Linked List: March 13, 2022

Sunday, 13 March 2022

Kolide 

My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring last week at DF. Kolide believes the average person is the key to unlocking a new class of security detection, compliance, and threat remediation. So do the hundreds of organizations that send important security notifications to employees from Kolide’s Slack app.

Organizations using Kolide can dramatically lower the actual risks they will likely face with a structured, message-based approach. More importantly, they’ll be able to engage their own users to fix nuanced problems that can’t be automated.

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MKBHD: The Green iPhones 13 in 59 Seconds 

Two more videos: iJustine and Rene Ritchie.

Apple provided me with review units of both of these phones, and, well, I agree the consensus from the above three — they’re both nice greens. They’re also way more green green than the “midnight green” iPhone 11 Pro. My wife commented that she prefers the iPhone 13 Pro’s “alpine green” to the 11 Pro’s midnight green specifically because midnight green was so muted — it looked green in some lighting from some angles, but more like dark gray in others. I will add that I don’t think the iPhone 13 Pro’s alpine green is a different shade or tint of green than the iPhone 13’s no-adjective green — the difference is simply the Pro’s matte finish, which is desaturating. I feel more confident than ever that the next round of non-Pro MacBooks are going to come in an array of fun colors.

Also: one more knock against the argument that Apple has something against the color green.

Rumor of the Day: Only the iPhone 14 Pro Models Will Get the New A16 Chip 

Ming-Chi Kuo finally has a Twitter account, and dropped this today:

According to Apple’s rules for naming iPhones, the four new 2H22 iPhones could be called iPhone 14 (6.1”), iPhone 14 Max (6.7”), iPhone 14 Pro (6.1”), and iPhone 14 Pro Max (6.7”).

Only two Pro models would upgrade to the A16 processor, while the 14 & 14 Max will remain the A15. All four new models will likely come with 6GB RAM, with the difference being LPDDR 5 (14 Pro & 14 Pro Max) vs. LPDDR 4X (14 & 14 Max).

Via Hartley Charlton at MacRumors, who reports in the comments that MacRumors confirmed with Kuo that is indeed his Twitter account.

If true, it’s impossible (for us) to know the reason. A TSMC production issue? A cost issue? Or perhaps it’s pure strategy, with Apple being confident that the A15 will remain ahead of the best Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm for another year (if not longer), and thus creating a new annual pattern where the very latest and greatest A-series chips only go in the iPhone Pro models, and the non-Pro models use the new chips from the previous year. Right now the Pro and non-Pro iPhones are differentiated primarily by cameras and external finishes (polished steel with matte glass vs. matte aluminum with polished glass).

If Kuo is correct, starting next year, Pro and non-Pro iPhones will be differentiated by their chip performance, too, and I would expect that to remain the case year after year. That makes sense to me — it’s true for Apple’s “Pro” models in the MacBook and iPad lineups.