An anonymous reader shares a report from the New York Post: A supposed glitch in the popular "Find My iPhone" app has been directing random strangers to the home of an unsuspecting Texas dad at all hours of the day, falsely accusing him of stealing their electronic devices.

[Software engineer] Scott Schuster told the local news station KTRK that he's been visited by close to a dozen irate people over the past few years, telling him that their missing phone had last pinged at his address. "[I] had to wake up and go answer the door and explain to them that I didn't have their device, and people don't tend to believe you," the dad of two told the outlet.
The Texas resident tells KTRK that his biggest concern was "someone coming to the house potentially with a weapon."

And the same station reports that local sheriff Eric Fagan "said he was so shocked and concerned that he informed his patrol units and dispatchers, just in case anyone called about the address." "Apple needs to do more about this," Fagan said. "Please come out and check on this. This is your expertise. Mine is criminal and keeping our public safe here in Fort Bend County." Fagan added that Apple doing nothing puts a family's safety in jeopardy. "I would ask them to come out and see what they can do. It should be taken seriously. You are putting innocent lives at risk," he said....

There have been other high-profile device pinging errors elsewhere in the country, with at least one that brought armored vehicles to a neighborhood. In 2021, body camera footage captured a Denver police SWAT team raiding the home of a 77-year-old woman in Colorado over a false ping on the app. Denver officers believed she had stolen guns connected to a car theft after tracking a stolen iPhone to her address using the Find My app. That woman later sued the lead detective.

ABC13 has tried contacting the software giant since Tuesday. Someone called back, so we know they are aware of the incident. Still, no one has said if they are going to fix the issue, or at the very least, look into the matter.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: An Apple Store at the Alderwood Mall was burgled last weekend, with thieves infiltrating the location through a nearby coffee shop. According to Seattle's King 5 News, thieves broke into Seattle Coffee Gear, went into the bathroom, and cut a hole in the wall to get to the Apple Store backroom. The burglars were able to bypass the Apple Store's security system by using the adjacent coffee shop, stealing a total of 436 iPhones that were worth around $500,000.

According to Seattle Coffee Gear manager Eric Marks, the coffee shop is not noticeably adjacent to the Apple Store because of the way that the store is laid out. "I would have never suspected we were adjacent to the Apple Store, how it wraps around I mean," Marks told King 5 News. "So, someone really had to think it out and have access to the mall layout." Police were able to obtain surveillance footage of the theft, but as it is part of an active investigation, it has not yet been released. Nothing was stolen from the coffee shop, but it will cost $1,500 to replace locks and repair the bathroom wall.

Apple has been teasing plans for an India retail store since 2016. Seven years later, it's finally here. Quartz reports: The company finally released a picture of the barricade of its first ever Indian retail store in Mumbai, the country's financial hub, on Apr. 5. The store will be located in Jio World Drive -- the mall owned by India's richest man Mukesh Ambani -- in the upscale commercial hub called Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC). So far, Apple has only sold goods and offered services in India via authorized third-party retailers, or through online portals such as Amazon, Flipkart, and Paytm Mall.

Apple has chosen a prime location for its first retail outlet in India. Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC), which is morphing into the city's main business district, houses offices for multinational companies and banks. BKC recently made headlines for hosting what is being touted as India's answer to the Met Gala: the opening of the multi-disciplinary Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Arts Centre (NMACC). The launch of the first-of-its-kind cultural arts space was flanked by both Bollywood and Hollywood celebrities -- from Shahrukh Khan to Zendaya. "Hello Mumbai," says Apple on their website. "We are getting ready to welcome you aboard our first store in India. And raring to see where your creativity takes you at Apple BKC."

The Apple Mumbai store promises to offer one-on-one support with a Specialist, expert service and support at the Genius Bar, and product exchanges for credit towards a future purchase.

