Some fascinating items. At the very least, take a look at the Steve Jobs job application. This is a nice bit of history, a sense of Steve before Apple.
There’s also a signed Mac OS X manual, a signed newspaper article (I believe it is from 2008, likely for the iPhone 3G – In the pic, you can already see Steve has lost weight), and a photo of the original Apple logo signed by Apple founder Ron Wayne.
[Via 9to5Mac]
Yup, it’s a Kickstarter. And Apple is coming out with a wireless AirPods charging case, possibly shipping sometime soon. But this is a cool idea. It’s a thin sleeve that slides over your existing AirPods case, adding Qi wireless charging. And it’s $20, vs a likely price of $69 for Apple’s still to ship case.
Cathy Locke, Sacramento Bee:
Apple’s iPhone repair and refurbishing center has been identified as the source of apparently inadvertent 911 calls received by Elk Grove police and Sacramento County sheriff’s dispatch centers over the past five months.
Since October, the Elk Grove Police Department’s dispatch center has been receiving about 20 non-subscriber initialized 911 calls per day, said Officer Jason Jimenez, police spokesman. The calls show no service provider for the phone, but the dispatch center has traced them to a cell tower near the Apple campus and determined that they are coming from the phone repair facility, he said.
The calls are coming from inside the house.
And:
Since Jan. 1, Hampton said, the sheriff’s communication center has received 47 uninitialized 911 calls and has been able to document that 30 of those came from the Apple facility.
Testing the iPhone/Apple Watch SOS capability?
[VIDEO] Click over to the main Loop post and watch this short video. Fantastic.
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:
The model coming as early as this year will let people summon Apple’s Siri digital assistant without physically tapping the headphones by saying “Hey Siri.” The function will work similarly to how a user activates Siri on an iPhone or a HomePod speaker hands-free. The headphones, internally known as B288, will include an upgraded Apple-designed wireless chip for managing Bluetooth connections. The first AirPods include a chip known as the W1, and Apple released the W2 with the Apple Watch last year.
The idea for the water-resistant model is for the headphones to survive splashes of water and rain, the people said. They likely won’t be designed to be submerged in water. The latest iPhones can survive splashes, while the Apple Watch is considered “swim-proof.” Apple’s plans could change or be delayed, the people said. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.
Is this enough to make you replace your AirPods with the latest and greatest? What if it came with a wireless charging case that went along with the AirPower wireless charging mat?
These questions aside, what would really drive me to upgrade would be improvements to the audio experience.
Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:
Apple has registered new tablets with the Eurasian Economic Commission this week, suggesting that an iPad refresh is likely on the horizon. The filings, uncovered by French website Consomac, are legally required for any devices with encryption sold in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia.
I buy it, seems a reasonable tree of logic.
Mark Bergen, Bloomberg:
On any given day, there could be a half dozen autonomous cars mapping the same street corner in Silicon Valley. These cars, each from a different company, are all doing the same thing: building high-definition street maps, which may eventually serve as an on-board navigation guide for driverless vehicles.
And:
Autonomous cars require powerful sensors to see and advanced software to think. They especially need up-to-the-minute maps of every conceivable roadway to move. Whoever owns the most detailed and expansive version of these maps that vehicles read will own an asset that could be worth billions.
The motivation for the next maps war is clear. Billions of dollars at stake. This article is a fascinating look at the players and the technological approaches to capturing the next generation of maps.
Just a taste:
The companies working on maps for autonomous vehicles are taking two different approaches. One aims to create complete high-definition maps that will let the driverless cars of the future navigate all on their own; another creates maps piece-by-piece, using sensors in today’s vehicles that will allow cars to gradually automate more and more parts of driving.
And:
These self-driving maps are far more demanding than older digital ones, prompting huge investments across Detroit, Silicon Valley and China. “An autonomous vehicle wants that to be as precise, accurate and up-to-date as possible,” said Bryan Salesky, who leads Argo AI LLC, a year-old startup backed by a $1 billion investment by Ford. The “off-the-shelf solution doesn’t quite exist.”
And:
It’s an expensive ordeal with a payoff that’s years, if not decades, away. “Even if you could drive your own vehicles around and hit every road in the world, how do you update?” asked Dan Galves, a spokesman for Mobileye. “You’d have to send these vehicles around again.”
Unlike conventional digital maps, self-driving maps require almost-constant updates. The slightest variation on the road—a construction zone that pops up overnight, or a bit of debris—could stop a driverless car in its tracks. “It’s the freak thing that happens that’s going to make autonomous not work,” said McNally, the analyst.
