Linked List: January 17, 2018

Wednesday, 17 January 2018

Apple Shuttle Buses Rerouted Following Attacks 

Jack Morse, reporting for Mashable:

The tech giant runs shuttle buses full of employees from San Francisco to its headquarters in Cupertino every day, and, according to a source inside the company, someone is attacking those buses — and breaking windows.

On an internal Apple email thread viewed by Mashable, one Apple employee speculated that the culprit may be firing “rubber rounds” at the buses. At least one of the buses only had the outer pane of its double-paned windows broken.

In response, late Tuesday night, Apple emailed employees to alert them that an untold number of shuttles would be rerouted, adding 30 to 45 minutes to riders’ commute. Mashable obtained the email and has verified its authenticity.

Christ, what an asshole the guy doing this is. Looks like he’s hit Google buses, too.

Apple to Create New Campus, Hire 20,000 New Employees 

Apple:

Apple expects to invest over $30 billion in capital expenditures in the US over the next five years and create over 20,000 new jobs through hiring at existing campuses and opening a new one. Apple already employs 84,000 people in all 50 states.

The company plans to establish an Apple campus in a new location, which will initially house technical support for customers. The location of this new facility will be announced later in the year.

Intriguing. This also seems to serve as Apple’s announcement that they plan to repatriate — and pay US taxes on — their overseas cash.

Gorgeous 50-Megapixel Panoramas Shot on an iPhone at 20,000 Feet 

These shots are amazing — but I have to ask: why an iPhone 7?

Farhad Manjoo: ‘It’s Time for Apple to Build a Less Addictive iPhone’ 

It’s time for Farhad Manjoo to write a less eye-roll-inducing column:

Imagine if, once a week, your phone gave you a report on how you spent your time, similar to how your activity tracker tells you how sedentary you were last week. It could also needle you: “Farhad, you spent half your week scrolling through Twitter. Do you really feel proud of that?” It could offer to help: “If I notice you spending too much time on Snapchat next week, would you like me to remind you?”

This sounds annoying as hell. Being aware of how much time you’re spending in which apps is an interesting idea, but you can already get a good sense of that in the Settings → Battery panel.

Another idea is to let you impose more fine-grained controls over notifications. Today, when you let an app send you mobile alerts, it’s usually an all-or-nothing proposition — you say yes to letting it buzz you, and suddenly it’s buzzing you all the time.

Mr. Harris suggested that Apple could require apps to assign a kind of priority level to their notifications. “Let’s say you had three notification levels — heavy users, regular users and lite, or Zen,” Mr. Harris said.

Apple could set rules for what kind of notifications were allowed in each bucket — for instance, the medium bucket might allow notifications generated by other people (like a direct message in Instagram) but not those from the app itself (Instagram just sending you an alert to remind you that your high school friend’s mom’s brother posted a new picture recently).

I’m all in favor of controls to reduce notifications. But excessive notifications don’t make me feel addicted to my phone — they make me annoyed.

This whole narrative that our phones are “too addictive” is nonsense. When I was a teenager my friends and I spent hours each week on the phone. Regular dumb old landline phones. There was no problem with landline phones being “addictive”. We simply craved social interaction and an alleviation of boredom. We use our “phones” today for the same reasons. They are more of a solution — again, to our collective desire for social interaction and alleviation of boredom — than a problem.