Kirk McElhearn’s piece on the origins of noise canceling headphones would be worth the read just for that background, but my favorite part is this bit:

A great example of effective noise cancellation is the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound. Back in 1974, sound man and chemist extraordinaire Owsley Stanley came up with a setup for the band that was distortion-free, and also served as monitors, so the band could hear themselves play without having blowback monitors on the stage in front of them.

If you are interested in some music history, take a few minutes to read about Owsley Stanley, the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and, on a related topic, the origins of a more well known Wall of Sound. Owsley was a chemist, in the drug sense of the word, cooking LSD for the Dead and others. But he was truly a gifted sound engineer and is famous for the high quality of his live recordings (no pun intended).

The original Wall of Sound was an important recording technique developed by the infamous Phil Spector that influenced a generation of sound engineers and an incredible number of famous recordings.

Jason Snell, writing for Six Colors:

Even if iPhones do get replaced at a much faster pace than Macs and iPads, it’s undeniable that most iPhone users don’t have a Mac. Your average Apple customer is an iPhone user.

For the last two years, the iPhone has provided more than half of Apple’s corporate revenue, and in the most recent quarter it was more than two-thirds of the revenue. Apple is rapidly becoming iPhone Inc., maker of smartphones and… various other devices.

And:

For the Apple Watch to become a hit product, it just needs to please a bunch of iPhone users. The iPhone market is large enough that the Apple Watch doesn’t need to stake out new ground for Apple, at least not yet. (I don’t think the Apple Watch will ever connect to Android devices, but it’s possible that one day the Watch might be such a device unto itself that it simply won’t care if you have a phone nearby, or what’s on it.) It’s going to be years, if ever, before the Apple Watch becomes a product that isn’t made for iPhone users.

It’s become an iPhone world, true, but it’s all about the ecosystem. Apple is too smart not to recognize that all the (profitable) elements in the ecosystem are supportive timbers that each do their part to keep the ecosystem upright and working.

But I still have to lament the lack of progress in a product like the Apple TV. This is a product that’s seen very little hardware improvement in ages, with software that’s in desperate need of a rethink. It’s been passed by in every way by its competitors.

To me, this is the center of Jason’s argument. Is Apple TV an important part of the ecosystem? It should be. The migration of eyeballs from traditional television to net-based programming is incredibly important, from a strategic standpoint. Apple ignores this part of the ecosystem at its peril.

It’s an iPhone world. For now.

Jeremy Horwitz, writing for 9to5mac:

What happens when an app — marketed as compatible with current iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches — is never updated for the latest version of iOS, and either stops working after an iOS upgrade, or never works at all on new devices? That’s the situation buyers of Square Enix’s $18 The World Ends with You: Solo Remix (and $20 iPad version) have found themselves in since iOS 8 was released. The game’s description claims that it “requires iOS 4.3 or later” and is compatible with devices that shipped with iOS 8, but it wasn’t actually iOS 8-compatible. Yesterday, Square Enix publicly flip-flopped on whether it would leave the game unplayable or fix it. Before changing its tune, the company told customers that they’d need to continue to keep using iOS 7 in order to play the game — an unrealistic alternative, though one that’s faced by users of numerous iOS apps that aren’t being updated by their developers.

Obsolescence is not a big deal for a 99 cent app, but a line exists, and that line is clearly crossed with an app priced at $20, or even $18.

A tough situation. You can’t force a developer to build an update. And it’s not quite fair to force a developer to refund money when the product they built actually runs on the OS for which it was built.

Should Apple refund a customer’s money when an app no longer runs on an updated version of iOS? That feels closer, but still, is it fair to penalize Apple for pushing the platform further along?

Re/code:

Researcher IDC said Amazon showed the steepest annual decline among the five major tablet makers, with worldwide shipments of its Kindle Fire devices falling by as much as 70 percent compared with the holiday 2013 period.

A spokesperson for the retailer criticized IDC’s methodology, saying “our most affordable tablet ever, the Fire HD 6 at $99, which is one of our high volume products, wasn’t included in the report.” She declined to discuss sales.

Well Amazon, you know how to solve the problem. Simply report sales figures.

Mashable:

Phone Expander is designed to make it easy for a user to easily save space on their iOS device by deleting cache files inside apps, easily remove large apps installed on the device, remove pictures or videos (backing them up to the desktop first) and soon, manage music on their devices.

I ran the app on my (backed up) iPhone and it allowed me to recover a little over 2.5 GB. Not a lot but every little bit counts.

