TidBITS:

I found myself aggravated by this situation, though not through a desire to defend Apple nor to denigrate Consumer Reports, despite its history in leading the charge on the non-existent Antennagate issue back with the iPhone 4.

Rather, it’s the way in which CR failed to serve its readers, rather than how it interacted with Apple, that worries me. (CR is a subscription publication that also makes some material available to the general public at no cost.) By not revealing its test methods more fully in its original report or admitting that it should have done more work to exclude its setup as the reason for the results, I worry that CR’s actions reduce the credibility of all technology reporting and reviewing.

I agree with Fleishman. When CR found its results to be so out of whack with what would be expected, they should have held off publishing their results until they figured out the issue.

Wall Street Journal:

Apple Inc. is planning to build a significant new business in original television shows and movies, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that could make it a bigger player in Hollywood and offset slowing sales of iPhones and iPads.

These people said the programming would be available to subscribers of Apple’s $10-a-month streaming-music service, which has struggled to catch up to the larger Spotify AB. Apple Music already includes a limited number of documentary-style segments on musicians, but nothing like the premium programming it is now seeking.

The technology giant has been in talks with veteran producers in recent months about buying rights to scripted television programs. It also has approached experienced marketing executives at studios and networks to discuss hiring them to promote its content, said people with knowledge of the discussions.

And:

In addition to TV, Apple indicated to these people that it is considering offering original movies, though those plans are more preliminary.

Executives at Apple have told people in Hollywood they hope to start offering original scripted content by the end of 2017.

Strikes me as an approach similar to Amazon’s. Amazon offers free video content with your Prime subscription. Pay for free shipping, we’ll sweeten the deal with a range of original, high quality content.

As far as I know, Amazon has not yet made any bundle deals for their content, corralling their offerings inside their ecosystem. Will Apple do the same? It certainly would swing customers away from Spotify towards Apple Music. And, if the video offerings were substantial enough, some customers would sign up for the video and look at the music as a nice side benefit.

Andy Ihnatko, writing about fake news:

I’ll use Apple as an example. They had a problem on their hands in the form of a deeply-negative Consumer Reports headline: “New MacBook Pros Fail to Earn Consumer Reports Recommendation.” CR had tested the new MacBook Pros and concluded that the battery life of all three models were insanely inconsistent.

Response Option 1: Apple calls the report “Fake News” and dismisses Consumer Reports as “failing, sad, and pathetic.” Next question.

Response Option 2: Apple disagrees with CR’s findings and tries to substantiate their results. An examination of CR’s testing methodology — done with the publication’s help — reveals no fudging, but identifies many quirks in the test protocol that probably contributed to a suspicious result.

Apple did exactly the right thing. If the original CR review was totally screwy, it shouldn’t be hard to demonstrate why, and Apple certainly has the resources to put in that kind of effort. Moreover, doing so indicates that they want to earn the trust of their customers, instead of demanding it.

And:

Apple emerges from all of this looking great, and everybody (Apple, Consumer Reports, and consumers) walks away with a better understanding of the issue.

This is exactly where the bar should be set. Truth seeking behavior.

[H/T John Kordyback]

Mac Rumors:

In the U.S. last month, an estimated 75% of revenue from headphones sold online came from wireless models, up from 50% in December 2015, according to Slice Intelligence. Apple’s new AirPods led the way, capturing an estimated 26% share of online revenue in the wireless headphone market since launching on December 13.

And:

AirPods stole the top spot from Beats, which took an estimated 15.4% of online revenue in the wireless headphone market, down from 24.1% between the start of 2015 and December 13. Given it owns Beats, Apple appears to have actually taken nearly 40% of online revenue in the market since launching AirPods.

I regularly see Apple’s traditional white EarPods as well as Beats over ear headphones out in public. But I have yet to see a single pair of AirPods in the wild. I expect this is wave, still too far from shore to see. Could also be a sign that people tend to use AirPods in more private settings.

But given the huge sales numbers, I think this will change, especially in cold weather climates as Spring arrives and more and more people are hanging around outside.

Jeremy Burge, Emojipedia:

The Google design team were months ahead of Apple with new emoji in the past year. Support for the latest emojis came to Android in the major Nougat release in August of 2016.

Yet the vast majority of Android users still can’t see these new emojis.

What they see, instead, are empty rectangles. Why? Lack of timely Android updates.

New emojis are bundled with system updates for iOS and Android, as emoji fonts and relevant Unicode support is provided at an OS level1.

This system should work well, but the weak link is relying on manufacturers to provide updates in a timely manner.

Vlad Savov reported in September2: most phones at IFA (large tech show in Europe) were running a year-old version of Android.

And:

These aren’t old phones not getting updates: they’re brand new phones running an out of date OS. It’s not a good sign.

Great post from someone who really knows the emoji business. One takeaway? Know that if you are including emoji in a text heading to an Android phone, the recipient might be getting rectangles.

Horace Dediu, Asymco:

In its first 10 years, the iPhone will have sold at least 1.2 billion units, making it the most successful product of all time. The iPhone also enabled the iOS empire which includes the iPod touch, the iPad, the Apple Watch and Apple TV whose combined total unit sales will reach 1.75 billion units over 10 years. This total is likely to top 2 billion units by the end of 2018.

And:

The revenues from iOS product sales will reach $980 billion by middle of this year. In addition to hardware Apple also books iOS services revenues (including content) which have totaled more than $100 billion to date.

This means that iOS will have generated over $1 trillion in revenues for Apple sometime this year.

Simply remarkable.

A spate of top engineers have left Apple for Tesla and other companies over the last few months. What’s going on?

The moves to Tesla are certainly interesting, but I wouldn’t read too much into the overall trend. Apple gains and loses people all the time and we never hear about it. It’s always been like this.

The Verge:

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the original iPhone introduction, and with it, a flood of stories about the design and development of the device. One video from Sonny Dickson, showing what looks like an iPod interface with a virtual click wheel, has attracted a ton of attention, since the longstanding story has been that two teams inside Apple competed to make the iPhone — one to turn the iPod into a phone, and the other to shrink OS X to work on a mobile device.

Not so, says Tony Fadell, who led the iPod team at Apple and then the iPhone team. He called me from the Detroit Auto Show, where he’s presenting on panels related to autonomous cars, to clarify what we’re seeing here.

We’ve all seen that video so it’s great to hear from someone involved as to the story behind it and the early iPhone development.

Paul Kent:

I’m organizing this dinner to honor our friend Sal Soghoian. We’ll be toasting Sal’s career while at Apple and wishing him well as he gets ready to write the next chapter! We’ll have a cocktail hour, a meal together and a chance to tell Sal how much we appreciate his contributions to the Apple user community. Your fee covers the cost of the meal (tax and gratuity included!), EventBrite fees, and chips in $5 for Sal and Naomi’s dinner. It will be a great night honoring a great guy who’s given so much to the Apple community.

I’ve known Sal for years and there is no better person in the Mac Community. I wish I could go to this event.

Digg:

These days, you can do pretty much anything with CGI (sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s… not). But back in the early days of movies, filmmakers had to be a lot more creative about they filmed stunts. This collection from silentmoviegifs explains how some impressive scenes from movies by the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were achieved — our personal favorite is the Chaplin rollerskating scene.

Today, it seems like anything that can be imagined can be done through CGI but in the days of silent films, they had to use old school technology to create the “special” effects.

In Fender Collection 2 you’ll get all of the glorious “tweeds” from the ’57 Custom Series, a refined, player-centric take on a classic platform that includes the ’57 Deluxe, the ’57 Champ, ’57 Pro, ’57 Twin and ’57 Bandmaster.

Plus you get a spot-on model of an original 1953 Bassman and a 1965 blackface Super Reverb.

It’s hard to argue how iconic some of these amps are. IK has done a great job in the past bringing some of the most sought after amps to the public in its AmpliTube products.

Somewhat buried in Jason Snell’s iPhone 10th birthday celebration writeup was this wonderful picture.

There’s the incredibly intense look on Steve’s face. And the fact that this is one of the last such events where none of the pictures was taken using an iPhone.

Gregg Keizer, Computerworld:

Apple will steal a march on Microsoft this year when for the first time this century shipments of devices powered by its operating systems outnumber those running Windows, research firm Gartner said today.

In 2017, Apple’s combination of iOS and macOS — the former on iPhones and iPads, the latter on Macs — will take second place from Windows on the devices shipped during the year. The gap between the two will widen in 2018 and 2019, with Apple ahead of Microsoft both years.

Not terribly surprising, given the rise of mobile and Apple’s dominance in that space. But still, just a little bit satisfying.

Not clear from the article but, presumably, first place is held by Android.

Family sharing is extremely useful. Use it to share music, apps, photos, and even a calendar. No blood test required.

Nice job laying this out by The App Factor.

This is cool. iFixit pulled together a single page, scrolling gallery of 10 years of iPhone teardowns, from the original iPhone all the way to the iPhone 7 Plus.

Definitely worth a look.

DSL Reports:

AT&T continues to quickly hike the cost of unlimited data in order to drive its dwindling grandfathered unlimited data users to metered plans. Users in our forums say they’re being notified of a $5 bump in the cost of unlimited data starting in March of 2017. The hike would be the second such hike in as many years, after AT&T bumped the cost of unlimited data last February.

Back in the early days of the iPhone, success for AT&T was no guarantee. To help bring customers to the fold, AT&T offered unlimited data plans for a limited time.

These plans have been “grandfathered” since then, but AT&T has made a number of efforts to wean customers off those unlimited plans to more traditional metered data plans. These efforts continue with the coming $5 per month bump.

We will start with an overview and work our way to create a Koala in pure CSS.

There’s also a video you can watch as well as the written instructions.

We would like to welcome Chris Lattner, who will join Tesla as our Vice President of Autopilot Software. Chris’ reputation for engineering excellence is well known. He comes to Tesla after 11 years at Apple where he was primarily responsible for creating Swift, the programming language for building apps on Apple platforms and one of the fastest growing languages for doing so on Linux.

That explains what happened.

Spotify:

What you’ll do:

Provide world-class leadership to our playlist editors and supporting staff.

Identify and substantiate new playlist ideas, e.g. from a playlist for shooting hoops with your friends, to the perfect warm up playlist for addressing the nation about health care legislation that bears your name.

Who you are:

Have at least eight years experience running a highly-regarded nation.

Familiar with the Spotify platform, with experience in programming playlists at a federal level. Anything from an eclectic summer playlist, to a celebratory, “I just found my birth certificate” playlist.

Can speak passionately about playlists at press events. Let us be clear, you should be nothing short of one of the greatest speakers of all time.

Someone with good team spirit, excellent work ethic, a friendly and warm attitude, and a Nobel Peace Prize.

This is an oddly specific job posting.

I’m happy to announce that Ted Kremenek will be taking over for me as “Project Lead” for the Swift project, managing the administrative and leadership responsibility for Swift.org. This recognizes the incredible effort he has already been putting into the project, and reflects a decision I’ve made to leave Apple later this month to pursue an opportunity in another space.

As Gruber says, I’d love to know what the other opportunity is.

Over the years, Sonos has weathered competition from better known rivals like Apple and Bose to find a devoted audience among audio enthusiasts. But lately its wireless speaker has lost ground to an unexpected competitor, Amazon’s Echo.

Now it faces another challenge: a change in the corner office. After 14 years leading the company he helped found, John MacFarlane has resigned as chief executive of Sonos and has been replaced by one of his deputies, Patrick Spence.

I don’t understand the competition. To me, Sonos and Echo serve different purposes—Sonos is a wonderful wireless speaker system and Echo is more of an assistant.

China’s largest mobile social media network WeChat is offering its 768 million users a function which allows them to by-pass app stores such as Apple’s.

I’m not really clear on how they implemented this, but bypassing the App Store is certainly not something Apple is likely to look kindly on.

Popular Mechanics:

Despite what you heard, the Amish aren’t against technology. Communities adopt new gadgets such as fax machines and business-use cell phones all the time—so long as the local church approves each one ahead of time, determining that it won’t drastically change their way of life.

So it is with the Amish horse-drawn buggy. You might have thought the technology inside this 1800s method of transportation stopped progressing right around then. Instead, buggy tech keeps advancing, and buggy makers have become electricians and metalworkers to build in all the new tech you can’t see under the traditional black paint.

As a Nova Scotianer, I’d never seen an Amish buggy until, while riding my motorcycle through Pennsylvania, I came through a curve and saw a large pile of “dirt” in the middle of my line. Rear tire hit the dirt and squirted out from under me. Freaked me out. I looked behind me and realized it wasn’t dirt but horse manure. As I got ready for the next curve, I thought, “Where the hell did that come from?” Looking through the curve ahead, I saw the buggy in the road and literally laughed out loud. I slowed and came up behind the buggy and saw two small children in the back, facing rearward. It was a “buggy station wagon”! The kids waved to me, I waved back and then passed the buggy, still laughing inside my helmet.