Click through to the main Loop post for an amazing graphic from Steve Troughton-Smith.
Steve used a variety of emulators to emulate a huge representative range of Mac OSes, from System 2 through System 7.6.1, then Mac OS 8.6, then on to Rhapsody developer release 1 and so forth, ending with Yosemite.
Incredible!
[VIDEO] This is the very first video on the Daring Fireball YouTube channel. For a first timer, John Gruber sure does have some chops. Nice job.
If you own, or plan on buying a pair of AirPods, check this out. Video on the main Loop post.
Wall Street Journal:
Apple Inc. is planning to build a significant new business in original television shows and movies, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that could make it a bigger player in Hollywood and offset slowing sales of iPhones and iPads.
These people said the programming would be available to subscribers of Apple’s $10-a-month streaming-music service, which has struggled to catch up to the larger Spotify AB. Apple Music already includes a limited number of documentary-style segments on musicians, but nothing like the premium programming it is now seeking.
The technology giant has been in talks with veteran producers in recent months about buying rights to scripted television programs. It also has approached experienced marketing executives at studios and networks to discuss hiring them to promote its content, said people with knowledge of the discussions.
And:
In addition to TV, Apple indicated to these people that it is considering offering original movies, though those plans are more preliminary.
Executives at Apple have told people in Hollywood they hope to start offering original scripted content by the end of 2017.
Strikes me as an approach similar to Amazon’s. Amazon offers free video content with your Prime subscription. Pay for free shipping, we’ll sweeten the deal with a range of original, high quality content.
As far as I know, Amazon has not yet made any bundle deals for their content, corralling their offerings inside their ecosystem. Will Apple do the same? It certainly would swing customers away from Spotify towards Apple Music. And, if the video offerings were substantial enough, some customers would sign up for the video and look at the music as a nice side benefit.
Andy Ihnatko, writing about fake news:
I’ll use Apple as an example. They had a problem on their hands in the form of a deeply-negative Consumer Reports headline: “New MacBook Pros Fail to Earn Consumer Reports Recommendation.” CR had tested the new MacBook Pros and concluded that the battery life of all three models were insanely inconsistent.
Response Option 1: Apple calls the report “Fake News” and dismisses Consumer Reports as “failing, sad, and pathetic.” Next question.
Response Option 2: Apple disagrees with CR’s findings and tries to substantiate their results. An examination of CR’s testing methodology — done with the publication’s help — reveals no fudging, but identifies many quirks in the test protocol that probably contributed to a suspicious result.
Apple did exactly the right thing. If the original CR review was totally screwy, it shouldn’t be hard to demonstrate why, and Apple certainly has the resources to put in that kind of effort. Moreover, doing so indicates that they want to earn the trust of their customers, instead of demanding it.
And:
Apple emerges from all of this looking great, and everybody (Apple, Consumer Reports, and consumers) walks away with a better understanding of the issue.
This is exactly where the bar should be set. Truth seeking behavior.
[VIDEO] Lots of rain and water accumulation. Should help point out any leaks before all the finish work is done. Still a fair amount of work to do, but things are really taking shape. Video in the main Loop post.
Mac Rumors:
In the U.S. last month, an estimated 75% of revenue from headphones sold online came from wireless models, up from 50% in December 2015, according to Slice Intelligence. Apple’s new AirPods led the way, capturing an estimated 26% share of online revenue in the wireless headphone market since launching on December 13.
And:
AirPods stole the top spot from Beats, which took an estimated 15.4% of online revenue in the wireless headphone market, down from 24.1% between the start of 2015 and December 13. Given it owns Beats, Apple appears to have actually taken nearly 40% of online revenue in the market since launching AirPods.
I regularly see Apple’s traditional white EarPods as well as Beats over ear headphones out in public. But I have yet to see a single pair of AirPods in the wild. I expect this is wave, still too far from shore to see. Could also be a sign that people tend to use AirPods in more private settings.
But given the huge sales numbers, I think this will change, especially in cold weather climates as Spring arrives and more and more people are hanging around outside.
Jeremy Burge, Emojipedia:
The Google design team were months ahead of Apple with new emoji in the past year. Support for the latest emojis came to Android in the major Nougat release in August of 2016.
