Space Javelin

Apple has launched an official website and app to deal with the space plague, cadets, so quarantine will continue for the foreseeable future, we're afraid. After a short interstellar hello from Cap'n Mike, Charles and special guest William Gallagher from the AppleInsider base talk about the rollback of Apple purchase limits, the new Safari in iOS 13.4, check the latest rumors about the Apple Watch Series 6 (which might come out this year, maybe?), and if ARM-based MacBooks are in our near -- or far -- future.

There's also news about CarKey, more HomeKit gear, extended trials of Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X, spending in the App Store, and the phasing out of kernal extensions (see also: preparation for ARM-based Macs). Zoom throws Facebook under the bus over a data-collecting scandal, Ming-Chi Kuo gets both praise and a little razzing, Google Podcasts comes to iOS, and some YouTuber bends credibility (and competence) trying to make the iPad look bad! Keep your chin up, cadets -- suspended animation is no fun, but your trusty command deck will keep you up to date until you bust out of your cryo-chambers like Cybermen on the rampage!

It's a brave new and ... kind of boring ... world we're exploring, cadets, but the mothership has sensed our ennui and sent a care package of new gear, new accessories, and new limitations ... but also a bucketful of free media to enjoy now that we have more shore leave than usual! Special guest Peter Cohen and Cap'n Charles pick through the goodies, uncover some baddies, dismiss some speculative rumors, crack some jokes, and take pride in the latest design accolades bestowed on (mostly) Apple. Stay with us, but keep your distance, cadets ... we're still adjusting the ratio on our social-distancing force fields!

Well, we guess its not a hoax after all, cadets, and as a result not only is all shore leave for March a non-starter but you're all confined to quarters for x number of weeks! Luckily, this is a great opportunity to catch up on some of our past briefings as well as the latest news and maybe even other podcasts, books, movies, TV shows, and even creative endeavors you've been putting off! Or just staring at 3-D cat pictures, whatever.

Capn's Mike and Charles battle an overload in the communications circuitry to bring you tales of panic buying, leaks of possible new features in forthcoming Apple OS releases, some new hardware, the conclusion of the award-winning soap opera The Virnet X Saga, Sensor Tower shenanigans, plus Bill Gates stepping back a bit further. Plus we blow the lid on poor consumer-level Mac Pro support, uncover some true crime stories, shame the police agencies that are lying about being unable to get into suspect iPhones, check out the latest from OWC and the oldest functioning Apple I around, as well as sing the praises of one-take full-length tours of Russian art treasures, without even being sponsored by Vladamir Putin! All this and more, cadets, so pass some of your quarantine time with us ... we'll keep our social distance, and so should you!

The coronavirus continues to spread like Bloomberg commercials, cadets, and remember -- only handshakes with holograms until further notice! This contagion is threatening some of our upcoming missions, like the Worldwide Developers Conference in June and other events we care about, but tightening Apple parts and hardware supply lines won't stop us from comparing Cupertino's and Mountain View's approach to plague-avoidance apps, letting you know you can get a good lunch or two out of Apple's US settlement over its battery handling, discovering more wireless CarPlay in 2021 shuttlecraft, finding more flaws in Intel's chips,and following up on the Sonos fiasco.

Capn's Mike and Charles find a new wrinkle in the Waymo-Uber court actions, stop more sites tracking you with help from Duck Duck Go, recoil in horror at Android running on an iPhone (and how dumb Correllium is to pull this stunt during a court case), alert you to a repair program for some 2019 iPad Airs, check out the Galaxy S20's "100x zoom" camera, mourn Wunderlist, upgrade their 4K (by spending their 401K), and geek out about the Doctor Who season finale! You've never seen an hour go by so fast, cadets, so in honour of our favourite timey-wimey TV show, we've covered it all in a hearts-stopping 46 minutes! Now that's what we call Daylight Savings Time!

COVID-19 continues to rain on various parades and is spreading across the Earth, cadets, so shore leave is right out -- just like Bob Iger! Cap'ns Mike and Charles grapple with the latest on this non-computer virus, update you on the latest news across the tech galaxy, and lambast MI5, Clearview AI, and this inept FCC for their do-nothing fines.

Laurene Powell-Jobs plans to give her wealth away, the iPhone XR and 11 rule the global smartphone charts, India will soon get an Apple Store, Alabama gets some AR Civil Rights history, Eero and Ecobee devices get HomeKit, and your Mac Pro can soon get wheels *and* feet if desired. MacRumors turns 20, Bob Iger hands over the reigns at Disney, streaming music takes over the industry, Warren Buffett embraces technology at last, and a family get a little Disney Magic out of their lost iPhone! All this and so much more, cadets, so even though you're confined to quarters -- you may need decompression pills after this jam-packed briefing!

The disease formerly known as Coronavirus continues to dominate the tech news, but there are far more than biological ills to deal with, cadets. Mike and Charles also delve into new product rumors and cancelled (or about to be cancelled) events, watchOS and Apple Services updates, First Alert speakers, Essential's forgetability, the folly of folding phones, and a bunch of bad calls from Google (via YouTube), MalwareBytes, and yes -- Apple!

