New website Ten Years Ago makes it easy to look back into the weird world of mostly forgotten web history. The site peers into the World Wide Web as of July 28, 2007, showing the now-simplistic-looking early designs of sites like YouTube, Amazon, The New York Times, and reddit.
Ten Years Ago is a useful tool in that it gathers together sites captured on the same day, so you can recreate what you might see if you were trawling the web on that day in July 2007. Back when even Apple, one of the most design-obsessed companies around, had a website that looked a little clunky.
My conversation with Mathias Bahnmueller started as pretty much all my phone interviews do. “Can you hear me?” he asked, and I replied affirmatively. Then I asked him the same question. His answer was yes—he could hear me very clearly. And this was a tiny miracle.
The reason I was coming through so clearly is that his over-the-ear device linked to the implant was streaming directly from his iPhone—essentially putting the conversation in his head.
Apple doesn’t get nearly the credit they deserve for the work they do in accessibility. I know quite a few people with varying levels and kinds of disability and accessibility issues and they all say that, while there’s lots of work to be done, Apple is far ahead of the rest of the industry in their commitment to these users.
Dave here. James Thomson, in a Twitter thread with Steve Troughton Smith, pondering the interface possibilities of the coming iPhone Pro (and I use that name as a shorthand for any and all phones Apple announces next month with a new hardware layout):
I’m curious what will happen for full screen stuff where the status bar would be hidden. Hide the home indicator too, and use everything?
This raises an interesting question. If the home button no longer has dedicated real estate but is, instead a fungible, virtual spot, with the ability to be turned on and off, what happens if an app runs full screen? How will you exit the app?
In other words, if a game takes over the full screen, presumably the home button will not be there. What will the user do to force exit the app, to return to the home screen?
To be crystal clear, I don’t see this as a problem. I see this as an interesting puzzle. We don’t know that the home button will disappear, we don’t know that developers will be allowed to grab the full screen without saving room for the home button.
But it’s an interesting question, one that I am quite certain Apple already has a lovely solution for.
Apple’s accidental release of the HomePod firmware prompted Steven Throughthon-Smith’s to go digging through and uncovering a lot of exciting pieces on the upcoming high-end iPhone, codename D22. Allen Pike then had an interesting take on what that new form factor could mean for the UI.
Max took Allen Pike’s thoughts on the notch and its impact on the nav bar (here’s my summary, with a link to Allen’s brilliant post) and worked up some beautiful, high-res mockups.
At 41 years old, Apple is a respected elder of the tech industry. But rather than easing slowly into retirement, the company is going through another growth spurt.
On Wednesday, Apple’s stock surged 5 percent to a record high of $157.14 after it reported surprisingly strong financial results. It is now worth $822 billion, more than any other company in the stock market.
High praise from the New York Times. Interesting.
But:
For Apple, which is far more dependent on hardware sales than other tech leaders, the recent performance is all the more impressive after its dismal 2016, when quarterly revenue fell for the first time in 13 years and the company’s sales in China dropped through the floor.
There it is. That’s the paper I know and love.
And:
“Wall Street is waking up to the reality that the next great product might not be an Apple car or the TV or the Watch,” said Trip Miller of Gullane Capital Partners, which loaded up on Apple shares when they were below $100. “The services business is the next great product.”
“Any product they release this year would be successful. There is pent-up replacement demand,” said Amit Daryanani, a hardware analyst with RBC Capital Markets.
A dismal 2016, and it doesn’t matter what they release, it’s all the pent-up replacement demand, not at all a sign of innovation.
Oh, and two last parting shots:
But he said such growth is unlikely to continue in 2019, when excitement about the new iPhones has faded.
And:
The risk is that customers decide to move on from the decade-old iPhone.
If Apple were a foreign country, CEO Tim Cook might have considerable political clout in the United States.
That’s because Apple owns $52.6 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, which would rank it among the top 25 major foreign holders, according to estimates from the Treasury Department and Apple’s SEC filings released on Wednesday.
Apple would be 23rd in all countries. That’s just one measure of a company’s financial heft, but amazing nonetheless.
