The Super Bowl is an enormous night for international television. Each year, more than 100 million people are estimated to watch the game, its advertisements and its halftime show. It all begins with the performance of the National Anthem, a tradition that has been carried out by some of the greatest voices in pop music history. The song isn’t easy to deliver — as Christina Aguilera discovered — but there have been some exceptional performances. Click through to see the best star-spangled renditions.
Whitney Houston’s version in 1991 will always be my personal favourite.
The championship game of the National Football League is the biggest entertainment event in the United States each year. It is watched by more Americans on television than anything else, by a large margin. The whole thing is a monstrous, quasi-religious spectacle. And it’s been like that for decades.
Last year’s game was seen live by almost 100 million Americans. Every year since the game started, without exception, well over half of Americans households with a TV tuned in. In many cases, more than three-quarters tuned in.
But how, exactly, did the Super Bowl get this way? How did it become such an unavoidable phenomenon?
It’s a fascinating and uniquely American super event.
Apple has temporarily shut down all its stores in mainland China through Feb. 9, the company said on Saturday.
The tech giant said in a statement on Saturday: “Our thoughts are with the people most immediately affected by the Coronavirus and with those working around the clock to study and contain it.”
“Out of an abundance of caution and based on the latest advice from leading health experts, we’re closing all our corporate offices, stores and contact centers in mainland China through February 9,” it said.
Jobs was a master salesman, but to him, selling wasn’t selling. It was seduction.
Jobs built on the ideas of Apple’s ’70s marketing legend Regis McKenna, who saw before anyone else did that Apple’s early computers could appeal to people who didn’t spend their time disassembling motherboards—to students, teachers, musicians, and other creative people like me, who thought computers could be, you know, fun.
Because of Jobs, Apple’s sales, marketing, and design teams understood consumer psychology better than perhaps any company in history.
I don’t know if I’d go so far as “sex sells” but there’s no doubt the original appeal of using a Mac for me was the idea that it wasn’t a device I had to “figure out” how to use. It was definitely seductive.
January 24th was the 35th anniversary of Macintosh, bless its little soul.
In reading a number of articles, I got to enjoy the original Macintosh intro event all over again. It’s a vivid reminder that Steve Jobs’ showmanship and obsession with detail was in full bloom way back at the beginning. One of the those details was “the speech.” (About 3:05 into the video.). Steve wanted to have the first Mac to speak for itself.
it got me wondering: who actually wrote these words. Steve? One of his minions?
Instinct led me to suspect another Steve—Steve Hayden, then a Chiat/Day creative director and author of the iconic 1984 Macintosh launch ad. He’s also the guy who gave me my start on the Apple business.
Though I haven’t worked with Steve for many years, I still enjoy squeezing info out of him from time to time. So I had to ask: Did you do it?
I love Segall’s tidbits from the history of Apple marketing.
I bring the confusion I have over Neil Young slamming the MacBook Pro to the podcast this week. Dave and I also talk about Apple earnings and Mac Pro in the wild.
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Foundation, the Apple original drama with Jared Harris and Lee Pace that’s based on Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novel trilogy, is set to become Ireland’s largest-scale production ever.
At a press briefing in Dublin today, national funding body Screen Ireland talked up the country’s production slate for 2020, noting that the Apple show would create more than 500 production jobs when it shoots at Troy Studios in Limerick.
The 10-episode series from David S. Goyer, Josh Friedman and Skydance Television chronicles the epic saga of The Foundation, a band of exiles who discover that the only way to save the Galactic Empire from destruction is to defy it.
This is the one Apple TV+ series I’ve been looking forward to the most. I read the original Asimov trilogy as a kid many years ago and enjoyed it immensely. How this will be brought to the screen will be very interesting.
It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple.
This is the fifth year that I’ve presented this survey to a hand-selected group. They were prompted with 12 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 to 5 and optionally provide text commentary per category.
Snell surveys many of The Usual Suspects about their opinions regarding Apple’s performance in 2019.
Earlier this week, Apple released eleven new underwater screensavers for the Apple TV HD and Apple TV 4K. If you are using the Aerial screensaver, the Apple TV will automatically download them and appear in the rotation alongside the existing videos.
The new videos were added sometime this week, around Monday or Tuesday. The new screensavers are available in 1080p and 4K variants, which means they will show up on any tvOS-compatible Apple TV.
The new batch includes overhead pans of coral reefs, closeups of underwater species like stingrays and humpback whale and a pod of dolphins.
