iCloud

iOS 10.3 introduces new capabilities like Find My AirPods, but one change that went somewhat under the radar is a new feature aiming to improve Siri and artificial intelligence as a whole. As detailed by ZDNet, a new iCloud Analytics feature aims to collect data from users and use it do improve Siri and other smart features.

We’ve noted several times that Apple desperately needs to improve Siri, especially if a standalone Siri Speaker is in the pipeline. Would you opt-in to iCloud Analytics if you knew it would help Siri?

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After rolling out a redesigned iCloud Photos app to the beta site earlier this month, today the updated experience is now available to all through iCloud.com.

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Apple is rolling out a fix for the iCloud Calendar spam issue that has plagued users over the past few weeks. On iCloud.com, the company has added a new Report Junk feature. This lets users remove spammy invites from their calendar and reports the sender to Apple for further investigation.

The feature is currently only available on Apple’s iCloud.com Calendar web app but it is likely to roll out to the iOS and Mac native Calendar in a future software update …

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Apple is readying some upgrades to its iCloud Photos web app found on iCloud.com, first noted by MacMagazine. The Photos web app allows users to access their iCloud Photo Library through a web browser, across Mac and Windows computers.

However, it is somewhat rudimentary in its current state … but the beta.icloud.com site now includes a redesigned Photos app featuring a sidebar and thumbnail scrubber like what already exist in the native Photos app for Mac. Apple tests new features on beta.icloud.com before rolling them out to everyone, so the new features should be available for everyone soon.

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Some Apple users have been plagued with iCloud calendar invite spam in recent weeks, with calendar periods being blocked up with unsolicited events from anonymous senders (usually with Chinese names). It is thought that the spammers are mass targeting any iCloud email account it can find on the web, rather than targeting specific users.

Apple has now acknowledged the issue in a statement to iMore, starting with an apology to anyone who has received iCloud calendar spam. The company says it is actively “identifying and blocking suspicious senders” to try and stem the arrival of the junk messages.

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It was reported yesterday that Apple is disbanding the division of the company responsible for its wireless networking products: the hard drive-equipped Time Capsule and both AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express routers. The report was given additional credence by recent discounts and the fact that the products haven’t been updated in more than three years.

On one level, the decision seems like a no-brainer for Apple. The company is in the premium product basis. Back in the days when Wi-Fi was a new thing, it made sense for Apple to boost adoption rates by offering its own products; now it’s ubiquitous, there’s no reason for the company to be in what is today a very mundane product category.

But if the news is confirmed, it will sadden me a little – and worry me slightly as well …

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Update: Apple has not yet commented on the specific claims made, but tells us:

We offer call history syncing as a convenience to our customers so that they can return calls from any of their devices. Apple is deeply committed to safeguarding our customers’ data. That’s why we give our customers the ability to keep their data private. Device data is encrypted with a user’s passcode, and access to iCloud data including backups requires the user’s Apple ID and password. Apple recommends all customers select strong passwords and use two-factor authentication.

Elcomsoft – the Russian company which sells iPhone cracking tools to governments and corporations – says that iPhones send near real-time call logs to Apple servers even when iCloud backup is switched off, and that these logs are stored for up to four months.

Elcomsoft CEO Vladimir Katalov told Forbes that it also isn’t just traditional phone calls that are logged, and that iOS 10 has expanded the scope of the logging …

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Over recent weeks, iCloud users have started to notice an increased amount of spam coming to various aspects of their accounts. Email accounts, of course, are always vulnerable to spam messages and the root cause can be a variety of different reasons. This new type of spam, however, relates to iCloud’s Calendar and Photo Sharing functionalities…

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I love the Apple ecosystem. It’s not perfect by any means, but I’d say that the vast majority of the time it lives up to Steve’s famous ‘it just works’ promise. It’s the main reason that I have two Macs, an iPad and an iPhone.

