Apple

Dongles have been Apple’s top-selling products for the last two years at Best Buy

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9to5Mac:

A report today from Ceros details the trend that Apple’s top-selling products overall (not just accessories) at the major retailer are indeed dongles. Specifically, over the past two years the 3.5mm to Lightning adapter and 3.3-foot USB-C to Lightning cable have been Best Buy’s most popular Apple branded items.

While AirPods just took over as the most popular individual product as of Q2 2018, dongles still prevailed as the top revenue generator overall, with Apple’s headphones category coming in second place.

Used to be, every cell phone brand made its own unique charger. That made for very little reusability and a nightmare if you forgot your charger. Outcry ensued, and we’ve now moved to two main form factors, both of which plug into the same USB brick. Much better.

This dongle thing feels like the pendulum swinging the other way. Now we have USB-C as a standard on our Macs, but dongles and USB-C confusion means we’ve got similar problems if we forget our dongle.

Will Apple ever move the iPhone from Lightning to USB-C? That certainly would simplify things for travelers, one dongle to rule them all.

UPDATE: I’m guessing this is unit sales, not revenue.

In ‘Small Fry,’ Steve Jobs comes across as a jerk. His daughter forgives him. should we?

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First things first, I do hate this headline. Perhaps that’s my reverence at work.

That said, here are a few chunks from this article about Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ upcoming book that are the focus of this point:

Mr. Jobs fathered her at 23, then denied paternity despite a DNA match, and gave little in financial or emotional support even as he became a god of the early computing era.

And:

In passage after passage of “Small Fry,” Mr. Jobs is vicious to his daughter and those around her. Now, in the days before the book is released, Ms. Brennan-Jobs is fearful that it will be received as a tell-all exposé, and not the more nuanced portrait of a family she intended.

And:

On the eve of publication, what Ms. Brennan-Jobs wants readers to know is this: Steve Jobs rejected his daughter for years, but that daughter has absolved him. Triumphantly, she loves him, and she wants the book’s scenes of their roller skating and laughing together to be as viral as the scenes of him telling her she will inherit nothing.

I do think the article is worth reading and that the headline is accurate, if not emotionally manipulative. I’m torn about reading the book. I know what I’ll find, and I’m not sure how much truth about Steve Jobs I want to absorb. But truth is truth and I’d be hypocritical if I ignored the sour for the sweet.

Ironically, this will be one of the first books I order in the newly rendered Apple Books.

On ‘Shake to Undo’

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Gruber is on a roll. In this Daring Fireball post, he digs into the iOS “Shake to Undo” gesture, an inelegant solution to a reasonably common and complex problem.

My favorite bit:

Here’s an anecdote I heard years ago about how Shake to Undo came to be. Scott Forstall charged the iOS team with devising an interface for Undo — everyone knew the iPhone should have it,1 but no one had a good idea how to do it. One engineer joked that they could just make you shake the iPhone to invoke it. Forstall said he loved the idea, and what was proposed as a joke has been with us as the Undo interface ever since.

My biggest issues with Shake to Undo are that it breaks flow (you have to stop whatever you were doing and shake your device like a maniac) and requires a physical action that is difficult for many people. I’d love to see this addressed as part of the architecture, as Undo is for the Mac.

Vector icon speed runs, an incredible resource

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Marc Edwards continues to add to his library of vector speed runs. He mostly works in Illustrator, but the techniques translate into most object drawing applications. Bookmark and pass along.

Here’s a link to an Imgur album with the complete set of images. Be sure to tap the load more images button at the bottom of the page to see them all.

Fully operational Apple 1 computer up for auction

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To me, this is one of the great artifacts of the computer age. Every little bit of this computer was assembled by hand, a genuine product of Woz and Jobs’ imagination and determination.

Terrific images, take a look.

Apple hired scores of ex-Tesla employees this year, and not just for its car project

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When I first encountered this article, I thought it was simply a one-sided view of typical employee migration from one tech company to another. But a few nuggets:

In 2018 so far, LinkedIn data shows Apple has hired at least 46 people who worked at Tesla directly before joining the consumer electronics juggernaut. Eight of these were engineering interns. This year Apple has also hired former Tesla Autopilot, QA, Powertrain, mechanical design and firmware engineers, and several global supply chain managers. Some employees joined directly from Tesla, while others had been dismissed or laid off before joining Apple.

So this means Apple is hiring, still growing, and Tesla attracts worthy talent.

