Among the highlights on the Club MacStories+ Discord: With the iPhone Duo on the horizon, a member raised the question of what happens when your current phone’s beta software is ahead of the version on its replacement. (Link) A question about moving years of Day One entries into Apple Journal sparked a conversation about app...
This Week on MacStories Podcasts
This week on MacStories podcasts: AppStories This week Federico shares thoughts from his review of iOS and iPadOS 27. Then in the AppStories+ post-show, he explains how he used agents to support the production of the review and Club MacStories extras. Listen on: Apple Podcasts Overcast Pocket Casts Castro Spotify YouTube NPC: Next Portable Console...
Previously, On MacStories
The iPhone 18 Pro Camera: Apple Reference Image and Tyler Stalman’s Review Chance Miller on the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 ChatGPT Is Surprisingly Thorough at Planning Running Routes Our Favorite Indie Apps for iOS 27, Vol. 1 TestFlight Fixes and Wishes watchOS 27: The MacStories Review macOS 27: The MacStories Review Our...
AppStories Scheduling
I wanted to give everyone a heads up that due to scheduling conflicts, we’ve moved AppStories+ to Monday, September 21 alongside the regular version of the show. We should be back to the regular schedule the following week. – John...
The Apple Game Controller I’ve Always Wanted
Remember when gaming on the Apple TV meant holding the Siri Remote sideways? Those were the good old days of gaming on the Apple TV circa 2015. With rumors circulating that Apple (or Beats) is working on a game controller, I thought I’d revisit why this is something I’ve wanted for over a decade now,...
Dropover
Interesting Links
AI safety has been in the news a lot lately with the heads of multiple frontier labs calling for a slowdown of model development. Hayden Field of The Verge has an excellent overview of why Silicon Valley is freaking out and where things may be heading. (Link) There were already rumors that Apple’s M7...
App Radar
Flighty Flighty, which supports the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, was updated with a few interesting features this week. First, the app’s Dynamic Island integration has been updated to show a departure countdown in the compact version of the view. The gate badge and in-flight progress graphics have been updated and now support...
The iPhone 18 Pro Camera: Apple Reference Image and Tyler Stalman’s Review
In the wake of last week’s Surprise and Shine event, Apple published a post on its Security Research blog about Apple Reference Image, a way to verify that a photograph taken with an iPhone hasn’t been altered. As Apple explains, AI offers helpful features like one-touch removal of distractions from an image, but that can make knowing what is real difficult.
This is not a simple problem to address. Modern cameras rely on sophisticated image-processing algorithms to produce the final viewable image, so certifying that an image accurately reflects what a real camera sensor captured requires a chain of trust covering the sensor as well as the computational photography software that interpreted the capture. Industry approaches to this problem, based on the C2PA standard, attach provenance metadata after capture and certify the history of image edits from that point forward. This approach, however, is vulnerable to compromise at any point in the editing chain, and a viewer has no way to detect such a failure. It can also create privacy risks for photographers working in dangerous conditions by tying the image to a public identity, either to a particular device or to an individual.
…new, opt-in camera mode lets a photographer create a securely timestamped reference image that accurately reflects what was captured by the iPhone’s camera sensor. Dedicated secure hardware on the device protects the integrity of this reference image, and Private Cloud Compute protects the privacy of the image data during processing.
The entire post is well worth reading because the solution is both clever and a great showcase of what Apple’s control over its chipset and Private Cloud Compute architecture can achieve for its customers. Apple also supports Google DeepMind’s SynthID watermarking technology.
Also, don’t miss Tyler Stalman’s review of the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max on YouTube. Tyler always does a fantastic job with his reviews, and this year’s review doesn’t disappoint, covering features like the camera hardware’s new variable aperture and what this year’s software updates mean for iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max users.