Apple

Apple names Isabel Ge Mahe as Managing Director of Greater China

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Apple press release:

Apple today announced that Isabel Ge Mahe, vice president of Wireless Technologies, has been named vice president and managing director of Greater China, reporting to CEO Tim Cook and COO Jeff Williams. In this newly created role, Isabel will provide leadership and coordination across Apple’s China-based team.

And:

lsabel has led Apple’s wireless technologies software engineering teams for nine years, focusing on development of cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, location and motion technologies for nearly every Apple product. She has also overseen the engineering teams developing Apple Pay, HomeKit and CarPlay.

In China, she has worked closely with Apple’s R&D team and carrier partners to develop new China-specific features for iPhone and iPad, including recently announced iOS 11 features such as QR Code support, SMS fraud prevention and enabling the use of a phone number as an Apple ID.

This is a highly visible role in an area critical to Apple’s growth.

A closer look at the iPhone 8’s facial recognition feature

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Yoni Heisler, BGR:

While Apple tends to keep upcoming technologies and features under lock and key, its upcoming facial recognition software will likely be based on technology it acquired when it purchased an Israeli machine learning company called Realface earlier this year. Consequently, a close examination of Realface’s cutting edge technology can provide us with a number of significant clues as to what we can expect out of the highly anticipated iPhone 8.

And:

The company also claims that its software can recognize faces with an impressive 99.67% success rate, a figure which is actually higher than the 97.5% success rate most humans are capable of when it comes to recognizing faces.

And:

Realface’s technology is said to be so sophisticated that it can filter out photos, videos and even sculptures designed with the express purpose of tricking the software.

Fascinating tech.

Apple’s risky balancing act with the next iPhone

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Jason Snell, Macworld:

This is one of those areas where Apple may be the victim of its own success. The iPhone is so popular a product that Apple can’t include any technology or source any part if it can’t be made more than 200 million times a year. If the supplier of a cutting-edge part Apple wants can only provide the company with 50 million per year, it simply can’t be used in the iPhone. Apple sells too many, too fast.

And:

Most cutting-edge technologies are going to cost more and initially be available in limited quantities, unless Apple makes huge investments in equipment and manufacturing and corners the world’s supply of those parts, which it has done on more than one occasion.

Apple’s has to balance discriminators against practicality, bleeding edge tech that can help the latest iPhone stand above existing phones against the problems that come trying to buy that bleeding edge tech in adequate and reliable quantities.

Apple’s long history of rejecting ‘objectionable content’ from the App Store

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Louise Matsakis, Motherboard:

The App Store is the most successful guarded ecosystem in the history of the internet. For nearly a decade, Apple has undertaken a remarkable task—keeping an enormous software marketplace free from spam, malware, and risks to user security. And for the most part, it has been good at the job.

But at the same time, Apple has repeatedly rejected apps and refused to clarify its decisions to developers and users. While it’s also frequently corrected its mistakes, rejections like Metadata’s show that Apple is not afraid to wield its power without explaining itself.

The company has effectively dictated what kind of content should live on the devices we carry around with us everywhere, and stare at for hours each day. By controlling what’s allowed in its App Store, Apple has shaped how iPhone, iPad, and Mac users experience the internet.

The article includes a small handful of examples to make its point. As you read this, keep in mind how impossibly complex a task Apple has in reviewing millions of apps in a steadily surging river of inputs. In recent years, Apple has improved the process with most app submissions turning around in a matter of a day or so, many turning around in a few hours.

With a process this complex, mistakes will be made, and edge cases will exist. But given the choice, I’d rather live in the walled ecosystem controlled by Apple, with its commitment to keeping out spam and malware, than any other choices out there.

Tim Cook is Silicon Valley’s ‘most imaginative’ CEO, according to IBM’s Watson

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CNBC:

Silicon Valley’s most powerful imagination belongs to a very powerful CEO.

That’s according to recent data from job search firm Paysa, which used IBM’s supercomputer Watson to determine that Apple CEO Tim Cook is the tech industry’s “most imaginative” leader. Cook is followed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Cisco’s Chuck Robbins.

