Business

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

Earlier this year we reported issues with using the LG UltraFine 5K Display with new MacBook Pros near wireless access points including Apple wireless routers. LG acknowledged issues caused by poor shielding, inventory was pulled from Apple Stores, and revised hardware with proper shielding is now shipping and should be in Apple Stores soon. This week we got our hands on one of the new models with shielding improvements to put to the test and see if the issues have really been resolved.

A rare third party product that has become critical path for Apple. An important problem to fix.

Laptop Magazine:

Not every company offers first-class tech support for its laptops. With confusing web resources, unhelpful social media accounts and clueless phone reps, many brands put a lot of unnecessary obstacles between consumers and the help they need.

That’s why, for over 10 years, Laptop Mag has published its annual Tech Support Showdown, in which we go undercover to test and grade the most popular laptop brands.

Apple has Apple Stores combined with excellent phone support. Over the last year, they’ve supplemented this approach with the excellent @AppleSupport Twitter account. Sure, there are stumbles, but Apple remains strong in this area, even as they grow in size and in product lines they have to support.

Nice anecdote from Guy Kawasaki, former Chief Evangelist for Apple.

Stephen Nellis, Reuters:

There is at least one thing Siri can do that the other assistants cannot: speak 21 languages localized for 36 countries, a very important capability in a smartphone market where most sales are outside the United States.

Microsoft Cortana, by contrast, has eight languages tailored for 13 countries. Google’s Assistant, which began in its Pixel phone but has moved to other Android devices, speaks four languages. Amazon’s Alexa features only English and German. Siri will even soon start to learn Shanghainese, a special dialect of Wu Chinese spoken only around Shanghai.

And:

At Apple, the company starts working on a new language by bringing in humans to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are then transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of the spoken text to learn from, said Alex Acero, head of the speech team at Apple. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices. From there, a language model is built that tries to predict words sequences.

Then Apple deploys “dictation mode,” its text-to-speech translator, in the new language, Acero said. When customers use dictation mode, Apple captures a small percentage of the audio recordings and makes them anonymous. The recordings, complete with background noise and mumbled words, are transcribed by humans, a process that helps cut the speech recognition error rate in half.

Fascinating.

Solid, simple tip from iDownloadBlog.

Jake Underwood, MacStories, shows off TouchRetouch, an iOS app that makes it easy to remove objects from photos.

This is like magic to me, removing an object from a photo and using context to replace background in the photo that the camera cannot see.

Natasha Singer:

Apple’s Macs and iPads have lost significant ground in the U.S. educational market during the last three years, in 2016 slipping to third place behind Chromebooks and Windows devices, according to new research.

The research in question is this report from Futuresource. From the report:

At an operating system level, Chromebooks continue to gain market share, reaching 58% in 2016, up from 50% in 2015. The strong combination of affordable devices, productivity tools via G-Suite, easy integration with third party platforms/tools, task management/distribution via Google Classroom and easy device management remains extremely popular with US teachers and IT buyers alike.

And:

Whilst the growth of Chromebooks has certainly been a major headache for Apple and Microsoft, they are not standing still. Both made major developments through 2016, Apple announcing the ‘Classroom’ app and major education focused functionality updates on iOS 9.3, including the ability to share iPads.

To me, the issue is not Apple devices losing luster. As the linked report makes clear, this is about the growth of Chromebooks and the Google ecosystem. Google’s ecosystem is incredibly affordable, just perfect for the education market.

Daniel Dourvaris:

One afternoon as I was lying on my bed browsing the internet, my MacBook Pro suddenly turned off. I turned it back on and within a few seconds there was weird hissing sound, followed by white smoke and thin flames coming out of from the back.

I got up and ran with the laptop for the bathroom where I could put it on the ceramic tiles. Not more than ten seconds had passed and already the heat from the bottom of the laptop burnt my middle and ring fingers so badly I had to let it drop.

And:

There was a bang as I backed away causing the back to pop and smoke kept pouring out. It kept sizzling for a few minutes and then finally it stopped.

