Solid review. At its core:

Apple’s big iPad problem is that it can’t convince people to upgrade, because an iPad is just a screen you hold in your hands that runs some apps that do some stuff. For users, that’s wonderful. If you already have an iPad you like, you don’t need a new one.

And:

If you are ready to upgrade, though, consider this the tablet for you. It brings the guts of an iPad Air 2—the most popular iPad model—into the body of a first-gen iPad Air. Will you notice the extra thickness and weight? No. (It weighs a pound, barely more than the Air 2. You’ll be fine.) What you might notice is the difference in the screen. This one’s not laminated to the glass the way it is on other new iPad models, which means you’ll see a little more of your own reflection in the display. It’s still high-res, still crisp, and still plenty good.

The Apple 9.7 inch iPad is $329. To me, if you are in the market for a starter iPad, this is a no-brainer.

Jean-Louis Gassée unpacks last month’s Apple Mac Pro confessional, seasoned with Microsoft’s new Surface devices and recent financial results.

Lots to enjoy here, but one particular conjectural question stands out for me:

Apple’s Developer’s Conference (WWDC) will be held in four weeks. We’ll be treated to the usual discussion of whether the iPad is a laptop replacement, of course, but Mac talk could prove to be even more interesting. In particular, will Apple announce an ARM-based Mac?

That seems far-fetched to me, though rolling their own Mac processors certainly seems a logical path for Apple to take in pursuit of owning the entire stack. Given how small (in terms of number of units as well as revenue) a slice the Mac Pro represents, seems to me (and I’m far from an expert) it’d be hard for Apple to recoup their investment on a custom Mac-targeted ARM chip.

That said, read Jean-Louis’ take here. Always thoughtful.

The new Echo Show is available in black or white (the core of the device is black, with a surrounding color bezel), preorders available now at $229.99, free shipping, released on June 28th.

From Amazon’s official Echo Show page:

• Echo Show brings you everything you love about Alexa, and now she can show you things. Watch video flash briefings and YouTube, see music lyrics, security cameras, photos, weather forecasts, to-do and shopping lists, and more. All hands-free—just ask.
• Introducing a new way to be together. Talk to family and friends who have an Echo or the Alexa App.
• See lyrics on-screen with Amazon Music. Just ask to play a song, artist or genre, and stream over Wi-Fi. Also, stream music on Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, and more.
• Powerful, room-filling speakers with Dolby processing for crisp vocals and extended bass response
• Ask Alexa to show you the front door or monitor the baby’s room with compatible cameras from Ring and Arlo. Turn on lights, control thermostats and more with WeMo, Philips Hue, ecobee, and other compatible smart home devices.
• With eight microphones, beam-forming technology, and noise cancellation, Echo Show hears you from any direction—even while music is playing
• Always getting smarter and adding new features, plus thousands of skills like Uber, Jeopardy!, Allrecipes, CNN, and more

I’m guessing a bunch of these pre-ordered units will be shipping to Apple folks for study and disassembly.

9to5Mac:

Apple has launched a new extended repair program for its Smart Keyboard for iPad Pro, allowing customers experiencing certain issues with the product to receive repairs or replacements from Apple for three years after the device is purchased. Apple informed its retail staff and authorized service providers of the new policy in an internal memo obtained by 9to5Mac (pictured below).

The program covers the Smart Keyboard for both the 9.7-inch (Early 2016) and 12.9-inch (Late 2015) iPad Pro models, and applies to keyboards experiencing certain Functional Issues, including: sticking/repeating keys, sensor issues, problems with the keyboard’s magnetic connector, connection issues, and unresponsive keys.

Got an iPad Pro Smart Keyboard? Tuck this one away.

From the leaked image:

• The new Echo Show will retail at $229.99 in the US
• Pre-orders can be taken starting Tuesday, May 9, 2017
• Pre-sale items will begin shipping to customers on 6/28/17

Is this real? It’s just an image, but very well done. The two dates in the image appear in two different formats, which does make me suspicious.

