[VIDEO] Click over to the main Loop post, jump to about 30:32 in, and listen to Larry Tesler tell the story of taking Steve on the tour that led to Macintosh, and the deal that gave Apple access to some pretty important Crown Jewels.
And if you have the time, the whole video is worth watching.
Pointed out by Michael Potuck, 9to5Mac, this was tucked at the end of Apple’s MacBook Air announcement:
Mac mini Also Updated Today
Whether they are using it as a desktop computer, a music and movie storage hub for the family, or as a code compile server for Xcode, customers love Mac mini. The standard configurations of Mac mini now come with double the storage capacity. The $799 configuration now comes standard with 256GB, while the $1,099 configuration features 512GB of storage, and every Mac mini is made from 100 percent recycled aluminum.
Good to know.
Check ’em out. Looking forward to the day when I can browse these in my Apple Store.
[VIDEO] First up, “Your next computer is not a computer”, followed by the sly, “How to correctly use a computer”. Apple is clearly all-out pushing the new iPad Pro as the computer for the masses. Both are embedded in the main Loop post.
Apple:
With iPadOS 13.4, Apple brings trackpad support to iPad, giving customers an all-new way to interact with their iPad. Rather than copying the experience from macOS, trackpad support has been completely reimagined for iPad. As users move their finger across the trackpad, the pointer elegantly transforms to highlight user interface elements. Multi-Touch gestures on the trackpad make it fast and easy to navigate the entire system without users ever lifting their hand.
This feels like a huge leap to me, beyond the trackpad experience on any existing computer. Makes me wonder if we’ll see a change to the Mac trackpad support to bring some of this new experience to macOS. This seems logical to me, especially for iPad apps ported to the Mac via Mac Catalyst.
As to LiDAR:
The breakthrough LiDAR Scanner enables capabilities never before possible on any mobile device. The LiDAR Scanner measures the distance to surrounding objects up to 5 meters away, works both indoors and outdoors, and operates at the photon level at nano-second speeds. New depth frameworks in iPadOS combine depth points measured by the LiDAR Scanner, data from both cameras and motion sensors, and is enhanced by computer vision algorithms on the A12Z Bionic for a more detailed understanding of a scene. The tight integration of these elements enables a whole new class of AR experiences on iPad Pro.
The stage is set for AR. This feels like a deflection point to me, Apple introducing key new technology that will mark a sea change to future user experiences.
And no small thing, Apple also delivered an amazing new keyboard case, the Magic Keyboard. Comes with a built-in trackpad, smooth laptop-like viewing angle adjustment, and a USB-C port (which charges the iPad Pro) built into the hinge. The case is pricey, $299 for the 11 inch, $349 for the 12.9 inch.
The line between iPad and Mac has never been more blurred. Will Apple port Xcode to iPad, give iPad users the ability to build apps on device?
Apple:
Apple today updated MacBook Air, the world’s most loved notebook, with faster performance, the new Magic Keyboard, twice the storage and a new lower price of $999, and $899 for education.1 The new MacBook Air delivers up to two times faster CPU performance2 and up to 80 percent faster graphics performance,3 letting customers breeze through daily activities and play more games. Now starting with 256GB of storage, MacBook Air allows customers to store even more movies, photos and files. With its brilliant 13-inch Retina display for vivid images and sharp text, Touch ID for easy login and secure online purchases, spacious trackpad, and all-day battery life combined with the power of macOS Catalina, it’s the best MacBook Air ever made.
And:
MacBook Air now features the new Magic Keyboard, first introduced on the 16-inch MacBook Pro.
And:
MacBook Air now starts with 256GB of storage, double that of the previous generation, so customers can store even more movies, photos and files. And for those who need even more storage capacity, MacBook Air offers up to a 2TB SSD, double the previous maximum storage.
Comes with a T2 Security Chip, Thunderbolt 3 ports, and support for up to a 6K external display.
Here’s a link to Apple’s MacBook Air page. And a link to Apple’s trade-in page in case you have a computer or phone you want to trade in, even if it’s not made by Apple.
