Apple:
Apple has enlisted three Canadian artists to help capture the inclusive and optimistic character of their country in A Portrait of Canada, a short film shot on iPhone and released today. Humble the Poet, photographer Caitlin Cronenberg and First Nations band A Tribe Called Red contributed their words, images and music. Their work was combined with photos shot by iPhone users across Canada.
All shot with iPhone, of course.
Eric Jackson, CNBC:
Apple announced recently that it had hired two big Sony TV executives to head up Apple’s original video strategy. It’s the strongest signal yet that Apple has grand plans to offer its own slate of original video content to compete with the likes of Netflix, Amazon and HBO.
Yet as Apple brings more high-quality content to its users, it’s likely to highlight a growing dilemma: Is it going to start offering better services to users with less privacy, or continue offering inferior services with strong privacy?
The title is provocative and, I think, needlessly so. I believe Apple is protecting our privacy, sees that as a fundamental principle. But Eric does make some interesting points, worth reading:
On Ben Thompson’s Exponent podcast from two weeks back — “Fruitful Clapping” — he discusses how Siri stops using your utterances/voice queries after 6 months. That’s problematic to improve Siri’s algorithm. You can’t compare utterances today to utterances a year ago.
And:
Spotify knows what music you like better than you do.
Apple Music gives you the world but doesn’t have that same magical insight into you — but you have better privacy.
And:
Google Photos organizes my photos magically in the background. It delights me that it’s somehow able to recognize my child from ages one to 15 as the same person through facial recognition software. It now has 500 million monthly active users — presumably many on iOS.
Apple’s Photos app makes me tag hundreds of photos of the same person to group them instead of recognizing them. The reason is Apple is doing facial recognition on the device instead of in the server.
These are all excellent points. But don’t dismiss Apple’s privacy protections as hangups. The malware haunting Windows and Android, the exploits based on backdoors that Apple protects against, are all part of the reason I appreciate Apple’s commitment to privacy. This is not a hangup.
But the question here is, where does privacy end and personalization begin? Can Siri know me, know my habits intimately, read and parse all my email, accumulate my personal preferences/habits/even peccadillos, all without breaking my privacy?
To me, that’s the core of the issue. If Apple can do that without selling that information to advertisers, employers, and insurance companies, I’m OK with that.
But where there’s accumulated data, there’s privacy danger. What if some black hat hacks Apple’s servers and uses that information to my detriment? What if an activist investor took over Apple and brought in their own management team, forced them to change their privacy policies?
Good food for thought. Personally, I like that Apple is stepping carefully here. That privacy hangup is one I can live with.
Carolina Milanesi, Tech.Pinions:
If you insist on looking at iOS 11+iPad Pro=PC you might miss the opportunity for this combo to live up to its full potential. I know for many PCs and Macs are synonymous of work and productivity, therefore my suggestion to start looking at the iPad Pro differently is missed on them. Yet, I promise you, there is a difference between wanting to replicate what you have been doing on a PC and wanting to understand if the iPad Pro can fit your workflow or even if it could help your workflow change to better fit your needs.
A lot of ink has been spilled on the topic of making the iPad Pro your main computer, replacing your Mac or PC. But Carolina makes the point that the iPad Pro, combined with iOS 11 (and that’s important), has now evolved into a device with distinct advantages, depending on your workflow.
Drag and drop is a good example:
This is possibly the best example of a feature that despite sharing the same name on the Mac is made zillion times better by touch. It turns something that is cumbersome to do with the mouse in something super intuitive.
And another:
I read many reports and I used to print them out and annotate them, highlight them and then take pictures of them so that I would not file them somewhere safe and never see them again. All those steps are now condensed for a much more efficient and equally productive experience. In this case, it is not about being able to do something I was doing on my Mac. It is, instead, the ability to fully digitize a workflow.
Read the whole thing. This fundamentally changed the way I see the iPad and Apple Pencil. Good stuff.
