Furthermore, the series won’t have a single host in the drivers’ seat. Instead, the trio conceived of a format that is more of an interview series than longer versions of the “Late Late Show” bit, with a different “host” for every episode.
“We’re really excited about the pairings we’re putting together,” Corden said. Those pairings include more traditional musical choices like John Legend with Alicia Keys and Seth MacFarlane with Ariana Grande, but also more outside-the-box choices like Billy Eichner in the passenger seat, surrounded by the band Metallica, or former NFL star and talk show host Michael Strahan with NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon.
It will be interesting to see how this goes. One of the keys to the success of the show was Corden’s personality and comedy, so I’m not sure how it will go with a longer format and different hosts.
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Apple is notorious for not looking back. When an anniversary of a big product approaches, the company routinely bounces requests to reminisce. (“I don’t think about that,” was Jobs’s response to me, on the 25th anniversary of Macintosh in 2008). In this case, Apple made an exception: last week I sat down with its senior vp of world wide marketing, Phil Schiller, who joined the company’s leadership team in April 1997, coincident with Steve Jobs’s return. Schiller had been deeply involved in the iPhone’s development and launch.
There are a lot of articles you can read today about the launch of the iPhone ten years ago but very few of them will be with one of the principals involved.
From a blog post that ran on the BBC News site, ten years ago today:
As the hype piled up Jobs told us we were witnessing history and he was going to reinvent the telephone – some doubts crept in.
And:
It is going to be expensive – $499 for the 4gb, $599 for 8gb – when it arrives in US stores in June.
And:
Apple is entering a market where giants like Nokia, Motorola and Samsung are making pretty smart phones. A bit of a contrast to the easier landscape which the ipod entered. Still – as Jobs pointed out – there’s a big market to aim at, with a billion mobile phones sold last year.
Fun looking back. After all, who knew what was coming? Well, Steve did.
BBC News correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, recalling that day, ten years ago, when the iPhone was first unveiled:
Ten years ago I was running from San Francisco’s Moscone Centre to a nearby hotel to edit a piece for the Ten O’Clock News when my phone rang.
“Have you got your hands on this new Apple phone for a piece to camera?” shouted a producer in London. “If not, why not?”
This appeared to be an impossible demand.
And:
Then I remembered that we had been offered – and turned down for lack of time – an interview with Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller. I turned around and headed back to the Moscone Centre. Having located Mr Schiller I asked whether before our interview I might just have a look at the iPhone.
He graciously handed his over – and rather than trying to ring Jony Ive or order 5,000 lattes as Steve Jobs had on stage, I brandished it at the camera for my Ten O’Clock News piece.
And:
The following weekend a Sunday newspaper columnist described me as having clutched the phone as if it were “a fragment of the true cross”, and some viewers complained that the BBC had given undue prominence to a product launch.
Undue prominence? As it turns out, no amount of coverage could fairly have been labeled undue.
Stop for a minute and imagine how momentous a change the iPod engendered within Apple itself. This was a company that, for nearly 30 years, had been a personal computer company. The blue sky thinking that allowed Apple to make a stand-alone MP3 player—to enter a mature market as an outsider and believe it could dominate—also engendered the sort of fearlessness that made it possible to break with other long-standing Apple shibboleths. The iPod eventually worked with Windows machines, even at the risk of cannibalizing Mac sales. iTunes eventually worked with Windows machines. Apple (gasp) made a Windows app! As Phil Schiller told Walter Isaacson in his Steve Jobs biography: “We felt we should be in the music player business, not just in the Mac business.” It was this conceptual leap, this strategic bravery (just as much as a penchant for good design and reliable manufacturing) that would be responsible for Apple’s success in the 2000s.
Apple was no longer just a computer company. It could be whatever it wanted to be.
And:
“I was actually pushing to do two sizes—to have a regular iPhone and an iPhone mini like we had with the iPod,” Apple’s chief hardware executive Jon Rubenstein says in Dogfight. “I thought one could be a smartphone and one could be a dumber phone. But we never got a lot of traction on the small one, and in order to do one of these projects you really need to put all your wood behind one arrow.”
And:
Jobs himself approved the list of people who could participate in the preparations, and more than a dozen security guards were on post 24 hours a day. Jobs originally decreed that all outside contractors hired to staff the event would have to sleep in the building the night before so that no details could leak out. Cooler heads eventually talked him out of it.
