Engadget:

Google is ready to unveil a shiny new version of Wear OS at last. This is the third major release of the platform (the first since rebranding to Wear OS), and Google finally shows an understanding that what people want from a smartwatch is not a phone replacement. They want a reliable daily assistant and coach that is fast and unobtrusive. The new system doesn’t have obvious battery life enhancements, though, which is still a major pain that the industry has yet to solve. It may be up to Google’s partners to figure that out for themselves.

Watch the video embedded in the article to see the new Wear OS at work.

My immediate reaction? It’s still round. Dealbreaker for me.

Back in the day, before my iPhone or iPad was usable as a hotspot, I used to use my Mac as a hotspot. I’d plug it into, say, a hotel’s ethernet cable, then open up my WiFi for the folks around me.

I haven’t done this in years, since my iPhone hotspot works pretty well and since WiFi is so easily found. That said, in general, the performance you’ll get from an ethernet plugged-in hotspot is much better than you’ll get from your sometimes spotty cellular service.

Nice walkthrough from Jonny Evans. Tuck this one away and pass it along.

This is an interesting idea. Still early days, but I do see some potential here.

Jump to the site and type in a word or phrase. Picular will return with a palette of colors, each with the specific hex code of that color.

If you click on the color’s hex code, that code will be copied to the clipboard. If you hover over the image mini-icon (bottom right corner of a color), you’ll see the image from which that color was picked.

The results are uneven. For example, type grape and you’ll see see an orange color that was clearly not from the grapes in the image, but from a stem in the background.

But that aside, I do see some upside here. Very interesting idea.

Lots of interesting nuggets in this survey. It’s a quick read, a single page. A few highlights:

19% of Android users surveyed indicated they plan on switching to an iPhone in the next year, compared to 12% last year.

The numbers were relatively small, so this might simply be a sampling issue. But if that number proves accurate, that’s a pretty big swing.

I’d be interested in a similar survey showing percentage of iPhone users who plan on switching to Android.

Another interesting point: The percentage of iPhone users who intend to upgrade to a new iPhone was 23% this time last year, and increased to a whopping 48% in the most recent survey. Part of that might be the perceived maturity of the iPhone X and Face ID (i.e., the kinks have been worked out), adding to a natural response to the waves of marketing.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple will add 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air models released in Mid 2012 to its vintage and obsolete products list on August 31, according to an internal document distributed to Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers and obtained by MacRumors from a reliable source.

But:

Normally, this would mean the 2012 MacBook Air is no longer eligible for hardware service, except where required by law. However, Apple has decided to include the notebook in its recently launched pilot program that allows for repairs to continue into the vintage period, subject to parts availability.

Apple says 2012 MacBook Air models will remain eligible for service at Apple Stores and Apple Authorized Service Providers worldwide through August 31, 2020, a full two years after the notebook is classified as vintage. Mail-in service will also be an option in the United States and Japan through that date.

I appreciate Apple making this available, helping keep select older models on the road for that much longer. They could easily have not done this, which would have pushed people to buying new machines instead of repairing their existing machines.

Reuters:

Apple Inc has acquired a startup focused on making lenses for augmented reality glasses, the company confirmed on Wednesday, a signal Apple has ambitions to make a wearable device that would superimpose digital information on the real world.

And:

Apple confirmed it acquired Longmont, Colorado-based Akonia Holographics.

Here’s a link to the Akonia Holographics web site, in case you’d like to get a better sense of them. I’d imagine the web site will eventually be taken down as they migrate to Apple.

Interestingly, the most recent entries on the News page are from 2016.

Apple:

The Photos app helps you organize and share your growing collection of photos and videos. It also includes a built-in set of editing tools that can improve your photos dramatically with one click, or let you fine-tune all the details.

Our specially trained Apple Support Advisors are experts in using Photos to transform pictures from good to amazing — and they’d love to show you how in a 30-minute guided phone session.

