Use ane_transformers as a reference PyTorch implementation if you are considering deploying your Transformer models on Apple devices with an A14 or newer and M1 or newer chip to achieve up to 10 times faster and 14 times lower peak memory consumption compared to baseline implementations.

We were just discussing Apple’s next AI move on yesterday’s JS Party live (ships to the feed next Friday). They’ve been the quietest tech giant since the GenAI movement kicked in to high gear. My guess: they’ll have a LOT to say at this June’s WWDC…

Tony Parker writing on Swift’s blog:

When Swift began life as an open source project, we wanted to open not just the language itself, but the ecosystem around it. Foundation has been instrumental in the success of decades of software and has been an integral part of the Swift developer experience from the beginning, and we knew it had to be included in the open source offering.

Historically, Apple’s open source efforts have varied in just how open they are when it comes to community. On that topic, this is an uplifting bit of prose:

Open source projects are at their best when the community of users can participate and become a community of developers. A new, open contribution process will be available to enable all developers to contribute new API to Foundation.

This new Foundation project is slated to launch on GitHub in 2023.

Vivian Qu states her case as to why Apple’s decision to remove outdated apps from the App Store is dumb, especially for indies like her.

Never mind the fact that my app has a 5-star rating and was still being downloaded, with no complaints from any of my users. Also disregard the fact that I had other highly-rated apps up on the App Store, some of which had been updated much more recently than July 2019, clearly showing that I have not abandoned these apps entirely. If there had been an actual reviewer who checked my outdated app, they would have discovered that I architected the app from the beginning to dynamically scale the UI so it resizes to fit the latest iPhone devices. All these could be signals that indicate to Apple that this is not a garbage-filled scam app that is lowering the quality of their App Store.

She goes on to tell the entire saga that she (and others) were put through to keep their apps on the store. Sometimes an app isn’t outdated, it’s just complete. Ya know?

This code is experimental (as you might imagine), but it’s full functional. It doesn’t implement all the Airplay protocols, but quite a few!

Lockdown Mode is the first major capability of its kind designed to offer an extreme, optional protection for the very small number of users who face grave, targeted threats to their digital security.

It blocks non-image attachment types in Messages, disables JIT compilation in Safari, blocks incoming FaceTime calls from unknown senders, won’t let the phone connect to a computer via a wired connection, and disables the ability to install new configuration profiles.

AppleInsider explains Apple’s new Private Access Tokens (PAT) tech announced at WWDC:

Using a new HTTP authentication method called PrivateToken, a server uses cryptography to verify a client passed an iCloud attestation check.

When the client needs a token it contacts an attester — in this case, Apple — which performs the process using certificates stored in the device’s Secure Enclave.

I’ve been waiting for someone to kill CAPTCHAs for us, but this will be an Apple-only solution for now:

The company is working to help make Private Access Tokens a web standard, but there is no mention of tokens working on Android or Windows. People on those platforms may have to put up with CAPTCHAs, for now — or wait for Microsoft’s and Google’s work on the matter.

I believe this is the draft of the standard that they’re referring to. Cloudflare also has a nice article on their work in this space.

Built using second-generation 5-nanometer technology, M2 takes the industry-leading performance per watt of M1 even further with an 18 percent faster CPU, a 35 percent more powerful GPU, and a 40 percent faster Neural Engine.1 It also delivers 50 percent more memory bandwidth compared to M1, and up to 24GB of fast unified memory.

I pity the fool who upgraded last Fall and can think of zero good reasons to spend another pile of cash at the Apple Store right now no matter how hard he tries to drum up literally any valid reason why that would be a wise decision but if he could think of one he totally would do it and now maybe he’s just waiting for someone else to come up with some sort of justification for doing exactly that. I pity that fool 😉

Mike Lapidakis thinks Apple’s Hide My Email feature that debuted in iOS 15 is “one of the most under-rated privacy launches of the past year.”

I’m a huge fan of the service and think the practice of a unique email per site is nearly as essential as using a unique password. When it’s this easy, you have no excuse.

