The Sony Xperia M4 Aqua sounds amazing. Its rounded edges look sleek. It’s waterproof. It has a 13-megapixel camera with Superior Auto, which, according to the company, means the phone “recognizes 52 different scenarios and automatically configures the optimal settings—so you don’t have to.” Finally, an end to the era in which humans, like common animals, had to do all their own scenario recognition.
As with so many smartphones, though, very few people will ever see the Xperia M4 Aqua, let alone own it. Even after spending billions of dollars and overhauling its leadership to refocus on the devices, Sony has fallen out of the top 10 in smartphone sales. (The company declined to comment.) It’s a common story for dozens of flagging manufacturers, toiling at what has become one of the most brutally competitive businesses on the planet. Unless you’re Apple or Samsung, “you can’t make money in phones,” says Roger Kay, head of consultant Endpoint Technologies Associates. So why keep trying?
And:
Together, Apple and Samsung account for more than one in three smartphones sold, data compiled by Bloomberg show. More important, Apple vacuums up more than 90 percent of the profits in the business, and Samsung takes most of what’s left. That leaves crumbs for the half-dozen other big smartphone manufacturers, plus a sea of upstarts.
Go back four years to 2011, and HTC was the world’s biggest phone maker, the writing was on the wall for Apple. Doomed again.
Something has to be done with drones. I’m sure that most people use common sense when operating a drone, but there are those that fly too close to airports, interfere with fire fighting efforts, and generally make a nuisance of themselves.
Nearly six years have passed since Microsoft began opening retail outlets patterned after Apple’s blockbuster retail locations. However, the now 116 Microsoft Stores are still a pale imitation to Apple’s own retail network of 460 locations, often featuring more employees than customers as the firm’s products have failed to excite and attract buyers.
This was a sad attempt to copy Apple’s success and it didn’t work. Microsoft under Ballmer tried to copy Apple in a number of ways and they all failed miserably.
Om Malik had a fascinating conversation with Liam Casey, the founder of PCH International. Om says that “Liam’s insights would be useful for a lot of founders,” and I agree.
Jim and Dan talk about the Microsoft event as it relates to Microsoft’s goal of one OS on every device and computer. They also discuss Dan’s new iPad Air 2 and how he’s using it for code, Jim’s copycat rage, and more.
The first Pill has sold more than a million units since its debut in 2012. Though it’s a hit, it’s gotten long in the tooth and the audio quality is really poor. That makes the Pill the perfect thing to tear down and rebuild. (Also, Bluetooth speakers are way easier than headphones.)
The result, the Beats Pill+, sounds much better, looks much better, and is a far more enticing product than its predecessor. It’s more than just a new piece of mobile candy. It’s an opportunity for Apple to show the extent to which it can shape the design of hardware coming out of its subsidiary.
We won’t know for sure until reviewers get units in hand for testing but the early comments from the Beats demo sound promising. I don’t read anything that makes me want to give up my Libratone Zipp speaker though.
We stumbled upon the Steve Jobs “Think Different” marketing campaign speech in light of the new movie release this weekend. As animators, we were really struck when he paused for a good while before he said “… marketing… is about values.” We could see in his body that this thought weighed on him. And, in fact, that thought would determine the direction of Apple for the next two decades.For Jobs, Apple was not about “making boxes for people to get their jobs done.” He and his executive team needed to be about something more. They needed to think beyond the equipment… beyond the dollars, toward something more. They needed to live in service to a higher calling. It’s hard to hear this speech without being moved. Not just because we are hearing a speech from a dead man, but because we know what Steve Jobs is saying is true. Our studio was challenged by this very real moment. Were we just clocking in and clocking out? Were we living from dollar to dollar? Or, were we working for something more?
Influencer marketing thrives on this same idea of standing for something more. It’s not just about pushing a product; it’s about aligning with values that people care about. Audiences aren’t interested in influencers who clock in and clock out, only promoting brands for a paycheck. They want authenticity, a connection that feels genuine. A leading tiktok agency, for example, understands that successful campaigns are built on this principle. It’s about creating a narrative where the brand and the influencer both stand for something bigger, something that resonates deeply with their audience. Seamlessly connect creators, brands, and influencers through the Amazon affiliate network. Additionally, to understand customers more efficiently, it’s important to utilize an email software for better organization.
I’ve seen this video before but the folks at ideaMachine Studio did some great work in cleaning it up. I may be a bit too cynical and jaded to attribute as much to the speech as they do but I certainly believe the sentiment is in Apple’s DNA. They don’t just want to make money. They really do want to change the world.
