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Jim and Dan talk about the Microsoft event as it relates to Microsoft’s goal of one OS on every device and computer. They also discuss Dan’s new iPad Air 2 and how he’s using it for code, Jim’s copycat rage, and more.

Solid review from Rene.

Wired:

The first Pill has sold more than a million units since its debut in 2012. Though it’s a hit, it’s gotten long in the tooth and the audio quality is really poor. That makes the Pill the perfect thing to tear down and rebuild. (Also, Bluetooth speakers are way easier than headphones.)

The result, the Beats Pill+, sounds much better, looks much better, and is a far more enticing product than its predecessor. It’s more than just a new piece of mobile candy. It’s an opportunity for Apple to show the extent to which it can shape the design of hardware coming out of its subsidiary.

We won’t know for sure until reviewers get units in hand for testing but the early comments from the Beats demo sound promising. I don’t read anything that makes me want to give up my Libratone Zipp speaker though.

ideaMachine Studio:

We stumbled upon the Steve Jobs “Think Different” marketing campaign speech in light of the new movie release this weekend. As animators, we were really struck when he paused for a good while before he said “… marketing… is about values.” We could see in his body that this thought weighed on him. And, in fact, that thought would determine the direction of Apple for the next two decades.

For Jobs, Apple was not about “making boxes for people to get their jobs done.” He and his executive team needed to be about something more. They needed to think beyond the equipment… beyond the dollars, toward something more. They needed to live in service to a higher calling. It’s hard to hear this speech without being moved. Not just because we are hearing a speech from a dead man, but because we know what Steve Jobs is saying is true. Our studio was challenged by this very real moment. Were we just clocking in and clocking out? Were we living from dollar to dollar? Or, were we working for something more?

I’ve seen this video before but the folks at ideaMachine Studio did some great work in cleaning it up. I may be a bit too cynical and jaded to attribute as much to the speech as they do but I certainly believe the sentiment is in Apple’s DNA. They don’t just want to make money. They really do want to change the world.

Quartz:

Twitter’s strength has always been hosting conversations around live events, but it’s not always easy to find them. Doing so often requires some savvy, juggling multiple tabs within Twitter’s app—not to mention knowing the right hashtags and accounts to follow.

Moments is designed to untangle some of these complexities by relying on curation to surface such conversations. Both Twitter’s staff and its partners—including NASA, Major League Baseball, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and BuzzFeed—will package tweets into collections, which will show up under a new tab called Moments.

I don’t know if I’d describe “Twitter’s strength” in that way but anything Twitter can do to make the service “less confusing” to new users is good for the company and will help keep the investor wolves from their door. Personally, I don’t find Twitter all that confusing but then again, I’ve been using it from the beginning. Am I wrong? Is Twitter confusing for new users?

Here is what Microsoft announced at its event. I still don’t buy into the one OS for all products.

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We’ve been working hard on getting The Loop Magazine updated for iOS, but we’ve added a couple of nice features too. We’ve updated the entire backend of the magazine, so things should be much faster for everyone.

My favorite feature is a new universal search. You can now type in a keyword and it will search every published issue of the magazine. Just tap on the result and it will take you right to the story.

In addition, Issue 35 was published today with looking at the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, 3D Touch, watch OS 2, iPad Pro, Apple TV from a gamer’s perspective, Wearable health reminders, and more.

Another issue of the magazine is almost ready to go and will focus on Apple Music.

You can download The Loop Magazine app for iPhone and iPad for free. Subscriptions are $1.99 per month.

“In this respect, Apple has been its own worst enemy,” he said. “This lack of cooperation has cast an unnecessary shadow over meaningful progress in developing a comprehensive and effective antitrust compliance program.”

Perhaps Apple, like many of us, are still wondering how the hell Amazon gets away with so much, without any punishment.

Jim and Merlin talk about appreciating ‘good enough’ and how to start playing guitar, and Merlin gets really excited about his new Amazon Echo.

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Matt is in a unique position to write about this debate:

I’m on both sides of this debate.

Let’s get the obvious argument out of the way: if you block ads, you’re depriving sites of revenue they presumably need in order to continue running, and if too many people do that, those sites are likely to go away. The reality is more complicated, but the argument is essentially sound – all other things being equal, and unchanged.

