Apple’s HomePod and Google Home show as a distant second to Amazon Echo. You can see the polling data here. Most of this is due to price.
That said, the HomePod is just an announcement, not yet a product in the wild, something people can actually fully experience. The fact that the HomePod is pretty much tied with Google Home, a product that is currently shipping and in people’s homes, tells me that there is a strong potential market for HomePod.
With price as a strong decision point for buyers, I suspect this data means the market will segregate into strong layers, with Amazon owning the cheap seats, Apple owning the higher tiers, and brand loyalty dividing the areas in between.
I’m addicted to movie trailers. I watch them to not only try to get a feel for whether a movie is worth watching for me personally but also to see the style of the trailer and to predict the movie’s popularity. I even go back and watch trailers from movies from before I was old enough to get into a theater. It’s fascinating to see how the movie trailer has evolved over the years.
Take the cautionary tale of Baywatch and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, two films predicted by pre-release tracking to do boffo box office over Memorial Day weekend.
But after their dismal “freshness” ratings hit Rotten Tomatoes’ all-powerful Tomatometer—which assigns a numerical score to a given film based on a round-up of critical reviews—the Rock-starring lifeguard comedy promptly flopped, and the fifth installment of Disney’s long-running Johnny Depp franchise hauled in a “soft” $46 million—the lowest opening for a Pirates movie in 14 years.
I had no idea Hollywood gave so much credence to Rotten Tomatoes’ aggregation of reviews. Personally, I’ve never used it to decide whether or not I see a particular movie. Have you?
Why on earth would you want to use your iPhone’s camera to scan a two-dimensional block-and-dot code? How could this possibly have a benefit worth the trouble? Why would Apple have any interest in building this in as an automatic feature within its Camera app?
Ask folks in China—and Japan, where advertisers, handset makers, and cell carriers pioneered 2D codes over 15 years ago. Apple says its listening to the Chinese market in adding 2D code scanning, but the benefits will be there for users worldwide.
QR codes are an interesting lesson in the differences between users in the “western world” versus those in Asia in particular. QR codes really haven’t taken off much here but they are a big part of the user experience in places like China.
If Apple really cared about customer experience, why wouldn’t the company make the process of redeeming Apple Pay cash as simple as paying it? Apple would not comment on the matter, but talking to analysts and payment specialists, it seems certain that Apple Pay’s design doesn’t prioritize you. Apple Pay prioritizes itself and its partners.
It’s about keeping those consumer dollars within the entire Apple Pay merchant ecosystem. Apple claims that 50% of U.S. retailers will accept Apple Pay by the end of the year. And Apple wants to make sure that money is actually flowing through this pipeline.
Contrary to the headline and the writer’s assertion, it’s not the “sneaky psychology” of Apple Pay that could be a concern but the general nature of the way we think about money. Slamming Apple for our own failings isn’t at all fair. But, that having been said, it is interesting that, while Apple isn’t going to make much money by “holding” on to our Apple Pay dollars, they do stand to profit from our use of “fuzzy money”.
Apple has released updates to its trio of iWork apps for the Mac — Pages 6.2, Numbers 4.2, and Keynote 7.2 — with all three receiving the capability to reply to comments (with each person in the thread receiving a unique color and author identification) and the addition of a library with over 500 professionally drawn shapes (in categories such as objects, animals, nature, transportation, arts, and more). The three iWork apps also receive a new Auto-Correction pane that enables you to set up text replacements and more.
Of the three, I only use Keynote on a regular basis. Do any of you use all three as an “Office” suite of apps?
Astronauts could soon be waking up to the smell of freshly baked bread. A new dough mixture and oven specially designed for use on the International Space Station will be tested during a mission next year.
It’s an ambitious goal. Bread is a staple food on Earth but can be life-threatening in space.
This sounds silly until you read the article and realize how important an experiment this will be.