Matt Richman:

With Apple Pay, Apple leveraged its business model, cultural influence, and customer base to enter arguably the most heavily-regulated international system on Earth in a way that everyone already in the system had a reason to like. This is an incredible accomplishment, and no other company could have done it.

Matt makes a great point, one often made by many others, that Apple will and can succeed because of its tight control and integration of both hardware and software.

Medium:

Giraffedata—a 51-year-old software engineer named Bryan Henderson—is among the most prolific contributors, ranking in the top 1,000 most active editors. While some Wikipedia editors focus on adding content or vetting its accuracy, and others work to streamline the site’s grammar and style, generally few, if any, adopt Giraffedata’s approach to editing: an unrelenting, multi-year project to fix exactly one grammatical error.

Henderson has now made over 47,000 edits to the site since 2007, virtually all of them addressing this one linguistic pet peeve. Article by article, week by week, Henderson redacts imperfect sentences, tightening them almost imperceptibly. “I’m proud of it,” says Henderson of the project. “It’s just fun for me. I’m not doing it to have any impact on the world.”

You’ve got to admire the dedication if nothing else.

Want to read at night but find the dimmest brightness setting too bright for you (or for your partner)? Apparently there’s a way to dim your iOS device even dimmer that its traditional brightness settings allow, using a little trick from the Accessibility Settings. Nice.

Re/code:

The ad — which is strongly evocative of Apple’s holiday campaign in the United States — celebrates the importance of family, even as it underscores the growing importance of China as a market for Apple.

Apple’s commercial depicts a young girl using the company’s products to create a memento for her grandmother incorporating a popular song from the 1940s, “Forever Smile,” sung by acclaimed Chinese singer and actress Zhou Xuan, who earned the nickname “Golden Voice.”

The spot is aware of Chinese culture without resorting to token motifs (no lanterns, dragons or other clichés). Indeed, it was produced by award-winning Asian filmmaker Ann Hui On-Wah, art director William Chang Suk Ping and cinematographer Christopher Doyle.

This is not the first Apple ad to run in China (that’d be this one), but the first created specifically for China.

Here’s the ad.

Wall Street Journal:

The iPhone maker sold $6.5 billion in bonds on Monday, including a round of 30-year debt that will pay 3.5% annually. That is even lower than Apple’s $17 billion bond sale in April 2013, when a 30-year bond yielded about 3.9%.

Apple’s deal is the largest U.S. high-grade corporate-bond sale so far this year, according to S&P Capital IQ LCD. Apple tapped the debt market less than a week after reporting a 38% jump in its latest quarterly profit.

Why is Apple trying to raise money?

Apple in a prospectus said it plans to use proceeds for general corporate purposes, including share buybacks. Bond investors are typically wary of companies that sell debt to buy back shares, because it effectively means a company is taking cash from bondholders to pay shareholders.

But in Apple’s case, investors said those concerns are assuaged in part by the company’s record-setting profit in the latest period, the gangbusters sales pace of its latest iPhone release and its significant cash reserves.

Adding to the attraction of the Apple bonds is the vast number of them outstanding, which makes them easy to trade when banks generally are cutting back on bondholdings and making trading more difficult.

Bloomberg:

> Amazon.com Inc., aiming to bolster its brick-and-mortar operations, has discussed acquiring some RadioShack Corp. locations after the electronics chain files for bankruptcy, two people with knowledge of the matter said. > > Amazon has considered using the RadioShack stores as showcases for the Seattle-based company’s hardware, as well as potential pickup and drop-off centers for online customers, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the deliberations are private. > > The possible move, discussed as part of RadioShack’s looming trip to bankruptcy court, would represent Amazon’s biggest push into traditional retail. Amazon joins other potential bidders, including Sprint Corp. and the investment group behind Brookstone, in evaluating RadioShack stores, people familiar with the situation said. RadioShack has more than 4,000 U.S. locations and is moving toward a deal to sell a portion and close the rest, according to some of the people. Sprint has discussed buying 1,300 to 2,000, they said.

I imagine Amazon is looking for a place where they can demo the Fire phone, Amazon Echo, and Amazon Kindle devices. Maybe they’ll keep copies of the Washington Post by the checkout.

If Radio Shack does shutter its doors, I will miss them. Where else can I buy solder? Resistors? Wire? I guess Amazon wins again. If you are struggling with your business debts, consider consulting with company insolvency specialists to avoid bankruptcy.