Patently Apple:
Last week Patently Apple posted a report titled “Apple invents a 3D Depth Mapping Camera for Hand Gesturing Interfaces for Future Macs & Smartglasses.” It’s a recurring theme (one, two and three) from Apple’s PrimeSense team from Israel. Today another such patent filing has surfaced titled “Gesture based User Interface,” based on hand gestures.
There’s more detail in the post and, of course, in the patents themselves. But in a nutshell, 3D mapping cameras and a host of hand gestures are likely in Apple’s future, along with tracking software for your Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Glasses.
Brian Feldman, New York Magazine:
The future of Tumblr is still an open question. The site is enormously popular among the coveted youth crowd — that’s partly why then-CEO Marissa Mayer paid $1 billion for the property in 2013 — but despite a user base near the size of Instagram’s, Tumblr never quite figured out how to make money at the level Facebook has led managers and shareholders to expect.
And:
For a long time, its founder and CEO David Karp was publicly against the idea of inserting ads into users’ timelines. (Other experiments in monetization, like premium options, never caught on: It’s tough to generate revenue when your most active user base is too young to have a steady income.) Even once the timeline became open to advertising, it was tough to find clients willing to brave the sometimes-porny waters of the Tumblr Dashboard.
And:
It is rare, but not at all unprecedented, for a site to reach Tumblr’s size, prominence, and level of influence and still be unable to build a sustainable business.
Tumblr is important. Twitter is important. Both have huge audiences, audiences that are vital, vibrant, and active. Neither has quite figured out how to turn those huge audiences into enough money to keep shareholders happy and keep the lights on.
I love both, but see Tumblr more as a publishing venture and Twitter more as vital infrastructure. Will Verizon have the patience to keep Tumblr alive until it can find a revenue path? I hope so. But I can’t help thinking that there’s a change that is coming to Tumblr’s underlying charm, either way.
Interesting read, all the way through.
Jordan Kahn, 9to5Mac:
Apple is looking to hire a “Siri Event Maven” that will serve as Siri’s own personal assistant on events and pop culture happenings trending among humans.
The role will be to make sure that Siri is up to date on all the non-traditional holidays, trending cultural happenings, and events that people might ask about. Apple says the Siri Event Maven will work with the engineers and designers working on Siri “to provide strategic awareness of cultural happenings in the collective zeitgeist.”
Sounds like a fun gig.
Washington Post:
In the past decade, electric guitar sales have plummeted, from about 1.5 million sold annually to just over 1 million. The two biggest companies, Gibson and Fender, are in debt, and a third, PRS Guitars, had to cut staff and expand production of cheaper guitars. In April, Moody’s downgraded Guitar Center, the largest chain retailer, as it faces $1.6 billion in debt. And at Sweetwater.com, the online retailer, a brand-new, interest-free Fender can be had for as little as $8 a month.
And:
Guitar heroes. They arrived with the first wave of rock-and-roll. Chuck Berry duckwalking across the big screen. Scotty Moore’s reverb-soaked Gibson on Elvis’s Sun records. Link Wray, with his biker cool, blasting through “Rumble” in 1958.
And:
McCartney saw Hendrix play at the Bag O’Nails club in London in 1967. He thinks back on those days fondly and, in his sets today, picks up a left-handed Les Paul to jam through Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady.”
And:
“Now, it’s more electronic music and kids listen differently,” McCartney says. “They don’t have guitar heroes like you and I did.”
That does sound a bit like a grumpy old person complaint, but read the article. The comment reflects the reality of the current trend in popular music, more about programming beats than emulating a specific riff.
Fascinating read.
Yesterday we posted Matt Gemmell’s take on this iPad Pro-bashing Twitter thread from The Outline’s Joshua Topolsky:
https://twitter.com/joshuatopolsky/status/879512768206053376
Another take, this from John Gruber:
I agree with almost every single word in Topolsky’s thread — but I also think he’s completely wrong.
