Gizmodo:

When two brothers from Naples decided to stop doing fashion design for other companies and start a brand of their own, they went hunting for an attention-grabbing name. They discovered that “Steve Jobs” wasn’t trademarked and decided on that. Now, a protracted legal battle has come to an end, and they have big plans for using the Apple founder’s name on pretty much anything.

And:

As expected, Apple’s legal department soon sent the brothers four large folders of legal documents and went to war. But the brothers won the case.

It’d be one thing if the founder was named Steve Jobs. But this is straight-forward riding on someone else’s coattails.

That said, there are plenty of precedents. Here’s one that springs to mind.

From Apple’s public statement on the iPhone battery throttling issue:

We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize. There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we’re making.

First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that.

Apple then goes into detail on battery aging and some battery shutdown history, all pretty readable. But at the very bottom is this:

Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com.

And:

Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.

Stay tuned for the details. Personally, I wish Apple had wrapped their PR arms around this issue a lot sooner. They certainly had all the pieces in place to have avoided this issue entirely.

Some people assign ill will to Apple, feel Apple was trying to do something shady with their battery tech. Some feel Apple was trying to manipulate people into buying new phones. I just don’t see any of that. No way.

Me? I think this was a fumble. This letter makes me feel a bit better about the whole thing, gives me a sense that Apple is both taking this seriously and is learning from this experience.

One final note: iFixit has dropped the price of their DIY battery replacement kits to $29 or less in case you want to do this yourself.

Two nuggets from this Bloomberg article:

Cook’s incentive pay totaled $9.33 million for the year ended Sept. 30, the Cupertino, California-based company said Wednesday in a regulatory filing. He also took home $3.06 million in salary and a previously disclosed equity award of $89.2 million, bringing his total payout for the year to about $102 million.

His top five lieutenants each got bonuses of $3.11 million, bringing their total compensation to about $24.2 million each, including salaries and stock awards.

And:

The Apple board stipulated this year that for security reasons the CEO should use private planes for business and personal travel, citing the risk given his high profile. Personal security costs were calculated at $224,216.

My two cents: Tim Cook is a bargain. Apple is an aircraft carrier of a company, both massive and incredibly complex. Tim is overseeing exponential growth while keeping Apple on track, dealing reasonably well with the problems that arise, all while remaining the very public face of a very public company.

As to the private planes, no issue there, makes sense. I just found it interesting that Apple made it policy, mandating that Tim fly private.

Robert Kientz, Seeking Alpha (free reg-wall):

Li-ION is the most advanced, commonly available batteries that are used in portable electronics like laptops and phones. That is because unlike Nickel Cadmium [NiCad], they do not develop ‘charge memories’. And they are better for small electronics than Nickel Metal Hydride [NiMH] because of shorter charge time and higher energy density, both critical for the uses of portable phones.

And:

Li-ION batteries typically fail faster than NiCad because they wear out in less charge cycles, which mean consumers get fewer charges before their batteries will need replacement.

And:

Apple has not designed flaws into its iPhone product with regard to battery management.

What Apple has done is provide software that allows its iPhone users who want to keep their phones to manage their batteries by slowing down the processor during times of lower power and to keep the phones from turning off spontaneously. Contrary to what many have said about this story, what Apple is doing is not abnormal at all.

There are two computer chip manufacturers that you may have heard of, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), that have built advanced power management technology into their chipset designs.

Provocative read. To me, Apple has done an amazing job optimizing its battery technology. Where they’ve slipped up here, in my opinion, is in communications. This would not be an issue of Apple gave users an easy way to tell where their device sits on the battery efficiency curve, made it easier for a user to have a sense of how much better their device would perform if they bought a new battery.

That said, I’m not sure Apple wants to be in the battery swap-out business. If Apple educated their users about the current state of their batteries, I suspect many consumers would develop a habit of updating their batteries, rather than live with a 75% solution.

