Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of retail, got a private demonstration of the fancy wireless speaker, the Phantom, and its sound quality seven weeks ago. On the spot, she said she wanted the space podlike device, which starts at $1,990, to be sold in Apple’s retail stores.
“She moved incredibly fast, from our first meeting to figuring out how the Phantom would be displayed,” Quentin Sannié, the co-founder of Devialet, the French audio company that makes the white and chrome speaker, said of Ms. Ahrendts.
This week, the Phantom will appear in 14 Apple stores in the United States, and the company is discussing how widely to roll out the product next year. The device will get the sort of prominent display treatment that is typically reserved in Apple stores for the company’s Beats audio accessories.
The move is an indication of how Ms. Ahrendts, who started at Apple last year, is changing the playbook at some of the iPhone maker’s stores this holiday season and the direction she’s going in: ultra luxe.
Interesting direction. Clearly, ultra luxe is in Angela Ahrendts’ DNA, given her previous experience running luxury brand Burberry. Apple Stores have always leaned toward the minimalist, with the focus squarely on Apple products. Over time, third party products have had less and less a role in impacting “main aisle” experience.
Apple has traditionally sold the most expensive accessories online only, like the $2,700 B&O BeoPlay A9 MKII speaker. “I asked Tim a very simple question: Why do we do it this way?” she said of her boss, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive. Mr. Cook told her he didn’t know, she said.
Surprising that this tidbit would be revealed publicly. I wonder if there’s more context there. Regardless, it will be interesting to see if there is a shift coming to the Apple Store, a move to add a luxury vibe to the Apple Store shopping experience.
As Apple Watch enters the critical holiday shopping season, it looks likely to get a sales boost from happy customers, almost two-thirds of whom are planning to give one as a gift, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Tuesday.
I’m not surprised. Apple Watch has changed my life and I’m sure other people are seeing the same thing.
Les Moonves, CEO of CBS, says that the company was in talks with Apple to be included in its still forthcoming cable-killing TV-subscription service — but that Apple has placed development of that service on hold.
I’m not sure what caused the company to put this hold. Perhaps they are making their services better before launching something so important. Whatever the reason, I’m really looking forward to it.
One of the more interesting aspects of Apple’s legal battle with Samsung is that it gave us an unprecedented look behind the veil of secrecy that typically shrouds all aspects of Apple’s product development and day-to-day operations. Over the course of discovery, innumerable court filings, and a fascinating trial, the inner workings of Apple were brought to the forefront for the first time in history. From photographs of iPhone prototypes to how Apple conducts market research, Apple’s legal battles with Samsung provided tech enthusiasts with a treasure trove of previously top-secret information.
With Samsung now agreeing to pony up for damages, we thought it’d be a good time to take a step back, reminisce, and take a look at some of the more interesting nuggets of information the hard-fought patent dispute brought to light.
The downside to lawsuits is this kind of insider info can often be gleaned from court filings. Apple has to give up some of its secrets in order to go to court. I’ll be the first to admit I love this kind of stuff, especially about prototypes. To me, they are fascinating glimpses into “alternative Apple universes” and things that might have been.
I’ve been on a tear lately about Apple Music and how it doesn’t work properly. I know there are a lot of people that are very happy with the service, and I’m really happy for those people.
However, there are a lot of people, me included that have had significant problems over the last few months. The update today is supposed to fix a lot of the bugs in the app. Basic things like being able to download music for offline listening—a feature that has never worked properly.
I believe in Apple and the message the company delivers about its products, which is why I’m so hard on Apple Music—it hasn’t lived up to Apple’s standards of a quality application or service.
I’m going to test the iOS updates a little more over the next couple of days, but I spent some time with the Apple TV update and there’s still some problems.
Maybe these problems are only happening for me, I don’t know. See if this happens for you:
If you seed a song and make a radio station in Apple Music and come to a song you don’t like; go to the top of the screen and press the button to bring up the menu; tap “Never Play This Song”; The next song will start playing; Don’t move down to the song, keep the cursor on the circle and press it again; Apple Music has no idea what song is playing. It’s been like that from the beginning for me.
For example, I was listening to Robert Plant:
When I followed the steps above, I get this. Apple Music thinks I’m listening to Peter Frampton.
It happens every time. I tried it again listening to a Boston song:
And I get this:
Here is something else to try.