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Twitter’s strength has always been hosting conversations around live events, but it’s not always easy to find them. Doing so often requires some savvy, juggling multiple tabs within Twitter’s app—not to mention knowing the right hashtags and accounts to follow.
Moments is designed to untangle some of these complexities by relying on curation to surface such conversations. Both Twitter’s staff and its partners—including NASA, Major League Baseball, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and BuzzFeed—will package tweets into collections, which will show up under a new tab called Moments.
I don’t know if I’d describe “Twitter’s strength” in that way but anything Twitter can do to make the service “less confusing” to new users is good for the company and will help keep the investor wolves from their door. Personally, I don’t find Twitter all that confusing but then again, I’ve been using it from the beginning. Am I wrong? Is Twitter confusing for new users?
Over the past six months, I’ve moved all my calendaring over to Fantastical from Flexibits. The one missing piece for me was the lack of an Apple Watch complication. On the Apple Watch, the complication is an area of the watch face given over to another function or app. For example, a watch face might feature a complication that shows the alarm status (mine shows that my alarm is set for 7am).
Today, Flexibits released a bunch of new shiny, including a new version of their Apple Watch app that includes a complication, so I can finally see my Fantastical calendar events on my watch. Huzzah!
There is way more new stuff than just the complication (new versions of Fantastical for iPhone and Mac, filled to the brim with new features). Make your way over to the web site to learn more.
Caitlin McGarry, writing for MacWorld, pulled together this interview with the director and creator of Steve Jobs.
Interesting that the current IMDB score for the movie is 6.5, but the metascore is 80/100. Usually, when there is a disparity like this, it goes the other way (low metascore, high IMDB score).
From the interview, here’s Boyle:
One of the things that’s really interesting about the film is this idea that Woz actually says [in the movie]: “You can be decent and gifted at the same time. It’s not binary.” That idea hangs over the whole film in a way. Everybody knows how [Jobs] did behave, that he was a difficult guy, especially to some people. For reasons you see in the film, he explains why he’s like that: that he wants A players, and B players discourage the A players. He was brutal in explaining it, and also brutal on himself. It’s not like he was swanning off. He pushed himself, clearly.
And Sorkin:
When you’re writing a character like this, it’s important for the writer not to judge the character. I have to be able to defend the character. I like to write the character as if they’re making their case to God as to why they should be allowed into heaven. I think that for whatever reason, deep down Steve felt that he was irreparably damaged in some way and was not worthy of being liked or loved.
Steve had this talent to wrangle other talented people to make these devices and machines that were not only successful commercially, but we have an emotional relationship with them. We love these things. That’s why it was important to him that rectangles have rounded corners and that money be spent on fonts and things like that. For Steve, mission accomplished in that regard. The only person that that wasn’t going to work on was his own daughter [Lisa Brennan-Jobs]. From a father, you’re looking for something else. That was what the movie was about.
Read the whole thing. Fascinating to see the film creator’s take on this. Lots of controversy around this film.
Recently Tweetbot 4 was released as a cross-platform update that’ll work on iPad & iPhone. Right now (at 50% off), it’s a $4.99/£3.99 app. Regardless of whether you bought the old Tweetbot recently, or at all.
Some people were pretty angry about this
I can understand people not wanting to pay for a piece of software when there are free alternatives. I can understand people not wanting to pay for an update if they feel the value of the update is just not worth the cost.
What I cannot understand is someone getting upset about a developer charging for an update.
Developers have mouths to feed, bills to pay. If someone builds a wonderful piece of software (Tweetbot definitely fits in this category), perhaps it helps to think of it as you supporting that developer. Paying for their app or update is you helping that developer keep the doors open.
Scott Knaster, aside from being an aspiring actor, professional Mad Magazine collector, and wonderfully entertaining writer, was actually once an Apple employee, back when the Mac was being born (1983-1990).
So when the folks behind the new Steve Jobs movie wanted a reality check on the portrayal of Apple’s early days, they came to Scott.
Last January the Steve Jobs movie came to town and called me up.
I was leaving work one day when I got a phone call from a guy named Todd Marks. He said he was on the crew of a new movie about Steve Jobs. He said they’re filming a scene that’s the public intro of the Mac in 1984. They heard I was there at the original event, and they wanted to talk to me about what was going on that day. Cool! I said sure, I’d come by.
