Jony Ive is leaving Apple after more than two decades in which his iconic designs for the Mac, iPod and iPhone turned one of Silicon Valley’s faded giants into the world’s most valuable company and defined a generation of consumer products.
Sir Jonathan is setting up his own new venture, a creative business called LoveFrom, with Apple as its first client. The transition will begin later this year, with LoveFrom launching fully in 2020.
Apple is making some positive changes in Apple Music. There are still a few little problems that crop up for me, but overall the service is doing very well.
On days when everything runs smoothly, taking public transit is one of the best ways to get around town. Not only is it cost-effective and efficient, but it also lets you stay hands free so you can sit back, relax and maybe even read a few chapters of your favorite book. But unexpected delays or overcrowded vehicles can quickly turn your ride from enjoyable to stressful. Starting today, Google Maps is rolling out two new features to help you better plan for your transit ride and stay more comfortable along the way.
I can certainly see how these would be useful features for those that rely on public transportation.
Sidecar, a new feature in Apple’s iOS and macOS operating systems, allows you to use your iPad as a second display with your Mac. It’s a great addition to the ecosystem and if you have the betas installed you can try it out. Bryan Wolfe gives you a rundown and how to get it setup.
If you are on the fence, deciding between PowerBeats Pro or AirPods, this is a solid review.
The one thing I think Marques missed was the impact on background noise. The in-ear-canal design of the PowerBeats Pro means you’ll get much less background noise than AirPods.
On the plus side, that’s a real benefit on an airplane or in a space with a lot of ambient sound. On the down side, I find I am much more aware of my environment, better able to have conversations with people with AirPods in my ear.
Apple is bringing Xbox and PlayStation 4 controller support to the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV this fall. It’s a big change from the select MFi Bluetooth controllers that were supported before, and it means you can now easily connect any PS4 or Xbox One controller to your device to play games on the go.
Big fan of this move by Apple.
I’ve been trying out an Xbox One S controller (with Bluetooth support) on my iPad Pro running the new public beta, and I’m convinced this is a big step toward using an iPad as a portable game console.
A step, because you are still depending on the console. Read the article for all the details on playing console games on your iPad, with the controller connected via Bluetooth.
All good. But makes me wonder, will Apple ship Apple Arcade games compatible with the PS4 and Xbox One controllers? If so, I think that would help make Apple a very important player in this space. Grab your iPad and favorite controller and play, with consoles or without.
Korean news sites are reporting today that Samsung Electronics is preparing to launch a text messaging service that can be used on the new Galaxy Note 10, PCs and laptops during the Galaxy Note 10 event early in August. The feature is noted in the reports as being similar to Apple’s iMessage.
To enable users to use text messaging services across different devices, Samsung will join forces with Microsoft to integrate their phone mirroring service Your Phone into the upcoming Galaxy Note 10, according to business newspaper the Korean Economic Daily.
OK, so far so good. But:
The app, which was first launched in March as a beta service, enables multiple cross-device experience by mirroring what appears on the smartphone screen to PCs with Bluetooth connectivity.
Wait, what? This is both confusing and seems a poor substitute for cloud syncing so all devices get all info. This strikes me as a hack.
Am I misunderstanding the description? Or is this a limitation driven by the Samsung/Android/Microsoft architecture?
NBCUniversal — the parent company of producers Universal TV — won an auction for the library after outbidding Netflix in a $100 million-per-year pact.
And:
Disney, meanwhile, has made clear that it doesn’t plan to stay in business with Netflix given its own streaming ambitions. Now that the company has majority control of Hulu, that platform is likely to benefit from the pullback of Disney-owned ABC’s programming from Netflix.
If you are into the biz side of TV streaming, this is a fascinating read. Lots of detail.
My takeaway: The breakup of content bundles is going to create a lot of options for consumers, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. If you want Star Trek, you’ll need to pony up for CBS All Access. Want The Office? You’ll need to get the service from NBC (if and when they ship one), or the service they ultimately license to. Add in Netflix, HBO, Disney, etc., and things are going to get expensive.
This is the universe Apple is walking into. They’ll start at zero, with no library to woo viewers away from all the other content-heavy services. But they have the advantage of a passionate user base, already ensconced in the ecosystem, likely to give Apple’s TV+ a try. And they have deep pockets, which will let Apple ride out the early, lean times.
