Very cool.

[Via Swiss Miss]

When it launches, the app will let customers choose which IKEA product they want and then use an iPhone or iPad powered by ARKit to see how the IKEA furniture looks in their own home before it’s purchased. IKEA has been doing this for years now, including an early version which required users to scan pages of an IKEA catalogue to view AR furniture, but the company said that Apple’s platform will greatly increase the consistency and quality of the experience.

I really hopes this works well. This could really help AR take off for the average consumer.

President Donald Trump will meet with the chief executives of technology companies including Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc on Monday as the White House looks to the private sector for help in cutting government waste and improving services.

This looks phenomenal. Check out the trailer.

Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note:

The scale of Apple’s iPhone supply chain operation demands military precision. Producing and selling 212M iPhones a year (in 2016) requires very different “people, processes, and purposes” than were needed when Apple was selling relatively modest numbers of Macintosh personal computers (4.6M units in its 2000 Fiscal Year, climbing to 5.3M units in FY 2006).

How did Apple grow from 5.3M Macs in 2006 to 212M iPhones last year, a 40X multiple? In one of his many Apple 2.0 strokes of genius, Steve Jobs hired an experienced supply chain executive, Tim Cook. With Jobs’ support and inspiration, the future COO and CEO assembled the necessary team, set new rules, and forged new partnerships. As quantity begets nature, Apple became a different company.

…although not entirely.

Another great read from Jean-Louis, including this take on the snipe at Phil Schiller as told in the about to be released The One Device — The Secret History of the iPhone:

Lovely. Besides looking at Schiller’s education and early programming experience, one has to ask how long would have Schiller lasted under Jobs if he wasn’t “technical enough”? As Monday Note readers know, I don’t agree with Phil’s every utterance, but the obvious disconnection with easily ascertained facts casts a shadow on the author’s credibility and motivations. Schiller rejoined Apple in 1997 and has worked directly for Steve and Tim ever since.

Read the rest of Jean-Louis’ post here. As for the book, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

M.G. Siegler, in this Medium post:

No less than Steve Jobs himself said to Walter Isaacson in interviews for his biography that Apple had “finally cracked it” with regard to what they wanted to do in television.

That was six years ago. We’re still waiting to see the fruits of that labor. It’s starting to feel like we may never see them.

And:

We’re now seeing what Apple thinks it must do: compete with Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc. Apple spent a bunch of time suggesting they would not take this approach. Their original content was all about promoting Apple Music or whatnot. But you don’t hire these two guys if you’re not going all-in on content.

And by “these two guys”, M.G. is referring to Apple’s hiring of former Sony Executives Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg (the production team behind mega-hits such as Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and The Crown which, in my mind, is about as original as TV content gets).

More from M.G.:

If Apple can build a viable Netflix competitor, they’ll have decidedly more leverage. But they also run the risk of alienating the powers-that-be in Hollywood, just as Netflix turned from friend (licensing their old content) to foe (bidding for the first-run premium content).

Part of the challenge for Apple is putting up an ecosystem fence around Apple TV. They’ve been unable to negotiate the kind of terms that allowed iTunes to flip the music industry on its head. And Apple does not own a critical mass of content to pursue a Netflix-like strategy. Will “these two guys” be the start of the next generation Apple TV original content?

I like the play, looking forward to watching what emerges.

I have long railed against construction that makes phones, tablets, and laptops difficult to repair. But this might be a new low.

As the iFixIt folks make their way through the Microsoft Surface Laptop teardown, it becomes clear that getting inside is no easy task. And these folks are pros at taking things apart. It’s their raison d’etre, their primary gig.

The whole thing turns a bit ugly. Just look at the picture in Step 5. Here’s a quote:

Now that we’ve got a clear look at the plastic, it seems these aren’t reusable clips at all, but weak ultrasonic spot welds that we’ve been busting through. This is definitely not going back together without a roll of duct tape.

Yeesh. I wonder what plan Microsoft has for repairing these units when they start rolling in. Will they simply replace the cover, discard the old?

[H/T John Kordyback]

Texas Monthly:

Monday, April 10, was going to be a big day for John Mackey, but he had no idea how big it would turn out to be. The co-founder, CEO, and spirit animal of Austin-based Whole Foods Market was flying to New York to launch a tour to promote the publication of his second book, The Whole Foods Diet (summary: Go vegan, or mostly vegan).

And:

As he stepped off the American Airlines flight at JFK (Whole Foods doesn’t own a jet, and Mackey flies coach), his phone lit up with urgent text messages and voice mails. A hedge fund in New York called Jana Partners had snatched up almost 9 percent of Whole Foods’ stock and announced that it would pressure the company to either overhaul its business or sell itself—perhaps to another grocery giant, such as Kroger, or to a less traditional player, such as Amazon. Mackey and other leaders might have to be replaced. A media frenzy ensued, and the PR team who had carefully staged what should have been a traveling celebration of their boss as a thought leader shifted into immediate crisis mode.

