Mikey Campbell, writing for Apple Insider:

It seems rumors that claimed Apple conducted research into an “iRing” wearable product were based in reality, as a new patent application reveals work on a finger-mounted device stuffed with microphones, motion sensors, a haptic feedback system, biometric sensors, cameras and even a small display.

Mac shrinks to phone, phone shrinks to watch, watch shrinks to ring. A natural progression.

Arthur Neslen, writing for The Guardian:

Independent lab tests have found that some Samsung TVs in Europe appear to use less energy during official testing conditions than they do during real-world use, raising questions about whether they are set up to game energy efficiency tests.

The European commission says it will investigate any allegations of cheating the tests and has pledged to tighten energy efficiency regulations to outlaw the use of so-called “defeat devices” in TVs or other consumer products, after several EU states raised similar concerns.

Remind you of anything?

The apparent discrepancy between real-world and test performance of the TVs is reminiscent of the VW scandal that originated in the US last week. The car company has admitted fitting software to 11m diesel vehicles worldwide which meant the cars produced less pollution during testing than real-world driving.

Harrumph.

[H/T Robert Davey]

That is one long list.

Brian X. Chen, writing for the New York Times:

In the first test, we recorded the data sizes of the 50 most popular news websites with and without ad blockers enabled. We used those figures to calculate approximate page load times on a 4G mobile network.

In the second test, which was designed to measure battery life, we compiled a custom iPhone app to cycle through dozens of popular websites in an endless loop. We then timed how long it took the battery to completely drain from our phone with and without ads.

Some of the results:

The benefits of ad blockers stood out the most when loading the Boston.com website. With ads, that home page on average measured 19.4 megabytes; with ads removed using Crystal or Purify, it measured four megabytes, and with 1Blocker, it measured 4.5 megabytes. On a 4G network, this translated to the page taking 39 seconds to load with ads and eight seconds to load without ads.

In another example, the home page of The Los Angeles Times measured 5.7 megabytes with ads. After shedding ads, that dropped to 1.6 megabytes with Crystal and 1.9 megabytes with Purify and 1Blocker. On a 4G network, the page took 11 seconds to load with ads and four seconds to load without ads.

Loading times for The New York Times were also faster with ad blocking software. The home page of NYTimes.com measured 3.7 megabytes when loaded with ads and took seven seconds to load; Purify shaved the size down to 2.1 megabytes and cut the loading time to four seconds.

And Chen’s ultimate conclusion:

As for me, the test results spurred me to keep Purify enabled on my iPhone. While I’m browsing, the app lets me easily denote a website whose ads I want to allow to be shown, an action known as “whitelisting.”

That means the websites I enjoy visiting that have slimmer ads — like TheGuardian.com, and, ahem, NYTimes.com — will be whitelisted. But sites saddled with ads that belong in digital fat camp will remain blocked for the sake of my data plan.

Zane Lowe used to work for Ben Cooper and Radio 1 before he left to help create Beats 1 for Apple. Now they’ve gotten together again, on stage at the Radio Festival in London.

Here are a few snippets from Music Week’s transcription of their conversation.

On signing with Apple:

I was at my kitchen table with my wife and my manager. And Apple do contracts really nicely – real attention to detail. I signed it and [laughs] my manager took a photo, it was so funny, I was like [strikes classic new centre forward signing pose]. He said, What shall we do with this? And I was like, Nothing! Don’t let anyone see that. Ever! It was cool, it was a moment.

On music as a core value of Beats 1:

What works in America might not work in Tokyo and might not work in Mexico City.

But we know Tokyo and Mexico City love Beats 1, so we’ve found a language that is common, and I believe that language is music. I loved waking up and listening to a good breakfast show when I was living in London, but every time I hear someone talk to a reality TV star, or talk about what’s in the papers, you’re off message from what I want, which is music. So I put the spotlight entirely on music. I’m bringing it back to music every single time. Because that’s what I know and that’s what Trent Reznor and Jimmy Iovine and Eddy Cue told me to do: We’re here for music, it’s about music, focus in music, play great music and make as much noise as you possibly can for music.