Fascinating read.
Arturrr:
In early 2017, a conversation with yet another Waze fanboy finally nudged me to start a navigation app experiment. I was skeptical that the Alphabet owned company could meaningfully best its parent’s home grown Google Maps. I was also curious whether Apple Maps had discovered competence since its iOS 6 release.
I thus set out to answer three questions:
- Which navigation app estimates the shortest travel time?
- How does each app over/underestimate travel times?
- Which navigation app actually gets you to your destination most quickly?
Which led to these three conclusions:
Very interesting. Obviously, this is a relatively small sample size. It’d be interesting if there was some way to crowd-source this experiment to come up with a map overlay that showed which solution worked best in a specific area.
Jean-Louis Gassée:
As a testament to Apple’s place in the pantheon of electronics, reviews for a new product from Cupertino come fast and — often — furious. HomePod, Apple’s contribution to the “smart speaker” genre, exacerbates the venomenon, pardon, phenomenon.
And these three rules for evaluating speakers:
First, we must keep in mind the influence of the room and our position in it, how reflective material can make music sound brittle, how carpets and curtains will deaden the sound — or provide welcome balance for an overly bright room.
Second, all speaker comparisons must be double-blind, where neither the person running the test nor the evaluators know which device is on at the moment.
Third, and most important, output level differences matter. Contestant speakers must be carefully equalized to within 1db, because in any comparison the louder speaker will always sound better.
And on tuning a speaker for a specific room:
How well the device can do this depends on the number of microphones (you need at least two for spatial location) and speakers (the HomePod has seven). In theory, more speakers are better, because it means the device will have more control as it adjusts the balance of sound energy. In reality, the smaller speakers — the tweeters — are the most important; lower frequencies impart little directional information, although the computer can still decide to reduce low frequency output in general if the room “booms” too much.
And:
Put less elegantly, in consumer advertising lore we call early adopters “dogs”: They eagerly snarf any new food. This tells us nothing; we need to wait and see if they come back to the pail.
That process, the spreading of Word-of-Mouth, will be complicated by software updates supposed to appear in the next few months — and for ever after that.
Terrific read, lots more than these few pull quotes.
John Gruber:
iOS 11 finally added a long-awaited feature for those of us who care about typographic details: smart punctuation. You can turn this on in Settings → General → Keyboards. When enabled, quotes and apostrophes (like “this” and ‘this’) are automatically turned into their proper counterparts (like “this” and ‘this’), two hyphens in a row (–) are turned into a proper em-dash (—), etc.
I say “finally” because MacOS has had the feature in the standard text editing system for many years, and I can’t think of a good reason why it wasn’t in iOS years ago.
And:
In some recent update to iOS (I think 11.2.5, but it might have been an earlier 11.2.x update), smart punctuation stopped working in Messages — and as far as I can tell, only Messages. Why? My best guess: unintended consequences when sending SMS messages.
I’m kind of shocked that it took this long for smart punctuation (which has been around in the Mac universe forever) to come to iOS. And that take it out, put it back in again Messages story is an interesting wrinkle.
Tim Cook from this FastCompany interview:
Even when we were idling from a revenue point of view–it was like $6 billion every year–those were some incredibly good years because you could begin to feel the pipeline getting better, and you could see it internally. Externally, people couldn’t see that.
On products like iPhone not being embraced right away:
[People said] it could never work because it didn’t have a physical keyboard. With each of our products there’s that kind of story. Over the long haul, you just have to have faith that the strategy itself leads to [financial results] and not get distracted and focus on them.
On distractions:
The priorities are about saying no to a bunch of great ideas. We can do more things than we used to do because we’re a bit bigger. But in the scheme of things versus our revenue, we’re doing very few things. I mean, you could put every product we’re making on this table, to put it in perspective. I doubt anybody that is anywhere near our revenue could say that.
On following into a product category:
I wouldn’t say “follow.” I wouldn’t use that word because that implies we waited for somebody to see what they were doing. That’s actually not what’s happening. What’s happening if you look under the sheets, which we probably don’t let people do, is that we start projects years before they come out. You could take every one of our products–iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch–they weren’t the first, but they were the first modern one, right?
In each case, if you look at when we started, I would guess that we started much before other people did, but we took our time to get it right. Because we don’t believe in using our customers as a laboratory. What we have that I think is unique is patience. We have patience to wait until something is great before we ship it.
You could make the argument that HomePod followed Amazon Echo and Google Home into the smart speaker market. But as we discussed in the latest Dalrymple Report, the HomePod has been around for a long time, long enough that it could have been a Steve Jobs brainchild.
