Evident by this long list of automotive experts, it’s clear Apple’s ambitions go well beyond just its iOS-based CarPlay in-dash system. Well beyond software too, as many of the names below are hardware engineers coming from Tesla, Ford and other notable automotive related areas. In fact, the majority of employees on this list that are reporting to team leader Steve Zadesky come from an automotive hardware background and many only joined Apple recently or around the time Cook reportedly approved the electric car project.
Jordan did a great job pulling together the list of Apple’s recent auto-related hires, along with some background for each one.
Apple holds the top spot for the eighth year in a row. In February, it became the first company to hit more than $700 billion in market value. As tech devotees await the launch of the Apple Watch in April, record smartphone sales were announced in January — 74.5 million phones in final three months of 2014– proving that the iPhone is still the product to beat.
Apple Inc., which has been working secretly on a car, is pushing its team to begin production of an electric vehicle as early as 2020, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The possibility of Apple building a car just took a slight turn towards the positive with this definitive quote from Bloomberg. Obviously, this is not a quote from Apple, so it is automatically suspect.
But add this bit of kindling on the rest of the stack, including the battery poaching lawsuit, which also moves the needle towards Apple investing in automobile hardware, as opposed to some form of Car OS.
Apple has determined that a small percentage of MacBook Pro systems may exhibit distorted video, no video, or unexpected system restarts. These MacBook Pro systems were sold between February 2011 and December 2013.
More information is available from Apple’s Web site.
A nice looking bundle of 8 apps for Mac users. The apps purchased separately would cost $469, but they are selling it for $44.99. If you use code ULTRAMAC5, you can get it for $39.99.
The Hangzhou store’s ceilings are almost 50 feet high, with no columns to be found. The façade of glass panels reaches from floor to ceiling without interruption, meaning Foster + Partners had to push well beyond their previous feats in glass manufacturing to get 11 seamless panes.
I’ve seen a lot of pics of this new store and it is an absolutely stunning architectural achievement.
Chinese PC maker Lenovo has found itself in the middle of a public relations disaster, following revelations that it sold a number of notebook computers with pre-installed software that hijacks users’ browser sessions to inject customized advertisements and seriously degrades the security of encrypted connections.
No matter what else they may do, everyone knows that Apple would never pull shit like this.
Twenty-five years ago today, a software application called Photoshop arrived, promising photographers and graphic designers a new realm of digital possibilities. But my brother John Knoll and I didn’t realize at the time just how broadly influential our little piece of software would become.
When I began writing the code back in graduate school instead of focusing on my PhD at the University of Michigan, I had no idea what it would become or how it would be used.
Photoshop might be the most complicated software application I’ve ever used. It’s an amazing tool.
Eric Clapton has been tapped for induction into the Blues Hall of Fame for his many musical achievements as well as for his role as a popularizer of the entire genre. He brought the blues to audiences in his native Britain and throughout the world, illuminating the work of the original blues artists who inspired him.
The snow in Boston may have been bad, but wait until you see what’s going on in Canada.
The amazing amount of snow in my and The Loop’s Publisher’s home province and other areas of Eastern Canada is reminiscent of what I remember seeing frequently as a kid. When you’re young, this amount of snow is magical. Thanks to Nicole Dalrymple for the link!
When you leave a movie theater, you’re probably not thinking, “Man, the sound in that movie was mixed perfectly.”
Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean you’re bad at watching movies. The sound mix in a movie – the combination of the dialogue, soundtrack and sound effects – is designed to be unobtrusive. As one sound mixer put it to me, as soon as the audience notices something slightly off in the mix, “you’ve lost them.”
I love this behind the scenes stuff, especially about subjects most of us have heard of but have no clue what actually happens.
A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.
All About Apple, an Italian non-profit organization that’s been operating for over a decade, has launched a crowdfunding campaign for All About Apple Museum, the “most comprehensive” exhibition of Apple and Apple-related products with over 9,000 pieces in its collection. The organization has assembled a team of volunteers and has been granted permission to use a new location in Savona, Italy, and they’re seeking funds to finish the project.
