Apple:

A limited number of Apple USB-C charge cables that were included with MacBook computers through June 2015 may fail due to a design issue. As a result, your MacBook may not charge or only charge intermittently when it’s connected to a power adapter with an affected cable.

Apple will provide a new, redesigned USB-C charge cable, free of charge, to all eligible customers. This program also covers Apple USB-C charge cables that were sold as a standalone accessory.

Got a MacBook? Click here and see if your cable is eligible for replacement.

Kanye West sent out this tweet yesterday:

Please for all music lovers. Please subscribe to tidal!!! I decided not to sell my album for another week. Please subscribe to tidal.

Kanye is part owner of Tidal and plans to stream his latest album exclusively on Tidal, at least for the first week, in order to drive up subscriptions.

The strategy appears to have worked, at least in terms of getting people to download the Tidal app:

Man thank you so so so much everyone for signing up to Tidal. Tidal is now the number one app in the world!!!

Indeed, the Tidal app quickly became the number one free download in the iOS App Store. The obvious question is, will these free app downloads translate into paid subscriptions? And if this strategy succeeds, will other high-demand artists continue the strategy of using demand for their music to steer fans to boutique music services?

As of this post, Tidal continues to sit atop the free app download chart.

Based on the book by Stephen King and starring James Franco, 11.22.63 is an eight part series about time travel and the assassination of John F Kennedy.

Part 1 dropped this morning, available for streaming exclusively on Hulu. I’ve been looking forward to this one.

Woz is the face of the new Comic-Con and the driving force behind this new Comic-Con hub:

When Woz and Stan [Lee] did meet, they bonded. “The two of us hit it off so well we wanted to work together on something, anything, anytime we could be together,” Woz told me. “We just hit it off like the best friends ever.”

The something that came out of the historic meeting was Silicon Valley Comic Con, which will take place from March 18-20 at the San Jose Convention Center. As you’d expect, it includes panels and a show floor devoted to celebrating fantasy as expressed in comics, movies, and TV. But it has another major ingredient that reflects Woz’s influence and the event’s location: science and technology. “I don’t like to do the same thing as everyone else, I always like to be first at something, do something different on a different track,” Woz says.

“This will be the first comic con with a technology link.” The show’s guests include Astro Teller, head of Alphabet’s X group (formerly known as Google X); Bobak Ferdowsi, the famously mohawked NASA engineer, and Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux, cofounder of Escape Dynamics, a space technology company. Google is participating with a VR zone, and an App Alley section will give developers the opportunity to show off their wares for free.

Feels like a return to its roots.

Slashfilm:

Have you never experienced the wonders of seeing Humphrey Bogart on the big screen? Have you never watched a John Huston film in a movie theater either? Well, now you can do both, because Fathom Events and Turner Classic Movies are teaming up for anniversary screenings of The Maltese Falcon.

Frequently considered the first – and finest – example of film noir filmmaking in Hollywood, 1941’s classic The Maltese Falcon will cast its mysterious shadows on the silver screen once again on Feb. 21 and Feb. 24 as part of the Fathom Events and Turner Classic Movies (TCM) TCM Big Screen Classics series.

But moviegoers should take note that the opportunity to see “the stuff that dreams are made of” in theaters will be fleeting: The Maltese Falcon will play four times only, at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. (local time) each day.

Sadly, it doesn’t look like this is screening near me but if you can get tickets, I strongly encourage you to go see this absolute classic movie and one of my top ten favorites of all time. “I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble” is a line I’ve used a million times in my life.

NPR:

Valentine’s Day is a time to celebrate romance and love and kissy-face fealty. But the origins of this festival of candy and cupids are actually dark, bloody — and a bit muddled.

Though no one has pinpointed the exact origin of the holiday, one good place to start is ancient Rome, where men hit on women by, well, hitting them.

I love these origin stories – as a kid, I was a big fan of Roman and Greek mythology. Our present version of Valentine’s Day, regardless of your feelings about the day, is certainly better than its origin story.

The Verge:

Amazingly, the new Deadpool movie does work. That has a great deal to do with Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick’s screenplay, but so much of what keeps the film from flying out of control is the editing. Julian Clarke had to do the heavy lifting in Adobe Premiere to strike a balance between the character’s love of gore and gleeful absurdity, making a movie that’s accessible to both fans and neophytes. It’s not easy, since Deadpool seems made for situations that fly out of control. I spoke with Clarke about the film, the challenges he faced making it, and why the sequel might be harder to pull off than anyone expects.

