Lots of news from Google yesterday. Among the product announcements are a pair of new phones, the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, and an AirPods-like set of wireless earbuds, the PixelBuds.
Now take a moment to read this post from Nick Heer (it’s short), taking the Verge review to task, just a bit. A taste:
That’s the sole mention of the headphone port in Bohn’s preview. That’s weird, because less than a year ago, Bohn agreed with Nilay Patel’s sentiment that removing the headphone port was “user-hostile”. Even two months ago, Bohn was “going to continue to be a curmudgeon about” the removal of 3.5mm headphone port on today’s smartphones.
It is interesting how much grief was sent Apple’s way over the removal of the headphone port. This was Apple skating to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.
Forget the wire connecting the two buds, forget the look, forget the sound. Instead, focus on the killer feature:
The headset’s most show-worthy feature is a live translate mode, which lets users hand their phone off to someone speaking another language and that speech will automatically convert to the wearer’s native tongue and be played back by the Pixel Buds.
Google has made a real chess move here. Apple has a choice to make. Will they pull resources off other projects to build a similar feature for iOS and the AirPods? If not, this is a terrific marketing discriminator for Google, a feature of their ecosystem that you can only get if you move to Android.
The ecosystem walls are getting taller, the feature sets richer, and the engineering demands becoming that much more intense. One significant distinction I think will become more important over time: Apple is developing a large (getting larger) lead in hardware, especially when it comes to chip design.
As natural language processing, image detection, augmented reality, and machine intelligence play larger roles in this space, Apple’s investments in bringing chip design expertise in house will start to pay dividends. The iPhone X and Face ID are just the very beginning.
A detailed post from Max Rudberg, lots of pictures, makes me feel more comfortable with the notch itself and how it might look in different situations.
A few highlights:
Regardless of your feelings for the notch, the reality is that to do a near edge-to-edge screen on a phone in 2017; you need to make place for sensors and speaker. The technology to hide them behind the screen simply is not here. We’ve seen different manufacturers choose different solutions to the problem. This is the one Apple chose, so let’s work with what we got.
That last bit is exactly right. These are the cards we’ve been dealt. Let’s work with that.
The familiar 20 pt tall status bar, the same height it’s been since the first iPhone, is now 44 pt tall on iPhone X.
That’s more than twice the height but, of course, it’s now split in two. Not our space to play with, so no reason for developers to worry through what will fit in the so-called horns.
If nothing else, just scroll through all the examples. This is the (at least short term) future.
The iOS design lab will offer technological training and certification to students, faculty, staff and members of the broader community interested in developing apps in Swift, the Apple programming language used to write some of the most successful apps in the App Store. The lab will support educational innovation, career development for students and economic development opportunities for the central Ohio community and the university’s other campus locations.
The Digital Flagship University initiative will launch during the 2017-18 academic year. The iOS design lab will open in a temporary space in 2018, moving to a permanent location in 2019. Students will begin training in Swift coding in spring semester 2018.
Sounds like a great program for the school and Apple.
Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service — a smart assistant for customer representatives to parse and get better insights from their interactions with users, as well as automate some of the interactions — because the team was (according to a notice on the site) “joining a project that touches the lives of countless people across the world.” TechCrunch has now learned what that project is: the team is joining Apple.
This is great news. As much as Apple touts Siri and how smart it is, I still can’t get it to work reliably.
If you’ve never tried to break up with an iPhone before, I’ll tell you this much: It’s not easy. After a year on iOS following many more on Android, I wanted to prove to myself that I could leave Apple’s “walled garden” without feeling like I’d sacrificed something. In the end, I couldn’t do it, and I feel completely, painfully owned by the richest corporation on planet Earth.
The author may not realize it but this is actually a hilarious whine about just how good and consistent the iOS experience is.
Apple on Wednesday released an update for Apple Watch owners that fixes an issue where the watch would join—and stay connected to—unauthenticated (captive) Wi-Fi networks.
You can download the update by opening the Apple Watch app on your iPhone, going to General > Software Update and then follow the onscreen instructions.
After taking a screenshot with the system keyboard shortcuts (⌘⇧3 and ⌘⇧4), a window will pop up allowing you to quickly share, edit or delete that screenshot without needing to hunt around your desktop for it first.
I was sold immediately. I went to the Mac App Store, ready to plop down $5 for the “Delete Screenshot” feature alone. Low and behold, the app is free. On his website, Josh says:
If you enjoy using it please feel free to buy me a coffee! ☕️❤️
I’ve been using Google Maps for years, since before Apple released its own map apps. When Apple Maps was first released, I found it very hard to read; there wasn’t enough contrast between roads and backgrounds, and texts were tiny. That’s improved a bit since the initial release, but not much.
Every now and then I try out Apple Maps, when looking for a certain location or a specific type of business. I tried again recently, to see if Apple had improved things with the releases of iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra.