“From that moment on, I was drowning in it,” Mackey says.

Mackey built Whole Foods from scratch, instilled a set of principal beliefs, built a management team that followed those beliefs. Whole Foods continued to grow, and then the hedge fund folks smelled the deal that was possible.

Fascinating, horrifying (depending which side of the fence you’re on), and a tale as old as Wall Street.

In February 2017, SpaceX announced a mission to head beyond the moon. They’ll take two private, paying customers to finance the trip, and they’ll launch in late 2018.

This marks the beginning of Elon Musk’s dream of populating Mars, giving Earthbound folk a second shot at coexisting on a planet all their own.

The linked document is a very readable blueprint for this dream. Will it happen? Not clear. Could it happen? Read the paper. Seems doable, with the right dreamer at the helm.

UPDATE: There’s been a lot of argument about the feasibility of a ship to Mars, mostly focused on the radiation shielding problem (a lot of radiation, and shielding is heavy/costly to propel). Here’s a good thread on the subject, and the solutions being proposed. [H/T Alex Satrapa]

Wired:

>The Monaco Grand Prix may be the car world’s glitziest race, the Indy 500 its most historic, but the 24 Hours of Le Mans wins the award for most masochistic—and therefore the most important to manufacturers and fans alike. The annual race—happening this weekend—offers the chance to prove who has not just the best technology, but the ability to harness it for a full 24 hours without disaster, at a place where disaster tends to reign supreme. Proper equipment such as helmets and car racing gloves provide critical protection for drivers in high-stakes races like the Monaco Grand Prix, where speed and precision are paramount. These helmets meet rigorous safety standards, featuring advanced materials and design to absorb and dissipate impact forces effectively. Their robust construction helps safeguard drivers from head injuries in high-impact collisions or sudden decelerations, offering enhanced protection during high-speed maneuvers and tight cornering typical of Monaco’s challenging circuit. This added safety helps drivers focus on their performance with greater confidence.

>What started in 1923 as a race for small European manufacturers and aristocrat drivers evolved into a proving ground for the world’s biggest carmakers. It’s where Bentley and Porsche would prove their mettle, Ford would crush Ferrari to settle a beef, and, in 1955, fast cars and an even faster track claim 80 lives in the worst crash in motorsports history.

Le Mans doesn’t get the coverage of other motorsports but I find it a fascinating race. I just watched Amazon’s “Le Mans: Racing is Everything” series and it was, unfortunately, antiseptic. A shame because they got amazing access to the drivers and teams.

Ars Technica:

Hardware improvements and the passage of time have made me more enthusiastic about the MacBook’s virtues and less bothered by its trade-offs. I still wish Apple would drop the price a couple hundred dollars and put the MacBook Air out of its misery, but even at $1,299 the MacBook has become a respectable mainstream laptop.

Obviously, “everyday laptop” depends on what you do every day but it sounds like this latest MacBook is a real little workhorse.

Apple today announced that Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg, two of television’s most creative and successful executives, are joining Apple in newly created positions overseeing all aspects of video programming. Erlicht and Van Amburg will lead video programming worldwide, reporting to Eddy Cue. They join Apple from Sony Pictures Television where they have served as presidents since 2005, and have been responsible for some of the most popular and widely acclaimed programming of the past decade, including favorites such as Breaking Bad and its spinoff Better Call Saul, The Crown, Rescue Me and many more.

Apple is getting serious about video content.

Amazon.com sent a shock wave through the grocery industry Friday when it announced plans to buy Whole Foods Market and formally enter the world of bricks-and-mortar retail.

Wow.

Can’t help but watch this over and over. Here’s hoping no one got hurt.

Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:

Upgrading more often than the average person is an occupational hazard of gadget addicts – and even more so of tech writers. But I do at least try to resist when an update is a relatively minor one.

I’d hoped that would be the case with the 10.5-inch iPad Pro. After all, I already owned the 9.7-inch Pro, so already had some of the more advanced features like True Tone. And 10.5 inches isn’t that much bigger than 9.7 inches, right?

Still, I had to be sure, so I wandered into the Regent Street Apple Store to try one out

There’s something about this so-called goldilocks iPad Pro, something compelling, in the same way as AirPods are compelling, but calling out from an already mature product line.

Ben’s journey is an interesting read and rang true for me. I hear that iPad calling.

