There is no federal law that requires stores to accept cash, so lawmakers are working on the issue at the state and city level.
Earlier this year, Philadelphia became the first city to ban cashless stores, despite efforts by Amazon to dissuade it. New Jersey passed a statewide ban soon after, and a similar ban is working its way through the New York City Council. Before this year there was only one jurisdiction that required businesses to accept cash: Massachusetts, which passed a law nearly 40 years ago.
I get why retailers, especially smaller ones, would like to go cashless but it certainly does and will hit those on the lower economic rungs much harder.
This video shows us inching ever closer to the dream of a universal translator:
Anytime I’m traveling I use Google Translate to check translations in real time on signage. You have to see it to believe it. This is real and LIVE while you move your camera. @ Paris pic.twitter.com/SvvdR8ttFs
Scroll down through the thread to watch universal audio translations. I would love to see more of this technology coming from Apple.
As is, you can ask Siri to say a phrase in a supported language (for example, Hey Siri, how do you say “where is the closest drug store” in Spanish). And there are third party apps that translate text on the fly. Works well, glad to have it, but I’d love to see more.
UPDATE: As several folks have pointed out, this technology evolved from the original Word Lens, which ran on iOS, but was purchased by Google. I believe accuracy has improved since its original release, and lots of languages have been added as well. And, as I said above, check the other demos in the thread.
Apple continues its close relationship with the NHL in a “Shot on iPhone” ad that’s all about hockey and camaraderie. As a devout hockey fan, I only wish this was longer.
This happened in Germany. From the translated report:
Her watch was equipped with a fall detection system and alerted the emergency services after the fall. A dispatcher in the control center accepted the emergency call. He heard a Watch announcement telling him that a person had fallen heavily. The Watch also transmitted the coordinates of the scene of the accident.
This never stops being cool to me. When I read doom and gloom reports about Apple’s ability to innovate, I see stories like this crop up and think, “Not so fast, curmudgeons!”
Here’s what I do: Instead of writing, I speak. When a notable thought strikes me — I could be pacing around my home office, washing dishes, driving or, most often recently, taking long, aimless strolls on desolate suburban Silicon Valley sidewalks — I open RecUp, a cloud-connected voice-recording app on my phone. Because I’m pretty much always wearing wireless headphones with a mic — yes, I’m one of those AirPod people — the app records my voice in high fidelity as I walk, while my phone is snug in my pocket or otherwise out of sight.
And:
Then comes the magical part. Every few days, I load the recordings into Descript, an app that bills itself as a “word processor for audio.” Some of my voice memos are more than an hour long, but Descript quickly (and cheaply) transcribes the text, truncates the silences and renders my speech editable and searchable.
And:
Writing by speaking has quietly revolutionized how I work. It has made my writing more conversational and less precious. More amazingly, it has expanded my canvas: I can now write the way street photographers shoot — out in the world, whenever the muse strikes me (or more likely, when I’m loafing around, procrastinating on some other piece of writing). Most of my recent columns, including large portions of this one, were written this way: first by mouth, not fingers.
Fascinating. I wonder if we’ll someday have the ability to build multimedia presentations in real time, via our AppleAR glasses and the mic in our AirPods. Constantly capturing everything around us, cataloging our snippets on-the-fly.
And, if we do get there, in whose hands will the output of that constant mass surveillance by citizen journalists end up?
The Thames Valley and Hampshire forces are rolling out the technology to show when motorists are using their phones.
But…
A sign will flash at the driver telling them to stop using their mobile – but the detectors cannot tell if it is a driver or passenger using the phone.
I totally get the value in stopping behind the wheel phone use. But not being able to distinguish between a driver and a passenger using their phones will create a lot of false positives which will keep this solution from accomplishing its goal.
Imagine having your iPad locked for 25 million minutes—it happened! Apple added an Air Quality Index to Apple Maps and The Met has an exhibit of some really cool rock instruments.
Apple’s decision to pull songs from its Apple Music service in China by pro-democracy musicians has come under fire from US lawmakers, suggesting Apple should not be taking part in what amounts to censorship by the Chinese government.
On Tuesday, it was reported Apple had removed a song called “Ren Jian Dao” from Apple Music in China that referenced the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. A cover of the song, translated as “Path of Man,” was also taken down from Tencent’s QQ Music service, with the takedowns considered an indication the government was cracking down on pro-democracy media.
The move has led to members of the U.S. Congress to criticize Apple for its role in the government-led crackdown.