Yet the vast majority of Android users still can’t see these new emojis.
What they see, instead, are empty rectangles. Why? Lack of timely Android updates.
New emojis are bundled with system updates for iOS and Android, as emoji fonts and relevant Unicode support is provided at an OS level1.
This system should work well, but the weak link is relying on manufacturers to provide updates in a timely manner.
Vlad Savov reported in September2: most phones at IFA (large tech show in Europe) were running a year-old version of Android.
And:
These aren’t old phones not getting updates: they’re brand new phones running an out of date OS. It’s not a good sign.
Great post from someone who really knows the emoji business. One takeaway? Know that if you are including emoji in a text heading to an Android phone, the recipient might be getting rectangles.
Horace Dediu, Asymco:
In its first 10 years, the iPhone will have sold at least 1.2 billion units, making it the most successful product of all time. The iPhone also enabled the iOS empire which includes the iPod touch, the iPad, the Apple Watch and Apple TV whose combined total unit sales will reach 1.75 billion units over 10 years. This total is likely to top 2 billion units by the end of 2018.
And:
The revenues from iOS product sales will reach $980 billion by middle of this year. In addition to hardware Apple also books iOS services revenues (including content) which have totaled more than $100 billion to date.
This means that iOS will have generated over $1 trillion in revenues for Apple sometime this year.
Simply remarkable.
Somewhat buried in Jason Snell’s iPhone 10th birthday celebration writeup was this wonderful picture.
There’s the incredibly intense look on Steve’s face. And the fact that this is one of the last such events where none of the pictures was taken using an iPhone.
Gregg Keizer, Computerworld:
Apple will steal a march on Microsoft this year when for the first time this century shipments of devices powered by its operating systems outnumber those running Windows, research firm Gartner said today.
In 2017, Apple’s combination of iOS and macOS — the former on iPhones and iPads, the latter on Macs — will take second place from Windows on the devices shipped during the year. The gap between the two will widen in 2018 and 2019, with Apple ahead of Microsoft both years.
Not terribly surprising, given the rise of mobile and Apple’s dominance in that space. But still, just a little bit satisfying.
Not clear from the article but, presumably, first place is held by Android.
Family sharing is extremely useful. Use it to share music, apps, photos, and even a calendar. No blood test required.
Nice job laying this out by The App Factor.
This is cool. iFixit pulled together a single page, scrolling gallery of 10 years of iPhone teardowns, from the original iPhone all the way to the iPhone 7 Plus.
Definitely worth a look.
DSL Reports:
AT&T continues to quickly hike the cost of unlimited data in order to drive its dwindling grandfathered unlimited data users to metered plans. Users in our forums say they’re being notified of a $5 bump in the cost of unlimited data starting in March of 2017. The hike would be the second such hike in as many years, after AT&T bumped the cost of unlimited data last February.
Back in the early days of the iPhone, success for AT&T was no guarantee. To help bring customers to the fold, AT&T offered unlimited data plans for a limited time.
These plans have been “grandfathered” since then, but AT&T has made a number of efforts to wean customers off those unlimited plans to more traditional metered data plans. These efforts continue with the coming $5 per month bump.
See the main Loop post for a look at two thought experiments, one from Rob Rhyne (via John Gruber) and the other from Mark Hibber. Both quite interesting.
Gartner:
Advances in various technologies will drive users to interact with their smartphones in more intuitive ways, said Gartner, Inc. Gartner predicts that, by 2019, 20 percent of all user interactions with the smartphone will take place via virtual personal assistants (VPAs).
And:
Apple’s Siri and Google Now are currently the most widely used VPAs on smartphones. Fifty-four percent of U.K. and U.S. respondents used Siri in the last three months. Google Now is used by 41 percent of U.K. respondents and 48 percent of U.S. respondents.
Interesting that Apple has not joined the Amazon Echo and Google Home party. The trend for voice is clearly rising. Though my Apple Watch is always listening, there is a core difference between Siri and Echo/Home. While both are always on, Echo and Home are more traditionally conversational. I ask about the weather and a voice responds, all without my having to tilt my watch to look at the screen or pull my iPhone out of my pocket.