There’s a lot more to read in this interview. Feels like a deeper look than most Tim Cook interviews.
Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is in talks to buy long-term supplies of cobalt directly from miners for the first time, according to people familiar with the matter, seeking to ensure it will have enough of the key battery ingredient amid industry fears of a shortage driven by the electric vehicle boom.
And:
About a quarter of global cobalt production is used in smartphones.
It’s a race to lock up cobalt supply, a race between smart phones and tablets, versus the emerging electric car market.
John Gruber dug into this article from the Hong Kong Free Press:
The US-based global tech giant Apple Inc. is set to hand over the operation of its iCloud data center in mainland China to a local corporation called Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD) by February 28, 2018.
You can read Gruber’s take here.
As a postscript, Gruber links to this Apple knowledge-base article, which lays out the encryption methods used to protect the various data types stored in iCloud.
I found all three of these definitely worth a look.
Lory Gil, iMore:
We’ve got a list of the best streaming live TV services. Keep in mind, though, that most of these services don’t offer unlimited access to broadcast channels like NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox. What I’m referring to is the ability to watch any broadcast channel available in your area.
And:
The thing about broadcast television is that I couldn’t watch it on Apple TV. I’d have to switch my TV input over, and then flip through the channels until I found something to watch. I rarely watched broadcast television because I tend to stick with Apple TV for my TV and movie watching activities.
And:
With HDHomeRun, not only can I watch live broadcast television on my Apple TV, I can also watch it on my iPhone or iPad. Plus, with a subscription, you can record live TV and watch it the way a person with cable and a DVR would watch TV. Skip those commercials!
If you are a cord-cutter and have an Apple TV, you should definitely read Lory’s review.
As much as I love to see products like this emerge to fill a void in the marketplace, I see the cord-cutter marketplace as a fragmented mess. And no matter how many alternatives emerge, they are all dependent on a non-throttled connection to the internet. That means, the power cards are still held by the internet providers. Hard to overcome the built-in advantage of being able to package internet access and programming.
Game changer? Really? Hmm. Let’s take a look.
Aneesh Chopra, Shafiq Rabaneesh Chopra and Shafiq Rab, Wired:
In late January, Apple previewed an iOS feature that would allow consumers to access their electronic health records on their phones. Skeptics said the move was a decade too late given a similar (and failed) effort from Google.
But:
This move is a game-changer for three reasons: It affirms there is one common path to open up electronic health records data for developers so they can focus on delighting consumers rather than chasing records. It encourages other platform companies to build on that path, rather than pursue proprietary systems. And it ensures that the pace of progress will accelerate as healthcare delivery systems respond to the aggregate demand of potentially millions of iPhone users around the world.
This, indeed, is a game changer. To me, the key is this:
That’s because Apple has committed to an open API for health care records—specifically, the Argonaut Project specification of the HL7 Fast Health Interoperability Resources—so your doctor or hospital can participate with little extra effort.
Developers, this is an app opportunity, an area full of untapped potential.
Start with the linked Wired article, then dig into the details of the Argonaut Project.
Great stuff.
[VIDEO] This is a terrific story, well told by Jason Koebler and the Motherboard team. From the video description:
Every year there’s a race to become the first to tear down the phone, with teams from around the world flying to Australia—where it’s first released—to compete to be the first to look inside the world’s most coveted new phone.
This video (embedded in the main Loop post) is riveting, well worth your time. If this sort of thing interests you, you might check out this Twitter thread, where Jason tells the story about dropping his MacBook, cracking the screen, and encountering iFixit for the first time.
[VIDEO] Matthew Roberts (the guy who posts those monthly Apple Park drone construction videos):
A drone crashed into Apple Park over the weekend. The drone pilot got in touch with me shortly after the incident to inquire if I could assist in locating the downed drone. I was happy to oblige, so I took a Phantom 4 Pro out and began searching for it. It was eventually located on the Solar Roof and appeared to be intact for the most part.
The drone operator has gotten in touch with Apple and notified them of the drone crash and it remains to be seen, whether the operator will get his crashed drone back.
The video (embedded in the main Loop post) has (very choppy) footage of the drone going down. When I first saw this, I was reminded of all those times I knocked on neighbors doors to get back baseballs, footballs, and frisbees that landed in their yard or on their roof. Never a drone though.