How they reached this conclusion:

To arrive at these results, Paysa fed “speeches, essays, books, the transcripts of interviews and other forms of communication produced by those highlighted above”— over 2,500 words — through the Watson Personality Insights API.

And here’s a link to IBM’s official Personality Insights API portal, if you want to play with this a bit yourself.

iPhone as a subscription service, Apple as a hit show producer

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Benedict Evans, on iPhone as a subscription service:

One can certainly argue that selling smartphones is a subscription business, and though Google does not itself sell phones (to any significant degree), Apple certainly does. You pay an average of $700 or so every two years (i.e. $30/month) and Apple gives you a phone. Buy an Android instead and you lose access to the (hypothetical) great Apple television service.

On the idea of buying Netflix:

From a pure M&A perspective, buying Netflix and immediately limiting its business to Apple devices would halve its value – why buy a business and fire half the customers? Buying it without such a restriction would have no strategic value – Apple would just be buying marketing and revenue. But as Amazon has shown, you don’t have to buy Netflix – they’re not the only people who can buy and commission great TV shows.

And on Apple taking on the business of producing hit shows to enhance its content:

Perhaps a deeper question, setting aside the purely strategic calculations, is that Apple has always preferred a very asset-light approach to things that are outside its core skills. It didn’t create a record label, or an MVNO, and it didn’t create a credit card for Apple Pay – it works with partners on the existing rails as much as possible (even the upcoming Apple Pay P2P service uses a partner bank). So, Apple has hired some star producers and will presumably be commissioning some shows, with what counts as play money when you have a few hundred billion of cash. But I’m not sure Apple would want to take on what it would mean to have a complete bouquet of hundreds of its own shows. That would be a different company.

The whole piece is thoughtful and well written. It’s all about the ecosystem. What serves the ecosystem serves Apple.

What was it like to be at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs visited?

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Alan Kay, responding to this question on Quora:

A good enough answer would be longer than is reasonable for Quora, but I can supply a few comments to highlight just how little attention is paid in the media, histories, and by most people to find out what actually happened. For example, I was present at the visit and demo, and it was the work of my group and myself that Steve saw, yet the Quora question is the first time that anyone has asked me what happened. (Worth pondering that interesting fact!)

Steve Jobs’ famous visit to Xerox PARC to see the Alto system graphical user interface is the stuff of legend. The Mac owes its inspiration and existence to that visit. This is a great story.

Chris Espinosa, Steve Jobs, and the Gallup poll question

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This is short but sweet. Chris Espinosa is a long time Apple employee. And “long time” is really an understatement. Chris is actually Apple employee #8. I’ve actually seen his #8 Apple badge. A cool piece of history.

Chris got a call from a Gallup pollster asking a pretty interesting question. Here’s Chris telling the story. I found it charming.

https://www.twitter.com/cdespinosa/status/886685676669771777

Tap on the tweet and read the thread. Be sure to read all the way to the bottom, as the actual pollster (or someone pretending to be him, but that’s not as good a story) weighs in.

How to tell which of your Mac apps is 32-bit vs 64-bit

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Why should you care whether an app is 32-bit or 64-bit?

From this Apple developer page:

At WWDC 2017, we announced new apps submitted to the Mac App Store must support 64-bit starting January 2018, and Mac app updates and existing apps must support 64-bit starting June 2018.

32 bits allows you 2-to-the-32nd addresses:

2^32 = 4,294,967,296

That’s 4 gigabytes of addressable space. A 32-bit computer can’t have more than 4 gigs of memory. A 32-bit program can’t directly address more than 4 gigs.

64 bits, on the other hand, gives you access to 2^64 which is equal to 2^32 times 2^32. Clearly, that’s a way bigger number. I won’t say we’ll never need more than 64-bits of addressable space, but I can’t imagine that need in my lifetime.

So how to tell which apps are 32-bit and soon to be end-of-lifed?

Easy. Go to the Apple menu, select About This Mac, then tap the System Report… button. In the page that appears, scroll down to the Software section (in the list on the left) and then tap Applications. Wait a minute or two while the list is built.

