While Iovine was the public face of Apple Music and held meetings with employees and artists in Los Angeles, in recent years “most of Apple Music’s operations” had been designated to Robert Kondrk and Jeff Robbin, overseeing business and engineering sides respectively. Cue is said to now be deciding on whether to continue divvying up responsibilities between Kondrk and Robbin, promoting one to a more public role, or hiring someone outside of Apple to become the new Iovine.

I’m not really surprised with the move, whether it’s Jimmy or Apple that made the decision. Jeff Robbin is a trusted and longtime Apple employee that already has a lot of responsibility in Apple’s media business, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see Eddy Cue lean on him a bit more.

Amazon.com became the second most valuable publicly listed U.S. company on Tuesday, surpassing Google parent Alphabet Inc for the first time.

These numbers change all the time and we don’t post about it every time they change, but this is significant for Amazon. They only trail Apple at this point.

In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $16 billion, making its co-founders — Jan Koum and Brian Acton — very wealthy men. Koum continues to lead the company, but Acton quit earlier this year to start his own foundation. And he isn’t done merely with WhatsApp — in a post on Twitter today, Acton told his followers to delete Facebook.

“It is time,” Acton wrote, adding the hashtag #deletefacebook.

Damn.

The Neve mic preamp is an undisputed audio masterpiece, adding genuine Neve sheen, richness, and thick musical detail to any signal that passes through it. The pinnacle of Neve preamp design is the classic 1073 module with EQ, but Neve also briefly produced the 1290 module — a rare, preamp-only version of the 1073.

Now, you can get the clarity, grit, and harmonically complex class‑A saturation of this amazing mic preamplifier in a simple two-knob plug-in that’s perfect for UA Audio Interface owners.

This release is huge. Being able to put the Neve Preamp into your chain using Universal Audio’s Unison technology will change the way your music sounds. There is a video and some sound clips on the UA Web site that you should listen to when you get a chance.

Walton Street Capital purchased the 20,000-square-foot Apple Store, a 35-story office building, and a retail building next door for $370 million in 2017, and is now planning to sell the store and 10,000 square feet of retail space for $175 million while holding on to the office building.

The biggest surprise to me in this story was that Apple didn’t already own the property.

Thanks to StackSocial for sponsoring The Loop this week. StackSocial has curated a collection of ten top apps to help you get the most out of your Mac in 2018. Highlighted by BusyCal 3, HoudahSpot 4, and the toolbar app used at Google and Facebook, uBar 4, The 2018 Mac Essentials Bundle will give your Mac (and you) a productivity overhaul. Get it now for less than $2/app — it’s just $19.99 (Orig. $525). The 2018 Mac Essentials Bundle includes the following:

1. BusyCal 3 ($49.99 Value) – Customize calendar views to meet your needs
2. Cargo VPN ($79.99 Value) – Protect your Mac while surfing public WiFi, bypass geo-restricted content, and more
3. HoudahSpot 4 ($29.00 Value) – Find just about any file (documents, photos, emails) on your Mac
4. uBar 4 ($30.00 Value) – Customize your Mac’s dock
5. Cisdem DuplicateFinder ($39.99 Value) – Free up space on your Mac by easily deleting any duplicate files
6. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 ($19.99 Value) – Construct and manage your own very theme park
7. Systweak Anti-Malware ($117 Value) – Detect and remove malware on your Mac
8. Concealer ($19.99 Value) – Keep sensitive files safe
9. Movavi Photo Editor ($39.95 Value) – Edits photos on the fly hassle-free
10. Flip PDF for Mac ($99 Value) – Easily batch PDFs into Flash & HTML5

Grab these 10 apps for just $19.99 at 96% off.

StackSocial has curated a collection of ten top apps to help you get the most out of your Mac in 2018. Highlighted by BusyCal 3, HoudahSpot 4, and the toolbar app used at Google and Facebook, uBar 4, The 2018 Mac Essentials Bundle will give your Mac (and you) a productivity overhaul. Get it now for less than $2/app — it’s just $19.99 (Orig. $525). The 2018 Mac Essentials Bundle includes the following:

1. BusyCal 3 ($49.99 Value) – Customize calendar views to meet your needs
2. Cargo VPN ($79.99 Value) – Protect your Mac while surfing public WiFi, bypass geo-restricted content, and more
3. HoudahSpot 4 ($29.00 Value) – Find just about any file (documents, photos, emails) on your Mac
4. uBar 4 ($30.00 Value) – Customize your Mac’s dock
5. Cisdem DuplicateFinder ($39.99 Value) – Free up space on your Mac by easily deleting any duplicate files
6. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 ($19.99 Value) – Construct and manage your own very theme park
7. Systweak Anti-Malware ($117 Value) – Detect and remove malware on your Mac
8. Concealer ($19.99 Value) – Keep sensitive files safe
9. Movavi Photo Editor ($39.95 Value) – Edits photos on the fly hassle-free
10. Flip PDF for Mac ($99 Value) – Easily batch PDFs into Flash & HTML5

Grab these 10 apps for just $19.99 at 96% off.

I love Siri and what it can do for me, when it works properly. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen with every device. The more devices I use Siri with, the more I’ve come to realize that maybe it’s my expectations of Siri that allows me to enjoy it on certain devices more than others. […]

“In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase ‘Alexa, laugh,’ the company said in a statement to GeekWire. “We are changing that phrase to be ‘Alexa, can you laugh?’ which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance ‘Alexa, laugh.’”