ARM’s lead CPU and system architect Mike Filippo joined Apple last month, based out of the Austin, Texas area, according to his LinkedIn profile. Filippo led the development of several chips at ARM between 2009 and 2019, including the Cortex-A76, Cortex-A72, Cortex-A57, and upcoming 7nm+ and 5nm chips.
Filippo also served as Intel’s lead CPU and system architect between 2004 and 2009, and he was a chip designer at AMD between 1996 and 2004, so he brings a wealth of chipmaking experience with him to Apple.
Look for more news like this as Apple tries to snap up even more talent for its ARM-based Mac efforts.
Earlier today, I posted Jeff Benjamin’s first look at macOS Catalina. Consider that the appetizer. Here’s Rene Ritchie with the main course, a detailed take on Catalina with all kinds of perspective and backstory.
According to a new report from the San Francisco Chronicle, Apple has hired a “handful” of hardware and software engineers from self-driving car startup Drive.ai – which is planning to close its doors later this week.
Interesting read, including a confirmation from Apple (via Axios).
So very curious. What’s Apple up to here? Wondering if there’s a specific product in the pipeline, or perhaps still a broader R&D effort sussing out the space, exploring various business models.
I think about news sites and great election tools, like interactive maps that show voting trends, real time meters that show likelihood of candidates (sometimes famously incorrectly), and the like. Interesting to see Apple News getting into this business.
Here’s a link to the candidate guide. This is some good work. I found it easy to navigate, with lots of detail on each candidate.
This little rabbit hole is an incredible labor of love from Sam Henri Gold. When I asked Sam how he pulled this all together:
I began the archive after the Every Apple Video Youtube channel went down in March(?) 2017, been updating it since. I’ve been sourcing from YouTube (both Apple’s own and other small personal channels ppl uploaded Apple vids to) as well as FTP servers and clips internet friends donated. I’m always looking for more donations!
Sit back, grab a hot beverage, and dig in. This is long, so consider skipping section-to-section to find specific topics of interest, to avoid getting overwhelmed.
Loop reader Niles Mitchell continues his quest to connect external devices to his iOS 13 iPhone. Last time, he successfully connect a Kindle. Can he use the same approach to access files on an Iomega Zip drive?
Scott Stein, CNET, walks through the big picture of the iPadOS public beta. Well balanced, pointing out the features that work well as well as the ones that fall short, all wrapped in a “it’s a beta, so have patience, this will likely change” sensibility.
Good set of instructions from Chance Miller, 9to5Mac. At this point, my advice would be to limit yourself to a spare device, one that does not depend on a specific app running perfectly. Or at least make sure the apps you need are said to run well on the beta.
The message from WWDC was clear: SwiftUI is the future, a unified approach to UI development designed to simplify the process of targeting multiple hardware platforms. It’s a bold, sprawling goal that will take years to refine, even if it’s eagerly adopted by developers.
And:
However, SwiftUI also raises an interesting question: what does it mean for Catalyst? If SwiftUI is the future and spans every hardware platform, why bother bringing iPad apps to the Mac with Catalyst in the first place? It’s a fair question, but the answer is readily apparent from the very different goals of the two technologies.
For non-developers, think of Catalyst (previously called Marzipan) as a development kit to make it easier for developers to port their iOS apps to macOS. But think of SwiftUI as more of a starting point to lay out apps that will run on all your Apple platforms.
John does an excellent job digging into the value of both Catalyst and SwiftUI, explaining each one’s place in the Apple universe. Both are important.
If I had to boil this all down to a single talking point, I’d say that Catalyst is the hero we need now, letting developers bring their iOS apps to the Mac, refreshing and enriching the Mac experience while we wait for SwiftUI to evolve and mature and for SwiftUI apps to become the norm on all platforms.
In a way, this model is similar to the early days of Mac OS X, when Carbon made it possible for classic Mac apps to run on OS X while we waited for developers to build and ship modern OS X apps.
For years, Internet users have been griping about the USB, or Universal Serial Bus, and its maddening difficulty to plug in right, even creating memes about the commonly shared experience. Some call it the USB paradox, the seemingly impossible process of making a 50-50 guess wrong twice.
