Skimming over the various announcements:

- The Apple File System (http://9to5mac.com/2016/06/13/apple-file-system-apfs/). Optimized for SSD, encryption built-in, "scalable". Is this the ZFS replacement we've been waiting for? Seems not, but at least something is happening.

- All sorts of new integration between iOS and Mac devices (e.g., a "universal clipboard" cut-and-paste from one to the other, Siri on the Mac desktop)

- They've also got some sort of proximity sensor (Bluetooth-based?) so when you walk up to your Mac wearing your Apple watch, you're automatically logged in

- Assorted app redesigns (e.g., new Music app to replace iTunes) with design language that looks a lot like Google's Material Design

- "Swift Playgrounds" to help kids learn to program on an iPad

So far as I can tell, there wasn't any sort of new hardware announcement. Many of Apple's new software features have strong analogs in the Google universe and if you're the sort of person who keeps your life in the Google/Android universe, the new OS X features really don't all all that much to what you've already got.

Oh, and it's not "OS X" any more. It's "macOS".


Overall, this is great if you're deeply into the Apple ecosystem (iCloud, iDevices, etc.). For me, the big news is a new filesystem. The rest? Doesn't change much.

I'm most excited about that. Now Apple people will stop getting mad at me for calling it "Oh-Ess-Ecks"

But seriously, I hope the Music app will be better. I really dislike iTunes. I just wish they hadn't named the new program so generically.

The filesystem, APFS, isn't ZFS but it certainly has many of the same features. Like ZFS it does copy-on-write, so it gets all the benefits like snapshots and cloning.

Another ZFS like feature is "space sharing", you can have multiple volumes on the same chunk of physical disk.

It also has atomicity to ensure that file metadata and the file can't get out of step if there is a crash/power outage (including native support for the macOS extended attributes).

The new version of TimeMachine that uses APFS is going to work an awful lot faster/better than the current one...

Given that they'll be using it on the Apple Watch, you can start to understand technical, rather than legal, reasons that they ditched ZFS.

It isn't going to be used in actual products until 2017 though. It will be great to have something with at least some of ZFS's features on my desktop machine.

There is no mention of ZFS style self validated/healing checksum features. And their RAID story is the existing software RAID0/1/JBOD run over the top of APFS

http://arstechnica.co.uk/apple/2016/06/apfs-apple-new-file-system-dev-details/
https://developer.apple.com/library/prer...0016999-CH2-SW1

Where did you see "Music app to replace iTunes" ? There are significant changes to the iOS Music app, but I don't remember seeing any info on iTunes on macOS changing ?

Things like that scare me. If you aren't going to require something that needs to be known (password or pin), then at least require something that is harder to steal or lose (like a fingerprint).

When you take the watch off it locks and you then need to enter a PIN to unlock it again.

Ok, that is a lot better than what I was imagining.

I presume the security method is similar to being able to use Apple Watch for Apple Pay.

The Apple watch requires your Watch password or your Touch ID fingerprint on the associated iPhone before it will do Apple Pay. And the watch must be and remain in contact with your skin the entire time or the watch will immediately lock and re-require the password or Touch ID on the iPhone.

My understanding is that the Apple Watch as implemented on Apple Pay meets the technical security requirements of the payments industry, and is certainly more secure than the US only implementation of chip on card without PIN. It is even more secure than chip+PIN, as I understand it.

The Watch to unlock Mac method I would expect a similar approach. It was mentioned that the time of flight latency of the radio handshake is measured to disallow a watch that is too far away to unlock the Mac even if it was the correct watch for unlocking.

More digging seems to imply that it's the new "Music app inside iTunes" or whatever. So yeah, false alarm there.

The new filesystem seems certainly better than HFS+, but the total absence of fancy RAID modes is a serious bummer. Given that NetApp was shipping products with all this stuff two decades ago, one would have to assume the relevant patents are dead and buried.

I don't have much to add about the Apple version of this, but I'm somewhat conversant in Google's approach. To Google, it's all about "signals" for "multi-factor" authentication. Does your phone have a GPS location that lines up with your house and/or is it associated with your home WiFi? That's a plus. Is it associated with your car's Bluetooth? That's a plus. Has the user recently used the phone's fingerprint reader? That's a plus. All these different plusses are stirred together and different security-relevant tasks have different bars for when they'll bother you for more password / PIN / fingerprint / whatever authentication data.

