There’s still a long way to go in this battle. One thing that sticks out to me is the arc of Samsung’s business since all this started. It’s entirely possible that Samsung will exit the smartphone market before all is said and done and that final appeal goes by the boards, that final payment is made.

With two quarters of Apple Watch under its belt, Apple has sold a total of 7.5 million units. Not too shabby, especially given the heavy competition and the fact that this is still an emerging category.

Lots of great music. Plush, Interstate Love Song, and all that great Velvet Revolver music including my favorite, Slither.

Sad end to a long, troubled story.

I’d set the tree on fire to cook this up.

The first-ever character-branded PANTONE Color inspired by Illumination Entertainment’s Minions.

Cool.

Tony Zhou:

Before Edgar Wright and Wes Anderson, before Chuck Jones and Jackie Chan, there was Buster Keaton, one of the founding fathers of visual comedy. And nearly 100 years after he first appeared onscreen, we’re still learning from him. Today, i’d like to talk about the artistry (and the thinking) behind his gags.

I discovered Keaton as a kid and loved his comedy. But it wasn’t until adulthood I realized just what level of genius I was watching. His stunts are, to this day, still incredible and many of them are unrepeatable. As an aside, if you’re a film buff, Tony Zhou’s “Every Frame a Painting” Youtube page has some great videos dissecting why we love what we love about movies.

The Hollywood Reporter:

Attendees at any of Chappelle’s 13 sold-out Thalia Hall performances will be greeted by staffers handing out gray smartphone sleeves, available in three sizes. They are then instructed to place their phones inside the sleeves and fasten them, at which point they are welcome to carry them inside the venue.

As soon as they enter the “no-phone zone,” however, the pouches will have locked shut, preventing anyone from firing off so much as a winking emoji. Need to make a call or send an email? No problem. Simply leave the designated zone (and head, say, to the lobby bar), and, as you move past several strategically placed stations, the pouches can now magically be unlocked.

This is an interesting use of technology to defeat technology. In a broad sense, I’m all for it and can see this being extended to many other events. I was at a concert a few months ago and could barely see the artist because of all the smartphone screens being held up, recording the music. It’s incredibly annoying. I get the idea that attendees want to “capture the moment” but people have taken it way beyond that impulse.

Wired:

It’s essentially a CliffsNotes version of popular music in 2015, the bare essentials of the year boiled down into one five-minute track–with a frenetic video that cuts around to feature the lead vocal track at any given moment. It’s not quite a heart-racing banger, but anchored chiefly by the bass line for The Weeknd’s “I Can’t Feel My Face,” it’s an addicting track worthy of DJ Earworm’s name.

For me, the most amazing part is the editing. I can’t imagine the amount of work that went into creating this video.

From Swift’s new, official home page on swift.org:

Swift is now open source!

We are excited by this new chapter in the story of Swift. After Apple unveiled the Swift programming language, it quickly became one of the fastest growing languages in history. Swift makes it easy to write software that is incredibly fast and safe by design. Now that Swift is open source, you can help make the best general purpose programming language available everywhere.

For students, learning Swift has been a great introduction to modern programming concepts and best practices. And because it is now open, their Swift skills will be able to be applied to an even broader range of platforms, from mobile devices to the desktop to the cloud.

Welcome to the Swift community. Together we are working to build a better programming language for everyone.

– The Swift Team

The site features source code repositories for the compiler, the Swift standard and core libraries, package manager, debugger, and lots of other goodies.

To learn more, start with the Swift blog.

Dan Frommer, writing for Quartz:

Notifications, one of the early big-idea purposes of a smartwatch, are pretty reliable and, with some attention to their frequency, very useful. One night at a restaurant, when a handful of things I’d put up for sale on eBay were closing around the same time, the sensation of an arm buzz every few seconds as a new bid rolled in was an amusing delight. (Another round, garçon!)

And

I reply to a large portion of text messages from the watch, using customized quick responses. Tracking my exercise has helped me lose 10 pounds.

And then this:

But that’s about it. And they are pretty much the same ways I used the watch when I first got it.

I love my Apple Watch. I look at Dan’s list and think, those are all great things. If my Apple Watch only did those things, it’d be worth every penny and I’d wear it every day, just for that. But I also get turn-by-turn directions on my wrist and, if need be, I can get them without having to look at my screen.

I can get a phone call on my watch, and I can even transfer that call to my phone. I can get all sorts of notifications, including texts, email, calendar events. The latest software release, which gave developers the opportunity to build 3rd party complications, made the Apple Watch face even more valuable to me.

I don’t think of the Apple Watch as a potential replacement for my phone, I don’t feel limited that it requires a connection to my iPhone to deliver much of its functionality. The Apple Watch does plenty. It makes my iPhone better.