And:
Jobs rehearsed his presentation for six solid days, but at the final hour, the team still couldn’t get the phone to behave through an entire run through. Sometimes it lost internet connection. Sometimes the calls wouldn’t go through. Sometimes the phone just shut down.”It quickly got very uncomfortable,” Andy Grignon, the senior radio engineer for the iPhone remembered in Dogfight. “Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued. It happened. But mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are fucking up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’”
The next frontier in digital advertising may be your car’s windshield.
Automakers, technology companies and glass manufacturers are teaming up to turn the display that graces the front of an iPhone into the windshield of a car — one that can show ads, directions and vehicle information to the person behind the wheel.
The advent of connected cars is creating a new sales battleground, and using a vehicle’s windshield may be the next way to pitch more products and services to consumers.
The closer we get to self-driving cars, the more inevitable (unfortunately) this will become.
This video shows the announcement at the 2007 Macworld Expo. I was in the room and it was an amazing experience but, ten years ago, none of us could have predicted how the iPhone would literally change the world.
The calendar has flipped over to 2017, and now it’s time to take a look back at all that happened in 2016. For us, that means looking at all of the great games releases in the App Store in 2016, and try to cut them down to the 50 best iOS games of the year. Once the top 50 are set, it comes down to sorting them to truly find the game of the year for 2016. Our list is complete with each one of these games deserving their own recognition for 2016. It’s the 50 best iOS games of 2016 according to AppAdvice.
I’m not a big gamer but everyone should be able to find one or two games on this list they’d like to play.
Discover and enjoy new interpretations of traditional Chinese New Year Nianhua folk art. Using Apple products with various apps, five young Chinese artists reinvent classic motifs to deliver new year blessings with a contemporary twist.
In honour of Chinese New Year, Apple has posted these absolutely gorgeous wallpapers for you to download.
Apple raked in $215.6 billion in sales in 2016, but it wasn’t enough to keep the company from reporting its first year-over-year sales decline since 2001. According to the company’s definitive proxy statement filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the company’s sales declined from $233.7 billion in 2015, and its operating income likewise fell from $71.2 billion in 2015 to $60.0 billion in 2016. The decline in these two metrics was enough to significantly cut incentive-based pay for Tim Cook and a number of other high-level Apple executives.
Don’t shed a tear. All of them make more in one year, “disappointing” or otherwise, than most of us will see in our lifetimes.
Thanks to Depth Effects for sponsoring The Loop this week. Now everyone can get beautiful Portrait Mode photos with their iPhone. Depth Effects gives you the power to apply a striking depth of field to any photo. Get DLSR-quality focus and bokeh with simple controls. Also, Depth Effects is the best app for anamorphic depth of field and cinematic bokeh.
Amazon is following the Netflix strategy, embedding Alexa everywhere it can possibly make sense. There are TVs (of course – think Amazon Fire TV Stick), refrigerators, and all sorts of Amazon Echo-like docks, all using Alexa’s voice recognition technology without requiring the purchase of an Echo.
Add to that the devices that integrate with Alexa’s APIs, making themselves controllable by the user’s Amazon Echo.
You can read about some of these devices, shown off at CES 2017, in this Loop post.
But Amazon has even larger ambitions for Alexa ubiquity. They’ve inked a deal with Ford to add Alexa voice recognition to their SYNC system. From this New York Times article:
This week at the International CES, the giant electronics conference in Las Vegas, Ford Motor announced that owners of its cars would soon be able to use Amazon’s Alexa voice-activated assistant in their vehicles. Drivers will be able to ask for a weather report, stream music from Amazon Music or add appointments to their calendars. They will also be able to use Alexa from home to start or unlock their cars remotely.
More importantly:
But the automaker also envisions drivers using Alexa to help with other tasks — like shopping on Amazon. Stuck in traffic? You can take care of Valentine’s Day by saying, “Alexa, order flowers on Amazon.”
This last is a direct threat to Apple’s efforts with Siri and CarPlay. In the past, Siri and Alexa have played in largely separate spaces. That changed when Amazon added Alexa to the Amazon Fire TV Stick, offering a much cheaper path to Netflix than Apple TV.
Perhaps signaling their intentions, Amazon has not yet built an app for the Apple TV to allow Apple TV users to access Amazon Video. And now, Amazon is more directly challenging Apple in the car space. And the ability to ask Alexa to order flowers (and many, many other things) from the car shows Amazon’s intentions much more clearly. Amazon is going after their own form of ecosystem lock-in.
Solid walkthough of the process of hunting down the largest files on your Mac. The old way was to use the Finder and construct a search based on file size. The modern way is to use the “About This Mac” storage tab to do all the heavy lifting for you.