Asahi Linux is a project and community with the goal of porting Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, starting with the 2020 M1 Mac Mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.

Our goal is not just to make Linux run on these machines but to polish it to the point where it can be used as a daily OS. Doing this requires a tremendous amount of work, as Apple Silicon is an entirely undocumented platform. In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open-source driver for it.

Asahi Linux is developed by a thriving community of free and open source software developers.

Yes, please!

This is super interesting to see bare metal Mac mini’s attached through Thunderbolt to the Amazon EC2 infrastructure. Really makes me wish I had a reason to use them. 😂

We upgraded to the new MacBook Pro M1 Max and decided to share our first impressions of the new hardware, how we migrate data and settings from our old machines (or don’t), which apps were “instant installs” for each of us, which apps we’re trying to live without, and how we get our new machines set up for work and play. Nerd out with us!

These teardowns are always an enjoyable read. This one is particular interesting because of the large upgrade this year’s line of pro laptops is and how Apple appears to be returning to form with their design decisions. Here’s the lede:

We’ve still got a long way to go with disassembly, but this new MacBook Pro has, at the very least, the first reasonably DIY-friendly battery replacement procedure since 2012.

This is a wrapper script that simplifies deployment of RPiPlay, which does the heavy lifting. How well does it work?

Screen mirroring and audio works for iOS 9 or newer. Recent macOS versions also seem to be compatible. The GPU is used for decoding the h264 video stream. The Pi has no hardware acceleration for audio (AirPlay mirroring uses AAC), so the FDK-AAC decoder is used for that.

Both audio and video work fine on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and a Raspberry Pi Zero, though playback is a bit smoother on the 3B+

Today we have a very special episode, where Gerhard gets to share his favourite learnings from Steve Jobs. If it wasn’t for his determination to build a better personal computer, Gerhard would have most likely continued with a career in physics.

We know what you’re thinking: it’s crazy and impossible to interview Steve Jobs, but on his 10th memorial anniversary, Gerhard was determined to combine the things that Steve said with his passion for computers, automation, and infrastructure.

Live your life and ship your best stuff because there’s nothing like the present.

Thank you, Steve.

From Axios:

Apple said Thursday it will relax some App Store rules in order to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by U.S.-based developers over its store terms.

…Apple will let developers communicate with users about alternative payment methods outside of the App Store. It will also set up a $100 million fund for small developers and make some other changes to its practices, but it’s keeping its overall commission structure.

This settlement is not yet approved by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

Karoy Lorentey with the announcement:

The Swift Standard Library currently implements the three most essential general-purpose data structures: Array, Set and Dictionary. These are the right tool for a wide variety of use cases, and they are particularly well-suited for use as currency types. But sometimes, in order to efficiently solve a problem or to maintain an invariant, Swift programmers would benefit from a larger library of data structures.

We expect the Collections package to empower you to write faster and more reliable programs, with less effort.

This joins the Swift Algorithms and Swift Numerics packages in what is becoming a valuable, open source resource for Swift developers around the world to use.

If you’re intrigued by the overwhelmingly positive reviews of Apple’s M1-based machines, but not sure if your favorite (or necessary apps) have made the transition, this site has your back.

(Hat tip to Christian Witts in our #applenerds channel for linking this up)

We are in a time where the open source tooling and developer story around Apple’s new M1 chip is all over our feeds. Among these was this interesting benchmark. It even highlights where a somewhat older Intel can still beat the M1, such as highly optimized crypto. In general, if your code relies on the Go parts more than native optimized code the M1 looks like a performance win.

We have a BIG show for you today. We’re talking about the future of the Mac. Coming off of Apple’s “One more thing.” event to launch the Apple M1 chip and M1 powered Macs, we have a two part show giving you the perspective of Apple as well as a Mac app developer on the future of the Mac.

Part 1 features Tim Triemstra from Apple. Tim is the Product Marketing Manager for Developer Technologies. He’s been at Apple for 15 years and the team he manages is responsible for developer tools and technologies including Xcode, Swift Playgrounds, the Swift language, and UNIX tools.