This is an interesting experiment by Apple. I’m all in favor of people who are interested in photography getting as much education as they can, particularly when it comes to editing their photos. Sadly, this isn’t available outside of the United States so I can’t speak to how good the training is. If anyone has taken it, I’d love to hear about your experience.

It’s a bit of race to see if the auction hits its reserve or if Apple will throw a spanner in the works and try to have the auction taken down.

Here’s a link to the auction. As I write this, the current bid is $12,400.

Rob Griffiths compares a pair of (nearly) identical photos, taken four years apart, one with a pretty good pocket camera and one with, arguably, one of the best smartphone cameras on the market. To be fair, the pocket camera was a 2011 model, so the pictures might as well have been taken six years apart.

The results were interesting, both to show how far our smartphone cameras have come, but also for the comparison of file size, ISO, f-stop and shutter speed.

[Via Michael Tsai]

From Reddit:

What does everyone do to find new good music on AM? I’ve been having to use Spotifys discover and recommendations to get good music.I prefer Apple Music to Spotify interface and usability wise but I really wish they would just up their algorithm game for discovering new songs or getting good songs based off “stations” I create based off a song I’m listening to. I sometimes get songs I already have or very mainstream options like Justin Biebers “No Brainer” come up and it’s like wow Apple lol

Here’s one response:

You need to put in a LOT of work to get Apple Music to work for you.What Apple Music would like is that you select the genres and artists that you like when you set your account, listen to the stuff from your library or tracks suggested by For You and have Music do the rest. This works well if you only listen to mainstream stuff but falters if you look for artists with smaller listener counts (i.e. most of my library).To fix this, you have to “Love” and “Dislike” a lot of songs yourself. For example, Music kept recommending Hip Hop for me (it’s probably the most popular genre on the platform); I had to dislike every Hip Hop song it threw my way for it to stop doing that. I also like Midwest Emo Pop Punk; most artists in that category are relatively unknown, so I had to import my Discover Weekly playlists for a few weeks and upvote songs from that to train Music to find artists like this for me. Apple Music’s For You didn’t get “good” until I spent roughly two weeks doing this. My New Music Mix is almost on par with Spotify’s Discover Weekly now, and I’m even getting Artist Spotlights from artists I didn’t think they did Spotlights on (like The Descendants).The only issue I’m having now is that I’m scared to listen to hip hop on Music since I feel like it will begin recommending all sorts of Trap if I listen to even one or two songs (which I do sometimes; I like to stay current on the genre even though I don’t like it much).

I agree with all of the above, but I have found one path to music discovery that works well for me.

Recently, Apple Music introduced the Friends Mix to the top of the For You page. When I first fired up the Friends Mix, it was a bland rehash of my favorites. It was fine, but there was nothing really new to discover.

The key was adding new friends. Once I started sharing my Apple Music name (I embedded it in a tweet, which I pinned) and started following everyone who followed me, my friends list grew and my Friends Mix started getting interesting, much more enjoyable.

SIDE NOTE: My Apple Music name is ZZDAVE and I make every effort to follow all followers. Follow me and help me grow my Friends Mix.

As to liking and disliking songs, one tip is to let Siri do all the heavy lifting. Hear a song you like? Fire up Siri and say “I love this”. Siri will tap that heart for you. Same for “I dislike this”.

Reference: https://squiddogetoken.com/

Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. tech industry has largely declared it is off limits to scan emails for information to sell to advertisers. Yahoo AABA -0.76% still sees the practice as a potential gold mine.

Yahoo’s owner, the Oath unit of Verizon Communications Inc., has been pitching a service to advertisers that analyzes more than 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes and the rich user data they contain, searching for clues about what products those users might buy, said people who have attended Oath’s presentations as well as current and former employees of the company.

Charles Arthur, in The Overspill, said it best:

Yahoo is like an object circling a black hole’s event horizon: it’s taking forever to actually fall in, yet its fate is certain. There’s simply no way for it to climb back out to be relevant.

