Apple:

The moment you use iPhone 6s, you know you’ve never felt anything like it. With just a single press, 3D Touch lets you do more than ever before. Live Photos bring your memories to life in a powerfully vivid way. And that’s just the beginning. Take a deeper look at iPhone 6s, and you’ll find innovation on every level.

The Financial Times asked this morning, before the Apple Event had even started, “Is Apple running out of innovation for the iPhone?” I think that question has been answered. Plus, the new installment plans are going to put iPhones in the hands of even more people.

Yesterday, Jim posted a link to the Wristly State of the Apple Watch report.

Since then, Wristly has posted this infographic that lays out the details of the report graphically. Take a look.

Jeff Carlson lays out 6 somewhat hidden features in the OS X Photos applications. I knew most of them, but as always with these sorts of posts, the real value was in the ones I didn’t know. Nice job, Jeff.

An excellent find by Jeff Benjamin, over at iDownloadBlog. This eBay auction adds $100 to your iTunes balance for $75. You can buy multiple copies.

Does it work? Yes. I bought two of them, total of $150, now have an iTunes balance of $200.

You have to use PayPal to buy these. According to the auction page, supplies are limited. Interesting promotion.

Gee, does this graphic look even slightly familiar? Stay classy, Sony.

Oh, and in case you are wondering, the binary in the graphic translates to:

Game on.

Cause PlayStation and new Apple TV.

[Via the always excellent not Jony Ive]

Thomas Gryta and Ryan Knudson, writing for the Wall Street Journal, lay out the complex maze of upgrade options should you choose to buy in to a new iPhone.

The new phone isn’t expected to include many major changes, but the days of the $200 upfront payment for the latest model are mostly over. Consumers now have a dizzying array of options for getting the new device, even if they aren’t thinking about switching wireless carriers.

Sprint Corp. and T-Mobile US Inc. have leasing plans that can run as low as $15 a month. Verizon Communications Inc. recently stopped offering contract plans to new customers and expects that about 60% of its smartphone sales in the third quarter will be on installment purchase plans, up from 18% in the second quarter of 2014. AT&T Inc. sold 68% of its iPhones on installment plans for the three months ended June 30.

Customers who have contracts and don’t want to switch carriers generally can still upgrade their iPhone for $200 at AT&T, Sprint or Verizon. T-Mobile doesn’t offer contracts at all. But installment plans and leasing options will be upfront in the marketing around Apple’s newest device this fall.

The carriers advertise the installment plans as money-saving, but the differences can be small. At AT&T, for instance, a 24-month installment plan for a single smartphone with 5 gigabytes of data a month costs about $2,448. With a two-year contract plan, the cost of that phone with data is about $2,359, not including taxes and fees.

The array of options is truly dizzying. Read on for more details. Here’s a link to an accompanying infographic that helps make some sense from the madness.

Well, we’re here.

Later today we’ll find out what Apple has up its collective sleeve. A new iPhone (or two)? A big screen iPad? A new iPad mini? A new Apple TV, along with App Store and gaming remote/controller? Official release of iOS 9, OS X El Capitan, and watchOS 2? A whole raft of Siri improvements?

All of these things have been rumored. We’ll find out soon enough.

Watch the live stream at 10 am PDT (1p ET) on Apple’s event site or on the Apple Events channel on your Apple TV.

Wristly on Tuesday released its market research report on Apple Watch “era 1.0,” which is the time before WatchOS 2.0 is released. There are some fascinating findings in the report that tackle everything from whether or not respondents will purchase another band to their satisfaction with the watch. Interestingly, satisfaction for the watch is higher than that of iPad or iPhone.

Thanks to SVALT for sponsoring The Loop this week. SVALT D Performance Cooling Dock unleashes your productivity through active cooling that increases the performance of Apple Laptops.

Polygon:

For many arcades, though, it’s a balancing act between old technology and modern business models. To stay afloat, the money has to come from somewhere, and arcades are adapting in different ways to continue to survive in the ever-changing economic landscape. By looking at four arcades — a traditional arcade, two arcade bars, and a national chain — we were able to see how well that balance is maintained, and how sometimes it isn’t quite balanced at all.

It must be the very definition of “labour of love” to run an arcade in 2015. I spent far too much time in them as a kid and still, when I see one in a mall, I wander in to see and remember.

Little Things:

How to convince eager drivers not to text while driving? Prove it to them in an unexpected way. See how these student drivers react when they’re told they can only pass on one condition.

The only way they’ll earn their license? “You must prove you’re able to use your mobile phone while driving.”

Great video proving to new drivers that they can’t do what they think they can do. As a motorcyclist, I see texting and driving all the time and it literally puts my life in danger. Anything anyone can do to prevent it is generally OK with me. Thanks to my friend Vito Mori for the link

CNET editor Seamus Byrne, via Twitter:

Oh my. Peak Apple. Someone is queuing in Sydney before THEY HAVE EVEN ANNOUNCED ANYTHING!!!

