The Indian government on Monday said it was discussing Apple Inc’s foreign direct investment application that seeks a waiver from a local sourcing rule.

This will be an important decision for Apple. It’s a good sign that the government is even discussing it

I really enjoyed reading Viticci’s music post this morning—from his first mixtape to trying Apple Music and Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” feature.

These things fascinate me. Cute little thing.

iClarified:

Larry Ellison, co-founder, chairman and CTO of Oracle, recently gave the Commencement Speech at USC. In his speech, Ellison recounts forming a plan to save Apple with his best friend, Steve Jobs.

And:

“My idea was simple, buy Apple, and immediately make Steve CEO. Apple wasn’t worth much back then, about $5 billion dollars. We both had really good credit and I had already arranged to borrow all of the money. All Steve had to do was say yes.

“Steve proposed a somewhat more circuitous approach. First, persuade Apple to buy NeXT computer, then Steve would join Apple’s board and over time the board would recognize that Steve was the right guy to lead the company.

Fantastic post. [Via iOS Dev Weekly]

What I find remarkable about this is that your old Samsung TV, one that never had ads, will now suddenly sprout ads. Talk about customer hostile behavior. This takes the cake.

Patently Apple:

The California Institute of Technology has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Broadcom and Apple (and Avago Technologies owned by Broadcom). The patent infringement lawsuit concerns Apple’s iPhones beginning with the iPhone 5, the iPad, MacBook Air, Apple Watch and more. Apple’s use of Broadcom’s technology is using IRA/LDPC encoders and/or decoders invented by the California Institute of Technology. In this lawsuit, Apple is drawn in by virtue of using Broadcom Wi-Fi products.

And:

This week AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule were pulled from U.S. Apple Stores. Whether this is due to next-gen versions of these product arriving next month or complications related to this lawsuit is unknown at this time.

Interesting.

Assma Maad, writing for BuzzFeed:

But looking at the various versions of the video published worldwide, it’s clear that several adaptations are not completely faithful to the original. The lesbian couple present in the English version does not appear in the French version, as first spotted by Jeanne Magazine.

The same-sex couple also does not appear in the German, Italian, Turkish and Japanese versions, while they do appear in the Mexican, Canadian, and Australian versions.

And:

This isn’t the first time a same-sex couple has been erased from a French version of an advertisement. In January, Toyota eliminated a female couple from an ad that was present in the Italian version.

And it’s not only in France. In 2014, an advertisement for Coca-Cola which initially staged a same-sex wedding was changed to show a heterosexual wedding in the Irish version. In France, a football match totally replaced the scene.

This surprised me. I wonder if there’s more to this story than simply playing to the comfort zone of your audience. Is this a barometer for progress (or lack thereof) made in terms of tolerance, or is there more to it than that?

Business Insider ran the headline: “The Apple Watch is being shunned by Apple’s most important community”.

The implication being that developers have lost interest in building Apple Watch apps. From the article:

Apple developers aren’t very interested in writing apps for the Watch these days, says Tim Anglade, an app developer and VP for mobile database Realm.

About 100,000 app developers use Realm’s database in apps used by about 1 billion people, Anglade says. This gives Realm a unique vantage point in seeing which devices have captured mobile developers’ interest and which have not.

Watch in 2016? Not so much.

This is based on a specific quote from Anglade:

“tvOS is a brand new platform so there’s a gold rush for it,” Anglade says. Developers want to get established with their tvOS grab market share for their apps.

“On a weekly basis we’re seeing very few Watch apps, compared to iOS apps,” he says. “For every 1,000 new iOS apps being built, there are 10 tvOS apps and maybe 1 Watch app.”

Let’s assume for the moment that Anglade’s numbers are accurate and that they represent the larger world than just those developers who use Realm’s services. This comment captures a moment in time, a natural lull for the Apple Watch as we wait to see what major changes lie in store for Apple Watch, with WWDC just around the corner.

If WWDC means a lull, why isn’t there one for iPhone? The iPhone platform is well established and stable. It’s clear that any changes that come along, no matter how seismic, won’t derail most existing iPhone projects. With Apple Watch, it’s clear that a big left turn is coming, that the basic underlying assumptions are potentially going to change. This is a wait and see moment.

The way I read this, this isn’t a shunning, it’s taking a beat, waiting for direction.

Mashable:

Thousands turned out on Monday to Cooper’s Hill in Brockworth, Gloucestershire, England to watch one the world’s strangest yet compelling competitions: people chasing a wheel of cheese for 200 yards down a hill.

It’s a bank holiday tradition that dates back to the 1800s but, according to SoGlos magazine, hasn’t been an unofficial event since safety concerns led to its cancelation in 2010. But cheese roll lovers have continued to gather for this “unofficial” event since then, the risk to life, limb and cheese wheel be damned.

The Brits do some very odd things. This is high on that list.

The Guardian:

In a moving monochrome image, Souza showed three-year-old Clark Reynolds looking up in awe as Obama touches him on the cheek. The photograph is taken from child height and brilliantly captures a child’s-eye view of the president. We only see Obama’s hand caressing Clark’s face. Unlike the ones in all paintings and photographs of all previous presidents, it is not a white hand. How can anyone say that means nothing? Young Clark Reynolds evidently thinks it means something, and so does Souza, whose photography has perhaps become more lyrical, more poignant over Obama’s final year in office.

