Apple

Apple appeals EU tax ruling, says it was a ‘convenient target’

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Reuters:

Apple has launched a legal challenge to a record $14 billion EU tax demand, arguing that EU regulators ignored tax experts and corporate law and deliberately picked a method to maximize the penalty, senior executives said.

Apple’s combative stand underlines its anger with the European Commission, which said on Aug. 30 the company’s Irish tax deal was illegal state aid and ordered it to repay up to 13 billion euros ($13.8 billion) to Ireland, where Apple has its European headquarters.

This story is far from over. Two forces are pulling hard at Apple. The EU wants maximum tax revenue, and the incoming US government wants Apple manufacturing back in the US.

Reuters: Porsche race car engineer joins Apple

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Reuters:

Apple poached the technical director of Porsche’s race car program earlier this year, a company source said on Friday, hiring a project manager who helped engineer the sports car company’s victorious return to the Le Mans endurance race.

And:

[Alexander] Hitzinger helped Porsche, owned by Volkswagen, return to endurance racing and to develop the 919 hybrid sports car from scratch, much in the same way Apple is now looking into building its own vehicle.

Porsche’s new race car won Le Mans and the endurance racing world championship in both 2015 and 2016 using largely unproven technology, which beat far more established rivals.

Jony Ive gives us a peek inside Apple’s design studio

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[VIDEO] Though the video embedded in the main Loop post is intended to promote the book Designed by Apple in California, it also gives a tantalizing glimpse inside Sir Jony’s design studio. Take a look.

Apple AirPod video reviews and unboxing

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Chance Miller, 9to5mac, pulled together a nice collection of AirPod review videos. I found them all worth watching, each bringing a different take.

One thing in particular I learned was the value of the long AirPod antennae (the sticks that hang from your ears). They ensure a reliable connection, even at a significant distance. As long as you have line-of-sight to your device, you can get up to 150 feet away.

I love the fact that when you take one AirPod out of your ear, your audio automatically pauses. Solid Siri integration as well.

Apple will charge $69 to replace a lost or broken AirPod

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Juli Clover, MacRumors:

After the one-year warranty has expired, Apple will charge a $69 fee for out-of-warranty service repairs. Battery service for AirPods that lose battery capacity is free during the one-year warranty period or $49 out of warranty.

If you lose or damage one of the AirPods or the charging case, Apple will charge $69 for a replacement, regardless of whether or not the AirPods are still under warranty. The pricing in Apple’s support document is U.S. pricing, and will vary based on country.

Interesting that the AirPods do not need to be replaced in pairs. Great technology.

Shigeru Miyamoto on Super Mario Run

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Chris Kohler, Wired, got the chance to ask Shigeru Miyamoto about Super Mario Run.

One highlight, talking about simply porting Super Mario to iOS:

“I don’t want to do anything that boring. We’ve been making Mario games for a long time, and Mario’s evolved with every new platform.

“For me, it wouldn’t be interesting work to just take the existing Super Mario Bros. game, put it on an iPhone, (and) emulate a plus control pad. That’s not very fun creatively. We’re more interested in looking at how we can be creative with Mario, and design for iPhone in a way that takes advantage of the uniquenesses of that device and the uniquenesses of that input and the features that that device has. For us, that is much more rewarding creative work.”

Super Mario Run is a fantastic game. In my opinion, it is well worth the $10. I hope it reverses the “race to the bottom” iOS game pricing trend, helps make it easier for developers to make a living creating great apps.

Using Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant on the iPhone

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Federico Viticci, MacStories, on the new Astra app:

Astra is, effectively, just a large microphone in the middle of the screen. You can sign into your Amazon account, give the app permission to record audio, and start sending messages to Alexa. To record a command, you hold down a Siri-like microphone button and then lift your finger to send a request to Alexa. When Astra displays a ‘Thinking…’ message it is not, in fact, processing your request on its own – the Alexa Voice Service is; Astra is just waiting for a response to speak back to you. Astra is a bridge to Alexa’s cloud brain: there are no visual messages and no interface elements built around Amazon’s assistant. Even the audio responses use Alexa’s standard voice.

This is a breach in Apple’s ecosystem, a way for a competing (and some would say, superior) service to live within the confines of the iOS walled garden. Google Maps is another example.

While Alexa and Astra might leach users away from Siri, Amazon is not a threat to steal users from iOS. But add in Amazon’s Fire TV Stick, which gives users access to Netflix, Amazon Video, etc., at a $40 price point, much, much cheaper than Apple TV’s entry point, and there’s the beginning of a slow erosion.

