First things first, take a look at this Bloomberg article, which started a wave of discussion about alleged stumbling HomePod sales:

At first, it looked like the HomePod might be a hit. Pre-orders were strong, and in the last week of January the device grabbed about a third of the U.S. smart speaker market in unit sales, according to data provided to Bloomberg by Slice Intelligence. But by the time HomePods arrived in stores, sales were tanking, says Slice principal analyst Ken Cassar. “Even when people had the ability to hear these things,” he says, “it still didn’t give Apple another spike.”

Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac, responds in this linked op-ed:

HomePod is a much more expensive speaker than its rivals, and is only useful for a particular slice of the market: those who own an iPhone and either have an Apple Music subscription or have all their music in iTunes and subscribe to iTunes Match. It’s not reasonable to expect sales of a $350 speaker with a limited market to rival those of a $50 device aimed at the mass-market.

Ben’s piece goes into much more detail, addressing the gloom and doom of the Bloomberg piece. Well reasoned, worth reading both.

I do think it is way too early to judge this market. Apple is in the premium space, Google Home and Amazon Echo are based in the commodity space. To me, the key to HomePod growth is Apple’s R&D investment in improving Siri intelligence. If Apple improves the Siri experience, they’ll automatically make HomePod more appealing.

I can’t imagine a more important Apple technology to invest in than Siri. Siri impacts every aspect of the Apple ecosystem and is immensely leverage-able. Siri is the rising tide that lifts all boats.

Alan Kay was there at the very beginning. He spent 10 years at Xerox PARC, culminating in that famous visit Steve Jobs made that ultimately spawned the Mac.

This is a bit of a walk down memory lane and a nice little read.

Christian Zibreg, iDownloadBlog, does a really nice job walking through the process of using the iOS Markup tools to sign PDF documents. Terrifically useful.

Bloomberg:

Finding billionaires in Silicon Valley isn’t hard. Dropbox Inc.’s Arash Ferdowsi and Veeva Systems Inc.’s Peter Gassner have both crossed the threshold this year, and tech fortunes make up a fifth — or about $1 trillion — of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

But tracking down members of the three-comma club at Apple Inc. is a less fruitful endeavor, even though the iPhone-maker is the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalization of $879 billion.

Chairman Art Levinson is the only insider to make the cut, and Apple stock accounts for just 20 percent of his $1 billion fortune, according to regulatory filings. The rest comes from his long tenure at Genentech Inc., where he was chairman and chief executive officer, and an early stake in Google Inc.

No other Apple insider comes close.

I think one core attribute of any huge company with few or no billionaires is a long legacy. A tech company born in current times that then grows huge is much more likely to make a billionaire or two. Or three.

Apple’s big growth curve happened long before billion dollar valuations were common. They went public in 1980, fragmenting their ownership stake, making it that much harder for a single person to emerge as a billionaire.

Thoughtful article.

Uber Technologies Inc said on Wednesday it is planning to offer more modes of transportation for riders through its app, giving people more ways to get around in cities.

In cities like San Francisco, having a variety of transportation options is especially important.

Apple Insider:

A message included in Apple’s first watchOS 4.3.1 beta warns users that older apps will no longer be supported in “future versions” of the operating system, suggesting support for software built with the watchOS 1.0 SDK could be deprecated with watchOS 5.

This is about watchOS apps built using outdated parts of the SDK. Another side of this: Will watchOS 5 continue to support the original Apple Watch hardware?

Motherboard:

As we’ve reported before, it is bullshit and illegal under federal law for electronics manufacturers to put “Warranty Void if Removed” stickers on their gadgets, and it’s also illegal for companies to void your warranty if you fix your device yourself or via a third party.

And:

Companies such as Sony and Microsoft pepper the edges of their game consoles with warning labels telling customers that breaking the seal voids the warranty. That’s illegal. Thanks to the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, no manufacturer is allowed to put repair restrictions on a device it offers a warranty on. Dozens of companies do it anyway, and the FTC has put them on notice. Apple, meanwhile, routinely tells customers not to use third party repair companies, and aftermarket parts regularly break iPhones due to software updates.

