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Apple Music surpasses 10 million paid subscribers

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Apple Music has surpassed 10 million subscribers across iOS, Mac, PC, Android and Apple TV in just six months, a milestone that took its largest rival Spotify around six years to accomplish.

Yep, this sounds right to me.

Apple is getting out of the ad sales business

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While iAd itself isn’t going anywhere, Apple’s direct involvement in the selling and creation of iAd units is ending. “It’s just not something we’re good at,” one source told BuzzFeed News. And so Apple is leaving the creation, selling, and management of iAds to the folks who do it best: the publishers.

I think this is good news. Ads are just not where Apple’s focus should be.

The Oristand standing desk

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Oristand:

The Oristand is a standing desk made of cardboard that easily collapses and requires no complicated assembly. It’s made out of industrial grade cardboard that is light, strong and affordable. Not to mention it is 100% recyclable. Meaning you can save some cash and we can save some trees.

I’ve been interested in standing desks for a while but most are over $200. At $25, this looks like something you could test out inexpensively. It’s being produced by the folks behind the Vancouver, BC based Hootsuite.

Blue Lola headphones review

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After having a runaway hit with the Mo-Fi Headphones (check out our review here), Blue is back at it again with a new pair of passive, closed-back isolation headphones. The Lola headphones promise to deliver much of what is loved about the Mo-Fi model, but at a more budget-friendly price and without compromising on some of the forward-thinking design features. I used Lola for a few weeks to see if they were able to live up to the promise.

I enjoyed this review by Matt Vanacoro.

The Dalrymple Report with Merlin Mann: Power Nipple

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Jim an Merlin discuss finding new music, using an iPad for ‘real work’, and rock star cameos.

Subscribe to this podcast

Links:

Here’s $100. Can you win $1.5 billion at Powerball?

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L.A. Times:

The odds of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in 292,201,338. But someone has to win, right? We decided to put that idea to the test.This game starts with $100 to play against multiple lottery drawings. Pick your numbers and watch the money disappear.

I spent $10,000 and “won” $814. That being said, I will still very occasionally buy a lottery ticket, even knowing the odds are stacked against me if only because it’s fun to dream, even if only for a little while, about that kind of money and what I’d do with it.

The two Apples

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Above Avalon:

There are two Apples: AAPL, the stock, and Apple, the company. While it would seem logical that one is merely a reflection of the other, in reality, the two are guided by vastly different parameters. Over the long run, Apple and AAPL will likely be at odds with each other due to the very nature of Apple’s long-term mission of making products that people love. It is the classic Wall Street vs. Silicon Valley battle, and 2015 was likely just a taste of what is to come.

It would be an understatement to say that AAPL had a weak 2015. When looking at stock price performance, AAPL’s underperformance was quite striking. While GOOG, FB, and AMZN saw strong double-digit stock price increases, AAPL reported a rare 3% decline, the first annual decline since 2008. Even more striking, AAPL’s performance meant that the market removed $46 billion of market cap from AAPL in 2015, whereas AMZN and GOOG were given nearly $350 billion of additional market capitalization.

Wall St never ceases to amaze me and I don’t mean that in a good way. From the outside, it looks like Apple – with record profits, sales, market share and category ownership – would be a Wall Street success story, Cybart does a good job of explaining why the exact opposite is true.

Apple Previews iOS 9.3 with Night Shift, Health and News improvements, new education features

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Macstories:

Earlier today, Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 9.3, which will introduce several new functionalities for built-in apps and for education users. To highlight some of the changes in this release, Apple has launched a mini-site with screenshots and descriptions of what’s coming in iOS 9.3.

Lots of good looking features here.

Tesla limits autopilot in Model S

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The function will now be restricted on residential roads or roads without a center divider, meaning the car cannot drive faster than the speed limit maximum plus five miles (8 km) per hour.

I don’t know how I feel about this whole thing. On one hand they are keeping if off the freeways, but the residential areas is where kids play, right?

When Autopilot launched in October, Musk cautioned the hotly anticipated function was in beta mode, or a test phase of development, with full ‘hands-off’ driving not recommended.

Is this really the type of technology we want to launch in beta mode?

BusyMac: Take control of your calendar and contacts in 2016 [Sponsor]

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Take control of your calendar and contacts in 2016 with BusyMac’s Two-for-One New Year’s resolution offer. Get BusyCal and BusyContacts together for only $49.99 — that’s two award-winning apps for the price of one!

BusyCal and BusyContacts are ideal for those who want more power and flexibility than the built-in Calendar and Contacts apps on OS X have to offer. BusyCal and BusyContacts are compatible with iCloud, Google and Exchange, and integrate seamlessly to form an easy to use solution for managing all of your contacts and activities.

Organize your calendar and contacts this new year and save $49.99 with this limited time Two-for-One offer from BusyMac!

When ‘The X-Files’ became A-List: An oral history of Fox’s out-there success story

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The Hollywood Reporter:

The X-Files’ complicated mythology, both real and scripted, makes its history the source of endless pop-culture autopsies. But as Fox readies a six-episode revival (starting Jan. 24), the people most responsible for the enduring franchise sound off — for the first time in the same place — about how the show came to be. And be again.

I’ve always been a huge fan of this show (and was even an extra on a few episodes). When it was good (and it wasn’t in the last couple of years on air), it was the best show on TV and I’m really looking forward to seeing the new episodes.

