When Pandora Media launched on the NYSE in June 2011, it started trading at $16 a share – with a $2.6bn valuation.
Optimism was rife for music’s big digital play on the stock market. The expectation was that the firm’s valuation, and global presence, would soar.
Today, over six years on, Pandora is worth less than a third of what it was that day, at under $5 per share.
And, according to MBW’s calculations, there’s even sorrier news for the firm’s new regime to contemplate: Pandora has now lost over a billion dollars in less than four years.
I hate the math, but it is the math. To me, Pandora hasn’t lost value as a music service. They still serve the same purpose, offer the same set of services. The loss is financial. But that’s what counts in this situation.
It gets worse: as recently as summer 2016, SiriusXM reportedly made a bid to acquire Pandora for $3.4bn, or $15 per share.
That’s more than three times what Pandora’s worth now.
Apple today is making it easier for users to view purchase history directly from their iOS devices. The company revealed in an updated support document today that you can now view your App Store and iTunes purchase history in the Settings app on iOS.
Previously, as the support document notes, this functionality was only available through iTunes on Mac and PC. While you could view purchase history via the App Store and iTunes Store on iOS, it was purely for re-downloading purposes and didn’t show detailed pricing information.
The Visitor Center at Apple’s new Apple Park campus will open to the public on Friday, November 17, according to an internal email that Apple sent out to employees today.
According to our source, the Apple Park Visitor Center features a gift shop with Apple-branded items available for purchase, much like the store at One Infinite Loop, but it does not have a full Apple Store and will not stock devices like the iPhone X.
One of the highlights of going to Macworld Expo each year in San Francisco was our drive to Cupertino to the Apple Employee Store to see what kind of cool swag we could score. I hope the new Visitor Center is just as exciting.
I mentioned when I wrote my iPhone X first look last week that I would follow-up with some more thoughts once I’ve had a chance to use the phone for a little while. Well, here it is.
The first thing I’d like to address is that some people are saying you have to relearn how to use the iPhone if you buy an iPhone X. That’s simply not true.
The interface on the iPhone X is almost exactly the same as all other iPhones. Granted, there are a few gestures that are new, like swiping down to get to Control Center instead of swiping up from the bottom, but that’s hardly learning the iPhone interface all over again.
Of course, the hardest thing to get used to was not having a Home Button, but not even that took too long. It was more breaking a longstanding habit than anything else. A week into using the iPhone X and I don’t reach for the Home Button anymore—I lift the phone for Face ID, swipe up and I’m in.
Speaking of Face ID, it’s brilliant.
I mentioned last week that it worked for me about 99 percent of the time, but there were instances when it wouldn’t unlock for me on the first try. I think I’ve found the problem and no big surprise, it was me.
Here’s what I think was happening. Actually, there are two things I think were happening.
First, I wear my glasses most of the time when I use my iPhone. I also wear my glasses on the end of my nose, not all the way up on my face. My habit is to put on my glasses and then reach for my phone.
I believe that Face ID was unable to see my eyes properly because the rim of my glasses was blocking them. In order for Face ID to work properly, it needs to see your eyes, nose, and mouth—by blocking my eyes, Face ID couldn’t recognize me.
When I put my glasses all the way up on my face, Face ID worked every time. I figured then that I had partially explained my problem.
The second thing that caused a problem for me was simply the angle I was holding the phone. When I started to track what was causing the iPhone X to not unlock, I noticed that I wasn’t actually pointing the phone at my face. In fact sometimes I held that phone almost flat, which meant Face ID was looking at the sky and not my face.
A possible third reason could have been that I wasn’t always looking at the phone when I tried to unlock it. I have Attention Aware enabled, so it needs to know I’m focused on the phone before it unlocks.
To be honest, I think the first two are more likely causes in my case.
The good news is that after a week, I don’t experience much of this any more. It’s not because I’m hyper-aware to do all the right things when I unlock the phone—in fact, I’m less aware now—it’s more because my habits have changed.
I can pick up the iPhone X, swipe up and be at the home screen very quickly now. I hold the phone in the right place, at the right angle, even with my glasses on—my habits have changed.
