Apple today introduced AirPods, innovative new wireless headphones that use advanced technology to reinvent how we listen to music, make phone calls, enjoy TV shows and movies, play games and interact with Siri, providing a wireless audio experience not possible before. AirPods eliminate the hassles of wireless headphones, by just flipping open the lid of its innovative charging case and with one tap, they are instantly set up and ready to work with your iPhone and Apple Watch. Advanced sensors know when you are listening and automatically play and pause your music. Using Siri, AirPods allow you to access your favorite personal assistant with just a double tap. This revolutionary experience is enabled by the new ultra-low power Apple W1 chip, which enables AirPods to deliver high-quality audio and industry-leading battery life in a completely wireless design. AirPods will be available starting in late October.
If you liked the original Apple ear pods, you’ll probably like these. But sadly for me, they never fit in my ears properly. And, at $159, they won’t fit my wallet either.
Apple today introduced iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, the best, most advanced iPhone ever, packed with unique innovations that improve all the ways iPhone is used every day. The new iPhone features new advanced camera systems that take pictures like never before, more power and performance with the best battery life ever in an iPhone, immersive stereo speakers, wide color system from camera to display, two new beautiful finishes, and is the first water and dust resistant iPhone. iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus will be available in more than 25 countries beginning Friday, September 16.
For the dual-lens camera alone I say, shut up and take my money.
Beats by Dr. Dre (Beats) today announced a host of exceptional new wireless products, expanding the brand’s premium portfolio to include a new line of wireless earphones called BeatsX along with the next generation of two current best-sellers with the introduction of Powerbeats3 Wireless earphones and Beats Solo3 Wireless headphones. As a collection, these new products include the Apple W1 chip, Class 1 Bluetooth, Fast Fuel charge and the premium sound fans around the world have come to expect from Beats products.
I can’t wait for the reviews of these. The Air pods are a non-starter for me.
Ever wish that you could use your Apple Watch to see which Pokémon are around you or to collect some goodies from the Pokéstop you are passing? Well, by the end of this year you will be able to do all that and more right from your wrist. During the iPhone 7 launch, the folks at Niantic announced the new features and functionality that will help keep your eyes off of your iPhone’s display.
Today, Apple and Nike introduced Apple Watch Nike+, the latest result of a long-standing partnership. Apple Watch Nike+ is the ultimate tool for anyone who runs, pairing exclusive Nike Sport Bands with Apple Watch Series 2, which features GPS, a two-times-brighter display, water resistance 50 meters,* a powerful dual-core processor and watchOS 3. Apple Watch Nike+ also includes exclusive Siri commands and iconic Nike watch faces along with deep integration with the new Nike+ Run Club app for unrivaled motivation to go for a run, coaching plans that adapt to your unique schedule and progress, and guidance from the world’s best coaches and athletes. Apple Watch Nike+ is the ultimate companion for those with a passion for running, whether they’re emerging runners or marathon veterans.
This Nike partnership is weird and interesting. Many runners complain about so many changes in the program and that it’s often confusing. But Apple and Nike keep trying.
Today, Apple announced the first sequel to the Apple Watch, which itself is the first big new product line that Tim Cook’s Apple created. It’s powered by an S2 system on a chip that features a dual core processor that they say is 50 percent faster than the old one, plus a new GPU that delivers double the graphics performance.
I went to the site and made the purchase. I got an email, immediately, telling me that the purchase was made. About an hour later, I got a second email with a link to redeem the offer.
I clicked the link, was taken to iTunes, entered my Apple ID password, and clicked to redeem the code automatically entered from the Walmart page. I was then presented with a button that said “Extend My Apple Music Membership”. I clicked the button and got a message telling me my Apple Music subscription was extended through the end of September, 2017.
More importantly, the message said my subscription would automatically be renewed at the $99 rate. It was not clear if I had to go back to Walmart to pay that $99. I suspect that Walmart is now out of the picture, that future payments will strictly be between me and Apple.
I do not have a family membership, so it is not clear how that will work. If someone with a family membership does give this a try, please ping me on Twitter and let me know and I will update this post.
Trademark attorney Brian Conroy contacted AppleInsider on Tuesday with a list of trademarks that Apple is said to have filed internationally for what could be upcoming products. Amongst the trademarks are known Apple product names, like Siri, Breathe, the True Tone Display as found in the iPad Pro series, macOS Sierra with several associated spellings, and the phrase “designed by Apple in California” as seen on nearly every Apple product.