Disney started W.E.D. Enterprises (for Walter Elias Disney), went looking for cheap land in Southern California, and recruited artists and art directors from various studios. They began designing aspects of the park, as Walt’s brother, Roy O. Disney, lined up meetings with potential investors: banks and TV networks. But with those pitch meetings just days away, Walt realized he had no big visual for his vision; he needed a show to go with Roy’s tell. “They had all these elements, but they didn’t have them all together in something they could present to investors,” explains Van Eaton.
So, on a Friday, Walt called Herb Ryman, a friend and former Disney artist known for working quickly, with an audacious idea: draw a huge, detailed map of the proposed park.
Fascinating story, a one-of-a-kind collectible. The map goes on the auction block June 25th, expected to fetch north of $500K.
Join us in this first-of-its-kind citizen science project, gathering scientifically valuable data from the total solar eclipse that will traverse North America on August 21, 2017.
Type your zip code or town name into the search field and you’ll see (drag the slider or hit the play button) a simulation of the eclipse that will unfold on August 21st.
Apple has always been fond of dreaming up hardware and software from a not-too-distant future, and there are glimmers of the iPhone in Apple’s history since long before the rumors about the device were taken seriously in the early 2000s. More than a decade before the smartphone was unveiled, Apple shared with the computing magazine Macworld a semi-outlandish design for a videophone-PDA that could exchange data. (Smartphones eventually made the PDA, or personal digital assistant, obsolete.)
The prototype for the device, published in the May 1995 issue of the magazine, is something of a missing link between the Newton and the iPhone—though still more parts the former than the latter.
Interesting look back. Be sure to take a look at the pictures.
Many of us have been using the dev builds of iOS 11 and MacOS High Sierra this week. I wanted to share some thoughts on what I think are some of the important advances.
And:
APFS is an entirely new file system enabling such features as clones, snapshots, encryption, 64-bit limits on file counts and sizes, crash protection, crazy performance for large file operations, and more.
And:
I’ve lived through all the Apple migrations and all the DOS/Windows migrations and not only is this among the most feature-rich releases, it is actually running right now on my Mac (and iPhone) after an in-place upgrade. I seriously sat there watching the install process thinking “this is going to take like a day to finish and it will probably fail and roll back in the middle or something”. After about 30 minutes the whole thing was complete. The amount of amazing engineering that went into both the creation and deployment of APFS is mind-blowing. And that it was done on phones, watches, and PCs is nothing short of spectacular and except for maybe the transition from FAT to FAT32, I can’t recall anything even close to this. There are a ton of features under the covers that will surface in use of Apple devices, but mostly it will just make everything better seamlessly.
There’s a lot more to this post, but I thought these words were worth highlighting. Sinofsky knows about designing, building, and delivering file systems. This is high praise indeed.
When Apple introduced its 64-bit A7 processor in September, 2013, they caught the industry by surprise. According to an ex-Intel gent who’s now at a long-established Sand Hill Road venture firm, the competitive analysis group at the imperial x86 maker had no idea Apple was cooking a 64-bit chip.
And:
The industry came to accept the idea Apple has one of the best, if not the best, silicon design teams; the company just hired Esin Terzioglu, who oversaw the engineering organization of Qualcomm’s core communications chips business. By moving its smartphones and tablets — hardware and software together — into the 64-bit world, Apple built a moat that’s as dominant as Google’s superior Search, as unassailable as the aging Wintel dominion once was.
I think we might be seeing another moat built, this time across the fields of Augmented Reality (AR), Machine Vision (MV), and, more generally, Machine Learning (ML).
And:
As many observers have pointed out, Apple just created the largest installed base of AR-capable devices. There may be more Android devices than iPhones and iPads, but the Android software isn’t coupled to hardware. The wall protecting the massive Android castle is fractured.
Lots more to this. Fascinating read. Apple is making some foundational investments that will leverage their blazing fast chip designs and machine learning to bring object recognition, machine vision, and augmented reality to life.