If there’s one thing I’m surprised with after using the iPhone X for a week, it’s how much I like the size. I loved the iPhone Plus models—they were big and had lots of real estate.
What I realized is that what I really loved was the screen real estate, not necessarily the larger physical size of the phone itself. I have an iPhone now that is basically all screen, but a smaller form factor than the Plus models.
I think this is something that will appeal to all of Apple’s customers. I find the size of the iPhone X closer to the iPhone 8, but the screen is closer to that of the 8 Plus. iPhone X is like having the best of both worlds.
I don’t really have a lot more to say about the gestures on iPhone X than I said in my first look last week. There are a couple of things you need to learn like pressing the side button to invoke Siri (if you don’t use “Hey Siri”), swiping down to get to Control Center, and swiping up instead of using the Home Button.
After a few days of use, these things weren’t much of an issue. Like I said before, this was mainly about changing habits.
The battery life on iPhone X is fine for me. I charge my iPhone overnight and unplug it in the morning. I use the device all day for whatever I happen to be doing that day and the battery lasts until I go to bed that night. That’s all I need from the battery.
I didn’t do any weird battery tests because the best test for me is to just use it like I normally would. That’s what I did and it lasted just fine.
The notch is still not a big deal to me. Since posting my initial thoughts, I’ve watch some videos and looked at photos and the notch still doesn’t bother me.
I’m still focused on what’s on the content on the screen, not how the notch looks with that content. I think that’s how most people will look at the iPhone X.
I’ve even talked to a couple of people that were vehemently opposed to the notch when the iPhone was first introduced and even they admitted that it didn’t bother them in every day use.
There is nothing about the iPhone X that would cause me to not recommend it as your next iPhone purchase. However, there are a mountain of reasons for me to recommend it.
Simply put: Face ID, power, speed, screen, camera and everything else that makes up iPhone X is just better than anything else that I’ve seen.
Following a multiple-outlet bidding war, Apple has emerged as the victor for a morning show drama starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon.
The Aniston-Witherspoon drama becomes Apple’s second straight-to-series order and joins Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories as the first projects the tech giant has picked up under programming heads Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht.
Not generally a fan of hour-long dramas but I love Aniston and will watch just to see her back on TV.
FStoppers ran a long, side-by-side comparison test, shooting various video modes (including 4K/60fps) on both an iPhone X and a professional video camera.
The video is worth watching, all the way through. In a nutshell, for most use cases, the iPhone X looks every bit as good, if not better, than its bigger, bulkier, more expensive counterpart.
My Apple review unit is silver; on Friday the Space Gray iPhone X I bought with my own money arrived. With both of them here, I have to admit that I may have made the wrong choice.
My 2 cents? Though I’ve always preferred Space Gray, I think the silver iPhone X is stunning.
Look at the picture Jason took at a football game, about 20 rows back. That’s amazing detail, especially considering how far away he was from the field.
And this comment, on using the iPhone X laying flat on a table:
I’m loving iPhone X in almost all the places I use it. The gestures are becoming second nature to me. But there’s one use case where it doesn’t really work: laying on a table. And it doesn’t work there for several reasons. The sizable camera bump makes the whole thing unstable. Facing straight up, the Face ID camera can’t see me, so I can’t unlock my phone without leaning way over the table or picking the phone up. And attention detection can’t detect me, so after 30 seconds the screen dims.
Worth noting. I’m wondering if there’s a fix for this. If not, perhaps Apple could add a mode that detects laying flat on the table, or a gesture to temporarily disengage attention detection.
Apple has updated their pie chart. Amazingly, more than half of all devices have updated to iOS 11, which was released less than 2 months ago.
Here’s the chart:
Here’s the Android chart:
That little sliver, Oreo, was released a few weeks before iOS 11. Nougat was released a year before that, and Marshmallow released in October 2015. Add them all together and they are still less than the 52% adoption rate of iOS 11.
There are four models each for the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and iPhone X. The models correspond to carriers and bands available for each phone.
Now that Apple no longer puts the model information on the back of the phone, you’ll need to dig into Settings or look in the SIM slot. Rene Ritchie lays out all the details.
