Apple:
Apple’s conference call to discuss fourth fiscal quarter results is scheduled for Tuesday, January 26, 2016 at 2:00 pm PT/5:00 pm ET.
As always, this call is open to the public via the webcast. Only analysts are allowed to call in and ask questions. It promises to be yet more record numbers for Apple.
This week, Jim and Merlin talk David Bowie. Also, Jim tries Windows 10.
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Today at NAMM, Apogee Electronics and Waves Audio announced a partnership that will connect the world’s most advanced multi-channel audio recording interface to the world’s most powerful DSP enabled audio network. Symphony I/O Mk II, Apogee’s new flagship converter, will offer optional SoundGrid connectivity, enabling it to connect to the Waves SoundGrid System for studio, live and post production audio networking with real-time digital signal processing of Waves and SoundGrid compatible third-party plugins.
This is a very interesting partnership. Apogee makes some terrific products—some of the best.
the Marshall JMP 2203 plug-in is an expert emulation of the legendary ultra-flexible 100-watt amplifier used by everyone from Iron Maiden and Slayer, to Jeff Beck and My Bloody Valentine.
I can’t wait to get home and try this plug-in. I love everything that UA does, but a rocking Marshall could be the best yet. UA also released the Sonnox Oxford Envolution and the Brainworx bx_digital V3 EQ Collection.
Either engaged automatically by just hitting a switch on the Profiler Remote or dynamically by using an expression pedal, all continuous parameters can be changed smoothly to take the tone from ultra dry clean rhythm to utmost distorted, FX soaked lead tones.
Kemper made a big splash a few years back with its amp profiling and while I haven’t had extensive experience with it, others I know have said they really like it.
Among the new shapes are 12-fret Grand Concerts (552ce 12-Fret, 562ce 12-Fret), Grand Orchestra guitar models (458e, 858e), along with a new 12-string Dreadnought (360e). Powers’ design philosophy is focused on giving players a broader spectrum of 12-string voices to enable them to find the right fit.
I’m heading up to Taylor’s booth to check these out today. Taylor is my favorite acoustic, but I don’t have a lot of experience with 12-strings, so it should be interesting.
The Washington Post:
Q-tips are one of the most perplexing things for sale in America. Plenty of consumer products are widely used in ways other than their core function — books for leveling tables, newspapers for keeping fires aflame, seltzer for removing stains, coffee tables for resting legs — but these cotton swabs are distinct. Q-tips are one of the only, if not the only, major consumer products whose main purpose is precisely the one the manufacturer explicitly warns against.
I’m sure I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to using Q-tips in a way that can be harmful but at least I’m not my mother. She’d use bobby pins (kids, ask your grandmother) to “clean” her ears.
Poor Harrison Ford. His life is a never ending series of disasters.
I’m usually pretty excited when Apple updates its music software, but I was blown away when they showed me their newest app, Music Memos and the updates they did to GarageBand on iOS. […]
Re/code:
Donald Trump, the billionaire and leading Republican candidate for President of the United States, says he wants Apple, the biggest technology company in the world by market valuation, to make its computers and other products in America. It made for a good sound bite, but it betrayed a deep ignorance of how the tech economy actually works and the role of American workers in it.When it comes to understanding technology, as he has proven time and again, Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
He’s an utter buffoon. He’s either ignorant about the power he’d have as president or being deliberately stupid. Either way, he’s proving unfit for the job he wants, let alone the job he has.
I love the Mac. I feel no need to replace it with one of Apple’s other devices, like iPad, nor would I think of replacing it with another type of Windows-based computer. While Apple has focused a lot of attention and resources on mobile over the past few years, it has also made quite a number of significant improvements to the Mac. That fact is often overlooked by many people in the industry. […]
Atlas Obscura:
If you think that Prohibition is a thing of the past, think again. There are a surprising number of places in the U.S. where the sale and consumption of alcohol is still illegal.While Prohibition was repealed in 1933, many municipalities opted to keep the ban in place. Thirty-three states allow for localities to prohibit the sale of alcohol, and in some cases consumption and possession. Kansas, Tennessee and Mississippi are dry states by default and require individual counties to opt in to sell alcohol.
