Apple Music has rebranded its The A-List: Alternative playlist as ALT CTRL, spotlighting new music across the broad spectrum of alternative music, Billboard can exclusively reveal. The playlist will be handpicked by the company’s staff curators.
ALT CTRL’s playlist art will feature a new artist each week, with the first cover stars being Haim, the Los Angeles pop-rock trio who just released the new single “Summer Girl” on Wednesday.
Other artists featured on ALT CTRL this week include Death Cab for Cutie, Billie Eilish, Fitz and the Tantrums, Twenty One Pilots, White Reaper and Clairo. The playlist will be constantly updated with new songs.
If you love hearing stories about Steve Jobs and Apple, carve out some time and immerse yourself in master storyteller Scott Knaster’s one-man show, Adjacent to Greatness.
Ignore the production values and just listen to tales from someone who was in the room, a fly on the wall, at some very interesting moments in time.
911 dispatchers in Nebraska say an Apple upgrade is to blame for a rise in the number of unintentional calls.
Sarpy County Communications in Papillion said it has received 7,000 abandoned calls so far this year, taking up valuable time and resources that could used for true emergencies.
As you might have guessed, these hangups are due to accidental 911 calls triggered by fall detection and Emergency SOS.
“My Apple watch, while [I was] wrestling with the grandchildren, called 911. All of the sudden my watch was talking to me and asking if everything was OK,” he said. In a panic, he hung up.
Is this a design problem? A user education problem? Both?
Officials say if you do misdial 911, please stay on the line to answer the dispatcher’s questions.
If you stay on the line, you can let the 911 operator know it was a misdial, save them trying to track you down in case the emergency was real.
In response to concerns raised by a Guardian story last week over how recordings of Siri queries are used for quality control, Apple is suspending the program world wide. Apple says it will review the process that it uses, called grading, to determine whether Siri is hearing queries correctly, or being invoked by mistake.
In addition, it will be issuing a software update in the future that will let Siri users choose whether they participate in the grading process or not.
And:
“We are committed to delivering a great Siri experience while protecting user privacy,” Apple said in a statement to TechCrunch. “While we conduct a thorough review, we are suspending Siri grading globally. Additionally, as part of a future software update, users will have the ability to choose to participate in grading.”
So opens Apple’s latest Behind the Mac ad, officially called “Test the Impossible”.
I love great writing and, to me, this is a great open. It speaks to me. Gives me permission to fail. Addresses the same soft call to genius as Here’s to the crazy ones.
I’ve always felt Macs were different. Special.
Nice writing, Apple.
UPDATE: Turns out this is from a speech Neil Gaiman gave in 2012. Here’s a link to Neil’s tweet laying this out. Yeah, he can write. [H/T Jon Alper]
During its third quarter earnings call earlier this week, Apple delivered good news as it beat estimates and saw revenue reach a new June quarter record. Chief among the reasons it did so was its services category which continues to grow exponentially. In fact, the services category is now bigger than Apple was as a whole ten years ago according to Horace Dediu.
What an incredible rise for services. Apple is still bullish on what services will make for the company over the next few years, which says a lot about what they expect to happen.
The Federal Trade Commission is probing Facebook Inc to check if the social media company’s acquisitions were aimed at snapping up potential rivals before they could become a threat, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter.
That’s one way to look at it. I see Facebook buying up companies they think will be the next popular social media thing allowing it to continue expanding into “what’s cool.”
Apple is hosting a new Music Lab that will allow attendees to create their own unique remix of Billie Eilish’s song “you should see me in a crown.” The sessions will be held in every Apple Store worldwide, starting tomorrow, according to Apple.
“In this session, you’ll deconstruct Billie Eilish’s song “you should see me in a crown,” find out what inspired her, and create your own version of the song using GarageBand on iPhone. Devices will be provided,” according to Apple’s web site.
According to Apple, Labs dive deeper into a creative approach by getting you started on a project that you can take further. Labs build on your existing skills.
The Labs session is part of a series that will see a Remix with Madonna and other artists in the future, Apple said.
I really like posts like this one: Very visual, easy to make your way through, focused on a single topic.
In this case, it’s a series of GIFs showing the key gestures your want to master to get the most out of iPadOS. Worth your time, if only to make sure you are aware of all of these.
Are you a bit of a gym rat? Perhaps a circuit all laid out with different days for, say, chest, back, and legs, with some cardio in there for good measure?
If this sounds like you, take the time to check out the newly released SmartGym 4. SmartGym 4 is a gorgeous solution to your exercise routine tracking. It’ll help guide your workouts and is closely integrated with your Apple Watch.
When the opening riff of Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times Bad Times” came through the radio in 1969, everything changed. Jimmy Page altered the course of popular music with a single guitar: his 1959 Fender Telecaster. Co-designed with Page, the Fender Jimmy Page Telecaster is an homage to that legendary instrument, which created some of the most iconic riffs of the 20th Century.
I remember Jimmy playing mostly Gibson guitars, but any instrument co-designed by Page is worth a look.