I much prefer the underwater screensavers to the city and atmosphere ones. My cat does too. You can watch all of them on Benjamin Mayo’s page.
Facebook users just got a new glimpse into — and a little control over — the myriad ways the social network tracks what they do when they’re not using Facebook. If you didn’t already realize it, by the way, Facebook is tracking an astounding amount of what you do when you’re not using the platform, an activity also known as living life in the real world.
The new Off-Facebook Activity tool, which the company announced last August, finally launched on Tuesday. It can tell you which companies are supplying Facebook with information about your real-world activity — for example, that you visited their website or purchased a product from it.
The feature also allows you to opt out of some of this collection — to a point. Clicking on a particular company’s listing will bring up a dialogue that will give you a slightly more specific look at what data was collected. There’s also the option to “Turn off future activity” from that company. If you’re looking for a nuclear option, you can click “Manage Future Activity” and then flip the blue switch on the right side of the page.
I was appalled at how many sites were tracking me using this “feature.” I turned it off immediately.
Word game addicts, say goodbye to your family, friends, and productivity: Spelltower is back and better than ever. The newly launched Spelltower+ from Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger takes the original game, modernizes it for the latest iPhone and iPad screen sizes, adds lots of new game modes, and packs several other key feature enhancements. Whether you’re a longtime Spelltower fan, or the game missed your radar entirely in its glory days, Spelltower+ deserves your attention.
Spelltower is a word game in which you trace on a grid of letters to connect them and form the longest words possible. It’s like connect the dots, but with letters. You can connect letters that are on any side of each other, including diagonal and backwards, and the longer the word, the better. Most tiles are just standard, but certain colored tiles give you a bonus of some sort, such as the blue tiles that take out the full row they’re sitting on when used. Yellow tiles are a new addition to Spelltower+, offering multipliers on your word’s point value. Overall gameplay is extremely simple, but hard to put down. It’s just plain fun, and the brilliant sound design and haptic feedback on iPhone make for a quality overall experience.
If you like words or “see” words in jumbles of letters, this is the game for you. Very addicting.
Apple today announced that all users in the United States can now experience a redesigned Maps with faster and more accurate navigation and comprehensive views of roads, buildings, parks, airports, malls and more, making it easier and more enjoyable to map out any journey. Apple completed the rollout of this new Maps experience in the United States and will begin rolling it out across Europe in the coming months.
“We set out to create the best and most private maps app on the planet that is reflective of how people explore the world today,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “It is an effort we are deeply invested in and required that we rebuild the map from the ground up to reimagine how Maps enhances people’s lives — from navigating to work or school or planning an important vacation — all with privacy at its core.”
It’s a big ask but I’d love to see this level of detail outside the US. Don’t forget about us up here in the Great White North, Apple.
I know it’s not too common for people to be out and about wearing masks in public in the United States, but it’s fairly common over here in Asia. The thinking behind it is actually to prevent you, the mask-wearer, from spreading your diseased germs to other, healthy, happy people.
And:
The Coronavirus, obviously, is different: doctors are recommending people wear masks to prevent coming into contact with the “novel” virus, thus keeping yourself safe. But the masks cover a huge portion of your face (even a big face, like mine) basically invalidating Face ID. I know, I know, this sounds very trivial, and it is. But trivial and annoying have long conspired together to cause great anger and frustration.
This is an interesting perspective, and makes me wonder if Apple has a team working on solutions to open your phone when wearing a mask. Perhaps a smarter, eye-centered Face ID, or a combination of Face ID and some other biometric (perhaps Touch ID as an additional option).
I’m not in the market for a Mac Pro, in any form, but I found this pair of videos quite interesting. Both are from audio engineer Neil Parfitt.
The first is the arrival and unboxing, with running observations along the way from the perspective of someone who makes their living working on TV and movie soundtracks.
My favorite quote:
I made a decision almost 22 years ago, while I was still on PC, that has brought me into this ecosystem that I can’t escape.
The second video is the Mac Pro, now rack mounted, with some interesting discussion about some of the workarounds Neil needed to get things working in his current (temporary) setup.
The NFL under terms of its agreement with its existing media partners cannot currently negotiate with other firms. But it is no secret Goodell and Apple CEO Tim Cook talk. One subject they surely broached is Sunday Ticket. DirectTV has two more years left to carry the out-of-market package and then is widely expected to walk because of shifting priorities at parent AT&T. The NFL has long been under pressure to open Sunday Ticket to more platforms than just satellite, and streaming it through Apple TV would solve that concern.