Interesting. Going to do more reading on the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.

This is a follow-up to Apple’s press release, which dropped Monday.

Mark Sullivan, Fast Company:

You have to see Apple’s Reno, Nevada, data center from the inside to truly understand how huge it is. It’s made up of five long white buildings sitting side by side on a dry scrubby landscape just off I-80, and the corridor that connects them through the middle is a quarter-mile long. On either side are big, dark rooms–more than 50 of them–filled with more than 200,000 identical servers, tiny lights winking in the dark from their front panels. This is where Siri lives. And iCloud. And Apple Music. And Apple Pay.

Powering all these machines, and keeping them cool, takes a lot of power–constant, uninterrupted, redundant power. At the Reno data center, that means 100% green power from three different Apple solar farms.

And:

Now Apple says it’s finished getting the rest of its facilities running on 100% green power–from its new Apple Park headquarters, which has one of the largest solar roofs on the planet, to its distribution centers and retail stores around the world. Though the 100% figure covers only Apple’s own operations–not those of of the suppliers and contract manufacturers which do much of the work of bringing its ideas to life–it’s also convinced 23 companies in its supply chain to sign a pledge to get to 100% renewable energy for the portion of their business relating to Apple products.

Part of this equation is Renewable Energy Certificates:

One REC is equal to a single megawatt of power produced from a renewable energy source.

And:

It turns out RECs (like carbon credits) can be sold independent of the energy itself. So it’s also possible for a large power consumer to buy only the RECs–and not the power–from a renewable energy project and use them to offset its use of dirty energy at one of its own facilities.

Apple could easily go down that road, buying its way to green. This from VP of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives Lisa Jackson:

“I am not aware of any other company that uses that same stringency for making sure the clean power that they’re investing in or purchasing is on the regional grid where it’s being used,” she boasts. But she acknowledges that there are still places in the world where that’s not possible, though that may have more to do with the reality of power markets than choices Apple has made. In some cases, the company has had to sign long-term contracts to acquire the RECs from a new project it helped create elsewhere in the same region. That was the case recently for a two-person office in Chile. There was no suitable green energy source nearby, so Apple is now offsetting the brown power used by that office with RECs from one of its green-power projects in Brazil.

Apple does not need to do this. They could simply buy their way into compliance. Credit where credit is due.

Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:

A new web standard being recommended for adoption would open the way for both Face ID and Touch ID to be used to login to websites.

The API, known as WebAuthn, allows existing security devices – like fingerprint readers, cameras and USB keys – to be used for website authentication

And:

There’s as yet no word on Safari, but with all current and recent iPhones and iPads offering either Face ID or Touch ID, and the latter supported on the MacBook Pro too, this would be tailor-made for Apple. It cannot be used with other browsers without Apple’s support.

Very interesting.

Bloomberg:

VirnetX Holding Corp. won $502.6 million against Apple Inc. after a federal jury in Texas said the maker of iPhones was infringing patents for secure communications, the latest twist in a dispute now in its eighth year.

VirnetX stock went up as much as 44% on the news, Apple stock not so much. Makes sense, since VernetX reported about $1 million in revenue last year, Apple a bit more than $200 billion.

The patents in question?

VirnetX claimed that Apple’s FaceTime, VPN on Demand and iMessage features infringe four patents related to secure communications, claims that Apple denied.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for Apple to write that check:

For VirnetX, the jury verdict in its favor could be a short-lived victory. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board has said the patents are invalid, in cases that are currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington.

Deadline:

Apple has nabbed a TV series adaptation of Foundation, the seminal Isaac Asimov science fiction novel trilogy. The project, from Skydance Television, has been put in development for straight-to-series consideration. Deadline revealed last June that Skydance had made a deal with the Asimov estate and that David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman were cracking the code on a sprawling series based on the books that informed Star Wars and many other sci-fi films and TV series.