It’s very apparent there’s a product category that outshines all others in terms of growth. It’s one Apple has been understandably proud of in their earnings calls for several years now, and that is Services.
And:
The Services category encompasses all the stuff Apple does online, “in the cloud.” Things like the App Store. iCloud. Apple Pay. Apple Music. The iTunes store. In other words, Services is everything you buy from Apple after you buy your initial hardware.
And this business has been exploding.
Jared digs into the details, starting with the vast difference between Apple’s cloud business of 5 years ago and the stellar operation into which that cloud business has evolved.
Another point is the way, as a percentage of the whole, Apple’s services business is increasing as the iPhone business decreases. The point being, Apple’s services growth represents diversification, less (slightly) dependence on iPhone sales. Will there come a day when iPhone sales represent less than 50% of Apple’s total revenue? Seems likely.
Amber Rudd (The UK Home Secretary) has said “real people” do not want secure end-to-end encryption on messaging services.
In response, Renate Samson Chief Executive of Big Brother Watch said:
“Suggesting that people don’t really want security from their online services is frankly insulting, what of those in society who are in dangerous or vulnerable situations, let alone those of us who simply want to protect our communications from breach, hack or cybercrime,” she said.
She’s making an argument that fits her agenda. I don’t believe for a minute that people want less security on anything, especially these days.
Costly cyber attacks are having a bigger impact on corporate earnings and are becoming a fact of life for companies as Oreo cookie maker Mondelez, drug maker Merck and others said that a destructive “worm” attack in the last week of the second quarter disrupted operations.
It’s not just the immediate fallout of an attack that hits companies, it’s the earnings too.
Apple updated their iOS adoption numbers for the first time in a while (I believe the last update was way back in February).
Here’s the chart:
Let’s compare that with the latest and greatest Android numbers:
Just to give some perspective here, the latest major rev of Android, Nougat, was released one year ago, in August 2016. The biggest slice in the pie chart, Marshmallow, was released in 2015, Lollipop in 2014.
It’s tough when you don’t control all the hardware.
The Amazon Echo can be turned into a spying tool by exploiting a physical security vulnerability, according to Mark Barnes, a researcher at cybersecurity firm MWR InfoSecurity. His research shows how it’s possible to hack the 2015 and 2016 models of the smart speaker to listen in on users without any indication that they’ve been compromised.
The issue is unfixable via a software update, meaning millions of Echos sold in 2015 and 2016 will likely have this vulnerability through the end of their use.
Barnes executed the attack by removing the bottom of the smart speaker and exposing 18 “debug” pads, which he used to boot directly into the firmware with an external SD card. Once the hack is complete, the rubber base can be reattached, leaving behind no evidence of tampering.
With the malware installed, Barnes could remotely monitor the Echo’s “always listening” microphone, which is constantly paying attention for a “wake word.” (The most popular of these is “Alexa.”) Barnes took advantage of the same audio file that the device creates to wait for those keywords.
The way I read it, this does require physical access, but once the hack is installed, there’s no obvious way to detect its presence, and an update won’t get rid of the malware.
The nav bar is the strip at the top of the display that allows you to navigate between views. It features buttons like “+”, “Edit”, “Done”, “< Back”, etc.
iOS 11 has changed the design of the nav bar, moving the title from the center of the nav bar to its own line, left justified, and to a much larger, bolded font size.
Allen posits that this change was made to accommodate the disappearance of a physical home button and the corresponding shrinking of the bezel, the growth of the screen to just about the bottom of the phone.
In Allen’s view, the nav bar will move to the bottom of the screen, on either side of the virtual home button.
I think he’s on to something. Read the post, look at the pictures to get your own sense of this.
If you haven’t already heard, Apple accidentally published a prerelease build of audioOS through their public update servers. Whether or not this leak was “intentional” is up for debate, but I personally believe it to be a mistake.
Regardless, Avery dug in and pulled out a series of HomePod alarm sounds. If you are interested in the process (requires some Terminal/basic Unix skills), read Avery’s blog post.
Photos, like iTunes and iMovie, doesn’t have a great way for you to access the media and other items that it manages, but there are some workarounds.