Later this month, the big-box retailer will start advertising try-before-you-buy rentals on its website for cameras, audio equipment and fitness trackers, the company recently told Recode. Best Buy is working with a San Francisco-based startup called Lumoid on the partnership.
Best Buy will feature the try-before-you-buy option on BestBuy.com and then send interested customers to Lumoid’s website to make the rental. Customers earn about 20 percentage of the rental price back in Lumoid credits and can use them if they go on to buy the item outright.
It’s unlikely this option will become available to us here in the Great White North but I often tell my photography students about lens rental. You get to try out gear before you buy it or you get to use gear you’d never buy but want to use for a specific purpose.
June 27th marks 10 years since Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, a device that would fundamentally transform how we interact with technology, culture, and each other. Ahead of that anniversary, Motherboard editor Brian Merchant embarked on an investigation to uncover the iPhone’s untold origin. “The One Device: The secret history of the iPhone”, out on June 20th, traces that journey from Kenyan mines to Chinese factories all the way to One Infinite Loop. The following excerpt has been lightly condensed and edited.
Ignoring the opening factual error on The Verge (the iPhone was unveiled by Jobs in January of 2007), the history of the development of the iPhone is a fascinating one. I’ve already added the book, “The One Device” (affiliate link), to my Amazon wish list.
It’s been getting harder for me to read things on my phone and my laptop. I’ve caught myself squinting and holding the screen closer to my face. I’ve worried that my eyesight is starting to go.
These hurdles have made me grumpier over time, but what pushed me over the edge was when Google’s App Engine console — a page that, as a developer, I use daily — changed its text from legible to illegible. Text that was once crisp and dark was suddenly lightened to a pallid gray. Though age has indeed taken its toll on my eyesight, it turns out that I was suffering from a design trend.
I wouldn’t say “the web” has become unreadable but far too many sites favor design over readability. My aging eyes can’t take it.
After years toiling away in secret on its car project, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has for the first time laid out exactly what the company is up to in the automotive market: It’s concentrating on self-driving technology.
“We’re focusing on autonomous systems,” Cook said in a June 5 interview on Bloomberg Television that amounted to his most detailed comments yet on Apple’s automotive plans. “It’s a core technology that we view as very important.” He likened the effort to “the mother of all AI projects,” saying it’s “probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on.”
In the interview on Bloomberg Television, Cook was hesitant to disclose whether Apple will ultimately manufacture its own car.
But that won’t stop everyone in the Tech Media from screaming, “This news proves Apple is making a car!”
Recently, we learned that AirPods will pair automatically with an Apple TV running tvOS 11. This is great news, but there are two features I’d love to see for future versions of tvOS:
Pair two sets of AirPods to a single Apple TV: This would allow my wife and I to listen on headphones, each with a different volume level, a blessing for people with different hearing needs and for parents with sleeping infants.
Pass the audio through to HDMI while AirPods are active: This would allow someone with a hearing deficit to listen at a louder volume while the room gets the regular volume.
Anyone else with the same needs here? Anything else to add to this particular wish list? Ping me.
In the video embedded below, Jeff Benjamin walks through the process of organizing your iPhone’s home screen using iOS 11 drag and drop. This is a fantastic use of drag and drop and an easy way to get your head around how this works.
I’ve spent the last week using a new 10.5-inch iPad Pro, and this is, in many ways, the easiest product review I’ve ever written. There are several significant improvements to the hardware, and no tradeoffs or downsides. There is no “but”.
Read the review. Fantastic upsides, no downside save price. The only question for me is which size to buy.
A few days ago, chess players using 32-bit devices found themselves locked out of chess.com. From the forum:
The reason that some iOS devices are unable to connect to live chess games is because of a limit in 32bit devices which cannot handle gameIDs above 2,147,483,647. So, literally, once we hit more than 2 billion games, older iOS devices fail to interpret that number! This was obviously an unforeseen bug that was nearly impossible to anticipate and we apologize for the frustration. We are currently working on a fix and should have it resolved within 48 hours.
