If you are considering the Powerbeats Pro as an alternative to AirPods, Zac Hall has your back here.

If nothing else, take a look at that image, in the middle, that shows the AirPods case and Powerbeats Pro case side-by-side. Had no idea the cases were so different in size.

Here’s a link to the image of the jacket, front and back.

The jacket brings back memories, the logo on the back reminds me of AppleLink and its successor, eWorld.

Also interesting, in the comments, is the fact that Apple.com was officially registered in 1987 as the 64th .com domain in history.

The video of the interview is embedded below. Follow the headline link to a transcript of the interview. This is the source of the comment, “We acquire a company on average, every two to three weeks”, that’s been flying around the blogs the last day or so. But the interview is much more than that, and absolutely worth watching.

Drag the Earth around to find your home, zoom in and out. Most importantly, tap that Earth button in the lower-left to reveal all the controls.

[H/T Varunorcv]

The thing that strikes me, absolutely, is that moment, right in the middle, where the music industry hit its height, and Napster stepped in.

I do think Napster was inevitable, and not the cause of the falloff. The availability of MP3 files over the internet made sharing possible, and piracy an obvious result.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Former Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts left the company last month, and ahead of her departure, she sat down to share her thoughts on her experiences at Apple on LinkedIn’s Hello Monday podcast.

Here’s a link to the podcast itself. If you are interested in Angela’s voyage, it’s a good listen, about 30 minutes.

Main Engine Cut Off:

Watch sunlight and weather patterns move across Earth throughout the day, and bask in the glory of our blue marble in real time.

Every 20 minutes (or every hour, you pick), Downlink updates your desktop background with the newest images of Earth.

Choose from 8 different views of Earth, including stunning full disk images from 3 different geostationary satellites.

Dave posted about dynamic wallpapers on Monday and I thought this would be a nice addition to that story.

The Verge:

Microsoft first released its Edge Chromium browser as early Canary and Dev builds on Windows last month. While Windows 10 users can test the new browser, Mac owners have been waiting to hear more details about when Edge will be available on macOS. Microsoft doesn’t have any solid dates to announce just yet, but the company has started teasing what Edge will look like on macOS.

During the company’s Build 2019 developer conference, Microsoft is announcing new features for Edge on Windows and teasing the upcoming macOS release. We understand that the release will be available very soon, and Mac users should be able to access both the Canary and Dev builds of Edge just like Windows.

I’m looking forward to testing this out. The “perfect” browser hasn’t been made yet and it’s not likely this will be it either but competition is good.

Apple:

Think you can toss a newspaper like the legendary Warren Buffett? Test your paper-flinging skills as you make your way from the streets of Omaha, Nebraska, all the way to Cupertino, California. Avoid vehicles and birds as you deliver papers to buildings near and far. Will anyone collect enough Warren Bucks to dethrone the Paper Wizard? Probably not.

This is a wonderful silly game reminiscent of the “paper route” games of years ago but that music has to go.

Got a Mac running Mojave? Check out Dynamic Wallpaper Club, browse and download dynamic wallpapers for your Mac. To install the downloaded HEIC files, go to:

System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Desktop

I’d accumulate all your dynamic wallpapers in a single folder, then click the + to add that folder to the Desktop Folders list.

Great story, with pictures documenting the whole thing. Terrific read. And don’t miss that one pic, in the gallery, of that massive polar bear paw.

[H/T, Varunorcv]

This ran in the New York Times on Thursday. I was on the road, but left it in my queue to post this morning.

This is opinion from the New York Times Editorial Board, doubling down on their (in my opinion) poorly thought through hatchet piece attacking Apple for taking down apps that used mobile device management for ways in which it was never intended.

This feels like the Times Editorial Board was caught on the wrong side of the MDM argument, and switched gears to find another avenue of attack.

At the heart of this new (old) argument:

Even if we take Apple at its word that it was only protecting the privacy and security of its users by removing screen-time and parental-control apps, the state of the app marketplace is troubling. Why is a company — with no mechanism for democratic oversight — the primary and most zealous guardian of user privacy and security?

As a reply to this, consider this response op-ed from Macworld’s Michael Simon:

The Times’ point that Apple shouldn’t be “the most zealous guardian of user privacy and security” just doesn’t hold water. What if the developer of one of these parental control apps had been caught using its permissions to spy on what kids were watching and reading? That would have made much bigger headlines than a handful of disgruntled developers. Apple users take privacy seriously, and they want to know there’s a gatekeeper in place.

