Tech News: Spring-Loaded Apples

me of having an anti macbias. Actually made it kind of a joke for a long time. And this episode is absolutely not affiliated with or sponsored by Apple. With all that out of the way, let me gush a bit about what Apple showed off this week during their spring Loaded event. We're gonna start off with the new Imax, which are just beautifully designed machines. Apple has always paid super close attention to esthetics. The new Imax reminds me a bit of the classic iMac G three computers from

the late nineties and early two thousand's. These were all in one computers, so monitor and CPU and all that stuff all in one package, and it was the big monitor style, you know, like the CRT style monitors, and there were several translucent case colors that you could choose from. They also follow in the style of the later iMac all in ones, which went with the flat display form factor with all the computer parts built in. So now

you've got this flat and incredibly thin. The new Imax are like less than twelve millimeters thick, but you've got this flat display, and you can choose one that has a back that has a bright color to it, kind of like smartphones do. I happen to really like the purple one. You can get matching accessories for it as well, like the keyboard and mouse will have accents that complement the color scheme of your computer. Now the thing just looks gorgeous to me. It also has a really neat

feature that I like. The computer uses its sensors to detect changes in environmental lighting. So if you're working in a space that has a lighting profile that changes over time, like you are working in an office that has a window, well, the iMac will dynamically adjust stuff like screen brightness and color balance and contrast. So for folks who work in digital photography or video production, those are really important considerations.

Back in our office in the old days, the video team would work in a darkened area sometimes you just call it the cave, because they needed to make sure they knew exactly what their monitor settings were in order to get the best result from editing. And if the lighting kept changing, you might end up having two shots that have mismatched color balance or white balance. Anyway, these computers look amazing, and if I were in the space to upgrade the old iMac I have, I would jump

on this. But all that being said, I'm not really in the Apple ecosystem. The iMac I have is from like the early mid two thousand's era, and I haven't touched it in years. So while I feel the urge to splurge, as it were, I don't think I can justify it for myself. These are expensive computers. They start at twelve nine for a base model that has four color options, or you could pay almost fift dollars for

the upgraded models with more color options. Now that's not ridiculously expensive for a new computer, but it's probably more money than I should pay just because I think they look pretty. I need to have a better reason than that. But maybe I'll do a side hustle and save up my pennies to get one anyway, because I mean, they're so pretty. I also do not own an Apple TV device. Lord, do I have a four K television. In fact, my television doesn't have HDR, doesn't support high frame rate, none

of that stuff anyway. All that being said, the announcements regarding the new Apple TV four K, which does support HDR and high frame rate, also included something that I thought was super cool. All right, so the device lets you stream content to your television or download stuff to the Apple TV device, and then you can view it on your super fancy television. All of that is standard.

None of that is new stuff. But the thing that impressed me is that Apple has built in a tool that automates sort of like the TV settings like brightness, contrast, and color balance. Using an iPhone, Apple TV owners can do a sort of automated calibration. But it's not affecting the TV settings itself. What it does is it measures the color balance that your television is outputting, you know, the brightness, the white balance, all these sort of things.

The contrast, the iPhone could pick that up and then adjust the video streaming to the television, so the settings of the video so that the TV displays video that is close to industry standard specifications. So again it's not changing the settings of the television set, but rather the video feed so that it shows up on your TV the way that the creators of various films and television

shows intended. And I think this is phenomenal. It's a pretty common experience for people to get television home from the store. They set it up, and then they sit down and watch and they feel like the picture quality just isn't as good at home as it was in the store. Well, getting the settings just right for your particular viewing environment takes a little bit of effort, and it's not necessarily intuitive or easy, particularly depending on the

model of the television. The user interface for some of these TVs gets to the point where you could spend hours trying to tweak settings and and not be any better result by the end of the day. And all of that means that you're going to have a less than optimal viewing experience. So this new feature for Apple TV helps you get around that by having the stream adjust for the jankie settings of your television, which happened

to like a lot. Oh, and then there's the iPad Pro. Heck, I'm on record years ago saying the iPad would be a flop. It is one of the dumbest things I've ever said on this show. And if you've been listening for a long time, you know that comes up against some pretty stiff competition. But I want to talk about a feature that Apple calls center Stage, and it involves

using the iPad Pro as a video camera. Now, I know there's this social stigma attached to using a tablet as a camera, and I get that, but this is kind of neat The iPad Pro has a wide angle lens which lets you get a really good field of view of a scene. So imagine you set up an iPad Pro to act as your video camera as you do some sort of you know, YouTube style video. The example that Apple used was a cooking video which was perfect.

