Apple: ‘iCloud Private Relay Overview’ (PDF):

New whitepaper from Apple with a lot of details about how iCloud Private Relay works. Still doesn’t list Apple’s CDN partners for the second relay hop, but that’s obviously some sort of strategic decision on Apple’s part. As the paper makes clear, you don’t need any particular trust in those CDN partners, because they never receive anything that could identify you, or locate you any more precisely than an 800 km² region.

iCloud Private Relay is still officially in beta, but it’s been so reliable for me that I had to check just now that I’ve got it enabled on all my eligible devices.

Source: Daring Fireball

∞ Apple Support: How to find your lost AirPods:

The first bit of this video is pretty straight-forward. Launch Find My, then tap Find.

But watch the video all the way through. There are subtleties (like the left and right buttons in the upper left) and details on activating Lost Mode.

Not rocket science, but better to be familiar with the process now, less stress when you can’t find your AirPods and that frantic search begins.

Source: The Loop

∞ Apple Support: How to use Dual SIM on iPhone:

Apple Support continues to knock it out of the Park.

This video focuses on the details on setting up dual SIMS, some combination of physical SIM card or eSIM. Incredibly useful if you have two lines or plan on traveling abroad.

Source: The Loop

10 free ways to send large videos and files from iPhone:

Ankur Thakur, iDownloadBlog:

Wondering how you can send a big video, graphics-heavy document, or other large files to someone from your iPhone? Look at ten ways to send big files from your iPhone to someone on another iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows PC, or Android phone. Most methods here are wireless, while others will require a Lightning cable.

This is worth bookmarking, for that moment when you find yourself having to move a massive file from one device to another. Nice walkthrough of each technique, with detail and links to more detail.

∞ Read this on The Loop

Source: The Loop

Daring Fireball: Tomorrow Is Doomsday for BlackBerry Devices:

From BlackBerry’s OS services FAQ:

As a reminder, the legacy services for BlackBerry 7.1 OS and earlier, BlackBerry 10 software, BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.1 and earlier versions, will no longer be available after January 4, 2022. As of this date, devices running these legacy services and software through either carrier or Wi-Fi connections will no longer reliably function, including for data, phone calls, SMS and 9-1-1 functionality.

I wonder how many people are still hanging on to old BlackBerry phones. At one point, they truly had a cult following.

Brian Hamilton on Twitter:

I’ve always wanted a little number pad next to my keyboard, so I tied my Stream Deck to PCalc!

Putting an Ear to the Ground of Apple’s Audio Efforts — Pixel Envy:

Parsons presses the two Apple representatives on new stuff released this year, like the third-generation AirPods and spatial audio. But it is when asked about lossless audio that Geaves gives the most intriguing answer:

“Obviously the wireless technology is critical for the content delivery that you talk about”, he says, “but also things like the amount of latency you get when you move your head, and if that’s too long, between you moving your head and the sound changing or remaining static, it will make you feel quite ill, so we have to concentrate very hard on squeezing the most that we can out of the Bluetooth technology, and there’s a number of tricks we can play to maximise or get around some of the limits of Bluetooth. But it’s fair to say that we would like more bandwidth and… I’ll stop right there. We would like more bandwidth”, he smiles.

Given that AirPods Max and Apple Music’s lossless audio option were announced within six months of each other, yet were incompatible for bandwidth reasons, it seemed like something had to give. It felt like a plot hole in both products’ respective stories.