New York Times:
On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, said Dr. Hanrahan and Dr. Catmull would receive this year’s Turing Award for their work on three-dimensional computer graphics. Often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize, which will be split by the two pioneers of what is often called C.G.I., or computer-generated imagery.
Ed Catmull is the former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios.
Catmull did foundational work in computer graphics at the University of Utah and, after getting his PhD, teamed up with a group of computer scientists, including co-winner Pat Hanrahan, to create RenderMan, the technology that would make Toy Story, and the Pixar movies that followed, possible.
[VIDEO] Jump to the original Loop post, watch the embedded video for an old school look at how we used to send emails, back in the day.
Apple Watch alerts adding to your stress level. Turn ’em off. At least until we all come up for air again.
Follow the headline link, check out the banner on Apple’s front page. Apple’s previous statement was that stores would be closed until March 27th. This statement seems more realistic.
It ends with:
We look forward to seeing you soon.
Me too.
Follow the link, look at all the prices. The iPad Air is a particularly good deal, $99 off across the board.
Amazon blog:
Company will invest over $350 million globally to increase pay by $2/hour in the U.S., £2/hr in the UK, and approximately €2/hr in many EU countries for employees and partners who are in fulfillment centers, transportation operations, stores or those making deliveries so that others can remain at home.
And:
We also know many people have been economically impacted as jobs in areas like hospitality, restaurants, and travel are lost or furloughed as part of this crisis. We want those people to know we welcome them on our teams until things return to normal and their past employer is able to bring them back.
No matter what you think of Amazon, the company is playing a critical role here, getting goods and food to people who cannot/should not be out and about. Amazon delivery people are on the front lines, much like postal and retail workers. To me, those raises are hazard pay.
Wesley Hilliard, AppleInsider:
Apple improves on their A-series processors every year for each new iPhone release, so a successor to the current iPhone 11 A13 chipset is expected in the fall of 2020. Each year as the iPhone flagship release approaches, benchmark scores for said to be from the new processor in the device start to populate popular benchmark tools, like Geekbench.
And:
New Geekbench testing, purporting to be from the A14 processor shows the first A-series processor to cross the 3.0 GHz mark.
The 12.9-inch iPad Pro has an A12X chipset with 8 cores and scores 1110 on a single core, and 4568 on the multi-core. The scores for the alleged A14 go beyond even that.
Single core performance of the device shows a 1658 score, with a 4612 multi-core score. This indicates a huge gain in its overall performance and will make multitasking and navigating apps smoother than ever.
Just for comparison, I went to the Geekbench browser and looked up Apple’s latest, the 2019 16″ MacBook Pro. The single-core score is 1122 and the multi-core score is 6993. Not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but amazing to see how far the Arm chipset has come.
[VIDEO] This is a bucket list item for me. Watch the whole thing or, if you are pressed for time, jump to about 3:23 to get a sense of this wild skiing course in action. Video embedded in main Loop post.
[VIDEO] Follow the headline link for the tech details from Juli Clover, watch the video embedded in the main Loop post to see the new Powerbeats in action. And here’s a link to the official Powerbeats page on the Beats by Dre site.
CNBC:
French antitrust authorities ordered Apple on Monday to pay a 1.1 billion euro ($1.23 billion) fine for anti-competitive behavior.
The French competition authority said the iPhone-maker was guilty of creating cartels within its distribution network and abusing the economic dependence of its outside resellers.
And:
“Apple and its two wholesalers agreed not to compete and prevent distributors from competing with each other, thereby sterilizing the wholesale market for Apple products,” said Isabelle de Silva, president of the French Competition Authority.
Apple’s response:
“The French Competition Authority’s decision is disheartening. It relates to practices from over a decade ago and discards 30 years of legal precedent that all companies in France rely on with an order that will cause chaos for companies across all industries. We strongly disagree with them and plan to appeal.”
Hard to imagine this fine standing as is.
Kirk McElhearn:
Major events continue to be cancelled around the world, due to the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak.
The first major event was the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, scheduled to be held in late February. Since then, Google and Facebook announced the cancellation of their developer conferences, and other smaller events have been cancelled as well. Yesterday, the London Book Fair was cancelled. And today, the news says that both Apple and Netflix have pulled out of SXSW, the annual everything festival in Austin, Texas, due to start in about a week.