There's also some minutiae about the late HQ Trivia, a look at the AirPods' newest competitors (and other Samsung debuts), Peter Cohen and Charles tell an old man to take a look at his life, the FCC tries to hide a new public comment period on its net neutrality repeal (give 'em what for here: https://tinyurl.com/lw3r5mh), and co-Cap'n Charles covered a whole bunch of other tech stories on his local talk radio station's "Tech Talk" show, which you can find here: https://tinyurl.com/wdkuz4p. Study up, cadets: there may be a pop (culture) quiz later!

This week -- just before we take a short holiday for Valentine's and President's Days -- Charles thought he'd do something really different, cadets, and bring back co-Cap'n Mike for a surprise break from our (wonderful) guest host parade. Yes, he's out of sickbay, and he's got OPINIONS ON THINGS. The crew take a look at the anniversary of the Apple-NeXT fusion, note a bunch of developer-level changes that are kinda huge in their own way, pick up on some changes coming in the next betas as well as LG TVs, and check in on the competition (in the forms of Spotify, Disney+, and even Samsung). But strap in -- there's a lot more in this jam-packed hour!

The New York beat cops have finally gone digital, Apple Card offers new report exports, the coronavirus outbreak is messing with a lot of manufacturers, another lab with a shady agenda makes claims against the just-cleared iPhone 11, vulnerabilities abound (but the government still wants more), PC Magazine ham-fists an XDR review, and Samsung has finally figured out that headphones can be platform agnostic! All this, and a report from the mess hall that they're all out of Blackberries! Strap in, cadets, the ship is experiencing more than the normal level of GeForce!

The things Cap'n Mike will do to get out of discussing Apple's (or anyone's) quarterly financial results, cadets, continues to astound, cadets. This time, he claimed the shuttlecraft needed to be taken out for a "maintenance shakedown" and left Cap'n Charles with no alternative but to teleport in our esteemed fellow traveler, Apple technology writer and editor at large Peter Cohen, to fill in. In addition to glowing spreadsheets of pure money-making, Peter and Charles discuss the ups and downs of the specific categories, some side notes about Apple News and Apple Pay, and then take a quick break to ponder the confoundingly amazing television that is Doctor Who at its best -- but only for a interstitial moment!

Before you know it, we're on to the tech news of the week, including all-new and even-worse fails by Amazon's Ring and Avast software (not to mention various dating apps) regarding privacy and legal malfeasance, the 10th anniversary of the iPad, the HomePod arriving in India, coronavirus office closures in China, some Apple TV and Apple TV+ news, Filmic's free app to leverage both of your iPhone video cameras simultaneously, and review the start of William Gallagher's new webseries for writers on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClo8KQLHnXvkrr7JH36qzZA). We also mentioned a great Doctor Who podcast called Gallifrey Public Radio, which you can find at http://gallifreypublicradio.com. Disable your quarters' video doorbell and meet in the crew lounge, cadets, there's a lot to go over in the latest log entry of the good ship Space Javelin!

While we wish the Mac a happy 36th birthday, cadets, we also wish Foxconn would stop jerking Wisconsin taxpayers around, we wish Flash would just hurry up and die already, we wish EA had some class, we wish Sonos hadn't tried to pull a fast one on their customers, we wish the FBI wasn't guilty of wishful thinking, and we really *really* wish we'd never heard the phrase "compromising pictures of Jeff Bezos."

That said, some wishes do come true -- Apple TV+ has buckets of viewers, Broadcom gets more Apple business, Tetris is killed off but already back on the Mac App Store, the Apple Watch saves more lives and gets more gym integration, and Disney+ is coming to Europe a week ahead of schedule! AppleInsider.com's William Gallagher sits in to help out with the usual mix of good news and industry nonsense, cadets, so be sure to have your yin-yang force fields in place -- things may get a little topsy-turvy!

We finally got the holo-crew machine working for the first time this year, cadets, so in addition to special guest Malcolm Owen from the good ship AppleInsider, we've got virtual Mike (who's still away with some sort of space plague) and virtual Alan Perry (to enumerate even more CES wins and fails). We put the astro-screws to disgraced Attorney General William Barr and his fake war on encryption, as well as to AccountEdge for dropping the ball on ever updating their decrepit code and jerking their users around. There's also lots of good news: Apple and their employees give generously, lots more Apple TV+ content coming, and rack-mount Mac Pros are now available.

Google -- which just hit the trillion-dollar valuation mark -- enables iPhones to be FIDO security keys, the Bluetooth LE audio spec is coming soon, NBC is will launch its own streaming TV service, Samsung decides to go big next year, and as usual the Apple Watch has helped save a life. All this and much more, cadets, so this week we're renaming the bridge the Hodge-Podge Lodge -- because it's not easy cutting and splicing digital audio in zero-G!