This week we discuss a bevy of not-so-good for Google stories; an Anker product to beware of; and thoughts about anticipated new Apple product announcements.
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Voice Over 0:00
This is the Intego Mac podcast—the voice of Mac security for Thursday, October 10, 2024. This week’s Intego Mac podcast headlines include: a bevy of not so good for Google stories; an Anker product to beware of; and thoughts about anticipated new Apple product announcements. Now, here are the hosts of the Intego Mac Podcast. Veteran Mac journalist, Kirk McElhearn. And Intego’s. Chief Security Analyst, Josh Long.
Kirk McElhearn 0:36
Good morning, Josh. How are you today?
Josh Long 0:37
I’m doing well. How are you, Kirk?
Kirk McElhearn 0:39
I’m doing just fine. You know, history repeats itself, and we’re recording on Wednesday the ninth, and this is the end of a two or three day Amazon Prime Day thing. It seems like these are coming more often, doesn’t it?
Josh Long 0:50
Yeah, Are these like multiple times a year? Or am I just confused? It feels like we have so many of these Prime Day type things.
Kirk McElhearn 0:59
Plus Black Friday, right? One interesting thing I spotted here in the UK. You know, Apple products don’t often get much of a discount on this sort of thing. But AirPods Pro 2, because now there’s multiple four AirPods available. AirPods Pro 2 are 50 pounds off. So they’re 200 pounds instead of 250 that’s a quite a big discount. And the latest Apple pencils also like 35 pounds off. It’s 94 instead of 29 usually in these events and Black Friday and anything you might see an Apple watch, it’s 7% off, right? I’ve seen the Apple Watch Ultra, which lists here at 799 on sale for maybe 769 or something, never a big discount. But this is a pretty big discount for Apple to be giving for something like that. It could be that Apple’s starting to treat their products a little bit differently. Maybe we’ll talk about this later, how Apple has kind of two groups of products now, the ones that get frequent updates, like the MacBook Pro, for example, which is supposed to be updated later this month, and all the others, like the air pods and the HomePod, the SE devices, the Apple Pencil, etc. About the MacBook Pro. This is a first as far as I can remember, and in more than 20 years of writing about Apple, I have never heard of a situation where someone has boxed units of a new Apple device weeks before it’s going on sale. And apparently, a bunch of Russian YouTubers have been making videos showing unboxing of the MacBook Pro M4 which apparently is going to be announced. I believe October 28 is apparently the rumored date for the next Apple Event.
Josh Long 2:32
And potentially shipping on November 1. So that’s the rumor. And so yeah, these Russian YouTubers are unboxing these MacBook Pros with M4 chips. They’re running benchmarks on them and things, and it really looks like they legitimately have them. So what’s interesting about this is, I don’t think this we’ve ever had something quite this big of a leak, right? Like the ones that people usually talk about are, like the iPhone four that was left in a bar like many, many years ago, where somebody who was legitimately testing an iPhone four model from Apple went to a bar and left it behind right and so that there have been a couple of other little things like that, but Nothing since then, and nothing this big where, apparently somebody actually got the product, like boxed in everything. Now there is a little bit of, you know, speculation that maybe the box is not really legitimate. Kirk, you were pointing out that the image on the front of the box seems to have kind of the same splash screen that they usually show on the existing MacBook Pro box. So that is a little bit suspicious. Maybe they actually got these units and stuck them in a box to make it look like they were doing a full unboxing. But whatever the case, they do appear to legitimately have M4 based MacBook Pros in their hands, and they apparently got them from some private group that was selling them. So, yeah, pretty crazy story. And I don’t know where this leak began, but this is a big deal.
