Apple now has a customer base of more than 250 million paid subscriptions across its Services offerings of Apple Music, iCloud and App Store continuing payments. Viewed against Amazon’s recent announcement of 100 million Prime members, that figure is substantial. But Apple is also adding around 30 million new subscriptions every quarter.
Fascinating perspective comparing Apple and Amazon subscription numbers. As I’ve said many times, it’s all about the ecosystem. HomePod brings Apple Music subscribers, enough to justify the development cost. iOS devices bring iCloud subscriptions. There’s a steady contribution of subscription money flowing in from HBO, Hulu, Netflix, etc. It all contributes to the services bottom line.
Amazon and Best Buy today announced a collaboration to bring the next generation of Fire TV Edition smart TVs to customers in the United States and Canada. As a first step in the partnership, Best Buy will launch more than ten 4K and HD Fire TV Edition models from Insignia and Toshiba, beginning this summer.
And:
The newly designed smart TVs come with the Fire TV experience built-in, uniquely bringing together live over-the-air TV and all your streaming content into one easy-to-view location. Connect any HD antenna and instantly use Alexa to search for and watch broadcast TV, or choose from a vast catalog of streaming TV episodes and movies from Netflix, Prime Video, HBO, PlayStation Vue, Hulu, and many more. Fire TV Edition includes a Voice Remote with Alexa, making it easy to launch apps, search for TV shows, play music, switch inputs, control smart home devices, and more. It can also be paired with any Echo device allowing you to easily use your voice to control your TV experience hands-free with Alexa.
I see this as a real challenge to Apple and Siri, as well as to Google. But I also worry about privacy and security implications. So much to unpack here.
There’s also the concept of buying two different technologies that are evolving at different rates, bundled together into one expensive, inseparable package. How often do you replace your TV? And how often do you replace your TV box (think Apple TV or ChromeCast)? If they are one and the same, seems to me it’d be problematic to change one without changing the other.
In the letter, Bezos stressed the importance of having high standards in running a business. By setting high standards, companies are able to live up to “ever-rising customer expectations,” he said.
Bezos also disclosed for the first time that Prime now exceeds 100 million members worldwide. In 2017 alone, Amazon shipped over five billion items through its Prime service worldwide.
Interesting that after all these years, Amazon has finally released these numbers. I wonder if they’ll ever announce Kindle and Echo sales figures?
Douglas Weber is an American industrial designer based in Fukuoka, Japan. He formerly worked for Apple in Cupertino and is a fellow coffee nerd. He is currently working on what he deems the perfect coffee grinder at his new company Lyn Weber, which he founded with VFX designer Craig Lyn. We recently talked about the new wave of coffee and cafes and how and why design is becoming such an integral part of coffee culture.
Facebook Inc said on Tuesday it would continue requiring people to accept targeted ads as a condition of using its service, a stance that may help keep its business model largely intact despite a new European Union privacy law.
And
Facebook Deputy Chief Privacy Officer Rob Sherman said the social network would begin seeking Europeans’ permission this week for a variety of ways Facebook uses their data, but he said that opting out of targeted marketing altogether would not be possible.
Whether you like targeted ads or not, it makes sense that Facebook is still going to require users to accept them—it’s their entire business model. The choice is simple—accept the ads or delete the app.
Without glass, the world would be unrecognizable. It’s in the eyeglasses on your face, the lightbulbs in your room, and the windows that let you see outside. But despite its ubiquity, there’s still some debate within the research community about how to define “glass.” Some tend to emphasize its solid qualities, others its liquidity.
Unanswered questions abound, like what makes one type of glass stronger than another, or why certain mixtures produce their unique optical or structural properties. Add to this the nearly infinite varieties of glass—one database lists over 350,000 types of currently known glass, though in principle the number of mixtures is limitless—and you get a surprisingly large and active field of research that regularly produces astounding new products.
Glass has shaped the world more than any other substance, and in many sneaky ways, it’s the defining material of the human era.
First things first, the new 9.7″ iPad (AKA, the education iPad, or the sixth-generation iPad) is terrific. If you are moving from a previous 9.7″ iPad, there’s nothing but plusses here. A brilliant screen, faster processor and, best of all, Apple Pencil support.
As you might expect, the first thing I wanted to do was make some pretty pictures, put the Apple Pencil through its paces. I played a bit with Apple’s built-in apps, and was able to use the Apple Pencil as a pointer in all the ones I tried, and for simple drawing (freehand line drawing using Markup) in some. But nothing really scratched that artistic itch, though Notes came the closest.
So I turned to Serenity Caldwell, iMore’s artist-in-residence. If you are not already familiar with Serenity’s work, take a look at her brilliant iPad review, paying particular attention to the video embedded in the review. Awesome work. Serenity really knows her way around the iPad, Apple Pencil, and drawing.
