Android Police:

Google has updated the developer dashboard for May, giving us an overview of the Android device ecosystem. Nougat continues to inch upward at a respectable rate—it’s now over 7% of devices.

True, that is significant growth for Nougat, absolutely, but compare to iOS 10 adoption, which last reported (back in February) at 79%.

Michael Tsai pulled together some coverage of Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop.

There’s this bit from Bloomberg:

Microsoft has already cracked the professional and creative markets with inventive tablets and a desktop that turns into a virtual drafting table. Now it’s chasing another category many believe is Apple’s to lose: the $1,000 laptop for everyone.

That’s one side of the coin. Me, I found this bit telling:

@davemark this sure looks like a magical experience to use… https://t.co/2Ga3iB7wnd

— Robert Davey (@RobJDavey) May 2, 2017

Click on the image to bring the animated GIF to life. Watch the flex on the screen, note the hand required to keep the screen from pushing over backwards.

Apple Watch sales, along with AirPods and Beats headphones have hit Fortune 500 level, which means they’re bringing in over US$5 billion to Apple’s “other products” category. Company CEO Tim Cook shared that detail during the company’s second fiscal quarter earnings report on Tuesday.

I know some people question whether these products are successful or not, but come on, That’s an incredible amount of sales. I vote successful.

In case you wanted to read Tim’s comments on this quarter’s earnings.

Metro:

Sheeple is now an official word and iPhone users are being used to illustrate it.

Respected American publisher Merriam-Webster listed it in the dictionary for the first time and for some reason decided Apple fans were the best example.

Many of you will already know it refers to people who mindlessly follow trends so the definition might be offensive to iPhone users.

Screw you, Merriam-Webster.

PCWorld:

It took months of hemming and hawing before I finally broke down and bought a password manager—and soon after I did, I couldn’t believe I waited so long. Thanks to 1Password (there are other top-notch choics as well), I’m no longer jotting down passwords on scraps of paper, nor am I forgetting passwords or using the same password for multiple accounts.

Like its fellow password managers, 1Password boasts mobile apps for Android and iOS, perfect for accessing saved passwords wherever you go. Once you master 1Password’s nifty mobile tricks, you’ll have no problem retrieving your new super-strong passwords at the precise moment you need them.

I’m a huge fan of 1Password on the Mac but don’t use it on my iPhone. These tips might just get me started.

Charity Buzz:

Bid now on this opportunity to have lunch with Apple CEO Tim Cook at Apple Park in Cupertino, California! Valid for 2 people. Experience will be approximately 1 hour. Cost of the meal is included.

Apple has been doing this for several years and will raise money for the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Group.

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

Thanks to more modern PCs, a wider install base for Intel Macs, and dedicated enthusiast communities and forums like TonyMacx86, it’s not too hard for anyone comfortable with PC building to assemble a Hackintosh using off-the-shelf parts. Community-developed apps and tools streamline the process of creating install media and setting up drivers, and while you’re probably going to have to do a little bit of Terminal work getting everything to function perfectly, most major setup problems are easy enough to overcome for anyone who has been building and maintaining their own PCs for a while.

And:

At this point I should mention this article is in no way intended to be an install guide or an endorsement of Hackintoshing. Today, as has always been the case, installing macOS on non-Apple hardware is a violation of Apple’s licensing agreement.

And:

Apple has done surprisingly little to shut down the Hackintosh community. When companies attempt to commercialize PCs running Mac software, as a long-gone company called Psystar briefly did back in 2008, Apple shuts them down swiftly and decisively. But macOS itself doesn’t do more than a surface-level check for genuine Apple hardware—the underlying hardware needs to be close-ish and special bootloaders spoof things like the model, firmware information, and serial number. These OSx86 enthusiast communities have existed for years without so much as a cease-and-desist. Contrast this with Apple’s much more stringent approach to iOS jailbreaking: the company releases new updates to disable old jailbreaks pretty quickly, at least in part because these jailbreaks rely exclusively on serious security flaws to work in the first place.

There is so much more to this article, well worth the read. But it is interesting that Apple has allowed the Hackintosh universe to survive and even to flourish.

Also interesting is the thought of what form Apple’s coming Mac Pro will take. Will Apple build an upgradeable tower, one designed to last longer than a generation? Given Apple’s reluctance to update a machine with relatively low sales numbers, I think they’d do well to build something that they can release into the wild, let the user community update and upgrade with third party parts, with a nice long extendable life span.