Kirk McElhearn 4:12
The only possibility is somewhere in the supply chain in China, that perhaps they fell off a truck, perhaps someone was able to get a couple of units out the door, which is pretty I mean, I can imagine that everyone searched, and you can’t stick a MacBook Pro in your socks either it’s a big device. So this sounds more like something that might have happened in transit from a factory to a warehouse. Or, you know, Apple creates these devices months before they go on sale, my iPhone 16 pro Max, I believe it’s in the battery health section that tells when it was manufactured and when it was sold. And it was manufactured in May and sold in September. So this is months before they’re sitting around in warehouses. They’re being transited around the world. And Apple did say in their last event that they’re shipping more by sea in order. Or to cut down their carbon footprint. So they’re taking more time to ship them, because airplane is overnight and sea is a week or 10 days or two weeks, depending on where it’s going. So there could be a complex supply chain in multiple countries that are preparing for the launch of the MacBook Pro M4 and these could have been stolen anywhere. In any case, we should know in a week or 2 10 days about this coming Apple Event. What are we going to get? We’re going to get new MacBook Pros, apparently, a new, redesigned Mac Mini, iPad Mini, which hasn’t been updated for four years, I think, no three years, September 2021 or October 2021 maybe a new Apple TV. It’s been a couple of years since we haven’t had that, and this is often the time of year that the Apple TV comes out, so we’ll find out soon. Speaking of rumors, there are competing rumors about whether the Apple ring is dead or about to be born, as Apple insider says. And I believe that this news came out partly because aura announced the latest version of their ring. So it’s the aura ring four that was announced last week, and Mark German Apple’s designated wiki says that Apple isn’t actively developing a ring and has no plan to launch one, because it would detract from any Apple Watch. And on the other hand, there are other rumors that saying that this is in progress now. Apple has patented all sorts of things. Apple patents a lot that they never use. And you know, patenting a technology can lead to licensing it to other countries. Can lead to licensing it to other companies who are making a product. I don’t recall Apple ever. You know, Apple has always been about making the products and refining them, right? They didn’t make the first smartphone. They didn’t make the first mp three music player, but they waited until it was time to make it better. I think the smart ring is only become mature, probably with the aura ring three, which is a couple years ago. And now there are other brands that make rings. And if Apple is going to do this, they’re going to want to do it right, and they’re going to want to make sure that this is a device. I don’t think it would detract from the Apple Watch for a lot of people, but make it a device that works with the Apple Watch and the iPhone, right?
Josh Long 7:07
And the last time we talked about this, I mentioned that one of the things that I could foresee maybe using something like this for would be sleep tracking, so I could charge my watch overnight. Now that I actually have a Series 10 which has a decent battery life. I very rarely need to charge this thing overnight, because the battery is so good on it, compared to my Series 5, which was getting pretty long in the tooth, and the battery is not so great on it anymore. So I, you know, this is one of those things that, like, I feel like it, it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense for Apple to launch a device like this, because if you think about it really, now, I know not everybody is going to wear a watch. I was not a watch wearer until I got the series one and started wearing an Apple Watch. But at the same time, not a lot of people necessarily want to wear rings either. I mean, if it’s a work related reason why you can’t wear a watch. You probably can’t wear rings in a lot of those circumstances, either, at least not metal rings. So, you know, I don’t really know that it makes sense for Apple to launch a ring in the near future.
Kirk McElhearn 8:15
No one’s ever gonna need more than 64 kilobytes of RAM, right?
Josh Long 8:21
Well, it’s just, and I’m just saying because this is too much of a directly competing product, like a smart ring and a smart watch do basically exactly the same thing, and you can do a lot less on a ring because of no display, right? Even if they had a tiny little display built into the outer edge of the ring.