Apple Inc., seeking a breakthrough product to succeed the iPhone, aims to have technology ready for an augmented-reality headset in 2019 and could ship a product as early as 2020.
Unlike the current generation of virtual reality headsets that use a smartphone as the engine and screen, Apple’s device will have its own display and run on a new chip and operating system, according to people familiar with the situation.
And:
Apple began putting together a team to work on AR-related projects a couple of years ago, Bloomberg reported in March. Led by Mike Rockwell, who previously ran engineering at Dolby Labs, the group has now grown to several hundred engineers from across Apple, the people said. Scattered across office parks in both Cupertino and Sunnyvale, California, the team is working on several hardware and software projects under the umbrella code name of “T288.”
And:
The new operating system, internally dubbed “rOS” for “reality operating system,” is based on iOS, the iPhone’s operating system. Just as tvOS powers the Apple TV, macOS runs on Macs and watchOS runs on Apple Watches, “rOS” will power Apple’s AR headset. Geoff Stahl, formerly a software manager for games and graphics at Apple, is one of the directors of the “rOS” software group.
Take with a grain of salt, but none of this is hard to believe.
Almost every Android smartphone ships with an oleophobic coating on the glass, and the purpose of that is to help make fingerprints easier to get off of the display. In short, it keeps the oil from your fingertips from adhering to the glass, and it also makes water easier to wipe away.
Over time, this coating wears off, but it usually takes at least a few months or years of intense usage. On the Pixel 2 XL, however, some owners are having this come up within just a couple of weeks.
iPhones have shipped with an oleophobic coating, starting with the iPhone 3GS. This is mature technology. Surprising to see this issue crop up with the Pixel 2.
I’ve got an email in to Google PR asking about this issue, will update this post if and when I get a reply.
In September, we launched a test that expanded the 140 character limit so every person around the world could express themselves easily in a Tweet. Our goal was to make this possible while ensuring we keep the speed and brevity that makes Twitter, Twitter. Looking at all the data, we’re excited to share we’ve achieved this goal and are rolling the change out to all languages where cramming was an issue.
As a result, your timeline reading experience should not substantially change, you’ll still see about the same amount of Tweets in your timeline.
Twitter says it probably won’t affect your timeline much but that depends entirely on who you follow. I expect my timeline will explode in size.
The glasses company is cleverly using the iPhone’s camera to take maps of people’s faces, and use that data to recommend styles of glasses that will best fit your face. It’s a step beyond the digital try on system the company has previously offered, where it would try to place a virtual pair of glasses on a picture to let you see how it looks.
Sadly, I’m in the market for glasses but dread going in to a store to try them on. This might resolve that pain point for me.
Apple is soft-launching direct, person-to-person payments in an iMessage today with the Apple Pay Cash beta. The feature, which was announced earlier this year, allows you to send and receive cash inside the Messages app on iPhones.
The program is launching in public beta today on iOS 11.2 beta 2, and you can opt in using the iOS Public Beta program. Once you’ve updated, you’ll see an Apple Pay button in the apps section of Messages that allows you to initiate a payment. Payments can also be triggered by simply asking for money in a message or tapping on a message sent by someone else asking for money.
The beta is available for U.S. customers only with iOS devices on 11.2 or later and with two-factor authentication set up on their Apple ID.
Back before our phones did everything, computers sat on our desktops or in our briefcases. The idea of a pocket computing device was something of a dream, but until the mid-1990s, it was too difficult to engineer into something a mainstream consumer could afford to buy.
The Pilot 1000 was bare bones, especially by today’s standards. It had a 160×160 pixel display. There was no keyboard, neither on-screen nor BlackBerry-style. You entered information into the device by learning a new way to write, called Graffiti. This was a gesture language entered with a stylus where each letter was designed to be clearly distinct from every other. It wasn’t hard to learn, but it wasn’t instant, either.
Even so, the Palm devices found a sweet spot, both in terms of price and size.
For many of us, this article will be a wistful trip down memory lane. For many more of you, it will invoke pity of those of us old enough to have used a PalmPilot.
At the forefront of modern telescopy is the Giant Magellan Telescope, the first device in a new class of ground-based optical instruments appropriately named “Extremely Large Telescopes.”