Add a song to Apple Music on Apple TV and then go to that artist and album. You should see one song; press play and when the big album appears on the screen press and go to the circle on top of the screen; press it and go to the album page.
Apple Music thinks—or at least suggests—you have the entire album in your music, even though you only have one song. Tap on the checkmark in Apple Music and a menu will appear that says “Remove from My Music.” I can press that 100 times and nothing happens. The song remains in my library.
There are other things, but I’ll stop there for today. I hope these are only issues that I have, but we’ll see.
This fall’s release of the new Anki Overdrive set feels a bit like the moment when James Bond’s quartermaster Q rolls out a go-go-gadget Aston Martin DB5 and says, with smug understatement, “I’ve added one or two rather special accessories…” The upgraded set, with reconfigurable tracks, might not look so different from the previous Anki Drive, or, for that matter, the Christmas present Elvis unwrapped in 1965. Inside the box, it’s still a set of little toy cars.
The innovation isn’t immediately obvious. Though the bluetooth relays that control the cars and the sophisticated infrared sensors that keep them on track are ingenious, the real action isn’t under the cars’ hoods, either: The genius is in the code. Like Tesla and Google’s self-driving car, Anki’s real leap forward is its software.
I was an early adopter of the original Anki Overdrive and really enjoyed it but ultimately returned it. But I still think it’s a very cool race car set if you have kids who are into them.
Go to Settings > General > Software Update to download the update. Apple says there are improvements to News app, Mail Drop for Mail and improvements to Apple Music.
It’s hard not to improve Apple Music considering how much of a piece of shit it is.
Apple released a new update for Apple Watch this morning. Go to the Watch app on your iPhone > General > Software Update to download and install the update.
Like James Dempsey and the Breakpoints, Airplane Mode is an indie band with iOS developers at its heart.
From the Airplane Mode blog:
Our friend Rene Ritchie posted a video of him sketching Marvel’s Jessica Jones with an Apple Pencil on his new iPad Pro, using an amazing app called Procreate, which automatically records every stroke and gives the option of exporting those strokes as a video.
Ohhhhhhhhhh.
Watch the video (below), read the blog post. I absolutely love this. Great job.
I would have settled for the iPad Pro being a really nice sketching tool – but what I’ve discovered is that the iPad Pro, the Pencil, and Procreate, get me 95% to a final illustration, and quicker than I would get there on my desktop.
In many respects, this is better than working in Photoshop on my Mac. I never expected to say that. The last 5% is due to the pieces that Procreate doesn’t do, that Photoshop does – text, labels, some of the more advanced features. So that’s software, not hardware – and I expect the app store will get a lot more firepower very quickly once developers really get to grips with the Pro.
This is a serious piece of kit that will find a central place in an illustrators workflow – but it will not replace a desktop.
And:
My bugbears with styluses are:
lag
jittery pressure sensitivity, so that you can see the linewidth change as you press harder, rather than having a smooth response to pressure
offset between the line and the tip
Apple has created a stylus with none of these problems, which places it squarely at the top of my list. This is as good as my Intuous in terms of responsiveness – and better than the Wacom Cintiq I tried. I’ve been told that you can calibrate the Cintiq to get past those issues, but here I don’t have to calibrate anything. It just works. I can’t find published specs on levels of pressure sensitivity of the Apple Pencil – but given the smoothness of the response I’d bet money on at least 1028.
The lack of lag is a minor miracle. Previous styluses using bluetooth connections have been plagued with visible lag between large sweeping line movements, and the screen response. Here Apple has weighted the deck in their own favour. When it’s taking data from the Pencil, the iPad samples at 240 times a second. This is compared to 60 times a second for finger input on previous iPads. The result is a seamless drawing experience.
This is a great review, shoots straight, pros and cons (the biggest con being price), well worth reading.
Apple Maps quickly became the butt of jokes when it debuted in 2012. It overlooked many towns and businesses and misplaced famous landmarks. It marked New York’s Madison Square Garden arena as park space because of the word “Garden.” The service was a rare blunder for a company known for simple, easy-to-use products.
It’s a different story three years later.
Apple fixed errors as users submitted them. It quietly bought several mapping companies, mostly for their engineers and other talent. This fall, it added transit directions for several major cities, narrowing a major gap with Google. Apple Maps is now used more widely than Google Maps on iPhones.