Apple’s need for Chinese approval lends itself to easy criticism when it does things like this.
Disney announced Thursday at the company’s investor day that Disney+ will be available starting on November 12 for $6.99 per month or $69 per year. Disney has already confirmed a number of television series and films solely available on Disney+. All films released in 2019 will also be available on Disney+ as soon as their theatrical and home entertainment windows have closed.
This seems like a great deal, especially for those who are fans of Dinsey’s back catalog. I wonder if the price point puts any pressure on Apple TV+?
Apple has persuaded 15 more of its suppliers, including Foxconn and TSMC, to manufacture Apple products using 100 percent clean energy. The additions bring the total number of suppliers in the program up to 44. Apple says it now expects to exceed its goal of using four gigawatts of renewable energy in its supply chain by 2020 by an additional gigawatt.
In April last year Apple announced that its facilities now run entirely on renewable energy, and in October the company added that it had achieved the same goal for its retail locations.
Scientists used to think that making such an image would require a telescope the size of Earth — until Katie Bouman and a team of astronomers came up with a clever alternative. Bouman explains how we can take a picture of the ultimate dark using the Event Horizon Telescope.
In light of yesterday’s announcement and wonderful photo of Bouman sitting with her MacBook Pro and watching the photo reconstruct live, this TED Talk from 2017 is really interesting.
Pixelmator Photo is a powerful, beautiful, and easy to use photo editor for iPad. It features a collection of nondestructive, desktop-class photo editing tools, a set of stunning, machine learning-enhanced film emulation presets, a magical Repair tool to remove unwanted objects from your photos, support for editing RAW images, and more. Simply put, it’s the best way to edit your photos on iPad.
This is such a great app. If you work with photos on your iPad, you have to check this out.
A 1993 prototype of Apple’s W.A.L.T phone, or “Wizzy Active Lifestyle Telephone” can now be seen in a new video from Australian iPhone leaker Sonny Dickson. Apple unveiled the W.A.L.T. phone at 1993’s MacWorld in Boston but it was never sold to the public. The early ancestor of the iPhone looked like a tablet but functioned as both a phone and a fax machine.
The video shows you a fully-functioning W.A.L.T. phone, complete with a touchscreen, a built-in address book, caller-ID and an attached stylus. The device had handwriting recognition, online banking access and even allowed you to customize ringtones.
While cutting edge in 1993, it looks like an abomination today.
During the “It’s show time” event in late March, Apple announced that the TV app would be coming to the Mac soon. This naturally sparked discussions about whether Apple would be bringing its other media apps to the Mac, finally splitting up iTunes into distinct applications.
And:
I’ve been able to confirm with sources familiar with the development of the next major version of macOS – likely 10.15 – that the system will include standalone Music, Podcasts, and TV apps, but it will also include a major redesign of the Books app.
Fascinating. Great read, and great find, both from Guilherme and from Steve Troughton-Smith, who first uncovered this.
With the public release of iOS 12.2, Apple made a subtle change to iOS Apple Maps, adding an Air Quality Index (AQI) in the lower right corner. If you’ve not yet seen it, pull out your iPhone and take a look.
Had some interesting back and forth on Twitter this morning. There’s a lot of confusion about what these AQI numbers mean.
For starters, the AQI numbers in different countries mean different things. To understand the scale in your country, start with the AQI Wikipedia page, which lays out all the possibilities.
In the US, the scale goes from 0 to 500, with 0-50 being good, 51 to 100 being moderate, 101+ scaling from unhealthy to hazardous. Here’s a map showing the range of AQI throughout the US. As you can see, today is good in most of the US, but really bad news for Phoenix, Arizona.
Not all countries show an AQI in Apple Maps. It does show up in the UK, but their scale runs from 1-10. Not clear if Apple will roll out AQI for more countries over time.
If you’ve got an Apple Watch Series 4, you can see the AQI on the Infograph Modular watch face.
Streaming giant Spotify, after years of attempting to woo the songwriting community, is now at the front of an effort to pay it less.
And:
At issue is the Copyright Royalty Board’s 2018 decision to raise the rate paid to songwriters by 44% over the next five years. Spotify, along with three other streaming services — Amazon, Google and SiriusXM/Pandora — is appealing that decision to the board, a move that has no direct precedent. The four companies have been shellacked with criticism by artists for their action.
And:
As a sign of how badly the PR war is going, many songwriters are canceling Spotify subscriptions and doing so publicly on social media, where they make sure to note their subscription fees will now be going to Apple Music.