When the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) becomes operational in the early 2020s, its effective aperture—a way of measuring the optical ‘strength’ of a telescope—will be double the size of the largest optical telescopes operating today. This feat of engineering is largely the result of advances in manufacturing the giant lenses at the heart of the GMT, and no one knows this better than the scientists at the University of Arizona’s Mirror Lab, where astronomers go when they need some serious glass.
I love stories of the mysteries of our universe but equally fascinating to me are stories of how we design and build the devices that let us discover those mysteries.
SyFyWire, on an epic image of the moon created by artist Seán Doran:
I have seen the Moon countless times through my own telescopes in the past, and it’s never looked as breathtaking as this! Mind you, I had to shrink this shot considerably to get it to fit here; this is about 2,000 pixels wide.
And:
But then, this isn’t a single image: It’s a mosaic composed of images taken using the Wide Angle Camera (WAC) on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a NASA mission that has been circling the Moon since 2009.
And:
To get the correct perspective for the Moon as a globe, Doran took the images, along with altimeter data, and mapped them onto a sphere. That way features near the edge look foreshortened, as they really do when you look at the entire Moon. He also used Apollo images to make sure things lined up. So the image isn’t exactly scientifically rigorous, but it is certainly spectacular.
As I used a pre-release iPhone X this week, it suddenly occurred to me that it might be fun to lip-sync a song to an Animoji and have it mimic my performance. I dubbed the idea “Animoji Karaoke” and have been filling my Twitter feed with it. Judging from my likes, retweets, and comments, I haven’t just been entertaining myself; some people said that it redeemed Animoji or justifed buying a thousand-dollar phone. Even cynics have taken notice of my breakthrough.
Harry’s efforts have spawned a tidal wave of similar efforts. If you’ve never seen one before, here’s a great example:
One thing I love about Austin Mann’s reviews is that they focus on real-life scenarios, as opposed to numbers and grades.
Read the review, check out all the images, watch the embedded videos. You’ll definitely get a sense of what Austin sees in the iPhone X display and camera.
One particular video to make sure you watch is the one embedded below. It shows the iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X displays side-by-side. The difference in the black-point for each display is obvious and, to me at least, surprisingly far apart. That iPhone X display is gorgeous.
Ever since the iPhone X rollout, I’ve been struggling to put into words that feeling the iPhone X brought to the table, something that’s been missing from iPhone rollouts for some time.
When iPhone X release day hit, lots of other people felt that thing. Suddenly, there were lines again. The iPhone X display at the Apple Store was mobbed. That magic thing was back.
I’m spoiled, I know: gifted with the rationalization of being a technology analyst, I buy an iPhone every year. Even so, I thought the iPhone 7 was a solid upgrade: it was noticeably faster, had an excellent screen, and the camera was great; small wonder it sold in record number everywhere but China.
What it lacked, though — and I didn’t fully appreciate this until I got an iPhone X — was delight.
Yup. That’s the word. Delight.
Face ID isn’t perfect: there are a lot of edge cases where having Touch ID would be preferable. By its fourth iteration in the iPhone 7, Touch ID was utterly dependable and, like the best sort of technology, barely noticeable.
FaceID takes this a step further: while it takes a bit of time to change engrained habits, I’m already at the point where I simply pick up the phone and swipe up without much thought; authenticating in apps like 1Password is even more of a revelation — you don’t have to actually do anything.
And:
The trick Apple pulled, though, was going beyond that: the first time I saw notifications be hidden and then revealed (as in the GIF above) through simply a glance produced the sort of surprise-and-delight that has traditionally characterized Apple’s best products.
Apple has found its inner delight. And that, as Ben so rightly puts it, is Apple at its best.
Switching from LCDs to OLEDs is a major engineering and manufacturing challenge, so I was eager to test and evaluate the new OLED iPhone X.
The result: Apple has produced an impressive Smartphone display with excellent performance and accuracy, which we cover in extensive detail below. What makes the iPhone X the Best Smartphone Display is the impressive Precision Display Calibration Apple developed, which transforms the OLED hardware into a superbly accurate, high performance, and gorgeous display, with close to Text Book Perfect Calibration and Performance!