I do think Dan’s writeup is smart, worth reading. I just think that calling the platform “stalled” is a bit “glass half empty”. I think the Apple Watch is an amazing achievement, one that helps me every single day.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, one of the first things he did was crush down the product line, simplify shipping products to fit in a two-by-two matrix. On one side of the matrix, laptops and desktops. On the other side, consumer versus pro.

Things have really changed since that simplification. iPods, iPads, iPhone, laptops galore, desktops, pro machines, and now the Apple Watch, all with related accessories. But there is a critical difference. Tim Cook is a master of the product supply chain. He keeps the moving parts moving, the machine well oiled.

Neil Cybart, writing for Above Avalon, digs into Apple’s evolving product lineup, laying out some insights from Phil Schiller to give a sense of the direction in which that lineup is moving. Great read.

Serenity Caldwell, writing for iMore, puts both devices through their paces. In a nutshell:

The Surface Pro and Surface Book are great machines, and I don’t begrudge anyone in the art community for picking one up. If you want something that’s going to act as your primary computer while on the road or at home, the Surface line has a lot going for it. The Pen feels like a Wacom-style tool, and you can get incredibly precise lines and strokes when you write with it. And you can use any desktop apps natively, which can be a huge boon for your workflow.

Where the Surface fails, however, is where the iPad Pro shines. The Pro may not be as powerful but has better battery life, a more natural-feeling stylus, superior entry-level apps, and is an outright joy to draw with. It’s a digital sketchbook and idea machine, and you can hook it up to your desktop Mac using third-party software to get a very close approximation of a true Cintiq drawing experience.

It’ll be interesting to see how reliable the Surface Book is a year or so down the line. As I mentioned in this post, my experience with Windows laptops has been miserable. My experience with iPads has been 100%. I’ve owned 4 different iPads and they are all still up and running.

I thought this was an excellent, informative review, but one thing in particular stood out:

I had to look back and forth from iPad Pro to my old Octa-Core Mac Pro in my office, which can’t even handle editing 4K in any way and realize what the iPad Pro represents in terms of technological performance leaps for something so portable. It really is a breakthrough.

The iPad Pro was given a clear directive, to push Apple’s ‘Post-PC’ initiative by offering a comparable level of performance to existing portable and desktop computers while capitalizing on all the advantages of being a mobile iOS device.

And if you have any doubts, the iPad Pro can indeed edit 4K video, albeit with a few creaks for longer video sizes.

A few months ago, Consumer Reports named Apple the most reliable brand in their annual laptop reliability survey [Subscription]. From that survey:

We estimate that only 10 percent of Apple laptops fail by the third year of ownership. The numbers for Windows laptop brands range from 16 percent to 19 percent. In addition, Apple laptops break down less often than laptops from other brands. Among laptops that fail, only 42 percent of Apples break down more than once, while more than half (55 percent) of non-Apple laptops break down on multiple occasions.

Consumer Reports has now released a more detailed breakdown of that data, broken down by specific product line:

This year’s survey doesn’t stop at the brand name—we also can see which product lines are more likely to require repairs. Not surprisingly, considering Apple’s overall showing, two Apple product lines came out on top. Apple’s MacBook Air has just a 7 percent estimated failure rate, while the MacBook Pro is almost as dependable with a 9 percent failure rate.

On the Windows side:

At the top of the list for Windows product lines are: Gateway’s NV (13 percent) and LT (14 percent); the Samsung ATIV Book (14 percent); Lenovo ThinkPads (15 percent); and the Dell XPS line (15 percent).

Reliability isn’t necessarily related to how much money you spend on a laptop. HP’s premium ENVY line is near the bottom, with a 20 percent failure rate, while the company’s less-costly Pavilion line fares better, at 16 percent.

Lenovo’s Y Series has the highest failure rate at 23 percent.

Every Windows laptop I’ve ever owned has broken down. Every one. Usually it’s the screen failing in some way. I’ve owned a lot of Macs, and I have run into problems, but I find that getting the problem addressed is far easier, and far less stressful.

From the United press release:

The iPhones will enable agents to assist customers who have checked into their flights with several pre-departure actions, including printing boarding passes and baggage tags anywhere in the airport. Customer service representatives will also be able to assist customers with alternate flight options, helping employees at customer service locations provide additional attention to those with more complex needs.

Future enhancements will include tools to provide full check-in capabilities in airport lobbies and the ability to offer customers much of the same functionality as traditional airport kiosks.

Interesting that they are distributing the iPhone 6 Plus and not the iPhone 6s Plus. An inventory clearing move for Apple? Nah, silly thought on my part, really. The 6 Plus is still being made and 6,000 phones is not enough to move the needle.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Apple, too, now seems to be re-energized in thinking of the iPad as a work platform. The improvements that they’ve brought to bear this year alone, including split screen multi-tasking, more robust support for hardware keyboards and, maybe most significantly, Apple Pencil, have markedly improved the device’s viability as a design tool.

