In 2017 and the first half of this year, Google shipped about 5 million Pixel smartphones worldwide, according to the research firm IDC. Apple Inc. sells as many iPhones in about eight days as Google did in 18 months — and even Apple has a relatively small minority market share in smartphones.
And:
Small numbers aren’t confined to Google, either. Journalists like me can’t stop talking about the “runaway success” of the Echo devices, Amazon.com Inc.’s rapidly expanding lineup of voice-activated home doodads. Amazon sold about 3.6 million of the two most popular Echo models from April to June, Strategy Analytics estimated. Fitbit, a company that journalists like me stopped talking about long ago, sold 2.7 million motion-tracking gadgets in the same period.
And:
For most software or internet tech empires, hardware is a niche hobby, and it will remain so for the foreseeable future.
It take a lot of R&D dollars, fragmentation of company focus, to design, test, build, and ship a hardware product. Why does Google do it? Interesting question.
It’s been 10 years since Spotify officially launched for fans—and new music and artist discovery has never been the same. We built our Swedish company to create a legal, better alternative to piracy—one that helps to fairly compensate artists for their work and shape music listening and sharing via streaming.
In honor of this important milestone, we’re unveiling our lists of the most-streamed artists and songs, milestones and achievements, and most influential genres over the past 10 years. Take a closer look.
The preference people have for Spotify over Apple Music or vice versa is always interesting to me. For example, my wife likes Spotify better because it has a wider selection of Yoga music for her to work out to. If you’re a Spotify fan, check out their Decade of Discovery playlist.
Analyst Horace Dediu tweeted out a chart of data compiled by Merrill Lynch Global Research on 32,523 smartphone users ranging from Apple, Blackberry, and Google to a series of global Android licensees: HTC, Huawei, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, Oppo, Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE.
For each maker, the most popular choice among users for their next phone was another model from the same maker. Among iPhone buyers, that figure was 70 percent. For Samsung and Huawei users, 53 and 54 percent respectively planned to stick with their brand. Just 42 percent of Google owners planned to buy another one, while other brand owners expressed even less loyalty.
I know someone will point out the Apple stat of “90% customer satisfaction” but that is different from this “Intent to Buy”. Still, I would have guessed Apple was higher than the 70% shown here. Regardless, this is where Apple has a huge advantage and where they still have plenty of room to grow by taking share away from various Android manufacturers.
At 300 Funston Street in San Francisco’s Richmond District, there’s an old Christian Science church. Walk up it’s palatial steps, past Corinthian columns and urns, into the bowels of a vaulted sanctuary — and you’ll find a copy of the internet.
In a backroom where pastors once congregated stand rows of computer servers, flickering en masse with blue light, humming the hymnal of technological grace.
This is the home of the Internet Archive, a non-profit that has, for 22 years, been preserving our online history: Billions of web pages, tweets, news articles, videos, and memes.
I can’t count how many times I’ve used the Wayback Machine. It’s an invaluable resource for research and curiosity.
Before photographer Philippe Halsman and Surrealist Salvador Dalí settled on the idea of tossing three cats into the air for the photograph Dalí Atomicus (1948), the Spanish artist suggested they blow up a duck using dynamite. Considering it took 26 attempts to pull off the picture of a levitating Dalí in a chaotic airborne scene, Halsman’s insistence against the first idea was decidedly the best course of action.
Halsman, a mid-century portrait photographer, sought to lift the veil on his subjects, however briefly, to reveal their innermost being. “A true photographer wants to try to capture the real essence of a human being,” he once famously said. But capturing the essence of Dalí was a complex task. Over nearly four decades, Halsman photographed the artist on many occasions, spurring the most iconic black-and-white portraits of the Surrealist.
I still remember the first time I ever saw this image as a kid and thinking, “This is stupid.” It took me many years and a level of maturity before I began to understand both the art of Dali and the photographic achievements of Halsman.
Developer Steve Troughton-Smith used SpriteKit to create his own Apple Watch face:
Experimenting with SpriteKit watch faces. Very easy to do; set watchOS to show most recent app on wake, and make a SpriteKit app pic.twitter.com/uhFG3pRp7w
This is an end-around, bypassing Apple’s lack of support for 3rd party watch faces. Scroll through the Twitter thread, check out all the faces. I hope Apple allows this bit of a market to evolve, eventually adding official support.
One concern about all this is the fear that Apple would be liable for watch face copyright infringement. Some say that that’s the reason Apple does not allow 3rd party watch faces. Does this eliminate that liability? Will Apple allow this to continue?