There is a huge amount of detail here, a terrific take on OLED and on the iPhone X display in particular. No small feat for Apple that DisplayMate named the iPhone X as Best Smartphone Display.
Auto-renewing subscriptions were made available to all app developers with iOS 10 and already include the option to offer a free trial. With iOS 11.2 though, developers will have added flexibility to help them attract customers.
Whether we like them or not, Apple is going to do app store subscriptions. How app developers implement it and use it will be very interesting.
Apple believes every company has a responsibility to pay its taxes, and as the largest taxpayer in the world, Apple pays every dollar it owes in every country around the world. We’re proud of the economic contributions we make to the countries and communities where we do business.
With all of the misinformation out there, Apple felt the need to set the record straight about taxes.
The justices left in place a 2016 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that upheld a verdict that found South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd had infringed Apple Inc’s patents on several popular features of the California-based company’s iPhone. Those included slide-to-unlock, autocorrect and quick links, which automatically turn information like addresses and phone numbers into links.
After a week of R&D, we found that we could indeed download apps just like iTunes used to. We decided to build a completely new app management section, which we are releasing in iMazing 2.5 (macOS) as part of our 100% free features.
To our knowledge, iMazing is the only non-Apple software to enable users to download their purchases from the iOS App Store. We strongly hope that Apple won’t block iMazing’s app download capabilities: we’ve done our best to provide tools which many iOS users truly need.
I’ve been a user and fan of iMazing for a long time. These new features are welcome to those of us who still want to manage our iPhones from our Macs.
I thought this ad was well done, though the story is told with selective memory. I did not see any exploding phones, porous security measures, malware, etc., etc.
The one word that springs to mind watching this is the one word that describes the true feeling the iPhone X must bring to mind for Samsung.
Lots of interesting tidbits in the linked TechCrunch article. Here are a few highlights:
As we’ve covered off in detail before Apple does not have access to the depth-mapped facial blueprints that users enroll when they register for Face ID. A mathematical model of the iPhone X user’s face is encrypted and stored locally on the device in a Secure Enclave.
Face ID also learns over time and some additional mathematical representations of the user’s face may also be created and stored in the Secure Enclave during day to day use
And:
The key point here is that Face ID data never leaves the user’s phone (or indeed the Secure Enclave). And any iOS app developers wanting to incorporate Face ID authentication into their apps do not gain access to it either. Rather authentication happens via a dedicated authentication API that only returns a positive or negative response after comparing the input signal with the Face ID data stored in the Secure Enclave.
Some people have pointed to the detailed face mapping accessed via ARKit and expressed concerns about privacy with 3rd party developers access to that data:
With the iPhone X developers can access ARKit for face-tracking to power their own face-augmenting experiences — such as the already showcased face-masks in the Snap app.
“This new ability enables robust face detection and positional tracking in six degrees of freedom. Facial expressions are also tracked in real-time, and your apps provided with a fitted triangle mesh and weighted parameters representing over 50 specific muscle movements of the detected face,” writes Apple.
And:
Now it’s worth emphasizing that developers using this API are not getting access to every datapoint the TrueDepth camera system can capture. This is also not literally recreating the Face ID model that’s locked up in the Secure Enclave — and which Apple touts as being accurate enough to have a failure rate as small as one in one million times.
The data being shared via ARKit is a small sample of what’s used for Face ID, and it is missing key details, like attention detection data.
The linked article goes into a lot more detail and is an interesting read.
As to how Face ID works, take a look at the video embedded in this tweet from The Verge’s Nilay Patel. Before you click, note that there are flashing lights that might trigger a reaction in some people. The embedded video really gives a sense of the dot projector at work. Fascinating stuff.
With the launch of the iPhone and subsequent devices, developers found themselves with a worldwide market hungry for their innovations: apps.
Yet, a renaissance needs cultivation, not exploitation. Ten years in, is the opportunity gone? Will artists find a way to create tools that elevate the human experience, or will the market be valued even above the impact to the future of the industry?
I am really looking forward to seeing this. Enjoy the trailer.
Thinking about getting an iPhone X? This is a well crafted guide to the iPhone X, with particular focus on gestures. Bravo, Apple. This is really helpful.