Timed with the spread of its first-party mapping data, Apple is giving the Maps app a big upgrade in iOS 13 that represents the company’s biggest push yet to overtake Google Maps as the world’s most trusted, go-to mapping service. Apple Maps in iOS 13 represents – if you’re in the US at least – Apple’s purest vision to date for a modern mapping service.
I really like Apple Maps these days. Yes, it had a difficult start, but that was years ago and Apple has been doing a lot of work to make Maps the best.
If you spent any time looking into which Mac desktop or notebook to buy before you paid out for a shiny new machine, you’ll have seen Apple’s website extolling the fact that many of them have T2 security chips. That’s nice. Only, it’s more than nice, it’s more than a way to invisibly secure your Mac, it is a process that has a dramatic and visible effect on just about everything you do.
And:
It sits there to ensure, first of all, that nothing can ever get loaded onto your machine without you explicitly wanting it to. The T2 chip provides a secure boot, which means that the only things that can run at start up is trusted, approved macOS software.
And:
Built into it is a dedicated Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) hardware engine. This makes sure the data on your storage drives is encrypted and because it’s done in hardware, there’s no hit to the speed of your Mac as macOS reads and writes data.
And:
There’s one more security feature the T2 chip brings that doesn’t get appreciated because it doesn’t tend to get noticed. If you have a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with a T2 chip and you close the lid, the T2 chip switches off the microphone.
Just a few highlights. Read the whole thing. Terrific stuff.
One thing that Apple has always been good at is being doomed. They were doomed when the Macintosh was only a year old, when they didn’t sell as many Macs as the market analysts thought necessary.
Doomed when Windows exploded on the marketplace, even as Apple cultivated a growing set of lifelong passionate followers.
Doomed when Jobs left (Michael Dell famously said, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”)
Doomed when the iPhone was a few years in, and the big players entered the market (there was even a funeral).
Click through the link and take a look at the chunk of the pie chart labeled Services. Year over year, that’s up about 13%. This is Apple shifting focus, recognizing the difficulty of sustaining iPhone’s explosive growth and sliding into other sources of revenue, a model started years ago.
While Services is still growing rapidly—it was up 13 percent over last year’s quarter—it’s not the fastest mover in Apple’s portfolio. That’s the category formerly known as Other, and recently relabeled as Wearable/Home/Accessories. The home of Apple Watch and AirPods has seen 10 straight quarters of double-digit percentage growth. After seven straight quarters with growth percentages in the 30s, the category revenue shot up 48 percent this quarter.
The doomed line used to bother me. But now I find it a valuable clue as to the level of understanding shown by the doomsayer. Crying doom is easy, but it missed the forest for the trees.
Apple continues to amaze me. Yes, there are flaws, unavoidable for a company this large, with products this complex. But one thing Apple ain’t, is doomed.
Amazon is so new, and so dramatic in its speed and scale and aggression, that we can easily forget how many of the things it’s doing are actually very old. And, we can forget how many of the slightly dusty incumbent retailers we all grew up with were also once radical, daring, piratical new businesses that made people angry with their new ideas.
The linked piece by Ben Evans shows both how everything old is new again and how systematically Jeff Bezos is scouring the old for ideas to repurpose to keep Amazon growing.
One example:
In Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames, a tremendously entertaining novel about the creation of department stores in 1860s Paris, Octave Mouret builds a small shop into a vast new enterprise, dragging it into existence through force of will, inspiration, and genius. In the process, he creates fixed pricing, discounts, marketing, advertising, merchandising, display, and something called “returns.” He sends out catalogs across the country. His staff is appalled that he wants to sell a new fabric at less than cost; “that’s the whole idea!” he shouts. Loss leaders are nothing new.
Meanwhile, the other half of the story follows the small, traditional shopkeepers in the area, who are driven out of business one by one. Zola sees them as part of the past to be swept away. They’re doomed, and they don’t understand—indeed, they’re both baffled and outraged by Mouret’s new ideas.
“In terms of exclusions, we’ve been making the Mac Pro in the U.S.,” Cook said. “We want to continue to do that. So we’re working and investing currently in capacity to do so, because we want to continue to be here. And so that’s what’s behind the exclusions. So we’re explaining that and hope for a positive outcome.”
It’s reassuring that Apple is going to continue Mac Pro production in the U.S. It makes perfect sense considering they have been making the current model here.
“This was our biggest June quarter ever — driven by all-time record revenue from Services, accelerating growth from Wearables, strong performance from iPad and Mac and significant improvement in iPhone trends,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “These results are promising across all our geographic segments, and we’re confident about what’s ahead. The balance of calendar 2019 will be an exciting period, with major launches on all of our platforms, new services and several new products.”
Revenue for all of Apple’s product categories including Mac, iPad, Wearables, and Services were up in the current quarter over the same period last year. iPhone revenue was down this year over last.
According to Apple, international sales accounted for 59 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
At their peak in the mid-20th century, drive-in theaters were the perfect place to catch a flick from the comfort and privacy of your car.
Many of you may have missed the “good old days” of the drive-in theaters (and today’s movie-going experience is in many ways vastly better) but there was a time when this was the best way to see a movie. We went often when I was a kid in high school, sneaking in friends, beer, and candy in the trunk.
