Apple Intelligence is available for those with an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max or any iPhone 16 model.

We join the debate as protests over the iPhone 16 demand accountability for exploitation in mineral mining.

Mariano Rivera was never secretive about the grip on his signature pitch. He’d show it to teammates, coaches, even reporters. He placed his index and middle fingers together along the seams. He pulled down with his middle finger upon release. The ball would whiz arrow-straight before veering sharply a few inches from where the hitter expected it.

When teaching pitchers how it should feel coming out of their hand, however, Rivera could be frustratingly vague. Put pressure on the middle finger, he would say. This can be a moneymaker for you. Even now, nobody can make a fastball move quite like Mo’s. “It is as if it dropped straight from the heavens,” he wrote in his 2014 memoir. “How can I explain it any other way?”

Eleven years after Rivera’s retirement, a wrist brace with claws could strip any last intimation of divinity out of pitching. A pitcher’s fingers slide into its four rubber rings, attached to metal straws that are fastened by a Velcro strap around the wrist. This device, the FlexPro Grip, measures exactly how quickly each of a pitcher’s fingers exert pressure on a ball. But the point of the gadget isn’t just to register finger forces. It’s to transform the art of pitching into a science.

One afternoon last year, at a training facility called VeloU, I watched as Aidan Dolinsky, a pitcher for New York University, slipped on the FlexPro Grip and awaited instructions from Adam Moreau, the device’s co-creator. “I want you to squeeze with your two fingers”—the index and middle—“but only at about 50 percent of your maximum pressure,” Moreau said. “Hold it there for a few seconds. Hold, hold. And then instantly—boom—ramp up to your max force.”

As Dolinsky squeezed, Moreau began peppering him with numbers. “Get to 69,” he said, glancing at the app in front of them, “and then when you see that little green dot there, slam on it … Okay, hold, hold, go!”

The young pitcher needed a few tries before he mastered the proper sequence of acceleration. “I realized I was squeezing too hard, so then I backed off too much,” Dolinsky said.

“That’s quantifying feel!” Moreau cried. Imagine, he said, standing on the mound, and knowing exactly how much force to put on each key finger, and exactly how to peak them at the same time. “What would that do to your spin?”

Today’s professional pitchers throw harder than ever, but their art is still largely dictated by speculative notions of feel. Pitchers have forever been licking their fingers and clutching rosin bags to help with grip; these days, camera technology and data analysis have put a premium on players who can also impart enough spin to make the ball run, ride, cut, carry, sink, tunnel, and bore along a split-second flight path. It’s not enough to be blessed with a golden arm. You need to have it work in conjunction with your fingers, too.

Only recently, though, has anyone tried to understand exactly how those fingers work in pitching. In 2017, Glenn Fleisig, an expert in biomechanics, led a cohort of researchers looking at how elite pitchers apply finger pressure while throwing. By stuffing a regulation baseball with sensors, the researchers found that the force of the middle and index finger on the ball spiked twice, the last coming roughly six to seven milliseconds before release—in essence, the instant the ball leaves the hand. The force of that final peak averaged 185 Newtons, exerted through two fingers kissing the seams of a five-ounce baseball. It’s enough force to heave a bowling ball about 90 miles an hour.

When I spoke with Fleisig, he recalled that the primary motivation around the study was injury prevention. Elbow tears are collectively a billion-dollar problem for Major League Baseball each year, and “knowing how hard someone grips has implications about what’s happening in your elbow,” he said. What he found, though, also unlocked a mystery about pitching. Fleisig had previously reported that the angular velocity achievable by a pitcher’s shoulder maxes out at about 90 miles an hour, but pitchers can throw faster than that. Something else had to be providing that extra oomph—the fingers. “A huge thing that separates a good pitcher from a great pitcher,” Fleisig said, “is their ability to do that last push.”

