Variety:

The series is inspired by Durant’s youth basketball experiences. It will explore the world of Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) basketball and the lives of the players, their families, and coaches.

The series will be produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Television along with Durant’s Thirty Five Media. Durant and Grazer will executive produce, along with Imagine’s Francie Calfo and Thirty Five Media’s Rich Kleiman.

Eddy Cue is a huge basketball fan, a die-hard Golden State Warriors fan, and a fan and friend of Warriors’ star Kevin Durant. From this New York Times article:

Another incident that stirred an online reaction came when a fan stood up and seemingly shouted at Rihanna to sit down. Numerous commenters declared they found his behavior disrespectful.

Internet sleuths soon identified the man: Cue, Apple’s senior vice president for internet software and services, who is a die-hard Warriors fan. Durant watched the election results last November at Cue’s house along with Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, and pop star Pharrell Williams.

This seems a natural fit. So much so, I wonder if Eddy Cue had a role in breathing life into this series. Personally, I hope this is the case. I think great passion can make the difference between bland and textured, between dull and riveting.

The shareholders meeting is typical a recap of what happened with the company over the last year, as well as voting on proposals. Typically, not much happens, but if you want a recap you can read this.

Whether it was housed at Olympic in London, Musicland in Munich, or in the famed Rolling Stones’ mobile studio, the Helios Type 69 console was at the center of hundreds of iconic albums from rock’s “Golden Age.” From must-own albums by Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Pink Floyd, to Bob Marley and the Wailers, David Bowie, Black Sabbath, and AC/DC, the Type 69 delivered fat, unmistakable attitude, with a punchy midrange and an assertive growl.

The Helios was legendary.

The Boston Dynamics robot can now open doors. Great. pic.twitter.com/xdNYM0YqXx

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 13, 2018

NowThis:

Boston Dynamics “spot-mini” is a dog-like robot that can open doors for its pals.

I saw this video yesterday. This is just a horror movie waiting to be filmed. So creepy.

Petapixel:

If you want to see a picture of Canon and Nikon’s continued dominance in the world of sports photography, just take a look at the massive camera arsenals each company brought to the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.

This story pops up every Olympics and every Olympics, I marvel at the incredible amount of hardware the big boys of DSLR bring to support their shooters.

If there’s music playing and there’s a HomePod in the room, chances are that music is coming from HomePod. But there may be times when you’ve got some background music coming from another source (your TV, say) and you want to identify the tune.

I am used to asking Siri on my iPhone to identify background music. Typically, I’ll fire up Siri and say:

What song is this?

But trying to get HomePod Siri to identify a song playing in the background proved tricky. I tried everything I could think of. No dice.

Fortunately, 9to5Mac’s Benjamin Mayo figured this out. To ask HomePod’s version of Siri to identify a background song, say:

Hey Siri, Shazam this.

Works every time. Weird to me that none of the more standard ways work. I hope we don’t end up with a Siri dialect problem, where users have to remember which command works on which version of Siri.

One piece of FUD I encounter again and again is that you can’t play competing streaming services, such as Spotify, on your HomePod.

There is an element of truth there, as Apple Music is currently the only first class citizen on HomePod. But you can AirPlay pretty much anything you can play on your Mac or iOS device to HomePod. Even Spotify.

What you lose when you AirPlay to HomePod is the ability for Siri to control the music. Though you can ask Siri to change the volume (“Siri Volume 25” to set volume at 25%, for example), you can’t get Siri to pause playback or skip to the next track. With AirPlay, you’ll need to use your iPhone or Mac to control the flow.

I wonder what magic is cooking for AirPlay 2. Will AirPlay 2 give Siri the ability to control track flow? If so, will Apple enable that gift for Spotify?

For the specifics of AirPlay on your Mac, MacRumor’s Juli Clover has your back.

Not sure how long iFixit has been posting teardown videos, but this is the first I’ve seen. Brilliant to be able to watch someone tear this tech down to the nubs.

So much to learn about the work and material that goes into HomePod. That outer mesh is magical. I wonder how they manufacture it.

One thing that is clear: This sucker is tough to take apart. It’s no wonder Apple charges $279 to repair or replace a broken, out-of-warranty HomePod.

The wait is almost over. Alto’s Odyssey launches on the App Store next week on Thursday, February 22nd. The game will be available on iOS + tvOS, right at launch.

This is the follow-up to Alto’s Adventure, a great game from Ryan Cash.

