Apple

China moves to end Apple, Samsung phone subsidies

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China Daily:

China should end smartphone subsidies to overseas vendors and give more support to local brands, industry insiders said on Tuesday, as telecom carriers pledged to cut operating expenses and Apple Inc gets ready to debut its next-generation iPhone.

Xiang Ligang, a telecom researcher in Beijing, said cutting carriers’ subsidies to foreign-made handsets will not only reduce carriers’ operating expense but also leave local players with more market demand.

The perception is that buyers of high end phones are price insensitive and will buy the phones even without the subsidies.

Apple pops the $100 barrier

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Apple stock today popped through the $100 per share barrier for the first time since they split the stock 7-1. That makes for a pre-split price of $700 a share. An important psychological step for Apple investors.

The design of the original Apple mouse

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Jim Yurchenco was just beginning his incredible design career when he was asked to design a mouse for a revolutionary new computer Apple was working on, the Lisa.

Yurchenco started looking at other input devices to see how it could all be done more elegantly. He found his answer in an Atari arcade machine. Its trackball seemed perfect for the job.

The Atari machine differed from the Xerox mouse in a few key ways. For one, its trackball wasn’t forced up or down. Instead, it just floated. Yurchenco tried doing the same and found the mouse functioned just fine if you let gravity do the work. Moreover, it resulted in less friction and fewer parts. That was one key insight. The Atari machine also used optics to track the trackball’s movement, relying on interrupted beams of light instead of mechanical switches. By borrowing this concept, Yurchenco further streamlined the internal components. That was insight number two.

The third insight came in how you use the thing. At first, Yurchenco remembers, everyone assumed mice had to be phenomenally accurate to deliver a good experience. “Suddenly we realized, you don’t care if it’s accurate!” he recalls. People don’t pay attention to what their hand is doing when they use a mouse; they just care about where the cursor goes. “It’s like driving a car. You don’t look at where you’re turning the steering wheel, you turn the steering wheel until the car goes where you want.”

Terrific read. While you are at it, spend a few minutes with Jim Yurchenco’s design philosophy in the video embedded below.

Apple beats Bud, Nike and GE to win the 2014 Emmy for Best Commercial

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[VIDEO] Ad Week:

The spot, created by TBWA\Media Arts Lab and directed by Lance Acord of Park Pictures, shows a teen at Christmas who seems anti-socially glued to his iPhone, though it turns out it’s for heartwarming reasons. It beat out four other nominees for the prize. Two of them were Super Bowl ads by Anomaly for Budweiser—”Hero’s Welcome” and “Puppy Love.” The other two were BBDO’s “Childlike Imagination” for GE and Wieden + Kennedy’s “Possibilities” for Nike.

The commercial took three days to shoot and was filmed in a historic house located on the edge of the River Valley in snowy Edmonton. Beautifully done.

Nintendo rises after report Pokemon game to debut on iPad

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This is a tricky piece of news.

Nintendo Co. (7974) jumped in Tokyo trading after its new Mario Kart 8 video game surpassed 1 million units in U.S. sales and affiliate The Pokemon Co. said an online trading-card game will be released as an application for Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPad.

The Pokémon game is owned by The Pokémon Company, which is affiliated with Nintendo (Nintendo has certain licensing and marketing rights) but not owned by Nintendo.

“We have been here many times before in regards to Nintendo’s tentative plans to introduce some of its characters for smart devices,” Amir Anvarzadeh, a manager of Japanese equity sales at BGC Partners Inc. in Singapore, said by e-mail. “This latest Pokemon cards plan which is already out on PCs is hardly a change in its direction.”

This is not quite correct.

Pandora CFO, Beats “not a competitive service”

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Here’s one for Gruber’s Claim Chowder file. Pandora CFO Mike Herring, speaking with Oppenheimer Securities analyst Jason Helfstein at an investment conference:

I don’t have much comment on Beats. Frankly, it’s not a competitive service in any form today. iTunes Radio is much more of it, competitive service and really had no impact on us long-term.

Apple bans benzene and n-hexane from supply chain, goes public with regulated substances spec

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From a letter released today by Lisa Jackson, former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and now Apple’s environmental director:

Recently, we received some questions about whether the chemicals benzene and n-hexane are used in the manufacturing of our products. Apple treats any allegations of unsafe working conditions extremely seriously. We took immediate investigative action, sending specialized teams into each of our 22 final assembly facilities, and found no evidence of workers’ health being put at risk. We’ve updated our tight restrictions on benzene and n-hexane to explicitly prohibit their use in final assembly processes.

Apple’s new “Achieve big things” iPad email campaign

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The ad features links to buy an iPad Air and a retina iPad mini, as well as sections that highlight Apple’s productivity suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), Microsoft’s Office iPad apps, and the Your Verse campaign.

Apple’s two new “Your Verse” ads

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Apple has added two new verses to its “Your Verse” ad campaign. The first one takes you on the road with Chinese musicians Yaoband. The second new “Your Verse” ad follows Jason Hall as he rallies thousand of his fellow Detroit bicyclists to inspire his city. Click through for the videos and links.