Hard to argue. Been a long time since I’ve encountered a Yahoo email account. This does not seem like a winning strategy.

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac, via this post by Jason Snell:

Apple’s AirPort line may be discontinued, but AirPort Express got one heck of an update today. Firmware update 7.8 for the latest AirPort Express hardware (2012 2nd-gen model, no longer sold) adds support for AirPlay 2 and Apple’s Home app. The teaser for support has been present since iOS 11.4 beta, but support hasn’t been live before today’s version 7.8 firmware update.

A lot of people were excitedly tweeting about this yesterday, discovering new life for that long-serving AirPort Express they’ve had, seemingly, forever. Props to Apple for this update. An extended life for an excellent, under appreciated product.

And props to Jason Snell for the best headline of the bunch.

Found this in a Reddit thread this morning:

A locked (closed) padlock, with a key shown next to it.In the Apple artwork, the text on the key previously displayed UM242, which is an actual type of key.

This emoji does not show in the title bar of Safari, presumably to prevent less-reputable sites pretending to be secure (encrypted using HTTPS) when they are not.

Fascinating.

Brian Barth, Washington Post:

In October 2017, Sidewalk Labs, a Google-affiliated company looking to make urban life more streamlined, economical and green by infusing cities with sensors and data analytics, announced plans to build the world’s first neighborhood “from the Internet up” on 12 acres of the Toronto waterfront, an area known as Quayside. Sidewalk aims to, for example, build an “advanced microgrid” to power electric cars, design “mixed-use” spaces to bring down housing costs, employ “sensor-enabled waste separation” to aid recycling and use data to improve public services.

So far, so good. But one group, Tech Reset Canada (TRC), has a problem with this:

TRC’s founders are not opposed to the concept of smart cities in principle. Their concerns revolve around the collection and commodification of urban data and whether that occurs through a democratic process or via corporate fiat.

As it is, technological innovation has far outpaced lawmakers’ ability to establish the rules of the road, whether in the context of Google and Facebook’s immensely profitable endeavor to commodify Internet browsing activity or Internet-connected assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, which eavesdrops on your every conversation while awaiting your commands. But critics of the smart city industry say that it brings the disconnect between policy and digital intrusions on privacy to another level.

Very interesting. Who owns the data collected in the running of a smart city? How will that data be used?

So far, the virtual world has been something we opt into — giving up various rights in the terms of service agreements we hastily click closed — and can opt out of if we so choose. It’s one thing to willingly install Alexa in your home. It’s another when publicly owned infrastructure — streets, bridges, parks and plazas — is Alexa, so to speak. There’s no opting out of public space, or government services, for which Sidewalk Labs appears eager to provide an IT platform.

I am a fan of smart cities. But there is an Orwellian side. This is a great read.

As has become a bit of a tradition, here’s your annual fall foliage prediction map.

Slide the slider until your area comes into bloom, then plan your leaf-peeping tour.

Shira Ovide, Bloomberg:

Like Apple’s 2017 iPhone editions, there will be three current year models but with even clearer product and pricing segmentation: good, better and best.

Here’s the thing, though: Apple has never done well selling the “good” phones in its lineup. That has hardly mattered because the more entry-level models effectively serve another duty: They push people to the more expensive versions that Apple increasingly relies on for its sales growth.

This article does a great job explaining Apple’s motivation in steering people to the top of the line models. As shareholders would rightfully expect, it’s all to maximize revenue.

Check out the first chart in the article, which shows Apple’s average revenue from each iPhone sold, on a yearly basis. Back in 2014, that number was $603. In only 3 years, that number skyrocketed to $758. Apple is good at this.

Think about the marketing you’ve seen over the last few years. Almost all of it is dedicated to pushing the top of the line iPhone X. When was the last time you saw a commercial for any other model, let alone the diminutive, in both price and form, iPhone SE.