Apple's slowing growth and cash-rich balance sheet are again fueling speculation that the world's most valuable company should make a big acquisition. From a report: Entertainment giant Disney recently joined a long list of potential acquisition targets that over the years has grown to include Netflix, Tesla, Peloton and Sonos. They all have one thing in common: Anyone betting that Apple would buy them has so far been sorely disappointed. "You're probably missing the value of the business if you think the key catalyst for investment is a major acquisition," said Kevin Walkush, portfolio manager at Jensen Investment Management. "It's a low-probability bet." Apple is famous for eschewing splashy acquisitions in contrast with peers like Microsoft and Amazon, which have continued to make deals despite increasing scrutiny by regulators. Instead, Apple favors buying small startups to augment its home-grown pushes into new markets even if those efforts take many years to bear fruit.

Further adding to the excitement of the upcoming Linux 6.4 merge window is the mainline kernel seeing the Device Tree (DT) additions for Apple's current M2 devices including the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini systems. From a report: The upstream kernel still has more work to go around the M1/M2 support compared to the downstream state with Asahi Linux, but at least now with this DT support will provide some basic level of upstream kernel support for the Apple M2. Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin today sent in the Apple SoC DT updates targeting the Linux 6.4 cycle for queuing into the SoC tree ahead of the merge window opening around the end of the month. The main addition with this pull request is adding the Apple M2 Device Tree series.

In every copy of macOS that has shipped since 2018, Apple has included the original Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto, and no-one seems to know why. From a report: The baffling discovery (or rediscovery - see below) was recently made by developer and waxy.org writer Andy Baio, who stumbled upon the PDF document while trying to fix a problem with his printer. Anyone with a Mac running macOS Mojave or later can see the PDF for themselves by typing the following command into Terminal:

open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf

If you're running macOS 10.14 or later, the 184 KB Bitcoin PDF should immediately open in Preview. The document can also be located via Finder: Navigate to Macintosh HD -> System -> Library -> Image Capture -> Devices, then open the Contents -> Resources folder. The whitepaper titled "simpledoc.pdf" should be in there.

Apple said that some users are experiencing disruptions of its weather app on Tuesday, citing a data provider issue. From a report: The Cupertino, California-based company said on its website that issues for the app were reported at 11 p.m. New York time Monday and continued Tuesday. Apple said that precipitation forecasts for the next hour may be unavailable in Alaska "due to a data provider outage," but disruptions appear to be across various cities. All other services, such as the App Store, Apple TV and FaceTime, appear to be available and working without issue.

Apple will expand ProMotion to the standard iPhone models in two years, according to Ross Young, CEO of Display Supply Chain Consultants. ProMotion was first introduced on the iPhone 13 Pro models in 2021 and remains exclusive to Pro models for now. MacRumors reports: In a tweet today, Young provided a roadmap outlining various display-related technologies coming to future iPhones. Notably, the roadmap indicates that low-power LTPO display technology will be expanded to the standard iPhones in 2025, which Young said will enable ProMotion on these devices, allowing the display to ramp up to a 120Hz refresh rate for smoother scrolling and video content when necessary.

ProMotion would also allow the display to ramp down to a more power-efficient refresh rate. iPhone 13 Pro models can ramp down to 10Hz, while iPhone 14 Pro models can go as low as 1Hz, allowing for an always-on display that can show the Lock Screen's clock, widgets, notifications, and wallpaper even when the device is locked. All in all, the roadmap suggests that the so-called "iPhone 17" and "iPhone 17 Plus" will feature ProMotion, and likely an always-on display too. Young also claimed the "iPhone 17 Pro" will be the first iPhone to feature under-panel Face ID technology.

Tim Cook's vision for AR and VR hasn't changed. "For almost a decade, Apple's CEO has been banging the drum that AR is more important than VR and that AR is fundamentally about bringing people together," reports The Verge. "And he's still at it." From the report: "If you think about the technology itself with augmented reality, just to take one side of the AR/VR piece, the idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people's communication, people's connection," Cook told GQ's Zach Baron in a long and very interesting profile just published by the magazine. Cook told Baron that he's interested in collaboration; he said something about measuring glass walls; he said his thinking on glasses-as-gadget has changed over the years.