And this explainer from Jason Snell (headline link):
For those who don’t know, NFL Sunday Ticket is a subscription offering that allows football fans in the U.S. to watch all live games that are being shown outside their local market. It’s been exclusive to satellite-TV provider DirecTV for decades, and has probably driven millions of people to sign up for DirecTV. (Me included!)
DirecTV pays the NFL $1.5B (that’s Billion with a B) per year for the exclusive rights to this package. Their deal expires at the end of the 2022 season.
This may be much ado about nothing, pure speculation on the part of The Athletic. And it might also be that Apple gets involved sooner, offering a streaming sidecar in cohort with DirecTV.
It’s been 10 years since former Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad. The move firmly pushed tablets into the mainstream gadget conversation while leading many to ask, “What the heck is this giant iPod touch?” (Oh 2010, you sweet summer child.) In a review of the first-gen iPad that year, CNET described the device as “an elegant, affordable supergadget.” One of the main draws was how easy it was to access and navigate the apps on the 9.7-inch screen.
We selected 25 apps that have turned the iPad into a useful tool for entertainment, reading, working and playing. Here are the top 10.
Myst came to market in 1993, which was a banner year in PC gaming—1993 also brought us X-Wing, Doom, Syndicate, and Day of the Tentacle, among others. It’s fascinating that Myst happened the same year that Doom launched, too—both games attempted to simulate reality, but with vastly different approaches. Doom was a hard and fast shotgun blast to the face, visceral and intense, aiming to capture the feeling of hunting (and being hunted by) demons in close sci-fi corridors; Myst was a love letter to mystery and exploration at its purest.
A few months back, Ars caught up with Myst developer Rand Miller (who co-created the game with his brother Robyn Miller) at the Cyan offices in Washington state to ask about the process of bringing the haunting island world to life. Myst’s visuals lived at the cutting edge of what interactive CD-ROM technology could deliver at the beginning of the multimedia age, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, fitting the breadth of the Millers’ vision onto CD-ROM didn’t happen without some challenges.
I never finished Myst – I didn’t have the patience for it – but it was an undoubtedly beautiful and cutting edge game and design.
The emoji list for 2020 is now complete, with 117 emojis making the final cut for release this year.
Additions include Bubble Tea, Smiling Face With Tear, bottle-feeding parents and the Transgender Flag.[1] Emojipedia is today releasing sample images for each of the new emojis approved as part of this list.
Welcome additions include an emoji showing People Hugging which shows a greater sense of empathy than the previous Hugging Face and a pinched finger gesture which is commonly referred to simply as “Italian Hand Gesture”.
I rarely use emojis but if you do, here comes a bunch more.
It’s a big day for one of my favorite all-time apps—Fantastical has been updated for all platforms, and for the first time, receives feature parity across platforms.
Fantastical is the best example of an app you didn’t know you needed until you start using it. From its natural language parser to the advanced calendaring features, Fantastical can handle anything you can throw at it.
While I’ve always enjoyed how intelligent Fantastical is for things like figuring out and parsing time zones (because we’ve all missed a meeting now and then), the developers have added some new features that add even more functionality to the app.
One of my favorites is the Meeting Scheduling function. How many times have we gone back and forth with someone—or worse, a group of people—to find a time that works.
Fantastical now includes meeting proposals, which makes it easy to ask people what dates or times work for them. Create a proposal with multiple times and the invitees will be asked to choose what times work for them. Once everyone responds and a common time is found, the proposal can automatically be turned into an event and added to your calendar.
Another feature I like is the addition of Interesting Calendars, which lets you add calendars for things like holidays, sports, TV, and other events. I always have the Boston Bruins schedule added to Fantastical, but sometimes there is calendar spam, depending on where you subscribe. This feature will look after that.
There are a lot of other features that are available like the improved parsing engine, Calendar Sets, improved tasks, and more. However, there is another significant feature that I need to address—Fantastical Premium.
Fantastical Premium is a subscription that unlocks all of the features of the app. One subscription covers all platforms: Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. The subscription comes with a 14-day free trial and is available for $4.99 per month after that. There is also a yearly subscription that will save you even more money.
There is a free version available, but it is limited in its features.
The big question for me was, what if I had Fantastical 2 and upgraded to version 3.0 but didn’t want a subscription? Instead of forcing its customer to upgrade, Flexibits is giving all of its Fantastical 2 the same features they had with the older version after the new app is downloaded. You can still upgrade to Fantastical Premium if you want, but you’re not losing a thing if you decide not to upgrade.