To help you avoid calls from scammers, Google is adding Call Screen to the Pixel, a new option that appears when you receive a phone call. Whenever someone calls you, you can tap a “Screen call” button, and a robot voice will pick up.
And:
“The person you’re calling is using a screening service and will get a copy of this conversation. Go ahead and say your name and why you’re calling,” the Google bot will say. As the caller responds, the digital assistant will transcribe the caller’s message for you. If you need more information, you can use one of the feature’s canned responses, which include “Tell me more” and “Who is this?” There are also buttons to either pick up or hang up the call, so you can accept or reject it at any time.
I wonder if it’d be possible for Apple to implement a feature like this that let you actually screen the call screening audio as it happens. In other words, the phone rings, ScreenBot answers, and you hear the back and forth with ScreenBot, then you jump into the call if it’s someone you know.
As is, sounds like Google’s Call Screen is all done via text transcription, rather than via listen-in audio. Could be wrong about this. We’ll know for sure once it ships.
I wonder what Apple’s business model is here. They made a second season, so the show has got to have some value to Apple. Is this purely filling the content pipeline, in preparation for the eventual launch of Apple’s media service?
The Swatch Group made plastic watches cool. This led to completely different product positioning. Swatch de-linked the watch from its core timekeeping function and turned it into a fashion statement. Watches were no longer about their intricate clockworks — they were now an avenue for self-expression. This shift from technology to fashion would soon become even more important in the age of smartphones and smartwatches. But it would still be decades before anyone knew what a “Home” button was.
For more than 30 years after the launch of the Swatch watch, the industry remained remarkably stable as Switzerland re-established itself as the global watchmaking leader.
It would take the vision and marketing powerhouse of another giant to disrupt the industry once more.
I don’t know if you can definitely say Apple has beaten “Swiss watchmakers at their own game”, but they definitely saw a niche in the watch market no one else was serving. The Apple Watch fascinates me if only for the fact it has gotten so many non-watch people to start wearing a watch and the reasons for wearing one are wide and varied – which is good news for Apple.
This is simultaneously funny and sad. FYI, no these humpbacks are not “going to kill us!” and there’s no need to call 911 to report there’s a whale under your boat. Finally, for God’s sake, don’t start your damn engines when whales are that close to you.
The National goes undercover to investigate some of Apple’s controversial business practices including allegations of overpriced repair charges and the battery/slowdown scandal.
I understand why Apple wants genuine parts in its products—they want the customers to have a properly repaired device with the right parts. I also have never believed that Apple intentionally slowed down the iPhone to force people into buying a new device. Having said that, you should watch the video.
The history of the security detail is arguably as old as the history of power. For as long as there have been people at the top, there have been knights, samurai, somatophylakes, housecarls, Varangians, and Praetorian Guards cast in the role of personal protectors.
These days, it seems like everyone has a security detail. We spent a day with three men in suits to find out how it feels to be safe.
I have some relatives in the “protection industry” and I’m always fascinated by the people who do this kind of work.
Folk, new wave, hip-hop, R&B, rap-rock, heavy metal and good old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll are among the many genres (and subgenres) represented by the latest shortlist of nominees for induction into the ever-broadening Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Stevie Nicks (already an inductee as a member of Fleetwood Mac), Def Leppard, John Prine, Roxy Music, Devo and Todd Rundgren are the first-time nominees for the 2019 class, it was announced on Tuesday, joining a more diverse selection of returning acts who have not been inducted, including Janet Jackson, Radiohead and Rage Against the Machine.
I love when these nominations come out because it provokes huge arguments between myself and The Publisher of The Loop on the Your Mac Life show.
When viewed the footage on a small iPhone scene they both looked fantastic. I was impressed to say the least but it all fell apart when viewing in fullscreen on my 27inch iMac. Too much sharpening meant the details just got lost and all the leaves with details just got smushed together. The C200 still looked great.
No surprise there. But:
The dynamic range however is super impressive. it’s able to keep the highlights on the bright sun while keeping details in the shadows. This is some crazy multiple exposure processing thats been done.
And:
In conclusion the iPhone camera is a smartphone camera and always will be. It is incredibly small but to be honest give completely mind blowing results.
And:
Is it as good as a cinema camera, not at all. Is it the best camera I have ever seen on a smartphone? 100%.
Hundreds of thousands of accounts on Google’s long-suffering social media service, Google+, may have been affected by a security flaw, the company said Monday, exposing personal information such as names and email addresses.
In the wake of the accidental exposure, Google said it is planning to shut down Google+ for consumers. But that will not happen for about 10 months. If you are wondering whether you still have a Google+ account — and if so, how to delete it — you can follow these instructions.