Jim and Dan talk about 5G, secret Siri recordings, Apple’s acquisition of Intel’s smartphone modem business, laptops new and old, Audio Hijack, UA Apollo and Arrow, and more.
It’s been a long time since Dan and I did an Amplified podcast, but when he called I jumped at the chance to record it again. I hope you enjoy it!
Called “In Search of Excellence”, this video is chock full of old school Apple, with lots of Steve Jobs’ takes on the world at that time. It was produced as part of a profile of six up and coming companies. This is the part of the series that featured Apple.
First things first, the book is written in Swedish (Spotify was founded in Sweden in 2006), so most of us will have to wait for a translation to read this ourselves.
The linked Variety interview with the authors makes it clear this is an unauthorized book, built on lots of off-the-record interviews. So if you do get a copy, take all the anecdotes with a grain of salt. Still want to read it, though.
As first revealed by ZDNet and Android Police, Google employees have been roving the streets of American cities, offering $5 gift certificates in exchange for a facial scan. Reached by The Verge, Google confirmed that it has been conducting what it calls “field research” to collect face-scanning data in order to improve its algorithms and thereby improve the Pixel 4’s accuracy.
Google, in an email to The Verge:
Our goal is to build the feature with robust security and performance. We’re also building it with inclusiveness in mind, so as many people as possible can benefit.
And:
Google is collecting infrared, color, and depth data from each face along with time, ambient light level, and some related “task” information like picking up the phone from the table. The company initially collected location information as well, but it tells me it doesn’t need that info, so it will cease collecting it and will delete it.
I get the goal here, to improve the accuracy of facial recognition, help tune out any bias. But can’t help but feel we are helping build the master facial recognition database of the future.
That line between being getting better at recognizing faces and offering public facial scanning and recognition is privacy. Two opposing forces, one wanting to pick you out of a crowd for use in security and advertising, and one wanting to preserve true anonymity.
Pixel 4 will be the first device with Soli, powering our new Motion Sense features to allow you to skip songs, snooze alarms, and silence phone calls, just by waving your hand. These capabilities are just the start, and just as Pixels get better over time, Motion Sense will evolve as well. Motion Sense will be available in select Pixel countries.
And:
Unlocking your phone should be easy, fast, and secure. Your device should be able to recognize you—and only you—without any fuss. Face unlock may be a familiar feature for smartphones, but we’re engineering it differently.
Differently? How?
Other phones require you to lift the device all the way up, pose in a certain way, wait for it to unlock, and then swipe to get to the homescreen. Pixel 4 does all of that in a much more streamlined way. As you reach for Pixel 4, Soli proactively turns on the face unlock sensors, recognizing that you may want to unlock your phone.
If the face unlock sensors and algorithms recognize you, the phone will open as you pick it up, all in one motion. Better yet, face unlock works in almost any orientation—even if you’re holding it upside down—and you can use it for secure payments and app authentication too.
Assuming this tech works as advertised, Google just raised the bar for Face ID. As is, I often have to shift my iPhone, tweaking the angle to my face, in order to get Face ID to kick in. This is no big deal, but it does throw a delay in there. I almost never have to enter my passcode, but I often have to play a bit for Face ID to kick in.
And though I can get Face ID to kick in with my iPhone a bit off to the side, it never works when sitting flat on my desk or when upside down.
The advantage to Google’s announced approach is that it supports wider angles and orientations, and also starts the recognition process when you reach for your phone, not waiting for a tap on the screen. A subtle point, but a natural next evolution.
Is Apple working on this? I suspect they already have such experiments in the lab, but only release what works really well on all Face ID phones, including the iPhone X. Being able to detect gestures, such as a hand reaching for your phone, no doubt requires some specialized software and powerful machine learning processors. Seems like this should be doable for Apple, given the power of the onboard machine learning hardware already in your iPhone and iPad.
The police officers wrestled with Colin Cheung in an unmarked car. They needed his face.
They grabbed his jaw to force his head in front of his iPhone. They slapped his face. They shouted, “Wake up!” They pried open his eyes. It all failed: Mr. Cheung had disabled his phone’s facial-recognition login with a quick button mash as soon as they grabbed him.
The iPhone’s so-called “cop mode”, introduced with iOS 11, kicks in when you press and hold either volume button and the side button simultaneously for 2 seconds. It brings up the SOS screen, but also requires you to enter your passcode to unlock your phone, disabling Face/Touch ID.
The authorities are tracking protest leaders online and seeking their phones. Many protesters now cover their faces, and they fear that the police are using cameras and possibly other tools to single out targets for arrest.
Facial recognition on one side, cop mode on the other. This is the road we are on.
The gray uniforms were a little goofy, but 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture kicked off a new era for Trek and revitalized the dormant franchise. That’s an achievement worth celebrating 40 years later with a return to the big screen.
Paramount and Fathom Events are teaming up for US showings of the film on Sept. 15 and 18. This is the original theatrical cut starring the cast of the 1960s Star Trek television series. Tickets go on sale online on Aug. 2.
I saw this in the theater during its initial release. You couldn’t pay me to sit through it again.