When I lived in the Southern US, I always found it weirdly quaint, but annoying nonetheless, how many places had prohibitions on the sale and service of alcohol. The best example is Lynchburg, Tennessee, the home of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey. You can’t drink Jack Daniel’s in the place where it’s distilled.
iMore:
Apple will soon be increasing the prices of paid apps and in-app purchases in a handful of countries due to exchange rate changes. App Stores affected by the change will be those in Canada, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, and South Africa. Those using in-app subscriptions in Russia and South Africa will need to resubscribe.These sorts of adjustments are not uncommon. The changes in pricing are expected to take place across these countries in the next 72 hours, according to an email sent to developers by Apple.
While this is disappointing, it’s not surprising. The Canadian dollar in particular has dropped like a stone in the past few months.
Petapixel:
When people ask me what lens they should get after buying their first camera, I always tell them to buy a 50mm f/1.8 lens because it’s one of the cheapest and one of the coolest lens you could buy.Why should you buy it? Here are 8 different reasons.
One of the first lenses I recommend beginning photographers buy is one of the “Nifty Fifties”. They are relatively inexpensive, generally better than the kit lens that came with your camera, great in low light conditions and will force you to move your feet to get the shot rather than just zooming into it.
Gardai responded to the scene and have confirmed that a number of plants have been evacuated.
It is understood that several threatening emails were received by the company.
There is nothing in the report to indicate what the threat was, but the plants were evacuated.
MIC:
The most shocking statistic in the report, released Sunday, is this: In 2015, a mere 62 people held the same amount of wealth as “the bottom half of humanity” — 3.5 billion people. Identifying the reasons why this is happening is as important as the statistic itself.Things are getting bad, quickly: In 2010, it took 388 individuals to match the wealth of the bottom half. But in the past five years, wealth has become so concentrated in the hands of the global elite that the number has reduced dramatically.
This story is more than just a little depressing.
Business Insider:
It’s all but a given that Apple is developing a car (even Elon Musk called the project “an open secret” in the auto industry). But when it comes to a new kind of personal computing gadget, several recent acquisitions and hires hint that Apple is at least exploring augmented reality.As always, Apple is tight lipped about what it’s cooking up in its research and development labs. But a recent series of acquisitions and hires shows the company is at least experimenting with augmented reality.
Let’s take a look at the evidence.
BI is using the tired cliche of “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” but what do you think? Is VR/AR “the next major computing platform”? While tech nerds may be salivating over VR and AR, do you think The Normals want this platform? Will VR be the next HD TV or the next 3D TV?
CBC:
A Victoria widow is outraged over Apple’s demand that she obtain a court order to retrieve her dead husband’s password so she can play games on an iPad.“I thought it was ridiculous. I could get the pensions, I could get benefits, I could get all kinds of things from the federal government and the other government. But from Apple, I couldn’t even get a silly password. It’s nonsense,” 72-year-old Peggy Bush told Go Public.
Experts warn this is a growing problem, as more people die leaving important information and valuable digital property on computers and electronic devices.
The news media is typically and gleefully playing up this story (it will get resolved by Apple without any court order required), it does bring forward some of the issues we are and will continue to have with our digital lives.
Apple:
“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is ‘What are you doing for others?'”
Tim Cook has often said that Dr King is one of his heroes and today, on Martin Luther King Jr Day, Apple’s front page is dedicated to him.
Venturebeat:
It’s always been important for advertisers and content creators to consider their target audience when developing an ad campaign. In the past year, however, we have seen a slew of ad campaigns that seem to have skipped over this essential, yet obvious, standard. Perhaps advertisers forget that unless they carefully understand and represent their audience’s values, they’ll get bombarded with aggressive tweets, posts, pins, and shares, calling them cold, insensitive, and downright ignorant.These kinds of campaigns can easily be avoided if advertisers learn to engage better with their consumers so that they truly grasp their audience’s character.