With a picture. Peak Apple indeed.

Instagram user Umi0407 posted these images. Fantastic.

Kirk McElhearn, on the iTunes Apple Music cache:

If you use Apple Music on your computer, you’ll find that the more you listen to music, the more your hard drive’s free space dwindles. Even if you don’t save music for offline listening, iTunes stores what you listen to in a cache. There’s a good reason for this: when you listen to something again, you don’t have to re-download it.

However, if you listen to a lot of different music, and don’t have a lot of disk space, then you may find that your free space is shrinking. It’s easy to clear this cache, but you can’t do it from within iTunes.

Read on for the details. It’s short/easy, but non-obvious.

Robert Scoble started a Facebook thread to discuss the new Steve Jobs movie when Woz weighed in with some pretty interesting comments.

From Woz:

One thing nobody likes to point out is that John Sculley himself, as well as almost all of us at Apple, believed that the Macintosh was Apple’s future. We all sacrificed the growing personal computer market (10x over a decade and MS got all the growth) in this belief. We (Sculley leading) had to work very hard for 3 years to make the Macintosh as successful (in dollars) as the Apple ][ had ever been, following Jobs’ vision. The choices can be argued because you can never go back and say what decisions would have what results, but it was a business decision to SAVE Apple as a company, after the stock dropped by a third in about a day when the Macintosh failed to sell due to not much software. Steve Jobs wasn’t pushed out of the company. He left. I supported him in his belief that he was made to create computers. But up until then he’d only had failures at creation. He was great at productizing and marketing the Apple ][ and the revenues financed the failures Apple ///, LISA, Macintosh and NeXT. This is not shown in the movie. After the Macintosh failure it’s fair to assume that Jobs’ left out of his feeling of greatness, and embarrassment about not having achieved it. That is not shown either. This movie is more about Steve Jobs inside, his non-feeling about a lot of things including how others thought of him, and some pushes to reform that in the end.

And:

When we started Apple, for real with money, I made the decision to be an engineer in the lab, for life. I did not want the conflict and politics of running the business. Hence, I did not see Jobs’ reactions to when things didn’t go his way. Pretty much everything we touched or tried was gold and it was hard to have things not go your way often in those times. Jobs would get into discussions but he was almost always the smartest person with the most thought out arguments and reasoning. The LISA cost too much when Jobs thought we could pull off some Woz Magic and make it cost very little. That’s only because Steve didn’t know computers and what it would take to make the right good machine. So it wasn’t that things didn’t go his way other than that his idea hadn’t panned out. In that case, he blamed the LISA team. Never himself. The right move of an executive would have been to keep the LISA secret, inside, until RAM prices dropped 10x, after maybe 5 years or so. But Steve felt it was the fault of lousy engineers who couldn’t find shortcuts. He would walk into meetings and tell engineers and teams that they were idiots and walk out. He then took over our Macintosh project because we had the few most creative sorts in the company, and headed it to being a low-cost LISA. He had the benefit of extra years for RAM prices to fall. Every penny had to be saved, as it still came out a bit on the expensive side. Color was out. Cleverness allowed it to use less RAM and more ROM and more floppy to save money. It had a disk file system but not a full general OS. Just a program to ‘look like’ a mouse-based computer was all Steve wanted, largely because his technical knowledge was low, on what an OS was about. The machine just had to look the way he wanted so he didn’t listen to others. The creative engineers put in a test port that could allow expansion but Jobs got wind of it and cancelled that, as it was openness. He continually fought the open/closed battle probably due to having lost it (with myself) on the Apple ][. I owned the Apple ][ and just told him to go get another computer if he wanted only 2 slots for a printer and modem (which he understood) instead of 8 useful ones. Kind of “my way or the highway” I told him. From some point on he was never going to be out of control of things.

Fascinating.

New York Times:

In an investigation involving guns and drugs, the Justice Department obtained a court order this summer demanding that Apple turn over, in real time, text messages between suspects using iPhones.

Apple’s response: Its iMessage system was encrypted and the company could not comply.

Government officials had warned for months that this type of standoff was inevitable as technology companies like Apple and Google embraced tougher encryption. The case, coming after several others in which similar requests were rebuffed, prompted some senior Justice Department and F.B.I. officials to advocate taking Apple to court, several current and former law enforcement officials said.

What purpose would taking Apple to court serve? The Justice Department certainly knows Apple can’t decrypt that data. The best they can hope for is to force Apple to stop encrypting iMessage data.

While that prospect has been shelved for now, the Justice Department is engaged in a court dispute with another tech company, Microsoft. The case, which goes before a federal appeals court in New York on Wednesday and is being closely watched by industry officials and civil liberties advocates, began when the company refused to comply with a warrant in December 2013 for emails from a drug trafficking suspect. Microsoft said federal officials would have to get an order from an Irish court, because the emails were stored on servers in Dublin.