Center Stage has the iPad Pro digitally punch in, zooming in and effectively cropping out the edges of the field of view so that you are in the center of the frame. But because we're talking about a wide angle lens, that gives you the freedom to move a little bit to the left and to the right. You've got some face there, and the iPad pro can digitally pan the perspective, keeping you near the center of the frame even as

you move around. It's kind of the same effect as if there were someone operating a camera and they were panning the camera to keep you in view. If someone else happens to join you in the video, the iPad pro can digitally zoom out and keep you both inside the frame of you. It's like having an automated camera operator. So I can see that being really handy for certain types of single creator videos like a SMR artists or cooking videos or maker videos, and I think that is

super neat. Apple had a lot of other stuff to talk about as well. They had a purple iPhone, as in the back of the iPhone is purple, and they also showed off air tags, which are little tokens you can attach to stuff like your keys, or maybe put one inside your wallet or your purse, and when you can't find those things, like when that happens, you can use your iPhone that's paired with that tag to track

down where it is. Apple's version gives you an indicator that tells you what direction the lost object can be found in. So you have a little arrow that says, go this way, and it also tells you how far away you are from it. It gives you like a distance meter, and it includes haptic feedback as you start to get closer, which is kind of like it's saying you're getting warmer. You're getting warmer as you know, you get close to whatever it is you lost. Now, these

kind of tags aren't exactly new. Tile does something similar, and in fact, there is some ongoing kerfuffle related to this, but I'll have to cover that in a later episode because it's just breaking news as I record this. But Apple's app approach is more precise than what I have seen in other implementations. Anyway, most of the stuff I mentioned will be available for order by the end of April, and a lot of it won't actually start shipping until

the second half of May. And a again, I am not an Apple guy, but I do admit some of these things sound kind of cool and useful for specific applications, specific use cases, specific types of users. I just don't happen to fall into those categories, but I do encourage folks who do fall into those categories to look into it further. However, we have some other tech news to

touch on. Over in the UK, TikTok is in some legal trouble and Longfield, who is the former Children's Commissioner for Britain, has filed a lawsuit that alleges TikTok has collected personal information of children who are using the app, which is a huge no no in the UK and the European Union. The lawsuit seeks out a staggering one billion dollars and damages from the company to cover for the data collection that has been going on since May ofen.

According to the allegations, the collected data includes stuff that you would expect like tele phone numbers, location information, and of course the videos actually shared through the app. But Longfield argues that this process is not communicated clearly to the user and moreover goes to great links to make it unclear what the company is actually doing with all the data it's collecting. The lawsuit seeks to force TikTok to stop the practice of collecting data that's originating from

children using the app. This is at best a complicated solution. For TikTok to work, it has to be able to collect some information, even if all it's doing is enabling the basic features of the app. A total halt could mean that TikTok simply won't be able to find a way to make things work for younger users, which in turn creates the problem of how do you make sure that TikTok has an age gate that it's restricted to people who are of age, which is a thorny issue.

TikTok representatives say that the allegations are misleading and that the company will quote vigorously defend the action end quote. That's to be expected. There's no surprise there. As for what I think, well, all major social media platforms are ultimately in the business of collecting user data and then leveraging that data in order to generate revenue. That's the nature of the business, and I agree that when it

comes to children, this is a huge problem. It's one thing for an adult to understand the consequences and implications of sharing so much information, although I would argue that a lot of adults, perhaps the vast majority of them, don't really understand this fully or appreciate it fully. However, it's definitely a challenge for a child to understand it, and I am not actually sure what the right solution

is here. Though, if TikTok could somehow have like an age gate on their side that prevented the company from collecting data about younger users, I'd be in favor of that. I just don't know how realistic that is. Meanwhile, over here in America, the Federal Communications Commission, or f c C, is making some moves to tackle the seriously annoying and

sometimes dangerous practice of robo calls. These automated calls range from being a nuisance to enabling various scams and misinformation campaigns. And I don't know about you folks out there, but for me, it has meant that if I'm getting a phone call and I do not recognize the phone number, I do not answer the phone. I just let those calls go to voicemail, and miraculously, about nent of calls

never leave a message. This convinces me that whatever the call was couldn't have been important, or else they would take the effort to leave a message. Meanwhile, I'm getting between five and twelve calls from numbers I don't recognize every single day. Well, everyone is fed up with that, including people in the government. So what exactly is the f c C doing. Well, it's kind of passing on

that responsibility to the telecommunications companies, which makes sense. So the idea is that the f CC will create a database or actually has created a database, that all voice providers will have to use. The database is the Robocall Mitigation Database, which sounds almost like it's a futuristic kind of police force, but no, this is a document or a database that phone companies will use to keep the

FCC informed on their individual robocall mitigation programs. Starting on September one, phone companies quote must refuse to accept traffic from voice service providers not listed in the Robocall Mitigation Database end quote. So in other words, if you fail to meet these FCC requirements, you don't get on that list. If you're or a phone voice provider, then if you're not on the list, you don't get in. That means like your calls will not go through to other people.