Apple gradually changed its app design to rely on library “files,” which are a special kind of folder, called a package. To the Finder, and for the purposes of copying and moving items, the library is a single folder. Inside, it contains all the sausage-making ingredients used by the apps, including original media files, modified ones (in the cases of Photos), project components, and one or more databases that track what’s inside the library.
Packages have been around forever. As Glenn says, this is a change in the way iPhoto and Photos stored their media.
Part of this is due to the nature of that media. Used to be, all photos produced a single jpeg. Over time, things got complicated, with live photos, bursts, undoable image editing, etc. Hard to not wrap that sausage making in a package.
As he does, Jason Snell pulled together a host of charts laying out Apple’s financial results six ways from Sunday. Lots to process here.
My favorite is the very last chart, Apple revenue by product category. Some things I see:
Look at the difference between iPhone and the rest of the revenue categories. Great visual snapshot showing the incredible importance of the iPhone to Apple.
Look how tightly clustered the iPad, Mac, and Services are. They all depend on iPhone as an anchor, but all make critical contributions to the ecosystem and bottom line. Good to see the relative contribution of the Mac there.
Interesting how the labels were done. Each label was placed on an outlying part of its labeled line. Works well. Wondering if this was Jason’s handwork, or a smart chart app. Either way, nice detail.
iMore has once again put together a transcript of today’s Apple earnings conference call with analysts. If you don’t get a chance to listen to the call, it’s always worthwhile to read Tim’s comments.
Apple on Tuesday posted quarterly revenue of $45 billion, which is up from the $42.4 billion reported in the year-ago quarter.
“With revenue up 7 percent year-over-year, we’re happy to report our third consecutive quarter of accelerating growth and an all-time quarterly record for Services revenue,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We hosted an incredibly successful Worldwide Developers Conference in June, and we’re very excited about the advances in iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS coming this fall.”
Apple sold 41 million iPhones in the quarter, up from 40.3 million sold in the year-ago quarter. The company also sold more iPads this year with sales coming in at 11.4 million units, up from 9.9 million last year. Mac sales are also up slightly in 2017 coming in at 4.2 million units. Services, which Apple touts a lot these days rose to $7.2 billion in 2017 from $5.9 billion last year.
Overall, this looks like a great quarter for Apple. Every product line item is up for the company this quarter over the same period last year. New Macs and iPads certainly helped with increased sales, and a new iPhone later this year should add more to the bottom line.
Amazing. If this headline didn’t mean anything to you, this from the Steve Bartman incident Wikipedia page:
The incident occurred in the eighth inning of Game 6 of the National League Championship Series (NLCS), with Chicago ahead 3–0 and holding a three games to two lead in the best of seven series. Moisés Alou attempted to catch a foul ball off the bat of Marlins second baseman Luis Castillo. Bartman reached for the ball, deflected it, and disrupted the potential catch.
That moment was seen as a huge turning point in the Cubs fortunes. Instead of holding on to the lead and moving on to the World Series (at the time, the Cubs had the longest World Series draught in baseball), the Cubs went on to give up 8 runs in the inning, lose the game, then lose the next game, ending their World Series hopes.
This was a huge story at the time, with Bartman’s life being turned upside down. Huge blame was heaped on him by an entire city. Remarkable and terrible.
The Cubs giving Steve Bartman a World Series ring is a terrific act of forgiveness.
Apple and Google have removed hundreds of trading apps from their online stores after an intervention by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) to crack down on online fraud.
In a statement on Tuesday, ASIC said it had conducted a sweeping review of mobile app stores focusing on those associated with so-called binary options trading. It said that the review highlighted over 330 apps that were offered by entities and individuals that appeared to be unlicensed.
Terrible scam, some reports of people losing their life savings.
A few months ago, I posted a link to an article with a small series of vector speed runs, animated GIFs showing how to use a drawing program, like Adobe Illustrator, to quickly create various icons.
The author, Marc Edwards, has since significantly increased his portfolio and gathered them on a single page. If you are interested in learning how to draw in this way, or if you spend any time creating icons, bookmark this page and spend some time watching Marc’s technique.
This is a wonderful contribution to the community. Please pass it along.
