The culprit is cost. The industry is riddled with bait-and-switch plans that start low and steadily ratchet higher in price with hidden fees. The experience is complicated by poor customer service.
Apple plans to offer a service similar to Amazon’s Channels. The idea is users can select the channels they want and pay a monthly fee. The company will bundle content from the likes of HBO, Showtime, AMC, CBS and others, plus throw in its shows as they come on stream.
It will be completely transparent, and backed by Apple customer service.
To me, this is the core of Apple’s advantage and potential to disrupt the cable TV business model. If Apple could offer internet service, cable would be toast. The lack of competition in that space, and the absolute dependency on cable for internet service is what makes this complicated.
Terrific analysis by Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac. Apple’s motivations aside, I think music curation is a tough problem to solve.
My musical tastes are all over the place. People who know me very well, musicians who share much of my musical tastes, have a difficult time making recommendations for me. It’s just not easy to figure out what music will press that button for someone.
That said, I’d like to see more experimental interfaces that make it possible for me to wander my musical tree on the fly. I’d like to play some music that I love, then have an interactive training session, via Siri, purely dedicated to exploring “more like this” kind of music, where I can do more than just love or hate the presented choices. Something more conversational that allows me to express specifics of what I enjoy or dislike.
For example, I love soulful music that contains technical artistry (e.g., great singing, complex harmonies, or technical guitar, piano skill, etc.) If you and I were listening to music together, I could point all these things out. But if all I get is “love” or “don’t love”, it becomes much harder to convey the subtlety of my personal tastes.
All this said, I think this ability is coming. With advancements in processing complexity and machine learning, I believe a new window to modeling musical tastes is opening. I have no doubt that someone, somewhere will crack this problem.
Most smartphone users will have experienced issues when using their devices with wet hands or in the rain, with residual water on fingers sometimes causing the display to incorrectly detect or fail to sense touches or swipes.
And:
According to two patent applications published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday, both titled “Finger tracking in wet environment,” Apple suggests the use of filtering to determine whether a detected touch is intended by the user or not. This occurs before the device performs “computationally-intensive touch processing,” with the aim of reducing processing time and power usage, as well as the byproduct of improved usage in wet weather.
As Apple increases the power of their processors, devices gain more of an ability to analyze all parts of the user experience. Computational photography and machine learning are starting points, but real time “touch processing” is another. Can’t wait to see what other features lurk in the iPhone’s future.
When The Ohio State University partnered with Apple to provide 65 thousand iPads over the next five years to its entire campus, it meant more than just giving each student a cool piece of tech. The deal marked a profound shift in university’s investment in technology, one that would have far-reaching implications.
And:
Starting with lower-level general education classes, OSU is looking to launch their own digital bookstore for much cheaper textbooks. In the chemistry class OSU trialed the digital initiative, students paid $20 for the digital copy of the course materials, rather than $250 for the physical copy.
This cost savings alone makes the iPad rollout a huge win. But the school has seen improvement in grades and a higher overall student engagement. This experiment was a huge success, and a big win for Apple in education.
Nuance has announced that the company has discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac. This was the most recent name of the company’s speech recognition software for macOS.
Following the acquisition of MacSpeech in 2010, Nuance created Dragon Dictate, a Mac version of their popular Windows speech recognition software. As a long-time user of this type of software, I’ve followed its progress over the years, as it improved greatly, then was ignored since last year’s update for macOS Yosemite. The software was very good, but the company was always plagued by poor support, expensive upgrades, and a general disdain for the Mac platform.
I knew the folks at MacSpeech and, while they tried to make a go of it as an independent company, they just didn’t have the resources to develop it much further when Nuance came calling. I spoke to MacSpeech about it then and they admitted it was just going to be a matter of time before Nuance killed this product. But it had a good run.
Apple has waded into the messy world of news with a service that is read regularly by roughly 90 million people. But while Google, Facebook and Twitter have come under intense scrutiny for their disproportionate — and sometimes harmful — influence over the spread of information, Apple has so far avoided controversy. One big reason is that while its Silicon Valley peers rely on machines and algorithms to pick headlines, Apple uses humans like Ms. Kern.