A win for the “Pro” community (not sure of a better label here), a win for the small army of parts suppliers who will seize on the opportunity to sell parts and supplies, a win for the communities who will benefit from product produced using these ultra-powerful machines.

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

KGI’s Ming-Chi Kuo has published an industry report today claiming that Apple will likely announce a Siri Speaker product (branding unknown, Kuo calls it ‘Apple’s first home AI product’) at WWDC in June. The device will compete with the Amazon Echo and go on sale in the second half of the year.

Kuo says Apple’s product will feature ‘excellent’ sound with seven tweeters and a subwoofer, and will be positioned as a more premium product than the Echo … with a higher price tag to match.

KGI’s report is not definitive about the launch timeline. It says that they believe Apple has a more than 50% chance of announcing the Siri Speaker product in June. This leaves some wiggle room in case plans change or the launch is pushed back.

Will I be able to order stuff from Amazon on the Siri Speaker? Send roses? Order pizza? Will Siri evolve from the current model, or will this be the existing Siri capabilities in my kitchen/living room?

If I say “Hey Siri”, who will get the call, my Apple Watch or my Siri Speaker? Will they expose settings to let me customize the experience?

If true, this will be interesting to watch.

Hulu came in at 4%, Amazon at 3%. From the article:

In a recent survey of US college students, commissioned by LendEDU, only 8% of respondents said they didn’t have a Netflix account. This doesn’t mean young people actually pay for Netflix, as 54% said they use a friend’s or family member’s account. But at 92%, that is still an astonishing level of audience penetration.

Very interesting numbers. This is an audience that Apple covets. Going to be interesting to see how they progress in this space.

Congrats to Joe Kissell and Morgen Jahnke for the acquisition, and to Adam and Tonya Engst and the rest of the TidBITS team for the sale.

New chapters for everyone.

Another 16 sports, news and entertainment companies will soon be livestreaming content on Twitter as the company furthers its mission to be the go-to source for live content around the clock.

Twitter isn’t the place I go for live streaming, but maybe I’m wrong.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is not the first exec to deal with sexual harassment and sexism issues. And he’s not the first to be accused of stealing technology. He’s also not the first to anger customers through cloddish statements. And he’s not the first to face significant doubts about his ability to manage a fast-growing startup.

But he is the very first speaker in the 15 years we have been putting on our tech and media events to cancel his interview due to the many embarrassing issues at his company. In this case, because the report from former Attorney General Eric Holder on Uber’s culture and management problems has been delayed until the week of Code at the end of May.

This clearly shows he wouldn’t be able to answer the tough questions Kara Swisher would have asked him.

High profile plaintiff’s attorney Mark Geragos is taking aim at Ja Rule and Billy McFarland for their negligence regarding the catastrophic Fyre Festival, which was set to be held at a “private” island in the Bahamas from April 28-30 and May 5-7. The festival was canceled after the first day. Supermodels Bella Hadid and Emily Ratajkowski, and musical acts such as Tyga, Blink-182 and Major Lazer were set to perform before the entire event was shut down. Attendees, who paid up to $100,000 to attend the event are livid, and one concert-goer has hired Geragos, who has filed a $100,000,00 class action.

The organizers of this event are so screwed.

This is a six part series from Graham Cochrane. He offers from great advice on mixing a song using out of the box plug-ins, which is a nice way to start off. Once you get used to what each plug-in does, you can purchase some of the industries best, like those from Universal Audio.

Ben Bajarin:

The big story is customer satisfaction with AirPods is extremely high. 98% of AirPod owners said they were very satisfied or satisfied. Remarkably, 82% said they were very satisfied. The overall customer satisfaction level of 98% sets the record for the highest level of satisfaction for a new product from Apple. When the iPhone came out in 2007, it held a 92% customer satisfaction level, iPad in 2010 had 92%, and Apple Watch in 2015 had 97%.

That’s an absolutely incredible number. I’ve been using my AirPods since they were introduced last September and love them.

For the third year in a row, Release Notes will gather together the best and brightest in the iOS and Mac development community to share our experiences, our struggles, and our victories in the face of an ever-changing software market. Whether you work for yourself, a small team, or a large company, if you’re the type of person who is interested in learning how a technology business is built and maintained, you’ll want to spend time in Chicago with us this fall.