On measuring success:

When I said to Apple, What is success? Because I come from a ratings system where I’m told I’m either up or down. Is that what we’re gonna do? Are you gonna give it to me every day? They said, No, we have our way of dealing with numbers. Apple don’t share numbers. So I said, How do I find out? They said, Noise. Go out and make as much noise as you can, and that’s what we’ve been doing. You said some rightful things about the job you’re doing at the BBC, so allow me one: we are loud as fuck right now. Maybe our meter isn’t an abacus, maybe our meter is a volume meter.

And yes, we have data, we’re Apple, they probably have some data for me on the percentage of what I’ve said is right or wrong straight after this, but the point is that Beats 1 is there to create noise for music. We work with incredibly exciting DJs and amazing artists. We gave 70% of the station’s real estate to artists and said, You do it. You do it. And by the way, artist-led radio is an opportunity, not an invention.

Lots more to this. Great read. Full of little insights into the birth of Beats 1.

Just one example:

The Pink ghost, known as Pinky, is programmed to try and land on the space 16 pixels (or two tiles in front) of Pac-Man to ambush him. However, due to “overflow error” in the game’s code, if Pac-Man is facing upwards, Pinky will instead attempted to land on the space 4 tiles in front of him and 4 tiles to the left. Interestingly, because Pinky is programmed to always be ahead of Pac-Man, you can usually make her stop chasing you by heading straight for her.

Loved every bit of this.

Arnold Frisch, writing for Seeking Alpha [Free reg-wall]:

Toyota put the first Prius vehicles on sale in Japan in 1997. Since then, including all of the Prius varieties, they have sold 5,300,000 vehicles for approximately $115 billion. This does not include the hybrid Camry and the Toyota and Lexus SUVs. But it took them seven years before they were able to break the barrier and sell 126,000 cars in 2004 (for about $2.8 billion).

And:

Tesla delivered their sports car starting in 2008 and continued deliveries until 2012 when they introduced the Model S. There were only 2,500 sports cars delivered (at $100,000+ each) and the Model S volume was at 75,000 in June 2015 (at an average price of about $85,000). Tesla’s total vehicle sales as of June 2015 were around $6.6 billion. However, they have just started to deliver their SUV and low-cost vehicles are scheduled for delivery starting next year. They also have gone into a sideline, selling battery storage systems for solar collectors. I reference a very good review of the latest variant of the Model S.

So, it took seven years after introduction for Toyota to get into the billion-dollar per year club, and it also took Tesla about seven years.

And:

But there is no argument over the fact that neither Toyota nor Tesla made any money at this for at least six or seven years.

Apple committed to about four years of development work involving 1,800 people – probably at a cost approaching $2 billion per year.

The math is certainly not exact, but if indeed Apple is intent on building, shipping, and selling a vehicle in 2019, it could be (adds seven years in his head) 2026 before they sell enough vehicles to cover their yearly costs.

On a side note, if you tap over to the Prius Wikipedia page, scroll about halfway down, you’ll see the year-by-year worldwide Prius sales numbers. This is, obviously, a very small sample size and a different era, but it is interesting to see these two examples to get even the slightest taste of what’s in store for Apple’s rumored vehicle.

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Google Inc (GOOGL.O) have agreed to bury all patent infringement litigation against each other, the companies announced on Wednesday, settling 18 cases in the United States and Germany.

Interesting.

Some very interesting changes in how Windows is installed in Boot Camp on OS X 10.11 “El Capitan”. When you open Boot Camp Assistant on a new Mac that supports Windows 8 or later, you’ll get the new Boot Camp interface.

Good information if you use Boot Camp.