Once the list appears, widen the window so you can see the column labeled 64-Bit (Intel). If you tap that label, the table will be sorted into the haves and have nots, 32-bit apps on top, followed by 64-bit apps.

For me, the vast majority of 32-bit apps are legacy holdovers from previous installs that the migration assistant brought along during various system updates.

Why doesn’t Apple let you have both? In a nutshell, supporting both flavors means Apple needs to maintain and ship 32-bit and 64-bit versions of all its supporting frameworks, essentially doubling their workload as well as the size of the OS. In addition, both 32-bit and 64-bit frameworks are loaded into memory, doubling that part of the memory footprint.

Apple aims to get an iPad in the hands of every hospital patient

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Sarah Buhr, TechCrunch:

Apple has made great strides in health in the last few years and if it gets its way, there will be an iPad in the hands of every hospital patient.

And:

Earlier this week, I went down to L.A. to take a tour of Cedars-Sinai‘s pilot program allowing patients direct access to their vitals, care team and educational tools through iPads.

And:

Without the iPad, doctors and nurses have to follow a paper trail and then write up duplicate information on a white board often found on the back wall in the patient’s room. Mistakes can happen and, as Cedars-Sinai doctor Shaun Miller told me, the staff often run out of room to write, leading to confusion or a lack of information for the patient.

And:

In another section of the hospital, new parents are utilizing unmodified iPads to FaceTime with their newborns who may be sick or premature. These babies need to be kept isolated from the outside world and the germs that come with it so new parents aren’t usually able to see their baby for a few days after they are born. But, with what the nurses refer to as BabyTime (FaceTime for babies), parents can interact virtually with their little one while they wait.

Lots of upside here. I can only imagine this gathering steam as the ability grows for doctors to interact with patients remotely via their phones and tablets, perhaps with satellite devices attached to draw blood, take readings, etc.

Apple Pay in China promo: Use it, get a discount

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Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:

Apple today launched a large-scale promotion in China offering special discounts for consumers who use Apple Pay, in the company’s latest bid to counter the dominance of rival digital wallets in the country.

Between July 18 and 24, Apple device owners who use the mobile payment system to make purchases in participating merchants across mainland China will receive concessions of up to 50 percent and as much as 50 times the usual number of reward points for credit cards, according to Apple’s official Chinese website.

I went to the official site and ran the results through Google translate:

Apple Pay brings as low as 50% off this season and up to 50x bank points.

Our lives are often filled with tedious, but do not have to pay so. With Apple Pay, just touch it and hear “bite”, and it will be done quickly and easily. Whether in supermarkets, cafes or shopping malls, payment has become more convenient. From 18th to 24th July 2017, where you can use Apple Pay to pay, you can enjoy as low as 50% discount, as well as up to 50 times the bank credit card points reward 3 in a designated store with a CUP cloud flashover logo.

Not clear to me how this discount gets funded. Is it all Apple or a shared cost with the merchant? Certainly an interesting move on Apple’s part.

Cracking the code behind Apple’s App Store promo cards

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Equinux blog:

Apple is known for doing things with more attention to detail than most companies. So it should come as no surprise that even App Store gift cards with their promo codes have a few secret details that help make the experience more Apple-like.

So what powers the simple App Store promo codes? Secret fonts, special dimensions, and many more.

Today, we uncover these secrets.

And:

Apple’s App Store gift cards have a special trick: you can simply hold one up to your iPhone or Mac’s camera and it’ll automatically scan in the code and redeem the card for you. As developers, we thought it’d be cool to print some of our own promo code cards to give away at events, so we tried to create our own scannable cards. Turns out, there’s more to it than meets the eye…

This is some fascinating reverse engineering. My concern is that the post exposes font details that might be used to break Apple’s carefully built promo card system. If so, I’d expect a pretty rapid response by Apple.

iPhone silly season and the elimination of Touch ID

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We’re homing in on a likely fall iPhone rollout and the rumors are flying. John Gruber, from a piece titled iPhone silly season:

With software Apple can (and does) play a bit fast and loose. iOS 11.0 won’t be baked until late August. But software can (and always is) patched. Hardware doesn’t work like that. Many of the decisions related to the hardware on this year’s new iPhones were made two years ago. (And there are decisions being made now for 2019’s new iPhones.)

