Tech News Roundup for August 21, 2020
Here are a few of the tech news stories that caught my eye over the last couple days.
Apple Responds to Epic Games Lawsuit
Apple has filed its first formal response to the Epic Games Lawsuit over in app purchases in Fortnite. In the filing Apple included a number of emails between it and Epic Games, as Epic asked Apple for special deals, citing the precedence that Apple gave Amazon a special deal for purchases in Amazon’s Prime Video App.
There’s not much to say here, other than that some of the quotes are quite amusing. Apple equates in app purchases being done outside of Apple’s payment system akin to shoplifting from an Apple retail store.
Apple Engineers Helped the US Department of Energy Build a “Secret” iPod
This one is wild. It recounts a tale of two Apple employees working on the iPod circa 2005 helping two engineers from the US Department of Energy modify iPod software to work on “secret” iPods that were built. These iPods had hidden data partitions to record data gathered by secret, and still unknown, hardware that was added to a normal iPod. There is speculation that this was used as a Geiger Counter, to detect nuclear materials and radiation. Tony Fadell, who was the Apple executive in charge of the iPod at that time, has said these stories are true, and that only 4 employees at Apple knew of the existence of this secret iPod program.
This is the stuff of James Bond movies.
BlackBerry Phones Are Coming Back… Maybe
After TCL’s contract to build phones under the BlackBerry brand expired earlier this year, a new company has acquired the license to produce phones under the BlackBerry name. OnWardMobility is a newer company out of Texas that has no track record itself in making phones, but does have several former members of Sonim, a company that makes ruggedized phones. OnWardMobility says that its BlackBerry Branded phones will have physical keyboards, be rugged, and have 5G connectivity. The first phone is expected in 2021.
As a refresher, BlackBerry Inc. has not made its own phones for several years. The last in house developed phone was the Blackberry Priv, the the first BlackBerry branded phone running Android. BlackBerry licensed the BlackBerry brand for phones to TCL, which made a few phones under the BlackBerry Brand from 2017 to 2019. TCL and BlackBerry did not renew the license in 2020 after BlackBerry decided it did not want to do the Android software support itself.
Lightroom for iPhone and iPad Update Permanently Deleted Some Data
Early this week Adobe released version 5.4 of Lightroom for iOS and iPad OS. Immediately after the update was released, users reported losing data. It was found that the update deletes any local data that was not synchronized to the adobe cloud service.
Adobe makes Lightroom available for free for local use on iPhone and iPad, which lets users use most of the functionality of Lightroom without a subscription. However the free use does not allow syncing any data between devices and up to Adobe’s cloud service. This update appears to have deleted all data for users of the free tier.
This is a huge black eye for Adobe. An argument can be made that users should not be relying on having data in only one location, and backups are very, very important, but I’m not sure how a bug this significant made it through to official release.
Google Releases Update for Pixel Buds Along With New Colour Options
Google has released the first Pixel Buds Feature Drop, which is an update to the company’s truly wireless earbuds. The most notable feature is an update to the EQ settings to allow for a bass boost, which should be nice for people who like more bass in their music.
Google has also released additional colours for the headphones, with “Almost Black” and “Quite Mint” joining “Clearly White” for sale in Canada. The colours are only for the earbuds themselves, the charging case remains white regardless of the earbuds colour.
Mobilesyrup - New Pixel Buds Colours
Mobilesyrup- Pixel Buds Update
Facebook Retiring “Classic” design in September
Facebook has announced that the new design for its website that first became available in March will be the new full time design starting in September. The website design more closely matches the design found on it’s apps for Android and iOS. It has been optional to this point on the web, with users who have been switched to it allowed to revert back to the older design. Come September, all users will be moved to the new design, with the old design no longer available. I logged onto Facebook for the first time in months to see if I have the new design, and I still don’t. Maybe I’ll log in again at some point in September to see what the new design looks like.