If you haven’t played Monument Valley yet, ask yourself when you stopped loving life.

iMore’s Nick Arnott has the most sensible reaction to the Masque attack I’ve read:

Apple has a lot of safeguards built into iOS. A Masque attack tries to get you to circumvent those safeguards and install malicious apps anyway.

It’s not a bug, but Apple needs to fix it. It’s also incredibly unlikely that any average user is going to get hit by this.

This week (which is to say last week),

PC World’s Jared Newman:

With the news that Microsoft is making all of its mobile Office apps free—the iPad and upcoming Android tablet versions—you knew there had to be some caveats.

It’s nice that Office is free now on mobile devices. Well, free unless you want to use premium features. Windows is also free. On devices with screens smaller than 9 inches.

Microsoft is trying to compete with Google, but it can’t match Google’s “it’s all free” model unless it becomes an advertising company. Is the freemium model going to work like this? I’m not sure.

In this episode we’re judging you, other parents. For so many things.

In theory this is what everyone wants, right? The equivalent of the computer from the Enterprise in your house giving you the 411 and gettin’ crap done for you.

Except the computer on the Enterprise didn’t have a creepy business model behind it. As Jon Mitchell says:

That’s right! Now you don’t even have to tell Amazon — the world’s most desperate selling-things company — what you want to buy. Just buy a $200 listening device, and Amazon will record all your wants, needs, and other conversations and send them to a “brain” in “the cloud!”

Somehow the video betrays the fact that Amazon’s whole point with this thing isn’t to give you a convenience, it’s to scrape all the rich, creamy data you’ll provide them. It doesn’t touch a single heartstring or appeal to a burning desire. “Just get it and put it in your house.” Yeah, no, I don’t think so.

Sat in on the Clockwise podcast to talk about iCloud Drive, the Apple watch “delay”, who should play Steve Jobs and awesome old-timey tech.

The Verge’s Sean O’Kane:

Gaming laptops are prone to wild designs, and the newest one from MSI — called the GT80 Titan — is no exception. The massive 18-inch laptop was announced today and its most notable feature is a mechanical QWERTY keyboard made by Cherry, a company that has been making mechanical keyboards for almost 50 years.

Sometimes the Island of Misfit PCs produces something that’s pretty cool.

iMore’s Rich Edmonds:

Apple has opened the doors of a new software and engineering office in Seattle, attempting to attract local talent in the shadow of Microsoft’s Redmond campus. The new office is looking to recruit talented individuals who will join former employees of Union Bay Network, the networking start-up Apple has confirmed it acquired.

Wasn’t someone just suggesting this a couple of months ago? I’m so old I remember when Apple opening a store in the Pacific Northwest was a big deal. By which I mean I am more than 12 years old.

In this episode we discuss our vast experience with Apple Pay. Which is one usage between the three of us.