Fire up Apple’s web site. There’s a gorgeous image of the iPhone X. Of course it makes sense that Apple would focus on the latest and greatest, but there’s also the flip side lesson, few people come to Apple for a budget phone:

This fits with a pattern of Apple’s relatively low-end iPhones not setting the world on fire. Remember the iPhone SE released in 2016? Apple said at the time that some people wanted a relatively smaller smartphone when most phones were getting supersized. It could have been the iPhone for the masses, but the $399 iPhone SE 2 has been relegated to a niche in Apple’s product lineup. The 2013 iPhone 5c was considered a budget alternative at $100 less than the $650 flagship model of the time. It is the Voldemort of iPhones. No one speaks of it.

“The Voldemort of iPhones”. Heh. I like it.

New York Times:

In 1986, Robin Williams was at a crossroads. “Mork & Mindy” was four years behind him, and his movie career had been foundering. His marriage to Valerie Velardi, his first wife and the mother of their son, Zak, was unraveling. But he still had two reliable sources of joy in his life: his live comedy act, and Zak.

Zak was just 3 at the time, but in his own way, he played a pivotal role in Robin’s stand-up tour from this period, which culminated in a performance at the Metropolitan Opera House.

Over the span of this hour-long set (which was also released as the Grammy Award-winning comedy album “A Night at the Met”), he plays his usual grab-bag’s worth of characters: Robin Leach, Ronald Reagan, a ballet-dancing Tom Landry and, in a whispery, falsetto voice, Zak.

I was/am a huge fan of Robin Williams. I first met him here in Vancouver while he was shooting Jumanji and I interviewed him in San Francisco at a Macworld Expo. We corresponded for a time and I treasured the little piece of him I had. I remember this bit well and this is a great dissection of it.

The Outline:

Optimism about self-driving cars has sustained a fever pitch for so many years, at this point, that some die-hard boosters of the concept would still insist it’s an inevitability. Countless journalists who have experienced, with their own bodies and two eyes, a self-driving car journey, have declared it the inevitable future.

But it hasn’t been a great six months for self-driving vehicles.

Obviously, the headline is (unnecessarily) hyperbolic but the issues discussed in the piece make a lot of sense. Self-driving cars will get here – that’s inevitable – but I don’t think it will happily nearly as fast as its proponents think or hope.

Rene Ritchie, iMore:

Tim Cook wasn’t and isn’t a product person, not like Jobs. He didn’t dream up the next world-changing device. What he did was make those dreams a reality. Famously, he didn’t invent the iPad. He figured out how to make it for $500.

It would have been easy for Cook and his cool, steady Southern charm, to have continued as CEO much as he had as COO — running things by the numbers. But, even early on, Cook showed signs of something more.

Apple has never simply been a technology company. Jobs was clear on that: Apple stood at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. Slowly, inexorably, Cook has added a third pillar to that foundation: Civil responsibillity,

Tim Cook has been in charge long enough now that he’s put his own stamp on the new, many orders of magnitude larger, version of Apple.

[UPDATE: OK, this is the new article. It shared a URL with an older article, so there was indeed some confusion. All should be good now.]

Another one of those interesting, readable articles with an unfortunate headline.

If you can get past the “Apple’s greatest flaws” sensationalism, this is actually pretty interesting.

Katharine Schwab, FastCompany:

It’s been a decade since the British designer Imran Chaudhri first imagined a user interface that would introduce millions of people to the smartphone. Chaudhri joined Apple in 1995, soon rising to become the design director of the company’s human interfaces group–where he was one member of the six-person team that designed the iPhone.

Credentials established.

Very early on, when we first started building prototypes of the phone, a couple of us were lucky enough to take them home… By using the phone and living with the phone, I had friends all over the world who were hitting me up all the time and the phone was pinging and the light was going on, so I realized for us to coexist with this phone, we needed to have something to act as a gatekeeper. Very early on, I designed what ultimately became Do Not Disturb.

