The European Commission today announced that it would be fining the company €997 million, or $1.23 billion, for abusing its market position between 2011 and 2016, related to its relationship with Apple.
And:
“Qualcomm illegally shut out rivals from the market for LTE baseband chipsets for over five years, thereby cementing its market dominance,” said Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, in a statement. “Qualcomm paid billions of US Dollars to a key customer, Apple, so that it would not buy from rivals. These payments were not just reductions in price — they were made on the condition that Apple would exclusively use Qualcomm’s baseband chipsets in all its iPhones and iPads.
Qualcomm will no doubt appeal this ruling. The size of this fine boggles my mind. $1.23 billion. That’s a lot of baseband chips.
Apple on Wednesday will release ARKit 1.5 to developers, giving them the latest tools to make augmented reality apps for iPhone and iPad users.
With the release of ARKit just six months ago, iOS became the largest augmented reality platform in the world, rolling out to hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users. The latest version will make the next-generation apps even more powerful and useful for the average user.
The new version has a better understanding of the scene and space around you, allowing it to place virtual objects on vertical surfaces like walls and doors. For instance, in one demo Apple showed me, a developer can make a game that requires the player to bounce a ball on the floor and hit a virtual target hung on the wall. ARKit 1.5 makes the target on the wall possible. If you miss the target, ARKit will recognize that and bounce the ball off the wall.
ARKit can now also map irregularly shaped surfaces like circular tables, allowing the entire experience of an AR scene to be more realistic. The resolution of the camera view in the latest version offers 50 percent greater resolution and supports auto-focus for an even sharper perspective.
In speaking with Apple about the release, one of the new features that impressed me the most is ARKit’s ability to find and recognize 2D images such as signs, posters, and artwork.
Think about this for a minute. You walk into a museum and see an image of the Apollo moon landing. When you hold up your iPhone, it recognizes the image and allows you to tap on it, which instantly takes you to the surface of the moon with the Apollo vehicle landing beside you.
While these are just example apps, it was an incredible demo to see. It really makes you think about the possibilities of what developers can do with this technology.
One of the main questions I have about augmented reality is when will it become important to the average, mainstream user. The game demos I’ve seen at Apple keynotes are great, but I’m not a gamer, so they don’t matter much to me.
One thing to remember is how new this technology is and how far it has to go. There are currently about 2,000 AR apps, but that number is only going to grow, as will the categories of apps developers will make. The same thing happened when Apple opened the original iOS App Store—as time went on the apps became more sophisticated and useful for everyone. The same thing should happen with AR apps.
ARKit 1.5 is a big step to making augmented reality a cool technology that average users will use even more than they do now.
If you’re tired of the “Upgrade to macOS High Sierra” notifications nagging your Mac to install a system software update that you perhaps have made a conscious decision to avoid, then you will likely appreciate this tip to completely stop the upgrade macOS notifications.
This is a great tip for those of us who can’t or don’t want to upgrade to MacOS High Sierra. But when I tried the tip both ways, my Mac doesn’t seem to have a “/Library/Bundles/” folder and the Terminal command comes back with an “OSXNotification.bundle: No such file or directory” result. Should I be concerned?
HomePod, the innovative wireless speaker from Apple, arrives in stores beginning Friday, February 9 and is available to order online this Friday, January 26 in the US, UK and Australia. HomePod will arrive in France and Germany this spring.
HomePod delivers stunning audio quality wherever it’s placed — in any room in the house, playing any style of music. Using just your voice, it’s easy and fun to use, and works together with an Apple Music subscription for a breakthrough music experience, providing access to one of the world’s largest cloud music libraries.
On Siri:
Siri, now actively used on over half a billion devices, has developed a deep knowledge of music and understands your preferences and tastes. And with Siri, HomePod can send a message, set a timer, play a podcast, check the news, sports, traffic and weather, and even control a wide range of HomeKit smart home accessories.
