Month: June 2017

Enlarge / One of the 2016 MacBook Pros. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Apple has some good news for those of you who still use older Macs: the new release, macOS High Sierra, will run on any Mac hardware that currently runs Sierra. The full support list is as follows:

• MacBook (late 2009 and later)
• iMac (late 2009 and later)
• MacBook Air (2010 and later)
• MacBook Pro (2010 and later)
• Mac Mini (2010 and later)
• Mac Pro (2010 and later)

Last year, Sierra dropped support for many 2007, 2008, and 2009-era Macs, the first time Apple had changed its system requirements since releasing Mountain Lion in 2012. At the time, the company told us that it wanted to bring the Mac’s software support cycle more in line with its hardware support lifecycle. Apple considers hardware made between five and seven years ago to be “vintage,” and it limits the type of service it will provide for those machines. Anything made more than seven years ago is considered “obsolete,” and Apple and its authorized service providers will no longer offer to support or repair it if you bring it in.

Still, given that desktops and laptops improve at a slower rate and have a longer useful life than phones and tablets, it’s nice to see that Apple isn’t just heedlessly dropping support for older hardware based on its vintage rather than its capabilities. Not all Macs will support all of High Sierra's new features—some capabilities rely on hardware only included in newer Macs—but as long as your Mac runs Sierra, you’ll be able to get most of the new improvements if you want them.

Enlarge / Tim Cook confirms. (credit: Apple)

Tim Cook began his Monday WWDC keynote by confirming a major app finally coming to Apple's TV line: Amazon Prime Video.

"Amazon is coming to the TV app in all Apple TVs later this year with Amazon Prime Video," Cook told the WWDC keynote crowd. This confirms rumors that began circulating in May about Amazon's video-streaming service finally landing on Apple's TV ecosystem.

Cook did not confirm whether the other half of the May rumor—that Apple TV will return to Amazon's virtual store shelves—will come true.

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SAN JOSE—Apple announced the next iteration of its wearable software at its annual developers conference today: watchOS 4. One of the new features will be a Siri-powered watch face with "proactive" information that changes using Siri's intelligence.

Developing. We'll add more details to this post as they become available.

Enlarge (credit: Daniel Arvesen)

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide its biggest privacy dispute in years, a case that asks whether the authorities need a probable-cause court warrant to access people's mobile phone location history.

"Because cell phone location records can reveal countless private details of our lives, police should only be able to access them by getting a warrant based on probable cause," said Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. "The time has come for the Supreme Court to make clear that the longstanding protections of the Fourth Amendment apply with undiminished force to these kinds of sensitive digital records."

For years, the authorities have been obtaining data pinpointing the cell towers that a suspect's mobile phone pinged—all without a warrant. That information is then used as evidence showing a suspect's past whereabouts. In the case before the justices, the authorities got 127 days of cell-site information that included 12,898 location points as part of a Detroit robbery investigation.

Enlarge / Mylan Chairman, Robert J. Coury, had some spicy responses for critics. (credit: Getty | : Jamie McCarthy )

Some pharmaceutical companies are troubled by stratospheric drug prices. Several have vowed to limit price hikes, for instance. And the powerful drug lobbying group PhRMA is at least trying to distract consumers’ attention away from price gouging by dangling shiny advertisements about their life-saving research.

But there are some companies that just don’t care. Mylan appears to be one of those.

Despite intense backlash from customers and advocates, several federal investigations, and blustering lawmakers, the company has yet to drop the soaring price of its epinephrine auto-injectors, EpiPen, as the New York Times pointed out this weekend. The paper sat down with 10 former high-ranking executives and Mylan’s current CEO Heather Bresch to try to understand their perspective.

Enlarge (credit: Credit: Ron Miller)

Tabby's star, which undergoes a chaotic pattern of dimming, has attracted a lot of attention due to suggestions that it might host an orbiting megastructure constructed by aliens. But it's not the only star with an odd pattern of dimming. Astronomers have now taken a close look at one called PDS 110 and come up with a possible explanation for its pattern: a giant planet with rings that orbits outside the plane of most of the other material in the system.

While it's a pretty tenuous explanation, the good news is that we should be able to get more data soon. The planet's next passage is expected to be in September, and the dimming should be clear enough to be visible to amateur astronomers.

Deep dive into the archives

PDS 110 lies a bit over 1,100 light years from Earth. It's similar to our Sun in terms of mass, but it's much, much younger; estimates are that it's less than 10 million years old. At that age, it's still expected to have a large disk of dust and gas that may be forming planets. But imaging of PDS 110 shows no sign of the dust, suggesting that the disk is at an angle where it doesn't obscure any of the star from Earth's perspective.