However, also listed in Apple trademark document are other phrases not immediately identifiable. Listed by Conroy as particularly notable are a mysterious “Iris Engine” and variants, plus registrations for a “Smart Button,” “Touch Bar,” “Progress Card”, and “Swift Lab.”
Also notable are “AirPod Case,” “Control Strip,” “Home Hub,” and “iBooks Storytime.”
I’d guess some of these will make more sense after today’s event, and more after (hopefully, fingers crossed) an early October event.
Clicks the link, pays your monies, gets your code in email, listens to the music.
From the fine print:
Get all the music you want with an Apple Music subscription.
Terms and Conditions: Valid only on purchases made in the U.S. from the U.S. iTunes Store or towards an Apple Music subscription. Use requires an active iTunes account & prior acceptance of license & usage terms. Not redeemable for cash, for resale, for shipments outside the U.S. & no refunds or exchanges (except as required by law).
I’m buying one, will edit this post once I have a sense of what happens to my existing subscription.
Update: Seth Weintraub passed along this link to the eBay/PayPal equivalent, if that’s your preference.
According to the latest research from Strategy Analytics, Apple’s iPhone 6s was the world’s top-selling smartphone model in the second quarter of 2016. Apple currently accounts for two of the three top-selling smartphone models shipped worldwide.
And:
Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “We estimate the Apple iPhone 6s model shipped 14.2 million units and accounted for 4 percent share of all smartphones shipped worldwide in Q2 2016. Apple’s iPhone 6s is currently the world’s most popular smartphone. The iPhone 6s is wildly popular in dozens of countries globally, due to its attractive hardware design blended with rich features such as 4K video, large multi-touch display, and fingerprint security.”
Woody Oh, Director at Strategy Analytics, added, “The Apple iPhone 6 shipped 8.5 million units worldwide for second position and 2 percent marketshare during Q2 2016, followed by Samsung Galaxy S7 edge in third place with 8.3 million and 2 percent share. Apple iPhone 6 has been on sale for almost two years and it remains near the top of best-seller lists in many regions like Europe. Samsung’s Galaxy S7 edge has proven popular among high-end consumers and its curved hardware design has given the firm a differentiator that Apple’s iPhone portfolio does not yet offer.”
Bluetooth, maligned early on for sub-par connectivity and audio quality, has come a very long way, and within a few years wired headphones will be seen as much an outlier as a wired mouse or trackpad. It’s Apple’s style to predict and support this transition at the hardware level by taking away the safety net of a headphone plug that hasn’t changed fundamentally since the ¼” jack was introduced 138 years ago. Nobody alive today has ever known a world without this plug.
To put it bluntly, headphones that plug into the 3.5mm jack are dumb. Literally. At the base level, they’re just wires conducting current to tiny speaker coils, without electronics at all. Sure, some are smarter with inline controls or analog signal processing such as bass boosting or noise cancellation, but most headphones are just dumb wires. And we know how Apple feels about wires, even if they’re pretty smart.
Read the post for details on the vast improvements that will come with Lightning connected headphones and thoughts on the evolution of existing products, like the MacBook Pro, that currently ship with a 3.5mm port.
Lots of excitement today as Apple looks to be rolling out the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, perhaps without a headphone jack, perhaps with wireless headphones or headphones that plug into a lightning jack. There’s also likely to be an Apple Music relaunch with an improved interface and, as the bokeh invitation suggests, some dramatic camera improvements.
The event will begin at 10am PT, 1pm ET. You can watch the live stream here or on the Events channel on your Apple TV.
The Apple Store is down and presents this message:
Looking forward to seeing what Tim, Jony, and the gang have up their sleeves.
[KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Ku] suggests Apple is working on its own Bluetooth-like communication chip and its own Bluetooth headphones.
And:
The chip may be included in the wireless earbuds Apple has in development, which are said to be Bragi Dash-style wireless Bluetooth earbuds that are entirely wire free. The earbuds will be called “AirPods,” based on trademark filings that have been discovered, and the product could be unveiled as early as September 7 alongside the iPhone 7.
And:
According to Kuo, Apple will sell its Apple-branded Bluetooth headphones alongside its Beats line of headphones, targeting the high-end market with the “AirPods” and the mid-range market with the Beats headphones. It is not clear if that means the AirPods will be priced higher than Beats headphones are at the current time or if Apple plans to lower prices on Beats going forward.