Xkcd proposes some terrific options to set when your iPhone is stolen. Just a nibble:

If phone is stolen, do a fake factory reset. Then, in the background, automatically order food to phone’s location from every delivery place within 20 miles.

Just read it. I’m sure you can think of your own options. And if you’ve never read xkcd before, here’s a link to a completely random one.

This is a fascinating post from The AAPL Tree, an Apple blog that has moved entirely to Apple News. The linked post mixes a good number of well researched facts about Apple’s India operations with some educated guesses.

If you are interested in Apple and India, don’t miss the crowdsourced revenue/net income chart in the middle of the post. It estimates Apple’s 2017 India revenue at about 11,618 crore. A crore is 10M rupee, about $156,000.

Doing the math (pulls out Pcalc), 11,618 crore is about $1.8 billion. Not too shabby.

This is something here for everyone.

PCalc was my first ever application. I started writing in the summer of 1992 and it took me around six months to get it into a state where I was happy to show it to the world. Some of that code still runs today, deep at the heart of the machine.

Such an incredible run for James Thomson. Congrats!

FileVault is Apple’s implementation of encrypting your data on macOS and Mac hardware. It will encrypt all of your data on your startup disk (although you can also encrypt your Time Machine backups as well) and once enabled, it will encrypt your data on the fly and will work seamlessly in the background.

FileVault has come a long way since I used it, but I haven’t enabled it in years.

Apple Inc defrauded iPhone users by slowing devices without warning to compensate for poor battery performance, according to eight lawsuits filed in various federal courts in the week since the company opened up about the year-old software change.

This is just the beginning.

I have never been a huge V guitar fan, but this one is pretty nice.

Bruno founded and managed Apple’s silicon competitive analysis group, which sought to keep the company ahead of competitors in the area of chip performance. He follows several other experienced chip engineers who have defected to Google from Apple over the past year, including Manu Gulati, Wonjae (Gregory) Choi and Tayo Fadelu.

These are highly skilled people for Apple. It would be very interesting to hear what made them leave Apple for Google.

Tara Sorensen, the head of Amazon kids programming, will take on a similar role at Apple as the company pushes more into developing original content. She will report to Apple’s chief content officers Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, themselves former Sony TV executives. Along with Sorensen, international development executive Carina Walker and business affairs chief Tara Pietri will also depart Amazon for Apple, with Pietri leading Apple’s legal affairs division. Walker will again be an international creative executive, reporting to fellow Amazon alum Morgan Wandell.

Apple is getting serious. It’s going to be an interesting 2018 in the video space.

Los Angeles residents Stefan Bogdanovich and Dakota Speas, represented by Wilshire Law Firm, this morning filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California accusing Apple of slowing down their older iPhone models when new models come out.

This lawsuit is complete bullshit. It shows the lawyers and people who brought the suit don’t understand what Apple is doing (not that they really care about that). They are not slowing down phones when new models come out, they are trying to optimize the battery and performance, as explained yesterday.

Facebook Inc and Universal Music Group on Thursday announced a global agreement that will enable users to upload videos featuring music from Universal’s library across the social media network as well as Instagram and Oculus.

Facebook has done a great job in staying ahead of the curve in recent years, offering its users enough to stay on the site. There must be a demand for this among its users, but I’m not sure how much.

Today we’d like to show you how to create a little experimental glitch-like effect on an image. The effect will be powered by CSS animations and the clip-path property. The technique involves using several layers of images where each one will have a clip-path, a blend mode and a translation applied to it.

Very cool.

This is a great compromise from Apple on template-based apps. I think there are situations where template based apps make sense and Apple is now allowing those on the App Store.

Loot boxes made big headlines in 2017 when EA released Star Wars Battlefront II and received a huge amount of backlash for including a very robust loot box system that made player progression painfully slow for gamers who didn’t spend money. There was a big uproar in the gaming community, EA’s stocks took a hit, and an international conversation started about the morality and implications of loot boxes in games.

I think it’s good that Apple is trying to protect its customers, or at least make the companies disclose the odds.