The former journalist has quietly become one of the most powerful figures in English-language media. The stories she and her deputies select for Apple News regularly receive more than a million visits each.
Curation, human or otherwise, is great if you agree with the methods or algorithms of the curator. It can be dangerous otherwise.
This video is relatively short (about 2 minutes) and the headline is from a quote right at the end, which doesn’t do the clip justice. This is Tim Cook talking about standing up for what is right, for who you are.
Photographers from around the world are capturing stunning photographs on iPhone XS using Portrait mode, taking advantage of its new Depth Control feature that makes it possible to adjust the depth of field to create photos with a sophisticated bokeh effect. An update coming soon brings Depth Control to real-time preview, allowing photographers to change the amount of background blur before the shot is taken.
These images pulled from the #ShotoniPhone tag across social media highlight the enhanced Portrait mode on iPhone XS, showing advanced photography techniques that everyone can use.
Take a look at the photos. Gorgeous. To me, these are as good as any shots I could have shot with a film camera (I am an amateur, but still, great stuff).
I wish Apple would put together a page with lots of sample photos you could play with, sliding a depth slider, trying all the different lighting modes, just to get a sense of all the different possibilities.
Nice little article on making your web page dark mode friendly. I believe this tag only works with the latest Safari beta, but it won’t hurt to add the code to your pages now.
Multiple sources familiar with the GrayKey tech tell Forbes the device can no longer break the passcodes of any iPhone running iOS 12 or above. On those devices, GrayKey can only do what’s called a “partial extraction,” sources from the forensic community said. That means police using the tool can only draw out unencrypted files and some metadata, such as file sizes and folder structures.
Previously, GrayKey used “brute forcing” techniques to guess passcodes and had found a way to get around Apple’s protections preventing such repeat guesses. But no more. And if it’s impossible for GrayKey, which counts an ex-Apple security engineer among its founders, it’s a safe assumption few can break iPhone passcodes.
This does sound promising, but I’ll take it with a grain of salt. Like jailbreaking a phone, this sort of thing is hard to quash completely. And certainly incredibly difficult to prove, one way or the other.
Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar along with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter and in doing so revolutionized the animation industry, is retiring after a ground-breaking five-decade career, during which he has been involved with dozens of hit films from Toy Story to Frozen to this year’s Incredibles 2.
Catmull, who acts as president of both Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, will step down from his current roles at the end of this year, according to a Disney announcement on Tuesday, and then stay on as an adviser through July 2019 before formally retiring.
End of an era. If you are at all a fan of Pixar, I strongly suggest reading Catmull’s brilliant book, Creativity Inc.
Side note, Steve Jobs did invest a large chunk of change and became the majority shareholder, and John Lasseter came along later on. Check the Pixar Wikipedia page for the history details.
With the beautiful new LCD display, Smart HDR, and Single Lens Portrait Mode, there’s been a lot to test.
My main questions about iPhone XR: How are the portraits? How’s the screen? How’s the battery?
I hope you enjoy the adventure as I set out to find these answers.
As usual, Apple made sure Mann had an iPhone XR to review well before most others. And, unlike his iPhone XS review, I really liked many of the shots in this review. Lots of good tidbits from a photographer’s perspective.
Imagine being able to remember every minute detail of your life. You can recall what the weather was like, what you were reading or what you wore to the shops at any minute, any hour or any day stretching back decades. It sounds like some kind of parlour trick, but it’s actually a real and very rare medical phenomenon.
As someone who can’t remember what he had for lunch last week, this “ability” is fascinating to me.
Steve Jobs famously described the computer as “a bicycle for our minds.” Whether or not you’ve heard that before, it’s worth refreshing your memory on the context by watching this short video. The gist is that humans aren’t very efficient at getting around when compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, but because we are “tool builders,” we can more than make up for it. The tools we create magnify our capabilities. They make us better versions of ourselves. And the computer, Jobs believed, is “the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with.” So what a bicycle can do for our bodies, a computer can do for our minds.