Kirk McElhearn 8:41
It’s like there are people who don’t want a watch. There are people, you know, there’s not a lot of people, but if you have tattoos on your wrist, the watch doesn’t work very well. It sensors don’t work very well. So maybe it’s an alternative to the watch anyway. Rumors, rumors. We’ve talked about this before. We’ll talk about it again. I do want to point out about you mentioned the battery life, and when we talked about your Apple Watch last week, we didn’t talk about that. I’m finding the battery life in mine is more than 24 hours. And I’m talking way more than 24 hours. So I’ve been tracking my sleep for years, and if I charge my watch before I go to sleep for 10 minutes, because it charges really fast, and it’s 90% ish, right? I have it on optimized battery charging so it doesn’t always go to 100% I get up in the morning, it’s about 80% I go through the day and in the evening, it’s never less than 60% when I go to charge it before I go to sleep. Now these are days that I’m not doing. I don’t do workouts, but if I go out and do a brisk walk when it’s not raining, which lately hasn’t been often, I’ll put the workout thing on just for the lulls, right? And so that uses a little bit more energy. I don’t really play music through it that much, so I’m not really pushing the watch, but I’m seeing battery life far superior than my previous one, which was a series eight.
Josh Long 9:56
Yeah, for me, it’s about 24 hours, maybe a. Bit less than that sometimes, but I’m typically only having to charge it once a day, which the Series 5 I was having to charge a couple of times a day.
Kirk McElhearn 10:07
But that’s because it was old. It was really old Josh.
Josh Long 10:11
And it also didn’t charge us as quickly either. So as you mentioned, the Series 10 does charge very fast, which is a nice thing to have. So for example, if I’m gonna take a shower, I’ll put it on the charging dock, because I don’t really need to wear it in the shower. That would be weird. So just charge it while I’m taking a shower, and it’s ready to go like, I mean, it’s it’s charged high enough that I can basically get 24 hours out of it, even though it’s not all the way to 100% by the time I’m done showering. So it’s very practical. Chart, the fast charging and the long battery life on it work together really well. So I’m very, very happy about that with this Series 10.
Kirk McElhearn 10:53
So we’ve talked a lot about AirTags on this podcast for a number of reasons. Because, one, they’re good for tracking things. Two, they can track people in malicious ways. And, you know, we’ve talked about how that’s changed. There’s an interesting story that came out recently, a group called everyday plastic that is, I guess they’re a pro recycling group that want to get as much plastic recycled as possible. They put a bunch of AirTags in plastic, in bunches of plastic that were sent to recycling places, plastic bags, plastic containers and plastic packaging and everything, and an awful lot of it didn’t get recycled and ended up being incinerated. And this is kind of interesting, because, well, I mean, we do it here, we put our plastics in a specific thing for recycling, and they did this in 40 bundles of soft plastics. So soft plastics is supermarket bags and plastic wraps and all that. And these were supposed to be recycled, and it turns out that most of them were not. I think this is interesting use of the air tag. It’s not the first time that someone’s done this for recycling, but it’s interesting that this device, which is designed for tracking your luggage, right, finding your keys or whatever can be, I don’t want to say, used surreptitiously, but can be used creatively for things like that.
Josh Long 12:06
Yeah, one of the things that I kind of wonder about with this is, you know, how reliable their methodology is. So basically, they were kind of like tracking where these AirTags were that were mixed in with a bunch of plastics, and they wanted to see where these AirTags ended up. And so, like they were able to, they think, determine that these plastics were being incinerated because the air tag was being incinerated, which, you know, that’s probably true.
Kirk McElhearn 12:36
Well, no, no, no, they traced them to the location, and they found that they were in an incineration location is what they found, right, right?
Josh Long 12:45
One could argue that, you know, maybe the AirTags were discovered and removed and then sent off for incineration with a batch of things that was not recyclable. So I don’t know, I maybe take this with a little bit of a grain of salt. But you know, if they’re using enough of these and hiding them well enough, then you know, maybe, maybe this is plausible research.
Kirk McElhearn 13:06
So AirTags are one thing, but you know, you can use Apple’s Find My network with a whole bunch of Apple products, including air pods, at least recent air pods. And what do you know? Someone in Waterbury is this Connecticut, I think his Ferrari was stolen. Ferrari worth $575,000 and he accidentally left his AirPods in the Ferrari and was able to find it, and the two people who stole it were arrested. Now what I want to know is, okay, you got a $575,000 car. That’s already a thing. Why doesn’t it already have some other kind of tracker in it? I mean, I would think any expensive car for insurance purposes must have a GPS tracker in it, built into the car. It wouldn’t even be something like you stick under the chassis like in a spy movie, right?
