Apple put out its yearly holiday gift guide to help you choose the perfect present for your family and friends.

Pandora, the largest streaming music provider in the U.S., and Sonos, the wireless home sound system, today launched new ways for listeners to control their music on Sonos within Pandora’s award-winning mobile app. Listeners can now control Sonos directly through the Pandora mobile app and command Pandora stations with voice commands via Alexa. The new experience also includes support for Premium, Pandora’s on-demand service launched earlier this year.

Just tried this and it worked great. Why can’t Apple do this? HomePod, I guess. I am looking forward to getting one of those.

Our passports are packed and we’re crossing the border. Before you know it, Lyft will be coming to you live in Toronto. We’ve been looking forward to taking our brand of ridesharing international for some time, and we’re super pumped to share this with our close friends up north.

Lyft is a great service and the one I use all the time. This is a good first step to expand Lyft’s reach.

YouTube has confirmed it is working to resolve a bug in its mobile app that causes significant battery drain on Apple devices, even when the app is running in the background.

Definitely something to keep on an eye on until it gets fixed.

Josh Hawley, a Republican seeking to unseat Democratic U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill in next year’s elections, announced at a press conference that he issued an investigative subpoena to Google. He expressed concern over the accuracy of the company’s privacy policy, allegations it misappropriated content from rivals and claims it demoted competitors’ websites in search results.

The first thing I wondered is if Reuters put the first line in because they think this is a political move. Regardless, Google will have to answer the charges.

I mentioned when I wrote my iPhone X first look last week that I would follow-up with some more thoughts once I’ve had a chance to use the phone for a little while. Well, here it is. […]

Apple believes every company has a responsibility to pay its taxes, and as the largest taxpayer in the world, Apple pays every dollar it owes in every country around the world. We’re proud of the economic contributions we make to the countries and communities where we do business.

With all of the misinformation out there, Apple felt the need to set the record straight about taxes.

The justices left in place a 2016 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that upheld a verdict that found South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd had infringed Apple Inc’s patents on several popular features of the California-based company’s iPhone. Those included slide-to-unlock, autocorrect and quick links, which automatically turn information like addresses and phone numbers into links.

Stop stealing and pay the money.

Rene Ritchie and I discuss our thoughts of the iPhone X after having it for a few days to do reviews.

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.