Apple Support: If your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch won't turn on or is frozen
My phone’s screen froze today and then called 911 while I was trying to restart it, so for next time that happens, here's how to do a hard reset:
iPhone 8 or later: Press and quickly release the Volume Up button. Press and quickly release the Volume Down button. Then press and hold the Side button until you see the Apple logo.
WALTR: Effortless iTunes Alternative for Windows & Mac
If at some point I have to abandon iTunes…
Drag-n-drop and Music, Ringtones, Videos, PDF & ePUB files into any Apple device without iTunes (& no extra apps).
Since the original release of Workflow in 2014, we’ve created hundreds of automations to help readers use their iOS devices more efficiently. The goal of this archive is to offer a complete catalogue of our old workflows as well as new custom shortcuts for Apple’s Shortcuts app.
Alexis C. Madrigal: No, You Don’t Really Look Like That (The Atlantic)
Since the 19th century, cameras have been able to capture images at different speeds, wavelengths, and magnifications, which reveal previously hidden worlds. What’s fascinating about the current changes in phone photography is that they are as much about revealing what we want to look like as they are investigations of the world. It’s as if we’ve discovered a probe for finding and sharing versions of our faces—or even ourselves—and it’s this process that now drives the behavior of the most innovative, most profitable companies in the world.
Scott Patterson and Alexandra Wexler: Despite Cleanup Vows, Smartphones and Electric Cars Still Keep Miners Digging by Hand in Congo (Wall Street Journal)
Supply chains at Apple, VW and others still include the owner of a mine where workers produce cobalt without safety equipment
Eric Harvey: How Smart Speakers Are Changing the Way We Listen to Music (Pitchfork)
Indeed, many of the most pressing issues of the streaming music economy—artist compensation, statistical transparency, sexism—remain untouched, if not deepened, by the rise of the smart speaker. Moreover, as Amazon, Apple, and Google continue to carve out their spaces in the voice marketplace, music consumers and musicians alike will continue to fight against the companies’ preferred walled-garden approach to exclusivity. And though there’s no real reason to sympathize with Tidal or Spotify, the idea that the smart speaker industry might become the exclusive province of massive firms with enough capital to experiment (and huge captive audiences to use as guinea pigs) is significant reason for pause, no matter how little one is interested in owning the devices. A world in which three of tech’s “frightful five” become the equivalent of the major labels, with exclusive holdings in hardware and software, and plenty of incentive to lock competitors’ products and content out of their systems, is a chilling idea, and not as far-fetched as it might seem.
By hanging up their rich textures in favour of rich effects, Apple has gone well beyond a coat of paint. If people fall in love with this new, beautifully living aesthetic, there will be an argument for building native apps for years yet.
Timmy Cai: Create a HTML Email Signature for Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8
If you want to create a custom HTML email signature for Mail on Mountain Lion, the HTML coding part remains the same but the installation have changed. Follow this tutorial to create a HTML email signature file and to get it installed into the new version of Mail on Mountain Lion OS X 10.8.
The Windows and Android communities need to better understand why so many of us choose Apple, and the Apple community needs to better understand the large market of people who can’t or won’t.
Ben Austen: The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale? (Wired)
Jobs has become a Rorschach test, a screen onto which entrepreneurs and executives can project a justification of their own lives: choices they would have made anyway, difficult traits they already possess. “Everyone has their own private Steve Jobs,” Sutton says. “It usually tells you a lot about them—and little about Jobs.”
Sean Oliver: I agree with the cacophony of criticism about Apple’s latest round of TV ads
They don’t show the product.
They don’t explain the product.
They make the target audience feel stupid.
They make the Geniuses look like unsupportive know-it-alls.
There’s no clear call to action.
Your success is delicious. Others look at your success and think, “Well, duh, it’s so obvious what they did there - anyone can do that” and, frustratingly so, they’re right. Your success has given others a blueprint for what success looks like, and while, yes, the devil’s in the details, you have performed a lot of initial legwork for your competition in the process of becoming successful.
I do know that Apple believes the future is invented by the people who don’t give a shit about the past.
Khoi Vinh: Follow Up to “Built to Not Last” (Subtraction.com)
It’s true, there’s not necessarily a business case to do this, but that is not the only thing Apple will be judged on in the decades to come. And that’s what I’m talking about here: how will future generations look back at Apple, and by extension its customers? Did we all live our lives by more than just the bottom line? Or were the late twentieth and early twenty-first century the decades in which we irrevocably decided that everything should be disposable (or even recyclable) after just two or three years?
…it’s a pity that Apple has chosen to re-enter the education market with a pitch about Reinventing the Textbook that, frankly, sounds pretty old hat. The reason, I suppose, is that there’s potentially a lot of money to be made selling the things to schools as replacements for the books.
Leslie T. Chang: Do Chinese Factory Workers Dream of iPads? (The New Yorker)
The simple narrative equating American demand and Chinese suffering is appealing, especially at a time when many Americans feel guilty about their impact on the world. It’s also inaccurate and disrespectful. We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine we have the power to drive tens of millions of people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in terrible ways. China produces goods for markets all over the world, including for its own consumers, thanks to low costs, a large and educated workforce, and a flexible manufacturing system that responds rapidly to market demands. To imagine that we have willed this universe into being is simply solipsistic. It is also demeaning to the workers. We are not at the center of this story—we are minor players in theirs. By focussing on ourselves and our gadgets, we have reduced the human beings at the other end to invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone.
‘The problem is that this is exactly what the competition are doing — they are competing with the iPad rather than solving a problem that hasn’t been solved yet. They’re always one step behind because they’re simply trying to re-create the solution that Apple has created for their vision of a touch tablet device.’
‘Mr. Jobs’s magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple’s immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to. If we view him unsparingly, without nostalgia, we would see a great man whose genius in design, showmanship and stewardship of the tech world will not be seen again in our lifetime. We would also see a man who in the end failed to “think different,” in the deepest way, about the human needs of both his users and his workers.’
‘The reaction to Jobs' death-- his full transformation into one of the era's most prominent secular deities-- reveals that we want more than anything to believe in the benevolent, progressive, and humane powers of technology.’
The Onion: Last American Who Knew What the Fuck He Was Doing Dies
‘Jobs will be remembered both for the life-changing products he created and for the fact that he was able to sit down, think clearly, and execute his ideas—attributes he shared with no other U.S. citizen.’
Apple is run by a hippie and it's the most valuable company in the world. Those who think liberal values are anti-business need to look at that closely.