And:
People like me and Topolsky — and millions of others — are the reason why Apple continues to work on MacOS and make new MacBook hardware. I can say without hesitation that the iPad Pro is not the work device for me. I can also say without hesitation that the iPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard is the work device for millions of other people.
Couldn’t agree more. I live in both worlds, with half my time spent in iOS and half in macOS. I would not want to lose either, but I don’t yet see a clean way to combine them into a unified product.
To me, iOS is clean and simple, sophisticated without being clumsy, heavy, or onerous, a perfect information consumption device.
The Mac is like strapping on a power suit, one designed to let me create all sorts of content and customize my experience with powerful software and hardware add-ons, and with an interface as complex and macro-laden as I want to make it.
I like them both, appreciate having them both, find it easy to move between the two worlds. And if the day comes where iOS does everything I need for both worlds, I’ll gladly go there.
Apple analyst Gene Munster, from his 5 year Apple forecast:
Over the next 10 years, we anticipate that AirPods will be bigger than the Apple Watch as the product evolves from simple wireless headphones to a wearable, augmented audio device. While both AirPods and Apple Watch should continue to grow, we see AirPods contributing about the same amount of revenue as Apple Watch by FY22.
The key is the word augmented. Currently, AirPods are simply a great pair of wireless earpods. But over time, as Siri takes on a larger, more intelligent role in the ecosystem and as Apple moves into AR, the AirPods will have a more central role, acting as a conduit to other devices via more complex gestures and audio commands, and piping augmented audio back into your ears.
Our best guess is that Apple Glasses, an AR-focused wearable, will be released mid FY20. This is based on the significant resources Apple is putting into AR, including ARKit and the recent SensoMotoric Instruments acquisition. We believe Apple see’s the AR future as a combination of the iPhone and some form of a wearable.
Apple Glasses and AirPods are a natural fit.
Lots of detail. Fascinating look back.
Yes, please.
[VIDEO] There are a lot of AR demos out there, including a few measuring tape demos that show how easy Apple has made it to put together an AR app. But the Minecraft demo shown in the video embedded in the main Loop post struck me as a perfect demo of ARKit. Enjoy.
J. M. Manness, writing for Seeking Alpha [Free Regwall] digs into the importance of augmented reality (AR) and how Apple’s approach is so groundbreaking. J. M. does a terrific job explaining the technical issues involved in AR, as well as why Apple’s approach has opened the floodgates for developers (and leapfrogged Apple over Google in this area).
A few tastes:
Essentially, an API does all the hard work for the programmer. This is true here probably more so than in any other API. ARKit provides services for each of the problems listed above. In each case, the incredible work of interpreting the real world scene, all the artificial intelligence programming that has been done, all is hidden under the hood, and the programmer just needs to request a description of nearby surfaces. Placing the model into the scene will subject it to the automatically detected light sources and resize it as it is moved in relation to the viewer, or the user moves the viewing device around it.
And:
In one how-to-program video, Brian Advent shows us how to make a simple game that places the sample spaceship at a random point in the viewing field. The user then touches the screen, and if you touch the ship, then it disappears and a new one comes up. Brian builds the app and runs it literally in less than 20 minutes.
A simple concept, but one that goes to the core of the issue. Apple made it easy for developers to harness the power of AR. ARKit solves all the technical issues, including lighting and placement, movement and permanence in space.
If you are interested in AR, take a minute to register a Seeking Alpha account (it’s free) and read the linked article. I’d search for the section called “WWDC” and start there.
Nicole Perlroth, New York Times:
The strike on IDT, a conglomerate with headquarters in a nondescript gray building here with views of the Manhattan skyline 15 miles away, was similar to WannaCry in one way: Hackers locked up IDT data and demanded a ransom to unlock it.
The Wanna Cry attack made huge headlines. The IDT attack did not.
But the ransom demand was just a smoke screen for a far more invasive attack that stole employee credentials. With those credentials in hand, hackers could have run free through the company’s computer network, taking confidential information or destroying machines.