So far, there’s no mention of the Echo Show on Amazon.com. We shall see.

If the Amazon Echo is real, this will certainly inform any similar product plans from Apple. The bar has clearly been established by Amazon in this category.

Jamf Now is an on-demand mobile device management solution for the iPads, iPhones and Macs in your workplace. We make device management simple and affordable for everyone, so businesses can support their users; no IT required. Manage your first three devices for free and add more for just $2 per device per month. Get started for free today!

Apple’s stock is currently trading above the $150 mark for the first time ever, after factoring in a 7-for-1 split in 2014, giving the company a record-high market cap of nearly $790 billion. That means Apple is just over $200 billion away from becoming the world’s first trillion dollar company.

It’s mind boggling to think of that much money.

Michael Grothaus, writing for Fast Company:

Competition for internships is intense, particularly at hot companies like Apple, Google, Tesla, and others. So how do you get an internship at these coveted companies? I spoke to Maxime Britto, who is now a software engineer and the founder of Purple Giraffe, a French online school for mobile developers. But before he founded Purple Giraffe, he got his start at Apple working as an intern. In his own words, here’s how he did it and what the experience was like.

Fascinating read, short but on point.

MacRumors:

Apple became the world’s largest wearables vendor in the first quarter of 2017 with an estimated 3.5 million Apple Watch shipments, according to new research data shared this afternoon by Strategy Analytics.

Apple Watch shipments overtook Fitbit shipments during Q1 2017, allowing Apple to capture 15.9 percent global marketshare to become the top wearables vendor.

Crushing it.

If you want to dig through the data, here’s a link to the original Strategy Analytics report.

The Week:

“It seems that the Trump era will basically control-Z everything that happened on Obama’s watch,” Oliver sighed. “I genuinely would not be surprised if one night Trump went on TV just to tell us that he personally killed every turkey that Obama ever pardoned.” Now, ISPs are touting their support for a “free and open internet,” with some regulatory changes, but you should take their “support” with a grain of salt, Oliver said, briefly explaining Title I and II of the Communications Act of 1934 — the entertainment “equivalent of chasing an Ambien with a shot of chloroform.”

ISPs like Verizon want to make net neutrality essentially voluntary, and “they now have a powerful ally,” Trump’s new FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, Oliver said. “The dangerous thing about Pai is that he presents himself as a fun, down-to-earth nerd,” with a Twitter feed full of Big Lebowski quotes and a novelty mug he describes as “infamous.” “But for all of Pai’s doofy, hey-I’m-just-like-you-guys persona, there are some things about him that you should really know,” he explained — like that he’s a former lawyer for Verizon who despises regulation, and that some of his ideas to replace Title II are “almost laughably lax.”

Yeah, he’s done it before but the issue has raised its ugly head once again.

Click the link, take a look at the picture. Imagine this as an Apple Store. That’ll be an amazing store to visit.

MacStories:

Apple has since posted a clarification to the iTunes Affiliate Resources website that says:

“We’d like to clarify some changes being made to the Affiliate Program. Commissions for all iOS in-app purchases will be reduced from 7% to 2.5% globally, and all other content types (including music, movies, books, paid iOS apps and TV) will remain at the current 7%.”

Great news for sites and people that use the program.

My Modern Met:

While the term photography was coined in the early 19th-century, Greek mathematicians had been making pinhole cameras since the 4th century BCE. With such a long history, photography is full of firsts, from the world’s oldest photograph to the first photo uploaded to Instagram.

While most early photos used the daguerreotype process invented by Louis Daguerre, technical inventions have created endless possibilities for photographers. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane to learn some of the famous first photographs that have changed how we view the world.

Without looking, guess who the subject of the “First Digital Photo of a President” was. I bet you’ll be surprised.

