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I don’t often need to do this but it’s a nice option to have.

A link to this PDF showed up in my email box. It’s an interesting document that shows Apple’s wonderfully clever packaging goes hand in hand with a commitment to minimizing their environmental impact.

Apple made an obvious bet on AR vs VR and it looks like it will pay off handsomely for them.

The CNBC All-America Economic Survey finds that 64 percent of Americans now own an Apple product, up from 50 percent when the question was last asked five years ago. The average American household reports owning 2.6 Apple products, up by a full Apple product from the 2012 survey.

“I cannot think of any other product — especially any other product at a high price point — that has that kind of permeation with the public and level of growth,” said Jay Campbell, pollster with Hart Research, which conducted the survey along with Public Opinion Strategies.

Absolutely incredible when you think about it.

One of my favorite apps on iOS has been updated adding a number of new features, including Drag and Drop. According to Pixelmator, these are the new features available in the update: Pixelmator for iOS is now fully compatible with … Continued

Netflix Inc said on Tuesday it had received formal approval to start a C$500 million production unit in Canada and sought to quell talk that it had asked for special tax benefits for investing in its first such unit outside the United States.

I don’t understand the criticism. A company should ask for all the deals it can, including tax breaks. If a country, city, state, or province doesn’t want the business, jobs, and investment, someone else will.

Fast Company: For minimum wage workers, a small emergency can mean financial disaster. A new app called Onward makes it easy for them to automatically set aside a few dollars each week to start an emergency fund. An app from … Continued

You can ask Siri to do a lot of things with the Apple Music app, and most of them work quite well. I often ask Siri to play the Hard Rock music station and it does. However, I got a nice surprise yesterday with Siri and Apple Music.

Money well spent.

Felix Krause: iOS asks the user for their iTunes password for many reasons, the most common ones are recently installed iOS operating system updates, or iOS apps that are stuck during installation. As a result, users are trained to just … Continued

“In Real Life” is a social experiment that shows what happens when online bullying is taken offline. What a powerful video.

Fun exercise in typography with concrete examples. If you’re not a design nerd steeped in this stuff, there are many good points to keep in mind.

Even when I can’t parse what he’s talking about, I always like reading and hearing Ive’s thoughts on design.

I’d bet the vast majority of us haven’t logged into AIM in years but we also felt a small tinge of regret with the announcement.

Whether you like the “new” iTunes or not, it’s always nice to have options. I’ll be downloading this version ASAP.

Oisin Prendiville:

Ideally, experiences that users have in one app should stand to benefit them in others. As a community of developers and designers we should be looking to agree upon shared best practices to provide a consistent user experience. There’s an opportunity here to help users understand and embrace drag and drop as a powerful way to interact with touch devices, just as they have on the desktop for years.

This is a great article with video examples on how things work. Oisin recently released Castro 2.5 with his implementation on how it all should work.

Thanks to Hullo for sponsoring the Loop this week. A hot, sweaty, flat pillow will wake even the deepest sleeper. Soft traditional pillows collapse under the weight of your head which can cause strains in your neck, shoulders and back. … Continued

Futuremark: Last week, a story went viral that claimed Apple was intentionally slowing down older iPhones to push people to buy its latest models. The claim was based on data which shows Google searches for “iPhone slow” spiking dramatically with … Continued

Very clever and useful hack for us podcasters.

I absolutely love my Les Paul guitars, but Gibson as a company has treated its employees and artists like shit for many years.

An important note if you upgraded to High Sierra and use Line 6 music gear.

Thanks to Bombich Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Bombich Software has released Carbon Copy Cloner 5, an upgrade to its bootable backup software for macOS. The upgrade features scheduled task grouping and sorting, guided setup and restore, task history trend charts, a health check for backups, advanced file filtering, and includes hundreds of improvements and fixes.

Carbon Copy Cloner 5 requires macOS 10.10 or later and will be compatible with APFS and Apple’s macOS 10.13 High Sierra release this autumn. A full-featured thirty day trial version is available.

Carbon Copy Cloner is an app that I’ve used for years, in fact, since it was first released. The new version goes a long way to make the software easier to use, while still adding more advanced features.

You can get 15% off Carbon Copy Cloner until September 3 by using the code LOOPINSIGHT at checkout.

I don’t like the beer, but this commercial is so damn funny.

Apple today announced that Katherine Adams, formerly senior vice president and general counsel of Honeywell, will join Apple as general counsel and senior vice president of Legal and Global Security, reporting to CEO Tim Cook and serving on Apple’s executive team.

The company also announced Bruce Sewell, who has served as Apple’s general counsel since 2009, will be retiring at the end of the year.

Bruce did a great job defending and promoting Apple’s principles as General Counsel. Katherine Adams seems to have the same values as Tim Cook and will make a worthy replacement for Bruce.

Dave Hamilton has some good info on how we can expect Sonos to work—or not—with Apple Music.

A pig, a pen, and lifelogging.

Here’s a humorous look at Google’s announcements yesterday.

The iOS design lab will offer technological training and certification to students, faculty, staff and members of the broader community interested in developing apps in Swift, the Apple programming language used to write some of the most successful apps in the App Store. The lab will support educational innovation, career development for students and economic development opportunities for the central Ohio community and the university’s other campus locations.

The Digital Flagship University initiative will launch during the 2017-18 academic year. The iOS design lab will open in a temporary space in 2018, moving to a permanent location in 2019. Students will begin training in Swift coding in spring semester 2018.

Sounds like a great program for the school and Apple.

Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service — a smart assistant for customer representatives to parse and get better insights from their interactions with users, as well as automate some of the interactions — because the team was (according to a notice on the site) “joining a project that touches the lives of countless people across the world.” TechCrunch has now learned what that project is: the team is joining Apple.

This is great news. As much as Apple touts Siri and how smart it is, I still can’t get it to work reliably.

The author may not realize it but this is actually a hilarious whine about just how good and consistent the iOS experience is.

Apple on Wednesday released an update for Apple Watch owners that fixes an issue where the watch would join—and stay connected to—unauthenticated (captive) Wi-Fi networks.

You can download the update by opening the Apple Watch app on your iPhone, going to General > Software Update and then follow the onscreen instructions.