I attended the very first Release Notes and it was really well done. The conference itself was filled with great speakers and it was a lot of fun.

In a letter made public on Friday, Apple suggested a series of changes to the draft policy that is under development and said it looks forward to working with California and others “so that rapid technology development may be realized while ensuring the safety of the traveling public.”

Google, Toyota, Ford, Uber, and Tesla also made suggestions for changes to the policies.

Gizmodo:

Everything’s cooler in slow motion, but high frame-rate photography is an essential tool for scientists studying phenomena that occur in the blink of an eye. Researchers at Lund University have just revealed the fastest high-speed camera ever developed that can capture the equivalent of an astonishing 5 trillion frames every second, fast enough to visualize the movement of light.

At those speeds, events that take place in as little as 0.2 trillionths of a second can be documented and studied at a speed that humans can comprehend. To help demonstrate just how fast that really is, the researchers used the new camera to film a group of photons traveling about as far as a piece of paper is thick, making it seem as if the light particles were barely moving, instead of racing past at 671 million miles per hour.

I’m always fascinated by this completely out of reach technology.

Ozzy Osbourne and Zakk Wylde have reunited! The guitarist has rejoined the Prince of Darkness’ band and they’ll be together onstage for Ozzy’s upcoming 2017 shows!

For fans of Zakk and Ozzy, there could be no better news than this. Ozzy has always had great guitarists in his bands throughout his career, but for me, Zakk is the man.

Variety:

An anonymous hacker has carried through on a threat to release “Orange Is the New Black” season five episodes online — after Netflix allegedly failed to respond to the cybercriminal’s shakedown demands.

Good for Netflix. The cost to them is hard to quantify, since it is not likely to impact their subscriber base. And refusing to pay the ransom sends a message to the community and to the hackers which hopefully will help others make a similar “don’t pay the ransom” decision.

The hacker or hackers also have obtained unreleased shows from ABC, Fox, National Geographic and IFC. The content appears to have been stolen in an attack on post-production studio Larson Studios in late 2016, according to piracy-news site TorrentFreak.

Not clear if that other content was released to the pirate sites as well.

Brian Foutty, SwiftTeacher.org, on the differences between an iPad and a Chromebook in the classroom:

The iPad’s camera is the BIGGEST curricular differentiator. The ability to use the iPad’s camera to take high quality pictures or video to record evidence for a presentation in Keynote or Explain Everything is invaluable in the classroom.

And:

When I taught math, my students would use the camera to take video to track the trajectory of a football being thrown one day and a pumpkin being dropped from 45 feet the next day. Students would then use the Venier Video Physics app on another day to chart the paths of the football and the pumpkins. The app generates mathematical equations.

And:

Having a small, lightweight, and maneuverable device (think iPad) with a great camera is what made it possible for me to provide my students an interesting, engaging, and memorable educational experience. And this is but one of many examples that my colleagues and I are doing in my district on a weekly basis.

Camera, powerful processor tip the scales to the iPad.

More from Brian:

The iPad’s microphone is also a key asset of the iPad. The microphone allows students to record their thoughts, questions, and observations as part of class notes using Notability or class projects using Explain Everything, a voice recorder app, or a student feedback app such as Recap. Audio gives the students yet another vehicle to express their ideas and their learning in order for teachers to keep them involved and engaged in learning. Combining the microphone, the camera, and iMovie gives teachers a really powerful curricular tool to engage students in a way that allows students to create content both academically and creatively that results in deeper, more meaningful learning experiences for students.

And:

As I previously mentioned, my district did, at one point, decide to purchase Chromebooks, which we still have because of their light use and another reason I will mention later. When my district received our Chromebooks, we unboxed them, deployed them, and that was it. We, as teachers, had to figure it out without any support or help other than internet research. Google’s direct support of Chromebook is non-existent because they did not manufacture the product. Let’s not forget that Google’s top business is Search! They collect data about our use and sell it to advertisers.

And finally, on affordability:

Many Chromebooks are cheap(er). Many of them are plastic and not well made, but that cheapness comes at a cost: durability and residual value. The conventional wisdom (in education) has been that Chromebooks cost schools less money to deploy. I do not believe this conventional wisdom to be actual wisdom or even true. The new iPad definitely renders this argument for choosing Chromebook completely null and void.

This is a great piece, from an educator with real world teaching experience, on the myriad advantages of the iPad. [Via The Overspill]