Sounds like Apple is positioning Apple branded headphones at the high-end and Beats in the midrange. To me, it does make sense to position each brand at its own unique pricing tier.
Apple, traditionally, has not played at the audiophile level. If I encountered Apple headphones and say, Denon or Audeze headphones, my instinctive reaction would be to assume that the Denon/Audeze were the higher end product. Apple vs Beats might be more of a push. This means that Apple would have their work cut out for them presenting the Apple brand as an audiophile brand.
That said, Apple branded products have a high margin. Which means that if the product is better and reviews well, they’d have an easier time positioning the Apple brand at the high end. My 2 cents.
From Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence, a reminder of the rules of adjective order that fluent English speakers follow without quite knowing why.
I read this on Twitter over the weekend and couldn’t wrap my mind around it. As Kottke says, “Did anyone learn this in school? I sure didn’t. How do we all know then?” Good question.
Marc Levoy is a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford. His profile on the Stanford website tells me he has recently retired from the institution after five years in favor of leading a team at Google — more specifically, working on photography projects at Google Research, including the likes of Google Glass, Nexus Smartphones, and Android. When he made the move, he was initially teaching a revised version of his Stanford course. Now, that very course is accessible online absolutely free. The outline depicts the course as an introduction to the “scientific, artistic, and computing aspects of digital photography.”
The course is a little heavy on the tech but definitely interesting and informative.
Jim Edwards, writing for Business Insider, brings together a story from The New York Times on Apple and agism with an anecdote about the engineer who got OS X to run on a PC:
“Bertrand walks in, watches the PC boot up, and says to JK, ‘How long would it take you to get this running on a (Sony) Vaio?’ JK replies, ‘Not long’ and Bertrand says, ‘Two weeks? Three?’
“JK said more like two hours. Three hours, tops.
“Bertrand tells JK to go to Fry’s (the famous West Coast computer chain) and buy the top of the line, most expensive Vaio they have. So off JK, Max and I go to Frys. We return to Apple less than an hour later. By 7:30 that evening, the Vaio is running the Mac OS. [My husband disputes my memory of this and says that Matt Watson bought the Vaio. Maybe Matt will chime in.]
“The next morning, Steve Jobs is on a plane to Japan to meet with the President of Sony.”
Wonder if Apple will finally give me callback on that genius bar interview.
I hope Apple does give JK a call back. He’s earned it, I think. And if his skills have fallen off, my guess is, he’d be happy to train up, and more than capable.
Ground zero for the iCar right now is the workshop at 960 Kifer Road in Sunnyvale. In this Silicon Valley suburb, which is also home to a long established Mercedes-Benz research and development centre among hundreds of ambitious start-up companies, Apple is rumoured to be developing elements of its newest product under the cloak of a shell company called SixtyEight Research.
And:
SixEight Research is named on documentation as being the importer of a 1957 Fiat Multipla 600 from the UK to the US in 2014 – a move that has led to rumours that the production iCar could take the form of an upright one-box MPV-style car similar in dimensions to the Volkswagen Budd-E revealed at the Consumer Electronics Show last January.
The article is full of little gems, a long thread of rumors and a sprinkling of cloak and dagger. Not sure how much, if any, of this is new information, but a fascinating read.
I’ve been thinking this past week (as I often do) about the ever-changing landscape of the App Store. This year has seen some of the biggest changes in policy and structure that I can remember. We have new subscription pricing models , search ads, a substantial purge of older apps , new requirements for app names and a variety of little changes to the App Store app itself in iOS 10.
I won’t know how the sum of these changes will impact my business until probably later this fall, but it seemed like a good time to look back at the last several years and examine the path that brought me here.
And:
The App Store ecosystem today is wildly different from what it was back then. I launched my first app into a store of around 90k apps, today we have well over 2 million. Back then we didn’t have advertising networks, in-app purchases or subscriptions. You were free or paid, and if you wanted to make a living you pretty much had to be paid.
Today things are quite different. Paid apps now make up a vanishingly small proportion of my income, and nearly all of my recent successes have come on the back of free apps. The transition between the two ends has not always be straightforward but I’ve focused hard on being adaptable and open-minded during the transition.
This is not a post about how difficult it is to make a living as an indie app developer. Rather, it is a recognition of the current reality facing developers and the shift that one seasoned developer has made to keep on doing what he loves.
