Apple on Thursday posted quarterly revenue of $52.6 billion, an increase of 12 percent from a year ago. Quarterly earnings were up 24 percent, the company said. […]

There are a few helpful tips on the page to help users get used to the new buttons and how to do some of the basic iPhone tasks.

Upwork, the largest freelancing website, today released its newest quarterly index of the hottest skills in the U.S. freelance job market. The Upwork Skills Index ranks the site’s 20 fastest-growing skills and is part of a quarterly series that sheds light on new and emerging skills freelancers are providing. This comes on the heels of the “Freelancing in America: 2017” study, the most comprehensive measure of the U.S. independent workforce, which found that 57.3 million Americans (36 percent of the U.S. workforce) freelanced in the past year and also predicts that the majority of the U.S. workforce will freelance within a decade.

This is pretty interesting data because it comes from a freelance website. Demand for Final Cut Pro grew more than 200 percent year-over-year, while Swift grew 100 percent.

Apple on Wednesday released a major update for GarageBand, bringing compatibility with the iPhone X, new instruments, sounds, and a brand-new Sound Library. […]

I’ve had my iPhone X from Apple for less than a day, so it would be irresponsible of me to call this a review—instead I’ll give you my first impressions of a few of the main features, and then follow-up with more details later this week or next. […]

Do not mess with hippos.

Fstoppers did a review of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro geared specially to photographers.

This is amazing.

One thing Apple does know, though: It doesn’t want them to feature sex. Or violence. Or any of the mature stuff you can find in hit TV shows like “Game of Thrones,” “Breaking Bad” or “The Walking Dead.”

…Apple wants comedies and emotional dramas with broad appeal, such as the NBC hit ‘This Is Us,’ and family shows like ‘Amazing Stories,’” the show Apple has already agreed to fund.

I suspected this would be the case. I’m not sure how I feel about it, to be honest—if the company is hiring talented people, they can probably put together whatever kind of show Apple wants. However, most of the biggest hit shows these days are not from traditional network TV stations. Apple could fall further behind Netflix, Amazon, and others before it even gets started.

Brooke Peterson went to visit her dad, who is apparently an Apple employee, on the company’s Cupertino campus. While there she took a video of her using his new iPhone X, with her father’s permission.

Well Brooke, I hope you enjoyed your trip to Apple because you probably cost your father his job by posting this video.

Om Malik:

I was in Tuscany, Italy recently and had a chance to put the new iPhone 8+ through the paces. While I made a lot of photos with my Leica SL, I wanted to take a moment and share some of the fantastic photos that came out of the iPhone.

Amazing.

They look like they’re having a blast!

SoundShare was already a great social music app, but it just got better with the release of 3.0 and new features like Party Mode.

Tim Cook:

“While it’s not time to share any details, we do plan for Mac mini to be an important part of our product line going forward.”

Well, good.

People often ask me why I love Eric’s guitar playing so much—this song sums it up. Clapton doesn’t need to play 100 notes a second to make you appreciate his playing. The opening riff is so heartfelt and meaningful, it makes you listen.

From Apple’s Machine Learning Journal:

The “Hey Siri” feature allows users to invoke Siri hands-free. A very small speech recognizer runs all the time and listens for just those two words. When it detects “Hey Siri”, the rest of Siri parses the following speech as a command or query. The “Hey Siri” detector uses a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to convert the acoustic pattern of your voice at each instant into a probability distribution over speech sounds. It then uses a temporal integration process to compute a confidence score that the phrase you uttered was “Hey Siri”. If the score is high enough, Siri wakes up. This article takes a look at the underlying technology.

We take speech commands like “Hey Siri” for granted these days, but what goes on in the background is absolutely amazing.

Dropbox Professional lets you store, share, and track progress on your work. Get powerful features like Smart Sync and Showcase as well as 1 TB (1,000 GB) of space.

The company unveiled the new plan earlier today.