Great success story for the Apple Maps team. Kudos.
This is an interesting list, one that explores the history of the iOS App Store, presenting 100 apps that moved the needle at various times. Looks like a lot of work went in to pulling this list together.
As with any list, there are quibbles (Plants vs. Zombies seems an obvious oversight to me), but I did enjoy the read.
Ocarina! I remember what a big deal that was when it came out. Great to see that on the list.
As of October, Apple Music has 6.5 million paid users, which is a great number for paying subscribers for such a young service. But Apple Music’s biggest problem is and will continue to be that millions and millions of people stream music for free from other services, and have little incentive to switch to a paid music service.
And:
67 percent of Americans streamed music every week before Apple Music existed. With no free tier, Apple has the cumbersome job of convincing the public, the majority of whom have chosen free services, to switch from something they know and pay for the same music without commercials.
And:
Apple Music also needs a standalone desktop app far, far removed iTunes, one of the least beloved pieces of software Apple has created. Earlier this year, Apple replaced iPhoto and Aperture with Photos for OS X, which has been a step up for most users. It should do the same for iTunes and build a new Music app for the desktop from the ground up.
Hard to argue with this logic. Apple Music is an odd duck, a part of the Apple ecosystem that doesn’t crush the competition with some combination of superior design, improved performance, or unmatchable convenience.
Apple Music doesn’t take advantage of its position inside the fence. Apple Music is tethered to the iCloud/iTunes music model, a hybrid created by the requirement that Apple Music play nice with my owned music. Lots of well publicized issues with this model.
Personally, I find the idea of a pure Apple Music app appealing, an app focused on discovery and music sharing, one with a social component that let me share my loved playlists with friends I follow, and let approved friends make their own additions to those playlists. I’d love the ability to “like” tracks, including tracks on Beats 1 and any radio station, and have those tracks automatically be added to a playlist for later recall.
Apple Music has a lot going for it. But I think it needs a reimagined interface, one with no strings.
Marketcircle has been developing Mac apps since 1999 that help small businesses do big things. Newly released is Daylite 6 with Cloud – manage your contacts, projects, to-dos, and schedule all in one app. Get the best of both worlds, a native app with the convenience of the cloud. Try it now on your Mac, iPhone & iPad, for yourself or with your team and take advantage of these great new features.
We’re committed to making the transitions from these products as painless as possible. We’ve posted more information on the Carousel blog and the Mailbox blog, and we’ll be communicating details directly to users of both apps in the coming days. Mailbox will be shut down on February 26th, 2016, and Carousel will be shut down on March 31st, 2016.
To our Carousel and Mailbox users, thank you for embracing these products—and we’re sorry. It’s not easy to say goodbye to products we all love. But ultimately, we think this increased focus will help us create even better experiences for you in the months and years to come.
I never used either product in part because of this. I’ve been around long enough to see dozens, if not hundreds, of services come and go. I rarely rely on new services (but I often test them out) simply because, to paraphrase Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, “Products come and go so quickly around here.” I may be too old and jaded but I think my time is too valuable to constantly be flitting from one new service to another, only to have the owner shut it down, sometimes with very little advance notice.
Calgary Hitmen fans had to be patient, holding their bears until the 2:41 mark of the second period when Stallard triggered the avalanche of stuffed animals at the 21st annual Petro-Canada Teddy Bear Toss on Sunday afternoon at the Saddledome.
I think I write about this story every year. I do it because it seems like fun event for a good cause and the video is always wonderful.
This video has some long, beautiful views of Apple’s new spaceship campus, now with a 4K quality setting. The voiceover (I believe) is from Steve Jobs’ famous Stanford commencement address from 2005.
Whether you’re looking at an important email, reading a web page, or doing just about anything else on your iPhone or iPad, perhaps you’d like to be reminded about it again at a later time or date. While Siri has long been able to create reminders for events and based on locations, a new feature available for the latest versions of iOS is the ability for Siri to remind you about what you’re currently looking at on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
In a nutshell, make your way to an article, email, etc., something you want to be reminded about later. Bring up Siri and say:
Remind me about this tomorrow
Substitute your own timing or location specification. The key is the word “this”.
When the reminder fires off, it will include a link to the page in question. This is handy.
Cardboard Chaos, a packaging company, hooked up with a master builder at the Fender Custom Shop to attempt to build a working Strat made out of cardboard.