Field joined Tesla in 2013 from Apple, where he was a VP of hardware engineering at Apple. At Tesla, he was responsible for development of new vehicles there, including the Model 3 electric sedan, which is the company’s first electric vehicle designed for the mass market. Earlier this month, John Gruber reported that Field had returned to Apple to work on Project Titan.

Add to the equation, a major hire attracts people who looked up to that person, appreciated working with them, followed them from Tesla to Apple.

Regarding competition with Apple for talent, a Tesla spokesperson said, “We wish them well. Tesla is the hard path. We have 100 times less money than Apple, so of course they can afford to pay more. We are in extremely difficult battles against entrenched auto companies that make 100 times more cars than we did last year, so of course this is very hard work.”

I found this a very interesting read.

Siri and the flashlight

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This started with Twitter user Paul Alvarado asking @AppleSupport why Siri could not do something basic and useful like turn on the flashlight.

@AppleSupport Why can’t I ask Siri to turn my iPhone flashlight on or off? Seriously, it’s inexplicably inane limitations like this that make me deeply despise Siri. cc @tim_cook @pschiller @cue

As you can see, Paul cc’ed Tim, Phil, and Eddy.

When I read this, I recognized the usefulness of the request. Asking Siri to turn on the flashlight would be an incredibly useful feature, especially when you are on your hands and knees trying to look under the couch for the only battery in the house that of course rolled under there.

So here’s the kicker, Phil Schiller’s response to the tweet:

https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/1032095824170250240

Yup. In iOS 12, Siri can turn on the flashlight. If you’ve got the beta, try it for yourself. And props to Paul Alvarado for asking the question and for his appreciative response to Phil.

Stephen Hackett publishes extensive screenshot library of every Mac OS since the Mac OS X Public Beta

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Stephen Hackett, 512 Pixels:

These images came from the OS, running on actual hardware; I didn’t use virtual machines at any point. I ran up to 10.2 on an original Power Mac G4, while a Mirror Drive Doors G4 took care of 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5. I used a 2010 Mac mini for Snow Leopard and Lion, then a couple different 15-inch Retina MacBook Pros to round out the rest.

This is simply remarkable work. Here’s a link to the screenshot library home page.

One vivid memory this brings to mind: I was working at Metrowerks, makers of CodeWarrior, and I had the chance to play with the first beta of Mac OS X. It was jarringly different. Finder windows used this multi-column browser approach, very different from the disclosure triangle, single-column of the original Finder. The colors were different, the window controls were skeuomorphic, had depth to them.

To be honest, I thought the beta was ugly. But over time, I got used to the change, and grew to love the power, functionality, and especially, the accessible Unix underpinnings of the new Mac OS.

Remarkable stepping through all these screenshots, watching macOS subtly evolve over time.

Let’s really think about this ‘new low-cost laptop to succeed MacBook Air’ thing

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John Gruber, Daring Fireball:

For most of the modern era at Apple, the company’s Mac portable lineup has been simple, dating back to Steve Jobs’s 4-square product matrix in 1998. iBooks and PowerBooks. Then, in the Intel era, plastic MacBooks and aluminum MacBook Pros. Lower-priced for consumers, higher-priced for pros.

The original MacBook Air threw a monkey wrench in this simple lineup, though. When it debuted in 2008, the MacBook Air was a premium portable, starting at $1799 with an 80 GB hard drive, and going up to $3098 for a version with a faster CPU and 64 GB of SSD storage. It was a different type of premium portable than a MacBook Pro, focused on a remarkably svelte (for the time) form factor. When Steve Jobs revealed that first MacBook Air by pulling it from a manila envelope on stage at Macworld Expo, there were gasps.

And:

This is one of those columns where I started with one idea, but in the course of writing it, drastically changed my mind. I find none of these scenarios satisfying, but I started out with the idea that the one thing Apple wouldn’t do is simply update the MacBook Air, as we know it or very similar, and just give it a retina display. I’ve been saying this for a few years now, that I saw the future as just MacBooks and MacBook Pros, and that the MacBook Air remained in the lineup only until the 12-inch MacBook could drop in price.

But the more I think about it, the more I think that something along the lines of the “just put a retina display in the MacBook Air” scenario seems the most likely.

These callouts are just snippets from an unusually long Daring Fireball column. When the MacBook Air came into being, it represented a huge change, filled a hole in the market. But the MacBook and MacBook Pro have taken advantage of the technology and material science gains MacBook Air brought to the market.

What will a new MacBook Air look like? Good question. Gruber’s take does a nice job exploring the tree of possibilities.

Google, Apple drop college degree requirements?

