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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.”

Thanks to BusyMac for sponsoring The Loop this week. 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!

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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.

1 Password has become one of my must-have apps on Mac and iOS.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Subscribe to this podcast

Links:

• Yo La Tengo – Fakebook
• Canvas Podcast from RelayFM
• Yo la Tengo – Fakebook (1990) Full album – YouTube
• The Plimsouls – A Million Miles Away (Valley Girl – 1983) – YouTube
• Drew Carey Show – Guest Musicians – YouTube
• Guns N’ Roses – Paradise City – YouTube
• Cat Stevens – “Here Comes My Baby”

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.

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.

Looks like I’ll need to pick up a Ferrari this weekend.

A great look at iTunes over the years by Kirk McElhearn.

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.

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?

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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!

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.

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.

Thanks to Igloo Software for sponsoring The Loop this week.

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