New York Times:

On Thursday, Mr. Bezos sent a tweet to his more than 222,000 followers asking for suggestions for philanthropic giving. He specifically asked for ideas that could help the world in the near term, a contrast to long-term personal investments he has made in for-profit companies with social impact, like Blue Origin, a space firm, and The Washington Post.

Here’s the Tweet:

Request for ideas… pic.twitter.com/j6D68mhseL

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) June 15, 2017

Amazing times we live in. Have a world changing cause worth supporting? Send Jeff a reply.

A cool feature, true, but what really stuck with me watching this video was how bright, vibrant, and smoothly animating that screen is. Far, we’ve come.

Neil’s a smart guy and this is a fantastic read. A few tastes:

Apple is not overselling the device’s speaker capabilities. In a somewhat controlled environment resembling a typical living room, HomePod’s sound output clearly stood out from that of Amazon Echo and Sonos Play 3. In fact, it made the Amazon Echo sound like a cheap toy, and the Sonos Play 3 sounded so inferior, I wondered if something was wrong with the Sonos.

And:

HomePod’s value isn’t found in asking Siri for sports scores or controlling the kitchen lights. HomePod’s value is found in an A8 chip controlling a series of microphones and speakers.

HomePod is a computer capable of mapping a room and then adjusting its sound output accordingly. This is another way of saying that HomePod is able to capture its surroundings and then use that information to tailor a specific experience to the listener. It is easy to see how collecting data and then using that data to improve the experience will position HomePod as an augmented reality (or maybe we should say augmented hearing) device.

Augmented hearing, a very specific form of augmented reality. And this is key to the future of HomePod. More from Neil:

A few augmented reality examples include the HomePod recording and copying the sound from one location or room and then replicating that sound in another room. This would be game changing as it would be as though we were in a completely different room even though we hadn’t changed locations. An adult would be able to speak to a child in another room by simply talking out loud in a regular tone thanks to multiple HomePods.

The idea of speaking to someone in another room in a conversational voice is just one (albeit fantastic) capability that could be unlocked by HomePod. Being a great music delivery service is a bit of a trojan horse to get one in the door. But the HomePod (in your house) and AirPods (out and about) are much more than music delivery devices. They are extensions of the ecosystem.

Bloomberg:

To make a ton of regular paper requires 100 tons of water, TBM says, while its Limex paper is made without water. In place of 20 trees, it uses less than a ton of limestone, as well as 200 kilograms of polyolefin. The five-year-old startup recently raised an additional 1 billion yen ($9.1 million) from an existing backer, and aims to list its shares by 2020.

Limestone is plentiful, water, obviously, not. Surprisingly, paper use is growing rapidly, demand said to double by 2030. This is an interesting play.

Jacquire King speaks the same way he produces and mixes records: he’s direct, to-the-point, and avoids unnecessary hype. It’s an approach that has served the 50-year-old Washington, D.C. native well, from his previous perch at Nashville’s legendary Blackbird Studios to his Grammy-winning work with Kings of Leon, Buddy Guy, and Tom Waits.

This video demonstrates perfectly why I love Universal Audio so much for recording and mixing. They care so deeply about matching their plug-ins to the analog counterparts that you can’t tell the difference. I use an older Apollo twin and UA plug-ins in all of my recordings.

The iPhone 360 explores the story of iPhone, from its prehistory, inception, and launch, to its evolution and impact. Coinciding with the 10th anniversary year of the iPhone launch in 2007, iPhone 360 includes integrated initiatives across the Computer History Museum to create new collections of artifacts and oral histories, scholarly research and insights, dynamic events, and educational content and curriculum.

Scott has been very quiet since leaving Apple a few years ago, so this should be an interesting discussion.

Ars Technica:

Unlike phones and tablets, which can still post big performance gains from year to year, desktops age more slowly and gracefully. A typical replacement cycle in many businesses and schools is three or four years, and, as long as they don’t break, you can easily keep using them for years after that.

Apple has lent us its top-end 5K iMac to test, but instead of just sticking to year-over-year performance comparisons, we’ll be going all the way back to 2012 to compare it against some of the older iMacs that it might end up replacing (we’ve also included the 2011 iMac in a few cases, though it can’t run all of the benchmarks that newer iMacs can). A lot has changed in five years, but how much faster have things really gotten? We’ll also get into the handful of technological updates Apple has made since the last new iMacs came out in late 2015.

There are some really interesting and geeky stats in this story but the bottom line is, if your three years or older iMac feels “sluggish”, you’ll notice significant speed gains on the newest iMacs.

longreads:

The smartphone is the signature artifact of our age. Less than a decade old, this protean object has become the universal, all-but-indispensable mediator of everyday life. Very few manufactured objects have ever been as ubiquitous as these glowing slabs of polycarbonate.