Written by

CNBC:

Recently, job-search site Glassdoor compiled a list of 15 top employers that have said they no longer require applicants to have a college degree. Companies like Google, Apple, IBM and EY are all in this group.

This just does not ring true to me. I know a number of people who work at Apple and Google without college degrees. And many more with degrees unrelated to the field in which they work.

I’d like to see the quote from Apple or Google citing a specific policy change. Ping me if you know more about this.

Office 365 update coming, will require macOS Sierra or later

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Microsoft Office blog:

As of the Office 365 for Mac September 2018 update, macOS 10.12 or later is required to update to the new version of the Office client apps for Mac and receive new feature updates.

macOS 10.12 is more commonly known as macOS Sierra. If you don’t want to update to Sierra, you’ll still be able to get support. You just won’t be able to update to the new shiny coming in September.

As part of the upcoming September 2018 update, Office 365 for Mac users on macOS 10.12 or later will receive an update from the Office 2016 for Mac client to Office 2019 for Mac in order to maintain access to new feature releases and updates.

If you use Office, keep this in mind. I’ve always found Microsoft’s penchant for embedding calendar years in a release name an odd branding choice. In a few weeks, you’ll jump from Office 2016 to Office 2019.

No matter, good to know what’s coming.

Phil Schiller, stuntman

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[VIDEO] This (video embedded in main Loop post) was filmed at the New York Macworld Expo, back in 1999. I find this simply amazing. Phil Schiller, taking one for the team. That is courage!

Reddit: Apple reserving China air-freight for upcoming weeks

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This is not really news, any more than the fact of Apple holding a September event is news. Both are connected, obviously, and both come like clockwork. But I did find this interesting:

My mom is an import / export broker and told me they were notified that Apple has reserved almost all air freight going from China -> USA for the upcoming weeks. And the note was “Product Launch” so either they’re placing iPhones in the states, or there is something else happening.

And, from the comments:

The funny thing is, those iPhones seriously add up in terms of value per cubic meter.

Imagine a regular living room, maybe 6 x 6 meters, with 2.75 m ceilings. That’s 99 cubic meters of space. An iPhone X box is 16x5x8.8 cm which translates to 704 cubic cm, or 0.000704 cubic meter.

So your average living room can hold over 140,000 iPhone X boxes. That’s a cool $140M of retail value right there.

Imagine the value of a cargo plane filled with iPhones.

Apple removes 14 Apple Watch bands from website, many others ‘sold out’ ahead of September event

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Mitchel Broussard, MacRumors:

We’re just under one month from Apple’s annual September iPhone event, which should also see the debut of the Apple Watch Series 4. Alongside each new edition of the Apple Watch, Apple typically updates its array of band accessories with new colors and styles. Echoing shortages from previous years, it appears that numerous Apple Watch bands have either been removed or are currently unavailable to purchase on Apple.com ahead of next month’s event.

Very curious what Apple has up its sleeve for the next Apple Watch. Thinner? Smaller bezel? New sensors? Improved heart-rate monitoring?

You can no longer sign up for Netflix via its iOS app

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Gadgets360:

Netflix is not letting people sign up for its service via its app for iPhone and iPad. The Netflix iOS app also isn’t allowing people to log in with accounts where the subscription has lapsed and no credit or debit cards are linked to the Netflix account, Gadgets 360 has discovered. This means there is currently no way for users of iOS devices to pay for Netflix via the payment method saved on their Apple ID, unless they signed up to do so in the past.

Tricky situation. Netflix is choosing to keep the 30% Apple would normally take as a fee, and sacrifice the ability for users to sign up for accounts in iOS.

I just signed up for a new Netflix account in iOS Safari, so that still works. Presumably, Apple does not get 30% of that fee.

I’m guessing Apple will not kick Netflix off the iOS App Store. Existing subscriptions continue to be a cash cow for Apple and the availability of Netflix is politically important for iOS and Apple TV.

Will this set a precedent for other, Apple burdened subscription services? Interesting.

UPDATE: From this AppleInsider post:

Since Aug. 2, testing of the idea has been taking place in 33 countries, Netflix confirmed to TechCrunch. Some of the bigger test markets include Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Italy, Japan, and South Korea.

The company in fact said that it’s been testing since June, but began in just 10 countries. All new or resubscribing Android users have been unable to use Google Play for billing since May.

Apparently, you can still sign up for a new account in the US, but seems like this move is in the works. [H/T Mike Wuerthele]

The number of days between purchasing my 2018 MacBook Pro and the spacebar starting to get stuck?

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Feh.