This is the opener of a terrific essay about Shortcuts, and the road that meandered to it.
If you have even the slightest interest in Shortcuts or inclination to tinker, put your feet up, grab a beverage, and savor this.
Take two minutes to watch Tim Cook speak. The content of his speech is strongly held, fervently delivered. I really got caught up in it.
Has he memorized this speech? I might just be missing it, but if he is reading from a teleprompter, he’s hiding it very well.
No matter, interesting to watch this political side of Tim Cook emerge, especially as compared with those early Apple rollouts, as he first dipped his toes in the keynote waters.
According to The Information, Apple’s original content will be made available for free to Apple device owners, a rumor we heard earlier this month from CNBC.
While Apple’s content will be available at no cost, Apple will encourage users to sign up for television subscriptions from other cable networks such as HBO or STARZ.
And:
By making third-party content available via the streaming service and launching it in most countries around the world, Apple will be able to better compete with Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, both of which are available in 190+ countries.
What will the service be called? How will it be delivered? Looking forward to all the details rolling out.
But one point stands out to me: By rolling their own content and by limiting the possibility of any controversial content, Apple has no legal/political/licensing limitations on where they can roll out that content. Very smart.
Last April, Steven Schoen received an email from someone named Natalie Andrea who said she worked for a company called We Purchase Apps. She wanted to buy his Android app, Emoji Switcher. But right away, something seemed off.
“I did a little bit of digging because I was a little sketched out because I couldn’t really find even that the company existed,” Schoen told BuzzFeed News.
The We Purchase Apps website listed a location in New York, but the address appeared to be a residence. “And their phone number was British. It was just all over the place,” Schoen said.
It was all a bit weird, but nothing indicated he was about to see his app end up in the hands of an organization responsible for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in ad fraud, and which has funneled money to a cabal of shell companies and people scattered across Israel, Serbia, Germany, Bulgaria, Malta, and elsewhere.
Oh, what a scheme. Incredibly sophisticated scam. Amazing story.
Today, Apple updated its T-shirt selection at the Visitor Center for fall with some designs that long-time fans might remember.
Eight designs are now available to purchase in either white or black for a grand total of sixteen shirts. Last fall’s set of clothing, first available at the iPhone X Special Event and later to the public in November, featured four designs in a range of colors for the same total of sixteen.
Held over from last year are shirts bearing a small rainbow Apple logo in the center and others emblazoned with Apple Park’s patent-pending ring logo, featured on invitations for September’s Special Event at Steve Jobs Theater. A monochromatic version of this design has been added as well.
I don’t know how I feel about Apple bringing back the old rainbow-coloured logo. Make no mistake, I had/have a lot of Apple logo gear including the sweatshirt pictured on the post’s page. But as much as I like the six-coloured logo, it feels like it belongs in the past.
Ever since the iPhone XS came out, there’s been criticism of its front camera — specifically, that it overly smooths skin. This, of course, was dubbed “Beautygate” in reference to Samsung-style beautification filters, which Apple has always insisted it doesn’t use.
Whatever the case, it was definitely there, but now it’s going away: during our iPhone XR review, Apple told me that iOS 12.1 will fix a bug in its smart HDR camera system that resulted in smoother-looking photos taken by the front camera on the iPhone XS and XR.
Essentially, Smart HDR was choosing the wrong base frame for HDR processing when you took a selfie.
Most of the blame for this issue centered on Apple doing something intentional or because of overly aggressive noise reduction. Turns out, it was just a bug.
This is from last year, but new to me. I love the guitar work, love the production. And if you like this, take a look at the same guitarist’s new cover of Ozzie’s Crazy Train (I’m looking right at you, Jim).
Interesting Engadget piece on the iPhone XR: Half review, half interview with Phil Schiller, all of it a good read.
A few tidbits:
The iPhone XR might be the most interesting phone Apple has made in years.
