There’s been a lot of press the past few days about Elon Musk and some pointed barbs he threw Apple’s way. This CNET piece did a good job pulling all these together.
So it is, perhaps, with an interview in which Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave to Germany’s Handelsblatt. In it, he suggested — jokingly?– that the Cupertino, California, tech titan hires Tesla’s engineering castoffs.
“Did you ever take a look at the Apple Watch? No, seriously,” he said of Apple’s alleged foray into cars. “It’s good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction. But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches.”
And:
“Yo, I don’t hate Apple,” he first tweeted. “It’s a great company with a lot of talented people. I love their products and I’m glad they’re doing an EV.”
And:
Musk followed up with another tweet addressing his views on the Watch. “Regarding the watch, Jony & his team created a beautiful design, but the functionality isn’t compelling yet. By version 3, it will be.”
It’s this last bit that I truly take issue with. I do indeed find the current incarnation of Apple Watch compelling. As is, today.
Take a look at this screenshot:
This is my current Apple Watch setup. It shows me the time, day, and date at the top. At the bottom, it shows the current outside temperature, any alarms (none were set when I took this), and remaining battery. In the middle is my Fantastical calendar complication, showing the next event on my calendar (Jim is adamant that his cooler always remain topped off. For emergencies.)
All of this functionality is rendered in a font that is large enough and clear enough for my aging eyes to see with no problem. And with watchOS 2, I have an incredible array of 3rd party complications from which to choose to customize my experience.
My watch looks good in the gym, in a business meeting, out at dinner, no matter how casual or fancy.
With the flip of a wrist and, perhaps, a tap or two, I can interact with Siri, control my music, set an alarm or timer, browse my email, send and receive texts, talk on the phone, and so much more.
The “functionality isn’t compelling yet”? To me, the Apple Watch is a remarkable piece of work, a miracle of design and technological prowess. We must have a different definition of compelling.
I had zero expectations when these cases arrived. I generally don’t use an iPhone case, haven’t used one since those bumper cases that Apple gave away free in the early days of the iPhone 4 (see antennagate).
The first thing I noticed was the packaging. This picture (click to embiggen) shows everything that came in the package:
Everything was beautifully crafted, including an incredibly detailed box, thank you note, and stickers. These alone made me a fan of the company, gave me a sense of their values.
Obviously, though, the most important thing here is the case itself. And it does not disappoint.
As you can see from the product page, Carved makes a series of laser cut inserts, all designed to attach firmly to their snug fitting, grippy iPhone cases. Basically, they carve out a series of these inserts, then glue them onto the cases with double sided adhesive.
The designs are what you’d expect from laser etched wood, richly detailed, precise, and unique. The fit is perfect. The case in the picture fits an iPhone 6 and 6s, but they also make an iPhone 6s Plus case as well. The wood has a protective spray on it, but is not waterproof or scratchproof, so you’ll want to take reasonable care of the case. But it is a solid case, seems very well made, has nice textured sides that give you a solid grip on your phone.
There is nothing like the Purina Pro Plan Incredible Dog Challenge. Nowhere else in the nation are the six most popular canine contests—the Agility, the Diving Dog, the 30 Weave Up & Back, the Fetch It!, the Freestyle Flying Disc, and the Jack Russell Hurdle Race—crammed into one Olympic-style event.
The animals are referred to as “athletes” without even a hint of irony, and, for their part, they earn this honor. The agility course requires speed, endurance, execution, and, most important, an almost unfathomable level of obedience.
This is rarely on TV but, when it is, I love watching it. It may be “goofy” but the training and commitment of both the dogs and their handlers is fantastic. I’ll admit to loving the Jack Russell Terriers crash into barriers a little too much and I’ve always wished I had a dog I could play Frisbee with.
One of Steve Jobs’ biggest legacies was his decision to stop relying on 3rd party semiconductor companies and create an internal silicon design team.3 I would go so far as to argue it’s one of the three most important strategic decisions he ever made.
If you study unit economics of semiconductors, it doesn’t really make sense to design chips and compete with companies like Intel unless you can make it up in volume. Consider the audacity back in 2007 for Apple to believe it could pull this off. How would they ever make back the R&D to build out a team and pay for expensive silicon designs over the long run, never mind design comparative performing chips? Well today we know. Apple makes nearly 100% of the profit in the entire smartphone space.
It is – in fact – these chip making capabilities, which Jobs brought in-house shortly after the launch of the original iPhone, that have helped Apple create a massive moat between itself and an entire industry.
I don’t think Apple’s advantage is as insurmountable as Cheney states but it is remarkable Apple is in this position. It’s a sense of mission and dedication and truly amazing foresight from the company that, for those of us long time Apple watchers, we could never have predicted 10 years ago.