If you have an iPad and Apple Pencil, take a look at these posts Serenity pulled together. I found them incredibly helpful.
How to use Apple Pencil: The Ultimate Guide: This one is a soup to nuts, everything you need to wrap your head around the Apple Pencil, showing you how to pair/unpair your Apple Pencil, check the battery level, charge it, and troubleshoot if you run into trouble. An easy read, and perfect for Apple Pencil newbies.
Linked inside the above-linked article is Serenity’s guide to Best Apple Pencil Accessories. Take a few minutes to scan through the post, just to get a sense of the options that are available, see if any of them fill a need for you.
Next up is Best drawing apps for iPad and Apple Pencil. This is a rich list of apps that will really help you get the most out of your Apple Pencil. The first app on the list, Linea, was an instant buy for me.
Signs and symbols on the sides of ships tell stories about an industry few outsiders understand.
Those who work in ports or on the water have a good view of the proceedings; tugs may have the best view of all. These photos get you closer to ships than most people will ever be.
“The sides of ships have their own sort of beauty,” says photographer David Webster Smith, who is also a San Francisco tugboat engineer. “As soon as I can, I get my camera out.”
I’ve lived in port cities most of my life and, while I’ve seen many of these markings on container ships, I never really paid much attention or knew what they represented. Turns out, they are pretty interesting.
I found this interesting. A short film, with animoji used to deliver the dialog. Wondering if this approach will find its way into a feature film or TV show. Seems to me a logical path for some show on Apple’s content schedule.
Apple’s U.S. customers installed 45 new iPhone apps in 2017, a growth of 10 percent over last year, while Services revenue from In-App Purchases and Subscriptions expanded by 23 percent–driven by games, music and video streaming and dating services. And overall, Apple’s U.S. App Store customers drove significantly higher revenue per user ($58) than Google Play ($38).
Distracted driving is a national epidemic. Our Safe Driving Report revealed that 92% of the drivers in the United States use their phones while behind the wheel.
And:
Taking just five seconds to send or read a text at 55 miles per hour is like driving an entire length of a football field while blindfolded, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The results showed that 70% of EverDrive iPhone users kept their DND feature enabled; one in four (27%) iPhone users disabled the feature. Of those users enabling the feature, phone use while driving decreased by 8%.
A slice of goodness from Apple that puts your safety first, taking steps to actually prevent you from using their product. Will more of this product curbing emerge over time, steps to help reduce smartphone addiction?
As always, gorgeous video but there’s an interesting note included with this one. The pilot, Duncan Sinfield, says:
it’s only a matter of time until the campus becomes shut-off to drones completely… with a geo-fence, or something similar. Security at Apple Park generally responds in two white Prius’s to my precise take-off locations in 10 minutes or less. While this is speculation, my instincts tell me that Apple is tracking all drones in the vicinity of the campus with sophisticated radio frequency technology from companies such as DeDrone (a San Francisco-based aerospace security company). As always, I respect all requests by Apple Security to land my drone and leave the area when asked to do so. They are always asking if I’m an Apple employee too. So to all of the Apple Employees watching (and reading), don’t fly your drones over The Park, it’s frowned upon!
Market Summary – Q4 2017: Apple remained the most profitable brand, capturing 86% of the total handset market profits. Further splitting profits by model, the top 10 models captured 90% of the total handset profits.
iPhone X alone generated 35% of the total handset industry profits. This is a significant landmark, as the model was available in the market for only two months during Q4 2017.
Nothing but good news for Apple and bad news for almost every other manufacturer.
While subtle variations in material, texture, lighting, and even the shape of a product can play tricks on the eyes, every device Apple currently offers or has produced in space gray can be grouped into one of several loosely defined categories. Below, we’ve cataloged and categorized the vast universe of Apple’s recent dark material finishes in an attempt to unravel the mysteries of space gray.
At first blush, this seemed really silly. But on further examination, it’s fascinating how many variations Apple has had for “Space Gray”. You’d think a company renowned for its attention to detail would be more consistent in its colour schemes.
Apple Inc. plans to integrate recently acquired magazine app Texture into Apple News and debut its own premium subscription offering, according to people familiar with the matter. The move is part of a broader push by the iPhone maker to generate more revenue from online content and services.
Texture was all about magazines, but I wonder if Apple will include other forms of media, like paid newspaper subscriptions, as part of this new service.
The phrase “Hey Siri” was originally chosen to be as natural as possible; in fact, it was so natural that even before this feature was introduced, users would invoke Siri using the home button and inadvertently prepend their requests with the words, “Hey Siri.” Its brevity and ease of articulation, however, bring to bear additional challenges. In particular, our early offline experiments showed, for a reasonable rate of correctly accepted invocations, an unacceptable number of unintended activations.