This is pretty shocking. Just scroll through the images. Venice is a city that depends on its canals, both for tourism and transportation.

[H/T Eric Vitiello]

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple’s annual software upgrade this fall will offer users plenty of new features: enabling a single set of apps to work across iPhones, iPads and Macs, a Digital Health tool to show parents how much time their children have been staring at their screen and improvements to Animojis, those cartoon characters controlled by the iPhone X’s facial recognition sensor.

But just as important this year will be what Apple doesn’t introduce: redesigned home screens for the iPhone, iPad and CarPlay, and a revamped Photos app that can suggest which images to view.

These features were delayed after Apple Inc. concluded it needed its own major upgrade in the way the company develops and introduces new products. Instead of keeping engineers on a relentless annual schedule and cramming features into a single update, Apple will start focusing on the next two years of updates for its iPhone and iPad operating system, according to people familiar with the change. The company will continue to update its software annually, but internally engineers will have more discretion to push back features that aren’t as polished to the following year.

Read the rest of the article for details, but can’t help but see this as a significant move in the right direction, assuming it is true.

This is not frivolous opinion. There is a lot of detail on both the tools used to measure things like “Fletcher-Munson loudness compensation”, and the measurements themselves.

From the conclusion:

The Look and feel is top notch. The glass on top is sort of frosted, but is smooth to the touch. When I first reviewed the home pod, I noted that it was light. I was comparing it with the heft of my KEF speakers. This thing, as small as it is, weighs 5 lbs. Which is quite dense, and heavy for its size. The Fabric that wraps around it is study, reinforced from inside, and feels very good to the touch.

And:

The Frequency response, Directivity, and ability to correct for the room all go to show that the HomePod is a speaker for the masses. While many of you in this subreddit would be very comfortable doing measurements, and room treatment, there is no denying that most users won’t go through that much trouble, and for those users the HomePod is perfect.

And caveats:

Because of the onboard DSP, you must feed it digital files. So analog input from something like a Phono is out, unless your Phono Preamp has a digital output which can then be fed to the HomePods in realtime via airplay, possibly through a computer. But you cannot give the HomePod analog audio, as the DSP which does all the room correction requires digital input.

And:

Speaking of inputs, you have one choice: AirPlay. which means, unless you’re steeped in the apple ecosystem, it’s really hard to recommend this thing. If you are, it’s a no brainer, whether you’re an audiophile or not.

And:

As a product, the HomePod is also held back by Siri. Almost every review has complained about this, and they’re all right to do so. I’m hoping we see massive improvements to Siri this year at WWDC 2018. There is some great hardware at play, too. What’s truly impressive is that Siri can hear you if you speak in a normal voice, even if the HomePod is playing at full volume. I couldn’t even hear myself say “Hey Siri” over the music, but those directional microphones are really good at picking it up. Even whispers from across the room while I was facing AWAY from the HomePod were flawlessly picked up. The microphones are scary good — I just hope Apple improves Siri to match.

And from the rollup at the top of the post:

am speechless. The HomePod actually sounds better than the KEF X300A. If you’re new to the Audiophile world, KEF is a very well respected and much loved speaker company. I actually deleted my very first measurements and re-checked everything because they were so good, I thought I’d made an error. Apple has managed to extract peak performance from a pint sized speaker, a feat that deserves a standing ovation. The HomePod is 100% an Audiophile grade Speaker.

I don’t have the expertise to speak to the audiophile comments, but everything else in the post clicks for me, jibes with my HomePod experience.

As to the negatives, I think Apple has done a great job of making sure the hardware is top notch. Which means they can fix the software negatives via updates over time.

Me? I absolutely love my HomePod. If you love music, and are willing to pony up for Apple Music, it’s a no-brainer purchase.

Last week we posted about the iOS 9 iBoot source code leak that was headlined to be the biggest leak in history.

Motherboard has followed up with details on the leak itself:

A low-level Apple employee with friends in the jailbreaking community took code from Apple while working at the company’s Cupertino headquarters in 2016, according to two people who originally received the code from the employee. Motherboard has corroborated these accounts with text messages and screenshots from the time of the original leak and has also spoken to a third source familiar with the story.

Motherboard has granted these sources anonymity given the likelihood of Apple going after them for obtaining and distributing proprietary, copyrighted software. The original Apple employee did not respond to our request for comment and said through his friend that he did not currently want to talk about it because he signed a non-disclosure agreement with Apple.