[Devin Gordon: Arms are flying off their hinges]

Fleisig’s work is emblematic of a recent and long-overdue boom in touch research. “We’re now catching up to where we’ve been for many decades in the auditory and visual fields,” David Ginty, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, told me. When Ginty started his somatosensory research lab in the mid-1990s, the field was small and quirky, dominated by a few labs producing a handful of papers a year. Today, the IEEE World Haptics conference, the top symposium where touch researchers share their findings, is a sprawling, festival-like event, sponsored by a subsidiary of Meta. Advancements in molecular-genetic techniques have enabled labs like Ginty’s to see how individual nerve cells respond to certain stimuli. It’s given researchers the best picture yet of the basic biology of touch, and it’s jump-started investigations into new treatments for chronic pain, anemia, irritable bowel syndrome, traumatic brain injury, and even low bone density. A stream of studies in recent years has also highlighted the psychological, cognitive, and creative benefits of doing things by hand.

In science, the closer anyone looks at touch, the more its influence becomes apparent. In baseball, it could revolutionize how teams look for the next Mariano Rivera with the magic feel.

For Connor Lunn’s entire baseball career, “feel” was waved off as something subjective and abstract, mostly because it couldn’t be measured. Eventually, Lunn, a recently retired minor-league pitcher, realized that people weren’t even trying. “We have every other metric out there—how hard you’re throwing, all the spin rates, the tail axis, everything,” Lunn told me. “But there was nothing out there on where you’re gripping the ball.” Learning how to throw a new pitch was like getting a prescription for eyeglasses based on what somebody else is telling you looks clear for them. In April, shortly before being signed as a free agent by the Tampa Bay Rays, Lunn was co-awarded the patent on a design for a baseball wrapped in a pressure-sensing fabric.

Alex Fast, a data analyst and writer for PitchingList.com, also thought the role of pressure was being overlooked. In March 2023, he gave a talk at the MIT Sloan Analytics Conference in Boston about measuring finger pressure in baseball. Using sensors and other supplies bought from Amazon, he built a feedback device that was tiny and flexible enough to be worn underneath a piece of tape on the fingertip and that could transmit force data to a microcontroller, worn inside a fanny pack on the pitcher’s lower back. “When I first got into analytics, I remember thinking that they’ve quantified everything,” Fast told me. But so many people that he spoke with after the conference shared his hunch about finger force, Fast told me later, that he began to think, This could be pitching’s next great analytical frontier.

[From the July/August 2023 issue: Moneyball broke baseball]

Part of what’s so notable about the attention being paid to touch in baseball circles is its contrast with how most of us navigate the world. I can point to one tool I reliably touch in my daily life: my iPhone, with its flat, smooth surface. I tap, scroll, and occasionally pinch it; calling it a touchscreen is an insult to the various forms of touch humans once used to manipulate pens, books, Rolodexes, keys, cash, coins, camcorders, calculators, discs, tapes, and credit cards. In households around the world, voice assistants and smart devices already respond nimbly to vocal commands to turn on lights, play songs, set temperatures, and change television channels. Hands-free fixtures fill the bathroom. Telehealth visits replace physical exams. Virtual reality has barely any use for the hands or feet.

That our grip on the physical world is slipping has real consequences: A long history of medical study has connected hand strength to overall physical health and longevity, for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear. Christy Isbell, a pediatric occupational therapist at East Tennessee State University, said she sees some kids as old as 4 or 5 years who have never held a pencil or a crayon. The absence of that tactile experience may change how they learn to read and write, she told me, and limit them in other ways. Healthy young adults who spend lots of time on their smartphones have weaker grips, duller fingers, and higher rates of hand and wrist injuries than their peers who use their phones less frequently. Professors at medical schools are raising alarms about the diminishing dexterity of surgical students.

Pitchers are an outlier. Unlike the rest of us, they must be attuned to precisely how their fingertips interact with the world every time they take the mound. And simply paying a little more attention to that interaction appears to make a great difference. According to research by the company that manufactures the FlexPro Grip, pitchers who use the device have been able to increase the rate of spin on their fastball by about 4 percent. A higher spin rate on a fastball can produce a “rising” effect that makes it harder for hitters to square up.

[Read: The scourge of ‘win probability’ in sports]

Even if the rest of us never get our finger pressure measured, the research is clear that we can benefit emotionally, cognitively, and physically by doing more with our hands—by jotting down notes, knitting, or taking a pottery class. With that effort, and the help of a few committed baseball buffs, perhaps we can arrest our collective drift into a hands-free world.