Craig Mod on his reading habits:

But in the past two years, something unexpected happened: I lost the faith. Gradually at first and then undeniably, I stopped buying digital books. I realised this only a few months ago, when taking stock of my library, both digital and physical. Physical books – most of all, works of literary fiction – I continue to acquire voraciously. I split my time between New York and Tokyo, and know that with each New York trip I’ll pick up a dozen or more volumes from bookstores or friends.

I found this really interesting.

Thanks to SVALT for sponsoring The Loop this week. Use code “LOOP” for a $15 discount on the ultimate high-performance Apple laptop dock, the SVALT D Performance Cooling Dock, that increases CPU Turbo Boost speeds by 106% and speeds up 4K exports in Final Cut Pro X by 10% on 15-in Retina MacBook Pro.

The Wall Street Journal:

Four years after Steve Jobs’s death, a new movie is reopening a debate over the Apple Inc. co-founder’s legacy.

Mr. Jobs’s allies, led by his widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, say the film “Steve Jobs,” and other recent depictions, play down his accomplishments and paint Mr. Jobs as cruel and inhumane. Ms. Jobs repeatedly tried to kill the film, according to people familiar with the conversations. She lobbied, among others, Sony Pictures Entertainment, which developed the script but passed on the movie for financial reasons, and Comcast Corp.’s Universal Pictures, which is releasing the $33.5 million production on Friday.

“A whole generation is going to think of him in a different way if they see a movie that depicts him in a negative way,” said Bill Campbell, a longtime Apple board member and friend of Mr. Jobs. Mr. Campbell hasn’t seen the film.

I don’t know that I agree with Campbell on his assessment of Jobs’ legacy and whether or not this movie will taint it. I doubt it. The debate will continue for generations with each making their own evaluations.

The most interesting tidbit in this story, and a piece of information that hadn’t been disclosed up until now, is the fact that Wozniak was paid $200,000 to consult on the film.

Petapixel:

Personal videos have long been an integral part of our lives, allowing us to share and cherish memories with our friends and family. Apple’s recent release of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s+ have introduced ultra high-definition 4K video recording to a massive new audience. With such a powerful device, you may want to tweak your footage before you share it. Today, we are taking a quick look at five different editing solutions for your iOS device.

As a photographer, I don’t mess around with video on my iPhone very much but when I do, I use a couple of these free apps to quickly bang out something I can post online.

Mother Jones:

Every photo ever taken by Apollo astronauts on moon missions is now available online, on the Project Apollo Archive’s Flickr account. That’s about 8,400 images, grouped by the roll of film they were shot on. You can finally see all the blurry images, mistakes, and unrecognized gems for yourself. The unprocessed Hasseblad photos (basically raw scans of the negatives) uploaded by the Project Apollo Archive offer a fascinating behind-the-scenes peek at the various moon missions as well as lots and lots (and lots) of photos detailing the surface of the moon.

This is one of those Flickr pages you don’t want to go to unless you have a lot of free time this afternoon.

This looks really interesting. It combines streaming services like Netflix and includes SkipMode, which completely skips over commercial breaks by pressing one button.

The first project is to build an artificial brain from scratch that can pass a high school science test. It sounds simple enough, but trying to teach a machine not only to respond but also to reason is one of the hardest software-engineering endeavors attempted — far more complex than building his former company’s breakthrough Windows operating system, said to have 50 million lines of code.

The second project aims to understand intelligence by coming at it from the opposite direction — by starting with nature and deconstructing and analyzing the pieces. It’s an attempt to reverse-engineer the human brain by slicing it up — literally — modeling it and running simulations.

Apple has purchased VocalIQ, a startup located in the United Kingdom that has developed a natural language API to allow computers and people to have a more natural dialogue, reports Financial Times. According to VocalIQ’s website, the company has developed a self-learning dialogue API built on 10 years of natural language research, belief tracking, decision making, and message generation.

Siri is becoming an increasingly important part of how people interact with Apple’s devices and operating systems.

