Apple drawings
September 14, 2026 at 8:09 PM by Dr. Drang
Everyone’s favorite Apple archivist, Stephen Hackett, wrote a short post last week in which he linked to Apple’s page with dimensional drawings of its products. He included this drawing of the iPhone 17 Pro:
You can click on it to see a 300 dpi version. The Apple page linked above will give you infinite-resolution PDFs.
When I zoomed in on Stephen’s page, I was initially confused, but then I realized what seemed odd to me. You see, I’ve spent an awful lot of the past 40 years looking at engineering drawings, and I can’t think of any that looked like this. That’s because the drawings I’m used to are for making the depicted product, but the drawings Apple’s offering up here aren’t for that.1 These are for others—not Apple and not its suppliers—to use for making cases and other accessories. I figured it was worth a quick post on what makes a drawing like the one above so different from what I’m used to.
First off, there are so many dimensions. Drawings of full products are typically called assembly drawings, and they have almost no dimensions. What they do is show how the various component pieces (subassemblies) are put together. The subassemblies have their own drawings that show how they are put together from their components, which are themselves typically subassemblies. Eventually, you get down to the individual part drawings, which depict a single piece of metal or glass or plastic. At each level in this hierarchy, the drawings tend to include only the dimensions necessary to build the object depicted. You don’t include the length and diameter of a screw on an assembly drawing; you simply call out its part number (which is also its drawing number).
Speaking of drawing numbers, if you look in the title block you’ll see that there is no drawing number. Design drawings always have these. They also have the names or initials of the draftsmen and checkers and, usually, a list of revisions. These public drawings don’t reveal any of that internal information.
There are names for many of the items and dimensions: product length, display active area, volume button, rear sensor, etc. These are not common in design drawings because they tend to be of no value to those doing the manufacturing. You don’t need to know what this hole is for; just make it this big and put it here.
Which leads us to tolerances, which are absent. Dimensions and positions are given to the nearest hundredth of a millimeter and there is no give or take. To the outside world, Apple’s dimensions are absolute and invariable. Inside Apple and its suppliers, people know better.
Also absent is any specification of material, other than a few generic mentions of glass. While assembly drawings don’t usually include materials, parts drawings always refer to material specs, usually included in another company document.
The last thing I’ll mention is the Notes section in the upper left corner. It has instructions clearly meant for people outside of Apple and making accessories. If I’d zoomed in on this section first, I probably wouldn’t have been even momentarily confused.
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Obviously. Apple isn’t going to post its design drawings; they’re among its most tightly controlled proprietary documents. Even for a company that considers everything a secret, the design drawings are really secret. ↩
New Apple Watches have ears
September 9, 2026 at 10:42 PM by Dr. Drang
Starting about 45 minutes into today’s Apple Event, during the segment on the new Apple Watch, Ron Huang introduced a couple of features of the Series 12 and Ultra 4 that struck me as both disturbing and possibly illegal. They certainly seem at odds with Apple’s commitment to privacy.
First came Live Rewind, a feature that lets you “go back in time” to pick up on something you missed that was said in the past 15 seconds. Here’s how Apple describes it on the website:
Live Rewind catches what you missed. Did someone say something you couldn’t hear in a loud restaurant or share cooking instructions you didn’t quite catch? Just double-click the Digital Crown, and Live Rewind transcribes what was said in the last 15 seconds. You can ask Siri about the content of the transcript or save it to the new Siri app to revisit later.
In the Event, this was illustrated by a waitress going through the restaurant’s specials too quickly for the diners to remember all of them. One of the diners double-clicks the crown on his watch and reads what she said.
It seems like your watch will be listening continuously, keeping the last 15 seconds in a buffer, ready to be transcribed when you ask. That’s fine for you, because you know it’s happening, but what about those around you? Did they agree to this? I doubt wait staff will be upset with their spiel being transcribed, but the idea behind Live Rewind seems to be that everyone and everything near your watch is being recorded for 15 seconds. Surely, some people wouldn’t consent to that if they were asked. Significantly, though, they’re not being asked. I’m sure Apple will argue that there’s no privacy issue because the recordings aren’t being saved. But if there’s a transcription, isn’t that a type of saving?