For many of us, they are the last thing we look at before sleep each night, and the first thing we reach for upon waking. We use them to meet people, to communicate, to entertain ourselves, and to find our way around. We buy and sell things with them. We rely on them to document the places we go, the things we do and the company we keep; we count on them to fill the dead spaces, the still moments and silences that used to occupy so much of our lives.

How completely the smartphone has taken over so many aspects of our lives is a remarkable story.

Nilay Patel, The Verge:

Walt Mossberg is retiring this year — he’s already written his last column, hosted his last Code Conference, and taped the final episode of Ctrl-Walt-Delete in front of a live audience in New York. But Walt’s also assembled an impressive collection of notable gadgets over his two-decade run as a reviewer and columnist, and we asked him to talk us through some of the more notable items as he cleared out of his office.

This isn’t everything — there’s far too much for that. But there’s nothing quite like Walt talking about gadgets and what they mean, and we tried to pick a few that defined their moments in a way few products now seem to do.

It’s been incredible having Walt on The Verge team, and we’re all going to miss his insight, wit, enthusiasm, and charm. I hope you enjoy this look at him doing what he does best: explaining technology to people who love it just as much as he does.

Love this. Lots of history, with Walt sharing favorite gadgets he’s accumulated over the years. I’ll miss having you around, Walt.

Nice video from Mac Rumors, showing off Siri’s deep-learning powered iOS 11 voices, as well as advances in contextual awareness. Well done, worth watching.

I’m a fan of Mac gaming, look forward to the updates to the MacGamerHQ top lists. This is not a competitive list (which game is #1, etc.) but more a curated list that you can browse to see which games appeal to you.

Me? I’ve got my eye on Obduction and The Witness.

Kottke.org:

> Ikea products have long been available on Amazon from 3rd-party resellers, but now Ikea is officially selling hundreds of their products on Amazon. Among the items that caught my eye are the iconic blue Frakta bags, the best kids’ drinking glasses ever made (we have dozens of these…love them), a kids’ foot stool, the Swedish meatball sauce packs, and those ubiquitous Glimma tea lights. Also, lots of rugs, picture frames, candles, bedding materials like those on https://orezon.co/blogs/home-decor/non-toxic-bedding-healthy-bedding-for-your-home, and many of the other things that are good to stock up on.

Go to amazon.com and do a search for the word Ikea.

This seems like a huge step for Ikea and a win for Amazon.

UPDATE: Jason updated his page, calling into question his original take. But take a look at this particular link. Note that the seller is listed as IKEA and that IKEA is a link. This seems different than all the third party IKEA product resellers. Disagree?

UPDATE2: And it turns out that that IKEA link is just a link to group IKEA products, but they are all sold by third party sellers. The update from Jason’s site:

> I am an idiot. All this Ikea stuff on Amazon is from resellers…the same stuff that’s been available for years on the site. (Same deal with all the Muji items on Amazon.) I mean, they are still genuine Ikea products and some of it isn’t even available from Ikea’s online store. Streamline your sales with our specialized Amazon FBA prep services. Anyway, not such a huge deal. I was wondering why Ikea would be adopting such a if-you-can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘em attitude towards Amazon; turns out they’re still just trying to beat ‘em.

Feh. But thanks to all the commenters and Twitter folks for steering me straight.

Associated Press:

A Taiwanese company that assembles Apple’s iPhones and other electronics is considering building a plant in Wisconsin that could employ thousands of people and give Gov. Scott Walker a huge political boost as he prepares to run for re-election.

A person with direct knowledge of the negotiations who was not authorized to speak publicly confirmed to the Associated Press on Wednesday that the state is in talks with Foxconn. At least one other upper Midwest state, Michigan, is also pursuing the plant.

This could be a rumor, could be Foxconn simply exploring options, could be Foxconn setting up a bidding war between Wisconsin and Michigan. No matter, this has interesting implications in terms of Apple potentially building future product in the US.

Christina Farr, CNBC:

Imagine turning to your iPhone for all your health and medical information — every doctor’s visit, lab test result, prescription and other health information, all available in a snapshot on your phone and shared with your doctor on command. No more logging into hospital web sites or having to call your previous doctor to get them to forward all that information to your new one.

Apple is working on making that scenario a reality.

And:

CNBC has learned that a secretive team within Apple’s growing health unit has been in talks with developers, hospitals and other industry groups about bringing clinical data, such as detailed lab results and allergy lists, to the iPhone, according to a half-dozen people familiar with the team. And from there, users could choose to share it with third parties, like hospitals and health developers.

This day can’t come soon enough. The sharing of medical data, in a safe, secure, and privacy respecting manner, is a space ripe for disruption. Apple is the right player to make this happen.