Charles Arthur, The Overspill:
A couple of weeks ago, I opened my Macbook Pro as usual. The keyboard lit up, as usual. I waited – there’s that pause while the display gathers itself (it’s a 2012 model) and the processor pulls everything together and presents the login window.
Except this time, nothing. The display didn’t light. There was the quiet sound of the fans going, but nothing. Oh dear. Closed the display, opened it to catch it unawares – no, that wasn’t going to fool it. After a bit more futzing around, I concluded that it was not in the mood to work. But I had work to do, and so I turned to my iPad Pro.
This is a well-written post, from someone who uses a MacBook Pro to maintain a blog. This is particularly interesting to me for the obvious connection to my work writing for and maintaining The Loop.
What I particularly like about this post is the objective list of the good and the bad. All of these comments resonated for me. If you’ve considered what it’d be like to move from MacBook to iPad, I’d encourage you to read this list of good and bad first.
Kylie Gilbert, Shape:
Kacie Anderson, a 24-year-old from Hannover, PA, used the watch’s SOS feature to call for an ambulance after suffering injuries from a car accident late last year. As Anderson recently shared in a letter to Apple, she was stopped at a red light with her 9-month-old baby when her car was struck by a drunk driver. She wasn’t able to reach her phone after the collision—but she was able to use her watch to get help.
“The moment he hit us everything inside the car went airborne. My face took a horrible blow to the steering wheel, headrest, back to the steering wheel, and then to the window. I blacked out for about a minute and could not see. My eyes were wide open but all I saw was black,” Anderson shares exclusively with Shape. “My hands flew around to feel for my phone and then I realized I had my watch on and commanded it to call 911.”
I love stories like this. Great publicity for Apple that shows an unassailable value of the Apple Watch.
I kind of love the look of Apple’s new Close Your Rings page. The design matches the Activity app icon, with lots of red, green, and that “Stand” shade of pale blue.
While we’re on the subject of Stand, I’d love to see Apple add just a bit more functionality to Stand tracking. As is, there’s a “you’ve not reached your Stand goal for the hour” and “You did it”. But nothing in between. The Activity app does show the individual stand status on a time line, but the current hour is either filled in (you reached the hour’s Stand goal) or faded (you’re not there yet).
I’m suggesting more of a status bar, something that fills up so I can see how close I am to my goal for the hour. As is, it’s a bit of a mystery how close I am. Sometimes, I get the “You did it” message and wrist tap when I reach the Stand goal, but often I do not get that completion message. Some sort of progress indicator (fill the Activity app’s bar for that hour as my Stand progresses, for example) would be a motivator for me and less frustrating.
Michael Steeber , 9to5Mac:
On the heels of this past Tuesday’s annual shareholders meeting, Apple has made the transition to their new campus official by changing the company’s corporate address to One Apple Park Way. The change comes just weeks after Apple was given occupancy permits for several sections of the main campus building.
I feel like a small piece of Apple culture shifted. Goodbye Infinite Loop (sung to this tune).
One of my favorite Siri features is the Shopping List. I love the fact that HomePod Siri supports this feature. To try this yourself, fire up Siri on your HomePod… […]
Add milk to the shopping list
If you don’t yet have a shopping list, Siri will ask if you want her to create one for you. Say yes. Next, tell Siri:
What’s on my shopping list?
Siri should read your list. The key here is that your shopping list is shared between your HomePod and iPhone. This gives you the ease of saying “Hey Siri, add zzz to my shopping list” pretty much anywhere within hearing distance of your HomePod. Then, when you get to the store, pull out your iPhone and either have Siri read the list, or fire up Reminders and tap the shopping list (that’s where the list is stored).
One small complaint: To me, a key to a shopping list, especially if you live with other people, is sharing. If you use HomePod to create a shopping list (as we did above), the shopping list will default to being locally stored on the iPhone used to setup the HomePod. As far as I can tell, once that list is setup, there’s no way to change the sharing settings for that list to share on iCloud.
A better path: If you find that your shopping list is, indeed, stored locally and not in iCloud, do this:
Now, when you ask HomePod Siri (or any of your Siris, really) to add an item to your Shopping list, you’ll have access to the same list on all your devices. Nothing special about the name Shopping, either. You could call it Grocery or Stanley. Just ask Siri to add an item to the XXX list, where XXX is the name of that list. Key is for the list to live in the cloud.
[VIDEO] First things first, you might want to listen to this one (embedded in the main Loop post) on headphones, else you’ll find your home devices firing off constantly. Amusing the first time it happens, but trust me, you don’t want that.