And:
Using Siri to deliver deep knowledge of artists, songs, albums and more, HomePod can handle advanced searches within Apple Music’s catalog, so users can ask questions like, “Hey Siri, when was this song released?” or “Hey Siri, can you play something totally different?” to change the mood. Apple Music subscribers can enjoy a catalog of more than 45 million songs, combined with their entire iTunes library, for online or offline listening — completely ad-free.
On SiriKit:
Through SiriKit, HomePod supports third-party messaging apps, so users can ask Siri to send a message to a friend or colleague using apps like WhatsApp. Reminders, note-taking and to-do list apps like Things and Evernote will automatically work with HomePod, so Siri can set reminders, create a new list, mark items as complete, or create and modify notes. For developers interested in adding SiriKit support, more information is available at developer.apple.com/sirikit.
On setup:
Setup is as easy and intuitive as setting up AirPods — simply hold an iPhone next to HomePod and it’s ready to start playing music in seconds. The Siri waveform appears on the top to indicate when Siri is engaged, and integrated touch controls also allow easy navigation.
The biggest question for me, how will Apple distinguish HomePod from Amazon Echo and Google Home, both priced significantly less. HomePod is $349.
From the post, this bit about KGI predicting a quick end-of-life for iPhone X:
KGI also expects a trio of iPhone models in the fall of 2018. He predicts the iPhone X will be “end of life” in the summer of 2018, instead of being retained as a lower-cost option in the following year. If this is the case, it would be the first time that Apple has not retained the previous year’s model to allow for a wide range of iPhones available at many price points.
This would not be the first time an iPhone flagship model didn’t stick around for a second year. In 2013, Apple introduced the iPhone 5S to replace the iPhone 5, and also introduced the iPhone 5C to occupy the second pricing tier.
The iPhone X was a relatively giant leap in hardware design. The notch took a lot of heat and it seems a logical speculation that Apple is working hard to shrink the hardware footprint and the notch. And that means a new rev of the iPhone X. Once that happens, it’d seem logical to end-of-life the previous version. If the KGI speculation is true. If.
But my favorite part of Gruber’s post is his takedown of a Newsweek article, with the headline:
Is Apple About to Cancel the iPhone X? Poor Sales Mean Device Faces ‘End of Life’”
This article got a fair amount of traction, but it was based on the Apple Insider article quoted above. Headlines. A sharp, cutting tool, dangerous when used poorly.
Follow the link above to Gruber’s post. A worthy read.
The “ring” building is situated on 175 acres, so it can take a lucky Apple employee as long as 10 minutes to walk from the parking garage to their office.
So Apple will provide 1,000 free bikes and 2,000 bike parking spots on its campus for employees to get from place to place.
Most Silicon Valley tech giants provide free bicycles for their employees, but given Apple’s corporate preferences, its bikes are minimally designed, compared to Google’s rainbow-colored two-wheelers.
It seems Apple settled on a completely chrome, minimalist bicycle design, and ordered a whole lot.
Not new news, but there’s a bit of video and a still shot of the bikes. Interesting to compare Google’s Google-color-scheme bikes to Apple’s minimalist take.
If you want an iPad to supplement your iPhone and Mac, you can still get one in the $329 “just call me iPad” model introduced last spring. But the bulk of Apple’s iPad efforts of late have centered on making the device a capable replacement for the traditional computer. The iPad Pro and iOS 11 represent a new vision for the iPad. This vision puts the iPad not next to the Mac, but instead squarely in its place. It’s a vision embodied by the question, “What’s a computer?”
If the tagline “What’s a computer?” doesn’t ring a bell, take a moment to watch it.
Two key moments:
At about 30 seconds in, our hero does a super-Pro-move to fold up the keyboard. I’ve not yet found someone who can duplicate that move, at least not nearly as smoothly. Wonder how many takes that took.
At 55 seconds in, there’s the real payoff. “What’s a computer?” Apple is clearly pitching the iPad Pro as the be-all and end-all in devices.