Will Apple go this route?
Good tutorial for folks new to the Mac.
Short answer:
There was no USB-C back in 2012 when Apple shipped Lightning on iPhone 5. It didn’t exist. The spec wasn’t even finalized until August of 2014.
But there’s more to this article. I especially appreciate the overlay showing the relative footprints of USB-A, USB-C, and Lightning.
Will the iPhone ever move to USB-C?
USB-C would require another port change for customers. Many people weren’t very happy with the last one, and Lightning was 10 years after Dock. It’s only been 5 years since Lightning. And in that time, with hundreds of millions of devices on the market, Lightning has become ubiquitous enough that everyone has it, typically in abundance.
Interesting that the Mac has made the first move, going all-in on USB-C. I wonder if there’s a prototype USB-C iPhone floating around an Apple campus somewhere.
In the just-released Greenpeace report, Clicking Green: Who is winning the race to build a green internet?, Apple simply crushes it.
Through page after page of detailed analysis, Apple comes out on top, and usually by a pretty fair margin. Apple should be very proud of these results.
If you want to cut right to the chase, scroll to page 46 for an alphabetical walk through all company scores. Compare Amazon’s individual category grades (they got an overall C) with Apple (one of the few companies that got an overall A).
Nice job, Apple.
From a blog post that ran on the BBC News site, ten years ago today:
As the hype piled up Jobs told us we were witnessing history and he was going to reinvent the telephone – some doubts crept in.
And:
It is going to be expensive – $499 for the 4gb, $599 for 8gb – when it arrives in US stores in June.
And:
Apple is entering a market where giants like Nokia, Motorola and Samsung are making pretty smart phones. A bit of a contrast to the easier landscape which the ipod entered. Still – as Jobs pointed out – there’s a big market to aim at, with a billion mobile phones sold last year.
Fun looking back. After all, who knew what was coming? Well, Steve did.
BBC News correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, recalling that day, ten years ago, when the iPhone was first unveiled:
Ten years ago I was running from San Francisco’s Moscone Centre to a nearby hotel to edit a piece for the Ten O’Clock News when my phone rang.
“Have you got your hands on this new Apple phone for a piece to camera?” shouted a producer in London. “If not, why not?”
This appeared to be an impossible demand.
And:
Then I remembered that we had been offered – and turned down for lack of time – an interview with Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller. I turned around and headed back to the Moscone Centre. Having located Mr Schiller I asked whether before our interview I might just have a look at the iPhone.
He graciously handed his over – and rather than trying to ring Jony Ive or order 5,000 lattes as Steve Jobs had on stage, I brandished it at the camera for my Ten O’Clock News piece.
And:
The following weekend a Sunday newspaper columnist described me as having clutched the phone as if it were “a fragment of the true cross”, and some viewers complained that the BBC had given undue prominence to a product launch.
Undue prominence? As it turns out, no amount of coverage could fairly have been labeled undue.
Internet History Podcast:
Stop for a minute and imagine how momentous a change the iPod engendered within Apple itself. This was a company that, for nearly 30 years, had been a personal computer company. The blue sky thinking that allowed Apple to make a stand-alone MP3 player—to enter a mature market as an outsider and believe it could dominate—also engendered the sort of fearlessness that made it possible to break with other long-standing Apple shibboleths. The iPod eventually worked with Windows machines, even at the risk of cannibalizing Mac sales. iTunes eventually worked with Windows machines. Apple (gasp) made a Windows app! As Phil Schiller told Walter Isaacson in his Steve Jobs biography: “We felt we should be in the music player business, not just in the Mac business.” It was this conceptual leap, this strategic bravery (just as much as a penchant for good design and reliable manufacturing) that would be responsible for Apple’s success in the 2000s.
Apple was no longer just a computer company. It could be whatever it wanted to be.
And:
“I was actually pushing to do two sizes—to have a regular iPhone and an iPhone mini like we had with the iPod,” Apple’s chief hardware executive Jon Rubenstein says in Dogfight. “I thought one could be a smartphone and one could be a dumber phone. But we never got a lot of traction on the small one, and in order to do one of these projects you really need to put all your wood behind one arrow.”