The fact that this infinite loop of requests gets interrupted says something about reliability of this technology. I’d hate for my life to depend on one of these assistants getting something right. As I understand it, the CNET folks who pulled this together tried several times to tweak settings to get the infinite flow and just couldn’t.
It’ll get there.
Side note: I kept expecting that weird fake flowers thing in the middle of the picture to come to life. Sadly, it did not.
The Register:
Apple last month fixed a flaw in macOS and iOS that allowed a text message to crash its chat software – and now it has the opportunity to do so again.
Various macOS, iOS, and watchOS apps that rely on Apples’s text-rending code can be crashed when sent a message containing a symbol composed of characters used in the Indian language Telugu.
And:
The symbol represents a combination of Telugu letters and signs, specifically the letter “ja,” the sign “virama,” the letter “nya,” a zero-width non-joiner and the vowel sign “aa.”
Trying to open a message with this symbol in iMessage or other apps that rely on Apple’s UIKit framework for text rendering, like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, and WhatsApp, will cause a crash. Don’t what ever you do try to create a filesystem folder using that symbol.
Unless you use Telugu or interact with someone who does, chances are you’ll never encounter this bug. But it is interesting. This came to light when this OpenRadar post appeared.
The original radar was marked as a duplicate, meaning Apple already knew about the problem. And sure enough, there’s already a fix in place in the latest betas:
https://twitter.com/reneritchie/status/964228823196848129
That’s not units sold, but 51% of total global smartphone revenue. Both have value, but I’d argue that revenue is much more important than units sold. While total unit sales buys influence, revenue buys investment in R&D.
51% of total global smartphone revenues is astonishing.
Check the picture in this tweet:
https://twitter.com/Caitlin_McGarry/status/964163777762643968
This, clearly, is the nature of the beast.
Seems to me, “damage” implies permanence. As far as I can tell, the rings left by HomePod, etc., are like smudges. A bit of mayo (or whatever cleaning miracle you use for your wood surfaces) and elbow grease, and it’s all cleaned up.
Or put something solid under the speaker to prevent the ring in the first place.
[H/T Jack Brewster]
FastCompany:
Engineers at five major SF-based tech companies would need to spend over the 28% threshold of their income to afford a monthly mortgage near their offices.
And:
Apple engineers would have to pay an average of 33% of their monthly income for a mortgage near work. That’s the highest percentage of the companies analyzed, and home prices in Cupertino continue to skyrocket.
This housing market is a chaotic bubble. But it continues to inflate, money continues to pour in.
Take a few minutes to scroll down this page, get a sense of the highlighted apps. A fascinating look at what’s already shipping. To me, this is the tip of the iceberg, and just the slightest taste of what’s coming down the pike.
Early, early days.
The Rajam Report highlights various reviews of the YouTube and Amazon Prime Video apps built for Apple TV. At the core are the complaints that the interface does not feel like a traditional Apple TV app, that they do not feel like they were written for Apple TV.
But why?
Take a look at this chart:
Those numbers are sales estimates. Pavan Rajam asks this question:
If you’re Amazon, Hulu, or YouTube, what incentive do you have to invest in a high quality tvOS app when it addresses a mere fraction of your overall TV user base?
Read the whole article. I do think Pavan has his finger on the pulse here.
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:
Apple Inc.’s HomePod, the company’s first foray into speakers in a decade, costs $216 to build and generates thinner profit margins than other products like the Apple Watch and iPhone, according to analysis by TechInsights.
Given the HomePod’s $349 price, that $216 cost suggests Apple is generating margins of about 38 percent, according to the product analysis firm. That compares with margins of 66 percent and 56 percent for the Google Home and Amazon Echo, products that compete in the smart-speaker market, but offer lower audio quality, according to the firm’s estimates.
Margin is complicated. Lots of analysis goes into setting prices and, thus, determining margin. But it does seem reasonable to assume this is Apple entering a somewhat crowded market, wanting to keep their pricing relatively low (compared to their cost) to help raise demand.
The bulk of the HomePod’s costs come from the internal speaker technology, including the many microphones, tweeters, the woofer and the power management components. That adds up to $58, while an additional $60 includes various smaller parts like the lighting system used to display the Siri animation on the top of the device.
The HomePod’s A8 chip is estimated to cost $25.50, while the external housing and other items come in at $25. TechInsights also estimates manufacturing, testing, and packaging to add up to $17.50.
There’s clearly a lot more going on under the hood in a HomePod than in the much cheaper Google Home or Amazon Echo. If you haven’t already, I would definitely click over to the iFixit HomePod teardown and watch the video. I found it fascinating.