So when a big Apple fan deliberately moves outside of that ecosystem, that’s a sign that something is very wrong. And I do so not just in one area, but two. The common theme? iCloud …

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Apple will unify its cloud service teams to improve product development and software quality, according to a new report by Bloomberg. Currently, employees that develop Internet services like Siri, Maps, iCloud, News and Apple Pay are housed in many different buildings mostly outside of the main Infinite Loop campus.

To improve collaboration and speed up product development, Apple will be moving all the relevant teams into the Infinite Loop buildings. This ultimately leads to a better services division, which is the leading source of revenue growth for the company. It is also unifying web products to run on a new backend, codenamed ‘Pie’ …

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One of the new features of macOS Sierra is that it can automatically ‘manage storage’ on your Mac. What this means is, if you’re getting low on SSD space, macOS can automatically upload older and larger files to iCloud and then delete them from your Mac. When macOS deletes a file, it leaves an alias that will download the file from iCloud as required.

Effectively, you don’t have to worry about how much physical storage your Mac has – you can just treat it as an infinitely large drive and macOS takes care of shifting things back and forth from the cloud as required.

That’s great in theory, but there seem to be a few flaws in practice …

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Apple has launched a new 2TB iCloud storage tier a little over a week out from the iPhone 7 launch event. The new 2TB plan, which is its largest plan available, will set users back $19.99 a month.

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It’s been a rough couple of days for Apple’s services. Apple Music took a lengthy hit on Wednesday with subscribers being signed out, then a widespread outage hit multiple services including iCloud on Thursday for several hours. All this during a quarter when Apple is selling itself to investors as a services company, not just the iPhone company, but these outages are way too common.

And it’s not just services. Apple had to re-release iOS 9.3.2 for the 9.7-inch iPad Pro, a minor bug fix update that bricked the company’s latest tablet for a lot of customers. Mistakes happen but it’s Apple’s response after everything is resolved that bothers me…

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Update 2: Apple is reporting that the iCloud.com services have also been restored.

Update: Apple is reporting that the availability of some services has now been restored but several features of iCloud are still down and undergoing maintenance.

As noted by Apple’s system status page, a multitude of Apple services are currently experiencing instability and downtime for some users. The affected services include the App Store, Mac App Store, Apple TV services, iTunes In The Cloud and critical features like Find My iPhone. We have also had a few reports of Apple Music downtime, seemingly repeating the outage yesterday, but Apple’s official status report does not mention any problems with Apple Music at this time.

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Apple subsidiary FileMaker is today releasing FileMaker 15, introducing a number of notable additions for mobile device users as well as a host of other new features and enhancements for the platform.

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Dropbox is today announcing a new upcoming feature of its platform, codenamed Project Infinite. When Infinite rolls out, you’ll be able to see all your files and folders stored on Dropbox in the Finder, but they won’t take up any space until they are needed. The company is currently targeting the feature at business users.

This means your Dropbox storage can be far larger in total size than your local disk (as is common with modern setups of 1 TB Dropbox tiers and small SSDs) with on-demand instantaneous access to any file at any time over the Internet …

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The Information is reporting that Apple’s efforts to build out its own cloud infrastructure are being held back by company politics. Apple wants to overhaul its cloud services backends to rely on new technologies built in-house but is facing several roadblocks, attributable in part to power struggle between the Siri group and another group handling other Apple services like iMessage and iTunes.

According to The Information, one engineering manager has already resigned with more likely to follow.

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Apple is reportedly working with Chinese server vendor Inspur as it seeks to bring the infrastructure for its cloud services in-house.

Apple currently relies on third-party companies to host its cloud content, most of the capacity currently provided by Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, with Google also recently joining the roster. However, the company is said to be working on developing its own data network and infrastructure in a project codenamed McQueen.

While part of the motivation will be cost, it was also recently reported that security is another significant consideration, Apple being concerned that servers received from third-parties may have been tampered with prior to delivery …

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