Nobody’s home has perfect acoustics, and we don’t want to adapt our lives around our speakers. Your speakers should sound great, wherever you choose to put them. So, we decided to make them adapt to the environment around you. We call this Trueplay. Sonos speakers already sound fantastic, but Trueplay brings you even closer to how music should sound. With Trueplay tuning, your speaker can analyze the acoustic profile of any room and fine-tune itself. Most importantly, tuning with Trueplay is incredibly easy to do.

This sounds really impressive. I love Sonos products and can’t wait to hear this.

Sometimes I just love Gruber.

A few days later, we got an email from Apple informing us that we violated their terms and conditions—and the offending developer account had been banned. Unfortunately, iFixit’s app was tied to that same account, so Apple pulled the app as well. Their justification was that we had taken “actions that may hinder the performance or intended use of the App Store, B2B Program, or the Program.”

Live and learn.

Well yeah, it’s an unreleased product that’s meant for developers to make apps and test on. Nobody is allowed to post information about it. I have a hard time believing they didn’t see this coming.

Jim and Dan talk about today’s release of Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan!), iOS 9.0.2, Dan’s new iPhone 6s, 3D Touch, the awesomeness of Siri, and a new age of computing.

Brought to you by Braintree (To learn more, and for your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go to braintreepayments.com/amplified) and Squarespace (Visit the link and use the code GUITARS for a free trial and 10% off your first purchase).

Built on a new, modernized foundation and compatible with Mac OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan,’ TextWrangler 5.0 introduces newly overhauled systems for Find Differences and syntax coloring. In addition, TextWrangler 5.0 introduces new built-in support for EditorConfig and adds dozens of other enhancements and new features.

I love Bare Bones Software. I’ve been using their products for 20 years.

iFixIt:

Over the weekend some brave Apple fans introduced their new iPhones to a life aquatic. The phones didn’t always emerge unscathed, but the overall trend is clear: the 6s and 6s Plus are dramatically less prone to liquid damage than their predecessors.

So, what changed? After disassembling a couple of new iPhones in the name of science, here’s what we found.

Remember, “dramatically less prone to liquid damage” does not mean “waterproof”. You still need to be very careful about getting your expensive electronics wet but it’s good to see Apple is taking baby steps towards helping the clumsy among us not damage our phones.

If you’ve got any interest in web development, take Safari’s Responsive Design Mode for a spin. Good to know it’s there.

To enter Safari’s Responsive Design Mode, select Develop > Enter Responsive Design Mode. As you’d expect, to exit, select Develop > Exit Responsive Design Mode.

Noelle Egner, posting on the official Box blog:

This morning, we kicked off BoxWorks 2015 with a fireside chat between Box CEO Aaron Levie and Apple CEO Tim Cook. Over the course of their broad-ranging conversation, Aaron and Tim covered everything from Apple’s big weekend (“13 million phones sold!”) to climate change (“It’s real”). Below are five of the best moments from the fireside.

As I already mentioned (in this post), Tim’s big comment was the goal of keeping OS X and iOS separate. But this comment also stood out:

If you’re a CIO, you want to do business with someone who’s part of an ecosystem, not someone who’s on an island somewhere. The island days are gone.

From CultOfMac’s liveblog of Tim Cook’s on-stage interview at Box’s BoxWorks Conference:

We don’t believe in having one operating system for both mobile and PCs. Like Microsoft,” he said. “We think it [detracts] from both. We have no intention to blend them.”

Tim said a lot of interesting things during his chat, but this is clearly a highlight comment. Tim made it clear that OS X has a future (good to know, especially on the eve of El Capitan’s release) and he also took a tiny swipe at Microsoft (Windows on everything).

Interesting.

Terrific job by Rene Ritchie. Lots to absorb here, definitely worth the read.

Don’t miss the big chart that lays out the major features of every version of OS X since the very first release, code-named Cheetah.

