Check out this rather brilliant piece imagining Apple keyboards past and present drinking in a bar, when in walks that obnoxious fellow, Touch Bar (via Daring Fireball). It’s high-larious, spot on, and flawlessly executed. Here’s a taste:

APPLE EXTENDED II: Lonely times, man. Lonely times. First, it was scissors then butterflies. Do you want to know what I miss? Electric Alps switches. That was the dream, right?

MACBOOK PRO (nervous, staring at the bar, napkins in both hands): Did you clean up before I sat down? It looks clean, but…

APPLE EXTENDED II (interrupting): Kids today. They don’t appreciate the reliable, credible haptic feedback of a single healthy keystroke. It’s all hunt, peck, and swipe swipe swipe.

TOUCHBAR (arrives): Hey! Nobody told me we were going out to drinks 🍷. This is great! 👍

The current W-iFi protocol we all use, WPA2, isn’t considered very secure these days. It badly needs to be upgraded. And that’s going to happen in late 2019 with WPA3. This article explains the problems with WPA2 and how WPA3 will fix them. Excerpt.“If you ask virtually any security person, they’ll say don’t use Wi-Fi, or if you do, immediately throw a VPN connection on top of it,” says Bob Rudis, chief data officer at security firm Rapid 7. “Now, Wi-Fi becomes something where we can say hey, if the place you’re going to uses WPA3 and your device uses WPA3, you can pretty much use Wi-Fi in that location.” That will change everything. The Wired article fills us in.

TechCrunch writes about a service called Meru Health, a company that wants to make mental health care more accessible to employees.

Meru Health offers an eight-week treatment program for depression, burnout and anxiety. The program, currently led by five licensed therapists, utilizes both cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral activation and mindfulness-based intervention. Provided as an employee benefit, Meru Health only charges companies if the patients report feeling any better.

Down the road, Meru Health may make its service available to everyday consumers, but right now, Ranta said the focus is on selling to larger employers and doing clinical research. Meru Health is also looking to bring on board a doctor to help with medication management and, possibly, even providing prescriptions.

Apparently the best solution for accidentally scratching your Apple Watch face is to sue the company because that’s exactly what Dean Lubaki did. He claims Apple’s advertising is misleading because his mode, the ceramic Edition, is called “brilliantly scratch-resistant.” Turns out his Milanese Loop band scratched the display surface when he took off his watch. Lubaki’s small claims court filing says his local Apple Store blew him off, so now he wants to stop Apple from “lying to customers on their website by falsely claiming that a product ‘won’t scratch'” and to stop “lying to customers to their face and in store.” Bonus: When Apple offered him a new watch and free accessory he said no so he can move forward with his case. Call it a hunch: Lubaki is really pissed off right now.

Apple plans to introduce a new HomePod, higher-end AirPods, and studio-quality over-the-ear headphones in 2019. Details are slim on the new HomePod, but sources did tell Bloomberg a little about next year’s AirPods refresh:

The Cupertino, California-based company is working on new AirPods with noise-cancellation and water resistance, the people said. Apple is trying to increase the range that AirPods can work away from an iPhone or iPad.

The over-the-ear headphones will be higher quality than Apple’s Beats line and compete with high-end models from Bose and Sennheiser. This all follows an AirPods refresh coming later this year with hands-free Siri support and a wireless charging case. Apple seems to be staying busy in the audio market.

Really, I just loved the first line of this piece by Josh Constine at TechCrunch, enough so I needed to make a nice graphic for it. It’s all about how Facebook leaked a bunch of app data meant for app owners (bad enough IMO) to app testers. Oops. It’s cool, though, bro, because Facebook fixed it. TechCrunch has the details.

Set the “days without a Facebook privacy problem” counter to zero. This week, an alarmed developer contacted TechCrunch, informing us that their Facebook App Analytics weekly summary email had been delivered to someone outside their company. It contains sensitive business information, including weekly average users, page views and new users.

This is far from a comprehensive list of the best tech ads in the last 35 years, but it’s a quick trip back in time to some of the best. Writing for TechCrunch, Sarah Wells offers thoughts and the videos for several Apple spots; the annoying (but definitely successful) “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” spot; Sprint’s “Can You Hear Me Now?” spot; and a compelling Google spot.

With stunning visuals (most of which were not CGI) and captivating choreography, Jonze breathes life into a product that got mixed reviews after its release in February. This made us think, what other tech commercials have grabbed our attention in the last 35 years and transformed how we think about technology?