This is a huge issue. The premise is, there are many of these attacks and they are almost all undiscovered, allowing the attacker to build up a treasure trove of employee credentials. The attack was allegedly carried out using cyberweapons stolen from the NSA.
Scans for the two hacking tools used against IDT indicate that the company is not alone. In fact, tens of thousands of computer systems all over the world have been “backdoored” by the same N.S.A. weapons. Mr. Ben-Oni and other security researchers worry that many of those other infected computers are connected to transportation networks, hospitals, water treatment plants and other utilities.
Lots more to this story, including one person’s quest to hunt down the perpetrator. Terrific read.
More evidence in favor of Apple’s commitment to not adding a back door to modern versions of iOS, as well as a firm argument for Apple’s approach to OS distribution. A major part of the problem is the flood of old, unpatched flavors of Windows and Android out in the wild.
[VIDEO] The Wall Street Journal pulled together a masterful insider’s take, embedded in the main Loop post, on the creation of the iPhone. Great, great, great.
[VIDEO] Every time I watch an iOS 11 tutorial, I get a larger appreciation for how big a leap forward this latest rev is. In this one (embedded in the main Loop post), Jeff Benjamin talks through the process of taking and managing screenshots in iOS 11.
Yesterday, we embedded a video pulled together by David Pogue on the 4 people Steve Jobs handpicked to review the original iPhone.
David Pogue also wrote a cover story for CBS News with a broader embedded video, which includes bits of the “4 original iPhone reviewers” piece, but goes further, including an interview with Bas Ording, an iPhone engineer who helped pull together the original touch screen mechanics.
From the Computer History Museum schedule of events:
How did iPhone come to be? On June 20, four members of the original development team will discuss the secret Apple project, which in the past decade has remade the computer industry, changed the business landscape, and become a tool in the hands of more than a billion people around the world.
Scott Forstall, the leader of the original iPhone software team will take part in a fireside chat with Computer History Museum historian John Markoff. A panel with three of the engineers who worked on the original iPhone, Nitin Ganatra, Scott Herz, and Hugo Fiennes, will describe how the iPhone came to be.
That’s tonight at 6p PT. If anyone goes, please do take some video, share online. Wish I could be there.
Josh Centers posts about what’s new in tvOS 11, but then goes further, digging into what’s still needed.
I’d go further, and add the ability to support multiple Bluetooth interfaces, as I’ve written about here:
Pair two sets of AirPods to a single Apple TV: This would allow my wife and I to listen on headphones, each with a different volume level, a blessing for people with different hearing needs and for parents with sleeping infants.
Pass the audio through to HDMI while AirPods are active: This would allow someone with a hearing deficit to listen at a louder volume while the room gets the regular volume.
Terrific read.
[VIDEO] Apologies to whoever sent this my way, lost the original link, so no hat tip. Video in original Loop post. That said, I absolutely love this. Not sure if this was some sort of bot post (the voiceover is clearly automated), but the video itself is excellent. Great bike-parking setup.
Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:
The book claiming to explore the secret history of the iPhone, The One Device, is now on sale in physical form ($19 at Amazon). You can also preorder the ebook for Kindle and iBooks as well; it will be released digitally on Thursday.
The book in question is The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone. Here’s a link to the book on Amazon. Looks like the Kindle version is available now, though it seems like this might only be in the US.
Authored by Brian Merchant, the book promises to detail the ‘untold account’ of how the iPhone was made. It features anecdotes from ex-Apple executives and top employees about the development of the secret project, as well as an ‘undercover’ trip to Foxconn and more. Early reviews of ‘The One Device’ are mixed.
Follow the headline link for details on the reviews. They are, indeed, mixed.
Jason Snell, Six Colors:
while the App Store has indeed had an editorial team for quite a while, Apple’s approach to App Store editorial has been nearly invisible. Editors select apps to highlight and might write short bits of text for use in collections, but for the most part the job has seemed to be more about curation than words.
This is not meant to disparage curation—it’s an important job and one of the ways the App Store can highlight the hard work of app developers who are making polished, impressive products.
