Apple Increases Planned US Investment by 20 Percent over Five Years, and Will Build a North Carolina Campus

Apple announced today that it has increased its planned investment in the US over the next five years. The company had previously set a goal in 2018 of investing $350 billion but is now planning on spending $430 billion and adding 20,000 new jobs in the US, a 20% increase over the previous goal.

At the center of Apple’s revised plans is a new campus that it will build in the Research Triangle area of Raleigh-Durham, which will create at least 3,000 jobs. The company is also setting aside $100 million to support local schools and other community initiatives.

In addition to the North Carolina campus, Apple has committed to creating 20,000 new US-based jobs over the next five years. According to the company’s press release, those jobs will be located in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Texas, Washington, and Iowa. Apple’s plan to spend $430 billion in the US also includes increased spending with more than 9,000 manufacturers and suppliers in all 50 states. Finally, the company plans to continue its investment in clean energy initiates across the US, including a new solar storage facility in Monterey County, California.

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Our thanks to Honeybadger for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: Apple’s Spring iPad Pro and iMac Event, Bartender 4, and Microsoft Xbox Cloud Gaming

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Sponsored by: Boom 3D – Experience Immersive Audio on Your Mac

This week on MacStories Unwind:

MacStories

Club MacStories

  • MacStories Weekly
    • Federico recommends Mailbrew
    • John’s collection of favorite event moments
    • Interview with Stephen Hackett about new iMacs
  • MacStories Unplugged – Viva L’Umarell: John discovers a hyper-niche Italian subcultures and a discussion of American suburbia leads to a very Federico story.

AppStories

Unwind

Apple’s New Siri Remote Lacks Motion Control Sensors Required by Some Apple TV Games→

Jon Porter of The Verge rounds up recent discoveries about the new Apple TV 4K’s Siri Remote. First reported by Digital Trends, the new Siri Remote lacks an accelerometer and gyroscope. As Porter explains:

The change means that the new Siri Remote won’t work with certain Apple TV games that rely on motion controls. According to code in tvOS 14.5 seen by MacRumors, trying to play an incompatible game will lead to the following error message: “To play this game on your Apple TV, you need to connect the Apple TV Remote (1st generation) or a compatible PlayStation, Xbox or MFi controller.”

On one level, the omission of the sensors in the new Siri Remote is surprising because it comes hard on the heels of an expansion of Apple Arcade’s offerings on all platforms, including the Apple TV. Still, the original Siri Remote was never a good game controller. The button layout and diminutive size made it a poor substitute for a traditional game controller. The new Siri Remote is a little bigger than the former version, but I don’t expect it would work any better as a controller.

With support for Microsoft and Sony controllers available since tvOS 13 and the addition of support for current-generation console controllers in tvOS 14.5, Apple has clearly made the decision that a purpose-built controller provides a better gaming experience. I just wish Apple would consider making its own controller with a fast, low latency connection like AirPods, which benefits from Apple’s proprietary technology layer that sits on top of Bluetooth.

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AppStories, Episode 214 – Music Part 3: Alternative and Companion Streaming Services→

This week on AppStories, we conclude our music miniseries with an episode dedicated to alternative and companion streaming services after checking in on Federico’s early experiments with an extensible text editor.

Sponsored by:

  • DEVONthink – The one place for storing and working with all your documents, snippets, and bookmarks
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AirTag Review Roundup

AirTags, which Apple announced on Tuesday, will go on sale tomorrow, April 23rd with deliveries beginning a week later on April 30th. Apple provided the tiny item-tracking device to several YouTubers and reviewers, and embargoes have lifted.

Here’s a rundown of the early reviews of AirTags along with coverage of the new purple iPhone 12:

Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch’s editor-in-chief, says AirTags work as advertised, pointing out that:

The precision finding feature enabled by the U1 chip works as a solid example of utility-driven augmented reality, popping up a virtual arrow and other visual identifiers on the screen to make finding a tag quicker.

Panzarino also digs into all the privacy edge cases that Apple has accounted for in his review and shows off some of Apple’s AirTag accessories and what an AirTag looks like disassembled.

https://twitter.com/panzer/status/1385223538697666568?s=21

Dieter Bohn at The Verge tested AirTags by giving one to a colleague and tracking him down using the Find My network:

After a half-hour of walking around, I finally found him. He was standing on a street corner with no foot traffic whatsoever, which meant that the intermittent signals I got detailing his location came from a couple of iPhones in cars that were driving by.

That’s impressive.

As Bohn and other reviewers note, however, both sides of the AirTags are prone to scratching:

https://twitter.com/backlon/status/1385223768981733376?s=21

The Verge has a short story and gallery of photos featuring the new purple iPhone 12.

Several video reviews were also released today highlighting the AirTags and the purple iPhone 12, which are embedded after the break.

Read more

‘How Apple Designed AirTags to Be Privacy-First and Stalker-Proof’→

Michael Grothaus at Fast Company interviewed Kaiann Drance, Apple’s vice president of worldwide iPhone product marketing and Ron Huang, a senior director of sensing and connectivity, about AirTags. The focus of the story is the privacy features built into AirTags, and it includes this interesting nugget not covered during Apple’s event on Tuesday:

AirTags also have a unique security feature called Pairing Lock, which protects against people who may find your lost item and snatch the AirTag from it to use as their own. Huang likens Pairing Lock to the iPhone’s Activation Lock. “It means that if you lose your AirTag, somebody can’t just pick up your AirTag, re-pair it with their phone, and continue using it,” he says. “This has been really impactful for the iPhone and we think it will be for AirTag as well.”

I’ve seen a lot of questions raised online about exactly how AirTags work and their privacy features, and this Fast Company story is a great place to start to learn more.

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‘The iPad Pro Is a Killer Machine but its Software Is Killing Me’→

Jason Snell, writing for Macworld about the new iPad Pro’s software limitations compared to its powerful hardware:

With the announcement of USB 4/Thunderbolt support on these new iPad Pro models, I’m thrown back to the past. In 2018, when Apple released the first iPad Pro with a USB-C port on the bottom, it didn’t update the software to read the entire contents of a thumb drive when you plugged it in. The hardware was willing, but the software was weak.

And here we are again. Thunderbolt adds even speedier connectivity, but for what? Faster photo and video imports? Okay, though once again, I’m reminded that Apple’s bread-and-butter pro media apps won’t run on these iPads.

Thunderbolt is great, but it’s difficult to take full advantage of it.

How about external display support? The new iPad Pros can drive even larger external displays, including Apple’s Pro Display XDR. Third-party video apps can take advantage of this to display high-resolution video and even some analytical displays. Which is great, but if you want to display the iPad interface itself, it’ll just be a pillarboxed mirror of what’s on the iPad’s own screen.

The last time a new iPad Pro’s hardware was so obviously more capable than its software demanded, we saw the debut of iPadOS seven months later. The 2021 iPad Pro’s hardware has created new low-hanging fruit for its software; I’d be really surprised if the second half of this story isn’t dropping in six weeks.

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