To me, the core of this post is the Combined Revenue chart embedded in the middle of the post. If you look at that chart, you’ll see how David’s revenues shift over time from paid (about 4 years ago) to almost all ad-based (current).
Margaret Sullivan, columnist for The Washington Post:
When NPR announced last month that it would no longer feature comments from readers on its website, general rejoicing followed.
“Good riddance — and everybody else should do the same” was the tone of the response I saw on Twitter. USA Today columnist Rem Rieder, noting that other news organizations are moving away from comments as well, wrote, “Their disappearance is welcome.” And even NPR’s ombudswoman, Elizabeth Jensen, wrote that the move made sense to her, since such a small slice of the audience was participating.
I disagree. I find value in reader comments that can’t be adequately reproduced elsewhere. The argument that the conversation has migrated to Facebook and Twitter is flawed. Those are good places for discussion, but they are no substitute for having discussion take place where the story itself lives. I’m convinced that many smart readers with something to contribute will not follow a story onto social media to talk about it. News organizations should fix online comments rather than ditch them.
I agree. There is no substitute for having the conversation where the story lives. There’s a sense of community that develops when old hands with long memories and weigh in, point out errors, spar with each other in a healthy way, and move the conversation along.
The hard part is keeping out the trolls and spam. That takes vigilance.
I totally understand why NPR and others have gotten rid of comments. At a certain level of popularity, keeping out the trolls and spam becomes unmanageable. And that’s a shame. I love the Loop community. They call me on my mistakes, which helps all of us, and they have my back when the trolls come.
It has been playing, ceaselessly, for three decades now, and it will stay lodged in your brain, like a barnacle made of synthesizers and cocaine, for hours after you read this article. (Don’t blame us—blame Starship.) This is the true story of how “We Built This City”—the most detested song in human history—got built.
If you play this song in my presence, I will smash whatever device this sound from hell is coming out of.
Did I mention how much I loathe this naming scheme?
From a marketing standpoint, Apple has simply been shooting itself in the foot every other year, muting expectations by putting an S on the box.
Even when an S model introduces a breakthrough feature, it comes in the context of “this is an off-year.” I’m trying to think of any marketer who has ever chosen such a course before, but I’m coming up blank.
Segall thinks more about this stuff than I do (and knows a hell of a lot more about it) so it doesn’t bother me nearly as much but he makes a good point. The S models always have had the perception of being “not as good”.
Queen Victoria, one of the last surviving old matriarchs in the Samburu National Reserve in northern Kenya, died of natural causes in 2013, with her family members close by.
Victoria headed an elephant group known on the Samburu Reserve as the Royal family, a group of about 20 elephants all named after kings, queens, and other royalty around the world.
(this) 15-minute video of the elephants’ investigation, made available exclusively to National Geographic for the first time, is an important new addition to the growing body of research about the complexity of elephant thought and perception and their responses to death. The video not only captures an important ritual of elephant behavior, but reveals new insights about the strength of social bonds.
Sad but remarkable video. I don’t know if the elephants are grieving in the human sense but they are certainly acknowledging the passing of their matriarch.
The iPhone 7 may take a leap forward when it comes to pocket photography, with rumors of a dual-lens assembly, better low-light, and an event invitation that hints at significant depth-of field effects.
We’ll get all the details next Wednesday, but there’s one aspect we can take for granted right now: The type of photography Apple is going to focus on.
Pundits keep trying to say that the iPhone will take over from the DSLR. That’s ridiculous. But the iPhone continues to be a very capable camera for the vast majority of people. Apple will make it even better on Wednesday.
Infinitude is a meditation on the cosmic evolution of matter and energy over time.
Experimental filmmaking techniques such as time-lapse, high-speed, and stop-motion photography were used to photograph handmade props, fluid dynamics, and angular momentum. Infinitude is a handmade representation of the exponential growth of complexity in the cosmos.
If you need a video to blow your mind and test your speakers, this one should do the trick.
Apple on Saturday added two new playlists to its Apple Music service, which are both based on your listening habits on the service.
“My New Music Mix” is a playlist with new music from artists Apple thinks you will like. This playlist is updated every Friday. My playlist was very good this week, although it did have one “Dance” song in there—not sure where that came from.
“My Favorites Mix” is based on songs you love on Apple Music. Other songs will be added if they feel it matches songs you’ve already loved.
Both playlists are in the “For You” section of Apple Music.
These are great additions to Apple and just what I think Apple should be focused on to improve the service. Well done.