Think about it: Apple just released its flagship XS and XS Max to a chorus of positive reviews, and now here it is, a month later, preparing to launch another smartphone that packs many of the same features found in those really expensive ones. For Apple, this is all a little unheard of.
Seems to me, this is the new normal, Apple easing into a new model for releasing and marketing iPhones. Having the same processor across the new product line has got to make life easier, production more cost effective.
“We had this technology we were working on for many years to be the future of the iPhone,” Schiller said of the X. “It was a huge ask of the engineering team to get it to market last year, and they did. … We knew that if we could bring that to market and it was successful very quickly after that, we needed to grow the line and make it available to more people.”
And:
“I think the only way to judge a display is to look at it,” he told me, adding that Apple calls these screens “retina displays” because your eye can’t discern individual pixels unless you press your face up right against the glass. “If you can’t see the pixels, at some point the numbers don’t mean anything. They’re fairly arbitrary.” And when asked if the screen was to blame for the XR’s staggered release, he simply said, “This is when it’s ready.”
It is interesting to see this lowest tier of the new product line be so highly recommended. Part of this is Apple’s proven genius with materials. Consider this quote from Ben Bajarin:
The Xr feels more premium than all its high-end Android competitors which bodes well for Apple.
No company has experimented more with material science/metals than Apple to get to where they are today.
A long, satisfying review. Lots to process, but a few things that stand out:
Only the iPhone XR offers a 128 GB storage tier, and it’s just $50 more. If you want more than 64 GB with an iPhone XS, you’ve got to pay $150 more than the base price and jump all the way to 256 GB. So in terms of what I would actually recommend for most people — getting the storage tier one level above entry level — the 128 GB iPhone XR costs $350 less than the 256 GB XS and $450 less than the XS Max.
People who are looking for some way that iPhone XR purchasers are getting screwed have it backwards. If anyone is getting screwed on pricing, it’s XS and XS Max purchasers, who don’t have the option of buying a 128 GB device for just $50 more than the baseline 64 GB models.
With anything beyond the free iCloud storage tier enabled, 128GB of storage should be more than enough. And, I’d argue, even 64GB should be enough as well, at least for most people. But for only $50, the leap to 128GB seems a no-brainer.
Another bit that stood out to me followed a series of images John took of his son. Take a look at the images, then read on:
In short, Portrait Mode is usable on the XR in some low light situations where it’s unusable on the XS.
Very interesting. I suspect this is something that could be addressed in a future software release. I can’t imagine the XS and XS Max can’t be tuned to solve this problem, but the proof is in the pudding.
Alongside the iPhone XR, Apple today released a new 0.3m Magnetic Apple Watch Charger that’s equipped with a USB-C connector for the first time.
An odd product. Vastly more people have iOS gadgets than Macs, and therefore are set to charge with USB-A instead of USB-C.
Is this simply a niche product for the few who have built their charging lives around USB-C? As opposed to the Mac folks who (I’d wager) all have a USB-A dongle, just in case they need to charge their Apple Watch on their Mac.
Maybe it’s that simple, that this is just a product (after all this time) for folks who need a USB-C specific solution for charging their Apple Watch.
It’s the “after all this time” part that tickles my brain. Why now? Is there some function coming to Apple Watch that can only be delivered via USB-C? As opposed to via a USB-A adapter?
Is there still the chance of USB-C making an appearance on a non-Mac product?
This cable feels like a crossover product, spreading USB-C adoption beyond the Mac.
Philip Elmer-DeWitt, quoting a Piper Jaffray survey update:
Apple’s share of smartphone ownership was unchanged in the Piper Jaffray Taking Stock With Teens survey. Of ~8,500 respondents, 82% have an iPhone, the highest percentage we 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, the highest ever recorded in our survey (up from 84% in Spring-18). Android was the runner up with 10%, down from 11% in the spring.
This is US teens, not world-wide ownership. But strong news for Apple, increasing their hold on the next generation of (well heeled?) phone buyers.