Originally published as a short story series in Astounding Magazine in 1942, Asimov’s Foundation is the complex saga of humans scattered on planets throughout the galaxy, all living under the rule of the Galactic Empire. The protagonist is a psycho-historian who has an ability to read the future and foresees the empire’s imminent collapse. He sets out to save the knowledge of mankind from being wiped out.

I don’t know how familiar any of you are with the Foundation trilogy but when I saw this news I had a little squeal of delight. It’s one of those series I go back and read every few years. Every time I heard that someone was trying to turn it into a movie, I died a little inside. Like Dune, Foundation is too large a world to be constrained to a single movie. A multi-year series is the only way to do it justice.

Israel’s consumer protection bureau said on Tuesday it was investigating Apple over a failure to disclose to consumers that its software could slow performance in some iPhones.

I think what these investigations will come down to is Apple’s intent. I don’t believe for a second they did this to trick people into buying a new iPhone.

CNBC:

Recruiters for Apple had been after Cook, a vice president at Compaq, which was then the world’s biggest seller of PCs worldwide. He turned them down several times, he told Charlie Rose in 2014. But then he thought, “I’m going to go out and take the meeting. Steve created the whole industry that I’m in, I’d love to meet him.”

When the pair got together, “Well, I’m just thinking I’m going to meet him and all of a sudden he’s talking about his strategy and his vision,” said Cook.

And Cook was impressed.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Cook had to be convinced to leave his gig at Compaq but it turned out well for all involved – except maybe Compaq.

Kif Leswing, Business Insider:

82% of teens of teens currently own an iPhone, according to Piper Jaffray’s “Teens Survey,” which questions thousands of kids across 40 states with an average age of 16.

That’s up from 78% in last fall, and it’s the highest percentage of teen iPhone ownership Piper’s seen in its survey.

iPhone ownership among teens could go even higher — 84% of teens say their next phone will be an iPhone.

That 82% number is up from about 60% four years ago. Slow and steady increase.

Ron Avitzur:

Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under unique circumstances.

I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.

I love this story. Ron kept showing up, determined to bring Graphing Calculator to life on the new (at the time) PowerPC chips. Be sure to read all the way down to the bet about being on the front page of the New York Times.

[H/T, @thisneedseditin]

Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note:

In 2008, for $278M, Apple acquires Palo Alto Semiconductor, a semiconductor design company. Less than a year after the iPhone starts shipping, the intent is clear: instead of buying off-the-shelf ARM chips, Apple wants to design its own processors for future iPhones.

And:

Compared to modest first-year iPhone sales, spending $278M to acquire Palo Alto Semiconductor looks out of proportion. And, of course, let’s not forget a context where Intel reigns supreme having just “captured” the Mac. As always, references to Apple’s “well-known” arrogance are at the ready: Who do these guys think they are, what do they know about microprocessor design and manufacturing?

This is a great read. There’s insight into Apple’s path from 68K to PowerPC, the PowerPC to Intel, with lots of links and backup detail. And then Jean-Louis moves on to the possibility of iOS running on an ARM-based Mac, with both the good and the bad implications.

UPDATE: I originally wrote about the possibility for a speed increase for the Xcode iOS simulator. I started a Twitter thread asking about this and the response was pretty much no, that the code will be native either way (currently x86 code, if ported, it’ll be native ARM code, only difference would be if the ARM processor was significantly faster than the original x86 processor.)

SlashFilm:

3D movies might soon be 3-dead.

3D box office revenues have taken a steep dive, with box office sales at their lowest level in eight years. It may finally be time to say sayonara to those bulky tinted glasses.

