The CEO of a major hospital is confirming that Apple’s health team has made yet another secretive hire: Rajiv Kumar, a top doctor who specializes in treating kids with diabetes. Kumar made headlines in the fall of 2015 by creating a HealthKit-enabled diabetes monitoring system for young patients at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University.

I love it that Apple cares so much about health and that they are investing heavily in it for the future.

From Google’s Self-Driving Car monthly report:

The human act of honking may be (performance) art, but our self-driving cars aim to be polite, considerate, and only honk when it makes driving safer for everyone.

And:

We’ve even taught our vehicles to use different types of honks depending on the situation. If another vehicle is slowly reversing towards us, we might sound two short, quieter pips as a friendly heads up to let the driver know we’re behind. However, if there’s a situation that requires more urgency, we’ll use one loud sustained honk.

Our goal is to teach our cars to honk like a patient, seasoned driver. As we become more experienced honkers, we hope our cars will also be able to predict how other drivers respond to a beep in different situations.

This whole thing is fascinating to me. While most cars are capable of a single sound, usually tuned to F#, perhaps playable at different volumes, the next wave of cars will be capable of a much wider range of sounds.

For example, this HHR SS which is for sale can play engine noises if they sense a pedestrian is nearby, while electric cars are virtually silent.

And what use is a horn is the surrounding vehicles are also self-driving? Long term, I suspect that the horn is an endangered species.

Ken Segall knew Steve Jobs well. Segall was a former TBWA\Chiat\Day creative director, he worked on a long range of advertising projects for both Apple and NeXT, and he was and is a fierce advocate for simplicity.

From an interview he did with the Guardian:

A growing number of people are sensing that Tim Cook’s Apple isn’t as simple as Steve’s Apple. They see complexity in expanding product lines, confusing product names, and the products themselves.

And:

Apple has a lengthy, award-winning history in advertising. Even marketers in other industries have long considered Apple ads to be the gold standard.

This isn’t because Steve Jobs created great ads himself – it’s because he was adament about keeping the process simple. He trusted a small group of smart people at his longtime ad agency and he was actively involved in the process, week to week.

There were no middlemen, no multiple levels of approvals, and no focus group research. Trust me, few companies on earth work this way. It was Steve’s way of keeping complexity at bay.

With Steve’s passing, things changed dramatically. Apple is building a large in-house marketing group. Teams compete to produce new campaigns. More people are involved. In short, Apple is now managing its marketing more like a big company and less like a startup.

My 2 cents:

Clearly Tim is not Steve. They have different strengths, different points of intellectual focus. Perhaps more importantly, Steve ruled over a much smaller company (he returned to Apple in 1997, announced his six month medical leave in Jan 2008, officially resigned in Aug 2011). Tim Cook has to both manage one of the largest companies in the world and keep its spirit alive with a wellspring of new products.

Even if, due to sheer size, simplicity on a global scale is no longer possible, simplicity on a local scale should be. Complexity of design is a captive critter, always looking to escape the confines of its enclosure. Minimalism requires diligence.

Rene Ritchie:

An external GPU (eGPU)-powered Apple Display won’t be among the things announced at WWDC 2016.

There’d been some speculation on Twitter and rumor reports about Apple possibly introducing a display with an integrated eGPU. Theory being, it would take some of the graphical processing overhead off MacBooks and/or facilitate a single-cable connection that could drive 5K. It sounds cool, but I asked around, and it’s not happening at the keynote or any time in the immediate future.

Sounds like no new MacBook Pro announcement, too. Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for both.

This back and forth between Motley Fool analysts Dylan Lewis and Evan Niu digs into the steps it takes to get an iPhone from the factory to your hand.

On Foxconn City:

They have hundreds of thousands of employees working there. It’s over a square mile, and they have dorms for employees, its own shopping center, I think they have their own cable network there. The executives there are likening it to this college experience, I think it’s kind of a stretch. You have people working 12-hour days, six days a week, putting together iPhones. That one Foxconn City location is just one of the 12 that the company has in China. Actually, folks following tech might have heard earlier this week, Foxconn announced it automated 60,000 jobs in one of its factories. Going back to that idea of providing some of the tooling, I’m sure Apple had something to do with that.

On Tim Cook and inventory reduction:

Tim Cook absolutely hates inventory. Setting up this model and supply chain, I’ve read reports where other industry executives look at Apple’s supply chain and they’re just blown away. They’re like, “Well, we can’t compete with this.” You can order a custom-built Apple device like a Mac, or an iPhone or something. You’ll get the tracking information and it literally ships from the factory to your doorstep, in a matter of days. They build it and they ship it directly to you.

And:

The flip to contract manufacturing took the amount of time that inventory sat on Apple’s balance sheet from months to days.

There’s a lot more. Good read (or listen, if you prefer).

Join the WWDCGirls and James Dempsey and the Breakpoints for an evening of mingling and music to benefit App Camp For Girls!