Mac Observer:

A popular video conversion app for Mac has suffered a malware infection on one of its mirror servers. If you downloaded HandBrake between 10:30 a.m. EDT on May 2, 2017 and 7:00 p.m. EDT on May 6, 2017, you should follow these instructions to check your Mac for a new variant of the malware OSX.PROTON. Yes, HandBrake was compromised by malware.

If you didn’t download it during the above times, you have nothing to worry about.

Gadgets 360:

The Senior Vice President Worldwide Marketing at Apple was in Bengaluru recently to inaugurate the company’s app accelerator facility in Bengaluru where he a spoke to group of Indian app makers that included CEOs of popular apps like Zomato and Practo, as well as developer of the indie app Avaz.

Gadgets 360 got a chance to sit down with Schiller and pick his brains on a wide variety of topics, both developer- and consumer-focussed.

Always fun to read the tea leaves when Apple executives speak.

The Android operating system clearly dominates the mobile market, with a share of around 72 percent. In Germany alone, around 67 percent of smartphone owners use a device with an Android operating system (source: Statcounter). G DATA security experts discovered over 750,000 new Android malware apps in the first quarter of 2017. That represents almost 8,400 new malware instances every day.

This is an absolutely staggering number. I don’t know how anyone using an Android device feels the least bit safe.

A comprehensive security solution is becoming more and more important for smartphones and tablets.

Yes, I agree. It’s called an iPhone and iOS.

I read through Gruber’s piece and tried to pick out one point to quote here, but it’s so thoughtfully woven together, you should just read it all.

Digg:

Seven-year-old Anu strolled gleefully onto her elementary school playground to show off her new hot pink “sports blade” (a word we just learned and love).

If you’re having a bad day (I sure am!), this short video will definitely put a smile on your face.

PCWorld:

A recently released survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that during the second half of 2016 50.8 percent of U.S. households were wireless only. That’s up from 48.3 percent during the same time period in 2015—a rise of 2.5 percentage points.

I bet many of you have as well. I still have one if only because I live in the boondocks and cell service sucks but, as soon as I move back to the Big City, I’ll dump the landline.

The funniest part of this study was:

Mobile-only folks tend to be smokers and binge drinkers, as NPR reported.

In the May 2017 study, the CDC said that “adults who had at least one heavy drinking day in the past year was substantially higher among wireless-only adults”

Seriously? That’s how you define a “binge drinker”? One heavy drinking day per year? I’d call that a slacker.

Amazon and Apple may have reached a truce.

The tech giants, who are increasingly competing for customers’ time, eyeballs and money, are close to an agreement to bring an Amazon video app to Apple’s Apple TV set-top box, according to people familiar with the two companies.

This agreement will benefit both companies. Amazon subscribers want to be able to use their Apple TVs to watch videos without using AirPlay and Apple wants to offer a full complement of programming options for its customers.

The company will fund more than 40 original shows and movies in the next year, spending hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a person familiar with the plans. YouTube is betting high-profile stars will attract more advertisers like Johnson & Johnson, which is sponsoring “Best.Cover.Ever,” a music competition from Ryan Seacrest that’s scheduled for later this year.

I think this is great. The original programming from Netflix and others over the past few years has been fabulous. Hopefully that trend will continue.

Sportscar maker Porsche is opening a digital technology center with 100 staff in Silicon Valley to forge new partnerships, cooperate with venture-capital companies and invest in new companies, it said on Friday.

This is a very interesting move for Porsche. They aren’t waiting to license technology in a few years when it matures, they are getting in on the ground floor where it’s being developed in Silicon Valley.

Shawn posted this last night, but this hits very close to home for me, wanted to add my 2 cents.

Matt Gemmell:

No company has done as much damage to the perceived value of software, and the sustainability of being an independent developer, as Apple.

Not that other companies wouldn’t have done the same thing — they would have. It’s just that Apple was the successful one.

It’s resolutely the fault of us as consumers, and it’s actively encouraged by the App Store.

This is a scorcher. At its heart, this is about the iOS App Store’s race to the bottom, price-wise, and the difficulty of making a living as a developer in a “pennies for your work” market.