Apple is also the only major smartphone manufacturer left that uses standalone modems. Other smartphone vendors use either integrated applications processor and baseband solutions from third parties (e.g., Qualcomm) or make their own integrated parts (e.g., Samsung and Huawei).
And:
On Apple’s job board, the company says it’s looking for a “Sr. Digital IC (PHY) Design Engineer.” Under the “job summary” section of the listing, Apple says the individual chosen for this position “will be part of a silicon design group responsible for digital baseband logic design in state-of-the-art wireless ICs.”
That’s not the only related listing on the company’s job board. Apple also has multiple positions related to RFIC design and layout. RFIC stands for “radio frequency integrated circuit.”
In another listing — this time for a “Sr. RFIC Design Engineer” — Apple says whoever fills the position “will be at the center of a wireless SoC [system-on-a-chip] design group.”
Tricky business, but follows the pattern of Apple trying to own as much of the stack as possible.
The evidence suggests that Apple prefers to keep average pricing for all products constant. Individual variants are priced so that, as the category matures, the changing mix leads to consistency in price ownership.
Thus the iPhone can be seen as controlling the $650 point, the Mac $1200, the iPod $200 and the iPad $450. This pricing signals the product’s value and the value of the brand.
The signaling is not just to buyers but also to competitors. Ownership of price forces competitors to occupy adjacent brackets.
And:
The overall pattern looks like a staircase with a widening price range where the lowest price remains constant and the upper price rises every three years by $100.
The “floor” of the range is a consistent $400 while the “ceiling” has expanded from $700 to about $950.
This year’s ceiling is due for the fourth leg up and if the pattern persists, we should expect it to reach $1100.
Apple announces their third quarter financial results, via converence call, today at 2p PT, 5p ET. You can listen live on Apple’s official earnings call page.
Key is Apple’s forecast for the fourth quarter. From Dan Frommer’s post:
It’s the mid-year trough of the current iPhone cycle, so expectations are modest. Wall Street expects Apple to report $44.9 billion of June quarter revenue, representing 6 percent year over year growth. That’s somewhere around 40-41 million iPhone shipments for the quarter, with some analysts — notably, Above Avalon’s Neil Cybart, at 38.8 million — expecting fewer.
But the real question is how Apple will forecast its fiscal fourth quarter, which ends in September — and carries some clues for this year’s iPhone launch timing.
Most years, the new iPhone launches in late September, with a nice, big launch weekend or two of shipments to end the quarter. This year, however, there’s buzz that the anticipated super-high-end flagship iPhone might not launch until October or later, and could ship in limited quantities.
The key behavior usages between both assistants is not a surprise since Google is, and will always be, better than Siri at searching the web. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s data and they will do that better than anyone. Therefore their AI agent will always be the best at search. The challenge we have today with consumer sentiment around Siri is with its weakness for general Internet search. If consumers do this regularly and want to use a voice assistant for searching and general information queries, Siri is not going to beat Google. Apple’s challenge is to help consumers understand the jobs where Siri is best.
I agree with Ben with everything in this article. My problem is that I tried to use Siri to schedule appointments and do some of the life duties that it’s supposedly so good at. The problem is, it didn’t work that well, and when something doesn’t work well, I stop using it. That’s what happened with Siri for me.
The new Siri could be the most amazing assistant at managing my life that AI has ever seen, but I’ve lost so much confidence in using it, that I may never find out. Instead of fighting with Siri to get something done, I’ll just manually add an appointment or reminder myself.
My most used Siri command these days is: “Set a timer for 5 minutes.”
“As most of you have probably heard by now, there has been a cyber incident directed at the company which has resulted in some stolen proprietary information, including some of our programming,” HBO Chairman Richard Plepler wrote in a message to employees, which the company shared with reporters.
I haven’t had a chance to use these amps, but it looks really nice. Fender has some of the most iconic amps ever made, so if you’re looking for a way to try out some digital models, you should take a look at these.
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh ruled late on Friday that iPhone 4 and 4S users can pursue nationwide class action claims that Apple intentionally “broke” FaceTime to save money from routing calls through servers owned by Akamai Technologies Inc.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Times change, technology moves forward.