This sort of thing comes up in computing periodically. In this case, if I’m reading this correctly, the variable used to hold the gameID was not big enough to handle chess.com’s growth. It is not clear if this problem is limited to iOS devices.
Could the developers have seen this coming? Probably. And even if they didn’t anticipate their success, they might have seen the gameID approaching this limit, made the change earlier.
There’s a lot to process in this 110 slide presentation on Apple’s China business. At its core, China is placing restrictions that are breaking the stickiness of Apple’s ecosystem.
From the China Channel presentation:
TO MOST CHINESE IPHONE USERS THE IPHONE IS JUST A LUXURY PHONE. THEY HAVE NO SIGNIFICANT INVESTMENT IN APPLE’S SERVICES ECOSYSTEM
And:
APPLE’S CHINA SERVICE ECOSYSTEM HAS BEEN SYSTEMATICALLY STRIPPED AWAY BY LOCAL COMPETITORS
And:
FROM APRIL 2016 IBOOKS AND ITUNES STORE HAVE BEEN BLOCKED IN CHINA. CHINESE AUTHORITIES ORDERED THEM TO BE TAKEN OFFLINE.
In most markets, Apple can depend on ecosystem loyalty. Most iPhone users would never even think of shifting over to an Android device. There’s brand loyalty, for sure, but there’s also ecosystem stickiness at work here. My photos, music, documents, etc., are all on my Apple devices, and I already have a great deal of expertise in using all this data, moving around the ecosystem. There’s little incentive to shifting over to Android.
According to this presentation, the Apple ecosystem stickiness is broken. For example, iMessage is hardly used in China. China is dominated by Android devices, iMessage is Apple device specific, spam is a huge issue, and WeChat is an entrenched tech in China, making it hard for iMessage to gain a foothold.
Can Apple overcome these obstacles? No doubt. But understanding the problems and retooling to overcome them is key.
After two years and more than 100,000 photos taken, we are proud to present ‘Vancouver Hyperlapse: Extended Version’; the 7min version of our love letter to Vancouver shot using a new and emerging technique that magically blends stop motion and time lapse photography.
I’m lucky enough to live in one of the most beautiful areas in North America, if not the world. Up until 2 weeks ago, the first thirty seconds of the video were my backyard views in Chilliwack.
It’s been a week since Apple announced the new 10.5-inch iPad Pro, and the early reviews are now in. While reviewers do express a few reservations along the way, the overwhelming tone is positive.
Phrases like ‘Apple pays off its future-of-computing promise’ and ‘the biggest step forward the category has made yet’ suggest that tech writers are finally taking seriously Apple’s claim that an iPad is for many a realistic replacement for a PC.
There is disagreement about just how far that claim stretches, and eyebrows raised over the all-in price of a device that makes little sense without a Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil, but those are the only real reservations found.
Great collection of reviews. You might also want to take a look at this review Serenity Caldwell did for iMore.
I scrolled down the list in the Productivity category and saw apps from well-known companies like Dropbox, Evernote, and Microsoft. That was to be expected. But what’s this? The #10 Top Grossing Productivity app (as of June 7th, 2017) was an app called “Mobile protection :Clean & Security VPN”.
Watch as Johnny Lin follows the money. This is no isolated incident.
In a nutshell, you need to update your AirPods firmware, then connect to an iOS 11 device to capture the updated Settings. Not a solution for everyone, but if you’ve got access to a single device running the iOS 11 beta, this seems to transfer the updating settings to your iOS 10 device.
From the dean’s introduction of Tim Cook (about 5:47 in):
It only seems natural that he should have wound up at the helm of the company that has changed the texture of our lives more than perhaps any other company in the history of the world.
Hyperbole? Perhaps. But there’s a core of truth there. I can’t think of a company that has changed the world in quite the same way.
The speech itself is terrific, inspirational, worth your time. I especially enjoyed Tim’s passionate words about Steve Jobs.