Matt does an excellent job laying out all the details. A core argument:

Has Apple created a huge market, in terms of potential customers? Absolutely. It’s just done so at the expense of its platform-invested developer community. Judging by the company’s value and income, it was a very wise move, and you can justify it on that basis if you choose. But don’t ignore the reality of the situation. Apple is not a benevolent entity; your human-centric partner in aesthetics and ethos. If that was ever true at all.

Apple created the App Store. Is it their responsibility to ensure that the people whose work they benefit from, on whose backs they ride, have the ability to earn a living? Are developers in the same “fair trade” category as the miners who dig the rare earths that go into each and every iPhone?

Matt cocludes with this about the Mac App Store, which offers an economic model based on far fewer users and much higher pricing:

For developers who target the Mac, the last segment of the glass-and-aluminium Cupertino hardware line-up to still have plausibly sustainable economics, there’s only one course of action: pray that Apple remains disinterested.

Still chewing on all this. Lots to process. But thought this was worth sharing.

Imagination said in April that Apple had notified the British firm it was developing its own graphics chips and would no longer use Imagination’s processing designs in 15 months to two years time.

I get why Imagination wants to hang on to Apple, but it makes a lot of sense for Apple to make its own chips. It has the facilities and technical people to make it happen. Doing so means that Apple doesn’t have to pay licensing fees to a third-party, which means it keeps more the money from each sale.

Ars Technica:

Apple plans to create a $1 billion fund to invest in “advanced manufacturing” jobs in the United States. CEO Tim Cook made the announcement last night in a CNBC interview with Mad Money host Jim Cramer, and he says that Apple plans to announce its first investment later this month. Cook wants the new fund to create a “ripple effect” in the job market—he says that the manufacturing jobs created directly by the fund will also create service jobs needed to support them.

“Advanced manufacturing” is a bit vague, but generally speaking, it’s an umbrella term that encompasses creating technologically advanced products or improving the processes by which those products are created.

Apple doesn’t say exactly what “advanced manufacturing” is but I’m betting it means chip fabrication. Apple is going to make its own silicon in the US.

Matt Gemmell:

No company has done as much damage to the perceived value of software, and the sustainability of being an independent developer, as Apple.

Not that other companies wouldn’t have done the same thing — they would have. It’s just that Apple was the successful one.

It’s resolutely the fault of us as consumers, and it’s actively encouraged by the App Store.

While Gemmell will be perceived as biased, he’s not far wrong. It must be disheartening for developers to see the race to the bottom on the iOS app store where people bitch about paying $4.99 for an app and complain about paying for updates/upgrades in the form of new versions.

Digital Photography Review:

The Canon EOS Rebel T7i/800D is the latest incarnation of Canon’s hugely popular mass-market range of DSLRs. This latest model is built around a 24MP sensor that uses Canon’s Dual Pixel AF system to offer improved autofocus in live view and video (more on that later).

At its core, it shares a lot with the more expensive EOS 77D but the differences become apparent when you first turn them on: both models feature a simplified ‘skin’ over the user interface, but only the T7i has these guiding functions switched on by default.

I’m a Nikon guy but, if you’re in the market for your first DSLR or to replace an older one, you can’t go wrong with the latest Canon Rebel. The Rebel line is the best selling camera for good reason.

Wired:

Deep inside the mountain, a crew of humans toils in one of the nation’s most secure military installations. Shielded by 2,500 feet of granite, these people gather and analyze data from a global surveillance system, in an attempt to (among other, undisclosed things) warn the government’s highest officials of launches and missile threats to North America.

Their military mole-city, completed in the mid-1960s amid Cold War worries, is—when fully buttoned-up—highly resistant to nuclear bombs, electromagnetic bombs, electromagnetically destructive behavior from the sun, and biological weapons. It’s designed to do its job, and let those inside do theirs, in the worst of worst-case scenarios.

This place has always fascinated and terrified me in equal measure.