Catching up on my reading list, found these two interesting pieces on Apple Services:
Jean-Louis Gassée, in a Monday Note titled Misunderstanding Apple Services, on the wave of headlines touting Apple Services as a standalone company:
If Apple Services were a standalone company, its $27.8B in revenue would just squeak past Facebook’s $27.6 (although I’m not sure we’re comparing the same four quarters).
And:
Remove “Apple” from “Apple Services”…would this stand-alone “Services” company enjoy the same success were it to service Android phones or Windows PCs?
Apple Services is an important member of the supporting cast that pushes the volume and margins for the main act: Apple Personal Computers. These come in three sizes, small (iPhone), medium (iPad), and large (Mac). If rumors of the addition of a cellular modem true, we may even see the Watch, today an iPhone accessory, added to the cast as the newest and smallest performer.
Everything else that Apple offers has one raison d’être: Fueling the company’s main hardware act without which Apple is nothing.
It’s the ecosystem. Apple Services serves the ecosystem.
Apple’s attempt at services lock-in is steadily increasing: HomePod supports only Apple Music and Siri, CarPlay supports only Siri and Apple Maps, iOS still doesn’t let one change default applications. None of these decisions are based on delivering a superior experience, the key to Apple’s differentiation with a hardware-based business model; all are based on securing an ongoing relationship with the company that can be monetized over time.
Again, this all makes sense, particularly for the bottom line: every bit of lock-in makes Apple’s business stronger. Stronger, that is like an oak tree.
Ben goes on to relate the fable of the oak tree and the reed. The oak tree represents strength, the reed flexibility. The analogy here is that Apple Services are becoming more locked in. That lock-in brings financial strength, but moves away from flexibility. And the lack of flexibility was the oak’s downfall.
After decades of selling products—and knowing exactly what people are buying, and when they are buying it—Amazon has started cutting out the middle-man by selling self-produced items. Through its AmazonBasics house brand, it sells all sorts of small items, from iPhone chargers, to batteries, power strips—even foam rollers, backpacks and washcloths. It’s the sort of stuff that you might not be too brand loyal over—who really minds whether it’s a Duracell or a Panasonic battery? Amazon sees that a product is selling well, and may decide to work with manufacturers to make the product itself—it’s a tactic that is already worrying vendors, and can’t bode well for partnerships in the long run. But those are the obvious instances. Now, Amazon is selling products across a wide array of categories, using a host of brands that do not exist outside the confines of amazon.com and do not make it clear that they are Amazon-made products.
This is a common business practice and it’s smart too. I remember one oil company in Canada that would look at what it spent the most money on each year and then either buy the company or do it themselves. Each year, more money stayed within the confines of the main company.
Co-creator and co-executive producer Ben Winston and series executive producer and co-showrunner Eric Pankowski spoke with Billboard about the series that’s set to launch on Apple Music. They called it “A Celebration of the Joy of Music.” I get that.
I was a bit worried about the future of this show, but I’m looking forward to seeing these episodes. At least Apple finally stopped pimping Pharrell, so we won’t have to deal with him.
I use Apple Music every single day, so I see all of the good and bad parts of the service. I also get to see the significant improvements Apple has made over time, and while there is still work to be done, the service is getting much better.
I mentioned in February 2016 that Apple’s built-in radio stations were effectively changing the way I listen to music. To a large extent that continues to be the case. Most of the time I will play one of the service’s pre-built stations instead of listening to music in my library.
Hard Rock has been among my favorite stations to listen to because it gives me a nice mix of songs I already know with some new songs. The key to the success of this station for me was the mix—I didn’t want all new songs, but rather I way to deliver the discovery of new music with the familiarity of songs I had heard before. It does this perfectly.
Surprisingly, it was the stations that I knew the music the most that I really didn’t like—Classic Rock and Hair Metal and perfect examples of this. These are the genres I grew up with, so I should basically know every song that was played on those stations. I didn’t.
For a while, those “classic” stations were the best of B-sides you never wanted to hear. For a while, I would skip as many songs as I would listen to, but that has changed.
It seems Apple flipped a switch and realized that classic stations should be playing the best of those genres with only a little bit of discovery. That’s the way those stations should be. The hits of those years have already been set—that’s what people want to hear.
If I’m having friends over and put on Classic Rock or Classic Metal, I want songs that everyone knows, one after the other, hit after hit.
That’s exactly what I get now.
I’ve added more “classic” songs to my library in the last two months than I have in the past three years. That’s a sign for me of how good the stations are getting.
Apple Music is making other changes too. The company recently added “My Chill Mix” to go with “My New Music” and “My Favorites” mixes. These mixes can be the core of your Apple Music experience if you want them to be.