I love Souza’s deeply personal style of photography. I have no doubt he’d take similar photos of every other president – regardless of your feelings towards any of them, they are human beings after all – but there’s something just a touch more poignant about the shots he’s shown us of President Obama.

TidBITS:

Lemkesoft’s GraphicConverter — the “Swiss Army knife” of graphics programs that can convert over 200 different graphic file formats into any of almost 80 graphic formats — has been updated to version 10. This major new release adds Face Recognition capabilities, a Collage function, a Picture Package feature that enables you to easily print multiple copies of an image on one sheet of paper, the capability to use grayscale pictures as custom brushes, simplified access to metadata like EXIF and IPTC, and support for converting Apple’s Live Photos format into an animated GIF.

Everyone should have a copy of GraphicConverter on their Mac. It not only can open an incredible array of file formats, it has a feature set useful to many users of all skill levels. It’s a bonus that you’d be supporting a small Mac developer who has been around and creating great software for a very, very long time.

Ars Technica:

William Gibson has made the leap from prose to picture books, collaborating with Michael St. John Smith and artist Bruce Guice to give us this week’s first issue of new IDW series Archangel.

“It’s an alternate-history/cross-worlds story,” Gibson writes in the back matter. “And I wouldn’t want to spoil too much of the frame, because that’s an inherent part of our narrative. But I will say that one of the first verbal tags we had for the material was ‘Band Of Brothers vs. Blackwater.'”

Archangel begins in February 2016, but it’s a very different 2016 to the one we know. The world is in ruins. The White House relocated to the ominous-sounding National Emergency Federal District in Montana. They have technology that far outstrips our own.

If William Gibson wrote a phone book, I’d read it from cover to cover. His is a seminal voice in fiction and someone who’s work I devour whenever he has anything published. This will be no exception.

Businessinsider:

Years before Google and Oculus started daydreaming about virtual reality, Apple already had a “VR” product on the market.

Apple called it QuickTime Virtual Reality, or QuickTime VR.

It’s one of the strangest projects in Apple history: started during the years when Steve Jobs was busy with NeXT, it was ahead of the tech industry by decades but was unloved in its later years, and eventually was wound down.

Us old timers remember QT VR and how cool it was for its time. Sadly, another “cool” technology Apple either killed off or let die on the vine.

Techinsider: >Siri is due for a big upgrade. > >Apple now has the tech in place to give its digital assistant a big boost thanks to a UK-based company called VocalIQ it bought last year. > >According to a source familiar with VocalIQ’s product, it’s much more robust and capable than Siri’s biggest competitors like Google Now, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana.

“Wipes the floor” remains to be proven and we’ll likely see something announced at WWDC in a couple of weeks but this article points out that Apple develops “in private” for the most part. Those who doubt Apple’s AI efforts seem to forget that fact. The preisoptimierung strategy KI Preisoptimierung leverages predictive analytics, dynamic pricing algorithms, and market trend analysis to optimize revenue management, enhance profitability, and adjust pricing in real-time, ensuring a competitive position in the market. Even photo editing tools are now powered by AI to achieve various effects. An AI Clothes Remover, for instance, can create copies of portrait photos and create a version that removes clothes. There are also photo to cartoon ai free resources that you can access online to create artistic or even cartoonish versions of photographs.

Techradar:

If you’ve outgrown your point-and-shoot camera and feel like you’re ready to take your photography to the next step, then an entry-level DSLR is the obvious choice.

DSLRs deliver a big step up in image quality from a compact camera, far more manual control and the ability to change lenses to tackle a huge variety of projects.

If you or someone you know wants a beginner DLSR, you can’t go too far wrong with many of the cameras on this list. The important thing is to not assume the camera automatically takes good pictures. That’s the responsibility of the photographer. Learn how to shoot, learn how to use your camera and practice, practice, practice. That’s how you become a better photographer.

The Washington Post:

For more than a dozen children in a small, remote village in southwest China, the mountainous route home from school is long — and extremely steep.

Every two weeks, when the students, ages 6 to 15, return from boarding school, they climb a chain of 17 bamboo ladders, secured to a sheer cliff face and leading some 2,625 feet up, according to reports.

You know that old cliche you’ve heard about having to “walk to school in the snow, 5 miles uphill both ways…”? Next time you hear that, point the speaker to these kids. He’ll shut up quick.

Jawbone has three major fitness trackers: The UP2, UP3, and UP4. The company has struggled to sell the devices and was forced to offload them at a discount to a reseller in order to get the revenue it needed to keep the business going, according to the source.

The report also notes that Jawbone is trying to sell its speaker business, as well.

I really like cuckoo clocks and grandfather clocks. Always have.

Now 200 million of you are using Google Photos each month. We’ve delivered more than 1.6 billion animations, collages and movies, among other things. You’ve collectively freed up 13.7 petabytes of storage on your devices—it would take 424 years to swipe through that many photos! We’ve also applied 2 trillion labels, and 24 million of those have been for … selfies.