And:
So what if Apple does delay the iPhone 12? I’ve long felt that the annual upgrade cycle for mobile phones is artificial and unnecessary. In the early days, there were big changes from model to model, but now we see tiny incremental changes, mostly affecting the devices’ cameras. What if Apple decided to move to a two-year cycle, starting with the next model?
Makes me wonder if coronavirus is going to change some basic behaviors. Simple things, like the normalcy of shaking hands. More complex things, like building a conference with the goal of putting thousands of people into the same room, and into the same room with key company personnel.
And, as Kirk points out, might coronavirus change events that depend on precise timing, as the yearly rollout of new iPhones depends on the stability and timing of the worldwide supply chain.
Kirsten Korosec, TechCrunch:
An arbitration panel ruled in December that Levandowski and Lior Ron had engaged in unfair competition and breached their contract with Google when they left the company to start a rival autonomous vehicle company focused on trucking, called Otto.
And:
Ron settled last month with Google for $9.7 million. However, Levandowski, had disputed the ruling.
Wow. In hindsight, that seems a mind-bogglingly poor decision. Levandowski has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
[VIDEO] The video, embedded in the main Loop post, features the women listed below, all backed by Beyoncé’s ***Flawless (feat. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie):
Buried in the Flixed study of the major streaming services is a chart titled, “How much do critics and audiences like what’s on?” If you want to look at the chart, follow the headline link and scroll about 3/4 of the way down.
The chart shows average Rotten Tomatoes scores across each services’ original content (which is all of Apple TV+, obviously).
Amazingly, the highest average Rotten Tomatoes audience rating belongs to Apple TV+, at 87%. At the same time, Apple TV+ owns the lowest average critic score, at 69%.
Draw your own conclusions here, but if I was running Apple TV+, I’d be more concerned with what the audience thinks, not so much what the critics think. And I’d weave that top audience average score into my marketing.
Kayvon Beykpour, Product Lead at Twitter (and founder of Periscope):
https://twitter.com/kayvz/status/1235248857308487682
The test is being run in Brazil and appears to be an experiment. Meaning, if Fleets do make their way to the mainstream, the form and process might be quite different.
As is, the value proposition doesn’t click for me. A big part of Twitter is the interaction, the follows, replies, retweets, likes and dislikes. The Twitter model tends to be a stream of consciousness, where your action is scroll, read, scroll, read.
With Fleets, it sounds like you have to tap out of that model and seek them out. In effect, you have to leave your feed to move to a non-interactive world.
And with the Snapchat-like vanishing tweet model, I worry that people will be emboldened to say some pretty terrible things, then vanish into the void, paying zero social cost for their misdeeds. And I worry that this system will be ripe for misadventure, with money poured into bots streaming lies, with the goal of disrupting elections and worse.
Granted, it’s not a new concept, so there’s the argument that this is just Twitter keeping up with Snapchat, Facebook et al. But I feel we should be moving towards solving the bot/misinformation problem, not expanding their reach.
To many of you, this is old hat. But for folks new to handoff, this is a bit of low discoverability that I find very helpful.
Jason Snell:
Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have now cancelled major conferences in the face of the spread of the coronavirus. Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC, usually takes place in early June—and all eyes will now turn to Apple to see how the company will respond.
And:
Perhaps the best reason to cancel conferences is not to stop the spread of the virus, but to slow its spread, because our existing health infrastructure will be under intense pressure, and if a huge spike of patients happens, the hospitals will be overwhelmed.
From the Google I/O cancellation announcement:
Due to concerns around the coronavirus (COVID-19), and in accordance with health guidance from the CDC, WHO, and other health authorities, we have decided to cancel the physical Google I/O event at Shoreline Amphitheatre.
All guests who have purchased tickets to I/O 2020 will receive a full refund by March 13, 2020. If you don’t see the credit on your statement by then, please reach out to [email protected]. Guests who have registered for I/O 2020 will not need to enter next year’s drawing and will be automatically granted the option of purchasing an I/O 2021 ticket.
