For years now, Apple nerds have pined away at the idea of Intel building ARM chips for Apple. Intel has always been at the front end of technology in terms of die shrinks and chip manufacturing. Unfortunately Intel has also always insisted on only building its own designs. That makes sense. I suspect being a chip designer/manufacturer is much more lucrative than being just a chip manufacturer.

Yesterday we received news that Intel has changed its mind and is now planning on building chips based on the ARM design. This seems like good news for Apple. It allows Apple to distance itself from Samsung (that same company that Apple sued for design theft) currently produces a lot of the chips found in iPhones and iPads. I’d also speculate that an Intel manufactured Apple ARM chip is smaller and more power efficient.

Without any inside knowledge, I’m guessing that Intel did not want to get into the chip-manufacturing-for-others business. Nonetheless, here we are. Let’s hope the iPhone and iPad can benefit.

I enjoyed reading Joanna Stern’s Wall Street Journal piece comparing chip-on-card versus mobile payment technologies (like Apple Pay). She timed over 50 transactions and figured out that on average, an Apple pay transaction takes six seconds and a chip on card transaction takes 13. If you do two transactions a day, that adds up to 85 extra minutes a year at the register. I already hate chip-on-card transactions. They take too long and when the transaction completes, the terminal rings an alarm klaxon that always makes me feel like I’ve just been caught shoplifting. Moreover, Apple Pay transactions require a separate PIN and are more secure.

It seems to me we’re moving in the right direction but not fast enough. I, for one, cannot wait for the day that I can get rid of all these bits of plastic I am carrying around.

Ben Lovejoy at 9to5 Mac explains how Microsoft accidentally released its golden key “and it appears impossible for Microsoft to fully patch it.”

While talk of a government-mandated magic back-door into the iPhone has subsided, I’m sure we’ll hear about it more after the elections. Tim Cook was right. Such a tool is dangerous by its mere existence and, as Microsoft discovered, such a thing will inevitably land in the hands of hackers, criminals, foreign governments, and other bad actors.

While an iPhone back-door would help law enforcement with criminals not smart-enough to use alternative encryption, the massive privacy intrusion combined with its inevitable release make it a terrible idea.

There has been a lot of rumbling lately about Twitter. While there’s a lot to like about the service (it remains my favorite and nearly exclusive social media outlet), Twitter has also become a playground for some pretty abusive and vile people. Charlie Warzel at BuzzFeed did a an impressive bit of reporting tracking the history of abuse of Twitter users and the company’s general failure to address the problem since the beginning. While I had known about some of the recent problems, I didn’t realize that this stems back to 2008. I recommend reading the entire article. It’s quite informative but also a bit disheartening.

Twitter responded that portions of the story are untrue but they don’t explain what those portion are or provide any further clarification. Having watched friends (primarily female) go through the Twitter meat grinder, I think the BuzzFeed story gets things generally right.

My one bit of feedback is that I don’t buy Twitter’s claim that they’re worried about lawsuits. Most people on the Internet have the ability to kick somebody off their website or service if they feel like they are behaving badly. If you don’t believe me, read the terms of service of every website on the Internet.

I think the reason why Twitter has been ignoring this problem is because they want everyone to use Twitter, even the jackasses. Maybe it’s time they grew up and started cracking down on this. If not, the rest of us will start voting with our feet.

I wanted a little escape tonight so I went in the App store and purchased the Dr. Who colouring book. It took about 30 seconds to realize that purchase was a mistake. It isn’t a coloring book at all. Instead, you get a picture and a series of colors. You then tap in a white space and it fills in with the selected color … perfectly … every time. Without the actual act of drawing, I don’t get the expected therapy.

If you’re looking for a coloring book app (and if you have an iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil I recommend you at least try), give Pigment a try. It gets iPad coloring right.

Because I can’t help myself, I was early to the game with the iOS 10 betas this year. As a nerd, I find it generally fun to be at the bleeding edge technology. When something goes wrong, I don’t blame Apple because it is, after all, a beta. Most things that break in beta get fixed before the final product ships. 

As such, I usually don’t worry too much about problems in beta. I am, however, concerned about the “Save to iCloud” dialog box in iOS 10. Here is a screenshot.

In iOS 9, the Save to iCloud dialog box was a little buggy but generally worked. It had a search bar and a way to navigate through your folders. Starting with iOS 10 beta 1 we got the above Save to iCloud dialog box. They’ve removed the search function and instead made it a very long scrolling list of folders. There’s no way to collapse the folders and no way to jump to a specific destination. Instead, every time you want to save something to iCloud, you need to scroll through a seemingly endless list until you find the folder you want. In that process, you need to be very careful. If you scroll too fast and the iPad mistakes your swipe for a touch, iOS 10 saves the file to whatever folder you happen to touch. As I discovered, it’s not always easy to figure out exactly where things end up. With every new iOS 10 beta I go back to this thinking it will have improved. So far it hasn’t.

This new Save to iCloud dialog box is unusable for someone that has more than a few iCloud-based folders. When this arrived, I was in the midst of a two-month experiment running most of my cloud-based files off of iCloud. There were good parts and bad parts but it was workable. This dialog box put the brakes on the whole experiment. At first, I thought it was simply a placeholder until they made something better. But now they are up to the fifth beta and there still has been no change with this dialog box. I’m starting to get worried that this is what they intend to ship.

Does anyone at Apple use more than 100 folders on their iCloud drive? If they do, this has to be a pain point for them. I know we still have a month or so before iOS 10 ships and I really hope that I end up looking like Chicken Little with this post but if Apple does not improve the Save to iCloud dialog box before iOS 10 ships, it’s going to be difficult to use iCloud with any significant number of folders.