Ryan’s MacStories post does a terrific job answering that question, painting the differences between a Mac and an iPad with absolutely no snark or venom. This is a wish list, an exploration of what the iPad still needs to cross the “What’s a computer?” divide.
Today Apple launches Apple Music for Artists, a dashboard designed to provide acts with hundreds of data points giving deep analytical insight into their fans’ listening and buying habits.
And:
The easily navigable dashboard’s home page provides artists with their current number of plays, spins, song purchases and album purchases. The user can specify the time period ranging from the past 24 hours to the 2015 launch of Apple Music.
An Insights panel showcases key milestones via bullet points that highlight such information as all-time number of plays and purchases for specific songs or cumulatively.
And:
Apple Music for Artists debuts more than two years after Spotify, Pandora and YouTube bowed their own artist dashboards. While admittedly a late entry, Apple hopes to make up for its tardiness with the depth of information available, level of transparency and the ease of use provided by the clean user interface.
Good news for Apple Music artists.
One side note: The original Billboard headline was “Apple Bows Apple Music For Artists to Provide Acts With Deep Analytics Dive”. Took me a few reads to parse that one. Music and Hollywood writers have their own headline language. You’d rarely (if ever) find the word “boffo” in a tech headline. But “Boffo Box Office”? Happens all the time in the Hollywood press.
When Hollywood folk check out the tech blogs, do they see the same alien language?
Intel Corp said on Monday that patches it released to address two high-profile security vulnerabilities in its chips are faulty, advising customers, computer makers and cloud providers to stop installing them.
Imagine being in the ocean, trapped in a swell some 700 meters from shore. Suddenly a yellow package drops out of the sky as if sent by a god, hits the water next to you and expands into a flotation device.
That was the experience of two unlucky, then lucky teenage boys off the coast of Lennox Head in Australia last week. Someone spotted the boys in distress and called it in, but the nearest lifeguard station was a kilometer away. Just that morning, however, Lennox Head had brought their new lifesaving drone into service.
What a great story. I was caught in a small rip when I was in Australia last month and it was all kinds of terrifying.
Spotify pays most of its revenue to the labels to license music rights. The labels then pay a small amount of that money to artists. In the age of record pressing, compact disc encoding, physical distribution, and the like, such a middle man was needed. Today, that middle man seems, well, antiquated. The labels, of course, will say they do far more than this, and maybe they do — for now. But come on, this middle man is so getting cut out of the equation at some point.¹
And Spotify, more so than any company before it — aside from maybe Apple (more on that in a bit) — is in a position to do just that. Of course, they can’t come out and say this — though it sure sounds like Jimmy Iovine did recently (again more in a bit) — because it would be declaring open war on their most important partners. But this is inevitable: Spotify will work with artists directly to produce and distribute their music, becoming, effectively, a label.
It’s hard to argue with the logic. It’s just a matter of time.
Apple and Malala Fund today announced that Apple will become the fund’s first Laureate partner, enabling a significant expansion of Malala’s effort to support girls’ education and advocate for equal opportunity. Led by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Malala Yousafzai, Malala Fund champions every girl’s right to 12 years of free, safe, quality education.
With Apple’s support, Malala Fund expects to double the number of grants awarded by its Gulmakai Network and extend funding programs to India and Latin America with the initial goal of extending secondary education opportunities to more than 100,000 girls.
A very worthy cause but why stop at 12 years of education? If finishing high school is important, isn’t a college education just as important?
The show that premiered in 1989, with its signature theme song “Bad Boys” by the reggae band Inner Circle, was only slightly different than its current iteration.
“Cops” quickly expanded to other counties, cities, and towns — Los Angeles and Multnomah, Las Vegas and Houston—and by 1992, it had been syndicated and nominated for two Emmys.