Thanks to Twocanoes Software for sponsoring The Loop this week. Makers of Winclone, the best Mac app for migrating, cloning and backing up your Boot Camp partition. This week Loop readers can use the code “theloop” to get 10% off Winclone 5, just in time to backup Boot Camp before upgrading to El Capitan. If you run Boot Camp in labs or classrooms, Boot Runner 2 from Twocanoes is a time saver for remote scheduling of maintenance reboots and an easy to use OS picker for your users. Check out the video or get the 14-day trial and see how easy Boot Runner makes managing dual boot Macs.

The European Commission is probing whether Samsung televisions’ sensed when they were being tested for energy efficiency and changed their power consumption to get better ratings than they deserved.

Samsung admits that its TVs radically changed their power-consumption during testing, but say that the low-power mode was inadvertently triggered by the tests, and was meant to be an automatic power-saving feature.

Sure it was.

NPR:

Apple has long touted the power and design of its devices, but recently the world’s most valuable company has been emphasizing another feature: privacy. That’s no small matter when many users store important private data on those devices: account numbers, personal messages, photos.

Apple CEO Tim Cook talks to NPR’s Robert Siegel about how the company protects its customers’ data, and how it uses — or doesn’t use — that information.

Yet another fascinating interview with Cook. He is really hammering home the security and privacy angle of Apple’s corporate position.

Bloomberg:

Amazon.com Inc. will stop selling media-streaming devices from Google Inc. and Apple Inc. that aren’t easily compatible with its video service, the latest example of the company using its clout to promote products that fit with its own retailing strategy.

The Seattle-based Web retailer sent an e-mail to its marketplace sellers that it will stop selling the Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast since those devices don’t “interact well” with Prime Video. No new listings for the products will be allowed and posting of existing inventory will be removed Oct. 29, Amazon said.

Interesting, if foolhardy, move by Amazon. They want to push sales of their own product so much, they are willing to give up the revenue generated by the more popular competitors products. I bet this means we won’t be seeing Amazon’s Prime Video on the Apple TV anytime soon.

Medium:

Ms. Fiorina’s trainwreck stint at HP has been well documented. But I want to address one tiny but telling aspect of her misbegotten reign: an episode that involved her good friend Steve Jobs. It is the story of the HP iPod.

The iPod, of course, was Apple’s creation, a groundbreaking digital music player that let you have “a music library in your pocket.” Introduced in 2001, it gained steam over the next few years and by the end of 2003, the device was a genuine phenomenon. So it was news that in January 2004, Steve Jobs and Carly Fiorina made a deal where HP could slap its name on Apple’s wildly successful product. Nonetheless, HP still managed to botch things. It could not have been otherwise, really, because Steve Jobs totally outsmarted the woman who now claims she can run the United States of America.

I can talk about this with some authority. Not only have I written a book about the iPod, but I interviewed Fiorina face to face when she introduced the HP iPod at the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show, and then got Steve Jobs’s side of the story.

Hindsight is 20/20 but many of us saw this deal as a “Huh? WHY!?” kind of move by HP. Many more of us predicted it would be a disaster, but not for Apple.

Good list of some of the top companies and where they stand with compatibility. Obviously, this will continue to change. Personally, I keep my music production machine a version back to ensure all of my music software works.

Google is close to rolling out a tool named “Customer Match” which, it appears, will combine a logged-in Google account with any email address handed by a customer to a retailer to create lists of addresses to target specific users with marketing material.

Creepy bastards.

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Google Inc (GOOGL.O) have agreed to bury all patent infringement litigation against each other, the companies announced on Wednesday, settling 18 cases in the United States and Germany.

Interesting.

Some very interesting changes in how Windows is installed in Boot Camp on OS X 10.11 “El Capitan”. When you open Boot Camp Assistant on a new Mac that supports Windows 8 or later, you’ll get the new Boot Camp interface.

Good information if you use Boot Camp.

Nobody’s home has perfect acoustics, and we don’t want to adapt our lives around our speakers. Your speakers should sound great, wherever you choose to put them. So, we decided to make them adapt to the environment around you. We call this Trueplay. Sonos speakers already sound fantastic, but Trueplay brings you even closer to how music should sound. With Trueplay tuning, your speaker can analyze the acoustic profile of any room and fine-tune itself. Most importantly, tuning with Trueplay is incredibly easy to do.

This sounds really impressive. I love Sonos products and can’t wait to hear this.

Sometimes I just love Gruber.