This is going to be a great event. I’ll be joining James on stage for a couple of songs, so pick up a ticket and I’ll see you there!

Apple:

Users are experiencing a problem with the service listed. We are investigating and will update the status as more information becomes available.

There are widespread outages being reported. iTunes, the App Store, Apple TV, etc., are all being affected.

Stephen Hackett gathered together some of the original iMac G3 ads. I remember these.

Zen Mode is a new way to experience the game. We’ve stripped away many things from hillside; no scores, no coins, no powerups, and distilled the game down to its purest elements. There’s no on-screen UI competing for your attention – it’s just you and the endless mountain.

What a fascinating idea. I can’t wait to hear how this goes for them.

Colors play a significant role when it comes to design. However, not everyone can create coherent, suitable color concepts. Thus, there’s a bunch of web applications that help you find appropriate color combinations. Monochromatic colors can be compiled just as well as complementary colors.

This is absolutely priceless.

[Via Coudal]

A three-judge panel at the patent agency found that the two patents never should have been issued in the first place because the idea of storing and paying for data is an abstract concept, not a specific invention. In March, the agency said the same thing about a third Smartflash patent.

I hate patent trolls.

Apple is offering free Beats headphones when buying a qualifying product.

The ride-hailing companies are seeking to resolve lawsuits by drivers who contend they should be deemed employees and therefore entitled to reimbursement for expenses, including gasoline and vehicle maintenance. Drivers currently pay those costs themselves.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know how I feel about this one.

I don’t know if this is staged or not, but I just love the photos. Stay safe!

Sam Byford, writing for The Verge:

My weapon of choice this Computex is the MOS Go, a hipflask-sized 12000 mAh battery pack that gives my MacBook about three quarters of a charge, which is more than enough for me to make it through a day of heavy use. (Of course, it’ll also charge a phone multiple times, and has a USB-A port if you need it.) Importantly, USB-C means the charging speed is dramatically better than you’d expect from a portable battery — it’s not all that much slower than plugging into the wall.

We’ve now got a battery I can put in my pocket that will give my MacBook a boost and multiple charges for my tablet and iPhone. And theoretically, that battery pack will be able to charge the next generation of MacBook Pro.

Will my next car have built in USB-C ports?

Jeff Benjamin takes a new high-speed cable modem for a spin, replacing the cable company’s native unit. The result? Speeeeeed.

Worth it? Read the post, decide for yourself.

A thorough review, well worth your time.

From the conclusions:

The design of the 9.7” iPad Pro is great. When looking at how tablets balance their choice of materials against their mass, thickness, and size, there’s still not really any competition for the iPad. At its core, the 9.7” iPad Pro retains the design of the iPad Air 2, but Apple has brought over the changes from the larger model like the four-speaker audio solution.

And:

The cellular model also adopts a new antenna design, which ditches the old plastic inserts for injected plastic lines much like the iPhone 6 and 6s. I think this is a huge improvement, as the color matching on the plastic inserts was poor to say the least, and they were never aligned quite right with the rest of the chassis.

And:

As far as performance goes, A9X is still the fastest chip that you’ll find in an ARM tablet, even if this isn’t exactly the same A9X that we saw in the larger iPad Pro. On the CPU side, we’re looking at the exact same performance that the larger model offers, which is pretty significant when you consider the $200 price gap between the two. There will obviously be different throttling characteristics due to this smaller iPad having less area to dissipate heat, but in general you can expect the same performance in CPU-bound tasks from both versions of the iPad Pro. As for GPU performance, it’s not as high as the 12.9″ model, but it’s the best you’ll get in a tablet of this size.

If you are balancing the 9.7″ and 12.9″ models, considering a purchase, this might be the most important paragraph:

Apple’s history with iOS products make me fairly confident that it will run into RAM issues long before A9X’s CPU and GPU or the SSD become the bottleneck. Because of that I don’t think the smaller iPad Pro is something that a consumer or a business can invest in and expect to use for four or five years, while the larger model with 4GB of RAM will still run well after all that time. At this point I don’t think there’s any place for 2GB of RAM in a tablet that markets itself as being for professionals, and in that sense I think the 9.7” iPad Pro is more like a successor to the Air 2 than a long-term usable device like the 12.9” model.

As always, great analysis.

The Verge:

None of the witnesses saw Graham’s face in February, and Graham himself wasn’t talking. He was physically similar to the man who held up the bank in February — but it was only enough to keep the case going, not enough to make it stick.

So investigators tried a new trick: they called Google. In an affidavit filed on February 8th, nearly a year after the initial robbery, the FBI requested location data pulled from Graham’s Samsung Galaxy S5. Investigators had already gone to Graham’s wireless carrier, AT&T, but Google’s data was more precise, potentially placing Graham inside the bank at the time the robbery was taking place.

And:

That data is collected as the result of a little-known Google feature that builds a comprehensive history of where a user has been — information that’s proved valuable to police and advertisers alike.