“Cops” married the growing pop culture obsession with police to the often unpredictable nature of the job. As Wurms puts it: “It’s not staged. It’s real life stuff, and you [never knew] what you were walking into when they were filming with you.”
It’s a show I’ve never watched much of but its longevity certainly raises some interesting questions.
This ad ran last year, but I just encountered it this weekend, thought it worth sharing.
I feel like the days of iconic album covers are all in the past. It’s not that the covers are any less creative, it’s more that I tend to get my music via links or as part of crafted playlists.
At the same time, album art went from 12″ album covers, to less than 5″ for a CD cover, down the the tiny thumbnails we have today.
The computer asked me if I wanted to update the iPad to the latest version of iOS, and I said yes without thinking much about it. Everything seemed to go fine, but then at the very end I saw an error message that I had never seen before telling me to press the iPad’s home button to attempt data recovery. What the heck? Nervous that I had somehow lost data on my daughter’s iPad, I pressed the button as instructed and crossed my fingers.
I then waited a while while the iPad told me that it was attempting data recovery.
I’ve seen this message, and I’ve heard from a number of other folks who’ve encountered the same issue while trying to apply an iOS update. Here’s a link showing what this looks like.
Seems to me it’d be easy enough to add in some kind of clarifying text to this error message. As is, it is a bit terrifying.
Cook said: “I think if you had to make a choice, it’s more important to learn coding than a foreign language. I know people who disagree with me on that. But coding is a global language; it’s the way you can converse with 7 billion people.”
I agree with Mr. Cook that coding teaches people logic and many other skills, but suggesting that it allows you to converse with 7 billion people is Trumpian foolishness. (If you follow Mr. Cook on Twitter, you’ll notice that he occasionally posts tweets in languages other than English. His minions clearly give him the texts, but it’s surprising that he doesn’t post code to converse with his Twitter followers.)
At a strictly surface level, I think Kirk has a point. Clearly, programming languages are not intended as conversing languages. You’d never chat with someone in Swift.
But digging in a bit, I took a different meaning from Tim’s comment. Programming languages are a common currency, a common language shared by many different cultures.
That said, is it more important to learn coding than a foreign language?
This iPhone X ad reached back in time, editing together snippets from a comedy album Muhammad Ali created early on in his professional boxing career, before he changed his name. The album was released under his birth name of Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., back when the world was first learning about “The Greatest”.
The snippets used in the Apple ad are from the second track on the album.
Every part of the U.S. has a different local term for a convenience store: the bodega, the corner store—even “the Wawa,” a chain name that Northeasteners use generically. Now Amazon wants to extend its brand to the notion of a grab-and-go shop with Amazon Go, a store that literally lets you grab and go.
And:
Amazon Go works like—well, like a physical manifestation of Amazon’s 1-Click checkout, where you “click” by taking an item off a shelf. On arrival, you launch the Go app, which comes out today for iPhones and Android phones and connects to your Amazon account. It displays a 2D code that you scan at one of several glass security gates. The code identifies you to the store and opens the gate.
And:
Once you’re in, AI algorithms start to track you and everything you pick up and keep. You can bag your items as you go if you so choose, and need interact with an employee only if you’re buying alcohol, in which case an associate standing in the liquor area will check your ID.
And:
I tested the system by picking up a can of LaCroix water and leaving the store. It was a non-event, which is sort of the point. The experience doesn’t feel like an act of advanced technology unless you scan the ceiling and notice the hundreds of matte-black cameras surveying the shopping floor below.
This is the future of retail. Or, at least, a major step along that path. Two things occur to me:
This is a direct example of AI eliminating the need for specific jobs. Clearly, there are plenty of employees in the chain here, both in building out the store and designing and coding the AI itself. But those jobs are front loaded. Once the stores are built, and the AI in place, this will require very few people to run.
What happens if someone gets hold of your Amazon login info and goes on a spree through a store? If someone uses my credit card fraudulently, my credit card company covers me 100%. Does Amazon have a similar policy?