The incredibly important Adobe Illustrator story

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[VIDEO] Vimeo:

When Adobe Illustrator first shipped in 1987, it was the first software application for a young company that had, until then, focused solely on Adobe PostScript. The new product not only altered Adobe’s course, it changed drawing and graphic design forever.

Watch the Illustrator story unfold, from its beginning as Adobe’s first software product, to its role in the digital publishing revolution, to becoming an essential tool for designers worldwide. Interviews include cofounder John Warnock, his wife Marva, artists and designers Ron Chan, Bert Monroy, Dylan Roscover and Jessica Hische.

It is hard to truly appreciate the impact Adobe had on the world of computing. In the video embedded below, you’ll meet John Warnock, the co-founder of Adobe, and watch as the invention and evolution of PostScript and Adobe Illustrator unfolds.

Absolutely brilliant.

China said to exclude Apple products from “public money” procurement lists

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Bloomberg:

Ten Apple products — including the iPad, iPad Mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro — were omitted from a final government procurement list distributed in July, according to officials who read it and asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. The models were on a June version of the list drafted by the National Development and Reform Commission and Ministry of Finance, the officials said.

Apple is the latest U.S. technology company to be excluded from Chinese government purchases amid escalating tensions between the countries over claims of hacking and cyberspying. China’s procurement agency told departments to stop buying antivirus software from Symantec Corp. (SYMC) and Kaspersky Lab, while Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) was shut out of a government purchase of energy-efficient computers.

iOS supports more European app developers than any other mobile OS

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There’s a new report out from Vision Mobile:

Apple’s iOS operating system forms the basis 497,000 jobs in Europe – around half of all ‘app economy’ jobs on the continent – according to a new report by Vision Mobile.

Although more developers overall use Google’s Android operating system, iOS is the preferred platform for professional developers (as opposed to hobbyists and explorers), prioritised by 43 per cent of professional developers, compared to 35 per cent for Android.

Interesting economics. 497,000 jobs in Europe alone, based on an OS that was released about 7 years ago.

Apple’s new “Dreams” ad

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[VIDEO] Dreams is the latest ad in the “You’re more powerful than you think” series. The song in the ad is When I Grow Up by Jennifer O’Connor.

As is now the norm, all the apps featured in the ad are highlighted on Apple’s web site.

The Hero Returns: Steve Jobs’ real genius

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Peter Sims on Steve Jobs and collaboration:

As the three-year anniversary of Steve Jobs’ passing approaches in October, complete lessons from his life and legacy are still far from written or understood. Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs, published soon after Jobs’ death in 2011, provided a formidable starting point, yet we still have a great deal to learn and understand about what made Jobs such a unique innovator and leader.

In studying Jobs closely over the past several years, I’ve become convinced that the common narratives we’ve heard neglect a central aspect of Jobs’ of genius and success. And, it’s something that we can all learn from, which is this: Steve Jobs was a superb collaborator with the people who he respected and trusted.

Fascinating article.

On making a living from the App Store

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David Smith:

This past week has seen an explosion of writing and discussion about the business of making software for sale on the iOS App Store. Personally I love it when these little bubbles of discussion appear. If you’ve listened to me for any period of time you’ll know that one of the things I really like is being a student of the App Store. These discussions provide the opportunity and motivation for all sorts of anecdotes which help expand my view on where things stand.

This post is a trifecta. There’s a link to the Developing Perspective podcast, where David Smith lays all this out verbally. There’s the post itself (which really clicked for me). And there’s the wealth of related links at the end of the post.

What privacy settings tell you about the profound differences between Google and Apple

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Quartz:

When you install an app on an Android smartphone or tablet, it asks for access to data such as your location or address book. If you say no, you can’t install the app.

Apple handles things differently. On its mobile operating system, iOS, apps don’t ask permission when they’re installed. Instead, iOS takes some permissions as a given—internet access for instance—but for more sensitive data, such as your photos or location, the app has to ask for access when you use it. That more closely relates the decision to grant access to the reason for asking for it.

That there should be a difference between Android and iOS, which between them control 96.3% of the smartphone market, isn’t surprising. They have different overarching philosophies: Android is free for any smartphone maker to use while iOS is for iPhones only. Developers can freely upload their apps to the Google Play Store while Apple has tight gatekeeping. Android is easily customized; iOS is not.

My two cents:

Mac gets Shazam’s always-on music and TV recognition

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Just as it does on your iOS device, the Mac version of the Shazam app will listen for music and attempt to identify it using its hefty database of tunes. Now it does TV too. Big privacy implications, however.

Ford replaces employee BlackBerrys with fleet of 9,300 iPhones

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Bloomberg:

The second largest U.S. automaker will replace BlackBerry Ltd. (BBRY)’s smartphones with iPhones for about 3,300 workers by the end of this year, Sara Tatchio, a Ford spokeswoman, said yesterday in an interview. About 6,000 more employees will receive iPhones over the next two years, replacing flip phones, she said.