Employees at an Apple store in Atlanta filed a petition on Wednesday to hold a union election. If successful, the workers could form the first union at an Apple retail store in the United States. From a report: The move continues a recent trend of service-sector unionization in which unions have won elections at Starbucks, Amazon and REI locations. The workers are hoping to join the Communications Workers of America, which represents workers at companies like AT&T Mobility and Verizon, and has made a concerted push into the tech sector in recent years. The union says that about 100 workers at the store -- at Cumberland Mall, in northwest Atlanta -- are eligible to vote, including salespeople and repair technicians, and that over 70 percent of them have signed authorization cards indicating their support. In a statement, the union said Apple, like other tech employers, had effectively created a tiered work force that denied retail workers the pay, benefits and respect that workers earned at its corporate offices.

FaceTime users are getting bombarded with group calls from numbers they've never seen before, often as many as 20 times in short succession during late hours of the night. From a report: Griefers behind the pranks call as many as 31 numbers at a time. When a person receiving one of the calls hangs up, a different number will immediately call back. FaceTime doesn't have the ability to accept only FaceTime calls coming from people in the user's address book. It also requires that all numbers in a group call must be manually blocked for the call to be stopped. "I got my first facetime spam starting 4 days ago," one user reported to an Apple support forum earlier this month. "It has been non-stop, over 300 numbers blocked so far. My 3 year old daughter has been accidentally answering them and going on video without a t-shirt on." The high volume of callbacks appears to be the result of other people receiving the call dialing everyone back when the initial call fails shortly after answering. As more and more people receive follow-on calls, they too begin making callbacks. Apple provides surprisingly few ways for users to stop the nuisance calls. As noted earlier, users can block numbers, but this requires manually blocking each individual person on the group call. That's not an effective solution for people receiving dozens of group calls, often to a different group of people in a short period of time, often in the wee hours.

Citing an article from The Verge's Alex Heath, Fast Company breaks down "Meta's plan to shape the metaverse by building its own wildly ambitious augmented-reality hardware." From the report: eath's article, "Mark Zuckerberg's Augmented Reality," covers two codenamed products. "Project Nazere" is a high-end pair of AR glasses that don't require a smartphone, with the first version shipping in 2024, followed by upgraded ones in 2026 and 2028. Also due in 2024 is "Hypernova," a more economy-minded take on AR eyewear that does piggyback on a smartphone's connectivity and computing muscle. The piece is full of technical details, such as Nazere's use of custom waveguides and microLED projectors to fuse your view of the real with a digital overlay. Both Nazere and Hypernova will supposedly work with a wrist device that uses differential electromyography to detect electric neurons, allowing for input that feels akin to mind control.

But along with all the specifics in Heath's story, what's also striking is its discussion of how these planned products roll up into Meta's highest-level goals. They are, of course, an extension of Mark Zuckerberg's hopes, dreams, and aspirations: "If the AR glasses and the other futuristic hardware Meta is building eventually catch on, they could cast the company, and by extension Zuckerberg, in a new light. 'Zuck's ego is intertwined with [the glasses],' a former employee who worked on the project tells me. 'He wants it to be an iPhone moment.'"

Everybody's entitled to their own definition of an "iPhone moment." Presumably, it involves a product of truly epoch-shifting impact -- not necessarily the first in its field but an unprecedented blockbuster that defines the category by bringing it to the masses. Something like, well, you know, the iPhone. For a tech CEO such as Zuckerberg, creating an iPhone moment isn't just about selling something enormously successful; it also provides full control over an ecosystem. That lets a company chart its own destiny in a way it can never do if it's building on someone else's platform. Zuckerberg has long been bugged by the fact that Facebook/Meta's products have historically sat atop environments operated by other companies, such as Apple and Google. I know this because he told me so himself...

In the wake of data privacy changes by mobile platforms last year, the enterprise tech world is suddenly very interested in customer-data platforms (CDPs). From a report: With Twilio's acquisition of Segment, Treasure Data's $234 million fundraise late last year and Salesforce's push into CDPs, the hot new buzzword is potentially a hot new market. "The way I think about [CDPs] is, it's trying to create a 360-degree view of each of your customers to help you more accurately identify what would most resonate with this customer," said Derek Zanutto, a general partner at CapitalG. The term first started appearing in mainstream conversations back in 2017. In short, CDPs are centralized places to store all the first-party data a company collects from its customers. "It's fundamentally a data platform that unifies the data, and processes it, and then activates the profiles across many channels," said Treasure Data CEO Kazuki Ohta. The key is not just collecting and storing that data, but making it available to use.