Florida court says iPhone passcode must be revealed

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This is a creepy story, and a troubling result. Bottom line, the court likened a passcode to a strongbox key. Reasoning, if you can be compelled by a court to turn over a strongbox key, you can be compelled to turn over your passcode.

I feel a tide turning here. This case will likely end up in front of the Supreme Court.

HBO to debut documentary on partnership and bond between Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine

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HBO press release:

THE DEFIANT ONES, a four-part documentary event, will debut on HBO in 2017, it was announced today by Casey Bloys, president, HBO Programming. Director Allen Hughes (“Menace II Society”) has made an unquestionably bold film about the unlikely but ultimately unbreakable bond of trust and friendship between two street-smart men from different worlds who have shaped many of the most exciting and extreme moments in recent pop culture.

And:

Set amid many of the defining events of the past four decades, THE DEFIANT ONES tells the stories of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre — one the son of a Brooklyn longshoreman, the other straight out of Compton — and their improbable partnership and surprising leading roles in a series of transformative events in contemporary culture.

And:

Allen Hughes filmed Iovine and Dre over a three-year period in making THE DEFIANT ONES. In addition to extensive interviews with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, who speak frankly about their highs and lows, the show includes interviews with such music icons as Bono, David Geffen, Eminen, Nas, Ice Cube, Gwen Stefani, Jon Landau, Tom Petty, Trent Reznor, Snoop Dogg, Bruce Springsteen and will.i.am. The series also features never-before-seen footage from a multitude of recording and writing sessions with Eazy-E, JJ Fad, Stevie Nicks, N.W.A., Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and U2, among others.

I will definitely watch this.

Six Colors’ favorite games, and a few of my own

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Last week, Six Colors posted a list of their favorite iOS and Mac games. Some fun games on that list.

That got me thinking about some of my favorite games.

One in particular, Nanuleu, came to me by way of this post from John Vorhees’ series of game posts for MacStories. Nanuleu is minimal in design, incredibly easy to learn to play, and strong in subtle strategy. Lots of replay value, and they’ve recently added more content to broaden the experience.

Here’s an App Store link to Nanuleu.

More games I love:

  • Kingdom Rush, and all the games in that series. There’s also a version on the Mac App Store, which brings slightly different game boards.
  • Plants vs Zombies (still very playable after all this time).
  • The Room, and all the games in that series.
  • Really Bad Chess, a cursedly wicked twist on chess.

Lots more games, but that list has been the most fun for me.

Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto on working with Apple to create Super Mario Run

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Shigeru Miyamoto, in an interview with glixel:

Glixel: What’s it been like working with Apple? How did the partnership for Super Mario Run come about? They’re supporting it a lot more than they usually do with individual games.

Miyamoto: The timing was really fortunate for both of us. On the Nintendo side we’d been talking a lot about going into the mobile space but we hadn’t decided that we were going to make a Mario game for smartphones. As we were talking about what we were going to create we started asking ourselves about what a Mario game would need to be. So we were experimenting with some things and we came up with the base idea, and that’s what we eventually showed to Apple.

Part of the reason we took it to Apple was that in order for us to have the performance we wanted we needed some development support to ensure that the game would run the way we expected. Because Nintendo is always trying to do something unique we also wanted to try and do something different on the business side too. We really didn’t want to do something in the free to play space, but in order to make sure we had the opportunity to do what we wanted [offer a taste of the game for free, and charge $9.99 to unlock the whole thing], we had to talk to the people who are actually running the shop. Naturally the people on the App Store initially told us that the free-to-play approach is a good one, but I’ve always had this image that Apple and Nintendo have very similar philosophies. As we started working together, I found that to be true and they became very welcoming of trying something new.

If you are a gaming fan, take a few minutes to read the interview.

Shigeru Miyamoto is an incredibly influential part of modern gaming’s history. The Super Mario and Zelda franchises are his creations.

The game Super Mario Run carries that DNA, that gaming delight, over to the iPhone. And somehow it does that in a game that only requires a single finger to play.

Unboxing Apple’s ugliest Mac

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I had no idea. I have to say, that really is one ugly Mac. That said, ugly is in the eye of the beholder.

It’s time for Safari to go on a memory diet

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Kirk McElhearn, writing for Macworld:

Right now, my iMac’s uptime (the time since my last restart) is nearly four days. And Safari is using 6.81GB of RAM, by far the largest memory hog on my Mac. The app itself is using about 1GB, but each tab, each window also uses RAM. You can see this in Activity Monitor (located in /Applications/Utilities), by selecting the Memory tab.