The rules also involved incorporating protocols that will verify that phone numbers are coming from where they claim they're coming from before it can go to a customer. So you might be aware of the practice of spoofing. That's when a robocaller uses a sort of mask for the phone number. They will often end up using a phone number that's similar to yours in an effort to get you to

pick up the phone. So you might get an incoming call and you're like, hey, this phone number is just a couple of digits off from mine, it must be local. I'm going to go ahead and answer. It turns out it's coming from who knows where, and that phone number was spoofed. Well, these protocols will let phone companies verify that a call that claims it's coming from a number that's just two digits off from your number is really in fact from that phone number. If it isn't, it's

got to be blocked. That's the kind of idea there. So the message here to phone companies is you have the tools and you have until June one to get them all in place, and if you do then you'll be on this list. But if you fail to do it, you won't be on the list, which means calls through your services are just gonna be blocked to all the other phone providers out there. This is an interesting approach. It is one that worries me a little bit just

for innocent customers of phone voice providers. I mean, they are not necessarily culpable for robocall practices that are carried out on that same service, but they depend on that phone service. I'm not sure how you work around that, Like, how do you make sure that the innocent customers who are affected by this are still able to communicate to folks using the phone. I don't know what the answer is there, but it is an interesting approach and I

will continue to cover this story. If you live in Seattle and you shop at Whole Foods, you might be able to pay for your artisanal groceries with the wave of your hand. Amazon is piloting a payment program called Amazon One at a few Whole Foods stores in Seattle. Customers who opt in can link a credit card or Amazon account to their palm print, essentially so then after having their groceries rung up after they've done shopping, they

can run their palms over as payment. They scan the palm and the money comes from the connected card or Amazon account. Amazon has already used this technology for a few of its pilot stores that operate without cashiers, and the company says that the tech could end up being used in other locations such as sporting events and such.

Not in a way, I think that approach could help down on practices like scalping and the whole resale market, which could mean that for stuff like you know, sporting events and theater events, that the folks who really want to go to those events but constantly find it difficult to get tickets because scalpers have bought up huge banks

of them might have a better chance. But then you could also say that whenever you start incorporating biometrics into payment plans, it gets a little creepy, so there can be a negative response, which I think is totally understandable and justifiable. Some groups are already expressing concerns about issues like privacy or potentially with hackers, so there are legitimate

objections to this. Uh, the questions would I use this kind of process, I mean probably, I've used similar processes for lots of other stuff, like when I travel on airlines, for example. But that's me, and that's my personal choice. I wouldn't blame anyone else for saying, yeah, I'm not comfortable doing that, And I think that's you know, a valid response and it comes up to individual preference. Finally, some of you gamers out there might be fans of an old game called Cotour a K Nights of the

Old Republic. This is an action RPG games set in the Star Wars universe. The story takes place thousands of years before the events of the film franchise, so it doesn't involve any of the characters from the Star Wars movies. The original game, produced by BioWare, published way back in two thousand three, and now it sounds like there is a remake in the works held by a Spear Media.

That company is best known for producing ports. So in the video game world, developers frequently focus on making a specific game for a specific platform like Windows, PCs or the PlayStation or whatever, and they spend a lot of time and money and other resources to make the game. But of course, there are lots of platforms for games out there, and most of them are not compatible with the other ones. So if the company wants their game to be available across all platforms, they have to port

the game over, essentially rebuilding the game for other platforms. Now, sometimes that can be done without having to recreate lots of the game other times, it's a more involved process, and many game studios don't have the time to do all of this internally, so they contract that work out to other studios like Asper Media. But this sounds like it's not just a port to let players run the

game on modern hardware. This sounds like Asper Media is actually going the extra step to remake the game, presumably so that the effects and gameplay are brought up to speed with more recent trends in the video game space. I'm pretty excited about this. Nights of the Old Republic

was a game I really enjoyed. I liked how the game asks you to make various judgment calls, and based on your decisions and gameplay, you might find yourself becoming an enlightened Jedi master or a vicious and ruthless Sith warrior, or perhaps something in between. So I'm really looking forward to seeing the outcome. Well that's a selection of stories

for Thursday, April twenty one. A reminder out there that if you have any suggestions for future topics that I should tackle and tech Stuff, reach out to me and let me know. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff H. S W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.