Damn right! Curation is a skill and highly polished curation a valuable skill.
With iOS 11, though, Apple’s really showing that it has redefined what the App Store editorial team is for. In the redesigned App Store app in iOS 11, app highlights go way beyond buttons that would present an app’s App Store page when you tapped. The new Today tab is populated with full-fledged feature articles, with screen shots, videos, animations, pull quotes, and real writing.
The change is pretty impressive. To get a sense of this, take a look at the Monument Valley 2 screenshot in Jason’s post. That’s some beautiful prose there. And well written copy helps the user get a sense of the game’s value, helps the developer by spurring sales, and helps put more coin in Apple’s bank. Win, win, win.
Mashable:
A new water park called Morgan’s Inspiration Island was designed for people with a wide range of disability identities — and it’s mind-blowingly accessible. The park, which opens June 17 in San Antonio, Texas, is fully wheelchair-accessible and hopes to welcome people with disabilities through careful consideration in design.
And:
The tropical-themed park features six major attractions, including an accessible river boat ride and a wide variety of splash pads — surfaces with geysers, water cannons, and rain curtains. Splash pads, unlike pools, are more accessible to people with mobility-related disabilities, but still provide the full water park experience.
And, notably, anyone with a disability is welcomed into the park for free.
This is amazing. Clearly, this was a labor of love, created with accessibility as a goal, rather than financial gain. Park founder Gordon Hartman did this for his daughter Morgan.
Read the article. There’s a lot of detail on the park. Brilliant.
[H/T John Kordyback]
Yahoo Finance:
When AAPL released the Apple Watch, it included a heart rate sensor. It has proven extremely accurate in testing, recently coming within 2% of the numbers reported by an electrocardiograph (EKG). However, AAPL has never marketed it as a medical device, because doing so would mean FDA certification.
Once under FDA regulation, the company would have to get each Apple Watch certified, in a process that could require months. Having to go through FDA certification would also reveal AAPL’s products before release — something the secretive company would hate — and could delay rolling out software updates.
But:
The FDA just announced its new Digital Health Innovation Plan, and it could change everything.
Noting that digital technologies used in consumer devices “have the power to transform health care,” the agency is trying to streamline the process needed for FDA approval. With a fall target for the pilot program, the FDA says it’s considering creation of a:
“Third party certification program under which lower risk digital health products could be marketed without FDA premarket review and higher risk products could be marketed with a streamlined FDA premarket review.”
The implications for AAPL and the Apple Watch are huge.
Risky path, privacy implications abound. But a perfect path for Apple.
[VIDEO] This looks phenomenal. Check out the trailer (embedded in the main Loop post).
Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note:
The scale of Apple’s iPhone supply chain operation demands military precision. Producing and selling 212M iPhones a year (in 2016) requires very different “people, processes, and purposes” than were needed when Apple was selling relatively modest numbers of Macintosh personal computers (4.6M units in its 2000 Fiscal Year, climbing to 5.3M units in FY 2006).
How did Apple grow from 5.3M Macs in 2006 to 212M iPhones last year, a 40X multiple? In one of his many Apple 2.0 strokes of genius, Steve Jobs hired an experienced supply chain executive, Tim Cook. With Jobs’ support and inspiration, the future COO and CEO assembled the necessary team, set new rules, and forged new partnerships. As quantity begets nature, Apple became a different company.
…although not entirely.
Another great read from Jean-Louis, including this take on the snipe at Phil Schiller as told in the about to be released The One Device — The Secret History of the iPhone:
Lovely. Besides looking at Schiller’s education and early programming experience, one has to ask how long would have Schiller lasted under Jobs if he wasn’t “technical enough”? As Monday Note readers know, I don’t agree with Phil’s every utterance, but the obvious disconnection with easily ascertained facts casts a shadow on the author’s credibility and motivations. Schiller rejoined Apple in 1997 and has worked directly for Steve and Tim ever since.
Read the rest of Jean-Louis’ post here. As for the book, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow.