Back in April, we learned that Amazon is working on a family robot. Now, LoupVentures  has gone into considerable detail in its analysis of this project. In part: “Amazon’s robot could open up new market opportunities. According to The Information, Amazon has considered offering home insurance. By having real-time monitoring of homes, the Amazon robot could monitor and notify a human in instances of theft, fire, or in-home hazards (i.e. an infant wondering near stairs), thereby mitigating the cost of a claim and lowering premiums. Lastly, Amazon has highlighted they want to deliver packages to your home when you are not there. We feel consumers would be more comfortable letting couriers into their homes if a robot could monitor the drop-off.” Are you ready?

Apple’s ongoing legal fight with Qualcomm over patent royalty payments iPhone parts suppliers must pay now includes the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Apple filed petitions to invalidate the four patents in question claiming they don’t cover new ideas, according to Bloomberg. The patents cover devices that are phones and PDAs, autofocus for digital cameras, circuit memory, and touch sensitive displays. It could take a year to get a final ruling, assuming the USPTO agrees to move forward with the filing. For now, Apple and Qualcomm will keep moving forward with their other lawsuits in the U.S. and abroad.

The massively popular battle royale shooter game Fortnite has already brought in US$100 million from iPhone and iPad players in the three months it’s been available on the iOS platform. Sensor Tower reports that’s three times as much as Arena of Valor brought in during its first 90 days on iOS. The game itself is free but offers in-app purchases that players are clearly happy to buy. You can download Fortnite for free at Apple’s App Store and join in on what’s currently the most popular game on any platform.

We know that Internet TV is booming. And yet the interesting fact is that conventional TV viewing isn’t dropping in proportion. It’s dropping only a little. That means that the sum of the two, in daily viewing hours, is increasing. It also explains why cord-cutting is often pooh-poohed as minor. Something’s keeping those cable TV subscriptions fairly attractive. No data caps? Local news and sports? DVR capability? The chart doesn’t explain; it just shows the data. Very interesting indeed.

Writing for Quartz, Nir Eyal opines on the reason why Apple made Screen Time on iOS 12, as well as Google’s Digital Health platform. Mr. Eyal studied the psychological techniques that companies use to get people hooked, and he wrote a book too. He says that Apple and Google don’t want you to get addicted, but instead form a healthy relationship with your devices.

As they often do with successful apps built on their platforms, Apple and Google took note of what consumers wanted and decided to incorporate these features as standard…They also went beyond what app makers can do by adding features only the operating system makers can offer, like batch notifications to reduce the frequency of intraday interruptions and the ability to put the phone in “shush” mode by flipping it over.

With few exceptions, when a product harms people, consumers tend to use it less often or find better alternatives. The feature fight between these two tech rivals benefits everyone. The move to help users create healthy habits with their devices is an example of competition making products better.

Apple promised its AirPower wireless charging pad for the iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods would ship some time in 2018, and now it’s looking like that’s going to be September—a year after it was unveiled. Bloomberg reports Apple is dealing with technical issues like keeping the device from overheating. A rumor saying AirPower would come in March came and went, Apple is staying quiet about the device’s status. For now, it looks like we still have three more months to wait for AirPower, and the promised wireless charging case for AirPods, too.

Writing for Techcrunch, Callum Booth talks about a device called Runvi. It’s on Kickstarter right now, consisting of two insoles, and it wants to be your AI-powered running coach by analyzing the way you move. These AI shoes are connected by something called the Core, which is a part of the insole you can remove. This acts as the brain, and powers the sensors, as well as logging and storing data before sending it to your phone.

There are other running products out there – the Lumo Run or Arion, which is another insole tracker, for example – but Runvi, on the surface at least, appears to be superior. It has more sensors, is cheaper than Arion, and is more self-contained, as it doesn’t need anything hooking over your shoe.

It’s vital to remember this is just on paper though. While the idea and set-up looks promising, we’ll have to wait until we have the physical copies in our hands, or, you know, in our shoes, before we can see how it works in reality. Until then, I’m quietly hopeful I won’t hurt my knee any more.

In another good article by FastCoDesign, Jesus Diaz writes how Apple’s research group developed some of the most highly influential tech of the century. For example, a feature coming in macOS Mojave called Stacks automatically categorizes your files on the desktop. But Stacks isn’t a new technology, and evolved out of concepts that ATG worked on.

The ATG was founded in 1986 by Larry Tesler, a computer scientist who had previously worked at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center–aka PARC, the birthplace of the graphic user interface–before moving to Apple. The group’s mission was to create breakthrough technologies that didn’t need to be products.

Though they were introduced onstage at WWDC as “Stacks,” they were once known as “Piles.” It extended the desktop metaphor even further by allowing users to organize their files in stacks of papers, images, or videos, leaving folders for more permanent archival purposes–just like real life.