The museum has reached its first funding goal (no doubt in part, at least, thanks to Federicco’s publicity) and is now pushing towards its first stretch goal. Looking forward to a visit once the museum is up and running. In case you are interested in making the trek out there, Savona is in the northwest of Italy, on the Ligurian Sea, to the west of Genoa.
Here’s a link to the English-language museum page.
LoopPay’s technology, however, purports to sidestep one obstacle that has so far hindered the wide adoption of mobile-payment services: the need for merchants to have to upgrade their checkout devices. Instead, LoopPay says its magnetic induction technology allows a smartphone to be tapped against the magnetic-stripe-reader machine that is already found in Samsung’s service, which is expected to be launched when Samsung unveils its Galaxy S6 smartphone in Barcelona in about a week’s time, would allow a consumer to register credit, debit, gift and loyalty cards onto a Samsung smartphone, and use the handset to make purchases, instead of carrying the cards in a physical wallet.
First things first, this time Samsung has gone too far. Jim put so much effort into his Heineken based mobile payment service which (I have this under the highest authority) he was going to call LoopPay.
Kidding aside, LoopPay uses a magnetic field to interface with existing magnetic strip readers. In effect, it allows a phone to mimic an actual credit card and is said to work with most existing card readers, meaning merchants won’t have to make any changes to accept LoopPay.
To use LoopPay, first you register your existing credit cards in its app (as many cards as you like). Once you’ve done that, you can pay by opening the app, tapping in your LoopPay-specific PIN, selecting your card and then holding your phone close to the merchant’s card swipe slot. When you do, most machines will recognize LoopPay’s magnetic signal as a swipe, and the transaction will proceed.
You can also remove your LoopPay fob from the phone if it’s easier to just hand it to the merchant—the cashier just needs to press a physical button on the dongle. The signal emits from the dongle, so it can even work when your phone’s battery has died. Of course, Samsung hasn’t said much yet about how it might implement LoopPay in its phones, but I could imagine there will be differences with the software and hardware.
Though I do like the fact that the technology can work with existing card readers, this seems like a short sighted system to me. It does not solve the security problem and it is far less convenient to use. You have to open an app and type in a pin.
With Apple Pay, you hold your finger on the Touch ID sensor, tap the merchant terminal, wait for the confirmation beep (which happens almost instantaneously) and boom, you’re done. And, unless I’ve missing something here, Apple Pay offers security that is head and shoulders beyond that of LoopPay.
Short term, LoopPay is an interesting alternative to pulling your credit card out of your wallet, if you have the right piece of hardware. Samsung is betting that LoopPay is enough of a draw to get you to invest in the next generation Samsung phone. Obviously, Apple is doing the same. It’s a horse race, of a sorts. But in this race, time favors Apple. Once Apple Pay acceptance hits a critical mass, compatibility with legacy merchant terminals will be less of an issue and ease of use and security will become the driving factors. And Apple Pay wins that one, hands down.
Electric-car battery maker A123 Systems has sued Apple Inc for poaching top engineers to build a large-scale battery division, according to a court filing that offered further evidence that the iPhone maker may be developing a car.
Apple has been poaching engineers with deep expertise in car systems, including from Tesla Inc, and talking with industry experts and automakers with the ultimate aim of learning how to make its own electric car, an auto industry source said last week.
The lawsuit is interesting, but more notable is the evidence this lends to the possibility of an Apple car of some sort. If Apple is building an automotive software platform, a Car OS, why would they need battery expertise?
John Browett, the former Dixons boss who was ousted from Apple after six months, is stepping down from Monsoon, the fashion chain he joined two years ago.
Browett replaced Ron Johnson at Apple and was replaced by Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Retail and Online Sales. Browett’s run at Apple was short:
Browett was a high flyer at Tesco before leaving to head up Dixons where he is credited with kicking off a turnaround at the PC World and Currys chains. He was poached to head up Apple’s retail division in 2012 but only six months later he was ousted by the technology group’s boss Tim Cook. Staff apparently disliked his efforts to make them more profit-driven rather than simply focusing on customer service.