To me, this is theft, clear as day. Not sure if Apple will go after the leakers, but if I were those leakers, I’d get some sound legal advice.

Warning: Don’t try this at home. This is a professional cord puller on a closed course.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, New York Times:

When do the strongest adult musical preferences set in?

And:

For this project, the music streaming service Spotify gave me data on how frequently every song is listened to by men and women of each particular age.

And:

Consider, for example, the song “Creep,” by Radiohead. This is the 164th most popular song among men who are now 38 years old. But it is not in the top 300 for the cohort born 10 years earlier or 10 years later.

Note that the men who most like “Creep” now were roughly 14 when the song came out in 1993. In fact, this is a consistent pattern.

I did a similar analysis with every song that topped the Billboard charts from 1960 to 2000. In particular, I measured how old their biggest fans today were when these songs first came out.

I was about 11 when I first really latched on to music, 12 when I got my hands on my first guitar. And by 14, I was deeply immersed in what would become my forever comfort music.

Fascinating article.

Wired:

Drone shows like the one on display at the Pyeongchang Games have taken place before; you may remember the drone army that flanked Lady Gaga at last year’s Super Bowl. But the burst of drones that filled the sky Friday night—or early morning, depending on where in the world you watched—comprised four times as many fliers. Without hyperbole, there’s really never been anything like it.

That was incredible.

Brian Irace:

If the Lyft app is installed on your iPhone, you can ask Phone Siri to order you a car. But you can’t ask Mac Siri to do the same, because she doesn’t know what Lyft is. Compare and contrast this with the SDKs for Alexa and the Google Assistant – they each run third-party software server-side, such that installing the Lyft Alexa “skill” once gives Alexa the ability to summon a ride regardless of if you’re talking to her on an Echo in your bedroom, a different Echo in your living room, or via the Alexa app on your phone.

This is a major difference in approach between Alexa and Google extensions, which both use a server-side approach, and Siri, which runs extensions client-side. In a nutshell, Siri’s approach allows for a more custom and, at the same time, limited approach, using communication and negotiation between devices to work out what’s what.

Currently, this communication seems limited to which Siri should respond to a request. If you lift your wrist and say “Hey, Siri”, your Apple Watch gets priority. If your HomePod Siri is enabled and your wrist is down, HomePod gets priority. You get the idea.

What’s missing is an intelligent mesh of negotiation and handoff. For example, if HomePod gets a request to make a phone call, that request should be handed off to your iPhone, perhaps verifying the handoff with a “Would you like me to make that call on your iPhone?” first.

There are permissions issue to deal with in this kind of scheme, but it certainly seems a logical need. If I ask HomePod to call a Lyft and HomePod doesn’t have that capability, seems logical for HomePod to hand that task off to another device that can order one for me.

All that said, I can only imagine that Apple is hard at work on a solution for this Siri mesh issue.

UPDATE: I left the word extensions out of the original writeup. Siri is server side, but the extensions are client side. I’ve not actually built a Siri extension, so I’m on shaky understanding here, but I believe this is correct.

Jesse Hollington, writing for iLounge, reviews a HomeKit-enabled power strip that provides three independently-controlled AC outlets plus three USB charging ports. This seems a pretty easy entry point to start exploring HomeKit, and a nice HomePod companion.

Siri, turn on the lights.

Glenn Fleishman, Macworld:

iTunes backups of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch don’t contain apps and some kinds of media. They contain settings and certain kinds of documents stored within apps, and may contain images stored in an iOS device’s Camera Roll. Some apps that use iCloud or other cloud-based sync mark their local content as not needing to be backed up, since it can be restored by logging back into an account or resyncing.

Confused? Fair enough. What does and does not get backed up, and where various elements do get backed up, is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle. Glenn Fleishman does his best do lay all this out.

My two cents? Backup your music library, photos, critical documents on removable media, store it somewhere safe. Update that backup periodically.

There a HomePod in your future? This is an invaluable resource you might want to spend a little quality time digging through.

Seems to me, Apple should put a link to this guide on their main HomePod page, make it a bit easier to find.

[H/T Robert Walter]

Have you cut the cord? Interested in the Olympics, but don’t have access to the channels that carry them? This is definitely worth the read.

If you live in the US, don’t forget that you can get your local channels, in high-def, over-the-air via an antenna, at least in most locations.

The games have officially started, and the Opening Ceremony will be replayed tonight during prime time. Here’s a link to NBC’s official Olympics site.