Linked List: July 3, 2020

Friday, 3 July 2020

Part of the schtick with Dithering — the new thrice-weekly podcast from me and Ben Thompson — is that we’re putting out new album art each month, with the help of designer extraordinaire Brad Ellis. The mask on the batter at the plate in this month’s art is not Photoshopped — that’s really how they played baseball during the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. Everything old is new again.

Anyway, the show is a lot of fun. 15 minutes per episode — not a minute less, not a minute more. $5 per month — cheap! If you’re not subscribed you’re missing out.

On iOS Apps Peeking at Your Clipboard Contents ★

Catalin Cimpanu reporting for ZDNet’s Zero Day:

In a video shared on Twitter, the Urspace developer showed how LinkedIn’s app was reading the clipboard content after every user key press, even accessing the shared clipboard feature that allows iOS apps to read content from a user’s macOS clipboard.

Erran Berger, VP of engineering at LinkedIn:

Appreciate you raising this. We’ve traced this to a code path that only does an equality check between the clipboard contents and the currently typed content in a text box. We don’t store or transmit the clipboard contents.

I know a lot of people are so cynical — justifiably — from never-ending news of privacy disasters that they just assume the worst about all these apps being revealed for looking at the clipboard contents. But I think almost all of this is just sloppy programming, not data collection. Even if you really did want to make an app that steals people’s clipboard contents, there’s absolutely no reason you’d check the clipboard contents this frequently. It’s just sloppy programming. But once revealed, a sloppy implementation like LinkedIn’s looks sketchy as hell.

It’s also the case that there are plenty of good reasons why an app might look at the clipboard without your having performed a manual Paste action. Think about image editors: for as long as I can remember, if you have an image on the clipboard, you can use File → New in MacOS’s built-in Preview app to make a new image with the contents of the clipboard. This does more than just save you the step of manually pasting — the new image is sized exactly right for the clipboard contents. It saves you a bunch of steps, not just one ⌘V. Same thing for podcast clients and RSS readers — if it looks like you have a feed URL on the clipboard, they can save you a few steps when subscribing.

It’s like managing camera and microphone access. Most apps want to access these things for good, honest reasons, but because some don’t, we need OS features to defend against the bad actors. And it winds up adding a bit of unfortunately necessary friction.

On Ming-Chi Kuo’s Report of a 24-Inch ARM iMac ★

Old pre-WWDC news I’m catching up on. From a note by Kuo on what he expects to be the first Macs to ship with Apple silicon chips:

(1) ARM 13.3-inch MacBook Pro:

The new model’s form factor design will be similar to that of the existing Intel 13.3-inch MacBook Pro . Apple will discontinue the Intel 13.3-inch MacBook Pro production after launching the ARM 13.3-inch MacBook Pro .

(2) ARM iMac:

ARM iMac will be equipped with the all-new form factor design and a 24- inch display. Apple will launch the refresh of existing Intel iMac in 3Q20 before launching the ARM iMac .

Something’s got to go first, so it might as well be the 13-inch (14-inch?) MacBook Pro. But it’d be a little weird for the smaller, cheaper MacBook Pro to move to Apple silicon before the 16-inch MacBook Pro, because Apple’s laptop chips are going to blow Intel’s away in performance. We can safely bet the house on this based solely on the performance developers are seeing from the A12Z-based dev kit hardware. If the smaller MacBook Pro moves to Apple silicon before the 16-inch model does, we’ll have a gap where the highest-performing model, by far, is the cheaper smaller one.

As for a 24-inch iMac, that size only makes sense if it’s a replacement for the 21-inch iMac, in which case there should be a new 30-inch iMac to take the place of the current 27-inch models. Going from 27 to 24 inches would be a huge downgrade in display size. It makes no sense at all that this would be the only iMac Apple would make, and makes almost no sense that it would be the first iMac they’d release with Apple silicon.