A report by the Motion Picture Association of America finds that box office revenues for 3D films in the U.S. and Canada have fallen 18% in 2017 to $1.3 billion, Variety reports. That’s the worst showing for 3D movies in eight years. In 2010, 3D movies sold $2.2. billion in revenue — nearly double the amount generated in 2017.

To answer the headline – yes and not soon enough. There’s only been one 3D film I’ve ever thought was worth the money – Avatar. I haven’t bothered to go see a movie in 3D in five years.

Apple:

As part of its commitment to combat climate change and create a healthier environment, Apple today announced its global facilities are powered with 100 percent clean energy. This achievement includes retail stores, offices, data centers and co-located facilities in 43 countries — including the United States, the United Kingdom, China and India.

“We’re committed to leaving the world better than we found it. After years of hard work we’re proud to have reached this significant milestone,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re going to keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the materials in our products, the way we recycle them, our facilities and our work with suppliers to establish new creative and forward-looking sources of renewable energy because we know the future depends on it.”

Some will blow this off as simple marketing fluff but everyone at Apple should be proud of this accomplishment and the company’s commitment to the environment.

Krebs on Security:

Social media sites are littered with seemingly innocuous little quizzes, games and surveys urging people to reminisce about specific topics, such as “What was your first job,” or “What was your first car?” The problem with participating in these informal surveys is that in doing so you may be inadvertently giving away the answers to “secret questions” that can be used to unlock access to a host of your online identities and accounts.

I test my poor wife on this stuff all the time. Like most people, she plays along with these little quizzes and questions but had no idea they can be used to harvest details about her for nefarious purposes.

Personally, I never respond to these things on social media and lie on every one of these questions when asked by a bank or other similar institution. For example, when asked where I was born, I often say, “Capetown, South Africa”.

As John Gruber points out, these are the kinds of questions often used by banks as supposed “security” questions.

This is an incredible documentary. Insightful and entertaining. In a nutshell, it focuses on the technology we are building and both the positive and negative implications.

Take a minute to watch the trailer, embedded below. It’ll give you a sense of things. Watch all the way to the end.

If this does catch your interest, you can rent the full movie here, watch a few more clips there too. The full movie pops up on YouTube, but I suspect those views are all bootlegged. It’s $3.99 to rent, worth supporting the team that made it.

Woz/USA TODAY:

“Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and … Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this,” he said in an email to USA TODAY. “The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back.”

Wozniak said he’d rather pay for Facebook than have his personal information exploited for advertising. And he heaped praise on Apple for respecting people’s privacy.

“Apple makes its money off of good products, not off of you,” Wozniak said. “As they say, with Facebook, you are the product.”

More shots fired. Is this a temporary tempest in a teapot, or will this wave of controversy cause real change?

Terrific piece from Zac Hall, 9to5Mac. The wish list is sensible, but what I also like is that the article explores some of what you can do now with watchOS 4.1. A very logical leap from one to the other.

Stacy Cowley, New York Times:

Credit card networks are finally ready to concede what has been obvious to shoppers and merchants for years: Signatures are not a useful way to prove someone’s identity. Later this month, four of the largest networks — American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Visa — will stop requiring them to complete card transactions.

Long outdated tech. Ridiculous that signature checking is still part of the system. Baffling that chip-embedded cards have only recently become a standard in the US.

Would love to see wider adoption of Apple Pay so we can get rid of the security risks that come with those pieces of plastic altogether.

Pretty, pretty phone. Just take a look at the pics. I would definitely love one of these.

There’s also a new (PRODUCT)RED iPhone X Leather Folio.

From Apple’s announcement:

A portion of proceeds for all (PRODUCT)RED purchases go directly to Global Fund HIV/AIDS grants that provide testing, counseling, treatment and prevention programs with a specific focus on eliminating transmission of the virus from mothers to their babies. Since partnering with (RED) in 2006, Apple has donated more than $160 million to the Global Fund, serving as the organization’s largest corporate donor.

Order online starting tomorrow, April 10th and in stores beginning Friday, April 13.