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!

Have You Ever Slept on a Buckwheat Pillow?

They’re totally different than the soft spongey pillows you’re used to. A buckwheat pillow is sort of like a beanbag for your head. Their unique and firm support simply can’t be matched by traditional pillows. The buckwheat hull filling will perfectly conform to the shape of your head and neck, providing comfortable support all night long. Buckwheat pillows also allow air to move freely though your pillow, preventing uncomfortable heat build up. Sleep on the cool side of the pillow all night long!

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.

The CNBC All-America Economic Survey finds that 64 percent of Americans now own an Apple product, up from 50 percent when the question was last asked five years ago. The average American household reports owning 2.6 Apple products, up by a full Apple product from the 2012 survey.

“I cannot think of any other product — especially any other product at a high price point — that has that kind of permeation with the public and level of growth,” said Jay Campbell, pollster with Hart Research, which conducted the survey along with Public Opinion Strategies.

Absolutely incredible when you think about it.

One of my favorite apps on iOS has been updated adding a number of new features, including Drag and Drop. According to Pixelmator, these are the new features available in the update: Pixelmator for iOS is now fully compatible with … Continued

Netflix Inc said on Tuesday it had received formal approval to start a C$500 million production unit in Canada and sought to quell talk that it had asked for special tax benefits for investing in its first such unit outside the United States.

I don’t understand the criticism. A company should ask for all the deals it can, including tax breaks. If a country, city, state, or province doesn’t want the business, jobs, and investment, someone else will.

You can ask Siri to do a lot of things with the Apple Music app, and most of them work quite well. I often ask Siri to play the Hard Rock music station and it does. However, I got a nice surprise yesterday with Siri and Apple Music.

Oisin Prendiville:

Ideally, experiences that users have in one app should stand to benefit them in others. As a community of developers and designers we should be looking to agree upon shared best practices to provide a consistent user experience. There’s an opportunity here to help users understand and embrace drag and drop as a powerful way to interact with touch devices, just as they have on the desktop for years.

This is a great article with video examples on how things work. Oisin recently released Castro 2.5 with his implementation on how it all should work.

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. … Continued

I absolutely love my Les Paul guitars, but Gibson as a company has treated its employees and artists like shit for many years.

An important note if you upgraded to High Sierra and use Line 6 music gear.

Thanks to Bombich Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Bombich Software has released Carbon Copy Cloner 5, an upgrade to its bootable backup software for macOS. The upgrade features scheduled task grouping and sorting, guided setup and restore, task history trend charts, a health check for backups, advanced file filtering, and includes hundreds of improvements and fixes.

Carbon Copy Cloner 5 requires macOS 10.10 or later and will be compatible with APFS and Apple’s macOS 10.13 High Sierra release this autumn. A full-featured thirty day trial version is available.

Carbon Copy Cloner is an app that I’ve used for years, in fact, since it was first released. The new version goes a long way to make the software easier to use, while still adding more advanced features.

You can get 15% off Carbon Copy Cloner until September 3 by using the code LOOPINSIGHT at checkout.

I don’t like the beer, but this commercial is so damn funny.

Apple today announced that Katherine Adams, formerly senior vice president and general counsel of Honeywell, will join Apple as general counsel and senior vice president of Legal and Global Security, reporting to CEO Tim Cook and serving on Apple’s executive team.

The company also announced Bruce Sewell, who has served as Apple’s general counsel since 2009, will be retiring at the end of the year.

Bruce did a great job defending and promoting Apple’s principles as General Counsel. Katherine Adams seems to have the same values as Tim Cook and will make a worthy replacement for Bruce.

Dave Hamilton has some good info on how we can expect Sonos to work—or not—with Apple Music.

A pig, a pen, and lifelogging.

Here’s a humorous look at Google’s announcements yesterday.

The iOS design lab will offer technological training and certification to students, faculty, staff and members of the broader community interested in developing apps in Swift, the Apple programming language used to write some of the most successful apps in the App Store. The lab will support educational innovation, career development for students and economic development opportunities for the central Ohio community and the university’s other campus locations.

The Digital Flagship University initiative will launch during the 2017-18 academic year. The iOS design lab will open in a temporary space in 2018, moving to a permanent location in 2019. Students will begin training in Swift coding in spring semester 2018.

Sounds like a great program for the school and Apple.

Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service — a smart assistant for customer representatives to parse and get better insights from their interactions with users, as well as automate some of the interactions — because the team was (according to a notice on the site) “joining a project that touches the lives of countless people across the world.” TechCrunch has now learned what that project is: the team is joining Apple.

This is great news. As much as Apple touts Siri and how smart it is, I still can’t get it to work reliably.

Apple on Wednesday released an update for Apple Watch owners that fixes an issue where the watch would join—and stay connected to—unauthenticated (captive) Wi-Fi networks.

You can download the update by opening the Apple Watch app on your iPhone, going to General > Software Update and then follow the onscreen instructions.

Today, along with a new family of hardware products [link], we’re introducing Google Pixel 2. We want you to be able to ask even more from your phone—so we’re giving you the highest-rated camera ever that helps you take great pictures and interact with the world around you, all-day battery life, and an Assistant that understands you better and helps you get more done.

I’m not sure about Google’s camera claims, but features like Google Lens sound interesting.

Today, we’re welcoming two new products to the Google Home family: Google Home Mini is small and mighty for hands-free help in every room. And Google Home Max is our biggest and best-sounding Google Home ever. They’re both radically helpful, and packed with the power of the Google Assistant, including some brand new features.

I haven’t seen or used either of these products, so I’ll reserve judgement. I have seen and listened to Apple’s HomePod and I know how good it sounds for music. There’s still a lot of questions to be answered with the HomePod, but I think I’ll wait until it’s released.

When it comes to multi-room audio, Sonos is still the gold standard. But the company has lagged behind on the smart speaker revolution, promising only that integration with assistants like Amazon’s Alexa would come in due time.

There is a ton of good news from Sonos today.

The European Commission said on Wednesday it was taking Ireland to the European Court of Justice for its failure to recover up to 13 billion euros ($15.3 billion) of tax due from Apple Inc, a move labeled as “regrettable” by Dublin.

Both Apple and Ireland are appealing the ruling that any money is owed, so this seems a bit heavy-handed by the EU.

Teach a machine using your camera, live in the browser. No coding required.

A new experiment done with Google.