The Atlantic:

The story of how avocados went from being an obscure West-Coast cash crop to the juggernaut of the Midwestern produce section is one of extreme feats of marketing and major shifts in ideas about nutrition. It is a story of a desperate renaming, a PR Hail-Mary, and of the changing nature of the Super Bowl. It is a tale best enjoyed with a squeeze of lime and generous sprinkling of cilantro.

Growing up in Nova Scotia, I never even saw an avocado. This story of its rise to become “America’s favorite fruit” is fascinating.

DIY Photography:

Not many know this but Google Earth had a bigger brother called Google Earth Pro and while the ‘lil sibling was free, getting the pro version was $400/year. No small change.

I guess there were not too many hoppers on that offer and now Google is releasing Google Earth Pro for free.

What can you do with the pro version? For starters, you can export bigger images, the regular version supported only 1000×1000px photos, while the pro version enables you to dump 4800×3200px photos which should be good enough for 4K resolution.

You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to grab the software but for those who can put it to use, it’s pretty cool.

Now there are signs that the companies are more likely to be ferocious competitors than allies. Google is preparing to offer its own ride-hailing service, most likely in conjunction with its long-in-development driverless car project. Drummond has informed Uber’s board of this possibility, according to a person close to the Uber board, and Uber executives have seen screenshots of what appears to be a Google ride-sharing app that is currently being used by Google employees. This person, who requested not to be named because the talks are private, said the Uber board is now weighing whether to ask Drummond to resign his position as an Uber board member.

Google is a big investor in Uber, and has been from the beginning. However, this isn’t the first time a Google employee sat on a company’s board and then decided to enter the same market. Eric Schmidt sat on Apple’s board and witnessed the development of the iPhone.

John Biggs:

Sources tell us Uber is hiring more than fifty senior scientists from Carnegie Mellon as well as from the National Robotics Engineering Center, a CMU-affiliated research entity. Carnegie Mellon, home of the Mars Rover and other high-profile robotics projects, declined to comment at this time, as did scientists mentioned by our source. Uber has “cleaned out” the Robotics Institute, said the source.

So, who isn’t building a self-driving car?

Great idea, great looking app.

Elgato Thunderbolt 2 Dock enables you to connect everything to your MacBook or Ultrabook at once. With two Thunderbolt 2 and three USB 3.0 ports, simultaneously connect all of your devices with only one cable. Built-in HDMI enables you to directly connect a display of your choice up to 4K resolution, while enjoying increased network performance with built-in Gigabit Ethernet and crystal-clear conference calls through the separate microphone input and amplified audio output.

Ars Technica:

“You know how every once in a while you buy the $40 bottle of wine instead of the $8 one, thinking you’re gonna have a special dinner or something?” Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson wrote over instant message. “And you get home, and you make the salmon or the pasta or whatever and you light the candles? And you pour the wine, swirl it like they do in Sideways so that it looks like you know what you’re doing… you bring it to your lips and after smelling it—it smells like wine—you have a sip? And it’s like… yeah, I guess this tastes good or something, but really it just tastes like wine?

“The Pono Player is kinda like that, but for music.”

I’m not an “audio snob” so I have no need for the Pono Player but is it of interest to any of our sharp-eared Loop readers?

The Verge:

Forever 21 has been pirating Photoshop, according to a new lawsuit from Adobe, and it’s facing serious fines as a result. The suit was filed yesterday in California District Court, alleging that Forever 21 pirated 63 different instances of Adobe software including copies of Photoshop, Acrobat, and Illustrator. Autodesk and Corel also joined Adobe in the suit, based on pirated copies of Autodesk, WinZip and PaintShopPro, among others. According to the complaint, Forever 21 “continued their infringing activities even after being contacted by Adobe regarding the infringement.”

How the heck did Adobe find out about this? Was there a whistleblower inside Forever 21?

Dan Frommer, writing for Quartz:

A big part of the iPhone’s success can likely be attributed to one decision: To finally offer it in larger sizes, matching the phones that Android rivals, such as Samsung and Motorola, have made for years. On Apple’s earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said the company saw a record number of new iPhone customers and more people switching from Android than for any of the previous three iPhone versions.

Of course, now that Apple’s met the demand for larger phones, it risks disappointing investors next time. Surely, nothing else can deliver such a big jump in sales? But perhaps the shift to larger smartphones will serve a secondary purpose. Paul Kedrosky, the financial commentator, theorized this week that Apple has created a “portability deficit”—i.e., big phones are cumbersome. This, Kedrosky posits, will prove helpful as Apple starts selling its new iPhone accessory, the Apple Watch, this April.