Apple (AAPL) is back on top of a fast-growing competitor in China.

Read more...

Shares of Apple (AAPL) closed down 2.16% on Wednesday after a report that the iPhone maker cut orders for its latest version by millions of units.

Read more...

Apple (AAPL) is expected to introduce its much hyped artificial intelligence features next week, but analysts aren’t expecting the rollout to turbocharge lagging demand for its latest lineup of iPhones.

Read more...

Apple (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook doesn’t seem to be too worried about the iPhone maker’s late start on artificial intelligence.

Read more...

I worry that the calculator we’ve known and loved is not long for this Earth. This month, when I upgraded my iPhone to the latest operating system, iOS 18, it came with a refreshed Calculator app. The update offered some improvements! I appreciated the vertical orientation of its scientific mode, because turning your phone sideways is so 2009; the continuing display of each operation (e.g., 217 ÷ 4 + 8) on the screen until I asked for the result; the unit-conversion mode, because I will never know what a centimeter is. But there also was a startling omission: The calculator’s “C” button—the one that clears input—was gone. The “C” itself had been cleared.

Until today, the iPhone’s calculator mimicked the buttons of its forebears: If you keyed in 48.375, for instance, instead of 43.875, tapping “C” within your app would zero out your entry so you could try again. “Forty-three point eight seven five,” you might say aloud to remember, and then again while you tried to press the buttons in their proper order. Now that zeroing function is no more. In place of “C,” the app provides a backspace button (⌫). Pressing it removes the last digit from your input: 48.375 becomes 48.37, then 48.3, and so on.

This may seem like an insignificant development, or a minor change for the better. Instead of clearing an errant figure and then incanting its digits while trying to reenter them, I can simply reverse to the point where I made the error—backspace, backspace, backspace—and type again from there, just as I’d do for text. By all measures of reason, this process is superior. Yet the loss of “C” from my calculator app has been more than a shock to me. It feels like an affront.

[Read: Lithium-ion batteries have gone too far]

The “C” button’s function is vestigial. Back when calculators were commercialized, starting in the mid-1960s, their electronics were designed to operate as efficiently as possible. If you opened up a desktop calculator in 1967, you might have found a dozen individual circuit boards to run and display its four basic mathematical functions. Among these would have been an input buffer or temporary register that could store an input value for calculation and display. The “C” button, which was sometimes labeled “CE” (Clear Entry) or “CI” (Clear Input), provided a direct interface to zero out—or “clear”—such a register. A second button, “AC” (All Clear), did the same thing, but for other parts of the circuit, including previously stored operations and pending calculations. (A traditional calculator’s memory buttons—“M+,” “M-,” “MC”—would perform simple operations on a register.)

By 1971, Mostech and Texas Instruments had developed a “calculator on a chip,” which condensed all of that into a single integrated circuit. Those chips retained the functions of their predecessors, including the ones that were engaged by “C” and “AC” buttons. And this design continued on into the era of pocket calculators, financial calculators, and even scientific calculators such as the ones you may have used in school. Some of the latter were, in essence, programmable pocket computers themselves, and they could have been configured with a backspace key. They were not. The “C” button lived on.

For me, that persistence fed a habit that I barely knew had been engrained. Decades of convention have made my mind and fingers expect the comforting erasure “C” provided. Destroy that input; make it zero! And zero it became, in an instant, a placeholder for any possibility. When I saw that “C” was gone, I was hanging art in my bedroom and trying to calculate a measurement for the center of the wall. Which is to say, my hands and brain were full: I was holding pencils and measuring tape as I balanced on a ladder and clung to the edge of the art frame. This was not the time for me to readjust my calculator’s input one digit at a time. I needed to zero that thang—but I couldn’t.

[Read: Please don’t make me download another app]

I am pleased but also confused to report that the iPhone’s “AC” button remains. When no value sits in the input buffer awaiting its desired mathematical operation, the ⌫ button changes to “AC.” The ability to destroy all local mathematics remains, at least for now. Also confusing: As TikTok influencers and tech tipsters have been pointing out for years, you could already backspace in the iPhone’s Calculator app just by swiping on the screen. (In the new app, that ability seems to have been removed.)