In my mind, without question, they are the best new product Apple has done in years. Are they perfect? No. But they’re so good at their core purpose: wireless earbuds, that it’s honestly hard to complain about a single thing.
And:
I use them with my iPhone, my iPad, and my MacBook. They’re so seamless to use it’s honestly frustrating to think about using anything else.
And:
Pairing, thanks to the W1 chip, could not be easier. It makes pairing any other non-W1 Bluetooth device seem like a farce. And believe me, I’ve paired a lot of Bluetooth devices over the years. That it took this many years to perfect such a task, only for Apple to come along and do it seemingly overnight, seems like a joke. A really bad joke. Everyone else who has played in the Bluetooth game for a long time should be ashamed.
This is a love letter. And not the first AirPods love letter I’ve encountered.
With that as background, I’ve been talking to non-Apple folks about the AirPods and, almost universally, they tell me they’ve read that the AirPods are mediocre. This is mystifying to me, since the only negative I’ve heard has been from people whose ears are not a great fit.
I started doing my own digging and, sure enough, the internet is filled with one-off reviews that seem ambivalent about AirPods. Some of the reviews were clearly about poor ear fit, some complaining about the lack of an attaching cable (pull an AirPod out of your ear and it will fall to the ground), and the ease with which they can be lost.
I turned to Amazon to read their reviews. Problem there? The only Apple AirPods on Amazon.com are outrageously priced markups sold by a third party. And the negative reviews are all about the price. But without digging further, the appearance is that the AirPods are mediocre.
Finally, I found a crowdsourced set of reviews that felt genuine, on Best Buy’s web site. Unlike Amazon, Best Buy sells AirPods direct from Apple. They are backordered until Feb 24th (as of this writing), but the reviews are almost universally positive.
So if someone asks, I’d send them the Best Buy link and tell them about the issue of ear fit, make sure they buy them from somewhere with a pain-free return policy.
A man who got tangled in an Arapahoe Basin chairlift Wednesday morning and was hanging unconscious from his neck was cut down by a professional slackliner who climbed up a lift tower, slid approximately 30 feet across the lift’s cable and cut him free with a knife tossed from ski patrollers.
Follow the link, watch the video. Best watched in full-screen. This is a remarkable save. You can see the knife tossed up to the climber after he was unsuccessful in kicking the hanging skier free. Incredible.
Apple Inc said it was planning to open a retail store in South Korea, its first in the country that is home to its smartphone archrival Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.
The iPhone maker listed hiring notices for 15 positions dated Thursday on its website, including a store leader and business manager. The listings did not specify the exact location or when those who are hired will begin working.
“We’re excited about opening our first Apple Store in Korea, one of the world’s economic centers and a leader in telecommunication and technology, with a vibrant K-culture,” Apple told Reuters in a statement Friday.
This seems culturally significant, almost personal.
While it has always been known that Apple considered a variety of ideas when they were deciding to enter the mobile phone market (with ex employees discussing it behind closed doors, as seen in this Cult Of Mac article, not much was known about alternate versions of the iPhone until now.
Much like the first production iPhone, the prototype features many of the same features including an aluminium chassis, multi-touch compatible screen, 2G connectivity and WiFi radios. However, despite carrying a similar design, the phone itself is extremely different from the iPhone we know today.
Check out the video below to see the so-called Acorn OS at work. Fascinating.
DeepMind’s AlphaGo is back, and it’s been secretly crushing the world’s best Go players over the past couple of weeks. The new version of the AI has played 51 games online and won 50 of them, including a victory against Ke Jie, currently the world’s best human Go player. Amusingly, the 51st game wasn’t even a loss; it was drawn after the Internet connection dropped out.
What I find most intriguing about this is that artificial intelligence is still in its relative infancy. AI can get so much better and humans have to wait for evolution.
At the CES show this week a raft of appliance and home electronics makers said they have added Amazon’s voice-controlled virtual assistant, Alexa, to products ranging from TVs to robot vacuums. For non-techies, CES is the annual Las Vegas geek fest where these companies converge to show off their latest and greatest gizmos and features to more than 100,000 attendees.
We don’t know where this is going yet, but it’s clear that Amazon wants to be the hub in your home, and third-parties are buying in. Siri still seems to be the assistant you carry with you, but not the one that controls your surroundings.
The maps most of us are familiar with feature landmarks that stand out — like mountains, roads, lakes and rivers. But a Ph.D. candidate of geospacial science in Australia thought it would be interesting to focus on what doesn’t stand out, but is cast in shadow.