Is there a 3D laser sensor on the back of the new iPhone? Is there a Touch ID sensor? I don’t know. But Apple knows, and has known for a while. Months, even.

And:

If the new iPhone ships without a Touch ID sensor and there is no replacement authentication technology that is as good or better than Touch ID — that would be a dead canary in the coal mine.

From this Bloomberg piece by Mark Gurman:

For its redesigned iPhone, set to go on sale later this year, Apple is testing an improved security system that allows users to log in, authenticate payments, and launch secure apps by scanning their face, according to people familiar with the product. This is powered by a new 3-D sensor, added the people, who asked not to be identified discussing technology that’s still in development. The company is also testing eye scanning to augment the system, one of the people said.

A move to add 3D face scanning is one thing. A move away from Touch ID is another thing entirely. Apple proved they are willing to (have the “Courage” to?) make a major hardware shift, forcibly doing away with one technology (the 3.5 mm headphone jack) to usher in a newer technology (Bluetooth headphones).

Will this be the case with Touch ID? As John Gruber says, that decision has likely already been made.

My two cents? “As good or better than Touch ID” has to address accessibility. If I am visually impaired, I can unlock my iPhone with my finger in the dark. An edge case, certainly, but one that is a bit of a litmus test for any Touch ID replacement.

In a low light environment, will I be able to unlock my iPhone with a facial scan? If I am in a meeting, I can subtly unlock my iPhone with my finger. Will I have to hold my next generation iPhone in front of my face to accomplish the same thing?

As John says, that would be a dead canary in the coal mine.

UPDATE: The new system is said to include an infrared camera and low angle support (hat tip to Rene Ritchie), which would solve the low light and hold the phone in front of my face scenarios. Other use cases include unlocking the phone while driving (say, to take a look at your map) and the mechanic of approving an Apple Pay purchase. All of these seem legitimately solvable if the underlying tech works as rumored. This is yet another opportunity for yet another magical Apple experience.

Another peek at ARKit’s future

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This video shows a more sophisticated bit of ARKit, letting you walk around a room and quickly map out the floorspace. While this app might not widely useful, it does show the tip of a pretty large iceberg.

For example, imagine walking/measuring around your entire house and ending up with a reasonably precise set of up to the minute blueprints. You might feed those into another app and place/rearrange furniture to get a sense of what will fit and what works where. You might use the numbers to order the precise amount of carpeting you need, or take your app to a store to make sure that bookshelf will fit in that corner.

Take a look. ARKit is a big deal.

https://twitter.com/madewitharkit/status/885217993088782339

Amazon Prime Day’s chess move against Apple’s HomePod

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The chess move? Amazon used the heavily promoted Prime Day to sell as many Amazon Echo devices as they possibly could, in part in an effort to disrupt Apple’s entry into the market with December’s HomePod rollout.

Brian Sozzi, writing for The Street:

Amazon said that it sold three times as many Echo devices worldwide midway through Prime Day. Imagine what the grand total looks like seeing as Amazon was hawking the smart speaker for a low, low price of $89.99. What this means to Apple is rather simple to understand: Amazon has managed to stuff more homes with Echos in front of Apple’s major HomePod launch. Hence, if you bought a discounted Echo why in the world would you want a HomePod, too?

While I do agree that Amazon is doing everything they can to maximize their home assistant market share in advance of Apple’s entry into the market, I disagree with the premise that Amazon is making big headway in eating future HomePod sales.

First, there’s price. $89.99 is a low enough price that it will not prevent someone from spending $349 to buy a HomePod. If the Echo was, say, $299, this might be a different story. But the vastly different prices puts the products in different market tiers.

Then, there’s capability. The HomePod gives inside access to the Apple ecosystem. The most likely candidates for a HomePod purchase have already invested in an Apple product, have made a little ecosystem nest out of music, files, apps and, most importantly, experience. While they might pop for $89.99 to give Alexa a try, I don’t see that sunk cost being enough to stop an Apple folk from buying into HomePod.