Hate to hear this. Had high hopes that the MacBook keyboard issues were behind us. I will add that my son’s machine (a 2017 model purchased earlier this year) has the same issue.

Check out the article URL, a nice little side comment in those last 13 characters.

One final note: Check out this video showing a warranty-voiding fix to the spacebar problem. Fascinating, but definitely not something you want to try at home.

Guessing the date of the Apple’s September iPhone event

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Rene Ritchie, iMore:

Since iPhone 5, Apple has announced every new iPhone during a special event held the first or second Tuesday or Wednesday of September.

Rene lays out the dates of Apple’s September events since 2013 and makes his best guess:

It’s likely we’ll see this year’s event on or around Wednesday, September 12.

And this from John Gruber:

I have no inside information on this, but September 12 is definitely my guess, for all the same reasons Ritchie mentions. Since moving iPhone intro events to September in 2012 with the iPhone 5, they’ve had three events on Tuesdays and three on Wednesdays. For whatever reason, I don’t think they like Thursdays.

I do love this game, for some reason. Part of it, for me, is that this kind of guessing hurts no one and does stoke the embers for the event without revealing something that would diminish the event.

September 12th sounds good to me.

Outfoxing iMovie to set a default movie resolution

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Josh Centers, TidBITS:

We’ve been trying to incorporate screencasts into more of our articles here at TidBITS—there are times when a short video conveys some point better than any number of screenshots. As far as tools go, ScreenFlow is the gold standard, but QuickTime Player can record screen actions and iMovie is a decent video editor. And both come with all Macs for free, so that’s where we’re starting.

But I recently stumbled across an infuriating problem: no matter what I did with my original screen recordings, I couldn’t use File > Share > File in iMovie to save a video file at a resolution higher than 720p.

Solid detective work by Josh Centers, as he works out a kludge to get a better iMovie resolution. But even better, his bit of hackery stuck and he now has reset the default iMovie resolution to something much more usable.

Even if you don’t use iMovie, you never know when the need will arise. Take a read through this, just to get a sense of the technique.

And:

I don’t want to sound ungrateful, since iMovie is an impressive tool to be bundled with the Mac for free, but hacks like this shouldn’t be necessary.

Yup.

iPad explodes in Apple Store Amsterdam, store cleared

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Here’s a translation of the body of the article, from the Dutch, courtesy of Google Translate:

An iPad has exploded in the Amsterdam Apple store. Three employees were affected by their airways. The store has been evacuated.

Cause is probably a leaking battery. The fire brigade told the local broadcaster AT5.

Employees of the store have immediately placed the iPad in a container with sand. The employees who suffered from the airways were checked by the ambulance staff. The Apple Store, which is located at Leidseplein, has been aired by the fire department.

As far as I can tell, this story is the source of all the other coverage I’ve encountered. As always, if possible, I like to go to the source and read these sorts of things for myself.

As to the word explodes in the title and story, that’s the translation direct from Google. Was there an actual explosion? Was this more of a sizzle and pop than a boom or bang? Hard to say. Grain of salt.

Apple’s best media moves

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Dan Moren, writing for Macworld, digs into the Apple TV’s TV app, the Movies Anywhere service, and Apple’s Apple Books rewrite.

The whole piece is worth reading, but a few nuggets:

The big question mark hanging over it all is what exactly will happen when Apple’s own video streaming service launches. Will it take over the [TV] app, pushing the rest of your content aside? Or will it be content to share a place on equal footing with the other partners? For customers’ sake, I certainly hope for the latter.

I use my Apple TV all the time, but never use the TV app, mostly because of the lack of Netflix integration. If Apple can get Netflix buy-in, and avoid overwhelming the TV app when they fold in their own Apple-branded content, the TV app will become my first stop when I switch to my Apple TV.

At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled a major overhaul to its ebook platform, including a graphical update to the reading apps, a better store experience, and reading features that take aim at Amazon’s own Goodreads service.

That’s good because Amazon does continue to dominate the market and has little in the way of competition, and Apple is one of the few companies big enough to seriously challenge it. The real question is if Apple can do anything compelling enough to draw market share from Amazon.

I’ve long been an Amazon Kindle reader. I buy all my books from the Kindle store, do most of my reading on my iPad. But this new version of Apple Books has my attention. A central issue for me is the ability to share books with my family, something Amazon only recent started offering. Apple’s deal is much simpler, is already in place for me, and the Apple deal has none of Amazon’s limits.

