Apple’s Most Back-Ordered New Product Is Not What You Expect
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OAKLAND, Calif — Apple this month unveiled an array of new gadgets: more powerful MacBook laptop computers, AirPod wireless headphones with longer battery life and HomePod Mini speakers in three more colors.
But a different and unheralded Apple release is garnering so much interest that it has become the company’s most back-ordered new product: a $19, 6.3-by-6.3-inch cloth to wipe smudges and fingerprints off screens.
The cloth, imprinted with the Apple logo in the corner, is made with “soft, nonabrasive material” to clean the screens of iPhones, iPads and MacBooks “safely and effectively,” according to the product page. The listing adds that the Polishing Cloth — capital P, capital C — is “compatible” with 88 different Apple products. For most U.S. shoppers, shipment is delayed until Jan. 11, at the earliest.
Charging $19 for a piece of cloth about the size of two stacked dollar bills is bold even by Apple’s standards, a company whose legions of loyal customers are conditioned to stomach steep prices. An Apple-branded set of four wheels to “improve mobility” for the Mac Pro, the company’s most expensive desktop computer, is priced at $699, for instance.
But the Polishing Cloth stands out because it is far more expensive than widely available alternatives. MagicFiber, a popular brand of microfiber cloth that uses ultrafine fibers to clean glass without scratching the surface, offers a pack of six for $9 on Amazon.
“You have to give them credit for the chutzpah to charge $19,” Walter Gonzalez, president and founder of Goja, the parent company of MagicFiber, said of Apple.
Even so, the price has not stopped Apple fans from rushing to be early adopters.
Albert Lee, 47, a director at a consulting firm in New York, said he bought the cloth at an Apple Store on Tuesday. He was picking up a new MacBook Pro, a high-end laptop computer, when the Polishing Cloth caught his eye. He bought four and then posted a picture of his bounty on Twitter.
“It’s just a point of sheer excess,” Mr. Lee acknowledged, calling the splurge an impulse buy of “the most elite cloth.” He added: “I just spent $4,000 on a laptop. What’s another $19?”
On Twitter, the cloth has been fodder for jokes and even a parody account since Apple quietly put it on sale on Oct. 18. Later that week, when Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, posted a tweet promoting a new retail store in Turkey, Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, needled him by replying, “Come see the Apple Cloth” with a trademark logo.
(Mr. Musk’s company is also not shy about testing the strength of its brand and the fealty of its customers. Tesla’s website offers a company-branded “handblown” decanter for $150 and a $60 umbrella with an “ergonomically designed handle.”)
Technically, the cloth is not a new product. Apple had previously provided it free for customers who bought one of its high-end monitors, Pro Display XDR. The $5,999 display has a special type of glass that reduces glare, but may scratch if wiped with a conventional cloth. Apple said it designed its own cloth for that special glass and decided to sell the product separately when some customers asked to buy extras.
An Apple official said in an interview, based on the condition that The New York Times not quote or identify her, that the company was not surprised by the demand for the Polishing Cloth. The official said the cloth was very effective and had been designed to be special, including a custom light gray color. Apple said the cloth was made of a nonwoven microfiber but declined to elaborate.
Federico Viticci, editor in chief of MacStories, a website dedicated to Apple news and apps, said he initially thought the Polishing Cloth was a joke.
“I’ve been cleaning my iPhone screen and my iPad screen with the cloth that comes with my eyeglasses or my T-shirt, or a paper towel like normal people,” he said.
But Mr. Viticci, who is based in Italy, said he ended up buying the Polishing Cloth because “I kind of realized the meme potential here.” His tweets about the product have since gotten hundreds or thousands of likes and retweets, with subscribers to his site asking for exclusive cloth photos.
Patrick Tomasso, 32, a Toronto-based YouTube creator of tech and photography-related videos, said he also thought that Apple charging $25 Canadian dollars for the cloth was “ridiculous” since many tech products include a microfiber cloth free.
