Thanks to SVALT for sponsoring The Loop this week. Use code “LOOP” for a $15 discount on the ultimate high-performance Apple laptop dock, the SVALT D Performance Cooling Dock, that increases CPU Turbo Boost speeds by 106% and speeds up 4K exports in Final Cut Pro X by 10% on 15-in Retina MacBook Pro.

This looks really interesting. It combines streaming services like Netflix and includes SkipMode, which completely skips over commercial breaks by pressing one button.

The first project is to build an artificial brain from scratch that can pass a high school science test. It sounds simple enough, but trying to teach a machine not only to respond but also to reason is one of the hardest software-engineering endeavors attempted — far more complex than building his former company’s breakthrough Windows operating system, said to have 50 million lines of code.

The second project aims to understand intelligence by coming at it from the opposite direction — by starting with nature and deconstructing and analyzing the pieces. It’s an attempt to reverse-engineer the human brain by slicing it up — literally — modeling it and running simulations.

Apple has purchased VocalIQ, a startup located in the United Kingdom that has developed a natural language API to allow computers and people to have a more natural dialogue, reports Financial Times. According to VocalIQ’s website, the company has developed a self-learning dialogue API built on 10 years of natural language research, belief tracking, decision making, and message generation.

Siri is becoming an increasingly important part of how people interact with Apple’s devices and operating systems.

Thanks to Twocanoes Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Makers of Winclone, the best Mac app for migrating, cloning and backing up your Boot Camp partition. This week Loop readers can use the code “theloop” to get 10% off Winclone 5, just in time to backup Boot Camp before upgrading to El Capitan. If you run Boot Camp in labs or classrooms, Boot Runner 2 from Twocanoes is a time saver for remote scheduling of maintenance reboots and an easy to use OS picker for your users. Check out the video or get the 14-day trial and see how easy Boot Runner makes managing dual boot Macs.

The European Commission is probing whether Samsung televisions’ sensed when they were being tested for energy efficiency and changed their power consumption to get better ratings than they deserved.

Samsung admits that its TVs radically changed their power-consumption during testing, but say that the low-power mode was inadvertently triggered by the tests, and was meant to be an automatic power-saving feature.

Sure it was.

Good list of some of the top companies and where they stand with compatibility. Obviously, this will continue to change. Personally, I keep my music production machine a version back to ensure all of my music software works.

Google is close to rolling out a tool named “Customer Match” which, it appears, will combine a logged-in Google account with any email address handed by a customer to a retailer to create lists of addresses to target specific users with marketing material.

Creepy bastards.

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Google Inc (GOOGL.O) have agreed to bury all patent infringement litigation against each other, the companies announced on Wednesday, settling 18 cases in the United States and Germany.

Interesting.

Some very interesting changes in how Windows is installed in Boot Camp on OS X 10.11 “El Capitan”. When you open Boot Camp Assistant on a new Mac that supports Windows 8 or later, you’ll get the new Boot Camp interface.

Good information if you use Boot Camp.

Nobody’s home has perfect acoustics, and we don’t want to adapt our lives around our speakers. Your speakers should sound great, wherever you choose to put them. So, we decided to make them adapt to the environment around you. We call this Trueplay. Sonos speakers already sound fantastic, but Trueplay brings you even closer to how music should sound. With Trueplay tuning, your speaker can analyze the acoustic profile of any room and fine-tune itself. Most importantly, tuning with Trueplay is incredibly easy to do.

This sounds really impressive. I love Sonos products and can’t wait to hear this.

Sometimes I just love Gruber.

A few days later, we got an email from Apple informing us that we violated their terms and conditions—and the offending developer account had been banned. Unfortunately, iFixit’s app was tied to that same account, so Apple pulled the app as well. Their justification was that we had taken “actions that may hinder the performance or intended use of the App Store, B2B Program, or the Program.”

Live and learn.

Well yeah, it’s an unreleased product that’s meant for developers to make apps and test on. Nobody is allowed to post information about it. I have a hard time believing they didn’t see this coming.

Jim and Dan talk about today’s release of Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan!), iOS 9.0.2, Dan’s new iPhone 6s, 3D Touch, the awesomeness of Siri, and a new age of computing.

Brought to you by Braintree (To learn more, and for your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go to braintreepayments.com/amplified) and Squarespace (Visit the link and use the code GUITARS for a free trial and 10% off your first purchase).

You can download the update by going to General > Settings > Software Update.

Built on a new, modernized foundation and compatible with Mac OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan,’ TextWrangler 5.0 introduces newly overhauled systems for Find Differences and syntax coloring. In addition, TextWrangler 5.0 introduces new built-in support for EditorConfig and adds dozens of other enhancements and new features.

I love Bare Bones Software. I’ve been using their products for 20 years.

I love these guys—just straight ahead Rock.

This is pretty cool. I just downloaded it on my Mac and setup was very easy—using the iPhone as a client was simply entering my email address into the app. I wonder if they’ll have an app for the new Apple TV.