“My Chill Mix” is something I listen to on Sunday mornings with a cup a coffee. It’s based on the genres I listen to the most, so Rock for me. Everyone’s mix will be different and based on the music they love the most. I’ve loved this playlist each and every week.
Apple said when they first launched Apple Music that it’s not just about the song you’re listening to, but the song that comes next. That’s very true. If you’re always wondering if you’ll hate the next song, you never truly enjoy your listening experience. I think they’ve finally got to that point for me.
Is everything perfect? No, but, let’s be honest, it never is.
Apple Music still doesn’t recognize a lot of the music I purchased in my library, which is annoying. I think, given the opportunity, Apple would never have promised that it would match our music library with songs on the service. There are just too many variables to get right like remastered versions of albums, Deluxe versions and other content that doesn’t allow for accurate matching. While Apple is trying, it’s become one of the main sore points for many users.
In addition, I’ve had this strange problem lately that when I play many AC/DC songs from Apple Music, it will only play the live version. I search for “You Shook Me All Night Long” from “Back in Black” and it will play a live version instead. It happens with may songs from AC/DC, across many studio albums. It’s weird.
Even with those couple of issues, you can’t ignore how much better Apple Music is and how significant the changes have been over the past six months. There’s more I’d love to see them do to engage music lovers in the app, but making the service better is a process that they’re clearly working on.
It all started as a joke. The Sword guitarist Kyle Shutt was smoking weed and talking with his bandmates about how absurd it is that every group that plays slow riffs or evokes feelings of dread get labeled “doom,” even if they sound nothing like pioneers of the genre: Black Sabbath, Pentagram Saint Vitus, Cathedral.
“Man, what if we did a heavy metal Pink Floyd cover band, called it Doom Side of the Moon, and did doom versions of Floyd songs!” he quipped.
Great idea and it turned out really good. You can listen to the album on Apple Music.
Thanks to last week’s inadvertent release of an unredacted build of HomePod’s version of iOS, we know some things that we didn’t know before. One of those things is that the new edge-to-edge iPhone is codenamed D22, and that the OS explicitly supports an iPhone display with hardware resolution of 2436 × 1125 pixels.
I love these resolution articles that Gruber does.
67 new emojis have been listed as “draft candidates” for inclusion in the 2018 emoji set, including softball, mango, salt shaker, and a variation of the much-loved pile of poo emoji.
Apple’s official data on the use of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi point out that their range is about 30 feet. But pilots apparently buck that trend quite a bit, and in a big way.
User LouB747 posted a video recently to his YouTube channel, showing that he successfully used AirDrop from his plane, which was cruising at 35,000 feet, to a pilot in another plane, a Singapore Airlines craft cruising at 36,000 feet. The pilot was sending pictures of the plane in flight, and the other pilot, one thousand feet away at least, confirmed receipt of the images over the radio.
Is it just me or does anyone else think this shouldn’t have worked? I can barely get AirDrop to work between my Mac and iPhone when they are two feet from each other.
Singapore Airlines told IBTimes UK that the AirDrop stunt definitely didn’t happen. “Our pilot was only replying in jest to the radio message from the captain of the other flight. Photos were exchanged by email later, however,” a spokesperson said.
Boeing has to test their engines for long periods of time in flight. I guess these Boeing pilots decided to liven up the boring work and not just fly around in circles.
In the middle of a Russian swampland, not far from the city of St Petersburg, is a rectangular iron gate. Beyond its rusted bars is a collection of radio towers, abandoned buildings and power lines bordered by a dry-stone wall. This sinister location is the focus of a mystery which stretches back to the height of the Cold War.
It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, “MDZhB”, that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues.
Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz.
The #1 rule for observing a solar eclipse, or for looking directly at the Sun at any other time, is safety first.
How do you know if your eclipse glasses or handheld solar viewers are truly safe? You need to know that they meet the ISO 12312-2 (sometimes written as ISO 12312-2:2015) international safety standard. Filters that are ISO 12312-2 compliant not only reduce visible sunlight to safe and comfortable levels but also block solar UV and IR radiation. Unfortunately, you can’t check whether a filter meets the ISO standard yourself.
The coming solar eclipse is an almost once in a lifetime experience. Don’t let it be ruined by using substandard equipment and/or dangerous viewing habits.
New website Ten Years Ago makes it easy to look back into the weird world of mostly forgotten web history. The site peers into the World Wide Web as of July 28, 2007, showing the now-simplistic-looking early designs of sites like YouTube, Amazon, The New York Times, and reddit.