But when he noticed that it was not shipping until next year, he said he got a “bit of FOMO” — fear of missing out — and quickly snapped up two sheets from a nearby Apple store. As a spoof, Mr. Tomasso then made an “unboxing video” of himself opening the “most revolutionary Apple product.”
In the video, he noticed that the Polishing Cloth’s color looked different in person — more gray, less white — and that there was a big crease in the middle that might need to be ironed.
His assessment? It’s a nice cloth worth maybe $5.
“I probably would not buy it again but I like the fact that I own one,” Mr. Tomasso said. Then he paused and added, “But I hate that I like that I own one.”
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The New York Times Pulls Out of Apple News
The Times said Apple News did not align with its strategy of building direct relationships with paying readers.
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By Kellen Browning and Jack Nicas
The New York Times said on Monday that it was exiting its partnership with Apple News, as news organizations struggle to compete with large tech companies for readers’ attention and dollars.
Starting on Monday, Times articles were no longer appearing alongside those from other publications in the curated Apple News feed available on Apple devices.
The Times is one of the first media organizations to pull out of Apple News. The Times, which has made adding new subscribers a key business goal, said Apple had given it little in the way of direct relationships with readers and little control over the business. It said it hoped to instead drive readers directly to its own website and mobile app so that it could “fund quality journalism.”
“Core to a healthy model between The Times and the platforms is a direct path for sending those readers back into our environments, where we control the presentation of our report, the relationships with our readers and the nature of our business rules,” Meredith Kopit Levien, chief operating officer, wrote in a memo to employees. “Our relationship with Apple News does not fit within these parameters.”
An Apple spokesman said that The Times “only offered Apple News a few stories a day,” and that the company would continue to provide readers with trusted information from thousands of publishers.
“We are also committed to supporting quality journalism through the proven business models of advertising, subscriptions and commerce,” he said.
The news business has had a complicated relationship with Silicon Valley for decades. Companies like Google and Facebook have decimated newspaper advertising sales and disintermediated news sites by positioning their own platforms as one of the main ways that people can consume news.
Yet when Apple created a news app in late 2015, promising to work with publishers to help them build a business, many news executives were cautiously optimistic.
Unlike other tech companies, Apple didn’t compete with news sites for ad dollars. And Apple adopted an approach that was antithetical to how its Silicon Valley peers handled the headlines: It allowed only mainstream news organizations in the app, and humans, not algorithms, ranked the top stories.
Apple’s aggressive promotion of Apple News on iPhones has given it an audience of roughly 125 million monthly readers, making the app one of the world’s most widely read news sources. But advertising in the app has generated little revenue for news organizations. For any subscriptions sold in the app, Apple also takes a 30 percent cut.
Last year, Apple introduced a new way for publishers to make money: Apple News Plus, a subscription service inside its news app that offers access to hundreds of publications, which typically have digital paywalls, for $9.99 a month.
Apple told publishers that the service would deliver customers they wouldn’t otherwise get. But many publications would be undercutting their own prices, and they would have to share half of the Apple News Plus revenues with dozens of other news organizations. Apple took the other half for itself.
Still, many publishers took the gamble, including The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and Condé Nast, which publishes The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired. Months after its debut, many publishers were underwhelmed by the sales, according to Digiday, a digital media news site.
Executives at The Times passed on Apple News Plus and later reduced the number of articles it supplied to Apple News. In an interview with Reuters last year, Mark Thompson, The Times’s chief executive, warned other news organizations about the risks of teaming up with Apple.
“We tend to be quite leery about the idea of almost habituating people to find our journalism somewhere else,” he said.
The Times said last month that its total subscribers had topped six million. Revenue has been rising from digital subscriptions, even as the company grapples with an advertising downturn brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Times has long had a complex relationship with the large tech companies. It has experimented with working with Facebook, including on an effort called Instant Articles several years ago.
But The Times stopped producing Instant Articles for the social network in 2017, saying it wasn’t getting enough revenue. Now Facebook pays The Times to feature its articles in the news tab on Facebook’s app, the company’s latest effort to work with the news industry. Times articles also appear in Google News, which sends readers to publishers’ websites, unlike Apple News, which generally keeps readers on Apple’s app.
