Linked List: April 9, 2019

Tuesday, 9 April 2019

The Guardian has an excerpt from Rick Reilly’s new book, Commander in Cheat:

Somebody should write that the way Trump cheats at golf, lies about his courses, and stiffs his golf contractors isn’t that far from how he cheats on his wives, lies about his misdeeds, and stiffs the world on agreements America has already made on everything from Iran to climate change.

“Golf is like bicycle shorts,” I once wrote. “It reveals a lot about a man.”

You could write a book about what Trump’s golf reveals about him.

Here it is.

My copy arrived a few days ago.

Steven Troughton-Smith Thinks iTunes Breakup is Nigh ★

Steven Troughton-Smith, on Twitter:

I am now fairly confident based on evidence I don’t wish to make public at this point that Apple is planning new (likely UIKit) Music, Podcasts, perhaps even Books, apps for macOS, to join the new TV app. I expect the four to be the next wave of Marzipan apps. Grain of salt, etc.

And yes, this means the much-discussed and long-awaited break up of iTunes. Finally!

Makes a lot of sense — we’ve all been waiting for the breakup of the monolithic iTunes app on Mac for years. In theory, what makes sense are separate apps for Music, Podcasts, and TV — and Apple has already announced that a new Apple TV app for Mac is coming this fall, presumably with MacOS 10.15. It also makes sense that these apps would be created using the upcoming fully-fledged UIKit for Mac stuff. (What we’ve been calling Marzipan for the last year is just one part of a much bigger story.) If Troughton-Smith is correct, we might even get betas of these apps in the 10.15 betas this summer.

Apple Drops $99 Data Migration Fee for New Macs and Repairs ★

Adam Engst, writing at TidBITS:

Apple has dropped the $99 fee that it previously charged for migrating data from an old Mac to a newly purchased machine. TidBITS reader and TekBasics consultant David Price wrote to tell us that he has generally advised clients to pay Apple to migrate data to newly purchased Macs, but when he accompanied his brother-in-law to pick up a freshly migrated iMac last week, Apple informed him that there was no charge for the service.

I contacted an Apple Store Operations Specialist, who confirmed the policy change.

I had no idea they previously charged for this.

Scheme to Swap Fake iPhones Adds Up to $900,000 Loss for Apple ★

Rick Rojas, reporting for The New York Times:

The con was simple: Send a fake iPhone to Apple claiming that the device would not turn on and that it was under warranty, and not long after, a genuine replacement arrived in the mail. It was a scheme that federal prosecutors said two college students in Oregon repeated on such a scale that it amounted to nearly $900,000 in losses for Apple as they sent in hundreds of counterfeit phones. […]

Records provided to investigators by Apple allowed them to connect Mr. Jiang to 3,069 iPhone warranty claims through his name and his email, mailing and IP addresses. All of them indicated “No Power/Wired Charging Issues” as the reason for the claim.

More than 1,500 of the claims were rejected, but nearly just as many were approved, with a new phone sent out. An Apple representative told an investigator, according to court records, that a key element of the scheme’s success was that the phones were inoperable, which meant the replacement process would begin before technicians could figure out they were counterfeit.

I don’t know how long these guys thought they’d get away with this, but I’d have guessed they’d have been flagged a lot sooner than 1,500 replaced iPhones and 3,000 attempts at the scam.

Ming-Chi Kuo: Mini-LED 31.6-inch Apple Display by Q3 ★

Benjamin Mayo, writing for 9to5Mac:

TF Securities’ Ming-Chi Kuo has released a report which lays out Apple’s product interest in mini-LED technology. Kuo says that Apple will launch a 31.6-inch (6K resolution) external display in the second or third quarter of 2019 and feature a mini-LED backlight.

This would be the standalone Pro display to go along with the new Mac Pro. If it’s on pace to ship in Q3 then it’s almost certainly going to be unveiled at WWDC in June.