I can’t disagree. I did the same iOS search for “Pubs near me” in Apple Maps, Waze and Google Maps. Apple Maps found none within two kilometers, Waze found three and Google Maps found all four.
Today, along with a new family of hardware products [link], we’re introducing Google Pixel 2. We want you to be able to ask even more from your phone—so we’re giving you the highest-rated camera ever that helps you take great pictures and interact with the world around you, all-day battery life, and an Assistant that understands you better and helps you get more done.
I’m not sure about Google’s camera claims, but features like Google Lens sound interesting.
Today, we’re welcoming two new products to the Google Home family: Google Home Mini is small and mighty for hands-free help in every room. And Google Home Max is our biggest and best-sounding Google Home ever. They’re both radically helpful, and packed with the power of the Google Assistant, including some brand new features.
I haven’t seen or used either of these products, so I’ll reserve judgement. I have seen and listened to Apple’s HomePod and I know how good it sounds for music. There’s still a lot of questions to be answered with the HomePod, but I think I’ll wait until it’s released.
When it comes to multi-room audio, Sonos is still the gold standard. But the company has lagged behind on the smart speaker revolution, promising only that integration with assistants like Amazon’s Alexa would come in due time.
The European Commission said on Wednesday it was taking Ireland to the European Court of Justice for its failure to recover up to 13 billion euros ($15.3 billion) of tax due from Apple Inc, a move labeled as “regrettable” by Dublin.
Both Apple and Ireland are appealing the ruling that any money is owed, so this seems a bit heavy-handed by the EU.
“We might be digging a hole to get at this thing, man,” Joshua Allen told me as we barreled across Nevada’s Black Rock Desert in the back of a covered pickup truck.
Allen and his peers from Oregon State University had just launched their homemade rocket at Big Ass Load Lifting Suckers (BALLS), an annual gathering of rocketeers that showcases the most powerful amateur rockets in the US. It was their first time at the event, held late in September, and they hoped that their two-stage rocket would fly to 100,000 feet, about one-third of the way to space proper. The Oregon State students, many of whom graduated in May, had spent the last year designing, building, and testing the rocket we were hunting from a pickup. Allen estimated that it contained over $20,000 of purchased and donated materials—and after a malfunction during its flight, he wasn’t sure they would recover it in one piece, if at all.
I never played with model rockets as a kid but this would be a “blast” to attend.
Hello, photographers. Here’s a giant list of 194 photo editing tools and apps you can use in your photography.
I started this research for my project Photolemur in July 2016. After sharing lists of 104 items and 148 resources, I’ve gathered even more photo editing tools for a new and updated giant list.
This is a great list with a wide variety of free and paid apps.
Nicole Laporte, Fast Company, on GIFs and the Emmys:
Then came the night’s biggest, and most controversial, moment: Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer rolled a faux presidential podium onto the stage to deliver a send-up of his infamous “largest audience” speech he gave the day after President Trump’s inauguration. Immediately, the Giphy crew began to splice the scene into GIF form. Part of Giphy’s genius lies in not posting the obvious clip, so Spicer himself wasn’t of much interest. Rather, they surveyed the sea of shocked and bewildered faces in the audience, looking for gold. They found it in Veep‘s Anna Chlumsky, her entire body contorted into an OMG expression—eyes bulging, neck veins popping—as she craned out of her seat for a better view of the strange performance. Within minutes, the editors had the three-second clip uploaded onto Giphy. It began to trend almost immediately. A week after the show, it’d been viewed more than 13 million times.
This is one corner of the future. Keep your eye on Giphy. I predict big things in their future.
In the meantime, this is a fascinating read, all the way through.
John Voorhees just celebrated a major milestone in his life. He left his full time job as a lawyer to dedicated himself to his indie empire, as a developer, podcaster, and blogger. If you’ve ever had similar thoughts, this is an inspirational read.
One tiny nugget, where John talks about that moment when his app got Federico Viticci’s attention:
As the end of 2014 approached, I made a mad dash to finish Blink. By this point, I had managed to get Federico’s attention when I’d posted a late-night teaser video on Twitter of my URL schemes in action. Five minutes later, he sent me a direct message:
And Federico’s response:
Oh man, wow. Please make this universal and let me in the beta as soon as possible! ❤
@viticci November 5, 2014
This is a wonderful read. I have to say, stories like this make me really glad to be a part of this particular community.
Today the MLB announced that the Oakland Athletics are piloting a new NFC ticketing solution which lets fans enter the stadium by tapping their phone (or Apple Watch) to a ticket scanner – just like you’d do to use Apple Pay.
And:
The pilot lasted for a six-game homestand starting Sept. 22nd after iOS 11 launched, and was the first time a professional sports event supported contactless tickets in Apple Wallet.