The need for CDPs first arose as companies realized they had this data but didn't know what to do with it. "What we're seeing that a lot of brands do is effectively build a data lake or a master data management system, where there's a lot of data coming together potentially," said Ryan Fleisch, head of Product Marketing for Adobe's CDP. "But where a lot of brands are looking for further partnership is: How do I make sense of that data, activate it and make a decision off of it?"

"The transformation of the data, the ability to personalize that customer information, I think is a key value prop of the customer data platform," said Twilio Segment Vice President Jodi Alperstein. "And really knowing that 360 view of the customer and really being able to identify them, and then be able to put it into action." It's also why CDPs are most commonly talked about in a marketing context, because it's the most natural extension of using data about customers. After Apple and Google restricted the use of third-party cookies in apps and on the web, marketers needed to find new sources of customer information.

Apple's controversial App Tracking Transparency feature available in iOS 14.5 is expected to have a significant impact on Facebook, Twitter, Snap, and YouTube in 2022. According to a report by Lotame, big tech platforms' revenue could drop by almost $16 billion. 9to5Mac reports: For those who don't remember, ATT requires that applications ask permission from users before tracking them across other apps and websites. For example, when you open the Facebook app, you'll see a prompt that says the app would like to track you across other apps and services. There will be two options from which to choose: "Ask App not to Track" or "Allow."

Talking about Facebook, Lotame's report shows that Zuckerberg's company will take the biggest hit as the privacy changes will cost it $12.8 billion in revenue: "The effects of these changes on these companies are hard to isolate because all four players are still growing extremely strongly, still taking share from the last bastions of traditional media and gaining share in digital media as privacy regulations make it harder and harder for independent publishers and technologies to execute,' said Mike Woosley, Chief Operating Officer at Lotame. 'To add to the complexity, the pandemic has introduced volatile and unpredictable gyrations in the pacing of media spend.'"

Apple has started widespread internal testing of several new Mac models with next-generation M2 chips, according to developer logs, part of its push to make more powerful computers using homegrown processors. Bloomberg: The company is testing at least nine new Macs with four different M2-based chips -- the successors to the current M1 line -- with third-party apps in its App Store, according to the logs, which were corroborated by people familiar with the matter. The move is a key step in the development process, suggesting that the new machines may be nearing release in the coming months. The M2 chip is Apple's latest attempt to push the boundaries of computer processing after a split with Intel in recent years. Apple has gradually replaced Intel chips with its own silicon, and now looks to make further gains with a more advanced line. After years of slow growth, the Mac computer division enjoyed a resurgence the past two years, helped in part by home office workers buying new equipment. The business generated $35.2 billion in sales the past fiscal year, about 10% of Apple's total.

Privacy is one of the selling points of Apple products. But for employees who develop these products, it can be a pain. The Information: Apple doesn't collect a lot of customer data from its services, including Apple Maps, the Siri voice assistant and its paid video-streaming service, according to more than a dozen former employees. And the customer data it does collect from products like the App Store and Apple Music aren't widely accessible to employees who work on those and other products, these people said. That makes it difficult for Apple to mimic popular features developed by its competitors, which collect more data and have fewer restrictions on employee access to such information, they said.

Look at Apple TV+. The paid video-streaming service, unlike its bigger rivals, doesn't collect demographic info about customers or a history of what they have watched, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation at Apple. That means Apple TV+ employees can't analyze how customers move from one piece of content to another, making it next to impossible to recommend more videos to them based on their preferences -- a contrast to Netflix, Disney and other streaming services, which use such data to get customers to watch more videos. [...] From Apple's app recommendations to new features for Siri and the company's Goldman Sachs-backed credit card, Apple engineers and data scientists often have to find creative or costly ways to make up for the lack of access to data. In some cases, as with Apple TV+, employees simply have to accept limitations on what they can do.