And:

As you can see [in the image in Kirk’s original post], the most egregious RAM user is Google Docs, which requires more than 500MB RAM for a single, blank document. Open a few more Google docs, and you’ll see that number quickly balloon. (It’s not clear whether this is Google’s fault or Apple’s fault.)

A lot of this memory usage depends on how long the pages or tabs have been open. If I launch Safari on my 12-inch MacBook, and open the exact same tabs, it only uses 2.8GB RAM. Of course, if I leave them open for a long time, that RAM usage will increase.

I fired up Activity Monitor on my Mac and tapped the Memory tab. My Safari only used 321MB (Less than 1/3 of Kirk’s 1GB).

I then created a new Google Doc blank document which used 193MB (again, much less than Kirk’s result), and added more Google Doc documents, each of which weighed in at slightly less than the original.

I don’t doubt Kirk’s results, but I suspect that there’s more here than simply Safari being a memory hog. It’d be interesting to see a more controlled experiment, loading known pages in a controlled environment after a fresh restart.

More Apple Store robberies

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The Next Web:

San Francisco Police Department has released footage of two recent Apple store robberies in the Bay Area, which took place on November 25 and November 29 (respectively) in the vicinity of Chestnut Street in San Francisco.

The first video captures three perpetrators daringly walk in, grab whatever they can and swiftly storm out – and all of that in the window of less than 15 seconds. Similarly, the second clip catches four men perform the same maneuver with almost identical pace.

In both cases, startled staff and customers merely watch the criminals make off with a bunch of gadgets in their hands.

It’d be interesting to know what Apple is doing about this problem, if anything. Does this fall into the category of nuisance, a small enough loss that Apple writes down the loss and moves on? Is there a stealth effort, after the fact, that tracks down the thieves via a Find My iPhone type mechanism?

Four new, quick cut Apple Watch commercials

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[VIDEO] The spots are all 15 seconds long. They each start with footage of someone opening a brand new Apple Watch, overlaid with the all caps message:

THE GIFT OF GO

Each commercial then branches off into quick cuts of going out, playing, running, and dancing. Solid work.

Videos embedded in main Loop post.

The Apple Mirror

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A mirror, with built in display elements, all based on iOS 10.

From the site:

Design includes the time and date in the upper right hand corner and weather in the top left. All apps can be moved around and placed anywhere on the mirror. After 45 seconds of inactivity the mirror goes to sleep (appears as any ordinary mirror), simply tap anywhere to wake back up and resume use. Some useful things you can do with this mirror: Request an Uber, watch Netflix, read the news, control smart thermostat / light bulbs, control Sonos speaker system and more.

Seems to me, there was an Android project a while back that did something similar. Search, search, search. Ah, here it is.

Living with the Touch Bar MacBook Pro

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Zac Hall, writing for 9to5Mac, details his three weeks of experience with his 15 inch Touch Bar MacBook Pro. Zac really puts his machine through its paces and focuses on the details. Definitely worth the read if you are considering a Touch Bar Mac.

The Verge on the best phone you can buy

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The verge waded through the morass of smart phones and picked the one they thought was the best that money can buy.

Hint: This is an Apple blog.

Apple now lets you schedule repairs at Apple Authorized Providers

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Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple recently made a quiet update to its Apple Support site, introducing a new feature that allows customers to find and schedule repairs for iPhones, Macs, and iPads from Apple Authorized Service Providers.

When troubleshooting a product, choosing “Bring in for Repair” after going through Apple’s support prompts now brings up all repair centers near a customer, including Apple’s own retail stores and retail locations where customers can get repairs from Apple Authorized Service Providers.

And:

In addition to including all nearby Apple Authorized Service Providers, the new repair site also lists availability, so customers can find the fastest repairs and get same-day service in many locations. There’s even an option to book a repair right from the site.

Here’s a link to the official Apple Support site so you can check this for yourself.

A chat with Shigeru Miyamoto on the eve of Super Mario Run

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Arguably one of the most influential figures in the history of gaming, this is a big moment for Shigeru Miyamoto and Nintendo. From the Verge interview:

“Super Mario Run is going to introduce millions of more people to the fun of Mario, and it’ll become the entry point for them,” Miyamoto explains. “And then the question becomes, once you’ve gone through that entry point, then what comes next? Is it a more traditional Mario experience? Is it something like the Mario Galaxy games? We’ll then have to look at what it is these new fans want from a Mario game, and we’ll continue to see Mario evolve in that way.”

Nintendo is exploring some new paths (Investment in Pokemon Go, Nintendo Switch, and porting Mario to iOS), all of which seem to be working very well.