Ten Years Ago is a useful tool in that it gathers together sites captured on the same day, so you can recreate what you might see if you were trawling the web on that day in July 2007. Back when even Apple, one of the most design-obsessed companies around, had a website that looked a little clunky.
My conversation with Mathias Bahnmueller started as pretty much all my phone interviews do. “Can you hear me?” he asked, and I replied affirmatively. Then I asked him the same question. His answer was yes—he could hear me very clearly. And this was a tiny miracle.
The reason I was coming through so clearly is that his over-the-ear device linked to the implant was streaming directly from his iPhone—essentially putting the conversation in his head.
Apple doesn’t get nearly the credit they deserve for the work they do in accessibility. I know quite a few people with varying levels and kinds of disability and accessibility issues and they all say that, while there’s lots of work to be done, Apple is far ahead of the rest of the industry in their commitment to these users.
Dave here. James Thomson, in a Twitter thread with Steve Troughton Smith, pondering the interface possibilities of the coming iPhone Pro (and I use that name as a shorthand for any and all phones Apple announces next month with a new hardware layout):
I’m curious what will happen for full screen stuff where the status bar would be hidden. Hide the home indicator too, and use everything?
This raises an interesting question. If the home button no longer has dedicated real estate but is, instead a fungible, virtual spot, with the ability to be turned on and off, what happens if an app runs full screen? How will you exit the app?
In other words, if a game takes over the full screen, presumably the home button will not be there. What will the user do to force exit the app, to return to the home screen?
To be crystal clear, I don’t see this as a problem. I see this as an interesting puzzle. We don’t know that the home button will disappear, we don’t know that developers will be allowed to grab the full screen without saving room for the home button.
But it’s an interesting question, one that I am quite certain Apple already has a lovely solution for.
Apple’s accidental release of the HomePod firmware prompted Steven Throughthon-Smith’s to go digging through and uncovering a lot of exciting pieces on the upcoming high-end iPhone, codename D22. Allen Pike then had an interesting take on what that new form factor could mean for the UI.
Max took Allen Pike’s thoughts on the notch and its impact on the nav bar (here’s my summary, with a link to Allen’s brilliant post) and worked up some beautiful, high-res mockups.
At 41 years old, Apple is a respected elder of the tech industry. But rather than easing slowly into retirement, the company is going through another growth spurt.
On Wednesday, Apple’s stock surged 5 percent to a record high of $157.14 after it reported surprisingly strong financial results. It is now worth $822 billion, more than any other company in the stock market.
High praise from the New York Times. Interesting.
But:
For Apple, which is far more dependent on hardware sales than other tech leaders, the recent performance is all the more impressive after its dismal 2016, when quarterly revenue fell for the first time in 13 years and the company’s sales in China dropped through the floor.
There it is. That’s the paper I know and love.
And:
“Wall Street is waking up to the reality that the next great product might not be an Apple car or the TV or the Watch,” said Trip Miller of Gullane Capital Partners, which loaded up on Apple shares when they were below $100. “The services business is the next great product.”
“Any product they release this year would be successful. There is pent-up replacement demand,” said Amit Daryanani, a hardware analyst with RBC Capital Markets.
A dismal 2016, and it doesn’t matter what they release, it’s all the pent-up replacement demand, not at all a sign of innovation.
Oh, and two last parting shots:
But he said such growth is unlikely to continue in 2019, when excitement about the new iPhones has faded.
And:
The risk is that customers decide to move on from the decade-old iPhone.
If Apple were a foreign country, CEO Tim Cook might have considerable political clout in the United States.
That’s because Apple owns $52.6 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, which would rank it among the top 25 major foreign holders, according to estimates from the Treasury Department and Apple’s SEC filings released on Wednesday.
Apple would be 23rd in all countries. That’s just one measure of a company’s financial heft, but amazing nonetheless.
It’s very apparent there’s a product category that outshines all others in terms of growth. It’s one Apple has been understandably proud of in their earnings calls for several years now, and that is Services.
And:
The Services category encompasses all the stuff Apple does online, “in the cloud.” Things like the App Store. iCloud. Apple Pay. Apple Music. The iTunes store. In other words, Services is everything you buy from Apple after you buy your initial hardware.
And this business has been exploding.
Jared digs into the details, starting with the vast difference between Apple’s cloud business of 5 years ago and the stellar operation into which that cloud business has evolved.
Another point is the way, as a percentage of the whole, Apple’s services business is increasing as the iPhone business decreases. The point being, Apple’s services growth represents diversification, less (slightly) dependence on iPhone sales. Will there come a day when iPhone sales represent less than 50% of Apple’s total revenue? Seems likely.
