Harley-Davidson wasn’t just fooling around when it showed off its electric Project LiveWire motorcycle. In a chat with the Milwaukee Business Journal, the bike maker’s Sean Cummings says that there will be an electric Harley within the next 5 years. That’s 2021, if you want to mark your calendar. He’s not giving any clues as to what this e-bike will entail, but it probably won’t resemble the 2014-era LiveWire.
Having said this, the very fact that Harley is planning a production e-bike is noteworthy.
For the riding community, this is going to be really interesting to watch. Electrics in general are the future and there have been a lot of attempts at electric motorcycles. I’ve test ridden the Zero Electric and it was an interesting experience. But, I’ve gone on record to say I think whatever electric bike Harley introduces will be a failure.
Harley’s customers don’t want electrics. Harley’s customers don’t want “small” bikes. I’ve talked to a lot of Harley riders and potential customers. None of them have any interest in an electric Harley. Low range, low speed, high price and no noise? Non-starter for that crowd. Harley will have a lot of work to convince potential buyers that an electric Harley fits with the company’s brand.
iOS 10 marks the beginning of a new era of iOS in many different ways. With a solid, mature core to build on, Apple is now feeling free to reach out into new areas that it has never before explored with its most popular operating system. We’ll have to wait for real world testing and future betas to see if they’ve truly delivered, but the promises of iOS 10 are some of the most ambitious Apple has ever pursued with “the world’s most advanced mobile operating system.”
So let’s take a look at the features Apple has planned for hundreds of millions of users next Fall.
A typically long but well-written overview with more details of the big new iOS we’ll be getting in the fall.
This seems to have been the keynote where Apple finally gave up on the idea that its CEO must be the center of the presentation. This is surely a relief to Cook, who never wanted to be as much of a showman as his predecessor, Steve Jobs. Instead of having to anchor everything, Cook bookended a set of surprising presentations by a surprisingly diverse array of executives. There were, of course, the traditional “white techie guys in Silicon Valley garb,” all interchangeable on stage except for Craig Federighi, SVP of software engineering, who has real stage presence. But there was also some racial diversity, there was some female representation, and even—gasp!—an African-American woman, Bozoma Saint John, who was a big, bright moment of energy on the stage.
None of this would be noteworthy, of course, outside of Silicon Valley. But coming from Apple, it was noteworthy indeed. Cook doesn’t sweat the details of a keynote the way Jobs did—no one did, or should—but he is ensuring that Apple projects the diversity he has championed over the years.
I noticed the change as well. Cook bookended the keynote and didn’t appear in the middle. And that’s not a bad thing. For me, it’s always been about what is being presented. I pay little attention to who is doing the presenting.
When Safari 10 ships this fall, by default, Safari will behave as though common legacy plug-ins on users’ Macs are not installed.
On websites that offer both Flash and HTML5 implementations of content, Safari users will now always experience the modern HTML5 implementation, delivering improved performance and battery life. This policy and its benefits apply equally to all websites; Safari has no built-in list of exceptions. If a website really does require a legacy plug-in, users can explicitly activate it on that website.
If no other reason, I’ll look forward to Safari 10 for this alone.
To make a long story short, it sounds like Apple is going to be collecting a lot more data from your phone. They’re mainly doing this to make their services better, not to collect individual users’ usage habits. To guarantee this, Apple intends to apply sophisticated statistical techniques to ensure that this aggregate data — the statistical functions it computes over all your information — don’t leak your individual contributions. In principle this sounds pretty good. But of course, the devil is always in the details.
While we don’t have those details, this seems like a good time to at least talk a bit about what Differential Privacy is, how it can be achieved, and what it could mean for Apple — and for your iPhone.
I know less than nothing about this stuff so I’ve been reading as much as I can about it. Green is a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University and writes about this subject fairly clearly.