And then there’s the question of legality. A great variety of law, both in the United States and across the world, concerns the recording of electronic and in-person conversations. I’m sure Apple has considered this, but I have to think some jurisdictions will frown on Live Rewind. If Apple has to defend it, that’s fine. What’s one more squadron of lawyers to Apple? But if an Apple Watch owner has to defend a transcription made innocently—made with Apple’s encouragement, in fact—that seems like an unfair burden. Maybe Apple should indemnify all future Watch buyers from privacy-related legal action.
Right after Live Rewind, we get the introduction of Siri Recap. From the Series 12 web page:
Siri Recap can summarize your chats to refresh your memory. Siri Recap transforms your conversations into high-level notes, so you can stay focused and present. Each Siri Recap includes a title, a summary, and key points that you can review in the Siri app on your Apple Watch or iPhone. You can turn Siri Recap on or off at any time from Control Center or choose where and when it takes notes, such as only at work or never at night.
Siri Recap does a summary, not a transcription, and it’s not automatic the way Live Rewind is, although it does sound as if you can set it up to always record when you’re at a certain place, so that’s kind of automatic. Apple touted Siri Recap’s privacy with three bullet points:
I think Apple is slicing the baloney pretty thin when it says audio isn’t recorded. Surely there’s some recording because summaries require context; they can’t be made on the fly. Maybe a transcription is done in near-real time and the summary is drawn from that. If so, the transcription is a type of recording, albeit one that isn’t stored after the summary is made. As for not identifying the speakers, I don’t see how that matters. Old-fashioned audio recordings don’t identify speakers, either, but they’re still intrusions on the speakers’ privacy if they didn’t give consent.
Apple has always focused on the privacy of its customers: your information is encrypted, your data stays on your device. It’s following that same pattern here, but the privacy concerns of Live Rewind and Siri Recap aren’t limited to the owners of Apple Watches. Apple now needs think about the privacy of non-customers and be able to explain how that’s being protected, too.
And while an argument can be made that textual transcriptions and recaps aren’t as invasive as saved audio recordings, that doesn’t mean they aren’t invasive at all. That little lock animation Apple’s been using to describe its commitment to privacy has been very effective, but its binary nature doesn’t fit when the products start putting privacy on a sliding scale.
Update 10 Sep 2026 8:14 PM
On Mastodon, Bill Lloyd sent me a link to this longer document from Apple with further explanation of Live Rewind and Siri Recap. The hoops Apple jumped through to avoid certain words is pretty funny. For example, in the discussion of Live Rewind, we learn that
Audio from the microphone flows into the audio buffer inside the Secure Exclave on the S11 chip.
You think your watch records the audio around you? No no no. The audio flows into the Secure Enclave, and flowing is definitely not recording because it’s a different word. Apple’s documentation poets liked flow so much, they also used it in the description of Siri Recap:
If a conversation is detected, audio flows into a protected buffer inside the Secure Exclave on the S11 chip.
Note also that the audio flows into a protected buffer inside the Secure Enclave, so that must make it doubly private.
Thanks for the entertaining link, Bill!
Web and native apps
August 17, 2026 at 2:19 PM by Dr. Drang
This is sacrilegious among some parts of Apple fandom, but I like using web apps. Oh, sure, I can imagine a world in which there’s a carefully crafted Mac app that has all the functions of a website I use but has all the Mac-like interface features I love and isn’t hobbled by a web UI. But I don’t live in that world and don’t expect I ever will.
For example, will the Python Software Foundation ever make a Mac app that includes all the documentation I regularly use? And even if they do, is it likely they’ll put in the effort to make better than just visiting the Python Docs web page? Would that be in keeping with their mission? So instead of waiting around for something that will never happen, I used Unite Pro to make a Python Docs site-specific browser.
Launching it takes me straight to the standard library home page, from which I can quickly jump to the docs of whichever module I’m invoking in my current script. I have similar SSBs for the Matplotlib and Pandas documentation.
You might argue that these SSBs aren’t really web apps, that they’re basically a set of static web pages connected by links. That’s nearly true, but while they don’t have the kind of interaction that you see in, say, Google Sheets, they do have search features that make them more interactive than just a list of links. Regardless of how interactive they are, they serve my needs.
