Apple hid a secret message in its latest YouTube video | Hacker News Reader

Apple hid a secret message in its latest YouTube video

techcrunch.com

49 pointssdan53 comments

Extracted from meaningless fluff article: The fake blue-screen in the Apple video is:

Error 09102019

This is just a thought. But it might be nice to have some sort of easter egg message in here for the hard core Apple fans that will stop the video.

01010011 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111 01101011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101001 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110100 01110010 01100001 01101110 01110011 01101100 01100001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00111111 00100000

01010111 01100101 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00101110

The binary encoded message reads:

> So you took the time to translate this? We love you.

That’s about as corporate-speak blasé as you can get for a hidden message. Impressive work.

I was hoping it would be 0101100101.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4TPlwwHM8Q

Be sure to drink your Ovaltine

https://youtu.be/zdA__2tKoIU

Oh the irony. Closing that video got Safari into some weird headless mode that doesn't show tab content. This bug has been around for 2-3 years (usually when you have ~100 tabs open and close playing videos).

https://imgur.com/a/x9qP4uv

That's more of a body-less mode...

>meaningless fluff article

Slightly undeserved jab, the article is short and to the point, with very little introduction.

The article is about essentially nothing. The message itself is about nothing. This is meaningless wrappers around an empty core.

My favourite easter egg of all time is in the brilliant BBC scifi comedy series Red Dwarf. In one episode the team end up in a dimension where everything is backwards. If you take one of the backwards sections and play it forwards there's a great easter egg... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNWGcYcBklE (first part is backwards, second is the same scene forwards).

Yep, I remember recording and reversing the audio from that when I was a kid. I recall being slightly offended

Slightly related, but I'm only aware of Gstreamer based video players that allow reverse playback: https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/tutorials/ba...

Gnome Totem video player, at least last time I tried, could play a video with audio backward after pressing the comma key, it's an hidden feature as it wasn't mentioned in its keyboard shortcut page...

Instead of rapid firing spacebar to catch the frame, you can use [.] and [,] to advance and go back a single frame when paused.

This was my biggest takeaway from that article. As someone who like to dissect guitar instructional videos on YT, I wish I had known this earlier!

2X faster than the 'best selling PC'

What then is the 'best selling PC'?

The raspberry pi of course.

I was going to suggest the Commodore64, which I'd hope would be at minimum twice as slow as an iPad

Probably at most twice if we're talking about latency: https://danluu.com/input-lag/

My C=64 has a tiny Jeff Minter in it.

mowing lawns and shooting llamas?

... and camels - very large camels

Probably a $500 HP laptop that Best Buy puts the most discount stickers on.

And the most crapware (that takes a bit off the price) on as well

Which is pretty good considering this iPad is $329.

What's the market like for low end laptops? I'd expect the big retailers to get their own 'exclusive' skus to prevent price matching etc.

Their claim refers to the top selling PC laptop in the USA during the first half of 2019.

Not sure what exactly it is - on Amazon the best seller is the Acer Aspire 5.

> Their claim refers to the top selling PC laptop in the USA during the first half of 2019.

What a broken metric. But yeah, it's hard to keep up with those superlative narration if you broaden your metrics.

I also didn't get it. What exactly is this PC they are talking about?

Even as binary aficionado I have to say this "secret" message is pretty weak.

It can be tricky to fit a meaningful message in a limited space. We had a hidden easter egg of the blog post header images of our blog at one stage. The background of the header image was an IBM punched card, with the message "<Our SaaS App Name> is the greatest HR app for small businesses" (or something like that) punched out.

Given the non techie audience of our app and blog, nobody detected the hidden message, much less decoded it in the 12 months we had them up there. We've since changed the header graphic style to something completely different.

There was a binary background in Silicon Valley season 5 episode 5, I paused it and spent a couple seconds decoding the first letter. Moments after I said it, my SO read out the entire message.

I had no idea she knew how to do that, much less do so in freeking real time.

She probably saw it/had translated it beforehand. Not a bad prank.

I thought this was a really good point, but it doesn't seem like the sort of prank that she'd make.

So I printed out "01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100100 01101111 01110010 01101011". It took slightly longer than I recalled, but she read it again pretty much right away (and also responded asking if this was news to anyone).

I think this just goes into the totally useless superpowers category.

I think it was in the Silicon Valley series where one of the t-shirt had a print in binary ASCII with 'bitcoin' in it, don't recall the episode right now...

I didn't translate it real time tho, man ascii and a couple of minutes... ^__^;

Cool idea. I personally found the meaning of the hidden binary message a bit of a letdown.

Despite how much I love technology and innovation, that 2 minute video made me a bit nauseous. It reminded me of the last part of the Koyaanisqatsi movie.

I do love Koyaanisqatsi. The last part is so tragic and poignant that I'm not really feeling that as a comparison. For those who don't know, this is where the music for the Dr. Manhattan origin sequence in The Watchmen comes from. Works even better here though.

Instead, for me, that apple video is a good match for the middle section i.e. breathless human industry and I think it is sorely missing the end sequence to reveal that this industriousness has forgotten something important. It is empty, futile and ignorant and will return to dust.

>The frames jab at the classic Blue Screen of Death that you might see when something goes real wrong on a Windows computer

You know Apple is a cult when they bring up the BSoD which doesn't exist for 4 years now. Now you get the Sad Face of Death.

Yesterday evening I had Friends on and saw the following scene of which I was reminded when I read this 'article':

https://youtu.be/agtJ6M0cj4M?t=16

They should express their love to tech people openning up osx instead of these lame attempts.

"Steve, sorry the new phone is so ugly. Please forgive us."

Ulgy to some, beautiful to others. I am from the latter.

Do really think so? I mean it's not completely awful, but I don't think Steve Jobs would have liked the camera cluster that looks like it has just been stuck on the back.

+1 this. They literally put a camera bump on top of a camera bump.

I'd imagine in 2019 they'd at least have no camera bump like the revolutionary iPhone 4/5 design? I love my SE for that reason primarily (not to mention form factor).

From what I saw on reddit it looks much nicer in person.

This has never bothered me.. I always have a case, which evens out the back surface. I'd get the small camera bump for good photos. I realize that this may not be acceptable by everyone, so speaking more as a personal choice. I love the design of iPhone 4 with this gorgeous glass too.

How about a phone that’s 2mm thicker, comes with 30% longer battery life, and no humps?

I really don't know. Maybe it would be heavier, and maybe I will get used to whatever. I'd agree with you - it will appeal to many more people this way, apparently.

It's hard to imagine what he would do. I'm sure he wouldn't like it, but if faced with the reality that the iPhone needs a camera spec bump in order to stay competitive, would he really still stick to his guns and demand a flush back? Would he make the entire phone the thickness of the cluster?

(I'm assuming here that he couldn't magic the camera cluster thinner with his reality distortion field)

Yeah, I mean obviously I can't speak for him. And he doesn't have magic powers, but when he was looking after the iPhone there were no compromises, and this just looks like one big compromise.

Right. Maybe he'd gone for a heavier and thicker phone then.

1. Modern camera

2. No camera bump

3. Thin phone

Pick two. Or else, what would be the solution?

If I knew that, I'd get paid Steve Jobs wages.

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