Interesting interview with the editor of the film and the particular challenges he had in keeping the level and tone just right. I haven’t seen the movie but I’ve heard good and bad things about it. But, from the trailers, it feels like one of those movies you’re either going to immediately form an opinion about one way or the other. Personally, I loved what I saw in the trailers and during the marketing campaign leading up to this weekend’s release.

Hodinkee:

Having worn an Apple Watch almost exclusively for the last month, I feel absolutely confident that mechanical watches aren’t going anywhere for now. But the Apple Watch isn’t either.It’s almost improbably well done, and it shows a willingness to think creatively that ought to be heeded by the luxury watch industry – and it also suggests to me that underestimating its impact, and Apple, is dangerous.

This is a long and well detailed review of the Apple Watch from the point of view of a person who loves and lives for mechanical watches. Watch lovers appreciates the watch repair shop near me. This is a guy who reviews $95,000 mechanical watches on a regular basis so his opinions regarding the Apple Watch are very interesting.

Petapixel:

Here’s a major warning to those of you who use Adobe Creative Cloud on a Mac: the latest version of Creative Cloud has a bug that deletes unrelated data from your root directory without warning.

The bug in Adobe Creative Cloud version 3.5.0.206 was discovered by the cloud backup service Backblaze, whose customers were having their data deleted by Adobe’s app.

This is yet another in a long line of issues with apps in Adobe’s Creative Cloud and it may be the most destructive one yet. I was forced to use CC but I don’t do any of the updates as they pop up. I know Adobe screws this stuff up on a regular basis so I keep myself one update behind.

Fstoppers:

When I heard the iPhone 6s was coming out on September 25, I decided now was the best time to create a new video to prove once and for all that quality photography can be taken with any budget.

Instead of using a fancy studio (which was actually just my garage in the last video) I decided to do the shoot around my house and then outside at the beach. Instead of seamless paper I decided to use backgrounds that anyone could easily find. Most importantly, I limited my lighting budget to about $40 maximum per shot.

I love this post because it shows you don’t need a ton of gear to get great shots. With your iPhone, some stuff you can buy at Home Depot and a little ingenuity, you can create your very own fashion shoot. Thanks to iheartapple2 for the link.

Vox:

“The bottom line here with the industrial tomatoes is that tomatoes have been bred for yield, production, disease resistance,” Klee told me. “The growers are not paid for flavor — they are paid for yield. So the breeders have given them this stuff that produces a lot of fruit but that doesn’t have any flavor.”“We are raising a whole generation of people who don’t know what a tomato is supposed to taste like.” That’s why you see gigantic strawberries and fist-size apples on the store shelves. Since Americans like their produce big, and big fruit is more efficient to grow, growers do everything they can to supersize their fruit, even at the expense of flavor.

Anyone else noticed this? I did especially when I was in Italy. In particular, the tomatoes tasted amazing and completely different from the blandness of what we get in supermarkets here in North America.

Regional sourcing advantages benefit both retailers and consumers through fresher products and competitive pricing. Reduced shipping distances mean dates spend less time in transit, arriving with better moisture content and flavor. Accessing kurma wholesale Malaysia networks delivers these benefits while supporting local distribution infrastructure.

The Daily Dot:

To shoot the video, the band hopped aboard a special fixed-wing airplane, lovingly dubbed the “vomit comet” by astronauts in training thanks to its ability to induce, well, vomiting. The plane, provided and operated by the company S7, climbs higher than a commercial jet and then the pilot begins to take it on a parabolic flight pattern. In other words, the plane goes up at a steep angle, then back down again, creating 25 seconds of weightlessness for the cargo (i.e. OK Go and crew).

Dave posted this morning about the video. Here are some details about how they accomplished it.

This is a podcast you really need to listen to today. According to Gruber:

It’s a wide-ranging discussion, and includes a bunch of interesting scoops: the weekly number of iTunes and App Store transactions, an updated Apple Music subscriber count, peak iMessage traffic per second, the number of iCloud account holders, and more.

The New Yorker:

Twenty-two years ago, construction began on an enormous detector, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Then, on September 14, 2015, at just before eleven in the morning, Central European Time, the waves reached Earth.