Josh Long 13:50
Yeah, that seems a little bit odd to me too. I mean, most people don’t have a house that’s worth that much, let alone a car.
Kirk McElhearn 14:00
So, okay, these are just two stories that highlight Apple’s Find My network, and I’m sure we’re gonna hear more of these. And every once in a while, we find an interesting one like this, and there’ll be more as it goes on. AirTags are three and a half years old. I doubt we’ll see a refresh to AirTags this month. This is more of a spring thing. I don’t know what Apple could do to improve the AirTags. Maybe better Bluetooth that has more of a range, but I can’t see that the air takes a pretty simple device. It does something, and it does it well, all right, let’s take a break. When we come back, we’re going to talk about Google. We have a Google interlude today with several Google stories.
Voice Over 14:33
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Kirk McElhearn 15:49
Oh, how about this? We have a gaggle of Google stories. How about that? We have three stories about Google and well, two of them are the fact that Google’s getting too big. Now we know that Apple has been required to have third party app stores in the European Union, according to a judge in the Google versus Epic trial, which, interestingly, didn’t get as much publicity as the Epic versus Apple trial, right? The judge has ruled that Google, according to The Verge, must crack open Android for third party stores in the US. I kind of think like this, this bread has risen. It’s time to eat it, right? We’ve we’re seeing this in a number of countries or European Union. Japan’s got something going on. It’s going to have to happen. These companies have to give in. Google’s going to have to do it. Apple’s going to have to do it. It’s finally about time that we get some sort of that we kill off these. Monopoly isn’t really the word, but I guess it’s a monopoly, isn’t it?
Josh Long 16:41
Well, I mean, on Android, to be fair, I think the situation has been very different from what it has been on iOS for many years, right? Because you’ve always been able to sideload apps relatively easily on an Android device, including third party stores. So what’s interesting about this is that the judge in this epic V Google case says that Google needs to allow third party stores within the Google Play Store, if I’m understanding this right, which is kind of funny, because what you go to a store to get a store like It seems a little bit silly, but you know if, if Google is going to be mandated to do this, then it only makes sense that Apple’s going to have to do this next so that. So if you know if, if it’s good for one company, it’s going to be good for another company too, I imagine that if this ruling stands, if Google’s not able to appeal this and get this overturned, then at some point, Apple is probably going to have to allow third party app stores within the app store outside of the just the EU because remember the the only way that right now that you can officially get third party app stores that are sanctioned by Apple on an iPhone would be, if you’re in the EU right now, anywhere outside of the EU, you can’t get, for example, the epic game store, but you can if you have an iPhone in the EU. So this would change things, so that, at least in the US now, you would be able to, for example, get the epic game store from the Apple App Store. Anyway, this is a little ways down the road, because I’m, I’m sure that Google is going to appeal this decision, and we’ll see what ends up happening with that.
Kirk McElhearn 18:29
Well, at the same time, apparently, the Department of Justice is examining unquote structural remedies to challenge Google’s internet search monopoly. This is from an article in The Guardian, and this came out. This is Bell Telephone in the 80s. This is Ma Bell being broken up into baby bells. Google does have a search monopoly. I mean, when you search for something, you Google it like back in the day, when you made a photocopy in an office, you Xeroxed it. It was the kind it was the thing you do. Most people don’t even know that there are other search engines unless they use Microsoft Edge, in which case they know that there’s Bing, but they probably switched it to Google, or they’re using Chrome. In that case, they’re definitely using Google. So I think it’s time for Google to be broken up. I don’t know if broken up is the right thing, but there has to be some sort of equal footing, because the biggest problem to me is that Google’s algorithm dictates the way people publish content on the web, and we take it into account. We don’t do SEO stuff, but we know that Google is looking for certain things, and articles have to be formatted a certain way, and they have to be a certain length. If they’re too short, they don’t get the same kind of ranking in Google Search. This has to stop. It’s ridiculous. Google has 90% of the global search market that is clearly a monopoly.