If nothing else, good to know how to tell if you have a Google Plus profile tied to your Google account.
This level of watch and their valuation always fascinates me. Not just for the incredible workmanship of the watches but because, generally, I find the individual watches to be butt ugly. But that may just mean I’m uncultured.
Over the years we’ve received feedback that people want to better understand how to control the data they choose to share with apps on Google+. So as part of Project Strobe, one of our first priorities was to closely review all the APIs associated with Google+.
This review crystallized what we’ve known for a while: that while our engineering teams have put a lot of effort and dedication into building Google+ over the years, it has not achieved broad consumer or developer adoption, and has seen limited user interaction with apps. The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.
Seriously, who didn’t see this coming… five years ago.
Safari on iOS 12 has a security mechanism in place to make sure malicious websites aren’t displaying a software keyboard that mimics the iOS one in order to act as a keylogger.
To trigger the warning: open a webpage in full-screen mode, for example a full-screen video on YouTube’s mobile website. Then tap several times at the bottom of the screen, as if you were typing on an invisible keyboard.
A warning message will appear telling you the website may be showing you a fake keyboard to trick you into disclosing personal or financial information.
Worth reading the comments on this page.
Note that this seems to only work on an iPad (something to do with the way iPad supports a full-screen mode that iPhone does not).
I have not been able to replicate this, but I am running a beta, so that might be an issue. A number of people have replicated this. If you can, please do ping me with specifics.
The beginning of the video is all about unboxing. If you want to skip ahead to the actual features, jump to about five minutes in.
One thing Jeff does that really shows off the difference between Apple Watch Series 3 and Series 4? He puts both on his wrist at the same time, so you really get a sense of how much more screen real estate you get with the Series 4. Nicely done.
This was an interesting read, an update on downloading your Facebook data more than anything else. The author ends up with a JSON version of their friend list, which is really just a list of friend names.
It’d be interesting if there was a way to end up with a JSON list of links to your friends as part of this process. Though, personally, I’m shed of the whole thing.
This is a really detailed review, with no kowtowing to Apple. One particular point worth highlighting:
The Apple A12 is a beast of a SoC. While the A11 already bested the competition in terms of performance and power efficiency, the A12 doubles down on it in this regard, thanks to Apple’s world-class design teams which were able to squeeze out even more out of their CPU microarchitectures. The Vortex CPU’s memory subsystem saw an enormous boost, which grants the A12 a significant performance boost in a lot of workloads. Apple’s marketing department was really underselling the improvements here by just quoting 15% – a lot of workloads will be seeing performance improvements I estimate to be around 40%, with even greater improvements in some corner-cases. Apple’s CPU have gotten so performant now, that we’re just margins off the best desktop CPUs; it will be interesting to see how the coming years evolve, and what this means for Apple’s non-mobile products.
Many Web sites and apps now offer two-factor authentication (2FA), which requires you to enter a short numeric code—the so-called second factor—in addition to your username and password. These temporary codes are either sent to you via text message or are generated by an authentication app. In iOS 12 and macOS 10.14 Mojave, Apple has streamlined entering such codes when sent via an SMS text message, reducing multiple steps and keyboard entry to a single tap or click.
I explain just below how this new feature works, but I also want to raise a caution flag. SMS is no longer a reliable way to send a second factor because it’s too easy for even small-time attackers to intercept those messages.
Read the article, especially the section titled “It’s Easy to Hijack SMS Codes”.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said on Saturday it currently had no reason to doubt statements from companies that have denied a Bloomberg report that their supply chains were compromised by malicious computer chips inserted by Chinese intelligence services.
“The Department of Homeland Security is aware of the media reports of a technology supply chain compromise,” DHS said in a statement.
“Like our partners in the UK, the National Cyber Security Centre, at this time we have no reason to doubt the statements from the companies named in the story,” it said.
This story just keeps getting stranger and stranger.
There may be no more perfectly satisfying treat than a Canadian butter tart. It is small and sweet, bracingly so, with hints of butterscotch and caramel. And each bite delivers three textures: flaky crust, chewy top, gooey center. While its exact origins may never be found, the tart became popular in Ontario in the early 20th century and spread across Canada thanks to its inclusion in the 1913 “Five Roses Cook Book.” Today there are numerous variations. Runny or firm? Raisins or plain? This recipe can be adapted to please all partisans.
I had no idea butter tarts were a Canadian thing until I moved to the US. I just assumed everyone enjoyed these yummy little desserts. It is definitely a delicious holiday tradition for many of us in Canada and, even better, fairly easy to make.
Happy Thanksgiving to all of our Canadian readers!