Just as an aside, it has been nearly five years since Fantastical users have had to pay for an upgrade, and this upgrade is paid monthly.
I have already signed up for Fantastical Premium because this is an app I can’t live without.
The original headline from the Electronic Freedom Foundation was:
Ring Doorbell App Packed with Third-Party Trackers
To me, that gave the appearance that the iOS app was packed with trackers. But the article itself doesn’t have a single mention of Apple or iOS, makes it clear the issue is with the Android app. Just wanted to call that out.
On to the article itself:
An investigation by EFF of the Ring doorbell app for Android found it to be packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers’ personally identifiable information (PII). Four main analytics and marketing companies were discovered to be receiving information such as the names, private IP addresses, mobile network carriers, persistent identifiers, and sensor data on the devices of paying customers.
The issue is not that the danger of your doorbell video or statistics being leaked, but that the trackers can be used to connect your IP address and other identifying info to other devices, building an on-line profile showing where you live and what other on-line information is linked to you.
This cohesive whole represents a fingerprint that follows the user as they interact with other apps and use their device, in essence providing trackers the ability to spy on what a user is doing in their digital lives and when they are doing it.
I hate this behavior. I love the idea of a video doorbell, but I continue to wait for one that is devoid of trackers, truly anonymized.
In an interview to the BBC last week, Facebook’s Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications, Nick Clegg, said it wasn’t WhatsApp’s fault because end-to-end encryption is unhackable and blamed Apple’s operating system for Bezos’ episode.
Two things I always look forward to after each Apple quarterly results call are the call transcripts (I can read quickly, but can only listen as fast as someone is speaking!) and Jason Snell’s set of charts reflecting “the numbers”.
Take a look. They are beautifully done. Three charts that tell a big part of the story:
Wearable/Home/Accessories – Just look at that growth. And that’s with all the headroom of HomePod vs Amazon Echo and HomeKit devices like a doorbell to compete with Ring or a smoke detector to compete with Nest. So much opportunity still to come.
Services revenue – Slow and steady growth, with just a little more pop the last two quarters.
Apple regional year-over-year growth (the very last chart) – Look at that China curve. A precarious dip a year ago, with steady recovery ever since.
Surprisingly readable, a headline in every paragraph.
One subtle point that stuck out to me. This is from Apple CFO Luca Maestri’s part of the call:
Mac revenue was $7.2 billion and iPad revenue was $6 billion. Both products had a difficult year-over-year comparison due to the launches of MacBook Air here, Mac mini and iPad Pro during the December quarter a year ago and the subsequent channels fill. Despite the tough compare, on a demand basis, our performance for both Mac and iPad was around even to last year.
Mac and iPad year-over-year was down, but for a good reason.
Continuing:
Importantly, around half of the customers purchasing Macs and iPads around the world during the quarter, were new to that product. And the active installed base of both Mac and iPad reached a new all-time high.
So though the short term year over year number is flat, the customer base is growing. Tim, earlier in the call, spoke about iPad growth “in key emerging markets like Mexico, India, Turkey, Poland, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam”.
This all makes me wonder what the iPad/Mac mix is in Luca’s “half of the customers purchasing Macs and iPads around the world during the quarter, were new to that product”.
No matter, clearly a blowout quarter, no matter how you look at it.
I love Neil Young. I have followed his career for as long as I can remember, and I love his music. However, Neil’s comments today about audio and the MacBook Pro are just completely wrong and nonsensical.
I’m not sure if his comments were a stunt to help sell his book or if he’s just lost touch with reality. Despite his hatred for digital, the things Young had to say today about the MacBook Pro were way off base.
Let’s take a quick look at what the MacBook Pro has to offer in terms of audio before we tackle the rest of Young’s comments. According to Apple’s web site, the 16-inch model has High‑fidelity six‑speaker system with force‑cancelling woofers; Wide stereo sound; Support for Dolby Atmos playback; and Studio‑quality three-mic array with high signal-to-noise ratio and directional beamforming.
That’s quite an impressive hardware list to get on a laptop. Now let’s look at the things that don’t make sense to me.
The only way you can get it out is if you put it in. And if you put it in, you can’t get it out because the DAC is no good in the MacBook Pro. So you have to use an external DAC and do a bunch of stuff to make up for the problems that the MacBook Pro has because they’re not aimed at quality. They’re aimed at consumerism.