Apple will expand the iPhone’s NFC chip reading capabilities before the end of 2019 so that it can be used to read data stored in security chips like those used in passports, according to comments made by the UK government.
And:
The iPhone’s NFC functionality is currently restricted so that it is only able to read NDEF data, so the UK government has been unable to make its EU Exit app available to EU citizens with an iPhone.
The app is available currently on Android devices only.
And:
“I’m also pleased to confirm that Apple will make the identity document check app available on their devices by the end of the year,” says Home Secretary Sajid Javid.
NFC tag reading was added to Apple Watch and iOS with the release of iOS 11. This appears to be expanding the type of tags iOS can read so the UK government can use an iOS app to verify identities.
The Dodo: There’s no wrong way to inspire potential pet owners to adopt their next animal companion, rather than shop. But the more attention-grabbing method of spreading that message, the better. First -time pet owners may consider reading online articles like can dogs eat cooked sauerkraut to learn which foods should not be fed to dogs. For those who’ve already said goodbye to a beloved pet, a pet cremation urn store can provide a meaningful way to honor their memory.
To promote a recent pet adoption event, the Mumbai, India-based group World For All commissioned a visual campaign aimed at encouraging families to find a place in their lives for a needy animal — and what resulted couldn’t be more brilliant at doing just that.
These are amazing. Every pet I’ve ever had has been a rescue and I encourage everyone looking for a new best friend to check out their local shelters. Exotic pet owners may consider buying Isopods online and set up a closed terrarium where they can thrive.
Do you consider yourself an audiophile? If you do, then you are familiar with Etymotic. If you’re not that interested in sound quality over musical content, then Etymotic will probably mean nothing, even though they’ve been around for over 30 years. In fact, Etymotic invented in-ear earphones for hearing testing, only later to be used for music listening.
Although there have been periodic upgrades, the basic technology of their ER4 XR earphones has remained unchanged over all these years. The question is: Do they hold up in the ever-changing world of headphones/earphones?
I’m a long time fan of Etymotics and this review points out a couple of things I haven’t seen before — physical filters that smooth out the frequencies and keep ear wax out of the earphone and cords that detach from the earpiece so, if the cord gets broken, you don’t have to buy a whole new set.
This is a crazy mashup of Edwin Starr’s War and the Village People’s YMCA.
Thing is, it’s incredibly well done. One of those, “I have no idea how this was created” kind of videos. Is all of this audio/video archived? Is some of it recreated?
Helpfully, as Glenn Fleishman points out, there’s this article from Josh Centers and TidBITS which lays out various fixes. Key to them all is making sure there’s a backup if you want to actually recover the data on your iOS device.
Guy Kawasaki was an Apple Evangelist back in the day. These are a few of his capsule takeaways from two stints with Steve Jobs and Apple, one from 1983 to 1987, and another from 1995 to 1997.
The streaming service says it has at least 139 million paid subscribers around the world. But there are decent odds that many more people are watching Netflix and letting someone else pay for it.
A new survey from analysts MoffettNathanson finds that 14 percent of US Netflix users admit that they’re watching the service using an account paid for by someone they don’t live with.
If 14% of surveyed users admit to Netflix pirating, chances are good that the true number is much higher.
So why doesn’t Netflix do something about this? From the analyst who did the survey:
On the plus side, he figures Netflix non-payers currently represent some 8 million users who could eventually be persuaded to pay for Triple Frontier and other Netflix content. On the other hand, if those non-payers never end up paying, they end up reducing Netflix’s growth prospects.
I can’t help but compare this to Apple’s approach to services, like Apple Music, with family pricing that gives discounts to encourage sharing. Will Netflix change their plan, lock illicit sharing up if and when Apple makes headway into their market?
Apple’s share of smartphone ownership was up slightly in the Piper Jaffray Taking StockWith Teens survey. Of ~8,000 respondents, 83% have an iPhone, the highest percentagewe have seen in our survey. The iPhone may have room to move higher, however, with 86% of teens anticipating their next phone to be an iPhone, tied for the highest ever in our survey.
Remarkably, according to Statista, overall US smartphone usage (not just teens), shows Android 54.2% vs iOS 44.8%.
So are teens the canary in the coal mine here, showing a future iOS adoption wave as teens grow up?
Certainly, the worldwide picture is very different. It’d be interesting to see a similar teen survey broken down by worldwide regions.