On Thursday, it announced it's taking some big steps to address some of the emissions associated with making and using those products by investing in a solar farm going up in Texas and cleaning up its supply chain. From a report: Apple is tackling part of its Scope 3 emissions. The biggest challenge for nearly any company is addressing carbon pollution from the manufacturing and use of its products. And Apple has a lot of products in circulation. The company has a mind-bending 1.8 billion devices currently in service around the world. If they were evenly distributed (spoiler: they're not), roughly a quarter of the world's population would own an Apple device. For those Apple devices to be useful, they need to be charged. I mean, duh. By the company's own carbon accounting, all that charging is responsible for nearly 22% of Apple's carbon footprint. Manufacturing all those devices is an even bigger chunk of emissions, accounting for more than 70% of its 22.6 million ton carbon footprint, according to its most recent environmental progress report.

Apple has responded to Meta's plan to take a nearly 50% commission for digital asset purchases made inside the metaverse after complaining about fees in the App Store, calling the decision hypocritical. From a report: Yesterday, it was revealed that Meta, more commonly known as Facebook, plans to take a steep 47.5% commission for digital asset purchases made inside the so-called "metaverse." The 47.5% cut includes a 30% hardware fee on top of a 17.5% platform fee. Responding to the plan, Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz told MarketWatch that Facebook is simply being hypocritical and that while it complains about Apple's own platform fees, it wants to charge creators even more. "Meta has repeatedly taken aim at Apple for charging developers a 30% commission for in-app purchases in the App Store -- and have used small businesses and creators as a scapegoat at every turn," Apple spokesman Fred Sainz stated in an email to MarketWatch. "Now -- Meta seeks to charge those same creators significantly more than any other platform. [Meta's] announcement lays bare Meta's hypocrisy. It goes to show that while they seek to use Apple's platform for free, they happily take from the creators and small businesses that use their own."

By combining two processors into one, the company has squeezed a surprising amount of performance out of silicon. From a report: "UltraFusion gave us the tools we needed to be able to fill up that box with as much compute as we could," Tim Millet, vice president of hardware technologies at Apple, says of the Mac Studio. Benchmarking of the M1 Ultra has shown it to be competitive with the fastest high-end computer chips and graphics processor on the market. Millet says some of the chip's capabilities, such as its potential for running AI applications, will become apparent over time, as developers port over the necessary software libraries. The M1 Ultra is part of a broader industry shift toward more modular chips. Intel is developing a technology that allows different pieces of silicon, dubbed "chiplets," to be stacked on top of one another to create custom designs that do not need to be redesigned from scratch. The company's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, has identified this "advanced packaging" as one pillar of a grand turnaround plan. Intel's competitor AMD is already using a 3D stacking technology from TSMC to build some server and high-end PC chips. This month, Intel, AMD, Samsung, TSMC, and ARM announced a consortium to work on a new standard for chiplet designs. In a more radical approach, the M1 Ultra uses the chiplet concept to connect entire chips together.

Apple's new chip is all about increasing overall processing power. "Depending on how you define Moore's law, this approach allows you to create systems that engage many more transistors than what fits on one chip," says Jesus del Alamo, a professor at MIT who researches new chip components. He adds that it is significant that TSMC, at the cutting edge of chipmaking, is looking for new ways to keep performance rising. "Clearly, the chip industry sees that progress in the future is going to come not only from Moore's law but also from creating systems that could be fabricated by different technologies yet to be brought together," he says. "Others are doing similar things, and we certainly see a trend towards more of these chiplet designs," adds Linley Gwennap, author of the Microprocessor Report, an industry newsletter. The rise of modular chipmaking might help boost the performance of future devices, but it could also change the economics of chipmaking. Without Moore's law, a chip with twice the transistors may cost twice as much. "With chiplets, I can still sell you the base chip for, say, $300, the double chip for $600, and the uber-double chip for $1,200," says Todd Austin, an electrical engineer at the University of Michigan.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said that proposed app store regulations in the U.S. and European Union would put iPhone users' privacy at risk. From a report: "If we are forced to let unvetted apps onto iPhones, the unintended consequences will be profound," Cook said during a keynote address at the Global Privacy Summit on Tuesday in Washington. "Data-hungry companies would be able to avoid our privacy rules and once again track our users against their will." Apple is under global scrutiny over app store policies. The EU is working on legislation that would force the company to allow apps to be installed from outside the Apple App Store, threatening Apple's grip on its platform and potentially limiting its ability to collect a commission from developers.