Twelve months of Apple Music have brought the service 15 million paid subscribers and, for its architects, a sense of optimistic, if slightly cautious, calm. Or so it looked at the Apple Worldwide Developers’ Conference on Monday afternoon, where Apple senior vice president of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue, vice president of Content and Media Apps Robert Kondrk, Nine Inch Nails frontman and Apple Music Chief Creative Officer Trent Reznor and the still title-less Jimmy Iovine gathered for a talk with Billboard.
Anything good and bad about Apple Music lays at the feet of these people. So when they talk about the issues involved, it’s always an interesting discussion.
It turns out Apple snuck a big photography announcement into the background of the WWDC presentation yesterday: RAW photo editing is coming to iOS 10.
The feature was hidden in the background among the many other listed improvements for developers in the next version of iOS, but since Apple didn’t call it out by name during the presentation, it went largely unnoticed.
This is a big deal to professional shooters and anyone who shoots in RAW but edits on their iOS device. It will also bring a lot of changes to apps in iOS that allow you to edit photos. And it means that, undoubtedly, RAW capture will be available in the next version of the iPhone and iPad.
Federighi’s emphasis on differential privacy likely means Apple is actually sending more of your data than ever off of your device to its servers for analysis, just as Google and Facebook and every other data-hungry tech firm does. But Federighi implies that Apple is only transmitting that data in a transformed, differentially private form.
Privacy advocates are really poring over this but so far, it sounds like Apple has found an interesting solution to the conundrum of wanting access to more data but not identifying customers from that data.
At WWDC we made lots of major announcements. iOS 10 is our biggest release yet, with incredible features in Messages and an all-new design for Maps, Photos, and Apple Music. With macOS Sierra, Siri makes its debut on your desktop and Apple Pay comes to the web. The latest watchOS offers easier navigation and a big boost in performance. And the updated tvOS brings expanded Siri searches.
Apple revealed a lot of new features from iOS 10 and macOS Sierra at Monday’s WWDC keynote. The final versions of each operating system won’t be available until the fall, and developers are the only folks who can try out them out right now.
But in July, Apple will release betas of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra to the general public. If you’re game for running a beta operating system, you can get your hands on the software by joining the Apple Beta Software Program.
If you’re not a developer and just can’t wait until the Fall to get your hands on the latest Apple operating systems, here’s how to grab the public betas in July. It should go without saying that you shouldn’t install these on a daily work machine and you shouldn’t install them without having a very recent backup. And if you do, please don’t bitch at developers when some of your apps stop working.
If you update to iOS 10 beta, you can remove some built-in apps from the Home screen on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
When you remove a built-in app from your Home screen, you also remove any related user data and configuration files. This can affect things like related system functions or information on your Apple Watch.
This is a little thing but it shows Apple is removing the hooks these apps had in the OS and making them stand alone. So we can delete them to our heart’s content.
As Steve Jobs once told President Obama when he asked why Apple didn’t make phones in its home country, the company didn’t hire manufacturers in China only because labor is cheaper there. China also offered a skilled workforce and flexible factories and parts suppliers that can, Apple believes, retool more quickly than their American counterparts.
But set that aside for now, and imagine that Apple persuaded one of its Chinese manufacturers to open factories in the United States or did that itself. Could it work? Apple could profitably produce iPhones in America, as some high-end Mac computers are produced, without making them much more expensive. There’s a catch, though, that undermines Trump’s and Sanders’s arguments. This becomes clear if you carry our thought experiment to its most extreme conclusion.
This is a really interesting article that makes the point that, in a global economy, it’s almost impossible to make global products in just one country.
A lot of people are wondering if their iPhone or iPad is going to be able to run iOS 10. At the bottom of Apple’s iOS 10 preview page is the list of supported devices. Basically, anything powered by the second-generation A5 chips and the iPad 2’s A5X chip is the new minimum requirement set by iOS 10. For the iPhone, that means the iPhone 5 and newer.