None of this is a product announcement, of course, only the latest in a long string of hints about what Apple sees in this space. Cook's been on this particular line since at least 2016, when he said on Good Morning America that AR "gives the capability for both of us to sit and be very present, talking to each other, but also have other things -- visually -- for both of us to see." [...] At various times over the years, Cook has said AR is a powerful technology for education, that he thinks it'll be as common as "eating three meals a day," and that he thinks AR is as big an idea as the smartphone. But he keeps coming back to the idea that AR should be meant to bring people together in the real world, not keep them apart or transport them to another universe entirely.

Cook also offered what sounds like an explanation for why the headset, which has been heavily rumored over the last couple of years, has taken so long to come out. "I'm not interested in putting together pieces of somebody else's stuff," he told GQ. "Because we want to control the primary technology. Because we know that's how you innovate." Maybe the most revealing thing in the story is the way Cook explains Apple -- or at least explains the way he hopes you'll see Apple. He talks frequently about Apple's environmental commitments, its loud fight against "the data-industrial complex," and the way Apple is trying to help people have better relationships with technology. (Conveniently ignoring that Apple is perhaps more responsible for our phone addictions than any other company, of course.) "Because my philosophy is, if you're looking at the phone more than you're looking in somebody's eyes, you're doing the wrong thing." Apple plans to unveil a mixed-reality headset on June 5th at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

An anonymous reader shares this report from the Washington Post: Steve Jobs never lived to be an old wise man.

But running Apple and Pixar, tumbling and thriving, earned him a lot of wisdom in his 56 years. Now, a small group of his family, friends and former colleagues have collected it into "Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words," available free to the public online starting on April 11. Somewhere between a posthumous memoir and a scrapbook album, it is told through notes and drafts Jobs emailed to himself, excerpts of letters and speeches, oral histories and interviews, photos and mementos. (Some physical copies are being produced for Apple and Disney employees, but that format won't be for sale to the general public.)

"Imagine yourself as an old person looking back on your life," Jobs wrote in a June 2005 email to himself as he was preparing to give the Stanford commencement speech. "Your life will be a story. It will be your story, with its highs and lows, its heros and villains, its forks in the road that mean everything." The book, published by the Steve Jobs Archive, will be released on Apple Books and the Steve Jobs Archive website. The fact that it aesthetically resembles an Apple product — mostly gray and white, minimalist — is no coincidence: It was designed by LoveFrom, the firm founded by Jony Ive, Apple's former chief design officer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It has been two years and four months since the first Apple Silicon Mac hit the market, and now Autodesk has finally updated some of its massively popular professional applications (AutoCAD and Maya) to run natively on M1 and M2 chips. The availability of AutoCAD for Mac 2024 was announced in a blog post on Autodesk's website on March 28. Like other major AutoCAD updates, it adds new features like expanded automation tools and easier workflows, but the announcement that "for the first time, AutoCAD for Mac 2024 and AutoCAD LT for Mac 2024 now run natively on both Intel and Apple Silicon architectures, including M1 and M2 chips in the M-series chips" is clearly the headlining feature.

Autodesk claims that Apple Silicon support "can increase overall performance by up to two times" compared to the 2023 version of AutoCAD. A day later, on March 29, Autodesk revealed the 2024 update for Maya, its 3D modeling software chiefly used in game development, film production, and visual effects. Maya 2024 brings native Apple Silicon support in addition to a slew of new features, including the LookDevX material editor, Hydra support, and so on. But in contrast to many other makers of widespread professional software in similar industries, such as Adobe and Unity, Autodesk's efforts to support Apple Silicon -- which were announced two years ago -- have been ongoing for an interminably long time. Even open source Maya competitor Blender beat Autodesk to the punch.

Apple set a June 5 date for the event where it plans to unveil a mixed-reality headset, the first major new product since its smartwatch debuted eight years ago. From a report: The company scheduled its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, better known as WWDC, to kick off on that Monday and run through Friday, June 9. It typically uses the first day of the conference to discuss its next-generation platforms and operating systems. This year's conference will be held as an "all-day experience" at headquarters in Cupertino, California. Central to the agenda this time around will be the headset, likely to be dubbed the Reality One or Reality Pro, Bloomberg News has reported. Apple will also showcase the accompanying xrOS operating system and a way for developers to write apps for the device.