Apple's plan to add a highly anticipated blood-pressure monitor to its smartwatch has hit some snags and the technology isn't expected to be ready until 2024 at the earliest, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The company has teams working on an updated sensor and software for the Apple Watch that would determine if a user has high blood pressure, but accuracy has been a challenge during testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The feature has been planned for at least four years, but it's probably two years away from hitting the market and may slip until 2025, they said. Apple's shares were up about 1% at 9:41 a.m. in New York. Blood-pressure features may become a key selling point for smartwatches in coming years, but the technology hasn't been easy to master. Though Apple rivals such as Samsung have launched watches with the capability, they require monthly calibration with a traditional monitor. Last year, Alphabet-owned Fitbit launched a public study to test wrist-based blood-pressure measurement.

Apple has started making the iPhone 13 in India, the company said on Monday. Reuters reports: The phone is being produced at a local plant of Apple's Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn, situated in the town of Sriperumbudur in Southern Tamil Nadu state, according to a source. Apple has been shifting some areas of iPhone production from China to other markets including India, the world's second biggest smartphone market, and is also planning to assemble iPad tablets there. India and countries such as Mexico and Vietnam are becoming increasingly important to contract manufacturers supplying American brands as they try to diversify production away from China. The iPhone 13 is the fourth model to be produced locally after Apple launched manufacturing operations in India in 2017 with the iPhone SE.

Apple faces an additional EU antitrust charge in the coming weeks in an investigation triggered by a complaint from Spotify, Reuters reported Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter said, a sign that EU enforcers are strengthening their case against the U.S. company. From a report: The European Commission last year accused the iPhone maker of distorting competition in the music streaming market via restrictive rules for its App Store that force developers to use its own in-app payment system and prevent them from informing users of other purchasing options. Such requirements have also come under scrutiny in countries including the United States and Britain. Extra charges set out in a so-called supplementary statement of objections are usually issued to companies when the EU competition enforcer has gathered new evidence or has modified some elements to boost its case.

Apple, looking to address criticism of its competitive practices by the European Union, developers and U.S. lawmakers, pointed to a report showing that third-party apps are thriving on the iPhone and other devices. From a report: In a study published by Analysis Group and touted by the iPhone maker, analysts said that Apple's own apps are infrequently the dominant option and only account for a small share of app usage. "We found that Apple's own apps, while used by many, are rarely the most popular of a given type and are eclipsed in popularity by third-party apps for nearly every country and app type we considered," the report said. In the U.S., the report found that Spotify is 1.6 times more popular than Apple Music, that Google Maps is used 1.5 times more than Apple Maps, and that Netflix is 17 times more popular than Apple's service. The Amazon Kindle service, meanwhile, was 4.5 times more popular than Apple's Books app.

Chef Jose Andres has relied heavily on technology as part of his humanitarian work in Ukraine, feeding thousands of people displaced by the Russian invasion. But he has a few gripes as well, including the fact that Apple Maps kept sending him to Russian-controlled areas. From a report: "Don't send people to enemy territory in a war," he told me in a brief interview after his appearance at the Axios What's Next Summit in Washington, D.C. Andres and his organization World Central Kitchen rely on satellite technology not just to personally navigate, but also to keep tabs on volunteers. While Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment, it's likely a big challenge to keep detailed, up-to-date maps of who is controlling which territory.

Apple today announced that its 33rd annual Worldwide Developers Conference is set to take place from Monday, June 6 to Friday, June 10. As with the last several WWDC events, the 2022 Worldwide Developers Conference will be held digitally with no in-person gathering. MacRumors reports: There will be no cost associated with WWDC 2022, with all developers worldwide able to attend the virtual event. Apple plans to provide sessions and labs for developers to allow them to learn about the new features and software updates that will be introduced at the event, plus there will be a traditional Swift Student Challenge.