This seems a reasonable policy. The risk of public exposure, of Google high level management, marketing, and engineering team exposure, way too high. Prudent caution.
Will Apple follow this lead? Google I/O was originally scheduled for May 12-14. Apple’s WWDC would normally occur about a month after that, which gives Apple some time to formulate their approach to this problem.
Do they cancel altogether? Produce the first-ever remote WWDC? One thing I can’t imagine is WWDC going on in the normal way, in person and as scheduled.
Coronavirus is throwing a monkey wrench into everything.
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. restricted employee travel to Italy and South Korea, after recently instating a similar policy for China, as the coronavirus outbreak continues to spread.
“We have instituted specific travel restrictions in a few countries including China, South Korea, and Italy,” the company told employees in a memo that outlines its latest response to the Covid-19 outbreak.
As to Apple Stores:
Apple also said “deep cleaning protocols are our top priority” and are in effect across its stores, offices and employee shuttles. It has since put hand sanitizer stations at the front of its stores as well.
Side note, from this Reuters’ article:
Foxconn, however, sought to allay investor concerns about the virus’ impact, saying it expects to resume normal production in China, its top manufacturing base, by the end of the March.
Erin Pearson, The Sydney Morning Herald:
Two men killed during a police chase in Melbourne’s north were being tracked from the air via the ‘Find My’ app after an iPad was stolen in an earlier home invasion.
Driver Vaatoa Chang, 29, from Sunshine West, and his Caroline Springs passenger Jonas Montealegre, 36, carried the iPad with them as they switched stolen cars in a two-hour attempt to flee police on February 4.
Riveting article, riveting video. The embedded video shows the getaway vehicle being tracked from the air, but in what appears to be some form of night-vision. Watch stuff get dumped from the car. Wonder if they figured out that something they stole was pinging, giving away their location.
Ended terribly.
My takeaway from the linked post was the heads up on the Cult of Mac white-labeled buy-back program.
[VIDEO] Being owned by Vox Media gave Nilay Patel and his team access to some folks with some very high end experience, including production work on large streaming shows (think Netflix and HBO) and massive podcasts.
The review pulls no punches. Worth watching (video embedded in main Loop post) and/or reading.
Once you’ve read/watched, here’s a thread with some counterpoint to the review.
Wall Street Journal:
Some operations executives suggested as early as 2015 that the company relocate assembly of at least one product to Vietnam. That would allow Apple to begin the multiyear process of training workers and creating a new cluster of component providers outside the world’s most populous nation, people familiar with the discussions said.
Senior managers rebuffed the idea. For Apple, weaning itself off China, its second-largest consumer market and the place where most of its products are assembled, has been too challenging to undertake.
And:
China has been a critical factor in Apple’s soaring market value. The country provides a stable, efficient, low-cost manufacturing base with an abundant network of suppliers that have helped cement Apple’s profitability.
And:
A clean break with China is impossible. Apple relies on a workforce of more than three million indirect workers in China. Its top manufacturer, Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group, hires hundreds of thousands of seasonal employees in China, many of whom manually insert tiny screws and thin printed circuit boards during the iPhone assembly process, people familiar with the process said. Tens of thousands of experienced manufacturing engineers oversee the process.
China has built a massive manufacturing machine. Massive. Moving elsewhere, starting from scratch, would be painful at the very least. It would also take time. And then there’s the availability of the raw materials, not to mention one of the world’s largest marketplaces.
It’s all a little bit of a perfect storm. Fascinating read.
Apple:
iPhone photographers around the world answered the call to participate in the Night mode photo challenge, sharing their captivating Night mode images shot on iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max. A curated panel of judges selected six winning photos from thousands of submissions worldwide. The winning images will be featured in a gallery on apple.com and Apple Instagram (@apple) and will appear globally on billboards.
Hard to pick a favorite, but that red tree calls to me. Also love the hanging laundry shot. Great pics.
Reuters:
Oppenheimer upgraded its rating on Apple to “outperform” from “perform”, saying the Cupertino, California, company was more prepared than its competitors to absorb the impact of the global health crisis.
Apple’s stock fell more than 16% from record high on February 12th.