This Week's Sponsor:

Listen Later

Listen to Articles as Podcasts


Listen Later: Listen to the Articles as Podcasts [Sponsor]

Listen Later gets you through that huge pile of web articles you’ve been saving for later. Let’s face it, the web is a big place, and there’s always more to read than you have time for. Read-later apps give you a place to save articles for later, but you still need to find the time to read everything you saved.

Listen Later helps you get through that stack of articles by combining the power of podcasts and AI. Simply send Listen Later a link to an article and its AI converts the text into a narration using one of its natural-sounding AI voices. Each article becomes an episode of your very own personal Listen Later podcast. Listen Later works with text from images, PDFs, and other text documents and can translate articles to other languages, too.

It’s easy to add your Listen Later podcast to your favorite podcast player, making it available whether you’re driving to work, out for a long walk, or simply hanging out. Best of all, though, by converting your articles to audio, Listen Later greatly expands the time you can spend on your read-later queue.

What’s more, with Listen Later, you never spend more than you need. You buy credits, which are used as you add articles to your podcast feed. When you’ve used up your credits, you can reload them automatically or purchase more manually. How much you spend is completely up to you.

Visit Listen Later today to learn more, sign up for free, and receive $2 in free credits to convert articles to audio.

Our thanks to Listen Later for sponsoring MacStories this week.


MacStories Unwind: It’s All Been Leading up to This

This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico has reached the pinnacle of handheld gaming with a setup that he’s been working toward for years.



This episode is sponsored by:

  • Kolide – It ensures that if a device isn’t secure it can’t access your apps.  It’s Device Trust for Okta. Watch the demo now.

Unplugged

A Federico Videogame Surprise


MacStories Unwind+

We deliver MacStories Unwind+ to Club MacStories subscribers ad-free and early with high bitrate audio every week.

To learn more about the benefits of a Club MacStories subscription, visit our Plans page.

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HomeKit Gadgets: The MacStories Team Collection

John: Everyone on the MacStories team is deep into HomeKit devices. For me, smart home gadgets tick all the boxes:

  • Hardware
  • Software
  • Automation

It’s really as simple as that.

However, as fun as HomeKit devices can be, they can also be frustrating. The best accessories fit comfortably into your household, making life a little easier but falling back gracefully to a simple solution for anyone in your home who isn’t interested in automation. It sounds easy, but it’s a tough balancing act that few companies get right.

We’ve all tried our share of HomeKit and other smart home devices. Some have worked out, and others have fallen by the wayside as failed experiments. Today, we thought we’d pool our collective experience and share with you the MacStories team’s favorite smart home gadgets.

We have a lot of ground to cover, so this story will focus on indoor gadgets. Soon, we’ll shift our focus to the great outdoors.

Table of Contents

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Apple Announces Expansion of Support for Used iPhone Parts in Repairs

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Today, Apple announced that it is extending its repair program to make it easier for repair shops to work with used parts while also limiting the use of lost or stolen devices.

A complaint leveled at Apple by right to repair advocates is that its use of parts pairing limits the use of used parts by repair shops. With its announcement today, Apple says that it has developed a system that satisfies customer privacy, security, and safety while broadening the use of used parts:

The process of confirming whether or not a repair part is genuine and gathering information about the part — often referred to as “pairing” — is critical to preserving the privacy, security, and safety of iPhone. Apple teams have been hard at work over the last two years to enable the reuse of parts such as biometric sensors used for Face ID or Touch ID, and beginning this fall, calibration for genuine Apple parts, new or used, will happen on device after the part is installed. In addition, future iPhone releases will have support for used biometric sensors. And in order to simplify the repair process, customers and service providers will no longer need to provide a device’s serial number when ordering parts from the Self Service Repair Store for repairs not involving replacement of the logic board.

The iPhone’s Activation Lock and Lost Mode are being extended to used parts as a deterrent to thieves pulling apart iPhones for their parts. If a lost or stolen part is detected, Apple says its calibration capabilities will be restricted. Also, Apple says it will expand the Parts and Service History section of its Settings app to include information about whether parts used in an iPhone are new or used.


Magic Rays of Light: Girls State, Franklin, Spatial Personas, and tvOS Game Emulation

This week on Magic Rays of Light, Sigmund and Devon highlight American Revolution-era drama Franklin ahead of its premiere on Apple TV+. They also dive into new Apple Original documentary Girls State, spatial personas on visionOS, and the possibility of game emulation on Apple TV.



Show Notes


Send us a voice message all week via iMessage or email to magic@macstories.net.

Sigmund Judge | Follow Sigmund on X, Mastodon, or Threads

Devon Dundee | Follow Devon on Mastodon or Threads

View our Apple TV release calendar on the web.

Subscribe to our Apple TV release calendar.