Disney announced last summer that it plans to launch an ESPN-branded direct-to-consumer offering early this year, followed by a Disney-branded service in 2019. To power the service, Disney acquired a large stake in the streaming solutions provider BAMTech for $1.58 billion last year.
And:
Disney’s BAMTech Media has hired former Apple and Samsung executive Kevin Swint as SVP and GM, Disney SVOD Service, to build, and ultimately run, the company’s upcoming Netflix competitor.
Netflix killer? I don’t think so. But they will make life just a bit harder for Netflix:
To prepare for the launch of its own subscription video business, Disney announced that it won’t renew its distribution agreement with Netflix.
Presumably, that will also include the content they will acquire in the Fox deal.
You could be forgiven if you’ve never eaten a butter tart. There is no flashy frosting or elaborate lattice to entice you. It’s easy to pass by.
But Canadians will tell you that these diminutive treats hold an expanse of flavor and textures: flaky pastry, caramelized crust and a bracingly sweet filling.
It wasn’t until I moved to the US that I found out Butter Tarts were “uniquely” Canadian (few things are so we celebrate where we can) and most Americans had never heard of them. BTW, they are easy to make and delicious!
The head of Apple, Tim Cook, believes there should be limits to the use of technology in schools and says he does not want his nephew to use a social network.
Cook was talking at Harlow college in Essex, one of 70 institutions across Europe that will use Apple’s Everyone Can Code curriculum, it was announced on Friday.
“I don’t believe in overuse [of technology]. I’m not a person that says we’ve achieved success if you’re using it all the time,” he said. “I don’t subscribe to that at all.”
Even in computer-aided courses, such as graphic design, technology should not dominate, he said.
As usual, interesting and thoughtful comments from Cook. Although, I still disagree with him on the importance of coding.
Whatever kind of cinema grabs your attention probably first grabbed your attention through the design of the movie poster, a genre that gets its due in novelty shops and specialist exhibitions, but often goes unheralded in popular conceptions of art.
Despite its utilitarian and unabashedly commercial function, the movie poster can just as well be a work of art as any other form.
I love the graphic style of these old posters, many for movies you’ve never heard of and which are undoubtedly, quite awful.
As individuals we think that having lots of cash makes us rich. For companies it’s the opposite. Cash is a liability. If you come across a company that is cash rich and has nothing else, its enterprise value will be zero. Companies are valued on their future cash flows, meaning their ability to generate cash, not how much they managed to keep. In other words, cash is a measure of past success and investors are interested only in future value.
This is an excellent FAQ on Apple and the Everest-sized mountain of cash they are sitting on.
Ahead of the promised “early 2018” launch of the HomePod, Apple has received official FCC approval for the smart speaker. Now that FCC approval has been obtained, Apple is free to begin selling the device at any time.
“If I go to Canada and visit some of my wife’s relatives, and I come back … they [can] say, ‘We want your laptop and your phone and your pass code.’ And I say, ‘Well, do you have any reason?’ They say, ‘We don’t need one.’ Is that correct? They can do that?”
“Welcome to America,” Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy added sarcastically.
Agents can demand a password to open your phone, without probable cause, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen confirmed during the hearing.
This is a concern not just for non-US citizens but also for US citizens arriving back into the country. Know your rights and know what to do and what not to do.
Universal Paperclips is part clicker, part resource management, part incremental game that has a definite “ending,” but is played over time at a pace you can set based on your style. You begin by simply pushing a button to make a paperclip yourself, which is then sold at a price you set, at a speed determined by the current demand. The lower the price, the higher the demand, but your demand early on will be very low no matter what, and your profits minuscule.
Just like a paperclip, Universal Paperclips is boring to explain…at least at first.
I got sucked into this game from a tweet by Rob Griffiths. I ended up creating 30 septendecillion paper clips. The game is best described as “a little odd” but definitely addictive for me. You can play it from your browser or via the iOS app.