Read on. Interesting to see this side of the movie business, especially where it concerns this movie.
Wish there was a way to run Dark Castle on this puppy.
And my wish was granted. If you’ve never heard of Dark Castle, here’s a Wiki.
As before, I couldn’t get the emulator to recognize taps on my iOS device, so run this on your Mac. To get started, be sure to click the Info button and read through all the screens to get a sense of the gameplay. On my setup, the standard “asd” movement keys got translated to “456”, and the mouse cursor/throwing mechanic took a bit of play to get the hang of, but after all this time, Dark Castle is still a hugely fun game.
Juli Clover, writing for Mac Rumors, about this Periscope session with Disney artists and the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil:
In the Periscope, Ranjo was impressed with the grip of the iPad Pro’s screen when used with the Pencil, and he also was a fan of the palm rejection features. When drawing on an iPad Pro, the palm of a hand can be rested on the screen, but it’s still responsive to zoom gestures. At the end of the video, which is well worth watching to see the iPad in action, he says “Let’s order a bunch of them.”
Jim, let’s order a bunch of them, too!
If you have a few minutes, watch the Periscope session. Fantastic to see the iPad Pro and Pencil and the Disney artists, at work. Riveting.
If you have a web site, your default pin is the first letter of your web site name (L for loopinsight.com, D for daringfireball.net, etc.)
Turns out, it’s very easy to create your own custom pin icon (Click here to open a CNN page, or here to open a NYTimes page, then drag the tab to the left to see their custom pins.)
Jason Mark (no relation, at least not that we’ve figured out yet) pulled together the details in this post.
In a nutshell, build a single color SVG file, save it on your server, reference it in your site header. Simple!
We’ve been working hard on getting The Loop Magazine updated for iOS 9, but we’ve added a couple of nice features too. We’ve updated the entire backend of the magazine, so things should be much faster for everyone.
My favorite feature is a new universal search. You can now type in a keyword and it will search every published issue of the magazine. Just tap on the result and it will take you right to the story.
In addition, Issue 35 was published today with looking at the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, 3D Touch, watch OS 2, iPad Pro, Apple TV from a gamer’s perspective, Wearable health reminders, and more.
Another issue of the magazine is almost ready to go and will focus on Apple Music.
“In this respect, Apple has been its own worst enemy,” he said. “This lack of cooperation has cast an unnecessary shadow over meaningful progress in developing a comprehensive and effective antitrust compliance program.”
Perhaps Apple, like many of us, are still wondering how the hell Amazon gets away with so much, without any punishment.
M.G. Siegler, writing for Medium, about Amazon’s decision to not carry the new Apple TV, Google’s Chromecast:
Amazon apparently doesn’t want to sell Apple TVs or Google Chromecasts because they have their own device, the Fire TV/Stick, which does much of the same thing as those two. More importantly, they have their own streaming service, through Prime, which neither of those devices currently support.
Maybe this is a play to ensure those devices support the Prime streaming service (with a sweetheart deal, no doubt). Or maybe these are in fact the first shots fired in a new battle on the content side of things. Maybe it’s not NBC, CBS, ABC, ESPN, HBO, Showtime, etc, we should be worrying about. Maybe it’s Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and the like.
And:
So we’re stuck in a world where in order to get all the content you want you need at least two, and perhaps even three set-top boxes in your living room. You need some combination of a cable box and a Roku/Apple TV/Fire TV/Chromecast/Xbox/Playstation.
Is this move by Amazon a short term bump in the road to ensure their content is properly supported? Or is this Amazon creating another walled ecosystem?
The company’s leaders, Nicolas Pinto and Zak Stone, are both established AI researchers who specialize in developing image-recognition systems using deep learning. Deep learning is an approach to artificial intelligence that lets computers learn to identify and classify sensory input.
And:
Perceptio’s goals were to develop techniques to run AI image-classification systems on smartphones, without having to draw from large external repositories of data. That fits Apple’s strategy of trying to minimize its usage of customer data and do as much processing as possible on the device.
I see this as a huge leap forward for Apple’s Photos app, adding a Google Photos level of search without accumulating data from those photos back on the main server.
One of the benefits of Google Photos is the ability to search for elements within a photo without the requirement of tagging. For example, you can ask Google Photos to search one of your photo albums for all pictures containing cats.
Google Photos does this by running an image analysis on all your photos, automatically generating tags for each photo, keeping the information from your photos on their servers for use in your searches (good) and for other purposes (not so good).