When was the last time you were well and truly lost? Chances are it’s been a while.
Extraordinary gadgets like smartphones and satnavs let us pinpoint our location unerringly. Like the people in Downton Abbey, we all know our place. However, the technology which delivers the world into the palms of our hands may be ushering in a kind of social immobility undreamt of even by Julian Fellowes’s hidebound little Englanders.
Discovery used to mean going out and coming across stuff – now it seems to mean turning inwards and gazing at screens. We’ve become reliant on machines to help us get around, so much so that it’s changing the way we behave, particularly among younger people who have no experience of a time before GPS.
I’m famous for having absolutely zero sense of direction. Even with GPS, I get lost all the time. But I’m OK with that. As a matter of fact, I use my GPS to get lost. I’ll set it for home and then go out riding my motorcycle. Whenever the GPS tells me to go in a certain direction to go back home, I go in the other direction. I’ve explored thousands of miles in the US and Canada like this and have found some wonderful places that I otherwise would have never come across.
Sometimes photographs deceive. Take this one, for example. It represents John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s rebellious gesture the day they won medals for the 200 meters at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, and it certainly deceived me for a long time.
I always saw the photo as a powerful image of two barefoot black men, with their heads bowed, their black-gloved fists in the air while the US National Anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” played. It was a strong symbolic gesture – taking a stand for African American civil rights in a year of tragedies that included the death of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.
It’s a historic photo of two men of color. For this reason I never really paid attention to the other man, white, like me, motionless on the second step of the medal podium. I considered him a random presence, an extra in Carlos and Smith’s moment, or a kind of intruder. Actually, I even thought that that guy – who seemed to be just a simpering Englishman – represented, in his icy immobility, the will to resist the change that Smith and Carlos were invoking in their silent protest. But I was wrong.
It’s a powerful photograph and I, like so many others, made assumptions about the third participant. The back story is fascinating but the tale of what happened to him afterward is heartbreaking.
The Obama administration has backed down in its bitter dispute with Silicon Valley over the encryption of data on iPhones and other digital devices, concluding that it is not possible to give US law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to that information without creating an opening that China, Russia, cybercriminals, and terrorists could also exploit.
With its decision, which angered the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, the administration essentially agreed with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and a group of the nation’s top cryptographers and computer scientists.
The administration also agreed with common sense. But make no mistake, this decision came about because of pushback lead by Apple, among others, and more importantly, the administration listening to and trusting the tech companies when they were told this couldn’t be done the way the government wanted it done.
Paul Mozur and Katie Benner, writing for The New York Times:
Apple has disabled its news app in China, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, the most recent sign of how difficult it can be for foreign companies to manage the strict rules governing media and online expression there.
The Apple News app, which the company announced in June, is available only to users in the United States, though it is being tested in Britain and Australia. Customers who already downloaded the app by registering their phones in the United States can still see content in it when they travel overseas — but they have found that it does not work in China.
Those in China who look at the top of the Apple News feed, which would normally display a list of selected articles based on a user’s preferred media, instead see an error message: “Can’t refresh right now. News isn’t supported in your current region.”
Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., declined to comment.
They all left in the wake of a very different sound nearly 30 years earlier: the explosion of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986, which left dozens dead and drove more than 100,000 people from their homes across a 1,600-square-mile swath of Ukraine and Belarus. These days, abandoned apartment complexes are nothing more than crumbled concrete wrecks. Vines crawl up the decaying walls of old farmhouses and break unintended skylights into their roofs. No one lives in the postapocalyptic setting.
No one human, that is. Wildlife populations there – shaggy-haired wild boar, long-legged elk, the howling choruses of wolves that so captivated Hinton last August – are flourishing.
That’s according to a study published last week in the journal Current Biology, which found that mammal numbers in the exclusion zone are as high, if not higher, than in even the most protected parks in Belarus.
Thanks to SVALT for sponsoring The Loop this week. Use code “LOOP” for a $15 discount on the ultimate high-performance Apple laptop dock, the SVALT D Performance Cooling Dock, that increases CPU Turbo Boost speeds by 106% and speeds up 4K exports in Final Cut Pro X by 10% on 15-in Retina MacBook Pro.
Over just a few years, the batteries in our smartphones have changed a lot. That means those old tips to stretch out your battery life just aren’t as true as they once were, yet we still share them like they’re gospel. Before telling someone to disable Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, let’s shed some light on those old myths.
Pass this along to the people in your life who still believe you can overcharge the batteries on laptops or iPhones.