I will acclimate, like I did to all the other ways in which having a magical general-purpose computer in my pocket has altered familiar interactions with formerly stand-alone devices. I’ve come to accept, for example, that the shutter button in my camera app doesn’t capture the lens view that I see on screen; instead, it initiates a set of software processes that construct the processed version of the scene that a thousand engineers think I want instead.

But the “C” button’s quiet departure feels different. A computer computes, and calculation was one of its first and most important tasks. Today’s calculator programs are—or were—simulations of calculators, the electronic machines that had been designed to perform mathematical operations—the old, chunky machine with a printed tape that sat on your accountant’s desk; the Casio or TI calculator that you used for high-school trigonometry; the rugged Hewlett-Packard that you swiped off Dad’s desk so you could make its display read BOOBIES upside-down (5318008). It feels silly to lament their loss, or to miss a virtual button that did little more than refer to its precursor. Swapping “C” for ⌫ may be overdue, and it could end up making the software versions of electronic calculators better. Yet this small change has been upending. I worry that the calculator, like many other smartphone apps, is not evolving so much as being fiddled with, and for the joy of fiddling at that. Maybe the whole calculator project needs to press “AC” on itself, before that button is gone forever too.

Fifteen years ago, an Apple ad campaign issued a paean to the triumph of the smartphone: There’s an app for that, it said. Today, that message sounds less like a promise than a threat. There’s an app for that? If only there weren’t.

Apps are all around us now. McDonald’s has an app. Dunkin’ has an app. Every chain restaurant has an app. Every food-delivery service too: Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Chowbus. Every supermarket and big-box store. I currently have 139 apps on my phone. These include: Menards, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Joann Fabric, Dierbergs, Target, IKEA, Walmart, Whole Foods. I recently re-downloaded the Michaels app while I was in the Michaels checkout line just so I could apply a $5 coupon that the register failed to read from the app anyway.

Even when you’re lacking in a store-specific app, your apps will let you pay by app. You just need to figure out (or remember, if you ever knew) whether your gardener or your hair salon takes Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, or one of the new bank-provided services such as Zelle and Paze.

It’s enough to drive you crazy, which is a process you can also track with apps for mental health, such as Headspace and Calm. Lots of apps are aiming to help you feel your best. My iPhone comes with Apple Health, but you might also find yourself with Garmin or Strava or maybe Peloton if you’re into that, or whichever app you need to scan into your local gym, or Under Armour, a polyester-shirt app that is also a jogging app. The MyChart app may help you reach a subset of your doctors and check a portion of your medical-test results. As for the rest? Different apps!

The tree of apps is always growing, always sending out its seeds. I have an app for every airline I have ever flown. And in every place I ever go, I use fresh apps to get around. In New York, I scan into the subway using just my phone, but the subway app tells me which lines are out of service. For D.C., I have the SmarTrip app. At home, in St. Louis, I have a physical pass for the Metrolink, but if I want to buy a ticket for my kid, I need to use the Transit app. For hiring a car, I’ve got the Uber app, which works almost anywhere, but I also have the app for Lyft, and Curb for taxis, just in case. Also, parking: I have ParkMobile, PayByPhone, and one other app whose name I can’t keep straight because it doesn’t sound like a parking app. (The app is called Passport. It took me many minutes of browsing on my phone to figure that out.)

If you’ve got kids, you’ll know they are the Johnny Appleseeds of pointless apps. An app may connect you to their school for accessing their schoolwork or connecting to their teachers; only thing is, you might be assigned a different app each year, or different apps for different kids in different classes. It could be Class Dojo, Brightwheel, Bloomz, or TalkingPoints. It could be ClassLink, SchoolStatus, or PowerSchool. The school bus might also have an app, so you can track it. And if your kids play sports, God help you. A friend has an app, SportsEngine, that describes itself as “the one app that does it all.” And yet, she has several more youth-sports apps on top of that.

Let’s talk about the office. Yes, there’s an app for that. There are a thousand apps for that. Google Docs has an app, as do Google Sheets, Slides, Mail, and Search. Microsoft is highly app-enabled, with separate apps for Outlook, Word, and Excel. Then, of course, you’ve got the groupware apps that allow you to coordinate with colleagues, such as Slack, Teams, Zoho, and Pumble. And the office-infrastructure apps that your employer may be using to, you know, make your job easier: Workday, Salesforce, Notion, Zendesk, Jira, Box, Loom, Okta.