Part 2 features Ken Case from The Omni Group. Ken is the Founder and CEO of The Omni Group and they’re well known for their Omni Productivity Suite including OmniFocus, OmniPlan, OmniGraffle, and OmniOutliner – all of which are developed for iOS & Mac.

Juli Clover via MacRumors.com on Apple’s M1 chip performance:

When compared to existing devices, the M1 chip in the ‌MacBook Air‌ outperforms all iOS devices. […] In comparison to Macs, the single-core performance is better than any other available Mac, and the multi-core performance beats out all of the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro models, including the 10th-generation high-end 2.4GHz Intel Core i9 model.

No, we don’t normally link up Mac performance benchmarks. In fact, I think this is a first. But we’ve been nerding out in #applenerds on Slack…and we’re just days away from the “Future of Mac” episode on The Changelog — so, the performance and benchmarks of the M1 chip are on my mind.

Keep in mind that the M1 is Apple just getting started with Mac chips. Look at the image below and you will see the M1 is running at 3.2 GHz — a faster clock speed than all other Macs on the list.

Six white-hat hackers spent a few months on Apple’s bug bounty program:

There were a total of 55 vulnerabilities discovered with 11 critical severity, 29 high severity, 13 medium severity, and 2 low severity reports. These severities were assessed by us for summarization purposes and are dependent on a mix of CVSS and our understanding of the business related impact.

This is a report of their findings: how they did it, vulnerabilities found, and how Apple responded to each one.

Max Braun thinks today’s webcams are boring, so he brought back a classic. Max took an Apple iSight and retrofitted it with a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, which “fits the iSight’s dimensions almost perfectly.”

The PiSight actually works like you’d expect it to. Just plug in the USB cable and the camera will show up in your video conferencing app of choice. The image quality is quite good, possibly better than the built-in camera of today’s MacBooks.

The best part is you can do this too because Max made all the plans available as open source.

Just in case you’re not completely taken aback by the absurdity of this project and are now considering building your very own PiSight, rest assured that I’m making everything available as open source.

The GitHub repo has a list of parts and where to get them, the 3D-print-ready model of the frame, and the source code. I’m thinking it should be possible to get the total cost down to under $150. I had to spend a bit more than that because I needed to experiment and opted for higher-end materials.

James Blizzard, writing for Browser London:

in my view, a number of factors are converging to make change ever more likely. Namely, the huge scale of cloud computing providers, Apple’s plans to migrate their laptop products to ARM-based processors, and the opening up of the educational space to include ARM-based systems.

There are some great thoughts from James in this article. From my vantage point, ARM is well-positioned for the short/medium-term, but RISC-V might just disrupt that for the long-term. One small piece of evidence: how Apple positioned this transition to Apple Silicon instead of to ARM.

First things first… does it actually work?!

Yes! Quite well, actually - on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Bear in mind that this is written entirely in JavaScript, so please adjust your expectations. The virtual machine is emulating a 1991 Macintosh Quadra 900 with a Motorola CPU, which Apple used before switching to IBM’s PowerPC architecture in the late 1990s.

Ok, cool. Does it run my favorite game?!

The short answer is “Yes”. In fact, you’ll find various games and demos preinstalled, thanks to an old MacWorld Demo CD from 1997. Namely, Oregon Trail, Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization II, Alley 19 Bowling, Damage Incorporated, and Dungeons & Dragons.

There are also various apps and trials preinstalled, including Photoshop 3, Premiere 4, Illustrator 5.5, StuffIt Expander, the Apple Web Page Construction Kit, and more.

We’re joined by Ronak Shah and Beth Dakin from the Safari team at Apple about their announcements at WWDC20 and the release of Safari 14. We talk about Safari WebExtensions, Face ID and Touch ID coming to the web, Safari’s plans to advance the web platform, and it all comes down to their focus on privacy, power, and performance.