The Merritt Parkway is a four-lane highway, with a large and wooded median in between. The lanes are narrow, there are no streetlights, and it’s completely surrounded by forest. The on-ramps are almost nonexistent, meaning that getting onto the road can be a bit like the initial descent of a roller coaster. The best part, however, is that no trucks are allowed–it’s a zippy car haven. And the cars do go fast.
I used to live in Westport and Danbury CT and, even though it added quite a bit of time to the trip, I always tried to take the Merrit Parkway. When the traffic was light, it was a high speed run into New York City. In the fall, it was one of the prettiest roads I have even been on. If you’re ever in the New York city area and have a car and a few hours to kill, drive the Merrit.
The environments in The Good Dinosaur are breathtaking. There are moments in the 30 minutes of the movie I previewed that look no different from live-action footage. And if it looks real, that might be because they used real data to create the locations in the film.
Some shots in the movie look out more than 50 miles in the distance. To accomplish this near-impossible task, the set team used actual USGS data of the northwest United States to create the sets in the film.
The amount of work that goes into any animated film today is mind-boggling but Pixar go so far beyond what anyone else does for the look of their films. As the story says, they wanted the environment to be another character in the story.
From Federico Viticci’s review of the just released new version of Overcast:
In using Overcast for the past year, Smart Speed has turned from a simple and clever addition to a lock-in factor for daily listening: I know that Overcast will make shows I listen to shorter without making them sound odd or unnatural, and it’s the kind of feature that I can’t enjoy in iOS’ built-in Podcasts app. Apple’s player has gotten considerably better on iOS 9; but, when looking at the total amount of hours saved with Overcast, I realized that those are hours of my life I got back by using Arment’s app instead of an alternative. This, combined with the many thoughtful touches of its interface, makes me happy to stick with Overcast.
Arment faced two problems, though. Overcast always needed to download new episodes before playing them: due to limitations of iOS 7’s web download and audio APIs, Smart Speed and Voice Boost couldn’t work with streaming – a popular feature that many podcast apps implement to avoid taking up storage on users’ devices with downloaded audio files. And, while it was Arment’s goal to gain market share with a freemium model that made Overcast free to use with an In-App Purchase to unlock advanced features (such as unlimited effects), the majority of Overcast users ended up staying on the free tier – a less capable version of the app that Arment himself wasn’t using, and which couldn’t be easily differentiated in a sea of podcast clients for iOS.
Overcast 2.0, launching today on the App Store, fixes both problems.
Smart Speed is a killer feature. I love Overcast, can’t praise it enough. Read the full review. As usual, Federico did a fantastic job.
The iPhone is a remarkable device, even if all it did was put the things you do every day into the palm of your hand.
But over time, Apple and the iPhone have slowly changed the nature of healthcare. At a foundational level, there’s HealthKit, Apple’s API that makes it possible for developers to build significant health-related capabilities into their own apps.
But more than this, there are peripherals that bring more self-monitoring into the user’s hands and simplify the process of sharing diagnostic data with a health care professional, all over the internet without requiring an office visit.
The latest of these is the AliveCor Mobile ECG, reviewed in this post by Jeremy Horwitz, writing for 9to5mac.
Some health accessories are undeniably useful, but others raise the question “why?” — why pay more to see my weight on an iPhone rather than the scale’s built-in screen? Why track daily tooth brushing, body fat percentages, or the humidity of one’s bathroom? People survived for thousands of years without charting every seemingly minor blip on their personal radars.
My perspective changed last month when my wife was diagnosed with a serious cardiac condition. One of those “seemingly minor blips” that can now be constantly monitored is your heartbeat, and when something’s wrong with your heart, advance knowledge literally makes the difference between living or dying. As it turns out, a San Francisco-based company named AliveCor is now on its third-generation version of an iPhone accessory that helps people with cardiac conditions. The AliveCor Mobile ECG ($75) is an FDA-approved electrocardiogram (ECG) monitor that can record and share your heartbeat directly from your iPhone. Measuring roughly 3.2″ by 1.3″ by 0.2″, Mobile EGC can self-attach to your iPhone’s back, or integrate with a bundled custom iPhone 6/6s case for only $79.
This is a remarkable achievement, one that would have been unthinkable not so long ago. This sort of inexpensive ($75) device is a game changer for the field of cardiology and patients with cardiac issues. Not only does this device save you a trip to the cardiologist, it makes it possible to have more frequent and more timely assessments of your condition, it makes the entire analysis less invasive and more convenient, and reduces the cost to all parties involved.
I suspect that a day will come when health care is embedded in software and devices like these, when the entire process is made more affordable and less restrictive, less controlled by insurance companies and their actuarial tables and available to all of us, regardless of our income streams.