Apple has already patched the KRACK attack WPA2 Wi-Fi vulnerability in the developer and public betas for iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS.

Great news.

So when we ran out of buttons to hide our software’s UI behind, it really forced us to use our imagination. Instead of squeezing UI in where it didn’t fit, we built a new button to conceal it: it’s called the Camera Button.

I didn’t even think this was possible.

Some security-minded companies have already worked on fixes and are offering patches.

This is a list of companies that are offering a fix to the Wi-Fi issue we reported on this morning.

Privately owned Keyssa Inc, backed by iPod co-creator Tony Fadell is suing Essential Products Inc, a smartphone startup founded by Andy Rubin, the co-creator of the Android mobile phone operating system, accusing it of theft of trade secrets in a lawsuit filed on Monday in U.S. federal court in San Francisco.

Andy Rubin basically stole iOS to create Android, so is it out of the realm to think he stole this technology from Fadell? Absolutely not. Especially since Rubin was in talks with Fadell’s company for 10 months.

The dismissals come at a crucial point for the company, which is pushing to increase vehicle production five-fold and reach a broader market with its new Model 3 sedan. The electric vehicle maker missed targets for producing the lower-cost sedan, manufacturing only 260 last quarter despite a wait list of more than 450,000 customers.

Twenty years ago, the spacecraft Cassini launched from Cape Canaveral on a journey to uncover the secrets of Saturn and its many moons. During its mission, Cassini recorded and sent nearly half a million pictures back to Earth, allowing scientists to reconstruct these distant worlds in unprecedented detail. Now you can visit these places—along with many other planets and moons—in Google Maps right from your computer. For extra fun, try zooming out from the Earth until you’re in space!

Very cool.

The San Diego-based company aims to inflict pain on Apple in the world’s largest market for smartphones and cut off production in a country where most iPhones are made. The product provides almost two-thirds of Apple’s revenue. Qualcomm filed the suits in a Beijing intellectual property court claiming patent infringement and seeking injunctive relief, according to Christine Trimble, a company spokeswoman.

Damn!

Apple has posted a support document noting that they are “aware of the issue” and are “investigating solutions” for an issue where some users are unable to open GarageBand after updating to iOS 11.

With Movies Anywhere, you can watch most of those digital movies across all of your connected accounts. Well, at least all of the ones connected to supported services, which currently are Google Play, iTunes, Amazon, and Vudu. Here’s everything you need to know about Movies Anywhere.

I don’t have this problem because I only purchase content from iTunes, but I know a lot of people that do have multiple accounts. Lory Gil did a nice article explaining how Movies Anywhere works.

Thanks to Hullo for sponsoring the Loop this week. A hot, sweaty, flat pillow will wake even the deepest sleeper. Soft traditional pillows collapse under the weight of your head which can cause strains in your neck, shoulders and back. They also retain body heat, which can make sleep uncomfortably warm. It’s time to abandon tradition and try something new!

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Try our buckwheat pillow, Hullo, for 60 nights. If it’s not for you, ship it back to us it for a full refund.

“It is something I had been thinking long and hard about for quite some time. It has not been an easy decision, but I feel I can no longer put it off,” Vice Chairman Kwon said “As we are confronted with unprecedented crisis…

I’m willing to bet you could search for a long time and not see the words “unprecedented crisis” in a company’s own press release.

Alphabet Inc’s Waymo sought at least $1 billion in damages and a public apology from Uber Technologies Inc as conditions for settling its high-profile trade secret lawsuit against the ride-services company, sources familiar with the proposal told Reuters.

They also want a public apology for stealing their trade secrets.

Apple on Wednesday released iOS 11.0.3 with a couple of important updates for users. According to Apple, the update fixes an issue where audio and haptic feedback would not work on some iPhone 7 and 7 Plus devices. The update also addresses an issue where touch input was unresponsive on some iPhone 6s displays because they were not serviced with genuine Apple parts.

You can download the update by going to Settings > General > Software Update.