Bishop-Taylor sells ultra-high resolution versions of these maps for poster and canvas printing on Etsy. He said the sales are helping him fund his effort to earn his Ph.D.
If you know someone who is a map lover (like me!), check out these digital maps on Etsy. I’m especially fond of the ones showing the difference between Roads of the USA vs the Roads of Canada map. Spoiler alert: for a country of our size, we don’t have many roads. Thanks to the_pc_doc for the link.
Apple today announced that the App Store welcomed 2017 with its busiest single day ever on New Year’s Day, capping a record-breaking holiday season and a year of unprecedented developer earnings and breakout app hits. In 2016 alone, developers earned over $20 billion, up over 40 percent from 2015. Since the App Store launched in 2008, developers have earned over $60 billion, creating amazing app experiences for App Store customers across iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Mac. Those efforts helped kick off 2017 with a remarkable start, making New Year’s Day the highest single day ever for the App Store with nearly $240 million in purchases.
And:
“2016 was a record-shattering year for the App Store, generating $20 billion for developers, and 2017 is off to a great start with January 1 as the single biggest day ever on the App Store,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “We want to thank our entire developer community for the many innovative apps they have created — which together with our products — help to truly enrich people’s lives.”
And:
Customers broke all-time records this holiday season with purchases from the App Store topping $3 billion in December. In the same month, Nintendo’s Super Mario Run made history with more than 40 million downloads in just four days after its release, and was the most downloaded app globally on Christmas and New Year’s Day.
LodeRunner was one of my favorite games from the long ago. I’m delighted that it still exists. It is as fun to play as I remember. Old school. Give it a try. Unfortunately, haven’t figured out how to play it on my phone. Keyboard required.
Jonny Evans takes a short look at some noteworthy USB-C hubs. Of particular note is the HyperDrive kickstarter:
Announced last year, HyperDrive occupies two of your MacBook Pro’s four USB-C slots. In exchange, it provides you with twin USB 3.1 ports, a microSD and an SD slot, a single USB-C port (at 5Gbps), a Thunderbolt 3 port and HDMI video output. You can power two displays at 4K or a single display at 5K with this.
All this for only $69. Seems like a terrific solution, assuming it ships. Here’s the Kickstarter link.
As of today, we are reducing our team by about one third — eliminating 50 jobs, mostly in sales, support, and other business functions. We are also changing our business model to more directly drive the mission we set out on originally.
And:
We set out to build a better publishing platform — one that allowed anyone to offer their stories and ideas to the world and that helped the great ones rise to the top. In 2016, we made big investments in teams and technology aimed at attracting and migrating commercial publishers to Medium. And in order to get these publishers paid, we built out and started selling our first ad products. This strategy worked in terms of driving growth, as well as improving the volume and consistency of great content. Some of the web’s best publishers are now on Medium, and we’re happy to work with them every day.
And:
However, in building out this model, we realized we didn’t yet have the right solution to the big question of driving payment for quality content. We had started scaling up the teams to sell and support products that were, at best, incremental improvements on the ad-driven publishing model, not the transformative model we were aiming for. Perhaps utilizing software such as entrepreneur games would be a game-changer in allowing a business like this to continue to thrive.
Terribly difficult problem to solve. Medium is a terrific platform, but they face the same problem as the models they aim to replace: How do you convert reader interest and attention into cash?
We are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans who want to get smarter about the world every day. It is too soon to say exactly what this will look like.
In a world where fake news pays better than real news, this is a truly daunting challenge.
Great post from Jeff Benjamin about the emerging 8K standard from VESA (They created the DisplayPort standard) and HDMI.
One particular point of interest:
One of the biggest takeaways is that HBR3 enables support of 4K at 60Hz using only two DisplayPort lanes. This means that DisplayPort Alt Mode via the USB-C interface can provide full 4K resolution at 60Hz, and still have two high-speed lanes remaining for SuperSpeed USB operation.
Why is this of note? Take the recently released LG UltraFine 4K Display, for example. That display takes advantage of DisplayPort Alt Mode, but the remaining downstream USB ports are forced to use antiquated USB 2.0 due to the lack of bandwidth. HBR3 would solve such an issue.
And:
To be fair, this isn’t exactly new, as DisplayPort 1.3, which was ratified in September 2014, also includes HBR3. VESA thereafter rolled HBR3 into DisplayPort 1.4. Unfortunately the Thunderbolt 3-enabled MacBook Pros and the 12-inch MacBook still rely on the HBR2-laden DisplayPort 1.2 for external display connectivity.