Apple: Apple today introduced Apple Pay Later in the U.S. Designed with users' financial health in mind, Apple Pay Later allows users to split purchases into four payments, spread over six weeks with no interest and no fees. Users can easily track, manage, and repay their Apple Pay Later loans in one convenient location in Apple Wallet. Users can apply for Apple Pay Later loans of $50 to $1,000, which can be used for online and in-app purchases made on iPhone and iPad with merchants that accept Apple Pay. Starting today, Apple will begin inviting select users to access a prerelease version of Apple Pay Later, with plans to offer it to all eligible users in the coming months.

Apple Pay Later is built right into Wallet, so users can seamlessly view, track, and manage all of their loans in one place. With Apple Pay Later in Wallet, users can easily see the total amount due for all of their existing loans, as well as the total amount due in the next 30 days. Apple Pay Later is offered by Apple Financing, a subsidiary of Apple, which is responsible for credit assessment and lending. Apple Financing plans to report Apple Pay Later loans to U.S. credit bureaus starting this fall, so they are reflected in users' overall financial profiles and can help promote responsible lending for both the lender and the borrower.

Apple has quietly acquired a Mountain View-based startup, WaveOne, that was developing AI algorithms for compressing video. From a report: Apple wouldn't confirm the sale when asked for comment. But WaveOne's website was shut down around January, and several former employees, including one of WaveOne's co-founders, now work within Apple's various machine learning groups. In a LinkedIn post published a month ago, WaveOne's former head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, announced the sale. "After almost two years at WaveOne, last week we finalized the sale of the company to Apple," Stankosh wrote. "We started our journey at WaveOne, realizing that machine learning and deep learning video technology could potentially change the world. Apple saw this potential and took the opportunity to add it to their technology portfolio." WaveOne was founded in 2016 by Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel, who set out to take the decades-old paradigm of video codecs and make them AI-powered. Prior to joining the venture, Bourdev was a founding member of Meta's AI research division, and both he and Rippel worked on Meta's computer vision team responsible for content moderation, visual search and feed ranking on Facebook.

An anonymous reader shares this report from AppleInsider: Apple has allegedly demonstrated its mixed reality headset to its top executives recently, in an attempt to generate excitement for the upcoming platform launch. While executives are keen on the product, others within Apple are not sure it's a home run hit. Eight anonymous current and former employees told the New York Times that they are skeptical about the headset, despite Apple's apparent glossy demonstration of the technology.
Manufacturing has already begun for a June release of the $3,000 headset, insiders say in the Times' article: Some employees have defected from the project because of their doubts about its potential, three people with knowledge of the moves said. Others have been fired over the lack of progress with some aspects of the headset, including its use of Apple's Siri voice assistant, one person said.Even leaders at Apple have questioned the product's prospects. It has been developed at a time when morale has been strained by a wave of departures from the company's design team, including Mr. Ive, who left Apple in 2019 and stopped advising the company last year....

Because the headset won't fit over glasses, the company has plans to sell prescription lenses for the displays to people who don't wear contacts, a person familiar with the plan said. During the device's development, Apple has focused on making it excel for videoconferencing and spending time with others as avatars in a virtual world. The company has called the device's signature application "copresence," a word designed to capture the experience of sharing a real or virtual space with someone in another place. It is akin to what Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, calls the "metaverse...."

But the road to deliver augmented reality has been littered with failures, false starts and disappointments, from Google Glass to Magic Leap and from Microsoft's HoloLens to Meta's Quest Pro. Apple is considered a potential savior because of its success combining new hardware and software to create revolutionary devices.

Still, the challenges are daunting.