In her note to employees, Ms. Levien said that exiting the partnership with Apple News was not expected to have “a material impact” to The Times’s business and that the company would work with Apple in other ways, including on apps, podcasts and hardware.
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To Be Tracked or Not? Apple Is Now Giving Us the Choice.
With Apple’s latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here’s what to know.
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If we had a choice, would any of us want to be tracked online for the sake of seeing more relevant digital ads?
We are about to find out.
On Monday, Apple released iOS 14.5, one of its most anticipated software updates for iPhones and iPads in years. It includes a new privacy tool, App Tracking Transparency, which could give us more control over how our data is shared.
Here’s how it works: When an app wants to follow our activities to share information with third parties such as advertisers, a window will show up on our Apple device to ask for our permission to do so. If we say no, the app must stop monitoring and sharing our data.
A pop-up window may sound like a minor design tweak, but it has thrown the online advertising industry into upheaval. Most notably, Facebook has gone on the warpath. Last year, the social network created a website and took out full-page ads in newspapers denouncing Apple’s privacy feature as harmful to small businesses.
A big motivator, of course, was that the privacy setting could hurt Facebook’s own business. If we choose not to let Facebook track us, it will be harder for the company to see what we are shopping for or doing inside other apps, which will make it more difficult for brands to target us with ads. (Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has disputed that his company’s business will be hurt by Apple’s policy.)
“This is a huge step in the right direction, if only because it’s making Facebook sweat,” said Gennie Gebhart, a director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit.
But, she added, “one big question is: Will it work?”
Ms. Gebhart and other privacy experts said Apple’s new feature might not be enough to put an end to shady tracking on iPhones. It could simply push developers and ad-technology firms to find loopholes so they can continue tracking people in different ways, she and others said.
For about two months, I have been testing early versions of iOS 14.5 to get acclimated with the new privacy control and other new features. Only a few developers have been testing the pop-up window with the public, so my findings about how well the privacy feature works have been limited.
But I found that iOS 14.5 also has other important new features. One is the ability to use Siri to work with a music player other than Apple Music, such as Spotify, by default. That’s a big deal: In the past, the voice assistant wasn’t convenient to use with other music services.
Here’s what you need to know about Apple’s new software.
Don’t Track Me (Please)
It’s important to understand how tracking works inside apps.
Let’s say you use a shopping app to browse for a blender. You look at a blender from Brand X, then close the app. Later, ads for that blender start showing up in other mobile apps, like Facebook and Instagram.
Here’s what happened: The shopping app hired an ad-tech company that embedded trackers inside the app. Those trackers looked at information on your device to pinpoint you. When you opened other apps working with the same ad-tech firm, those apps were able to identify you and serve you ads for Brand X’s blender.
Apple’s new privacy feature is intended to let you decide whether you want that to happen. Now, when you open some apps, you will be greeted with a pop-up window: “Allow [App Name] to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites?” You can choose “Ask App Not to Track” or “Allow.”
When we select “Ask App Not to Track,” two things happen. The first is that Apple disables the app from using an Apple device identifier, a random string of letters and numbers that is assigned to our iPhones and is used to track our activities across apps and websites. The second is that we communicate to the app developer that, broadly speaking, we don’t want our information to be tracked and shared with anyone in any way.
That seems easy enough. But No. 2 is where things also get slightly complicated.
Ad-tech companies already have many ways to follow us beyond Apple’s device identifier. For example, advertisers can use a method called fingerprinting. This involves looking at seemingly innocuous characteristics of your device — like the screen resolution, operating system version and model — and combining them to determine your identity and track you across different apps.
It’s difficult for Apple to block all tracking and fingerprinting happening on iPhones, privacy researchers said. That would require knowing about or predicting every new tracking method that an ad-tech firm comes up with.
