working condition.

PDF Reader Pro For Mac: $24.99

We have a deal on PDF Reader Pro For Mac. This app features bookmark and search functions, as well as a night mode that’s easier on your eyes. You can also iInsert, add, and replace images and texts in your PDFs and use markup tools to highlight, strikeout, underline, and more in the PDF file. It’s $24.99 through our deal.

How Nasa Recorded a Quake on Mars For The First Time

Early this month, the NASA InSight probe detected seismic events on Mars for the first time. Wired has a feature on how the Mars scientists achieved this staggering feat.

It took NASA’s InSight probe two long months of listening before it detected the first faint rumblings from the red planet. On April 6, the probe’s seismometer registered what was later confirmed as the first ever marsquake detected by human instruments. But measuring the rumblings of a planet that – at its closest – remains almost 34 million miles away, requires an almost unimaginable amount of patience. Twice a day, a team in Switzerland receives seismic data from the InSight probe, where they perform an initial analysis.

Google Assistant Can Read Your Kids a Bedtime Story

If you have Google Assistant and the latest version of Google Play Books on your iOS device, it can now read your kids a bedtime story.

Ahead of National Tell a Story Day taking place on Saturday, youngsters now have more ways to hear a bedtime tale. As of today, the feature will be available on iOS and Android phones in English in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and India.

Sounds like a great feature. When I asked Siri to read me a bedtime story, she said: “Next you’ll be asking me for a glass of milk. And a dark matter cookie.” Damnit Siri, that doesn’t even make sense.

It Turns Out That Science Petition Wasn’t Warning About AirPods

Remember that science petition going around that 250 scientists signed, warning about AirPods and cancer? Turns out it had nothing to do with AirPods.

So rather than finding any link between cancer or other issues in levels of EMF at or below the current, accepted regulations, the scientists involved here were simply asking for more research into to area and suggested that it was probably a good idea to limit human exposure.

Various bloggers picked up the subject and worked to associate it with Apple’s AirPods…without regard for the fact that nothing in the petition even suggested concern about in-ear headphones, Bluetooth, or AirPods.

Financial Gain in Modern Tech Dehumanizes Us

Axios writes:

Tristan Harris, the former Googler who helped popularize the notion of “time well spent” laid out the shift he says the tech industry needs to make in order to stop, as he puts it, “downgrading humanity.” … Harris made the case that today’s technology downgrades humanity by creating a vast artificial social system powered by “overwhelming” AI and an “extractive” attention economy.

The problem, as Harris notes, is that the first company to blink loses.

Mighty Vibe Spotify Offline Player: $76.99

We have a deal on the Mighty Vibe Spotify Offline Player. This device is just what the name suggests: it will play your Spotify music on-the-go without a smartphone or Internet connection.  It’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled, supports wired and most Bluetooth headphones and speakers, has 1,000+ song storage, and is durable and has a built-in clip-on. Plus, the promo video below is definitely funny. It’s $76.99 through our deal.

iOS Mouse Support Could Come This Year

Federico Vittici and Steve Troughton-Smith are saying that iOS mouse support could be coming this year as an accessibility feature of iOS 13. Mr. Vittici mentioned it on the Connected podcast, while Mr. Smith confirmed the rumor via Twitter.

https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1120447708215554049?s=21

I personally don’t see the need for a mouse on a touch-oriented device. But I’m glad it will be optional, instead of a required component of iOS. Edit: 20190425: I take that back.  I didn’t think of the scenario where many people can hook up an external monitor to their iPad. In that case, mouse support is perfect.

WhatsApp is Failing to Stop People Sharing Child Abuse Material

Material depicting child abuse l is still being widely shared across WhatsApp. An investigation by The Next Web found the Facebook-owned messaging service had failed to tackle the problem, despite assurances it would do so.

Despite Facebook’s attempts to clamp down on inappropriate content, the two-week long investigation conducted in March found dozens of WhatsApp chat groups with hundreds of members that share child sexual abuse material. The groups were identified through a third-party WhatsApp public group discovery app that Google recently banned from Play Store, but can still be sideloaded using the installation files that are available online elsewhere. Nitish Chandan, a cybersecurity specialist who is also the project manager of CPF, found that members are being solicited using invite links, who are then called on to join a more private group using virtual numbers so as to evade detection.

Tim Cook On Why You Should Turn Off All Those Push Notifications

Tim Cook addressed the TIME 100 Summit Tuesday. There, he encouraged people to put down their iPhones. He even said he turned off push notifications from lots of apps, reported Techcrunch.

Today, when users install new apps they often say “No” to push notifications. And with Apple’s new tools to control notifications, users are now actively triaging which apps can get in touch. In fact, that’s what Tim Cook says he did, too. “If you guys aren’t doing this — if you have an iPhone and you’re not doing it, I would encourage you to really do this — monitor these [push notifications],” the CEO suggested to the audience. “What it has done for me personally is I’ve gone in and gutted the number of notifications,” Cook said. “Because I asked myself: ‘Do I really need to be getting thousands of notifications a day?’

Sir Jony Ive on Design and Apple's Values

Sir Jony Ive does not make a huge number of media appearances. When he does, they tend to be worth taking in. Design magazine Document has an in-depth interview with Sir. Jony and Dior top designer Kim Jones in its new edition. In it, he talked about design tools, the future, and the values that run through Apple.

To me, what the institution represents first and foremost is a set of values and a clear sense of why Apple exists, and what contribution we can make to culture—what contribution we can make to society. What I can bring to that is to practice what I do within those values and to extend them. I think it stems from my sense of curiosity. I’m absurdly, frantically inquisitive. Given that I’ve been at Apple for nearly 30 years now, I think I’m sort of steeped in those values. I think the values are powerful but they’re general, and it’s how you turn your curiosity and ideas into vision. I think that very simplistically describes my relationship with Apple.

You Could Get a TurboTax Refund if you Make Under $34,000

If you make less than US$34,000 per year, you could get a TurboTax refund if the company made you pay them when you filed your taxes.

If you are one of the millions of Americans who made under $34,000 last year, you should have been able to use a free version of TurboTax. If TurboTax directed you to a paid version, it’s worth giving the company a call.

“I called today and they are issuing a refund on my credit card,” one reader said. “I just had to mention ProPublica.”

Thanks to lobbying by corporations like TurboTax, the IRS doesn’t do our taxes for us like other countries.

iPhone Users 2x as Likely to Text and Drive

In a new study (n=2,000) 51% of iPhone users said they text and drive, compared to 35% for Android users.

16% of iPhone users said they never get distracted while driving (vs. 23% of Android users and 38% of users of other mobile operating systems).

iPhone users are more than twice as likely than Android users to video-chat, use Instagram, stream shows on Netflix or Hulu, and take photos and videos while driving.

10% of iPhone users admitted watching videos on YouTube while driving, while 4% of Android users admitted to doing the same.

5 Reasons to Upgrade Your Mac to an SSD

This was written a few months ago, by the awesome Steve Sande by the way, but is worth discussing.

Chances are good that if you have an older Mac, it has an internal hard disk drive. Today, we’ll look at five reasons why you should update that Mac to an SSD.

SSDs are very affordable nowadays. If your Mac isn’t too old and ready to retire, this upgrade is a good move.