During its State of Unreal keynote at GDC 2023, the company showed off new animation tools that make it possible to create realistic facial animations using only video captured from an iPhone. The Verge reports: Epic showed this off with a live demonstration featuring the actor behind the upcoming game Senua's Saga: Hellblade II. It was a short clip, with the actor speaking directly into the camera, but it appeared to be rendered both quickly and accurately. Even more impressive, the company then showed off the same animations captured onstage used to bring another MetaHuman character to life. The animator is launching this summer. Epic's MetaHuman Creator was announced in early 2021 to streamline the process of making more realistic human faces, body movements, and facial animations.

Apple plans to spend $1 billion a year to produce movies that will be released in theaters, Bloomberg News reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the company's plans, part of an ambitious effort to raise its profile in Hollywood and lure subscribers to its streaming service. From the report: Apple has approached movie studios about partnering to release a few titles in theaters this year and a slate of more films in the future, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. The list of potential releases includes Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio; the spy thriller Argylle, from director Matthew Vaughn; and Napoleon, Ridley Scott's drama about the French conqueror. The investment is a significant increase from years past. Most of Apple's previous original movies have either been exclusive to the streaming service or released in a limited number of theaters. The company has pledged to put movies in thousands of theaters for at least a month, said the people, though it hasn't finalized any plans.

After a years-long wait, Apple Pay today launched in South Korea, allowing those living in the country to use Apple's payment system to make contactless payments using the iPhone or Apple Watch. MacRumors reports: Apple has been working to bring Apple Pay to South Korea since 2017, but Apple was unable to be registered as an electronic financial business operator because regulators were investigating whether Apple Pay violated local regulations and laws. Apple was finally approved by financial regulators back in February.

NFC terminal adoption was also low in retail stores in South Korea around when Apple Pay first launched, which continues to be an issue. There are more NFC terminals than there were six years ago, but The Korea Times suggests Apple Pay will face "significant challenges" in Korea due to the limited number of NFC terminals. At the current time, Apple Pay is limited to Hyundai Card users, which could see South Koreans interested in using the service picking up a Hyundai Card. No other card companies are participating in Apple Pay as of yet.

Microsoft is preparing to launch a new app store for games on iPhones and Android smartphones as soon as next year if its $75bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard is cleared by regulators, according to the head of its Xbox business. From a report: New rules requiring Apple and Google to open up their mobile platforms to app stores owned and operated by other companies are expected to come into force from March 2024 under the EU's Digital Markets Act. "We want to be in a position to offer Xbox and content from both us and our third-party partners across any screen where somebody would want to play," said Phil Spencer, chief executive of Microsoft Gaming, in an interview ahead of this week's annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. "Today, we can't do that on mobile devices but we want to build towards a world that we think will be coming where those devices are opened up."

Microsoft is fighting with regulators in the US, Europe and UK, which have all raised concerns about the potential impact on competition from the owner of the Xbox console buying the developer of Call of Duty, one of the world's most popular games franchises. PlayStation maker Sony has been a vocal opponent of the deal. However, Spencer argues the deal can boost competition in what he called the "largest platform people play on" -- smartphones -- where Apple and Google currently operate what some antitrust authorities have called a "duopoly" over distribution of games and other apps. [...] While acknowledging it was hard to predict exactly when Microsoft will be able to launch its own store, Spencer said it would be "pretty trivial" for Microsoft to adapt its Xbox and Game Pass apps to sell games and subscriptions on mobile devices. Microsoft's current lack of mobile games was an "obvious hole in our capability" that it needed Activision Blizzard to fill, he added.

The closing keynote at the SCaLE 20x conference was delivered by 80-year-old Ken Thompson (co-creator of Unix, Plan9, UTF8, and the Go programming language).

Slashdot reader motang shared Thompson's answer to a question at the end about what operating system he uses today: I have, for most of my life — because I was sort of born into it — run Apple.

Now recently, meaning within the last five years, I've become more and more depressed, and what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious. But they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it's okay.

And I have come, within the last month or two, to say, even though I've invested, you know, a zillion years in Apple — I'm throwing it away. And I'm going to Linux. To Raspbian in particular.