Apple’s current Photos app does allow you to manually tag your photos, and does do some semi-automated facial recognition. Seems to me, this acquisition will allow Apple to leapfrog Google’s efforts, performing similar automated image analysis, but on-device without requiring data about your personal pictures to make a trip back to the company servers.
Apple continues to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to its commitment to privacy.
Via a third-party distributor, Avnet, Apple is now selling authorized lugs for the Apple Watch that accessory makers can use in their own bands for the device.
The lugs are all stainless steel, and come with the phrase “Made for Apple Watch” etched on them. 38- and 42-millimeter versions are available in lots of 25 or 200. Costs range between $278.75 for 25 38-millimeter lugs, to $1,866 for 200 42-millimeter units.
That’s a cost of $9.18 per for 200 38-millimeter lug sets, and $9.33 per for 200 42-millimeter lug sets.
Bands must conform to Apple’s official design guidelines, which dictate not just dimensions but criteria like materials, durability, and functionality. Accessory makers will also likely have to buy one of Avnet’s pentalobe screwdrivers, which are $12.65 apiece.
Between the new wave of MFi Apple Watch bands this will enable, and Apple Watch’s move to Target, this should only be good news for Apple Watch sales numbers.
There are a lot of terrific new features in OS X El Capitan. But given how much time I spend reading in Safari, my current favorite is tab pinning. If you are an old hand at this, move along, nothing to see here.
New to El Capitan? Give this a try:
Open up a new window
Open up your favorite web site
Click the site’s tab (the area under the title bar, to the left of the +) and drag it to the left until it turns into a mini tab, then release it. You’ll need to be within about half an inch of the left edge of the window for the pin mechanism to kick in.
The tab will be marked with the site’s mini icon, typically in the form of a single letter (the Loop is an L, Daring Fireball a D, the New York Times a fancy T).
Open a few more sites, drag them to the left, until you’ve got 3 or 4 tabs pinned on the left.
To revisit one of the pinned sites, click on its tab. To expand a tab, drag it back to the right. Easy peasy.
But the real value of tabs doesn’t emerge until you do this:
With a few tabs pinned to the left, open a new Safari window.
Your pinned tabs will be pinned in the new window, too.
I find this incredibly useful when I am making my way through my morning site visits. As I find stories I want to read in depth and, perhaps, comment on in The Loop, I accumulate those tabs, pinning them as I go. A pinned tab takes up very little tab bar real estate and let’s me keep a few unpinned tabs to work with as I work on a specific story.
So much for “Do No Evil.” There’s no technological reason the 991/2 doesn’t have Android Auto playing through its massively upgraded PCM system. But there is an ethical one. As part of the agreement an automaker would have to enter with Google, certain pieces of data must be collected and mailed back to Mountain View, California. Stuff like vehicle speed, throttle position, coolant and oil temp, engine revs—basically Google wants a complete OBD2 dump whenever someone activates Android Auto. Not kosher, says Porsche. Obviously, this is “off the record,” but Porsche feels info like that is the secret sauce that makes its cars special. Moreover, giving such data to a multi-billion dollar corporation that’s actively building a car, well, that ain’t good, either. Apple, by way of stark contrast, only wants to know if the car is moving while Apple Play is in use. Makes you wonder about all the other OEMs who have agreed to Google’s requests/demands, no?
Two different core approaches to privacy, now playing out in the marketplace.
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Earlier today, we posted about a report from Palo Alto Networks about YiSpector, iOS malware that was said to attack non-jailbroken iOS devices.
We reached out to Apple for comment and they responded with this statement:
“This issue only impacts users on older versions of iOS who have also downloaded malware from untrusted sources. We addressed this specific issue in iOS 8.4 and we have also blocked the identified apps that distribute this malware. We encourage customers to stay current with the latest version of iOS for the latest security updates. We also encourage them to only download from trusted sources like the App Store and pay attention to any warnings as they download apps.”
Bottom line, sounds like this may have been an issue in the past, that Apple has already added the safeguards to deal with YiSpecter back in the iOS 8.4 release, and that if you download your apps from the App Store, you’ll be safe.
Matt is in a unique position to write about this debate:
I’m on both sides of this debate.
Let’s get the obvious argument out of the way: if you block ads, you’re depriving sites of revenue they presumably need in order to continue running, and if too many people do that, those sites are likely to go away. The reality is more complicated, but the argument is essentially sound – all other things being equal, and unchanged.