Apple says that this year's event will feature additional information sessions, more learning labs, more digital lounges to engage with attendees, and more localized content, with the aim of making WWDC22 "a truly global event." Though the event will be digital, Apple also plans to host a special day for developers and students at Apple Park on June 6 to watch the keynote and State of the Union videos together. Space will be limited, and Apple will take applications.

Apple is expected to hold an online keynote on the first day of WWDC to unveil new software, including iOS 16, iPadOS 16, macOS 13, tvOS 16, and watchOS 9. It is also possible we could see new hardware at WWDC, as Apple is working on an updated Apple silicon Mac Pro, a new version of the MacBook Air, and more.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: What makes the ["Infinite Mac"] project unique isn't necessarily the fact that it's browser-based; it has been possible to run old DOS, Windows, and Mac OS versions in browser windows for quite a while now. Instead, it's the creative solutions that developer Mihai Parparita has come up with to enable persistent storage, fast download speeds, reduced processor usage, and file transfers between the classic Mac and whatever host system you're running it on. Parparita details some of his work in this blog post.

Beginning with a late 2017 browser-based port of the Basilisk II emulator, Parparita wanted to install old apps to more faithfully re-create the experience of using an old Mac, but he wanted to do it without requiring huge downloads or running as a separate program as the Macintosh.js project does. To solve the download problem, Parparita compressed the disk image and broke it up into 256K chunks that are downloaded on demand rather than up front. "Along with some old fashioned web optimizations, this makes the emulator show the Mac's boot screen in a second and be fully booted in 3 seconds, even with a cold HTTP cache," Parparita wrote.

CPU usage was another issue. Old operating systems and processors didn't really distinguish between active and idle processor states -- your computer was either on or off. So when you emulate these old systems, they'll ramp one of your CPU cores to 100% whether you're actually using the emulator or not. Parparita used existing Basilisk II features to reduce CPU usage, only requiring full performance when "there was user input or a screen refresh was required." Infinite Mac won't run later releases of classic Mac OS (including 8.5, 8.6, and 9) because those releases ran exclusively on PowerPC Macs, dropping support for the old Motorola 68000-based processors. Emulators like QEMU are capable of emulating PowerPC Macs, but (at least as far as I am aware) there are no easy browser-based implementations that exist. Not yet, anyway.

According to Bloomberg, Apple and Meta "provided customer data to hackers who masqueraded as law enforcement officials." Bloomberg's William Turton reports: Apple and Meta provided basic subscriber details, such as a customer's address, phone number and IP address, in mid-2021 in response to the forged "emergency data requests." Normally, such requests are only provided with a search warrant or subpoena signed by a judge, according to the people. However, the emergency requests don't require a court order. Snap Inc. received a forged legal request from the same hackers, but it isn't known whether the company provided data in response. It's also not clear how many times the companies provided data prompted by forged legal requests.

Cybersecurity researchers suspect that some of the hackers sending the forged requests are minors located in the U.K. and the U.S. [...] The fraudulent legal requests are part of a months-long campaign that targeted many technology companies and began as early as January 2021. The forged legal requests are believed to be sent via hacked email domains belonging to law enforcement agencies in multiple countries. The forged requests were made to appear legitimate. In some instances, the documents included the forged signatures of real or fictional law enforcement officers. By compromising law enforcement email systems, the hackers may have found legitimate legal requests and used them as a template to create forgeries. Further reading: Hackers Gaining Power of Subpoena Via Fake 'Emergency Data Requests'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple is developing its own payment processing technology and infrastructure for future financial products, part of an ambitious effort that would reduce its reliance on outside partners over time, according to people with knowledge of the matter. A multiyear plan would bring a wide range of financial tasks in-house, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren't public. That includes payment processing, risk assessment for lending, fraud analysis, credit checks and additional customer-service functions such as the handling of disputes.

The push would turn the company into a bigger force in financial services, building on a lineup that already includes an Apple-branded credit card, peer-to-peer payments, the Wallet app and a mechanism for merchants to accept credit cards from an iPhone. Apple is also working on its own subscription service for hardware and a "buy now, pay later" feature for Apple Pay transactions, Bloomberg has reported. Part of the project has been dubbed "Breakout" internally, underscoring the idea of breaking away from the existing financial system, according to the people.