The house had filled up with smoke everywhere, the acidic stench of melted plastic made my eyes water.

Look at the pictures. Amazing. Looks like melted modeling clay.

This is scary.

It’s long been known that Lithium batteries can swell up inside a computer case, causing problems with, for example, the trackpad in some older designs, as they are being pressed from beneath. But that’s nothing compared to the danger of a situation like this.

Warren Buffett is one of the richest people in the world, one of the world’s shrewdest, hardest working investors. He does his homework before he spends a dime.

As has been widely reported, Buffett more than doubled his ownership in Apple stock (was 59M shares on Dec 31, now up to 133M shares) so far this year. In yesterday’s interview with CNBC, Buffett lays out his logic. Compelling.

You can watch part of his more than three hour interview here.

From the official transcript:

When I take my great-grandchildren to Dairy Queen they bring along friends sometimes. They’ve all got a iPhone and, you know, I ask ’em what they do with it and how … whether they could live without it, and when they trade it in what they’re gonna do with it. And of course, I see when they come to the furniture mart that people have this incredible stickiness of — with the product. I mean, if they bring in an iPhone, they buy a new iPhone. I mean, they’re … it just has that quality. It gets built into their lives. Now, that doesn’t mean something can’t come along that will disrupt it. But the continuity of the product is huge, and the degree to which their lives center around it is huge. And it’s a pretty nice, it’s a pretty nice franchise to have with a consumer product.

And:

what I do know is when I take a dozen kids, as I do on Sundays out to Dairy Queen they’re all holding their Apple, they barely can talk to me except if I’m ordering ice cream or something like that. And then I ask ’em how they live their lives. And the stickiness really is something. I mean, they do build their lives around it, just like you were describing. And the interesting thing is, when they come into … when they come into get a new one, they’re gonna get they overwhelmingly get the same product. I mean, they got their photos on it and, I mean, yeah, I know you can … you can make some shifts and all that. But they love it.

And:

Apple strikes me as having quite a sticky product and enormously useful product that people would use, and not that I do. Tim Cook’s always kidding me about that. But it’s a decision-based … but again, it gets down to the future earning power of Apple when you get right down to it. And I think Tim has done a terrific job, I think he’s been very intelligent about capital deployment. And I don’t know what goes on inside their research labs or anything of the sort. I do know what goes on in their customers’ minds because I spend a lot of time talking to ’em.

Obviously, Buffett doesn’t base his buying decisions on anecdotal evidence. But I feel certain that observations like this trigger some switch that makes him dig deep into the financials. And clearly, Buffett likes what he found.

From Fast Company:

Every phonemaker on the planet has been gunning for Apple for a decade (and a bunch of them are no longer in business). Apple’s speedy and continuous reinvention has kept the competition at bay. New features, new materials, and new designs are cranked out like clockwork, year after year, and at a scale that has become truly astounding. The difficulty of the engineering, manufacturing, and marketing integration required is hard to overstate. And each year, Apple’s products get better.

Well stated. Apple’s products continue to raise the bar. At the same time they continue to get more complex, more sophisticated.

And with that rise in complexity comes cracks in the process. As Dan Moren points out in Adventures in Siri failures, inconsistency is an issue that bedevils Siri.

Hop over to the main Loop post for links to the referenced posts, and some op-ed on Apple, Siri, and complexity.

Andrew Murphy, Loup Ventures:

We think Apple will win an Oscar in the next five years. That’s how long it will take for Apple to scale its original content spend from less than $200m today to $5-7b. The reason why expect $5-7b in Apple original content spend in five years is because Apple must catch up to Netflix and Amazon, the former of which will likely be spending more than $10b per year at that point.

Wait, what? Apple? An Oscar?

Not such an outlandish claim, actually. Apple is still dipping their toes in the original content waters. But once that wheel starts turning, they’ll make deals with quality content creators, in the same was as Netflix and Amazon. This is the new studio system.