The portability deficit suggests that the larger the phone, the less portable. The title of Dan’s piece is “Maybe this is the real reason Apple made the iPhone bigger.” In other words, Apple made a larger phone to create the need for an Apple Watch.

I don’t know if I buy that, but I do think the Apple Watch addresses the portability deficit. Like a cell repeater, the Apple Watch helps get the message from your phone to your brain, washed through a more portable interface.

Over time, we’ll presumably be able to pack enough technology into a watch-size package that the phone itself will no longer be necessary.

M.G.Siegler draws an analogy between Apple and Big Oil:

With this latest quarter, Apple surpassed ExxonMobil in 2008, Royal Dutch Shell in 2008, and Gazprom in 2011 for the most profitable quarter in the history of business. The unifying theme? All oil & gas companies. All operating in a world before the recent collapse of oil prices.

The downside of explosive single product growth is dependence on that revenue. In a sense, Apple is painted in a corner, dependent on iPhone sales to maintain their growth.

In fact, Apple now has the best problem in the world: having unearthed the best business in history, the iPhone, there are seemingly few places left to dig for gold — or, perhaps more appropriately, oil.

If I was a betting man, I’d bet on Apple here. Time and again, they’ve proven adept at reinventing themselves, at catching the next wave before anyone even realized it was a wave or, perhaps more appropriately, before anyone recognized how large a wave it would be.

Read Siegler’s piece. It’s well written, thoughtful, and full of interesting links.

Marriott President and CEO Arne Sorenson explains the unexplainable:

> We have withdrawn our petition to the FCC on cybersecurity – an initiative we thought was the right thing to do. However, in the face of disagreement from both regulators and our customers, we see that the effort was doomed. > > This issue has been a complex one, and one that has opened Marriott to much criticism – the most painful of which has been the misunderstanding of our intentions. We wanted to protect the security of Wi-Fi use for conferences at our hotels – it had nothing to do with individual guest use of Wi-Fi or personal Wi-Fi hotspots. > > In fact, we have led the industry in offering millions of customers free Internet access. In October, we announced that Marriott Rewards Members – a membership that is free and open to anyone – would have free Internet when they book direct. That message has been drowned out by the noise with the FCC. > > Cybersecurity is a major concern across the business world and, certainly, in our industry, where guests and conference-goers rightly expect that any hotel-provided connection be secure. We are in a pitched battle against hackers who are at work daily trying to fool consumers – sometimes by setting up a Wi-Fi network that seeks to lure conference-goers into a site intended to steal passwords or other valuable data. To prevent that from happening and to further improve security measures, professionals like the one on this site link can be consulted.

To me, the logic is simple. If you care so much about the security of your guests, make internet access free for all your guests. All of them. The Marriott Rewards program is free, fair enough. And if you required guests to sign up to get free access, that would be reasonable. It gives you some level of (really, the illusion of, but that’s just a quibble) control over who is on the network. But if you take money from anyone, if internet access is a revenue line item for you, then you are simply blowing smoke.

My 2 cents.

Kirk McElhearn:

Could Apple be planning to bring ebooks back into iTunes? There was a logic to splitting them out, and releasing the iBooks app. This app serves three purposes:

• You can manage ebooks with it
• You can read ebooks with it
• And you can buy ebooks from the iBooks Store

But the iBooks app is the only part of the iTunes Store that isn’t in iTunes. And you can still purchase ebooks from iTunes; they just download into iBooks afterwards. It is a bit confusing having two storefronts, and two different interfaces. Add to that the fact that iTunes still manages your ebook syncing. So what’s the point of having another app?

Read on. He makes a pretty good case.

Macworld:

Go is about slowly-evolving strategies to surround the largest territory on the board. Each player, black and white, alternates placing stones on a board with a 19-by-19 grid. Building up territory, where the opposing player cannot get a foothold, each player attempts to enlarge his or her territory, and thwart advances and invasions by the opponent.

It’s easy to learn the rules of Go; it’s hard to become really good at the game.

Go is a fascinating game I’ve played (poorly) for years. If you’re looking for something different in your gameplay, check out the apps recommended in the article.

Pacific Standard:

Imagine your favorite musician, actor, filmmaker, or painter. Undoubtedly, each one grew up idolizing—emulating, even—their artistic heroes. As such, if you pay close enough attention, it’s not hard to see those influences permeating the artist’s work. But at what point does paying homage to source material become a swindle?