Apple Inc. is developing an advanced heart-monitoring feature for future versions of its smartwatch, part of a broader push by the company to turn what was once a luxury fashion accessory into a serious medical device, according to people familiar with the plan.

This is one of those rumors that I would put in the “makes sense” category. Apple has redefined how we track health on our watches in the last few years. If they are able to add a reliable EKG to the watch, it would seem to fit into the company’s larger plan of enabling its users to track health and fitness.

Long ago, Google Maps had a huge edge over Apple Maps, but Apple Maps made great strides. In many areas, Apple Maps caught up. In my travels (mostly in the eastern US), Apple Maps works well, gets me where I need to go, does a solid job predicting traffic, rerouting me as needed. And the tight integration with my Apple Watch makes a big difference when I’m navigating new territory.

I realize Apple Maps is great in some areas, lacking in others, but this post is about one specific feature, a feature in which Google has a decided edge: Representing property, buildings, and structure outlines on map.

Justin O’Beirne has pulled together an incredibly detailed post showing these differences. As you make your way through the post, you can’t help but see how massive Google’s lead in this particular area has become.

Google has repeatedly told journalists that it started extracting data from Street View imagery in 2008, as part of its “Ground Truth” project. So this suggests that Google may have a 6+ year lead over Apple in data collection.

And:

And as we saw with AOIs [Areas of Interest], Google has gathered so much data, in so many areas, that it’s now crunching it together and creating features that Apple can’t make—surrounding Google Maps with a moat of time.

This is not a complaint. For me (and I recognize your mileage may vary here), Apple Maps works quite well. But the arguments and images in Justin’s post are fair proof. Google has a big edge in data collection.

Can Apple catch up? Of course. If they spend the money, make the commitment.

As has been said many times before, data is the new oil.

Just checked. In stock. Get ’em while they last.

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

When I’m traveling with only my iPhone and iPad, I can record audio on an external device—an SD-card recorder from Zoom, usually—but how do I get those files onto my iOS device? iOS can’t see the contents of a standard SD card.

And:

It’s still a little bit silly that, now that iOS has a file-management app, you still can’t plug in a mass storage device via a USB adapter and copy files off of it directly.

And this from John Gruber:

Apple even makes an SD card reader for iOS devices. It just seems downright wrong that it only allows you to import photos to your camera roll. Clearly a connected SD card ought to show up as a source in the iOS 11 Files app, right?

To me, the inability of iOS to handle external drives, SD-cards, etc., is a barrier to an iPad becoming a first class computing citizen.

Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:

It took almost six months since the initial murmurings, but Apple and Amazon have finally resolved their differences. The Apple TV 4K and fourth-generation Apple TV are available to buy from Amazon.com, following the launch of the Prime Video tvOS app earlier this month.

Checked it just now, here’s what I see:

Here’s a US link to the Apple TV 4K – 32GB. Hopefully, Apple and Amazon will work the stock issue out in the next day or so.

Roger Fingas, AppleInsider:

When users tap the button to listen to a song, the app will now save a sample for upload when internet access returns. A notification should pop up once a result is ready. The Android version of Shazam previously had equivalent offline support.

“Apple’s Shazam”. Weird to hear, but yup, Shazam is now all Apple’s.

Smart addition. Glad to have this in iOS.

Back in August this year, Apple replaced the App Store logo consisting of pencil, ruler, and paintbrush with the new logo featuring three plain sticks (kind of) on iOS and MacOS. According to KON, the new logo of the App Store on iOS and MacOS is a clear violation of the Chinese copyright law.

There is no doubt that they are the same. Apple has been using a similar looking logo for years, so it’ll be interesting to see if they argue that it was just changing what it was already using. We’ll see.

Last week, we ran a post titled iPhone 6s running slow? Consider replacing your battery.

In response to the referenced reddit thread, Geekbench founder John Poole did some testing. If the battery/performance issue is of interest, this is a fascinating read.