Looking forward to next Thursday’s rollout of Super Mario Run and, in March, to the Nintendo Switch and the open world version of The Legend of Zelda.

Jimmy Fallon plays Super Mario Run and Zelda: Breath of the Wild in front of Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto

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This was delightful, infectiously fun. Turns out, Jimmy Fallon is pretty good at this game. Great marketing for both Super Mario Run and the Nintendo Switch, which they showed off midway through the video, with Jimmy getting a chance to explore the open world of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Switch.

I love that they had Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto in the audience to watch. My favorite part of the show was Miyamoto playing the Super Mario theme with the Roots. [VIDEO and links in main Loop post]

Nintendo’s official Super Mario Run gameplay video

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Nintendo’s Super Mario Run will debut one week from today, an iOS exclusive at least through the end of the year.

Interested in the gameplay? The video embedded in the main Loop post will take you through the highlights. To me, this feels like a Nintendo game worth of Super Mario. The fit and finish is just what you’d expect, the sound effects spot on.

Apple VP Jennifer Bailey talks about Apple Pay, shines on stage

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Apple VP Jennifer Bailey got onstage at the Code Commerce Series and spoke, interview style, about the current status of Apple Pay.

If you have even the slightest interest in Apple Pay, this is worth watching. Jennifer is well spoken, really knows her stuff, and offers some projections on where Apple Pay is going. For example, she proposed that in 2017, two thirds of the top 100 retailers will accept Apple Pay.

A few years ago, I wrote about Craig Federighi being a natural presence on stage. He’s confident, self effacing, well-spoken, and passionate. He does a terrific job representing Apple.

To me, Jennifer Bailey has that same personality. I think she’d be great on stage at an Apple event. She certainly breathes life into Apple Pay discussions.

Americans are paying Apple millions to shelter overseas profits

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I’m not a fan of the article’s title, but it is definitely an interesting read. At its core:

Taking advantage of an exemption tucked into America’s Byzantine tax code, Apple stashed much of its foreign earnings—tax-free—right here in the U.S., in part by purchasing government bonds, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. In return, the Treasury Department paid Apple at least $600 million and possibly much more over the past five years in the form of interest, a Bloomberg review of its regulatory filings shows.

And:

Blaming U.S. companies for following the tax code, however complex or flawed, is misguided, says Richard Lane, a senior analyst at Moody’s Investors Service.

“If these companies don’t need the money in the U.S., there’s no incentive to give Uncle Sam” that money in taxes, he said. “What sane chief financial officer, who’s doing their fiduciary duties to shareholders, would pay money to some entity for no good reason? If there’s a moral issue, I’m not sure whether there’s immorality to that.”

In a nutshell, the article details that Apple is buying US Treasury bonds to park overseas earnings, while still maintaining that money as overseas.

Given the availability of this strategy, if I’m an Apple investor, I suspect I’d be upset if Apple didn’t follow this strategy.

Counterpoint to Jim’s issues with Apple Music

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If you have not yet read it, take a few minutes to read Jim Dalrymple’s heartfelt critique of Apple Music, iTunes Match, and Apple’s embrace of Hip-Hop.

I do agree with a lot of Jim’s thesis, especially his points about iTunes Match and Apple exclusives. Rock and metal seem to have become second class citizens there.

That said, I have become more and more a fan of the overall Apple Music experience, warts and all. I love being able to share music with my kids via our family plan. There’s hardly a song I can think of that I can’t find on Apple Music. My kids share what they love, which keeps me up on newer music, and I get to share the roots music that informed and influenced the music they love.

I think Apple Music’s DNA is broadening, not narrowing. Though I do agree that Apple exclusives tend to be star-centric, with focus on trying to sign deals with the biggest names, that makes business sense.

But Apple Music is not abandoning other flavors of music. As I write this, I have Metallica’s newest (Hardwired to Self-Destruct) blasting direct from Apple Music to my MacBook Pro’s speakers.

As I make my way through the new releases on Apple Music, I see Disturbed: Live at Red Rocks, Sixx:A.M.’s Prayers for the Blessed, both mixed in with plenty of pop, jazz, country and, yes, plenty of hip-hop. That said, Jim’s point is certainly well taken. There’s way more hip-hop/rap than rock. The trend is clear.

I see this as a bit of a pendulum. The most highly represented music is driven by the personal tastes of the people running the show. That makes sense. Before Beats entered the equation, the pendulum swung the other way.

And with all that said, I hope that the folks at the top will read Jim’s editorial and take it to heart. The choices made with iTunes Match and Apple Music exclusives do matter. Don’t let your own personal tastes limit the Apple Music experience for those folks who skew different.