That may be why I’ve been getting a lot of questions from developers and designers regarding what I’d like to see from Apple Watch apps. After thinking about it for a good long while, the list turns out to be pretty straightforward.
Rene Ritchie has a good list of things to look out for when designing for the wrist. Like Rene, I’ve been getting a lot of questions on this too. We’re in for some interesting times.
In the first episode of “Behind the App”, a special series of Inquisitive, we take a look at the beginnings of iOS app development, by focusing on the introduction of the iPhone and the App Store.
Congrats to my friend, Myke Hurley, on his new show.
Over a series of late October days, camera operators working on an episode of ABC’s “Modern Family” set aside their typical high-definition videocameras and picked up iPhones. The command “Action!” was followed by a tap of that familiar red button on the device’s small video screen.
The result, which will be shown next Wednesday, Feb. 25, is an episode shot almost exclusively on mobile devices, an approximation of the way that many actual modern American families (of a certain class) communicate today.
This is truly amazing. Not just that it’s being shot with iPhones, many filmmakers are doing that, but that such a popular show has that much confidence in the quality and capabilities of an iPhone.
“I think somebody is kind of trying to cough up a hairball here,” Akerson said in a telephone interview. “If I were an Apple shareholder, I wouldn’t be very happy. I would be highly suspect of the long-term prospect of getting into a low-margin, heavy-manufacturing” business.
Recognizing that this is merely a rumor, I have two thoughts here: First, Apple is aware of all of this. Second, it’s Apple—they were probably warned against making a phone too, but they did it. Apple is going to enter markets it believes it can dominate in some fashion—markets that need changing and where they can break the status quo.
It will probably not come as a great surprise to learn that Apple won in a number of categories for 2015 customer satisfaction survey. The study, conducted by market research brand keys, also gave Apple subsidiary Beats an award as well.
It appears Apple pretty much cleaned up in its categories. According to Brand Keys, Apple won in the laptop, smartphone and tablet categories for 2015. Apple was followed by Samsung, Lenovo, LG, Sony, Motorola, Nokia, and Blackberry. There’s not much of a surprise in the order of companies following Apple either.
Beats won in the headphone category, which is a surprise for me—Beats aren’t really that good, but this is about satisfaction, not quality. Beats was followed by Bose, Sony, JVC/Parrot (Tie), Rocketfish/Audio-Technica/Panasonic (Tie), Apple, Maxell/Monster/Skull Candy (Tie), and Egghead/Pioneer (Tie).
For the 2015 survey, 36,605 consumers, 18 to 65 years of age from the nine US Census Regions, self-selected the categories in which they are consumers, and the brands for which they are customers. Seventy (70%) percent were interviewed by phone, twenty-five (25%) percent via face-to-face interviews (to identify and include cell phone-only households), and 5% online.
A scathing critique of Michael Bromwich, the lawyer overseeing Apple after it lost an iBooks antitrust lawsuit, alleges that he has unfairly billed the company some $2.65 million for investigative practices that have gone well beyond the initial intent of his role.
DiskWarrior does one thing, and does it well: it optimizes and repairs disk directories, which contain the information that tells your Mac where files are stored on the disks attached to it. If directories become corrupted, you can lose files. While your data may still be on a disk, the Mac is no longer capable of finding it. DiskWarrior works both as preventive medicine—to fix errors before they become serious—and to correct more serious errors and help recover files when things get really bad.
I am no longer a professional Mac Consultant but, when I was, DiskWarrior was an indispensable tool. I still highly recommend it.
France, Germany and Spain all favour Apple devices when opening emails. 47% of emails in France are opened on an Apple device, 46% in Germany and 47% in Spain. Italy, in contrast, saw a decrease of 44% year-on-year in the use of iPhones to read emails. Yet Apple products remain the most used in Italy overall with 50% of emails opened on an Apple device, including a 15% increase in the use of iPad.
Even more remarkably:
Email open rates on Android devices dropped 30% year-on-year while total opens on iPads and iPhones increased by 18% and 5% respectively.