M.G. Siegler, in this Medium post:
No less than Steve Jobs himself said to Walter Isaacson in interviews for his biography that Apple had “finally cracked it” with regard to what they wanted to do in television.
That was six years ago. We’re still waiting to see the fruits of that labor. It’s starting to feel like we may never see them.
And:
We’re now seeing what Apple thinks it must do: compete with Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc. Apple spent a bunch of time suggesting they would not take this approach. Their original content was all about promoting Apple Music or whatnot. But you don’t hire these two guys if you’re not going all-in on content.
And by “these two guys”, M.G. is referring to Apple’s hiring of former Sony Executives Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg (the production team behind mega-hits such as Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and The Crown which, in my mind, is about as original as TV content gets).
More from M.G.:
If Apple can build a viable Netflix competitor, they’ll have decidedly more leverage. But they also run the risk of alienating the powers-that-be in Hollywood, just as Netflix turned from friend (licensing their old content) to foe (bidding for the first-run premium content).
Part of the challenge for Apple is putting up an ecosystem fence around Apple TV. They’ve been unable to negotiate the kind of terms that allowed iTunes to flip the music industry on its head. And Apple does not own a critical mass of content to pursue a Netflix-like strategy. Will “these two guys” be the start of the next generation Apple TV original content?
I like the play, looking forward to watching what emerges.
I have long railed against construction that makes phones, tablets, and laptops difficult to repair. But this might be a new low.
As the iFixIt folks make their way through the Microsoft Surface Laptop teardown, it becomes clear that getting inside is no easy task. And these folks are pros at taking things apart. It’s their raison d’etre, their primary gig.
The whole thing turns a bit ugly. Just look at the picture in Step 5. Here’s a quote:
Now that we’ve got a clear look at the plastic, it seems these aren’t reusable clips at all, but weak ultrasonic spot welds that we’ve been busting through. This is definitely not going back together without a roll of duct tape.
Yeesh. I wonder what plan Microsoft has for repairing these units when they start rolling in. Will they simply replace the cover, discard the old?
Texas Monthly:
Monday, April 10, was going to be a big day for John Mackey, but he had no idea how big it would turn out to be. The co-founder, CEO, and spirit animal of Austin-based Whole Foods Market was flying to New York to launch a tour to promote the publication of his second book, The Whole Foods Diet (summary: Go vegan, or mostly vegan).
And:
As he stepped off the American Airlines flight at JFK (Whole Foods doesn’t own a jet, and Mackey flies coach), his phone lit up with urgent text messages and voice mails. A hedge fund in New York called Jana Partners had snatched up almost 9 percent of Whole Foods’ stock and announced that it would pressure the company to either overhaul its business or sell itself—perhaps to another grocery giant, such as Kroger, or to a less traditional player, such as Amazon. Mackey and other leaders might have to be replaced. A media frenzy ensued, and the PR team who had carefully staged what should have been a traveling celebration of their boss as a thought leader shifted into immediate crisis mode.
“From that moment on, I was drowning in it,” Mackey says.
Mackey built Whole Foods from scratch, instilled a set of principal beliefs, built a management team that followed those beliefs. Whole Foods continued to grow, and then the hedge fund folks smelled the deal that was possible.
Fascinating, horrifying (depending which side of the fence you’re on), and a tale as old as Wall Street.
Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:
Upgrading more often than the average person is an occupational hazard of gadget addicts – and even more so of tech writers. But I do at least try to resist when an update is a relatively minor one.
I’d hoped that would be the case with the 10.5-inch iPad Pro. After all, I already owned the 9.7-inch Pro, so already had some of the more advanced features like True Tone. And 10.5 inches isn’t that much bigger than 9.7 inches, right?
Still, I had to be sure, so I wandered into the Regent Street Apple Store to try one out
There’s something about this so-called goldilocks iPad Pro, something compelling, in the same way as AirPods are compelling, but calling out from an already mature product line.
Ben’s journey is an interesting read and rang true for me. I hear that iPad calling.