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Single-Space Challenge: Trying to Manage My macOS Windows All in One Virtual Desktop

A couple of weeks ago, in a members-only special episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, John Siracusa went in-depth on his window management techniques on the Mac. This was absolutely fascinating to me. I strongly recommend checking the episode out if you can. One of the many reasons it captivated me is the fact that John Siracusa uses macOS in only a single space (the system’s name for virtual desktops) and lays out windows in a very specific way to take advantage of his entire display.

This is completely opposite of the way I’ve been managing and arranging windows on my Mac for the past ten years. To work on my Mac, I always heavily rely on having at least three spaces and switching between them on the fly depending on the task at hand. Moreover, I rarely keep more than two or three windows open at a time in each space.

However, since I’m always up for an experiment and shaking things up, I thought I would try going back to a single space on my Mac for a full week. I approached this by drawing inspiration from John Siracusa’s window management techniques and digging up an old Mac utility that helped me with the transition. I’ve learned a lot from this challenge; even more surprisingly, it has sparked in me a newfound interest in Stage Manager on the Mac.

Let me tell you how it went.

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Automattic Acquires Messaging Integrator Beeper

Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg, reports that Beeper, the messaging app that ultimately lost its fight to bring blue bubbles to Android, has been acquired by Automattic, for $125 million according to his sources.

You may recall that Automattic, the company behind WordPress, Tumblr, Day One, Pocket Casts, and other endeavors, acquired a company called Texts last fall. Roughly two months later, Beeper took advantage of a loophole in iMessage’s architecture to offer iMessage natively on Android. After some back and forth, Apple ultimately blocked the technique Beeper was using.

According to Gurman, Automattic is acquiring Beeper’s team of 27 employees, its app, which integrates services like Signal, Facebook Messenger, and Slack, and about 100,000 customers. Of those things, I suspect the people and the customers were most important to Automattic because, as I explained in my story about the company’s purchase of Texts, the two services run on different technology stacks. Regardless of Automattic’s underlying motivations, it’s more apparent than ever that the company is betting that consumer demand, government regulation, and antitrust lawsuits will open up messaging platforms for companies ready to integrate them.

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AppStories, Episode 378 – Are We Entering a Post-App World?

This week on AppStories, we explore whether we’re experiencing the beginning of the end of apps and consider what might replace them.


Sponsored by:

  • Genius Scan – A scanner in your pocket.
  • Jam – Developer friendly bug reports in 1 click.

Are We Entering a Post-App World?


On AppStories+, we explain why we’ve said goodbye to time tracking.

We deliver AppStories+ to subscribers with bonus content, ad-free, and at a high bitrate early every week.

To learn more about the benefits included with an AppStories+ subscription, visit our Plans page, or read the AppStories+ FAQ.

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Are You Worse at Security Than the TSA? [Sponsor]

You know the drill: when you go through airport security there are two lines. In one, a TSA agent makes sure you’re the person in your passport photo. In the other, a machine scans your carry-on for explosives, weapons, or a normal-sized bottle of shampoo.

Enterprise security is much the same, but instead of passengers and luggage, we’re talking about end users and their devices. In the first line, user authentication verifies a user’s identity, and it’s gotten pretty sophisticated in the past few years, with SSO and MFA becoming more common.

But user devices don’t get nearly the same level of attention. The average device trust solution only looks at a handful of endpoint security factors, like OS updates and firewall. If this really were the TSA, that wouldn’t even be an x-ray machine, more like holding a bag to your ear and listening for a ticking sound.

And that’s assuming an organization looks at end user devices at all. Kolide’s Shadow IT report found that 47% of companies let unmanaged devices access their resources, and authenticate via credentials alone.

Unmanaged devices (those outside a company’s MDM) can be infected with malware, full of PII, or worse–they can belong to a bad actor using phished employee credentials.

And hey, there are valid reasons for a device not to be enrolled in MDM. Contractor devices, Linux machines, and employee phones all need to be able to access company resources. But there’s plenty of room for middle ground between “fully locked down and managed” and an open-door device policy.

Specifically, companies need device trust solutions that block devices from authenticating if they don’t meet minimum security requirements.

Even with phishing-resistant MFA, it’s frighteningly easy for bad actors to impersonate end users–in the case of the MGM hack, all it took was a call to the help desk. What could have prevented that attack (and so many others) was an unspoofable form of authentication for the device itself.

That’s what you get with Kolide’s device trust solution: a chance to verify that a device is both known and secure before it authenticates. Kolide’s agent looks at hundreds of device properties (remember, our competitors only look at a handful). What’s more, our user-first, privacy-respecting approach means you can put it on machines outside MDM: contractor devices, mobile phones, and even Linux machines.

Without a device trust solution, all the security in the world is just security theater. But Kolide can help close the gaps. (And we won’t even make you take off your shoes.)

To learn more, please watch our on-demand demo.

Our thanks to Kolide for sponsoring MacStories this week.