This is big for Apple Pay, Apple Watch, and Apple Wallet. I’d expect this to roll out to more, if not all teams next season. Just a matter of time before this moves to other sports, as well.
The Apple A11 Bionic processor has 4.3 billion transistors, six cores and an Apple custom GPU using a 10nm FinFET technology. Its performance appears to be almost double that of competitors and in some benchmarks exceeds the performance of current laptop PCs.
And:
Apple has come to the point where is dominates the processor space. But they have not stopped at processors. The effort now spans all manners of silicon including controllers for displays, storage, sensors and batteries. The S series in the Apple Watch the haptic T series in the MacBook, the wireless W series in AirPods are ongoing efforts. The GPU was conquered in the past year. Litigation with Qualcomm suggests the communications stack is next.
A name you’ll be hearing more and more of is the person who runs this silicon engineering effort for Apple, Johny Srouji. This is a great read.
Of the 832 individuals surveyed, 28 percent said they plan to purchase iPhone X as their next smartphone. An additional 20 percent of respondents said they intend to buy iPhone 8 Plus, while 17 percent will go for iPhone 8.
Lots of intent numbers to process. Small survey size, but not hard to see this as representative.
Interesting to see how many people have their eye on the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus.
Laurene Powell Jobs, a billionaire philanthropist, entrepreneur and president of the Emerson Collective, is buying a significant stake in Monumental Sports & Entertainment, a sprawling $2.5 billion complex that includes the NBA Wizards, NHL Capitals and Capital One Arena, people familiar with the deal said.
And:
Through her sizable investment, Powell Jobs instantly commands an influential position in the male-dominated ownership circles of the “Big Four” professional sports leagues. Very few women’s names stand atop the ownership list of the NBA’s 30 franchises: Jeanie Buss of the Los Angeles Lakers, Ann Walton Kroenke of the Denver Nuggets and Gail Miller of the Utah Jazz.
And:
Powell Jobs, 53, is one of the wealthiest women in the world, estimated to be worth about $20 billion. Much of that comes from her stock in Apple, the iconic company co-founded by her late husband Steve Jobs, who died in 2011. She also owns 4 percent of the Walt Disney Company.
This is a big, bold move by Laurene Powell Jobs, a follow-up to her nonprofit’s purchase of the Atlantic Magazine and bringing her that much closer to the Washington DC area and to the so-called corridors of power.
Generally whenever Apple announces a new iPhone it also announces a new System-on-a-Chip, and this year was no different. The newly launched iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and the iPhone X all use Apple’s in-house A11 Bionic processor. Inevitably, comparisons are made between Apple’s latest SoC and the latest offerings from Qualcomm, Samsung and Huawei. It doesn’t usually take long for benchmarking numbers to appear and for Apple to be declared the winner.
So, why is it that Apple’s SoCs always seem to beat the competition? Why are the processors used by Android seemingly so far behind? Are Apple’s chips really that good? Well, let me explain.
There are two kinds of people: those who have needed tech support, and those who constantly give it over the phone to their friends and families. Both know how tricky and complicated this process can be, but Chalk — a new AR app launching today on iOS (for free) — looks to save the day.
Built by Vuforia, the company behind the tools used by the majority of augmented-reality apps, Chalk operates much like a videoconferencing call, connecting the cameras between two remote smartphones. (It’s iOS-only to start.) The only difference is that both use the rear-facing camera, so the person getting help can show the device or software they’re confused by, and the other person can draw on it.
This is one of those apps that really show off the upside of AR. I would have loved to have something like this when I did tech support.
Diners at Hearth, the newly health-conscious, 13-year-old restaurant from James Beard award-winning chef Marco Canora, may have noticed a new addition to their place settings in recent weeks. Next to plates, napkins, and utensils there are now boxes. Some are old cigar boxes, others kitschy Etsy finds — but all of them are big enough to contain a few cell phones, because the boxes are Canora’s solution to what he views as harmful cell phone addiction.
I like this idea rather than the mentioned bans or discounts. It also reminds me of the joke: “Want me to put my iPhone down? Be more interesting than my iPhone…”
Apple on Tuesday released an update to iOS 11, bring ing the current version to iOS 11.0.2. The latest version fixes an issue where some users reported hearing crackling noises during calls, and it also fixed a problem that caused some photos to be hidden.
You can update by going to Settings > General > Software Update on your device.
It’s easy to create an external installation drive. It’s also handy to keep around, just in case you’re in a situation where you rather use the drive than rely on booting in Recovery mode.
Here are a couple of different ways you can create a bootable macOS High Sierra installation drive.
I’ll be installing macOS High Sierra on Thursday and after I back everything up and ensuring I have a good bootable backup drive, I’ll do is this. But this line in the article:
…the download will be over 5GB, so it’ll take a few minutes.
Bugs the hell out of me. For many of us, it will take significantly longer than just “a few minutes”. I’ll be looking at over 30+ minutes just for the download.