Using Photos to sync photos of an event from different sources

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Jason Snell, Six Colors:

I went to a wedding in London over the summer, and as you might expect at an event full of techy people, I ended up with hundreds of photos of the event from numerous sources—at least six. I imported them all into my Photos library and then discovered that they were all mixed up—the bride walking down the aisle, immediately followed by dancing at the reception, followed by the exchanging of vows.

This happens to me every time I get photos from other folks and try to mix them with my own photos of the same event. This is especially true when I travel with a group, and we each have our own view of the same series of locations.

The issue, for the most part, is the time stamps and device clocks:

Most cameras embed time data on every file they take, which is great, but whenever I try to mix photos from multiple sources in one place, I end up discovering all the ways that the clocks don’t match. For some of them, the clock is right but the time zone is wrong. For others (especially non-cellular devices that rely on a human to set their clock correctly) there are a few minutes of drift. For still others, there’s a time but not a time zone embedded.

Though this is less and less an issue as more and more photos are taken with clocks set by servers, there are still time zone issues, as well as photos taken using regular cameras.

Take the time to make your way through Jason’s post. If nothing else, I appreciate the walkthrough of smart albums and what they can do for you. Great stuff.

Apple reassures customers after Australian media reports hack by teen

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If you haven’t heard about this story, here’s yesterday’s Loop post. Shocking stuff.

Apple’s reassuring response:

An Apple spokesman said the company’s information security personnel “discovered the unauthorized access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement” without commenting further on the specifics of the case.

“We … want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised,” the spokesman said.

That last is so good to know.

You can listen to full music on Apple Music after logging in on the web interface

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Here’s a link to the song Everytime (A Cappella) for you to try for yourself.

I clicked the link on my Mac, logged in to the page that appeared, and was able to listen to the song in my browser, without jumping to iTunes.

According to the Reddit comments, this seems to have appeared sometime after WWDC. It also appears that there is a 3rd party API so people can build their own web-based music players. The API might still be in beta, though I tested the above link on the public release of High Sierra.

Interesting.

UPDATE: Here’s a post from Kirk McElhearn about all this from back in June, when it first became available.

Google updates their cloud storage pricing

Written by

Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:

The new plans include 100GB storage for $1.99 a month, 200GB for $2.99 a month, and 2TB for $9.99 a month (down from $19.99). The free 15GB for non-paying users remains. There’s also a new family option for divvying up a single storage plan amongst up to five members.

And Apple:

Apple’s iCloud monthly storage plans aren’t so different: they start with 5GB free storage for non-paying users, then offer 50GB for $0.99, 200GB for $2.99, and 2TB for $9.99.

To me, 5GB might as well be zero. The smallest configuration for Apple’s most popular phone, the iPhone X, is 64GB. What does that 5GB offer for a 64GB phone? It seems paltry. To me, this is stingy and bad optics.

At the very least, I think Apple should match Google’s free 15GB and unlimited free photo storage. Even better, raise that bar. As is, this feels like nickel and diming people who are spending as much as $1,000 for a phone.

Apple’s growth story

Written by

Neil Cybart:

There are three drivers behind Apple’s return to revenue growth:

  1. iPhone. The average selling price (ASP) of iPhone is up $100 year-over-year.
  2. Services. Apple is seeing strong revenue growth from the App Store, licensing, and AppleCare.
  3. Wearables. Apple’s wearables platform is gaining sales momentum as Apple Watch and AirPods go mainstream.

Lots of interesting detail in the article. On that last bullet, I am seeing Apple Watch and AirPods everywhere now.

When I am out running, I see more and more other runners with AirPods in their ears. Mainstream is the right term here.

On a related note, I get why Apple sticks with white as the only color. As was the case when the iPod first started, those white headphones were incredibly important to the branding. I see AirPods white as a similarly important brand marker.

Super Duper advanced Mac tricks!

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[VIDEO] The title put me off, but I dove in anyway (the video, per usual, is embedded in the main Loop post). And it was worth it.

There’s a lot goin on in this video. Sometimes the value is not in the tip itself, but in the journey, the exploration, the techniques involved in bringing the tip to life. A lot of little nuggets here. Worth your time.

Inside the iPhone repair ecosystem: Where do replacement parts come from and can you trust them?

Written by

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

There’s a thriving market for unofficial, aftermarket iPhone parts, and in China, there are entire massive factories that are dedicated to producing these components for repair shops unable to get ahold of parts that have been produced by Apple.

The entire Apple device repair ecosystem is fascinating, complex, and oftentimes confusing to consumers given the disconnect between Apple, Apple Authorized Service Providers, third-party factories, and independent repair shops, so we thought we’d delve into the complicated world of Apple repairs.

Terrific, fascinating read.