Thanks to Twocanoes Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Makers of Winclone, the best Mac app for migrating, cloning and backing up your Boot Camp partition. This week Loop readers can use the code “theloop” to get 10% off Winclone 5, just in time to backup Boot Camp before upgrading to El Capitan. If you run Boot Camp in labs or classrooms, Boot Runner 2 from Twocanoes is a time saver for remote scheduling of maintenance reboots and an easy to use OS picker for your users. Check out the video or get the 14-day trial and see how easy Boot Runner makes managing dual boot Macs.

I’ll be posting more about this camera, but I’ve been using it and it’s so great.

Walk along the bedraggled queue of people, and pillows and discarded bottles of water bore the same bright blue color and were emblazoned with the hashtag #NextIsNew.

“They were given to us by Apple,” a person in queue told International Business Times. A friend of his, however, was a little more savvy, quietly informing him: “No man, it was Samsung, I did a little research.”

What the fuck is wrong with this company? Instead of these types of stunts, why not try to build a better product—that philosophy is the one thing they haven’t copied from Apple.

Pixelmator for iOS 2.1 update includes support for iOS 9, multitasking on iPad via Split View and Slide Over, 8K resolution support, Open in Place and Save to Photos features, and more.

I love and use Pixelmator on iOS and Mac, and have for years. These guys make great apps.

Flo Gehring made some great wallpapers available for users to download free. I really like the water droplets.

On a bustling street in China’s southern boomtown of Shenzhen, more than 30 stores carrying Apple Inc’s iconic white logos peddle pre-orders for the new iPhone, a gadget that has become a status symbol among many better-off Chinese.

Many of the stores look just like Apple’s signature outlets, right down to the sales staff kitted out in blue T-shirts bearing the company’s white logo and the sample iPads and iWatches displayed on sleek wooden tables.

First, what the fuck is an iWatch? Second, I wonder if there’s anything Apple can, or would, do about this. According to the story, the stores are selling “genuine Apple products.” Interesting problem.

Jim and Dan talk about Dan’s newfound Apple love, the iPhone 6s, Watch OS 2, apps as the future of TV (and the fundamentally changing way we view TV as a medium), the iPad Pro, the Pencil, and ad blocking from the standpoint of an independent content creator.

Brought to you by lynda (Visit the link to get free 10 day trial access to their 3,000+ courses), Braintree (To learn more, and for your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go to braintreepayments.com/amplified), and Squarespace (Visit the link and use the code GUITARS for a free trial and 10% off your first purchase).

Samantha Bielefeld talking about The Verge:

What I would like to see is the author not afraid to bite the hand that feeds, to confront the real issue here…the problem isn’t with there being advertising on the web driven by page impressions. The issue is how awful they look, how invasive they can be (auto-play audio/video, yuck!), their attempts at deceiving your website’s audience, and tracking your every mouse click or tap around the web in order to serve their own needs while sacrificing the privacy of the customers they are seeking to gain.

Great read.

I’ve been asked about ad tracking on The Loop quite a bit since iOS 9 and its content blockers were released. I use The Deck to serve ads on the site, and have for the last few years. Jim Coudal, the owner of The Deck, and I share a philosophy that ads should be unobtrusive and respectful to the reader.

Here is The Deck’s official stance on ad tracking (spoiler: there is none):

Short version. We don’t track our readers in any way or allow any other behind-the-scenes shenanigans. We just serve useful, relevant ads in a simple, unobtrusive way to support independent publishers. Please white-list The Deck when using ad blocking software. Thanks.

We will never share your personal information obtained by tracking, either individually or in aggregate, with advertisers or any one else for one very good reason: we don’t have any.

I understand people are upset with being tracked and having ads all over the sites they want to visit, but that’s not what The Deck or The Loop is about. When you block the sites that do make you angry, remember to white-list the ones that treat you with respect.

Coudal also recently spoke with Fast Company about ad blocking.

Many people look at the “s” model of the iPhone as a less significant release than the years Apple does a full design change, but that’s just not the case. This year’s iPhone 6s and 6s Plus is full of new features and is probably the strongest “s” model iPhone Apple has ever released. I’ve been using the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus for about a week and a half, having received the devices from Apple two days after the September 9 keynote. […]

Apple Inc. is accelerating efforts to build an electric car, designating it internally as a “committed project” and setting a target ship date for 2019, according to people familiar with the matter.

The go-ahead came after the company spent more than a year investigating the feasibility of an Apple-branded car, including meetings with two groups of government officials in California. Leaders of the project, code-named Titan , have been given permission to triple the 600-person team, the people familiar with the matter said.

This would be such a huge deal. Apple’s designers would undoubtedly come up with something great, and it fits with the company’s commitment to make the world a better place.

I picked up my Apple Watch with watchOS 2 from Apple in the days following the September 9 keynote presentation in San Francisco. I hadn’t installed any of the watch betas, so I was really looking forward to giving the … Continued