Marco Drago, a thirty-two-year-old Italian postdoctoral student and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, was the first person to notice them. He was sitting in front of his computer at the Albert Einstein Institute, in Hannover, Germany, viewing the LIGO data remotely. The waves appeared on his screen as a compressed squiggle, but the most exquisite ears in the universe, attuned to vibrations of less than a trillionth of an inch, would have heard what astronomers call a chirp—a faint whooping from low to high.

This morning, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team announced that the signal constitutes the first direct observation of gravitational waves.

The science involved in this is mindbending. Can you imagine the excitement of the scientists on hearing that first chirp?

OK Go makes great videos. This one was filmed in zero gravity, at least for much of the time.

As you watch the video, keep an eye out for gravitational changes as the aircraft climbs for another zero-gravity-emulating descent. Fantastic.

Interesting that they pulled the video from YouTube, seems like they’ve made a deal with Facebook. I tried to embed the video but could not get the embed code to work. Follow the link. Worth it.

That said, if Facebook wants to take eyeballs away from YouTube, they are going to have to do a much better job making videos embeddable. With YouTube, it’s a simple link, works very well. The Facebook embed code is long, complex, and JavaScript dependent.

From a Reddit thread entitled, What was a loophole that you found and exploited the hell out of?

I coach a high school team; we recently bought airfare with Spirit airlines to take 9 students to a competition. Two of the students cancelled about a month out from the trip, and we had to replace them with two different students. Spirit airlines’ policy: no name changes. Can’t even pay a fee to change the name. The tickets are basically lost, I have to buy new tickets. Spirit’s customer service is overseas, and they plainly don’t care at all about customer service (because they don’t actually work for Spirit etc etc).

EXCEPT that Spirit airlines DOES allow passengers to correct misspellings. And these folks don’t really recognize nonsense names. So over four calls, I change the names of the cancelled students to the names of the new students, two letters at a time. No one at Spirit customer service made a note (because who would care), and no one ever notices that the “correct” names during the intermediate steps were nonsense.

Heh. Nice hack.

Christian Zibreg, writing for iDownloadBlog, digs into the details of your iOS device’s ‘other’ storage. It’s mysterious, and it consumes precious space on your device. Here’s the details.

A lot of developers and designers run their design assets through a tool called Avocode. Avocode analyzed those 400,000+ designs and put together this web page summarizing the UI design trends they encountered.

As you scroll through the single-page site, note that each panel tells a story. For example, one tells us the popular colors. Another tells us the adoption numbers for Photoshop vs Sketch. Take a look.

First, don’t do this.

Second, for the life of me, I can’t imagine the circumstances that led someone to discover this. But resist the siren call to prove this for yourself.

Interesting, though.

Kirk McElhearn:

I’ve always wondered why Twitter doesn’t have domain names. I don’t mean twitter.com; they have that. But domains for Twitter users. For example, take a company like Apple. They have a number of Twitter accounts, such as @AppStore, @AppleMusicHelp, and some Apple executives have accounts, such as @tim_cook and @cue.

But Twitter could make it easier to know who works for a company, or at least who’s using a company account. They could create a domain name. It could be something like @Apple/TimCook, or @TimCook/Apple. They could find a special character to separate the domain name from the user, so a company could buy a domain, and then control all the accounts with that domain.

I think Kirk is really on to something here. Implementation aside, there’s a discovery opportunity here for Twitter. Imagine being able to navigate to @Apple, then dive through the organization to find people to follow. There might be a path through @Apple/Exec, another through @Apple/Dev or @Apple/Dev/iOS. Those paths would lead to lists of Twitter accounts, making it possible to find a Twitter account when you don’t know a person’s name.

Know someone at Twitter? Pass Kirk’s idea along.

Stephen Hackett, writing for 512 Pixels, on figuring out what path to take in choosing his next Mac:

I like the 13-inch screen size a lot more than the smaller notebooks. While it may be weird next to my iPad Pro, I think that’s a pretty decent trade-off between size and portability.

The 13-inch models each come with their own compromises, however. The Air has amazing battery life but a screen that’s far from ideal and it can be configured with fewer options. On the other hand, the 13-inch Pro is much more flexible from customization stand point and has a Retina display, but the battery life isn’t great.