“From a technical standpoint, there isn’t a whole lot that you can do” to stop such tracking, said Mike Audi, the founder of Tiki, an app that can help you see what other apps are doing with your data.
Yet the privacy change is still significant because it explicitly asks us for consent. If we tell apps that we don’t want to be tracked and they keep doing so, Apple can bar the offenders from its App Store.
Understand the Facebook Papers
A tech giant in trouble. The leak of internal documents by a former Facebook employee has provided an intimate look at the operations of the secretive social media company and renewed calls for better regulations of the company’s wide reach into the lives of its users.
How it began. In September, The Wall Street Journal published The Facebook Files, a series of reports based on leaked documents. The series exposed evidence that Facebook, which on Oct. 28 assumed the corporate name of Meta, knew Instagram, one of its products was worsening body-image issues among teenagers.
The whistle-blower. During an interview with “60 Minutes” that aired Oct. 3, Frances Haugen, a Facebook product manager who left the company in May, revealed that she was responsible for the leak of those internal documents.
Ms. Haugen’s testimony in Congress. On Oct. 5, Ms. Haugen testified before a Senate subcommittee, saying that Facebook was willing to use hateful and harmful content on its site to keep users coming back. Facebook executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, called her accusations untrue.
The Facebook Papers. Ms. Haugen also filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided the documents to Congress in redacted form. A congressional staff member then supplied the documents, known as the Facebook Papers, to several news organizations, including The New York Times.
New revelations. Documents from the Facebook Papers show the degree to which Facebook knew of extremist groups on its site trying to polarize American voters before the election. They also reveal that internal researchers had repeatedly determined how Facebook’s key features amplified toxic content on the platform.
The pop-up window also makes the privacy control far easier for people to discover, said Stephanie Nguyen, a research scientist who has studied user experience design and data privacy. In the past, iPhone owners could restrict advertisers from tracking them, but the tools to do so were buried in settings where most people wouldn’t look.
“The option was available before, but, really, was it?” Ms. Nguyen said. “That’s a big shift — making it visible.”
As of this week, all apps with tracking behavior must include the App Tracking Transparency pop-up in their next software updates. That means we initially will probably see a small number of apps requesting permission to track us, with the number growing over time as more apps are updated.
Overdue Features
Apple’s new software also includes two other interesting new features: the ability to use Siri to play audio with a third-party app like Spotify and the option to quickly unlock an iPhone while wearing a mask.
For many, these will feel long overdue. Siri has seamlessly worked only with Apple Music for music playback since 2015, which has been frustrating for those who want to use the voice assistant to play songs using other music apps. The change comes as antitrust scrutiny mounts over whether Apple stifles competition by favoring its own apps.
To make Siri work with other audio services, you won’t have to change any settings. If you normally listen to music with a third-party app, such as Spotify, Siri will simply learn over time that you prefer that app and react accordingly. (Audio app developers need to program their apps to support Siri, so if they haven’t done so yet, this won’t work.) That means if you always use Spotify to play music, you will be able to say “Hey, Siri, play the Beatles” to start playing a Beatles playlist on Spotify.
The other new feature helps solve a pandemic issue. For more than a year, wearing a mask has been extra annoying for owners of newer iPhones that have face scanners to unlock the device. That’s because the iPhone camera has not been able to recognize our covered mugs. Apple’s iOS 14.5 finally delivers a mechanism to unlock the phone while masked, though it requires wearing an Apple Watch.
Here’s how that works: When you scan your face and the phone determines it can’t recognize you because your mouth and nose are obstructed, it will check to see if your Apple Watch is unlocked and nearby. The Apple Watch, in effect, acts as proof to verify that you are the one trying to unlock your phone.
To make this work, update the software on your iPhone and Apple Watch, then open the Settings app on your iPhone. Scroll down to “Face ID & Passcode.” In this menu, go to “Unlock with Apple Watch” and toggle on the option to use your Apple Watch to unlock when the image scanner detects your face with a mask.
Next time you are at the grocery store and look at your phone, your watch will vibrate once and unlock your phone. Sweet relief.
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