That said, here are seven ad campaigns that just plain failed in 2015.
As much as many of us, myself included, hate most of the advertising we see, a good campaign can really capture our attention. Sadly, so can a bad one. These campaigns make you wonder how the hell they managed to make it out into the wild.
“We are making Beats 1 the premier free broadcast from Apple and phasing out the ad-supported stations at the end of January,” an Apple spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “Additionally, with an Apple Music membership, listeners can access dozens of radio stations curated by our team of music experts, covering a range of genres, commercial-free with unlimited skips. The free three-month trial of Apple Music includes radio.”
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Beta Monkey’s Jazz Essentials IV is a diverse downloadable set of live jazz drum tracks with over 3 GB of jazz drumming performances of essential jazz standards.
I love Beta Monkey’s products. I have too many of them to even count and use them all the time in my recordings.
Positive Grid teamed up the world’s brightest DSP engineers and component level modeling and profiling authorities, working with the world’s leading producers, world-class engineers, and mixing & mastering gurus to develop some breakthrough technologies to bring software plug-ins to the next level.
The video is really interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing more about this.
Steven Levy:
I press a button on the steering column, and a female voice accompanied by an icy synthesizer note — the kind of thing you hear when monorail doors are about to close — intones the word, “Autodrive.” Something catches in my throat; it may be the closest thing I’ll know to flying the Millennium Falcon when it thrusts into hyperspace. In truth, not much really changes. The Lexus rolls forward and rambles down a street in a neighborhood that is all streets and no buildings or people, a Potemkin village of roadways. There is an intersection ahead with a stop sign. The car stops. My foot has not touched the brake.I am behind the wheel of a Google self-driving car.
There is no doubt autonomous cars are the future so these articles about the early days fascinate me. There are still a lot of issues, both inside the car and out, that need to be resolved before fantasy becomes reality though.
The San Gabriel Valley Tribune:
For kids of a certain age — say, 35 and up — it’s the stuff dreams are made of: more than 900 vintage pinball and arcade games, with almost no duplicates among them.Although many of these machines once sucked quarters out of pockets at a dizzying pace — Dragon’s Lair alone likely drained more piggy banks of allowance money than anything else in 1983 — they’ll all be available to play for a single price this weekend at the Museum of Pinball in Banning.
How much fun would it be to spend a weekend in this place?
I believe this was originally written in 2011, but so appropriate now.
Alan Rickman died from cancer. Snape, Hans Gruber, and so much more. Damn.
Engadget:
It’s tough times for GoPro’s fledgling empire. The action camera maker is cutting the jobs of about 7 percent of its workforce (roughly 105 people) after poor sales during the fourth quarter, particularly in the first half. It doesn’t have a detailed explanation for the drop, but it recently slashed the price of the notoriously expensive Hero4 Session — clearly, it misjudged how much people were willing to pay for the tiny cube cam.
As my very smart friend Ben Bajarin said on Twitter, “GoPro simply maxed their user base, peaking essentially. No reason for base to buy new ones and no product to expand their TAM.”
In other words, everyone who wants a GoPro likely already has one. As a motorcyclist, I always thought it would be cool to have one until I realized, I’m never going to watch/edit/post the video so why bother?
Motley Fool:
While reasonable people can disagree about Apple’s iPhone sales, Global Equities Research Co-Founder Trip Chowdhry pulls no punches with his newest Apple commentary. Instead of discussing the merits or limitations of the company as an investment, Chowdhry resorts to ad hominem attacks, calling Apple CEO Tim Cook “completely clueless.” If you set aside the unnecessary rhetoric, and dig into Chowdhry’s concerns, his argument doesn’t pass muster.
Chowdhry is known for making wild and mostly wrong predictions about Apple. Remember his 2014 claim that Apple “…only (has) 60 days left to either come up with something or they will disappear”? But, as the article points out, these claims are more about Chowdhry and his company’s profile than they are about any accuracy about Apple. Which makes his pointless name calling even more disgusting.