And:

Inside, getting people to understand that [distraction] was going to be an issue was difficult. Steve [Jobs] understood it…internally though, I think there was always a struggle as to how much control do we want people to have over their devices. When I and a few other people were advocating for more control, that level of control was actually pushed back by marketing. We would hear things like, ‘you can’t do that because then the device will become uncool.’

And:

You might install about 10 applications on an afternoon and say, ‘yeah, you can use my camera, you can use my location, you can send me notifications.’ Later on down the road, you find out Facebook’s been selling your data. Later on down the road, you realize that you’ve developed a sleep disorder because these things are blinking every night and you actually don’t really care about them until the morning.

These are just snippets, just a taste of what I found to be a truly fascinating interview.

Nice little rollup and video from AppleInsider. My favorite new Siri things:

• Being able to turn my flashlight on and off
• Asking Siri to find my devices

That second one is more than simply a handoff to the Find iPhone app. It will give you instant feedback if your device is nearby, and will offer to play a sound on the device. This is a very efficient way to locate a misplaced device, all with a single command and a button tap.

9to5Mac:

A report today from Ceros details the trend that Apple’s top-selling products overall (not just accessories) at the major retailer are indeed dongles. Specifically, over the past two years the 3.5mm to Lightning adapter and 3.3-foot USB-C to Lightning cable have been Best Buy’s most popular Apple branded items.

While AirPods just took over as the most popular individual product as of Q2 2018, dongles still prevailed as the top revenue generator overall, with Apple’s headphones category coming in second place.

Used to be, every cell phone brand made its own unique charger. That made for very little reusability and a nightmare if you forgot your charger. Outcry ensued, and we’ve now moved to two main form factors, both of which plug into the same USB brick. Much better.

This dongle thing feels like the pendulum swinging the other way. Now we have USB-C as a standard on our Macs, but dongles and USB-C confusion means we’ve got similar problems if we forget our dongle.

Will Apple ever move the iPhone from Lightning to USB-C? That certainly would simplify things for travelers, one dongle to rule them all.

UPDATE: I’m guessing this is unit sales, not revenue.

Digital Camera World:

It’s here. After weeks of teasers, leaked images, cardboard mockups and more, Nikon has confirmed its new Z-system mirrorless line. The line is launched with two models, the Z7 and the Z6, and a handful of lenses. The more senior of the two models is the Z7, and this is the camera that we spent some time with a few weeks prior to the launch.

What follows is a detailed look at the key parts of the camera’s spec sheet, as well as our first impressions from our time with a pre-production sample of the model.

Lots of people, amateurs and pros alike, have been waiting for this camera from Nikon. I’d love to try one out but, at a price point starting at $3400.00 US, I’d have to sell one of the children.

I’m taking offers on a used child if anyone is interested.

Ars Technica:

In April, we reported that Apple was working on developing a TV series based on Isaac Asimov’s highly influential Foundation series of science fiction novels. Today, Ars has confirmed not only that Foundation was in development, but it has now been given a full series order—meaning we’re definitely going to see it.

Foundation takes place over more than a thousand years, and the story tracks a group of exiles who are fighting against the Galactic Empire in order to save it. It is a highly influential work of science fiction; its impact can be felt in Star Wars, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and many other sci-fi films, books, and video games. Several previous failed attempts have been made to bring Foundation to the screen—including ones by Independence Day director Roland Emmerich and Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan.

The Foundation series was the first series of books I ever read as a kid, scifi or otherwise, and I reread it several times in the ensuing years. I’m really excited and a little worried about this as a TV series. It’s an incredible series, spanning worlds, galaxies, and time. I hope they do justice to it.

Pulp Librarian:

In the 1970s the cost – and size – of calculators tumbled. Business tools became toys; as a result prestige tech companies had to rapidly diversify into other products – or die! This is the story of the 1970s great calculator race.

Are you old enough to remember your first “pocket calculator”? We weren’t allowed to use them in school and my dad wouldn’t let me use one for my homework – I had to do the math by hand and he would check it with his calculator. Thanks to Dave Mark for linking to this on Twitter.