More thoughts on Apple’s headphone jack

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Peter Kirn writing for Create Digital Media:

There are two common misunderstandings of the news. One reading (from Apple critics) assumes this locks you into proprietary Apple headphones. It doesn’t. The other (from Apple fans who don’t know that much about audio) assumes higher audio fidelity from “digital” headphones. It probably doesn’t mean that, either (there are some benefits to putting the digital-to-analog converters off the device, but no indication yet that will necessarily mean better sound). First, let’s consider why Apple would do such a thing.

I still don’t see the downside to making this change.

Igloo Software: What if you could get 5% of your day back?

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Thanks to Igloo Software for sponsoring The Loop this week.

What if you could get 5% of your day back? What would you do?

You already have enough work to do today and shouldn’t have to waste time looking for the things you need to do your job.

Igloo makes it easy to find what you need, when you need it. And it’s not just for locating your traditional intranet stuff like HR policies and expense forms. It also helps you find experts, talk about problems and share content with your team. So stop digging through your inbox for that file from 3 months back and give yourself the tools you need to do your best work.

Try it yourself or send your IT guy to investigate Igloo, an intranet you’ll actually like.

Supercut shows how Hollywood thinks hacking works

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Mentalfloss:

One movie trope Hollywood just can’t seem to move past? The frantic hacker. Here’s how those scenes usually go: A character on the screen is shown banging away at a keyboard while a timer counts down and lines of code flash across their monitor. But how realistic is that? YouTuber elsafrickey compiled clips from various movies made between 1970 and 2000, and the resulting supercut shows that while technology has changed over the years, the misrepresentation of hacking has remained consistent.

I won’t lie – I’ve made several girlfriends and one wife nuts from yelling at the TV screen, “That’s not how it’s done!”

How Mickey Mouse evades the public domain

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Priceonomics:

In 1997, Congress introduced the Copyright Term Extension Act, which proposed to extend corporate copyrights again — this time, from 75 to 95 years. To ensure the bill passed, Disney cozied up to legislators.

Watchdog records show that the Disney Political Action Committee (PAC) paid out a total of $149,612 in direct campaign contributions to those considering the bill. Of the bill’s 25 sponsors (12 in the Senate, and 13 in the House), 19 received money from Disney’s CEO, Michael Eisner. In one instance, Eisner paid Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) $1,000 on the very same day that he signed on as a co-sponsor.

While it is impossible to say for certain whether or not Disney’s efforts directly impacted politics, the results heavily worked out in their favor: the bill quietly and unanimously passed in the House and Senate with no public hearings, no debate, no notice to the public, and no roll call.

On October 27, 1998, Mickey Mouse’s copyright was extended another 20 years, to 2023.

That’s only seven years away. We can look forward to Disney extending the Mickey Mouse copyright again and again with no public oversight or comment.

Everything Google is working on for the new year

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Ars Technica:

It’s that time of the year again—welcome to the Google Tracker! This is a bi-annual series where we recap every ongoing project (that we know about, at least) inside of Google’s sprawling empire.

This is a long, long list.

Apple in talks to stream NFL London games

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The National Football League is planning to live-stream all three games scheduled to be played in London next season, and Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc subsidiary Google are among the technology companies in talks to buy the rights to conduct the streams, said two sources familiar with the situation.

This will be a big win for whoever gets the streaming rights. It’s interesting that the NFL deemed streaming this year with Yahoo a success, but Yahoo isn’t mentioned anywhere as being a contender for next year’s games.

U.S. Marshals raid hoverboard booth at CES

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The maker of the Onewheel electric skateboard called in federal marshals to shut down the booth of a company making a similar product.

The guy tried to deal with the company and ask them to stop stealing his product—they wouldn’t even respond. I think they’re listening now.

Safari turns 13

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Steve Jobs unveiled the “Fastest Web Browser Ever Created for the Mac” this day back in 2003, introducing the Safari web browser that four years later would power a new kind of mobile browsing experience on iPhone.

I was there when Safari was introduced. It’s been quite a run for Safari on Mac and iOS.

The iPhone headphone jack

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There have been a lot of rumors surrounding a change to the headphone jack in an upcoming version of the iPhone. Basically, Apple is working with its supplier to use the iPhone’s Lightning port for audio and get rid of the traditional headphone jack. […]

Pete Townshend and his console

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There is just nothing better than hearing someone like Pete talk about how he uses his console to write and record.

Apple buys startup that reads people’s emotions

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Apple Inc. has purchased Emotient Inc., a startup that uses artificial-intelligence technology to read people’s emotions by analyzing facial expressions.

Fascinating technology. There are a number of uses for it, including advertising, but I don’t think that’s what Apple will use it for.

Doctors also have tested it to interpret signs of pain among patients unable to express themselves, and a retailer used it to monitor shoppers’ facial expressions in store aisles, the company had said.

Both of those options seem viable to me, especially the medical angle, given Apple’s foray into helping the medical profession recently.

Canadians more upbeat than US neighbours, at least on Twitter

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McMaster University:

We watch the same TV shows, listen to the same music and wear the same clothes. But when it comes to what we say on Twitter, Canadians and Americans could hardly be more different.

After analyzing millions of tweets, McMaster linguists have found that Canadians tend to be a pretty polite, happy bunch of tweeters.

They also found that our neighbours’ tweets tend to be a little more, uh, raunchy.

You Americans are apparently a foul-mouthed bunch.