I remember working at Metrowerks back then, on a Cheetah beta, trying to wrap my head around the huge leap from Mac OS to this jarring, new-fangled OS Steve Jobs seemed intent on forcing down our throats. A sea-change. But ultimately, far superior in every way. Smart guy.

From the Techdirt blog:

We get it. Many of you really hate online advertising. And, indeed, there’s often a good reason for that. The ads can be irrelevant, intrusive and annoying. And, in some cases, they can even be dangerous, as scammers or those with malicious intent slip bad code into ad networks in order to wreak havoc on visitors’ computers. So here’s a deal: if you don’t want to see display/banner ads on Techdirt any more you don’t need to. Just go to your preferences page (whether you have an account or are just browsing without a login) and click the button saying you want to disable ads. And, that’s it. No more network display ads.

Fascinating idea. Good for them. If every site followed this lead, we could tune out the ads that offended, send back a clear message to the advertisers.

Mike Shields, writing for the Wall Street Journal, pulled together this fascinating interview with Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association of sorts for the advertising industry.

Some core comments from Rothenberg:

There is a real issue. I’m not worried because the marketing and media value chain has shown remarkable resilience. There is a natural human need to have businesses proposition you with goods and services and vice versa. You need to have that communication. I’m really not worried about whether advertising will be able to find its way through digital channels. I am concerned — very, very concerned — that costs of ads will go up and up and up from this unethical obstruction.

On the cause of this problem:

There is a fair amount of shared responsibility here. We have definitely, definitely over time gummed up the advertising experience and Web pages with all kinds of analytics and pixels and tags and all kinds of things. The more we are able to do with advertising on the Web, the more it contributes to the problem. So this is absolutely something the industry can address and should address.

On potential legal action:

We’ve examined this, and there are some pretty good legal principles here. So that might be a course of action. Maybe. Certainly nothing aimed at consumers. That would be a bad idea. In terms of the software companies, nothing is imminent.

One thing that frustrates the hell out of me is that these companies are ad-blocking profiteers. They are trying to divert a portion of brands’ spending to line their own pockets.

Read the rest. It’s fascinating. Always good to see both sides of an issue, but Rothenberg seems blind to the real problem. He seems to see it as ad blockers taking money from his client’s pockets. This is not a chicken and egg problem. We know which came first. If ads were helpful or, at worst, innocuous, this issue wouldn’t exist.

Take responsibility for the problem, apologize, vow to do better, than do better. Anything short of that is self-serving.

From Apple’s press release:

Apple® today announced that Apple Music™, iTunes® Movies and iBooks® are now available to customers in China. Apple Music combines an extensive and diverse music library with the knowledge of world-class music experts who have programmed playlists and radio stations just for you. Launching with millions of songs in its catalog, Apple Music in China features music from artists including Eason Chan, Li Ronghao, JJ Lin and G.E.M., as well as a wide range of international artists including Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and many more. Fans can also rent or purchase movies from a great selection of Chinese studios as well as Hollywood blockbusters on the iTunes Store®, in addition to enjoying paid and free books from the iBooks Store℠. For the first time, customers in China will have access to Apple’s entertainment ecosystem with music, movies and books right at their fingertips.

“Customers in China love the App Store and have made it our largest market in the world for app downloads,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “One of the top requests has been more great content and we’re thrilled to bring music, movies and books to China, curated by a local team of experts.”

Following their established pattern, Chinese Apple Music fans get a free, three-month trial membership, priced at 10 RMB/month for an individual plan, 15 RMB/month for a (up to six member) family plan.

The RMB, or renminbi, is the official currency of China. You can read about it here.

This is pretty cool. I just downloaded it on my Mac and setup was very easy—using the iPhone as a client was simply entering my email address into the app. I wonder if they’ll have an app for the new Apple TV.

Andrew Cunningham & Lee Hutchinson did a massively comprehensive job filling John Siracusa’s reviewer shoes. This is going to take a while to process.