And folks who’ve heard both systems consistently say that HomePod is head and shoulders better sounding than Alexa when it comes to playing music.

What Amazon has not done is deliver a better quality speaker system which is also compatible with Apple Music. While Echo can act as a dumb Bluetooth speaker, you’d still need your iOS device or Mac in the loop to control the Apple Music experience, and that defeats the purpose.

I see HomePod entering the market in the same way as Apple Watch. The market is crowded, but crowded with devices that offer no real advantage to the Apple ecosystem. And to me, that’s all the difference in the world.

Latest Apple Park drone footage, the homestretch

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[VIDEO] As you’ll see in the video embedded in the main Loop post, things are really coming along. The focus this month is the landscaping. Keep an eye on the details, like all the shrubs and trees, and the landscape leveling/grading. And, about 2:45 in, you’ll see they’ve moved the historic Glendenning Barn into place.

How a MacBook Pro was used to cut the movie Baby Driver in real time, on location

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Editor Paul Machliss has cut some difficult movies. You’ve seen his work if you’ve ever seen the quick edits in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and The World’s End, both personal favorites.

From the linked Premium Beat article:

For the film to work just right, Machliss had to be on set editing to verify that the timing of each shot was perfect: “To make it work you had to sort of be there at the moment of creation . . . I was there every day of every moment of every take. Edgar would do a take and yell ‘Cut!’ and then from the other side of the set go ‘How was that Paul?’ . . . and sort of wait until you went . . . ‘Yes it’s good.’ Then he felt he could move on. The advantage, of course being, we knew that six months down the line we weren’t gonna go ‘Ugh, we missed a trick here,’ ‘This didn’t work.’”

And:

To keep up with the production, Machliss had to be mobile and fast. He managed to put together an editing cart, pictured above: “This was the edit cart, basically, which was loaned to me by the sound department when we very quickly learned that I had to be absolutely mobile.”

The cart is pretty bare bones — a MacBook Pro, some external hard drives, “[Avid] Media Composer with an A-grade monitor which doubled either as a second screen for Media Composer, or as a full screen in its own right when Edgar wanted to come over and say ‘How does that look?’”

Check out the image of the extended keyboard at the very end of the article. It was new out-of-the-box when the film started.

[H/T Oliver Thomas]

Apple unveils smart home experiences in its retail stores worldwide

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Megan Rose Dickey, TechCrunch:

Unless you’ve had a chance to try some Apple HomeKit products in someone’s home or apartment, it can be hard to understand how it all works. In order to help with that, Apple has unveiled interactive HomeKit experiences in 46 of its retail stores worldwide.

Now, when you go into Apple’s new retail stores, you’ll be able to use the Home app from either an Apple Watch, iPhone or iPad to control devices like the Phillips Hue light bulb, the Hunter ceiling fan and many others. If you tap to the lower the shades in the living room, for example, you’ll see the shades lower in the house shown on the screen.

Smart.

Interview with Apple’s third co-founder, Ron Wayne

Written by

Motherboard:

Ronald Wayne lives in a little house in the town of Pahrump, Nevada. The 83-year-old designer and engineer was Apple’s original third co-founder, though nowadays he is perhaps best known as the unlucky guy who sold his 10 percent stake of the company for $800 just 12 days after it was incorporated in 1976. Today, it’s estimated that his shares would have been worth $67 billion.

Fascinating interview. My favorite response:

Q: What Apple products do you use now?

A: I have never owned an Apple product in my life, and I didn’t even have a computer until the mid 90s. What would I do with it? If you say “anything you want,” I’d come across the table at you. I had to have a reason. It popped up in the mid 90s when a friend asked to write him a short story and I delivered to him on a typewriter. So I had someone cobble a computer together for me and it just had basic internet and (Corel’s) WordPerfect on it. And over the years I have never had anything but the simplest computers.

Read the whole thing. Very interesting guy.

Windows Phone dies today

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Tom Warren, The Verge:

Microsoft is killing off Windows Phone 8.1 support today, more than three years after the company first introduced the update. The end of support marks an end to the Windows Phone era, and the millions of devices still running the operating system.