The flip side of this coin. When data is stored in Ireland, the laws of Ireland apply. Or do they? We’ll soon find out.

The Justice Department wants Apple and other companies that use end-to-end encryption to comply with the same kind of wiretap orders as phone companies. Justice and some former law enforcement officials argue that consumers want investigators to have the ability to get wiretaps in the mobile, digital world if it means solving crimes.

“If you ask about wiretap functionality in the broad privacy context, you get one answer,” Mr. Terwilliger said. “If you ask it in the context of a guy with a loose nuke, or some kind of device, you get a different answer.”

Is this a liberty versus safety argument? Certainly a hot button topic.

Samsung continues to plummet. Apple is eating their lunch.

Jean-Louis Gassée, writing for Monday Note, lays out some basic VC thinking. If you want to build a company, you’ll likely start by self-funding. Then you’ll turn to family and friends, perhaps an angel or two. But if the idea is too big to build from that pool, you’ll turn to venture capital.

If you have an entrepreneur inside you, this is a good read. Especially this last bit, which walks through some basic (albeit extreme) VC math:

At the first round of financing, Investor A buys 50% of company, say 50 shares for $10M. Management, family, friends and other investors own the other 50 shares.

Trouble happens, the product is late, the economy… The company is running out of money. Family and friends are tapped out. With one exception, the investor group is running away. In the absence of other sources, the remaining more courageous Investor A is now in a position to dictate terms.

For another $10M, the re-upping Investor A wants 900 new shares.

There are now 1,000 shares. Investor A owns 900 (second round) + 50 (first round) shares, 95% of the company. The rest (family, friends, other investors) used to own 50% of the company, their 50 shares now represent 5% ownership. This is a muscular dilution.

The pros shrug it off, they know the rule. Family and friends are indignant, especially if, after the refinancing, the entrepreneur gets a fresh grant of option to keep him/her motivated.

Hardball.

Hodinkee:

This video, Talking Watches with Jean-Claude Biver, not only tells us how he, and other top tier consumers collect (case quality and dial originality are a must!), but also about his early days in the watch industry, which date back to the 1970s. In sum, this 20 minute video is an amazing primer on not only serious watch collecting, but also how the watch industry came to be what it is today

I’ll never be able to afford any of the watches mentioned in this video but I’ve always been fascinated by these timepieces, their construction and what makes them so valuable.

CBC News:

A kayaker had the thrill of a lifetime when a pod of about 30 orcas surrounded her boat near San Juan Island, in Washington State, east of Victoria, B.C.

“We are in whale soup. There’s one coming right under our boat, oh my God!” said Michelle Feis to her guide as a killer whale swam less than a metre from their double kayak.

I’m lucky enough to live in a part of the world where this is a farily common occurrence. They are magnificent animals, even if a little terrifying up close.

TidBITS:

We’re heading into Apple’s annual upgrade season again, with the upcoming releases of OS X 10.11 El Capitan, iOS 9, and watchOS 2, along with innumerable associated apps. Every upgrade is touted as the next best thing, teasing us with hot new features and promising improved performance, reliability, and security.

Unfortunately, these constant upgrades fill many people with dread, or if that’s overstating the case, with weary resignation. As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but most changes foisted on us by technology companies are no longer aimed at fixing bugs or making everyday usage easier. Bugs are fixed, certainly, and security vulnerabilities blocked, but those under-the-hood improvements are part and parcel with checklist features from the perky twenty-somethings in Marketing and whatever visual tweaks were deemed trendy by the hipsters in Design.

I know many of you are tempted to scream, “Stop this bus! I want to get off!”

Adam makes some great points. I’ve long since stopped upgrading immediately, simply for the sake of upgrading. I wait to make sure the release, Apple’s or anyone else’s, is stable enough and provides enough value for my liking. Certainly, there are some updates and upgrades you must do right away but, for the most part, I wait until I need to update and know what I’m updating to and for.

Smoky Mountains:

The 2015 Fall Foliage Map is the ultimate visual planning guide to the annual progressive changing of the leaves. While no tool can be 100% accurate, this tool is meant to help travelers better time their trips to have the best opportunity of catching peak color each year.

For those of us lucky enough to live in a region where there are actual colors of fall, this is a great tool (for our US readers) to plan and anticipate when the autumn leaves will be at their peak in your area.

Nick Wingfield, writing for the New York Times:

Apple stumbled into the games business almost by accident not long after it released the iPhone in 2007, igniting a new multibillion-dollar mobile games industry in the process.

That’s sort of true, though this ignores Apple’s original foray into the console business, with the 1995 release of the Apple Bandai Pippin console. But I digress.