Josh Long 19:39
Well, I think one of the things that’s kind of interesting about this is the way that Google goes about ensuring that it has such a high market share for search. We’ve talked before about how Google pays an awful lot of money to Apple to ensure that it’s the default search engine on Apple systems. And so that’s obviously. A really big one, because Google is spending more than most of its competitors can ever like, even fathom spending on anything. So that’s one of the areas where I think there may be a strong case against Google.
Kirk McElhearn 20:14
Okay, another Google story, they are testing verified check marks in search. Now this is one of your crusades. Josh about how Google Ads can be deceptive and fake and all that. And so we have an article on the verge, and they show two screenshots. Now, Google often tests things among certain users to see how they react. And so I’ve not seen this. I don’t think you have, but they’re showing these check marks after the names of Microsoft and Apple. And if you hover over the check mark, it says this icon is being shown because Google’s signal suggests that this business is the business that it says it is. I don’t like the grammar there. Google can’t guarantee the reliability of this business or its product, so basically they’re just confirming that the business name corresponds to the domain. But these blue check marks, which the value of the blue checkmark has been diluted on Twitter. How many companies are going to get this? It looks like yes, maybe they’re just trying this out with some people, but I don’t know how reliable This is. If only fortune 500 companies get this. Now, it’s true that scammers will target people by trying to impersonate well known companies, right? So we’ll have to see if they actually make this change. But I think anything to protect people from scammy ads and scammy search results is a good thing.
Josh Long 21:26
Well, yeah, you make some good points there. I think the biggest thing for me is that if Google did a better job of vetting companies that are able to float this high in the search results in the first place, then there really shouldn’t be that much of a need to have these verification badges. It just it over complicates things like I would, I would really like if Google actually just did a good enough job of vetting things that you wouldn’t need these things at all. And as you mentioned, one of the biggest problems, really is ads, because there are a lot of malicious parties that are buying up ads all the time on Google ads, which show up at the very top of Google search results. This is one of the main ways that people are getting infected on Macs today, and also, really on Windows PCs too, because these malware makers are just buying ads. And the way that the Google ad system works, you’re able to basically make a direct copy that mimics the exact way that any legitimate company’s ads will look if they were at the top of results. People are used to just clicking on whatever the results are at the top of the search, right? They do a search and they assume number one is going to be the thing that they’re actually searching for, because it’s Google, and we can trust Google. And just the idea that Google isn’t properly vetting these things and is allowing people to spoof some other company is just mind blowing to me. And really this whole idea of blue checks to sort of mitigate that, like Just do your job in the first place, vet things properly, and then the blue checks are totally unnecessary.
Kirk McElhearn 23:13
Well, Google Ads use what’s called N.H.I.. No humans involved. It’s all automated. No one looks at the ads. No one checks anything, so they don’t have to change that. I added two more Google stories while we were talking, because this is something that’s actually quite important. There’s an app called IA writer, which full disclosure, it’s my text editor of choice. I’ve been using it for many years. I’ve been beta testing it, et cetera. And they’ve published an article. The company’s called information architects. They published an article saying, our Android app is frozen in carbonite. Basically, Google has changed the way people can access Google Drive. And they said that, well, you should just get read only access to Google Drive. Now this is for people who are using Google Drive to store documents that they’re writing, right that they’re writing and editing. The other option is that they would have to pass an annual cloud application security assessment, and information architect says this requires hiring a third party vendor like KPMG, which would cost them about one to two months of revenue from their Android app to get this thing every year. Now, shortly after information architects went public with this panic, the company that makes transmit, which is an FTP app, that can also access Google Drive, has said that they will no longer be able to use Google Drive for the same reason. I don’t understand what Google is doing. Like if you’re using a cloud storage system, you should be able to access it with whatever you want. Now, maybe Google is saying, well, we don’t want fraudulent apps accessing Google Drive. Not sure that this is really the solution, but this is a big problem. A lot of people depend on Google Drive, and they’ve paid for Google Drive storage, and they’re using apps to access it, and if they’re limited, as companies drop out app by app, because they’re not going to pay this VIG to be able to use Google Drive. This is a big problem for Google, and for users.