[Read: The app that monetized doing nothing]

And what about all the other apps that I haven’t yet brought up, the ones that may now be cluttering your phone? What about Doova, Nork, PingPong, and Genzillo?  Those are not actually apps (as far as I’m aware), but we all know that they could be, which is my point. Apps are now so numerous, and so ubiquitous, that they’ve become a form of nonsense.

Their premise is, of course, quite reasonable. Apps replaced clunky mobile websites with something clean and custom-made. They helped companies forge more direct connections with their customers, especially once push notifications came on the scene. They also made new kinds of services possible, such as geolocating nearby shops or restaurants, and camera-scanning your items for self-checkout. Apps could serve as branding too, because their icons—which are also business logos—were sitting on your smartphone screen. And apps allowed companies to collect a lot more data about their customers than websites ever did, including users’ locations, contacts, calendars, health information, and what other apps they might use and how often.

By 2021, when Apple started taking steps to curtail that data harvest, the app economy was already well established. Smartphones had become so widespread, companies could assume that any customer probably had one. That meant they could use their apps to off-load effort. Instead of printing boarding passes, Delta or American Airlines encouraged passengers to use their apps. At Ikea, customers could prepay for items in the app and speed through checkout. At Chipotle or Starbucks, an app allowed each customer to specify exactly which salsa or what kind of milk they wanted without holding people up. An apartment building that adopted a laundry app (ShinePay, LaundryView, WASH-Connect, etc.) spared itself the trouble of managing payments at its machines.

In other words, apps became bureaucratized. What started as a source of fun, efficiency, and convenience became enmeshed in daily life. Now it seems like every ordinary activity has been turned into an app, while the benefit of those apps has diminished.

Parking apps offer one example of this transformation. Back before ParkMobile and its ilk, you might still have had to drop coins into a street meter. Some of those meters had credit-card readers, but you couldn’t count on finding one (or one that worked). Parking apps did away with these annoyances. They could also remind you when your time was up and, in some cases, allow you to extend your parking session remotely. Everyone seemed to win: individuals, businesses, municipalities, and, of course, the app-driven services taking their cut. But like everything, app parking grew creaky as it aged. Different parking apps took over in different places as cities chose the vendors that gave them the best deals. These days, I use ParkMobile in some parts of town and Passport in others, a detail about the world I must keep in mind if I want to station my vehicle within it. The apps themselves became more complex too, burdened by greater customization and control at the user and municipal level. Sometimes I can use Apple Pay to park with ParkMobile; other times I can’t. Street signage has changed or vanished, so now I find myself relying on the app to determine whether I even have to pay after 6 p.m. on a weekday. (Confusingly, sometimes an app will say that parking is unavailable when it really means that payment is unavailable—because payment isn’t required.) The apps sometimes sign me out, and then I have to use my password-manager app just to log back in. Or, worse, my phone might have “off-loaded” whichever parking app I need because I haven’t used it in a while, such that I have to re-download it before leaving the car.

Similar frustrations play out across many of the apps that one can—or must—use to live a normal life. Even activities that once seemed simple may get you stuck inside a thicket of competing apps. I used to open the Hulu app to watch streaming content on Hulu—an app equivalent of an old television channel. Recently, Hulu became a part of Disney+, so I now watch Hulu via the Disney+ app instead. When HBO introduced a premium service, I got the HBO Go app so I could stream its shows. Then HBO became HBO Max, and I got that app, before HBO Max turned into  Max, a situation so knotty that HBO had to publish an FAQ about it.

I’d like to think that this hellscape is a temporary one. As the number of apps multiplies beyond all logic or utility, won’t people start resisting them? And if platform owners such as Apple ratchet up their privacy restrictions, won’t businesses adjust? Don’t count on it. Our app-ocalypse is much too far along already. Every crevice of contemporary life has been colonized. At every branch in your life, and with each new responsibility, apps will keep sprouting from your phone. You can't escape them. You won’t escape them, not even as you die, because—of course—there’s an app for that too.