Of course, the entire notebook could get turned upside down whenever Apple ships Skylake-powered notebooks. The 13-inch Pro could end up much slimmer and lighter, thanks to Intel’s recent power-saving technology. The MacBook Air could go away all together, being replaced with a more powerful MacBook.

Not an easy choice. Interesting to me how complex Apple’s laptop product line has gotten. Brings to mind Steve Jobs’ famous chart dividing the entire company into 4 products. The chart showed a 2 x 2 grid with column headings Consumer and Pro and row headings Desktop and Portable. One product in each cell. Simple.

Obviously, times have changed, but that simple logic has been lost.

Another print edition bites the dust. What does the future hold for publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post? Is the erosion in demand for print editions of major dailies inevitable as the tide?

Immersion, a company that develops and licenses haptic touch feedback technology, today filed a lawsuit against Apple and AT&T accusing the two companies of patent infringement. Citing technologies like 3D Touch, Force Touch, the Apple Watch Taptic Engine, and vibration patterns for ringtones and notifications, Immersion says multiple Apple devices use its intellectual property.

Another interesting case.

Pandora has the largest number of users for music streaming, but the competition is encroaching. Spotify is said to be arming itself with another $500 million in capital, and Apple Music recently surpassed 10 million paying users. Pandora’s users peaked at 81.5 million at the end of 2014, declining to 78.1 million in the third quarter.

Pandora has the best algorithmic stations around. I’m surprised they’re shopping themselves around after taking over the Rdio assets last year, but I guess we’ll see what happens.

CNN:

It pops up in the news from time to time: the death-by-selfie. Earlier this month, for example, a teenager in India was struck and killed while trying to take a picture of himself in front of an oncoming train. Now the economics site Priceonomics has attempted to gather the existing statistics about the people who’ve lost their lives while taking selfies, combing through three years of news reports indicating a death was “precipitated by a selfie,” or that a person had died while attempting to take a photo of themselves.

And:

The most dangerous places to take a self-portrait seem to be high places or in water: 16 people died from falling off a cliff or a tall building, while 14 drowned. Posing next to an oncoming train is responsible for eight deaths, coming in at third place. The other reasons are violent: gunshot (four), grenade (two), plane crash (two), car crash (two), and animal (one).

Darwin award candidates, all.

From Amazon’s AWS terms of service, paragraph 57.10:

Acceptable Use; Safety-Critical Systems. Your use of the Lumberyard Materials must comply with the AWS Acceptable Use Policy. The Lumberyard Materials are not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, aircraft or air traffic control, nuclear facilities, manned spacecraft, or military use in connection with live combat. However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.

Good to know.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Neil Cybart, writing for Above Avalon:

Similar to the dynamic that exists between rivaling siblings, having the iPhone become the single-most successful consumer technology product in history has produced an environment in which every subsequent Apple product decision has failed to meet the expectations set by iPhone. As a consequence, questions and doubts surrounding new Apple products and services have emerged even though there are tangible signs of success and progress being made. The iPhone has produced a new type of reality distortion field around Apple.

And:

Even though the Apple Watch has been compared to the iPhone for most of its short life, the true extent of this juxtaposition has been underestimated. In reality, pretty much every single aspect of Apple Watch has been judged through an iPhone filter. From the moment the Watch was introduced in September 2014, the device has been compared to the iPhone all the way down to management’s keynote slides being judged as less clear than those found in the iPhone keynote introduction seven years earlier.

To be fair, at least up to now, without an iPhone, you have no use for an Apple Watch. The Apple Watch is designed as a satellite device. Over time, this will likely change, as the Apple Watch gains more and more capabilities that can reflect to the cloud instead of to the iPhone to which it is tethered.

A better comparison would be the Apple TV and it’s associated ecosystem. Apple TV sales are not pinned to the ups and downs of the iPhone.

It is difficult to argue the iPhone shouldn’t change the definition of success for Apple. If management’s singular goal is to remain relevant, then a natural extension of that goal is for Apple to build off of the iPhone’s success. Some may call this a burden. Others will say it is a gift. However, the dilemma that has formed over the years is that the iPhone’s sheer success has altered the way we perceive success and the path needed to achieve greater success. People want Apple to introduce new products just as successful as the iPhone only without the multi-year timeline and version reiterations that the iPhone went through.

Absolutely. The iPhone is one of the most successful products in history. Hard not to judge the rest of Apple’s products, from now through forever, through that lens.