Ajay Bhatt led the team at Intel that created the USB — a near-ubiquitous connection interface that allows users to plug mice, iPods, printers, thumb drives and other devices into a computer. He recognizes that the model has led to frustration.
“The biggest annoyance is reversibility,” Bhatt told NPR. Nonetheless, he stands by his design.
Obviously, it’s a design decision but it’s still frustrating.
Search for Alien 3 on your favorite video-on-demand service, and you’ll inevitably land on a specific movie: David Fincher’s 1992 sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 hit Alien and James Cameron’s blockbuster 1986 follow-up Aliens. There are different versions out there — the theatrical version and the longer “assembly cut,” a recreation of an earlier version of the film. But they’re variations on the same work, a moody, visually striking, but not entirely successful film that drops protagonist Ellen Ripley on a lice-ridden prison planet that isn’t prepared to fend off an infestation of the xenomorphs she fought in the first two films.
Audible Studios’ new audio drama Alien III by William Gibson offers one of those alternate paths for the Alien series. Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive, has his own vision of what happened after Ripley, Hicks, Bishop, and Newt nuked LV-426 from orbit in Aliens.
I definitely would have preferred this version to the one that became Alien 3.
Apple has started to provide participants of its public beta program with the first builds of three of its milestone operating systems, including iOS 13, iPadOS, and macOS Catalina.
As with other public beta releases from Apple, it is usual to find the contents of the public test version to be functionally similar to that of the most recent developer beta.
As always, if you are participating in this beta, make sure you have a recent, verified backup of your data.
Canon versus Nikon. Dell versus HP. Microsoft versus Apple. Tech companies have been battling over their piece of the pie for years, that ain’t new. But recently, tech and non-tech companies alike have started changing up their business models so that instead of simply selling you a device and calling it a day, companies would rather sell you an ongoing subscription for the product you want, complete with a recurring monthly payment. Welcome to the Service Wars.
The beauty for companies is that once you sign you up, they’ve got you. It’s one thing not to buy another product from a specific company, but it’s another thing entirely to cancel one of your countless subscriptions, delete your account (and maybe migrate your data), and switch to another platform (assuming that’s even an option). After all, it’s just $10 or $15 a month, right? That’s nothing.
As more and more companies use subscription services, we’ll have to be vigilant to make sure we keep an eye on them. Those $5-$10/month services can really add up.
Vox: >According to https://www.vansales.com the full-on driverless car could be an order of magnitude safer than the human-driven variety. Despite generations of driver education, traffic policing, highway building, and automobile safety regulations, nearly 40,000 Americans are killed in motor vehicle crashes and another 2.5 million are seriously injured annually. Safer cars, like safer airliners, are a good thing. But since Vanderbilt’s time, the controlled risk of driving has been an antidote to meaningless work and passive leisure. > >Driving is dangerous, and we like it that way. We may never love driverless cars the way we love the recklessness of being behind the wheel.
This is an overly romanticized view of driving. The vast majority of people generally hate it and will be more than happy to become passengers in autonomous vehicles.
Then on Wednesday, Nathan started looking at the downloaded videos. He found the usual shrimp and other small animals that we had been seeing on the first four deployments. And then he saw it, a large tubular animal off on the corner of the screen, looking as if it was hunting the e-jelly. The next short video showed the same thing. Then, in the third video, the tubular animal revealed an enormous set of arms and tentacles coming in to attack the e-jelly.
Watch the video. Fantastic. I hope we can turn things around before the giant squid becomes just a scientific memory.
This was a pretty amazing auction. The centerpiece was Gilmour’s “Black Strat”:
“The Black Strat,” a 1969 Fender Stratocaster which Gilmour used to record Pink Floyd albums “The Dark Side of the Moon,” “Wish You Were Here” and “The Wall,” sold for $3,975,000.
The winning bidder?
Over$4 million for the Black Strat and co!! A record purchase. Honored to support Gilmour’s charity ClientEarth.
Jim Irsay is the owner of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts. What do you do with a guitar like that? Do you hang it on a wall? Will it ever be played again?
I love this series, all filmed on the latest iPhone, in this case, the iPhone XS.
Here’s the released video, commissioned by Apple, shot by Donghoon Jun and James Thornton of Incite in collaboration with WET. It’s called Experiments III: Cascade.
And here’s the “making of” video, called Experiments III: Cascade (Behind the Scenes):