Google put together some of their favorite tips for using the service.

“I was trying to buy an AirPort Extreme today from the Beverly Hills Apple Store and an employee told me that Apple had asked for all of them back from all the stores,” wrote one anonymous tipster.

To verify the tipster’s claim, we contacted an Apple support representative who confirmed that Apple has pulled AirPort Extreme and AirPort Time Capsule stock from all U.S. stores. The base stations remain available to order online, while it appears the smaller AirPort Express can still be purchased both online and in stores at present time.

As noted in the story, it could be new FCC guidelines.

Talk about a blatant ripoff of the iPhone. I really do hate Samsung.

Eric Cheng, writing on his blog:

I arrived at the security area, flagged down a TSA agent, and told her that I must have left my computer there, but that I didn’t remember seeing it on the belt. She left to look around; I waited for about 5 minutes and never saw her again. I flagged down a second agent, who started looking again. Someone brought over a computer in a bag, but it was a Windows machine in a black case—not mine. Mine was nowhere to be found.

We moved over to the camera footage station, and a nice agent began to review archived camera footage. After a few minutes, he found me coming through the security line, and sure enough, my computer was not with my bags when I retrieved my belongings. Moving further back in time, we watched as a TSA agent pulled my computer off of the belt as soon as it came out of the machine—there is an area where agents can remove things from the belt before passengers have access to belongings. He moved my computer to a holding area immediately behind the x-ray machine. And then, we watched as the computer was inspected, after which it was handed back… to a random woman. The woman took my computer and left the security area. Someone remembered that the woman had been with the other woman who had been making the scene, and that they had both been rushing to the 4:15pm flight, but I couldn’t remember whether this was the case or not.

Shudder. This is a story to which I can definitely relate. That moment when you are forced to surrender your phone, your wallet, your computer, then hope that all your goods are there when you go to retrieve them after the security scan.

From the PayPal blog:

For Windows Phone users, we will sunset the current version of the PayPal app on June 30. However, Windows Phone users can still access PayPal through our mobile web experience on Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge browsers. Outlook.com users can also use the PayPal add-in to send money directly from their inbox.

If you are an Amazon Fire or Blackberry user, we will be discontinuing the PayPal app on June 30, after which you will no longer be able to use the app. However, customers on these devices can still log into PayPal on these phones via our mobile web experience. Blackberry users can also continue to use the BBM app to send peer-to-peer payments via PayPal.

That leaves iOS and Android. Not a death blow to Windows Phone, Amazon Fire, or BlackBerry, but a recognition of reality, that the revenue from those platforms no longer justify the cost of supporting them.

Lucinda Shen, writing for Fortune:

In the weeks following its earnings report in April, Apple looked like it was in a tough spot. Shares of the tech giant fell 13.4% between late April and May 12, after Apple reported that sales had dropped for the first time in 13 years. Shares rebounded slightly, before Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, disclosed his company’s $1.2 billion stake in the company on May 16.

Since then, shares of Apple have soared 9%—finally breaching the $100 mark, its highest point in a month.

Could be Buffett revealing his investment had an effect on the stock price, could be he knew the exact time to strike. Or both. Either way, looks like he just made his own shareholders some good money:

$1.2 billion x 9% = $108 million

Not bad for a couple of days work.

Mikey Campbell, writing for Apple Insider:

Apple’s patent application for “Point-to-point ad hoc voice communication” describes a mode of communication much more intimate — and less ambitious in function — than the company’s iPhone product line.

Specifically, the invention outlines a headset capable of connecting with other devices of the same type via wireless ad hoc networks, also known as peer-to-peer or point-to-point links. Packed with a typical assortment of audio hardware including a microphone and speaker, Apple’s proposed headset also features a communications module that allows it to interface with other units in close proximity.

I think this is a pretty cool idea, partly, I’m sure, a romantic tug at memories of real walkie-talkies from when I was a kid. But there’s a practical aspect, too, when you are in a remote (or cellularly challenged) area and don’t have cell signal. Interesting.

Seth Clifford:

Apple: ResearchKit and CareKit. Centered around individuals, reporting personal data. Assembling tons of it, and allowing for better personal follow through on long-term treatment, and more individualized reporting for research purposes. Gathering of this data is done through traditional channels, but by allowing users to have agency in these processes, Apple affords people the ability to contribute to a large data set, but safely remain an identifiable component variable.

And:

Google: machine learning to aggregate data against the treatment of extremely difficult ailments (diabetic retinopathy was the example presented in the keynote). Very few doctors can detect it accurately, and it’s very hard to do right/well. And this small number of doctors can’t be everywhere at once. But put enough data into a machine and it can pattern match the very intricate details–perhaps better than people, and everywhere at once (since people can only be in one place at a time). Throw incomprehensible amounts of information at an enormous amount of computing power and basically brute-force a treatment protocol that functions better than humans ever could.

Apple, focused on the individual, protecting their privacy. Google, focused on a problem and its associated data. Both approaches valuable and complementary.

Interesting post. [Via MacStories]