Hmmmm, from some of the reports I saw, I’m not sure if this is it or not.

This year, celebrate International Women’s Day by supporting a women-led business. Starting this week, businesses can now identify as owned, led, or founded by women, by enabling the women-led attribute from their Google My Business dashboard. Attributes appear on a business’s Google listing on Maps and Search and give customers more details like “Has Wi-Fi” and “Outdoor seating” to help them decide where to go.

Great idea from Google.

Over the past few days, users with Alexa-enabled devices have reported hearing strange, unprompted laughter. Amazon responded to the creepiness in a statement to The Verge, saying, “We’re aware of this and working to fix it.”

Thankfully it’s being fixed.

Wow, these are spectacular.

There are a ton of fixes and improvements in the latest update. If you have Logic Pro X 10.4 installed, you can go to the Mac App Store to download the update.

John Gruber on publication LittleThings shutting down:

Any publisher that is dependent on Facebook, or that trusts Facebook, is out of their goddamn mind.

Gruber is absolutely right.

Dan Frakes:

I’ve long recommended creating a bootable installer drive—on an external hard drive, thumb drive, or USB stick—for the version of macOS you’re running on your Mac.1 It’s great for installing the OS on multiple Macs, because you don’t have to download the ~5GB installer onto each computer, and it serves as a handy emergency disk if your Mac is experiencing problems. 2 Here’s this year’s version, for both macOS High Sierra (10.13) and macOS Sierra (10.12), of my annual how-to guide.

It’s never a bad idea to have one of these.

This is just so funny and well done. Thanks to my good friend Peter Cohen for sending this to me.

If you’re an Apple user who’s interested in joining the smart home revolution—or adding even more smarts to your existing setup—this book is the ideal guide.

I had a look through this book this morning. HomeKit isn’t as complicated as I thought it was after reading a few sections of the book.

Alykhan Jetha (AJ), CEO of Marketcircle:

An important lesson I’ve learned as CEO of Marketcircle is that as a business, it’s critical to evolve or you get left behind. In order for us to stay competitive in our market, to continue innovating, and to provide you with excellent products and services, we have to focus on Cloud. With 87% of our revenue coming from Cloud, it doesn’t make sense to continue working on a platform that splits our resources and is decreasing in demand. If we continue to support both platforms, both will suffer.

The company announced end of life for Daylite Server and Billings Pro Server, but it is a wise decision considering where things are going, and have been going for many years. It just makes no sense to try to keep both products going.

Less than one year after launching YouTube TV, the company is increasing its pricing to $40 per month from $35 per month as it adds Turner’s channels, which include TNT, CNN and TBS, and soon will be adding MLB Network and NBA TV, the company said.

I don’t care much about the $5 a month increase, but if I’m going to try this, I need to have Discovery and ID. They don’t have those yet.

This is so incredibly great. He is so funny at the beginning and end.

A coalition of 22 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia on Thursday refiled legal challenges intended to block the Trump administration’s repeal of landmark rules designed to ensure a free and open internet from taking effect.

I hope this works.

Jason Kottke:

On Tuesday, I woke up feeling a bit tired, uninspired, and just generally not in the mood to tackle my to-do list for the day. I understand myself well enough by now to know how to react to this situation (most of the time) but was curious about how other people deal with such episodes. So I asked on Twitter: “What do you do to get yourself moving when this happens to you?” I got tons of interesting responses, which I’ve organized into some broader categories in the hope that they’ll help someone out in the future.

I may go for a walk and play some guitar today.

Marco Arment:

App developers sometimes ask me what they should do when their features, designs, or entire apps are copied by competitors.

You know, Marco’s conclusions really upset me, but he’s right.

The latest in smart speaker innovation deserves state-of-the-art surface protection. Our Leather HomePod Coaster is designed in Minneapolis and handmade by skilled artisans. You’ll love it, but don’t put a ring on it. Your HomePod’s new home features durable & luxurious American full-grain leather with an ultra-soft leather backing because the only rings you should see in your home this season are of the Olympic variety on TV.

That didn’t take long. Seriously, if you’re going to put your HomePod on something, you should use Pad & Quill—I have several of their products and they are all high quality.

An unhappy discovery after we placed a HomePod on an oiled butcher-block countertop and later on a wooden side table was that it left a defined white ring in the surface. Other reviewers and owners (such as Pocket-lint, and folks on Twitter) have reported the same issue, which an Apple representative has confirmed. Apple says “the marks can improve over several days after the speaker is removed from the wood surface,” and if they don’t fade on their own, you can basically just go refinish the furniture—the exact advice Apple gave in an email to Wirecutter was to “try cleaning the surface with the manufacturer’s suggested oiling method.”

I didn’t have my HomePod placed on an oiled wood surface, so I never noticed this. Still, it doesn’t seem like this is something you would want to have happen when placing a speaker in your home.

The 50-watt Friedman Buxom Betty is what guitar amp fantasies are made of — a gorgeous, hand-wired single-channel amp that delivers the dynamic shimmer of American vintage tube combos as well as the comely roar of classic British stacks.

I really like the unique sound of Friedman amps. The Buxom Betty cleans up really well, but it also gives you some grit when you need it.