This is some amazing craftsmanship. Watch the design unfold in the video below. I so want one of these.
In the wee hours, a loud evacuation alarm went off at London’s Young Vic theatre, repeatedly (for hours) blaring the message:
“Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please. Due to circumstances beyond our control, it has become necessary to evacuate the building. Please leave the building immediately by the nearest exit. Do not use the lifts.”
The Japanese Apple Store in Tokyo’s upmarket Ginza district had to be evacuated and a promotional event canceled over the weekend after it received a bomb threat.
The event was a Sunday promotional event featuring the movie director Isao Yukisada, who last directed the Chinese romance-suspense film Five Minutes to Tomorrow in 2014.
It’s not known exactly why the event was targeted, but four hours before the 2pm event was scheduled to begin, the Apple Store received a handwritten note saying that the store would be blown up if the appearance was not canceled.
Kirk McElhearn, writing for Kirkville, reports that users are passing the old 25,000 track limit. He adds:
With iTunes Match and iCloud Music Library, all tracks in your library are counted against the limit with the exception of iTunes Store purchases. So any tracks you add to your library that you’ve ripped from CDs, or that you add from Apple Music, count against the limit.
Eddy Cue said, earlier this year, that Apple would increase the track limit to 100,000. If anyone has tried to put that many tracks in the cloud, please post in the comments. And anyone else who has more than 25,000 tracks, post the number of tracks that you’ve matched or uploaded.
MacRumors verifies the new 100,000 limit in this post:
Eddy Cue has confirmed to MacRumors that Apple has indeed “started rolling out support for 100k libraries.”
For one year, Mork and Mindy was arguably the most successful science fiction TV show ever made. The comedy about an alien and his human best friend turned Robin Williams into a global sensation. How did this miracle happen, and why didn’t it last? To find out, I talked to the people who made the show.
I don’t think I can name another TV show from my youth that was more of a must-see than Mork and Mindy. To this kid, the show was funny and different and Robin Williams was a force of nature, even within the confines of a situation comedy. Plus, I had a huge crush on Pam Dawber.
Thanks to Igloo Software for sponsoring The Loop this week.
What if you could get 5% of your day back? What would you do?
You already have enough work to do today and shouldn’t have to waste time looking for the things you need to do your job.
Igloo makes it easy to find what you need, when you need it. And it’s not just for locating your traditional intranet stuff like HR policies and expense forms. It also helps you find experts, talk about problems and share content with your team. So stop digging through your inbox for that file from 3 months back and give yourself the tools you need to do your best work.
Try it yourself or send your IT guy to investigate Igloo, an intranet you’ll actually like.
Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica, had the chance to sit down with Apple Senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi to discuss Apple’s move to make Swift open source.
“As they’re working day-to-day and making modifications to the language, including their work on Swift 3.0, all of that is going to be happening out in the open on GitHub.”
So instead of getting a big Swift 3.0 info dump at WWDC 2016 in the summer and then digging into the Xcode betas and adapting, developers can already find an “evolution document” on the Swift site that maps out where the language is headed in its next major version.
Apple is definitely making a big effort here to evolve Swift (a relatively young language) with input from developers.
Making Swift open source and developing new versions out in the open makes it easier for developers to see what Apple is doing, but it also makes it easier for them to contribute to the project directly. Apple says that developer feedback has already been instrumental in developing features and taking the language from beta to 1.0 to 2.0, but at least theoretically, the company will no longer be the sole arbiter of what does and doesn’t end up in the language. Developers can submit pull requests, and Swift.org outlines the processes that should be used when developers want to propose changes.
“When you look at many of the language features that we announced in Swift 2.0 that are now out in terms of error handling and the guard statements, availability, controls, and so forth, these were all based on that dialogue that’s been ongoing with developers who’ve been adopting Swift in their real applications,” Federighi said. “With Swift being developed out in the open in open source, we think it’s going to deepen that interaction considerably.”
Fantastic collaboration. This will only make Swift a better language. It’d be great if Apple could extend this approach, find other ways to bring their developer community into the mix.
Dan Moren, writing for Six Colors, walks through the process of eliminating duplicates in your Calendar. If you’ve ever had duplicates creep into your Calendar, you know what a pain it is to delete all those copies, one at a time.