Josh Long 25:01
This actually might be a good case for switching to a third party solution, right? Like So Google is one of the big players in this in this space, Dropbox has done things in the past that have kind of restricted how you can use Dropbox, which is, it’s been around a long time. It’s a free service, but you know, from time to time, these big companies will change the way that you’re allowed to use their service, and it would be nice to have more players in this market. The problem is that there’s it’s really difficult to get a foothold in a market like this because of these giant players like Google and Dropbox that have been around for a really long time and already have tons and tons of users who are getting by with whatever limited features they they have access to. There are some startup players in the market. There’s Proton Drive, for example. Proton is the same company that makes Proton mail, for example, which is a more private, secure, encrypted email service. So they’ve got a Google Drive alternative. But the question is like, how many people are going to sign up for Proton Drive if they allow for integrations into third party apps? I don’t know whether they do. Kirk’s just breaking this story right now on the podcast, so I haven’t had a chance to look into this. I would love to see third parties like Proton Drive give this kind of access, optionally to third party apps, so that they can work with an API and integrate with Proton Drive, so that you can use other cloud services that are maybe a little bit more open and a little bit more private than something like Google Offers.
Kirk McElhearn 26:47
Well, I need to correct you about one thing you said, Dropbox is free, and that’s just because you’re too cheap to pay for it, and you’re getting the basic two gigabytes or whatever. Many people pay 10 or $20 a month for Dropbox because they need a terabyte or two terabytes. OneDrive is another option. Box is one that’s been around for a while. I don’t know how reliable they are, but it’s not easy for all of these apps to interface with all of these cloud services, particularly on mobile. On a Mac, if you can mount a cloud service in the Finder, it’s no problem. It’s a folder. But on mobile, it’s different, and it may not be as responsive. And for something like a text editor, you need to respond quickly, right? You need that your edits be recorded quickly. One of the things about Google is many businesses use this, and you may have Google Docs that you access from the browser, but also that you access in Google Drive and other files in Google The problem is that Google is trying to push out small developers, is what it sounds like that they’ll let the big developers continue accessing Google Drive, and that the small ones, they’re making them pay basically, you know, vig, to be able to use Google Drive, kind of a shame. Okay, very quickly, before we finish, Anker is a Chinese company that is well known for making things like chargers and battery packs. And there are a number of battery packs that are a fire hazard, and you should stop using them. We’re going to link to an article. To an article on Android police, which talks about how to check your serial number, how to find the form for the recall program. This is something really worrisome, because you might have this in your bag when you’re traveling. You might be charging your phone overnight in a hotel or something. The company will send you a replacement if you have proof of purchase. So if you have bought an Anker thing, get your Amazon proof of purchase out. But if you’re using an Anker Power Pack, please check to make sure that it’s safe.
Josh Long 28:28
And this is Anker A, N, K, E, R, not spelled like the anchor on a ship. Anker has been around for a long time. They’ve been sold on Amazon for ages, and now they’re also in some retail stores and things like that too. A very popular brand, definitely something to check out if you use any Anker battery packs.
Kirk McElhearn 28:46
Okay, that’s enough for this week until next week. Josh, stay secure.
Josh Long 28:49
All right, stay secure.
Voice Over 28:52
Thanks for listening to the Intego Mac podcast. The voice of Mac security with your host, Kirk McElhearn and Josh long to get every weekly episode. Be sure to follow us in Apple podcasts or subscribe in your favorite podcast app, and if you can leave a rating, a like or a review, links to topics and information mentioned in the podcast can be found in the show notes for the episode@podcast.intego.com the Intego website is also where to find details on the full line of Intego security and utility software intego.com.
