Jason Snell: Last December I complained that Apple was withholding iOS 18 security updates from iPhones capable of running iOS 26, leaving users who didn’t want to upgrade to Apple’s latest OS version yet in some security peril. […] The good news: As of Wednesday April 1, Apple is pushing out iOS 18.7.7 to all […]

MacRumors (9to5Mac): In a new support document, Apple said new purchases, in-app purchases, and subscription renewals are no longer available in Russia unless a user already has funds in their Apple Account balance, which can continue to be used. […] Apple reportedly took this action in response to an order from the Russian government, which […]

Eric Seckler (MacRumors): Today, we are proud to celebrate a major milestone: Android is now the fastest mobile platform for web browsing. Through deep vertical integration across hardware, the Android OS, and the Chrome engine, the latest flagship Android devices are setting new performance records, outperforming all other mobile competitors in the key web performance […]

John Buck at The Verge (gift link), excerpted from his great book, Inventing the Future:

Steve Perlman: Almost everyone at Apple, and definitely everywhere else, assumed that multimedia would always require specialized hardware — and be expensive. A few of us thought otherwise.

One of the few was Gavin Miller, a research scientist in Apple’s Graphics Group, who worked with Hoffert to crack the problem of software compression and decompression, otherwise known as codec.

Gavin Miller, research scientist: We went for a lunchtime walk, and by the end of it, we had generalized the model to include constant color blocks and 2-bit per-pixel interpolating blocks. This allowed us to trade off quantization artifacts in large flat areas for more detail in textured areas. The result was an increase in quality and performance that helped to make the codec practical for really small video sizes.

Just a typical lunchtime walk-and-talk.

Fun anecdote from 1990:

He asked Peppel to create a product plan that he could announce at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference on May 7th. That day, Casey took to the stage and announced QuickTime to a stunned audience, saying, “Apple intends to develop real-time software compression/decompression technology that will run on today’s modular Macintosh systems. A system-wide time coding to allow synchronization of sound, animation, and other time-critical processes.”

Casey explained that Apple’s new multimedia architecture would be delivered by the end of the year. He did not say that QuickTime had no budget, staff, or offices.

Worthington: We were dumbfounded.

Konstantin Othmer, QuickDraw engineer: I was standing next to Bruce Leak, and asked him, “What the heck was that?” He said he had no idea.

QuickTime actually shipped by WWDC 1991, teaching Apple the important lesson that anything they announce at WWDC, no matter how premature, will ship as promised.

Great roundup of links from Stephen Hackett:

The crew is made up of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen. They are now on their way to the moon, set to return in 10 days. Their rocket may be the product of a hugely-flawed program, but right now, that doesn’t matter. They are getting us closer to returning to the lunar surface than we’ve been in 50 years. That’s worth celebrating.