Amber Rudd (The UK Home Secretary) has said “real people” do not want secure end-to-end encryption on messaging services.
In response, Renate Samson Chief Executive of Big Brother Watch said:
“Suggesting that people don’t really want security from their online services is frankly insulting, what of those in society who are in dangerous or vulnerable situations, let alone those of us who simply want to protect our communications from breach, hack or cybercrime,” she said.
She’s making an argument that fits her agenda. I don’t believe for a minute that people want less security on anything, especially these days.
Costly cyber attacks are having a bigger impact on corporate earnings and are becoming a fact of life for companies as Oreo cookie maker Mondelez, drug maker Merck and others said that a destructive “worm” attack in the last week of the second quarter disrupted operations.
It’s not just the immediate fallout of an attack that hits companies, it’s the earnings too.
Apple updated their iOS adoption numbers for the first time in a while (I believe the last update was way back in February).
Here’s the chart:
Let’s compare that with the latest and greatest Android numbers:
Just to give some perspective here, the latest major rev of Android, Nougat, was released one year ago, in August 2016. The biggest slice in the pie chart, Marshmallow, was released in 2015, Lollipop in 2014.
It’s tough when you don’t control all the hardware.
The Amazon Echo can be turned into a spying tool by exploiting a physical security vulnerability, according to Mark Barnes, a researcher at cybersecurity firm MWR InfoSecurity. His research shows how it’s possible to hack the 2015 and 2016 models of the smart speaker to listen in on users without any indication that they’ve been compromised.
The issue is unfixable via a software update, meaning millions of Echos sold in 2015 and 2016 will likely have this vulnerability through the end of their use.
Barnes executed the attack by removing the bottom of the smart speaker and exposing 18 “debug” pads, which he used to boot directly into the firmware with an external SD card. Once the hack is complete, the rubber base can be reattached, leaving behind no evidence of tampering.
With the malware installed, Barnes could remotely monitor the Echo’s “always listening” microphone, which is constantly paying attention for a “wake word.” (The most popular of these is “Alexa.”) Barnes took advantage of the same audio file that the device creates to wait for those keywords.
The way I read it, this does require physical access, but once the hack is installed, there’s no obvious way to detect its presence, and an update won’t get rid of the malware.
The nav bar is the strip at the top of the display that allows you to navigate between views. It features buttons like “+”, “Edit”, “Done”, “< Back”, etc.
iOS 11 has changed the design of the nav bar, moving the title from the center of the nav bar to its own line, left justified, and to a much larger, bolded font size.
Allen posits that this change was made to accommodate the disappearance of a physical home button and the corresponding shrinking of the bezel, the growth of the screen to just about the bottom of the phone.
In Allen’s view, the nav bar will move to the bottom of the screen, on either side of the virtual home button.
I think he’s on to something. Read the post, look at the pictures to get your own sense of this.
If you haven’t already heard, Apple accidentally published a prerelease build of audioOS through their public update servers. Whether or not this leak was “intentional” is up for debate, but I personally believe it to be a mistake.
Regardless, Avery dug in and pulled out a series of HomePod alarm sounds. If you are interested in the process (requires some Terminal/basic Unix skills), read Avery’s blog post.
Photos, like iTunes and iMovie, doesn’t have a great way for you to access the media and other items that it manages, but there are some workarounds.
Apple gradually changed its app design to rely on library “files,” which are a special kind of folder, called a package. To the Finder, and for the purposes of copying and moving items, the library is a single folder. Inside, it contains all the sausage-making ingredients used by the apps, including original media files, modified ones (in the cases of Photos), project components, and one or more databases that track what’s inside the library.
Packages have been around forever. As Glenn says, this is a change in the way iPhoto and Photos stored their media.
Part of this is due to the nature of that media. Used to be, all photos produced a single jpeg. Over time, things got complicated, with live photos, bursts, undoable image editing, etc. Hard to not wrap that sausage making in a package.
As he does, Jason Snell pulled together a host of charts laying out Apple’s financial results six ways from Sunday. Lots to process here.
My favorite is the very last chart, Apple revenue by product category. Some things I see:
Look at the difference between iPhone and the rest of the revenue categories. Great visual snapshot showing the incredible importance of the iPhone to Apple.
Look how tightly clustered the iPad, Mac, and Services are. They all depend on iPhone as an anchor, but all make critical contributions to the ecosystem and bottom line. Good to see the relative contribution of the Mac there.
Interesting how the labels were done. Each label was placed on an outlying part of its labeled line. Works well. Wondering if this was Jason’s handwork, or a smart chart app. Either way, nice detail.