I’ve been waiting for this review and Austin Mann does not disappoint. There’s lots to consume here, lots of examples/comparisons.
My particular favorite is the video that shows video optical image stabilization on the 6s and 6s Plus side-by-side (3rd video down). The 6s Plus has it, the 6 does not. What a huge difference.
AT&T has flipped the switch on Wi-Fi calling, making it available to customers with eligible plans that are running iOS 9. MacRumors has received tips from customers who were able to activate Wi-Fi calling and we were able to activate the feature on our own iPhones. A number of readers in our forums are also having success activating Wi-Fi calling.
Wi-Fi calling is a feature that lets calls be placed over a wireless connection when cellular connectivity is poor, functioning much like an AT&T M-Cell does now. It’s similar to Apple’s own FaceTime Audio feature, which also routes calls over a Wi-Fi connection.
If AT&T is your carrier, you find yourself with a poor cell signal but with solid access to WiFi, WiFi calling is for you. It won’t eat up your data plan and your signal will go from nonexistent to excellent.
Anthony Ha, writing for TechCrunch, laid out this dialog from the new Steve Jobs movie:
Woz: You can’t write code, you’re not an engineer, you’re not a designer, you can’t put a hammer to a nail. I built the circuit board, the graphical interface was stolen from Xerox Parc, Jef Raskin was the leader of the Mac team before you threw him off his own project. Everything — someone else designed the box! So how come 10 times in a day, I read “Steve jobs is a genius.” What do you do?
Jobs: I play the orchestra. And you’re a good musician, you sit right there, you’re the best in your row.
In the article comments, the real-life Woz weighed in with this:
I always give Jobs the credit for finishing a design into a product and marketing it and much more. The movie made up this part based on the first few months of the Apple ][ but I, instead of Jobs, should have been the one to say “I’m the best in my row, actually in every row.” I only wanted recognition as a good (great) engineer.
Handelsblatt: Apple just hired some of Tesla’s most important engineers. Do you have to worry about a new competitor?
Musk: Important engineers? They have hired people we’ve fired. We always jokingly call Apple the “Tesla Graveyard.” If you don’t make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple. I’m not kidding.
Handelsblatt: Do you take Apple’s ambitions seriously?
Musk: Did you ever take a look at the Apple Watch? (laughs) No, seriously: It’s good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction. But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can’t just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car. But for Apple, the car is the next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation. A new pencil or a bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough.
Yet another person who should know better being dismissive of Apple. Remember when cell phone manufacturers said it’s not easy to make a phone and that Apple couldn’t just walk in and take over? How’d that work out for them?
Obviously the iPhone is infinitely worse than any current DSLR for stills but surprisingly it appears to be a far better video camera than my $3000 DSLR when there is enough light present.
With the Apple-designed A9 chip in your iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus, you are getting the most advanced smartphone chip in the world. Every chip we ship meets Apple’s highest standards for providing incredible performance and deliver great battery life, regardless of iPhone 6s capacity, color, or model.
Certain manufactured lab tests which run the processors with a continuous heavy workload until the battery depletes are not representative of real-world usage, since they spend an unrealistic amount of time at the highest CPU performance state. It’s a misleading way to measure real-world battery life. Our testing and customer data show the actual battery life of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, even taking into account variable component differences, vary within just 2-3% of each other.
Academy Award-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin uses actual events to take the audience on an imagined — as in, fictional — series of fast-paced exchanges in the minutes before the curtain would rise on the introduction of each product.
But the writer and director weren’t looking to create a biopic that rigidly adhered to the details of Jobs’s life — rather, they wanted to create an “impressionistic portrait” that drew from real-life events.
The story is populated by events that never happened — such as a dramatic reimagining of preparations for the Mac’s demo in which it blows up in rehearsal, instead of declaring, “Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag” — and long, stinging exchanges that aren’t drawn from any of the six biographies written about Jobs.
I’ll still see the movie but will be disappointed if only because I would have preferred more “reality”. Steve Jobs was such a fascinating person that his life story, in my opinion, doesn’t need the kinds of embellishments described in this review.
Lightroom for mobile on iOS can now be used locally on your phone or tablet without the desktop Lightroom app, without a Creative Cloud Photography Plan subscription and even without an Adobe ID. The same feature is coming soon to Android.
This move is part of an overall desire to broaden the audience. By letting people use Lightroom for mobile without Creative Cloud, Adobe is making the app competitive with other popular standalone photo editing apps like Snapseed or Pixelmator’s mobile version.
I use and love the desktop version of Lightroom and this will be another tool I can use when I’m out and about using my iPad.
