FOCUS: TRANS DEVICE DO NOT DISTURB ON STEROIDS
  • 🤔 Lets see, Quicken and DevonThink 3 are running on my Mac which means I am paying bills and don't want to be distracted, so I can receive notifications from my wife, my bank, American express, my broker, Quicken, DevonThink 3, and any time sensitive notifications. Everyone and everything else will either get a message I am busy if appropriate and otherwise sent to the Notification Center to be dealt with when I am finished and all this happens automatically.
  • Any number of other Focus conditions can be established with a huge variety of permitted or not permitted interruptions and toggled on or off on time of day/day of the week, applications in use, physical location, or manually triggered. These are shared and can be triggered via iCloud with other Macs and other devices running macOS 12, iOS 15, iPadOS 15, even TVOS 15. Custom icons on the menu bar indicate if there is an active focus and what it is.
  • EVALUATION: Depending on the individual and circumstances this could be very helpful. There are enough restrictions and exceptions to keep Focus from being too draconian so it could be realistically useful. The standard Focus conditions tend to duplicate existing system conditions, but Focus offers the opportunity for precise targeting. Useful but not a killer app.


PRIVATE RELAY
  • A feature available through iCloud+
  • Not a VPN per se. but offering one of the principle features of a VPN, IP address and location hiding, without the attendant hit to internet throughput. Imagine my surprise when What Is My IP told me I was in San Francisco, CA (when I look outside, San Francisco, CA looks amazingly like Fort Worth, TX 🤷‍♂️)
  • EVALUATION: A reasonable (the cost is covered under Apple One) and very high performance (I cannot detect any performance hit) alternative to a full blown VPN. If you want to foil trackers completely you can choose a setting that yields an IP somewhere within the United States, or you can choose the option of an IP address in your area if you want to find local services. This is a winner for the security conscious user in the United States. (As far as I know it is not yet available outside the U.S. yet, and will probably be illegal in some (many?) countries.
  • NOTE: Private relay does not fool Find My...

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein