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Mac Observer:

Apple just raised the cap on Apple TV app sizes from 200 MB up to 4 GB, bringing them in line with iPhone and iPad apps. Apple told developers the change lets them give users a better overall experience. For end users, that means more immersive apps and potentially a step towards a 4K Apple TV.

Not “potentially”. Definitely. It’s just a matter of when. I predict at/by WWDC 2017.

Consumer Reports is an irresponsible organization that rushed to publish its faulty MacBook Pro results before Christmas only to be caught and have to backtrack. I don’t trust a word these people say about anything.

Today, we’re starting to roll out an updated ride services experience to make it even easier for you to book a ride directly from Google Maps, on both Android and iOS globally.

Having it take you out of Google Maps and into Uber or Lyft was really clumsy. This will work much better and offer a better solution. I did try the same feature in Apple Maps, but every time I used the feature, it crashed the app, so I just stopped.

iPhone app purchasers may sue Apple Inc over allegations that the company monopolized the market for iPhone apps by not allowing users to purchase them outside the App Store, leading to higher prices, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday.

Wait a minute. People want to sue Apple because they feel they could buy the apps cheaper if Apple didn’t have a monopoly on the App Store? This is absolutely insane. Apps cost under $1 in a lot of cases—how much do people think developers work is worth? The clear answer is nothing—they want it all for free.

What the protections Apple provides in the App Store? Specifically apps free from malware and other malicious code. The safety and sense of security purchasing from the App Store is very important.

This is ridiculous.

Wired:

When Ezra Edelman set out to make the documentary O.J.: Made in America, he had one goal: To make a five-hour movie about how the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder case became a flashpoint for talking about race and the American criminal justice system. Not only did he hit his goal, but he overshot that runtime by about three hours.

“No sane person would do this,” Edelman says now, sitting in a lounge in New York’s Post Factory, where his doc was edited. In the end, he took some 800 hours of footage—some from archive material, some from interviews with 72 people—and boiled it down into one single 467-minute movie. It took him more than two years. But he didn’t do it alone. In fact, it wasn’t even entirely his idea. We spoke with Edelman and his creative partners to get the story of how they created the wildly ambitious documentary.

I didn’t see the dramatized version of the O.J. story but I really enjoyed this documentary about it.

Tremolo systems first started appearing on guitars in the 1930s and have evolved multiple times in the ensuing decades.

Utilizing tremolo can be an integral aspect of your sound—see: Duane Eddy, Jimi Hendrix, David Gilmour, Jeff Beck and Eddie Van Halen—or add a splash of color to your style.

But what is a tremolo system, how does it work and what are the benefits of one system over another?

Some of my favorite guitarists used a tremolo a lot, but I never really used it that much in my own playing. Using it properly is definitely an art.

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.