And:
Jobs himself approved the list of people who could participate in the preparations, and more than a dozen security guards were on post 24 hours a day. Jobs originally decreed that all outside contractors hired to staff the event would have to sleep in the building the night before so that no details could leak out. Cooler heads eventually talked him out of it.
And:
Jobs rehearsed his presentation for six solid days, but at the final hour, the team still couldn’t get the phone to behave through an entire run through. Sometimes it lost internet connection. Sometimes the calls wouldn’t go through. Sometimes the phone just shut down.”It quickly got very uncomfortable,” Andy Grignon, the senior radio engineer for the iPhone remembered in Dogfight. “Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued. It happened. But mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are fucking up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’”
This is a great, great read.
Amazon is following the Netflix strategy, embedding Alexa everywhere it can possibly make sense. There are TVs (of course – think Amazon Fire TV Stick), refrigerators, and all sorts of Amazon Echo-like docks, all using Alexa’s voice recognition technology without requiring the purchase of an Echo.
Add to that the devices that integrate with Alexa’s APIs, making themselves controllable by the user’s Amazon Echo.
To read more about Amazon’s direct challenge to Apple, jump to the main Loop post…
Solid walkthough of the process of hunting down the largest files on your Mac. The old way was to use the Finder and construct a search based on file size. The modern way is to use the “About This Mac” storage tab to do all the heavy lifting for you.
Some thoughts on the plethora of mediocre reviews outside the Apple bubble.
Reuters:
Apple Inc said it was planning to open a retail store in South Korea, its first in the country that is home to its smartphone archrival Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
The iPhone maker listed hiring notices for 15 positions dated Thursday on its website, including a store leader and business manager. The listings did not specify the exact location or when those who are hired will begin working.
“We’re excited about opening our first Apple Store in Korea, one of the world’s economic centers and a leader in telecommunication and technology, with a vibrant K-culture,” Apple told Reuters in a statement Friday.
This seems culturally significant, almost personal.
Sonny Dickson:
While it has always been known that Apple considered a variety of ideas when they were deciding to enter the mobile phone market (with ex employees discussing it behind closed doors, as seen in this Cult Of Mac article, not much was known about alternate versions of the iPhone until now.
Much like the first production iPhone, the prototype features many of the same features including an aluminium chassis, multi-touch compatible screen, 2G connectivity and WiFi radios. However, despite carrying a similar design, the phone itself is extremely different from the iPhone we know today.
Check out the video in the main Loop post to see the so-called Acorn OS at work. Fascinating.
Apple, from their press release:
Apple today announced that the App Store welcomed 2017 with its busiest single day ever on New Year’s Day, capping a record-breaking holiday season and a year of unprecedented developer earnings and breakout app hits. In 2016 alone, developers earned over $20 billion, up over 40 percent from 2015. Since the App Store launched in 2008, developers have earned over $60 billion, creating amazing app experiences for App Store customers across iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Mac. Those efforts helped kick off 2017 with a remarkable start, making New Year’s Day the highest single day ever for the App Store with nearly $240 million in purchases.
And:
“2016 was a record-shattering year for the App Store, generating $20 billion for developers, and 2017 is off to a great start with January 1 as the single biggest day ever on the App Store,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “We want to thank our entire developer community for the many innovative apps they have created — which together with our products — help to truly enrich people’s lives.”
And:
Customers broke all-time records this holiday season with purchases from the App Store topping $3 billion in December. In the same month, Nintendo’s Super Mario Run made history with more than 40 million downloads in just four days after its release, and was the most downloaded app globally on Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Amazing sales numbers.
LodeRunner was one of my favorite games from the long ago. I’m delighted that it still exists. It is as fun to play as I remember. Old school. Give it a try. Unfortunately, haven’t figured out how to play it on my phone. Keyboard required.
Pick a movie, album, TV show, book, etc., and the artwork finder will bring up the associated iTunes artwork.
Play with it, it’s fun.
Pretty much everything you’d ever want to know about iCloud keychain, with lots of links for more detail. Well done, very readable.