Another fascinating article in Apple’s Machine Learning series. It got a bit dense for me at times (or, rather, I’m a bit dense for the article) but there are lots of interesting tidbits of info included.
Winners of the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes were announced at Columbia University in New York City on Monday. The Pulitzers are highly revered and mark the best in journalism in 14 categories.
Netflix Inc’s blitz of new programming attracted a surprisingly high 7.4 million new customers from January to March, reassuring investors who are betting the video streaming pioneer’s massive spending will fuel growth around the world.
Netflix’s shows are great, as are many of the others put out by similar services. These numbers show how much consumers want these types of shows. This is exactly what Apple is looking to happen when it releases its video content—we’ll see how that works out.
America’s fast-food desserts straddle two very different categories: our country’s most horrific edible disasters and our most cherished culinary treasures. For every gem like the Orange Julius, a pulse-quickening emulsion of citrus and dairy, there is the Burger King Lucky Charms Shake (RIP), a Breaking Bad-like chemistry experiment gone wrong. There are the old nostalgic treats, like that McDonald’s soft serve, that don’t stand the test of time — and others, like the Taco Bell cinnamon twists, that do.
This is a ranking of those treats.
A surprisingly fun (and possibly horrifying) read. And now I’m hungry.
This detailed tutorial really puts Workflow through its paces. If you’ve not yet spent quality time with the iOS Workflow app, this is a wonderful way to get started. Nice job by iMore’s Matthew Cassinelli.
First things first, I do love these deep dives by people like Guilherme Rambo. This is not a leak, but more of a grind-it-out, pay attention to the details analysis.
In this case, Guilherme came upon some code with a log message that said:
“This is where the 3rd party face config bundle generation would happen”
From Guilherme:
It’s clear from the wording of the message that this feature is not implemented at the moment, but it’s definitely something Apple has planned. This new capability could come as soon as watchOS 5, or be dropped altogether. I personally hope they go forward with it since it’d be pretty cool to be able to install new watch faces on my Apple Watch.
This is a fascinating piece, a step-by-step on how something promising went south. This is a group interview, with notables like former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, Facebook ad-tech entrepreneur Antonio García Martínez, virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, free software activist Richard Stallman, and many more.
The flow of this article is, how things went wrong in 15 steps. Terrific read.
Here’s a cool list of the different jobs on a movie set and how they fit into the system.
Gunn posted this on Twitter and not only is it an interesting breakdown of the jobs on a film set but many of them are further linked to descriptions of the job. So, if you’ve ever wondered what the Best Boy Grip does and whether you’re qualified for the position, this is the chart for you.
All of us, adults and children, have had our lives transformed in the decade since the iPhone was unveiled. Now we have always-connected email, messaging, shopping, banking and so on, in addition to social, gaming and entertainment apps. Many of these seem benign, but we use them more than we know.
What does a healthy, moderate digital life look like?
I believe that for Apple to maintain and even grow its customer base it can solve this problem at the platform level, by empowering users to understand more about how they use their devices. To do this, it should let people track their digital activity in detail and across all devices.
Considering the market share, I always bristle whenever a pundit says, “Apple needs to solve this problem…” instead of at least including Google and Android in the discussion. But there’s no doubt that Apple, with its stated concerns about user privacy and demonstrated control over all aspects of the iPhone, is uniquely situated to at least begin the discussion on these issues.
The specifics of Huseby’s legal case apply only in Norway, of course, but his case speaks to a problem faced by independent iPhone repair shops around the world. Apple’s use of the legal system and trademark law turns average repair professionals into criminals and helps the company corner the repair market for Apple products.
This is just one of many cases that will need to be adjudicated before the issue is settled but I think, in the long run, Apple will lose this fight.
Among the casualties of the impending transition to 64-bit apps is one long-lasting oddity: QuickTime 7 Pro.
What makes this app so unusual are a few factors. For one thing, it’s one of Apple’s own apps. For another, it was first released in 2005, making it almost 13 years old, though it hasn’t seen an update in about 8 years.
But despite its age and the fact that the writing was on the wall for QuickTime 7, news that it wouldn’t see an update when macOS makes the jump to all-64-bit-all-the-time sparked some cries of frustration from users, including both myself and Jason, who have carved out a place in their workflows—and their hearts—for this little anachronism.
Probably the single thing that pisses me off most about the (completely understandable) move to all 64-bit is that Apple has crippled QT over the years and is now forcing us to use less suitable and functional apps. QuickTime Player X is utterly useless as a production app.
