Essential Apple Podcast 137: Strange Days?

Recorded 26th May 2019

This week I am joined by the semi regular co-hosts Nick (@spligosh) Riley and Donny (@rtteachr) Yankellow, to take a look at the stories of the last week or so. Of course, after the week light on news when I recorded with John Chidgey there has been a veritable deluge of news over the last 7-10 days. Including a new MacBook Pro, the WWDC19 “invitations”, the whole Huawei “blacklisting” affair, an odd little gaming device from Panic and a depressingly long list of security stories.

GIVEAWAYS & OFFERS

  • Listeners of this show can claim $10 off purchases of Luminar and/or Aurora HD 2019 use the coupon code EssentialApple at checkout for your extra discount!
  • Get Donny’s 2FunDads iMessage stickers for FREE

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On this week’s show:

NICK RILEY

DONNY YANKELLOW

APPLE

  • Apple announces more powerful 8-core MacBook Pro – 9to5 Mac
    • Apple offers free keyboard replacement program for MacBook, MacBook Pro – Zdnet
  • Apple announces its Worldwide Developers Conference 2019 to be held June 3-7 in San Jose, CA – Macworld
    • Reusing the “mind blowing” theme from the Showtime event with Monkey, Robot, Skull and Unicorn is interesting and not something I believe I have seen before
  • Pegatron moving iPad and MacBook manufacturing out of China – Cult of Mac
  • 71% Of Higher Education Students Would Prefer To Use A Mac, Says New Research – Redmond Pie
  • Apple facing class action lawsuit over alleged iTunes & Apple Music data sale – Apple Insider
  • Former Apple retail chief Ahrendts says ‘mission accomplished,’ denies reported criticisms – Apple Insider

TECHNOLOGY

  • Huawei’s European Customers Are Put on Hold by U.S. Ban – New York Times
  • Adobe Warns Customers of Potential Legal Action for Using Older Versions of Creative Cloud Apps – Mac Rumors
  • Panic announces Playdate gaming device: “It’s yellow. It fits in your pocket. It’s got a beautiful black and white screen. It’s not super cheap, but not super expensive. It includes brand new games from some amazing creators. Plus it has a crank.” – [Playdate] (https://play.date (https://play.date/))
  • Check for issues before installing a Windows 10 update – CNet

SECURITY & PRIVACY

  • WhatsApp discovers ‘targeted’ surveillance attack – BBC News
  • Snapchat employees spied on users by misusing internal tools – 9to5 Mac
  • San Francisco is first US city to ban facial recognition – BBC News
    • California’s Senate may ban facial recognition tech in police body cameras – Engadget
  • Google recalls its Bluetooth Titan Security Keys because of a security bug – Tech Crunch
  • 33 Linksys router models leak full historic record of every device ever connected – Ars Technica
  • Bug-hunter reveals another ‘make me admin’ Windows 10 zero-day – and vows: ‘There’s more where that came from’ – The Register
  • The Internet Security Apocalypse You Probably Missed (OpEd) – The New York Times

WORTH A CHIRP / ESSENTIAL TIPS

  • This macOS tool automatically opens all Apple News links in Safari – 9to5 Mac
  • BeLight Software’s Amadine vector drawing app leaves beta £20 in the Mac App Store, $20 US Direct… free trial on the Amadine page
  • iOS Game Oddmar

Nemo’s Hardware Store (33:57)


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  • ProtonVPN – a VPN to go with it perhaps? Prices also starting from nothing!
  • Fake Name Generator – So much more than names! Create whole identities (for free) with all the information you could ever need.
  • Wire – Free for personal use, open source and end to end encryted messenger and VoIP.
  • Pinecast – a fabulous podcast hosting service with costs that start from nothing.

Essential Apple is not affiliated with or paid to promote any of these services… We recommend services that we use ourselves and feel are either unique or outstanding in their field, or in some cases are just the best value for money in our opinion.


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