I’m not a fan of the timing of the New York Times op-ed, coming on the heels of its wrongly logicked argument about MDM. Feels like a vengeance move.

Jason Del Rey, Vox:

In the fall of 2004, Jeff Bezos’s company was still mostly selling just books and DVDs.

That same year, Amazon was under siege from multiple sides. Some of its biggest competitors were brick-and-mortar chains like Best Buy, which was still in expansion mode at the time, with sales growing 17 percent annually.

And:

Amazon was worth $18 billion at the time.

And:

But 15 years later, Amazon is worth more than $900 billion, compared to just $33 billion for its old foe eBay, which spun off its (more valuable) payment division, PayPal. And the Amazon Prime membership program is perhaps the biggest reason why.

This is a fantastic, behind the scenes look at how Amazon Prime came to be, with interviews with people who were part of making it all happen. Great read.

Ina Fried lays out all the ways that Amazon harvests your personal data. The list is surprisingly long.

Don’t miss the links at the end for what Google, Facebook, Tesla, and Internet people finders know about you.

Hope King, for Cheddar:

I recently took my first ride in a self-driving car while in Phoenix, Arizona, where Alphabet’s Waymo has been operating the world’s first commercial self-driving taxi service since early December.

and:

My trip spanned 4.4 miles and took about 15 minutes. In the car with me was my videographer Doug, a Waymo spokeswoman, and one safety driver at the wheel.

Ready or not, autonomous vehicles are hitting the road. True, these fleets are all staffed with humans behind-the-wheel, and are in a few markets, not nationwide, but they are up and running.

Hope King does a nice job describing the experience, with video snippets, pictures, and well laid out observations.

One quote in particular stood out to me:

I was excited, but I was also a little nervous the entire time.

Imagine if there wasn’t a driver behind the wheel with hands ready to grab the wheel, foot ready to stomp the brake. This is so key. And a reason I do think we’re still far away from a true, autonomous vehicle rollout.

ABC News:

In an exclusive interview, Cook told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer that Apple is working hard to promote increased regulation of the use and storage of consumer data, empower parents to control their kids’ relationship with devices and enable customers to be more aware of how much time they’re spending on their phones.

He explained why he doesn’t want customers to use Apple products too much and why, and shares his take on children’s usage of devices.

I’m glad to see this issue seems to finally be coming up on Cook’s radar. Parents are hungry for options to help them manage the screen time and content on their children’s’ devices.

VOX:

Technology companies based in Seattle or Silicon Valley now account for five out of the five most valuable companies in America, leading to a spate of commentary last year from lawyers like Columbia’s Tim Wu to economists like Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff arguing that Big Tech has, in some sense, gotten “too big.” And in 2019, politicians are starting to listen.

At the same time, big technology companies have been brutalizing suppliers and competitors (and, not irrelevantly, publishers of journalism) with a range of questionable tactics — including Amazon’s price wars against competitors, Apple’s high-handed management of its own App Store, and Facebook’s long parade of privacy scandals. As the rich get richer, the criticism has become more intense.

None of the efforts to break up these companies will actually come to fruition – as the article points out, US anti-trust laws are mostly about high prices – but it may bring about additional regulation of the companies, something that must be worrisome to the companies involved.

New Atlas:

When Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon on July 20, 1969, it was one of the biggest milestones in human history. Today, we take it for granted that the lunar landing was possible, but at the time, no one had ever done anything remotely like it – let alone in a craft that had never been fully tested. In view of NASA’s promise to return to the lunar surface in the next decade, the approaching 50th anniversary of this monumental feat brings into focus what is still a pertinent question: How does one land on the Moon?

Unsurprisingly, it ain’t easy.

Gizmodo:

The 1987 video, which can be viewed on YouTube, is clearly meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but it shows viewers an amazing world of technological innovation with a handful of things that we actually got.

The video shows Apple payphone stations that communicate with satellites in space (at least they got the satellite part right), and something called the Vista Mac II, eyewear that doubles as a computer (something that we’re still waiting on, sadly). And there’s so much more.