For young British crooner Sam Smith, that line was crossed last October when Tom Petty and songwriter Jeff Lynne noticed that Smith’s single “Stay With Me” was too reminiscent of Petty’s 1989 hit “I Won’t Back Down.” (It was announced on Monday that Petty now has a songwriter credit and will receive royalties.) While the two songs have eerily similar choruses, it raises an interesting question: Are artists in these scenarios always deliberately plagiarizing, or is there something subtler, perhaps subconscious, at play?

There have been many such cases. There’s the dispute over the origins of Stairway to Heaven. There’s the plagiarism lawsuit over the origins of George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord (which, by the way, is the last Beatles/ex-Beatles song to go to #1 on the Billboard charts in the UK – See the comments to learn why the change). And so on.

The linked article digs into some of the science behind all this:

There is, as it turns out, a known phenomenon, called cryptomnesia, where previously stored memories present themselves as original creations. We’ve all experienced something like this: You’re asked your opinion on a newsworthy subject and, perhaps unconsciously, find yourself parroting an op-ed you read earlier in the day.

Music is mathematical in nature. Every rhythm has its roots somewhere. Every chord has been played before. There certainly is originality in music, but the vast majority of musicians grow up learning to play music created by others. Those learned melodies and musical techniques form a foundation that cannot be unlearned. Translation: This sort of thing was bound to happen, and bound to happen again.

Back to the Sam Smith / Tom Petty song issue, here’s what Tom Petty had to say:

About the Sam Smith thing. Let me say I have never had any hard feelings toward Sam. All my years of songwriting have shown me these things can happen. Most times you catch it before it gets out the studio door but in this case it got by. Sam’s people were very understanding of our predicament and we easily came to an agreement. The word lawsuit was never even said and was never my intention. And no more was to be said about it. How it got out to the press is beyond Sam or myself. Sam did the right thing and I have thought no more about this. A musical accident no more no less. In these times we live in this is hardly news. I wish Sam all the best for his ongoing career. Peace and love to all.

Here’s a mashup comparing the Sam Smith and Tom Petty songs, side by side. [Hat tip Next Draft]

NBCNews:

The NFL experience is getting pretty high-tech — for everyone, that is, except players on the sidelines.

Russell Wilson might pick up a tablet on the sidelines in Super Bowl XLIX, but he won’t be able to use it to check his email, play “Angry Birds” or take a selfie. It’s a Microsoft Surface Pro 2 handicapped to perform one function and one function only: display photographs.

Specifically, photographs of previous drives. It’s a function that before this season was fulfilled by binders full of black-and-white photographs. (Microsoft reportedly paid $400 million for the privilege).

The NFL has really tightened the screws on allowing any other technology on the sidelines. Part of this is the money Microsoft paid, certainly. But part of this is to maintain a level playing field, to avoid giving a more tech savvy team an unfair advantage.

NFL coaches have an abundance of stats to pore through before big games. Having those same stats during the game, however, is a completely different animal.

Today, if a coach has the ball on fourth-and-two on his own 49 yard line with three minutes left in the game while trailing by a touchdown, he has to trust his gut and his staff’s research to make the right decision.

Good read. [Hat tip to Brother Stu]

Vox:

Super Bowl commercials are a big deal.

At a cost of about $4.5 million for a 30 second spot that’s often filled with celebrities, pop music, and special effects, advertisers are clearly willing to pay a premium to be a part of the big game.

Here are the 2015 Super Bowl commercials, listed alphabetically by advertiser. We will update this post throughout the weekend, as new ads are posted online.

I love the game and will watch it (GO HAWKS!) but also admit to enjoying the commercials, too.

John Gruber’s take on this post from Above Avalon:

First, in terms of iPhone operations and considering nothing else, Jeff Williams has clearly done an amazing job. Apple sold a record 74 million iPhones last quarter, and though the company doesn’t break that down by models for competitive reasons, everyone knows that a huge chunk of those were the brand-new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. They were supply-constrained on both models, particularly the 6 Plus, but only by a few weeks. Operationally Apple did an incredible job meeting demand for iPhones — they sold more than ever but were less supply-constrained than in the last few launch quarters. For context, in 2008, Apple sold a total 10 million iPhones for the entire year. All credit to the hardware, software, and product marketing teams for the fact that 74 million people wanted to buy an iPhone last quarter. But the credit goes to Williams’s operations team that there were 74 million units available to sell.

Jeff Williams, secret ops superstar. Read the rest of Gruber’s post for some thoughts on CEO succession. Great stuff.