While most have accepted that the death of Windows Phone occurred more than a year ago, AdDuplex estimates that nearly 80 percent of all Windows-powered phones are still running Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 8, or Windows Phone 8.1. All of these handsets are now officially unsupported, and only 20 percent of all Windows phones are running the latest Windows 10 Mobile OS.

Reminds me of a funeral parade Microsoft threw for the iPhone, back in the day. Karma, baby.

Siri usage and engagement dropped since last year, as Alexa and Cortana grew

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Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Siri remains the most popular virtual assistant with 41.4 million monthly active users in the U.S., according to a new report from measurement firm Verto Analytics out this morning, but it has seen a 15 percent decline since last year – or 7.3 million monthly users. In addition, the study found that engagement with Siri has also dropped by nearly half during this period, from 21 percent to 11 percent.

Meanwhile, Amazon Alexa usage has been skyrocketing – jumping 325 percent in monthly active users – that is, from 0.8 million to 2.6 million monthly users, as its user engagement also increased from 10 percent to 22 percent during the same time frame.

Cortana has seen an increase as well, growing from 0.2 million monthly users in the U.S. to 0.7 million, or a 350 percent increase. Its user engagement tripled, from 19 percent to 60 percent.

Siri is about to undergo a sea change, as iOS 11 shifts from human to digitally generated Siri voicing. At the same time, Apple is hard at work building out SiriKit (first introduced with iOS 10) and Siri’s native intelligence. I suspect this year over year drop will be more than made up for over time as Apple starts shipping more enhanced versions of Siri with each new iOS release.

Add to that the benefit that will come when HomePod ships later this year. These are still the beginning times.

Apple ramps up ambitions in pre-paid smartphone market

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Colin Gibbs, FierceWireless:

Apple began to pursue the prepaid market more aggressively in 2016, as the market research firm gap intelligence noted in September, and that pursuit has only grown more ambitious over the last year. The iPhone’s prepaid retail channel placements more than doubled from the second quarter of 2016 to the second quarter of 2017, growing from 15 SKUs to 46 SKUs, and they increased 35% from the first quarter of this year to the second quarter, according to fresh data from the San Diego-based firm.

And:

Meanwhile, Apple secured a new prepaid distribution deal through Costco in the second quarter, and it increased prepaid retail placements at AT&T (up 200% quarter over quarter) and Best Buy (up 125% quarter over quarter), according to gap intelligence. The iPhone has seen 15 new retail placements across five prepaid carriers recently, gap intelligence said.

Who owns the pre-paid market? Android. This is a natural market for the iPhone SE, 5s, and 6, Apple finding ways to sell more phones, compete in every market.

The iPhone killed my inner nerd

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Tom Warren, The Verge, on being a teenage IT manager for his family:

All of our email went through my Exchange server, and I had a custom app that pulled mail from ISP and Hotmail POP3 accounts and filtered it through an assortment of anti-spam tools before it was allowed to hit an Exchange inbox. All of my family’s important documents were stored on a file server, backed up in a RAID array. I even used Zip drives for the really important stuff. I was a true IT administrator, and I was only 15.

All of these PCs were built by hand, with custom cases, cooling configurations, and my own selection of processors or RAM. I laughed at the thought of having to buy a Toshiba or Packard Bell PC, and opted for AMD’s Athlon 64 processors. I’d build powerful gaming rigs and spend hours writing scripts to get a better field of view in games, or a slight advantage by squeezing out every single drop of performance by altering textures per map. I would enter contests and win better processors or RAM, upgrade my PC and push the older components down to my servers.

And:

All of that tinkering and hacking things ended for me shortly after the iPhone arrived, and the closest I’ve come to it recently is playing around with a Raspberry Pi and Kodi.

And:

Apple’s App Store and the iPhone have altered computing massively, beyond my own examples. Nokia, BlackBerry, Microsoft, Motorola, and Palm have all had their businesses disrupted by the iPhone. The iPhone’s impact has also shaped how we use PCs today, and our expectations of computing in general. Apple’s iPhone has been on the market for 10 years now, and it hasn’t experienced a single instance of a mass malware attack like we’ve seen twice in the past month on Windows PCs.

Apple’s locked down and sandboxed environment for apps is a new model that has succeeded with consumers and security. Sure, there have been vulnerabilities, bugs, and near misses, but nobody has been forced to pay $300 to unlock their iPhone after a huge malware attack.

This article resonates for me. I truly miss the days when I could tweak just about every aspect of my devices, from swapping out memory, drives, graphics cards, to building custom cables that enabled third party devices to interface with my rig.

The new reality, of our own making, is a constant state of siege, one that makes the Apple ecosystem a safe port in the constant storm. But I do miss the tweaks and the repairability.

Apple ARKit in action

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Nice collection of ARKit videos, most farmed from @madewithARKit.

My favorite:

https://twitter.com/madewithARKit/status/884512251184590851

I love the T-shirt. Reminds me of the earliest CodeWarrior black shirts. And I love the fact that ARKit is linked to the HTC Vive. Bravo!

Amazon is quietly rolling out its own Alexa Geek Squad

Written by

Jason Del Rey, Recode:

Amazon has quietly been hiring an army of in-house gadget experts to offer free Alexa consultations as well as product installations for a fee inside customer homes, multiple sources told Recode, and job postings confirm.

The new offering, which has already rolled out in seven markets without much fanfare, is aimed at helping customers set up a “smart home” — the industry term used to describe household systems like heating and lighting that can be controlled via apps, and increasingly by voice.

While Amazon has a marketplace for third parties to offer home services like TV mounting and plumbing, these new smart-home-related services seem important enough to Amazon that it is hiring its own in-house experts.

Amazon is focused on expanding Alexa’s position as the number one home assistant, building out their ecosystem as much as possible before Google builds up any traction and before the real threat, Apple and HomePod, start their assault on Alexa’s market share.

Gruber: Speculation regarding the pricing of and strategy behind this year’s new iPhones

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John Gruber, Daring Fireball:

I created a bit of a stir the other day when I suggested the OLED iPhone “Pro” could start at $1,500.

Let’s take a serious look at this. $1,500 as a starting price is probably way too high. But I think $1,200 is quite likely as the starting price, with the high-end model at $1,300 or $1,400.

And:

You can’t talk about iPhone specs and pricing without considering scale. It’s not enough for Apple to create a phone that can be sold for $649/749/849 with 35 percent profit margins. They have to create a phone that can be sold at those prices, with those margins, and which can be manufactured at scale. And for Apple that scale is massive: anything less than 60–70 million in the first quarter in which it goes on sale is a failure — possibly a catastrophic failure.

In short, new iPhones aren’t defined by what Apple can make for a certain price, but by what Apple can make for a certain price at a certain incredibly high quantity.

What follows is a relatively long logic chain, but one that is well worth making your way through. By the end of John’s post, I was convinced that Apple will indeed be introducing a deluxe iPhone tier this fall, or soon thereafter.

UPDATE: Fascinating response to Gruber’s post from Philip Elmer-DeWitt [H/T Jason Hooper]. At its core:

Is Gruber speaking for Apple for himself when he defines terms and describes bundles?

I put the question to him this morning, but I don’t expect a candid answer. He’s a man who knows how to keep a secret. Besides, a good journalist will protect his or her sources, even when their names are out of the bag.

Gruber responds: “I have no inside information in this regard [2017 iPhone pricing]. Nada, none, zilch. Feel free to quote me on that. I have no comment regarding my tweets on inductive charging and can’t believe you even asked about that.”

Shocked commuters gawp as woman brings iMac and keyboard onto train

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A picture is worth a thousand words:

https://twitter.com/davidhill_co/status/882254867066232832

I do find the whole thing entertaining, but not too hard to see this happening. Could be she needed the larger screen or, perhaps, this might be the only computer to which she had access and a project deadline that forced her hand.

They had me at gawp.

Who would Tim Cook pick as a successor?

Written by

John Martellaro, Mac Observer:

There might come a day when, heaven forbid, Apple CEO Tim Cook cannot perform his duties for some reason. As a result, like every corporation, Apple has a succession plan for its CEO. What might Apple’s look like?

Interesting speculation.