If you were around Apple in 1987, you can be forgiven for believing this was a viable future for the company in ten years. The reality was much less rosy though.

The Daily Beast:

“Dry counties” exist as a sort feral anachronism—like phone booths and video stores. They appeared in response to perceived social or economic need, and when those needs dissipated, they were left behind, like flotsam from a flood nobody remembers. We are a nation that’s pretty good at building laws, and pretty lousy at dismantling them.

And so dry counties persist—today an estimated 18 million people are unable to buy a legal drink where they live. Mostly these persist in the south, and a map of dry counties overlaid with one of the Bible Belt, not surprisingly, shows considerable overlap. (Although the penchant for dryness fades as you get closer to the Gulf of Mexico.) The states with the most dry counties are Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee. Fact: you can still get arrested for possession of alcohol in some dry counties, as a 69-year-old man in Culliman, Alabama, learned recently.

This is such a weird and wonderful quirk of US liquor laws. I still remember my first visit to the Jack Daniels Distillery in Lynchburg and saying, “let’s go to the pub afterward!” and being incredibly disappointed by the response.

CNBC:

“We haven’t changed our [Apple] holdings,” Warren Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick on Thursday, on the eve of the kickoff of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha this weekend.

Apple shares are up more than 32% this year, including a boost from the iPhone maker’s better-than-expected first-quarter earnings report this week.

“I was pleased with what they reported,” Buffett said, while noting he never makes investment decisions based on a single quarterly report. “What they talked about and reported is consistent with the reason we own $50 billion-plus of Apple.”

Good news for Apple in general. Warren Buffett is seen as a bellwether for stable, sane stock market analysis that doesn’t chase trends.

MacRumors:

Powerbeats Pro are now available to pre-order from Apple.com and the Apple Store app in the United States and Canada.

Powerbeats Pro are Apple’s first totally wireless Beats earphones, equipped with the same H1 chip as the second-generation AirPods for hands-free “Hey Siri” and faster connection speeds between the iPhone, Apple Watch, and other devices.

Will you be getting a pair?

The Sun:

Ben Tsu, from Taiwan, fell asleep with his AirPods in his ears, but woke up unable to find the right earbud anywhere. After scouring his room – using the ‘Find My Airpods’ app on his phone – Ben quickly discovered his headphone was a lot closer than he first thought.

“The map showed that my AirPod was at home, and I could hear the ‘beep, beep’ sound, which seemed to follow me around the room

“But I checked under my blanket and looked around but couldn’t find it – then I realised the sound was coming from my stomach!

I think this story is full of crap.

Bloomberg:

Nadella’s turnaround over the five years since he replaced Steve Ballmer as CEO has been nothing short of historic. The company had been universally viewed as spiraling toward obsolescence, having missed almost every significant computing trend of the 2000s—mobile phones, search engines, social networking—while letting its main source of revenue, Windows, the operating system that comes preloaded on PCs, stagnate.

Nadella’s peers say Microsoft’s resurgence is as terrifying as it is impressive. When asked what threat a renewed Microsoft poses to the tech universe, the CEO of a rival software company, who requested anonymity to speak more candidly, begins humming Darth Vader’s Imperial March theme from Star Wars. Put another way: The Empire has struck back.

Regardless of what you think of Microsoft, its “resurrection” under the guidance of Satya Nadella is remarkable. My favorite part of the story is how ignorant the writers are. They say, “Nadella appears irritated by questions about the company’s ascendancy. “I would be disgusted if somebody ever celebrated our market cap,” he tells Bloomberg Businessweek. He insists the valuation—which passed $1 trillion on April 25 and is up more than 230 percent since his watch began in February 2014…”

Petapixel:

If you subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud for Photoshop and Lightroom via the $10 per month Photography Plan, there may be some pain coming to your wallet. Many customers no longer see the $10/month plan on Adobe’s site — the cheapest plan is listed is $20/month.

Instead of $10/month for 20GB of storage being the most affordable plan, only the $20/month with 1TB cloud storage is being offered. If you only use the Photography Plan for the software and not the storage, a phasing out of the $10-per-month/20GB plan would effectively be a 100% price hike with no practical benefit for you.

This will definitely get me to unsubscribe from Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Interestingly enough, the Canadian Adobe Creative Cloud page still lists the $9.99/month US price point.