I’ve been recording in my studio for many years, and I have a lot of the DAC (digital-to-analog conversion) gear that Young is talking about. If I plug in my Universal Audio Apollo 8 into my MacBook Pro, I have studio-quality gear at my disposal.
There are no “problems” to deal with. The MacBook Pro is a workhorse that can handle any amount of audio that I want to throw at it. The Mac is the engine that is powering everything else I’m doing.
There are instances where people will record a song idea into the MacBook Pro using the built-in mic. Usually, these are ideas, songs written on the road, on a tour bus or hotel room. If these songs are chosen by the band to be released, the ideas are recorded into full-fledged songs.
So what exactly is Young arguing here? Does he not know the quality of the DAC gear is high-quality enough to make an album, even on a MacBook Pro? Is there a specific album he thinks is poorly recorded? I sure would like to know the answer to that one.
I’ve talked to many well-known artists over the years that have recorded songs into phone voicemails, voice memos, cassette tapes, and all kinds of other crazy mediums. I’m also sure that Young used some of these tricks to record some of his song ideas before they were released. Clearly, these were not great quality recordings.
To me, Young seems to be arguing something that is halfway between “analog is better,” and for some reason, “the MacBook Pro sucks.” He’s just confusing all kinds of thoughts that don’t fit together at all.
I believe that analog has its place in music. I won’t dispute that. Recording on tape was great back in the day. However, the industry has moved away from many of the old analog way of doing things. It’s opened up the music world to artists that would never have had the chances they do today.
Apple, to its credit, has tried to make recording music a positive experience for its users. From GarageBand and Logic to the higher-end features of the MacBook Pro, Apple has brought together a team of passionate, world-class audio engineers to work at the company.
Apple has also used some of the best people in the music industry, like the legendary Bob Clearmoutain, to help develop the AAC codec it uses on Apple Music. The company did this to help create a better codec, so we hear better music.
Let’s look at some of the artists that won Grammys this year that use Logic and, therefore, a Mac: Billie Eilish & Finneas, Lizzo, J Cole & 21 Savage, Chemical Brothers, and Jacob Collier.
We also know of a lot of other artists that use Macs and Logic to create music and soundtracks like Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, The Weekend, Fall Out Boy, Ramin Djawadi (Game of Thrones, Westworld), and many others.
Many of the studios Young would have artists go into to record their music are now gone. Closed. Forever. They couldn’t make it work in the new music economy. That’s sad, but it’s true. Studios are also costly, and most young artists would never be able to afford a recording studio.
The truth is, we have a way to create an end-to-end recording solution and do it all on a MacBook Pro. That is a good thing for music and the people that create the music we listen to every day.
Neil Young took his well-documented hate of digital recording and turned it into an undeserved, nonsensical slam on the MacBook Pro.
Apple on Tuesday reported its financial results for the fiscal first quarter of 2020 with quarterly revenue of $91.8 billion. That’s a 9 percent increase over the same quarter last year, and an all-time record according to the company.
“We are thrilled to report Apple’s highest quarterly revenue ever, fueled by strong demand for our iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro models, and all-time records for Services and Wearables,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “During the holiday quarter our active installed base of devices grew in each of our geographic segments and has now reached over 1.5 billion. We see this as a powerful testament to the satisfaction, engagement and loyalty of our customers — and a great driver of our growth across the board.”
Apple said that international sales accounted for 61 percent of the revenue.
Apple’s iPhone revenue was $55.9 billion this quarter, up from the $51.9 reported in the same quarter as last year. Mac sales were $7.1 billion, down from the $7.4 billion last year; iPad revenue was $5.9 billion, down from $6.7 last year; wearables was $10 billion, up from 7.3 billion last year; and services revenue $12.7 billion, up from the $10.8 billion posted last year.
In an interview with The Vergecast, Young tells Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel that even though Grammy-winning artists are able to make music almost anywhere they go on their laptop or mobile devices, they’re still sacrificing on audio fidelity.
Young said, “A MacBook Pro? What are you talking about? You can’t get anything out of that thing. The only way you can get it out is if you put it in. And if you put it in, you can’t get it out because the DAC is no good in the MacBook Pro. So you have to use an external DAC and do a bunch of stuff to make up for the problems that the MacBook Pro has because they’re not aimed at quality. They’re aimed at consumerism.
That’s what Steve Jobs told me. He told me that exact thing: “We’re making products for consumers, not quality.”
All due respect to Mr Young but he’s full of shit. I will categorically say Steve Jobs never said that to him.
