The Unicode Consortium is a serious bunch of people with a serious job. It’s a non-profit organization dedicated to standardizing software text worldwide — heavy stuff! As part of that noble goal, the consortium has the weighty task of approving the addition of new emojis, the silly little single-character cartoons we append to our texts. And a feud has broken out between the serious typographers and the more frivolous bloc who oversee emojis — all over a pile of poo.
Following a submission for the June 2018 class — a proposed emoji titled “Frowning Pile of Poo” — the consortium erupted into a fierce debate over whether such a poo emoji was really necessary and, more broadly, whether the emoji creation process had become too frivolous and commercialized.
As Buzzfeed explains, Michael Everson and Andrew West are two typographers who vociferously objected to the latest submission, saying it cheapened the consortium’s image and was damaging to the Unicode academic reputation.
“The idea that our 5 committees would sanction further cute graphic characters based on this should embarrass absolutely everyone who votes yes on such an excrescence,” they wrote. “Will we have a CRYING PILE OF POO next? PILE OF POO WITH TONGUE STICKING OUT? PILE OF POO WITH QUESTION MARKS FOR EYES? PILE OF POO WITH KARAOKE MIC?”
The answer to all those questions is surely a resounding “Yes!” but let’s move on. An argument could be made that frowning poo is a necessary addition for those times when you want to covey your feelings with poo, only with a more dour and unhappy subtext. Emojis can be misinterpreted, after all. As the proponents argue in their 12-page proposal, it would “fill in the missing gap in emotions and attitudes that can’t be expressed with the smiling poo emoji alone.”
The typographers weren’t buying it. “As an ordinary user, I don’t want this kind of crap on my phone,” Everson wrote.
The obvious culprit is Apple. “It is a pity that Apple followed Softbank rather than KDDI in its reference glyph, since a coil of dog dirt with stink lines and flies is surely the only proper semantic,” the rebuttal memo declared.
There is also fear that the renegade emoji group is running roughshod over normal processes, implementing emojis in less than a year’s time with very little scrutiny or oversight. “Why the rush?” asked West.
In the meantime, Apple has just released its latest round of emojis — more than 70 of them if you update your device to iOS 11.1. As always, anyone you send the new emojis to will need the update as well, or they won’t be able to see them.
Unfortunately, this controversy won’t be flushed away any time soon.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.