You can see this sort of thinking when you're logged into and using your Gmail, but when you want to change your settings, it asks for your password again. Likewise, my Android phone sometimes demands my password-pattern even though I have it set up to let me log in with my fingerprint.

I also have one of those Yubiko 2FA USB tokens for Google. When setting up a new computer, they want you to plug it in, but after that they set a cookie in your browser and they're happy, and don't ask for you password again very often, and I don't think I've ever been asked for the 2FA token more than once on the same computer. Presumably, my "signals" are staying relatively consistent. I'd be curious how hard I have to work before Gmail in Chrome demands my 2FA token again.

If I remember correctly there are still some key patents in the area that haven't expired yet but will soon. Can't remember where I read that though.

I've been playing the new Doom game, and one of their new variants on the old "find the blue key card to unlock the blue door" puzzle is now "Find the handprint to unlock the biometric console". Of course, it's Doom, so you find the dead technician's body, rip off the dead guy's arm, carry it to the console, and slap it on the handprint scanner. Same thing as the "find the blue key" puzzle from a mechanics perspective.

Wonder how long it'll be before someone breaks into a system that way in real life? I wonder if the Apple watch keeps functioning if the wearer dies.

Some discussion on the patents here:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/NetApp's_filesystem_patents

The early NetApp patent appears to have expired some time last year, although the USPTO has a "patent term calculator" Excel spreadsheet that you can download that tries to compute these things and requires you to answer a bunch weird questions and I might not have gotten them all correct, yadda yadda disclaimers here. Still, it's probably no coincidence that Apple has made some sort of a decision based on a reading of these issues.

Snide thought: Apple could just buy NetApp. They've certainly got plenty of cash in the bank, and NetApp's market cap is "only" $7 billion. Chump change for Apple.

Without looking back at the launch announcement/review details, my understanding is that the Apple watch sensors are looking for ongoing heartbeat via blood vessel pulsation. So no, a dead person still wearing the Apple watch doesn't count as 'authorized'.

My perspective is that we need to arrive at the stage where the password is no longer considered the ultimate authorization. Passwords have been a huge problem and security risk vector for decades. Any system that depends upon a password to resolve important trust/verification questions is rigged to fail, in my view.

As I understand it the iPhone fingerprint Touch ID sensor similarly is supposed to scan the sub-surface layers for the finger pattern matching. I recall some experimenting with lifted/copied finger prints when the first generation Touch ID sensor was released but I have not seen any further testing with the most recent (and much faster) second generation of Touch ID sensor found on the on iPhone 6S.

$7 Billion would be the most expensive acquisition ever for Apple. Certainly beyond chump change range.

If Microsoft could buy LinkedIn...

Or Nokia...

Some high end safes already look for signs of life (like a pulse) to ensure the eye/finger hasn't been plucked out/cut off to access the safe. Some gun safes have that feature, but I can't remember which manufacturer I was looking at when I saw that.

I just did something I'm still feeling a bit odd about.

- I really need a newer faster laptop, yet still portable. (Faster than a MacBook Air, lighter than a MacBook Pro.)

- Apple has nothing that satisfies the constraints. (Yet. The rumored new machines sound great.)

- I occasionally need to have a PC around and haven't owned a PC in years.

Ergo, I just walked into a Microsoft Store and purchased a Surface Book. The hardware seems to be solid. The purchasing experience was... not exactly smooth... but that's largely because this was a work purchase, for which I have a tax exempt number, and then my work credit card denied the purchase (because who'd ever, you know, buy something at a Microsoft Store?).

So now I own this thing. (Or, really, now my employer owns this thing.) We'll see how well it works.

Kinda like cheating on your wife with the hot hooker up the street because you just can't wait.

Will probably end up the same way with regrets and a virus.

I've seen a couple stories on Engadget about iOS 10 allowing you to "remove" stock iOS apps.

The one thing I haven't seen is what this means for default apps. If I remove the Apple Maps app and tap on an address somewhere, what happens?

The default apps issue is one of the few remaining issues keeping me away from considering the iPhone (although Google's apps sort of route around that for me). If they loosened up about that I might be tempted.

You get a prompt telling you that Maps isn't installed. The prompt has a button to take you to the App Store to re-enable Maps. The same applies to Mail and the other apps.

That's what I figured. Ugh.

I reckon looking at the changes they are making this year that picking default apps could happen in the future. They have changed tack on a lot of similarly closed down bits in the OS.

Some people who talk about being able to pick the default apps for protocols seem to assume that it is a five minute change for Apple to provide it. There would be significant engineering effort involved to put in a sensible mechanism to make it happen, it isn't like they've already implemented it and just turned the feature off !

(I'm not saying you're one of "those people", I just get irritated when I see people who do assume it is a trivial change to make)

Totally aware that it's a significant engineering effort. But it's (a) something that people have been clamoring for from the beginning, and (b) it should have been built into the OS from the start, and (c) they've had 10 major OS versions to do it by now and still haven't. So user frustration on this topic is understandable.

What users want is to be able to say, "hey Siri, navigate to the airport" and have it launch Waze instead of Apple Maps to get the job done. Or "hey Siri, play me some They Might Be Giants" and have it do so in Plex. Or to click on a date/time in an email and have it open in the Google Calendar app. We have become accustomed to doing this kind of thing in our desktop operating systems, so it's natural for us to want to do it on our phone operating systems.

For many, many people, they have no such thing. Mobile first, and often mobile only.

And not in the mobile browser either. Natural often just means what you are used to, from the past.

Allowing non-Apple apps to become the primary/default app for a core iOS function (especially something user facing like email) risks boxing Apple in and limiting their ability to rewire iOS in the future. Creating public API and methods that third partys can use to replace core app functionality creates real future limits on how quickly or quietly Apple can internally pivot and evolve the platform, especially if they must cajole other companies to follow along and continue to support (for some amount of time) those companies that prefer the prior method.

Those statements apply to any OS, not just iOS. Other operating systems have chosen to support the configuration of default apps, despite the extra work and the extra limitations inherent in that type of design.

Without that feature, looking at it from the outside, it makes iOS look like it's still not a mature operating system. Either that or it makes Apple look like they're trying to push their default apps on us and to downplay third party applications.

Funny thing is, despite all those arguments against having default apps configurable in iOS, now that I think about it, I've seen evidence that there is already low-level support for this in iOS, and it's been there for while. For instance, the third-party YouTube app gets launched when I click on a YouTube link in some other third-party application. That's exactly the sort of behavior I'm talking about, the only missing piece is the dialog box where I get to configure which app plays Youtube videos.

Wasn't that the basis for a pretty large lawsuit against another operating system?

Hopefully someone won't have to sue Apple to finally get this functionality.

There was a market share factor involved. iPhone currently is nowhere near Windows percentages that occurred during the peak Windows era.

Lots of anti-user behavior in the mobile space. I consider the mobile operators collusive control of SMS (and the associated price bundling) to be anticompetitive, yet somehow this is widely perceived as acceptable. There are many things users cannot do with SMS because the mobile companies forbid or restrict access from outsiders.

I've also found it interesting that phone companies still charge for SMS separately, as if it were the old days where SMS involved a separate transport mechanism. These days it's rolled into the data stream where it's just another part of the digital bitstream and it really doesn't deserve to be separated like that. Any excuse for a company to get money (or continue to get money) and they'll do it. It's like when a county collects a road toll pay for a bridge, but then they keep tolling anyway long after the bridge is complete.

Another thing that I think is odd, that is widely perceived as acceptable, is how we're paying cable companies to bring us television channels which have commercials. We're 'paying' twice there. Once upon a time, the commercials were entirely how the channels got paid for.

How that market share was acquired was also a key factor and where the long series of lawsuits began. It took years for the various state justice systems to batch things up and bump it to the federal level.

The starting point was Microsoft forcing OEMs to buy a copy of MS-DOS and/or Windows for every computer that went out the door. Even when said computer didn't ship with any Microsoft software. This was also the foundation of the EU case against Microsoft, from a complaint by Novell originating in 1993.

Being able to set default programs only came as a resolution during the tail end of the lawsuits, due to evidence that Microsoft on both business and technical levels was abusing it's OS monopoly powers.

I recall that Windows always had the ability to set default programs for certain types of data. The only thing that differed was that the default *web browser* was forced to be IE in its early days.

Came across another, more detailed, Ars article on APFS:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/06/a-z...fs-file-system/