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I’ll be watching you
— The Police

Mary Meeker is a well respected venture capital analyst. Each year, she releases a report revealing a series of important internet trends, slices through vast troves of data. Over the coming days, you’ll no doubt encounter posts focused on bits and pieces from the report.

Here’s a link to the deck itself. It’s more than 200 slides, quite comprehensive.

Or read the linked article, which does a pretty nice job cherry picking some of the more important data, explaining why you should care about it.

Lots to process.

This is just one part of a long series of Apple analyses John Kirk is writing for Tech.pinions. The series is great, but this one is just chock full of goodies, a fun read.

For example:

Roadmaps work well for some companies, especially those companies that work hand in hand with partners. The roadmaps of Microsoft and Intel worked great because they allowed the two companies to coordinate their efforts and work toward a common goal. But why would Apple ever want to publish a roadmap?

For example, Apple was working on the iPhone for years and years and years before they released it in 2007. Imagine if they had laid out their plans for the iPhone in a roadmap published in 2003, or 2004, or 2005, or 2006. Who would that have benefited?

It might have made Apple’s investors happier — although I doubt it. It might have made Apple’s critics happier — although I SEVERELY doubt it. No, the only ones who would have been happier would have been Apple’s competitors. And Apple doesn’t want to make their competitors happier.

And this quote from the book Design Crazy by Max Chafkin:

I (Brian Maggi) started with Apple in 1992 on the Newton, which was a quasi top-secret project. Then Sculley did a demo at CES [the Consumer Electronics Show] with the Newton tethered to a IIfx, which was this monster Mac the size of a suitcase. That was the way Apple would do things. Be kind of secret, but the minute they got something working, barely working, they showed it to everybody. Then for two years you’d listen to people ask about where it is.

My 2 cents? I love the not knowing. It can be maddening, but when Apple manages to keep things under wraps (harder and harder to do), the unveil of something truly innovative and new is one of my favorite delights.

Wired:

The FBI has been issuing national security letters for decades. The controversial subpoenas, which allow the feds to obtain customer records and transaction data from internet service providers and other companies without a court order, come with a perpetual gag order that prevents recipients from disclosing that they’ve received an NSL.

Only a small handful of recipients have ever publicly disclosed that they got one from the government, and only after lengthy court battles challenging the subpoenas. But today, Yahoo became the first company to go public about NSLs it has received without needing to duke it out with the feds in court.

Here’s a link to the redacted letters if you care to have a peek. I found them pretty fascinating.

If true, this is great news. Props to Marc A. Morissette, who wrote about this exact solution back in February.

Guess that’s this year’s hardware budget spent.

Macworld:

Only Tim Cook and co. know exactly what the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote has in store, but now we know the day, time, and place those announcements will happen. We’re expecting the latest versions of iOS and OS X to take the spotlight at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, and hopefully some news about the Apple Watch (watchOS 3 or new hardware, perhaps). WWDC is primarily a developers conference, so expect Apple’s emphasis to be on software.

Apple hasn’t yet announced whether or not the WWDC Keynote will be livestreamed but it has in the past so I’m going to assume it will be for this event as well. I like to play the game of “Spot Jim Dalrymple in the crowd” at these keynotes. To be fair, he’s not hard to find. Waldo he’s not.

mophie:

Charging your phone is now as simple as setting it down. Place your mophie case with charge force wireless power on any wireless charging base and power is sent to your device directly on contact. Never fuss with cables again.

When connected to your device, smart charging circuitry communicates with your device to determine the perfect amount of power it needs for a safe, quick charge. Fail-safe circuitry prevents over-charging and controls temperature to prevent overheating.

I’ve always liked mophie’s product offerings and I like the look of this system. But at $100, I don’t know that I need/want this product just yet. It certainly points the way to the future of charging our iPhones, though. Thanks to my friend Loren Finkelstein for the link.

If you’ve ever been to WWDC, the you know Yerba Buena Gardens and the venues surrounding the gardens. Brand New gives its thoughts on the new logo and identity.

Ars Technica:

You’ve probably heard of science fiction’s Golden Age, that incredible period in the 1940s and ’50s when masters of the genre like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, and Jack Vance were in their primes. But the early 20th century was an even weirder and more fantastic time for science fiction, when the genre was still in flux and the atomic bomb hadn’t yet transformed our ideas about the future forever. Sci-fi historian and editor Joshua Glenn has just finished a multi-year project to bring what he calls the Radium Age back into the public eye. He has brought ten Radium Age classics back into print through his indie press HiLo Books, and he has written a number of fascinating guides to the great books of that era. Now, with his definitive list of the 100 best stories and novels of the Radium Age (1904-33), he’s bringing the project to a close.

As a kid, I was a huge fan of science fiction and my local library had a bunch of these old stories. In checking out the list, I see I’ve read about 25% of them. Some of them don’t stand up because of writing style but if you’re looking for some stuff to put on you summer reading list, you can’t go too far wrong grabbing a few of the listed books.