UPDATE: Since this story was posted, Apple has removed “iPad 2” from the list.
Apple made several interesting announcements today during its WWDC 2016 keynote. Here are the major announcements from the event.
The Apple WWDC keynote has just wrapped up. If you missed the video, Apple will likely have it available on iTunes and the Apple TV in a few hours. In the meantime, here is a wrap-up about the things Apple announced this morning. Which ones are you most excited by?
The DxO ONE is a miniaturized pro-quality camera that can be used standalone, or attached directly to your iPhone (or iPad) via a patented Lightning connector. When connected, it turns your Retina display into the camera viewfinder and provides full control over aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and more via a companion iOS app. With a large 1” sensor and fast prime lens, the DxO ONE provides 10x the sensitivity of the iPhone camera which allows it to capture gorgeous portraits and stunning low-light images that rival those from a DSLR — only these images can be shared instantly via every service supported by iOS.
Editor’s Note: I’ve been using a DxO ONE for months and love the camera. I take it on every trip I go on to get better pictures.
Microsoft said on Monday that it was acquiring LinkedIn in a $26.2 billion cash deal, as the company seeks new sources of growth on the internet.
The acquisition, by far the largest in Microsoft’s history, unites two companies in different businesses: one a big maker of software tools, the other the largest business-oriented social networking site with more than 400 million members globally. Both, though, make most of their money by catering to professionals.
Does this mean LinkedIn will get more or less annoying?
Like many of her fellow attendees, Vijay has created a handful of apps for Apple’s iPhone and iPad. But the biggest difference between her and the thousands of other developers who will flock San Francisco’s Moscone Center on Monday is that Vijay is now only nine years-old.
Vijay is attending WWDC as part of Apple’s scholarship program, which gives hundreds of free tickets to developers from around the world who are creating apps for Apple devices. This year’s group of recipients saw the most winners under the age of 18, and a more diverse crowd than years past. Out of 350 recipients, 120 of the lucky winners are students under the age of 18. Submissions increased by 215% more than doubled from organizations focused on science, technology, engineering, and math.
She started coding at seven. When I was nine, I couldn’t even spell “programming”, let alone do it.
After regaining control of his Twitter account, Mckesson explained that the hacker or hackers were able to take over by convincing Verizon to reset his SIM. With the SIM reset, the person responsible was able to receive text messages intended for Mckesson and therefore bypass the two-factor authentication the activist used to keep his account secure.
The band’s new album dropped today. They’ll be one of the bands playing at the Beard Bash on Monday in San Francisco, so you can grab the album before the show.
Amazon.com Inc is preparing to launch a standalone music streaming subscription service, placing it squarely in competition with rival offerings from Apple Inc and Spotify, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
The service will be offered at $9.99 per month, in line with major rivals, and it will offer a competitive catalog of songs, the sources said. Amazon (AMZN.O) is finalizing licenses with labels for the service, which likely will be launched in late summer or early fall, the sources said.
I sure hope Apple has its shit together because Amazon is a master at the cloud.
I know the Apple Maps page says it will show notifications of construction and accidents, but this is the first time I’ve personal seen an accident shown in Maps. It happened once and I haven’t seen one again, even though Google Maps will show accidents along my route.
Peter Thiel is getting closer to his goal: Gawker Media has filed for bankruptcy protection and says it eventually plans to find a new owner for the company.
We’ve investigated claims of Twitter @names and passwords available on the “dark web,” and we’re confident the information was not obtained from a hack of Twitter’s servers.
The purported Twitter @names and passwords may have been amassed from combining information from other recent breaches, malware on victim machines that are stealing passwords for all sites, or a combination of both. Regardless of origin, we’re acting swiftly to protect your Twitter account.
Bluetooth 5, the next generation of Bluetooth standard, will be formally announced next week, offering double the range and quadruple the speed of the current low-energy wireless protocol.
The announcement will come on June 16 from the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, of which Apple is a member.