Great article from Khoi Vinh. While he focuses on design, you could substitute that word for almost any other work you want to do on the iPad. We’re getting so close. iPad Pro made a huge jump, but there’s still a little way to go.

I don’t know why, but I just love this kind of thing.

Chief Executive Marissa Mayer’s attempts to revive the traditional business have born little fruit, and almost all of Yahoo’s market capitalization of about $34 billion is ascribed to its stakes in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Holding Group Ltd. and Yahoo Japan Corp.

I remember when Yahoo was a star. Now investors raise the share price on talk of the company selling it’s core business.

Apple will host special events at local Apple Stores for The Hour of Code. Great stuff.

Macworld:

One of the cool things about the new fourth-generation Apple TV is that it supports HDMI-CEC, so that you can control your TV or your speaker system using the remote control that came in the box along with it, automatically switching everything to the right input, controlling volume, and turning everything off at once when you’re done.

But like the fourth-gen Apple TV, the second- and third-gen models (so, basically, every “black puck” Apple TV) have another, often overlooked trick up their utterly non-existent sleeves: they can be controlled from any other remote control. (Caveat: it needs to be a remote that issues its commands over infrared, not RF, but since that accounts for the overwhelming majority of remotes, we’re pretty confident saying “any.”)

Doing this won’t mean your TV automatically switches to the correct input, say, and of course it wouldn’t allow you to use Siri on the new Apple TV, since the third-party remote you’ll be using wouldn’t have a mic or Siri support. But what it does mean is that you can either deliberately or accidentally loose the little white or silver remote that you had been using with your Apple TV and just use the big remote that came with your TV.

Really useful tip for those of us who want to use a single universal remote to control all of our TV-connected bits and bobs.

ZDNet:

In the survey, almost 20 percent of respondents reported a breakdown in the first 3 years of use, most of them seriously affecting system use.

Apple, as in year’s past, has the most reliable notebooks by far – a 10 percent breakdown rate in the first 3 years – with Samsung and Gateway distant seconds at 16 percent, and the rest of the industry – including Acer, Lenovo, Toshiba, HP, Dell and Asus, at 18-19 percent.

Windows machines used more than 20 hours a week – average for Windows systems – have a higher break rate. Apple users report using their machines an average of 23 hours a week, 15 percent more. More hours, fewer breakdowns, what’s not to like?

The results of the Consumer Reports survey are predictable. While Macbooks aren’t perfect, they do tend to be significantly more reliable than their Windows counterparts. Good ammunition for those of you having the “Should I buy a Mac or a PC?” discussion with friends and relatives this holiday season.

Interested in podcasting? Have an idea for a podcast, but worry that no one else shares your passion? Watch this video. It’s inspirational. Oh, and, that guy giving the talk is Stephen Hackett, one of the founders of Relay.FM. He knows what he’s talking about.

Jonny Evans, writing for ComputerWorld, lays out a series of Apple Watch tips and tricks that might be new to you, even if you are a grizzled veteran.

My favorite, by far:

A call comes in and you check your Watch. You know you want to talk to this person but want to use your iPhone to make it. Suddenly anxious you grapple through all your pockets to find your phone and the call drops. It needn’t be this way – just use the Answer on iPhone button at the bottom of the incoming call screen (turn the Digital Crown a little and you’ll see it). The person calling will hear a repeated sound while you search for your phone. Stay cool.

When I read this, I wondered if the person calling me would intuitively know to hang on, or if they’d hang up, thinking something went wrong. So I tried it.

This is designed perfectly. The moment you tap the “Answer on iPhone” button, the call is answered and Siri’s voice says, “Please hold on a moment”. Then, a series of repeating tones plays, that makes it sound like you are on hold. My instinctive response was to stay on the phone. This is great.

Dan Moren, writing for Six Colors:

One of the more interesting features of Photos for Mac is its ability to not store my entire photo library on my Mac’s drive. It does this by syncing the entire library to iCloud Photo Library and then dynamically loading and unloading photos as you use it.

This is a nice feature to have if your photo library is big and your hard drive space is limited. The post is definitely worth reading, just so you understand the basics and can turn to this approach if it ever becomes necessary.

My only concern is what to do if something goes wrong. If some (or most) of your photos are stored in the cloud, how do you recover them if things go south. As is, I manage all my photos on a Mac with plenty of drive space. I back up that Mac regularly, then occasionally back up that backup to an external drive I keep off site.

Losing my photos would be devastating to me. How easy is it to recover from a scenario where my photos are split between storage mechanisms?

This year’s list includes over 120 covers by 60 designers, and there is little doubt in my mind that this really is a golden time for book design.

[Via Coudal]