You might also suggest I use Dash, an actual app, instead of an SSB for browsing documentation. It incorporates many many sets of documentation and uses local copies so you don’t have to be online to use it. These are all good points and are why I tried Dash several years ago. It just didn’t fit me, probably because searches in Dash returned too many results across too many libraries. There are probably ways to get it to serve up more focused results, but I didn’t want to become a Dash expert (I’m not Brett Terpstra). I just wanted to see documentation relevant to what I was working on at the time. Initially that meant going to the appropriate website; now it means launching the appropriate SSB.
But I’m not a web app absolutist. I recently ended a web app experiment that’s brought me back to a native app. This was with Mastodon and Mona. When Mona 7 came out at the end of last year, I decided to hold off on buying its Ultra in-app purchase. After all, I thought, Mastodon exists on the web. Does it really need an app?
So I made an SSB with Unite Pro for the Mac and used the free versions of Mona on iOS and iPadOS. Eventually, I felt guilty about using an app without paying the developer, so I did the Add to Home Screen thing on my iPhone and iPad a couple of weeks ago to even things out and use the web on all three platforms. It was terrible.
The biggest problem was the lack of timeline syncing and updating. In theory, this problem should have started when I was using Mona on two devices and an SSB on the third. In practice, it wasn’t so bad because I do almost all of my Mastodon reading and posting on my phone. It was when I started using “web Mastodon” on my phone that I noticed how poorly Mastodon updates the timeline.
On the web, Mastodon puts a link at the top of the page saying there are new posts to load into your timeline. When you tap the link, the new posts load, but your position in the timeline can jump around wildly, and then you have to scroll to get back to where you were. A small annoyance, perhaps, but one that happens again and again every day.
And there’s no syncing between platforms with web Mastodon. This is, as I said, less of a problem for me because I’m mainly reading and posting on my phone, but the scrolling necessary on one device to get to where I had been on another just reminded me of all the scrolling described in the previous paragraph, and it seemed worse.
So I subscribed to Mona Ultra and switched to it on all three platforms. The Mastodon web Home Screen icons are gone from my iPhone and iPad, and the SSB is gone from my Mac. Ultra’s extended settings are nice, and I’m happy to pay for them, but the main advantage is the smoother experience I get with a real app written to use the features of the platform(s) it runs on. In this case, one of those features is iCloud syncing.
(By the way, if you feel tempted to tell me about another Mastodon app, like Ivory, don’t. I know about them—I’m happy with Mona.)
In summary, I don’t have any magic tricks for choosing between web apps and native apps. I just know that it’s worth a little time to try out both and see what fits. Every app and every person is different, and you have to decide from direct experience.
Apple Music weirdness
August 15, 2026 at 5:18 PM by Dr. Drang
I was out on a walk yesterday, listening to the ’70s Hits Radio Station on Apple Music, when “Don’t Leave Me This Way” came on. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to look at a text while the song was playing and was surprised at what the Music app told me about the song.
I’m pretty sure George Benson never covered “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” but even if he did, that’s not the version I was listening to. It was the version everybody knows by Thelma Houston, with her incredible voice and that fun bass part during the chorus. I’ve been listening to it for 50 years, and it’s unmistakable.
So how did Apple Music get the artist wrong? Is the info provided with the album wrong and Apple is just repeating someone else’s mistake? When I got home, I checked this Heartbreak Hits compilation album on other services. Amazon Music, Spotify, and Tidal all had the album, and they all had the artist listed correctly as Thelma Houston. Only Apple got it wrong.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen mistaken artist attribution like this before, but Apple’s weird choice of album to pluck the song from is very familiar. I listen to a lot of Apple’s Radio Stations and its Essentials and Deep Cuts playlists, and it’s common for a song to be assigned to a compilation album instead of the original source. Even when Apple has the original album in its library. As you might have guessed, I find this annoying.
It’s not exactly wrong to show a song as being on a compilation album; most hit songs have been put on “best of” and other sorts of compilations. But it’s bad scholarship. Yes, if the song was released as a standalone single—as many Beatle songs were—the only album you can assign it to is a compilation, but that’s fairly rare.
If, for example, you look at the Prince Essentials playlist—which you should; it’s fantastic—you’ll see that both “Gett Off” and “1999” are shown as being from his The Hits/The B-Sides album. That’s certainly a fun album to listen to, but neither of those songs “belong” to that album. “Gett Off” is from Diamonds and Pearls, and if I have to tell you where “1999” is from, I don’t know why you’ve read this far.
Apple likes to say that music is part of its DNA. I suggest they schedule some genetic counseling.