It’s tough to know how compelling the games on Apple TV will be until the company reveals the system this week. Yet many of the components necessary for a satisfying game experience will come with the device, the people say — including more power for better graphics, a new remote that could double as a controller and, perhaps most important, an app store to buy and download games.

The controller is critical. If the Apple TV nails this design, makes a controller that truly enables a powerful gaming experience, that might be just the ticket to bring both gamers and game designers to the table.

The problem is, how can you design a true gaming controller that also serves as an unobtrusive remote? A solid gaming controller needs to fit in both hands comfortably, with easy access to buttons, trackballs, joysticks, or some other form of highly responsive controls.

The existing Apple TV remote is a minimalist’s dream, about as far from a gaming remote as you can get. Will Apple ship a Bejeweled-capable remote with an option to purchase a Call of Duty-capable gaming controller as an add on?

Or will Apple pull a real rabbit out of its hat, with a magical device that somehow serves TV, Bejeweled, and Call of Duty? Will the new remote take advantage of Force Touch in a way that’s not been done before?

Guess we’ll find out Wednesday.

This is the Steve Jobs movie I’ve been waiting for, hoping for. Penned by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Danny Boyle, terrific cast. And it looks like they’ve pulled it off.

Here’s a taste, just one of ten review excerpts in the article, this one by Todd McCarthy of the Hollywood Reporter:

How do you get to the bottom of a character like Steve Jobs, a figure so towering and complex that he could arguably serve as the basis of a film as ambitious as Citizen Kane? If you’re a dramatist with the character insight and verbal dexterity of Aaron Sorkin, you make him the vortex of a swirling human hurricane, the puppetmaster who kept all around him on strings, the impresario of a circus dedicated to the creation and dramatic unveiling of technological wonders that changed the world. Racing in high gear from start to finish, Danny Boyle’s electric direction tempermentally complements Sorkin’s highly theatrical three-act study, which might one day be fascinating to experience in a staged setting. With its high-profile launches at the Telluride, New York and London film festivals, this Universal release is clearly positioned as one of the prestige titles of the fall season and will be high priority viewing for discerning audiences around the world.

This is pretty typical of the reviews. If you like Sorkin and dialog-driven films like A Few Good Men, The American President, and The Social Network, this might be the Steve Jobs film for you.

Me? I’m definitely in.

Wired:

When I was kid, I had Star Wars toys—but they weren’t “smart” and most of them weren’t even battery powered. But kids these days have access to awesome toys like this remote controlled BB-8 (by Sphero) from the Star Wars VII movie. It looks pretty cool.But how does it work?

If you prefer to think it works by magic, don’t read this article. But even after reading, the mechanism is still pretty cool.

Pavan Rajam, writing for The Rajam Report:

Apple TV is unique among Apple’s product line, in that it doesn’t compete in a zero-sum market. Sure, a lot of people use Apple TVs to stream content today, but it’s often not the only box hooked up to their TVs. Contrast this with iPhone, Watch, or Mac, where people buy and use an Apple product at the expense of their competitors.

You use your iPhone or you use a competitor’s phone. You use Mac, Windows, or something else for your main computer. Rarely does Apple ship a product that doesn’t ask for your loyalty. But Apple TV plugs into any HDMI interface and, as long as your TV has multiple HDMI ports, doesn’t ask you to make a choice. It runs just fine alongside a ChromeCast, Roku, etc.

There is clearly a viable market for streaming media players like Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV. However, the bigger opportunity is breaking into the market for Pay TV set top boxes, which today are less compelling products but retain access to the content consumers want. The only way any tech company will be able to pull that off is by having a TV Service to accompany their hardware. Of the companies with streaming media products on the market, only one is rumored to be working on such a service.

Apple has honed and polished its market takeover strategy and now appears ready to apply the same tactics it used to transform the music universe to television and other published media. Up ’til now, Apple TV has been a dabble, an experiment, albeit one that has sold comparatively well, by some reports close to 30 million units.

Unlike its competitors, Apple is playing the long game in the TV market. Apple TV’s long term goal is not about beating Amazon, Google, or Roku in the streaming media player market, it’s about redefining the TV market by building a true smart TV platform. One that seamlessly integrates with the Apple ecosystem and converges all the different functions (gaming, long form video, home automation, and who knows what) we want from our TVs into one product. In other words: the only thing you need to hook up to your TV.

This is going to get interesting.

(BTW, be sure to visit Pavan’s original post, check out the prescient pull quote from Steve Jobs. Worth it, IMO)

Benedict Evans:

For as long as the idea of the ‘mobile internet’ has been around, we’ve thought of it a cut-down subset of the ‘real’ Internet. I’d suggest it’s time to invert that – to think about mobile as the real internet and the desktop as the limited, cut-down version.

He’s right. Even looking at The Loop’s stats, many more people access the site on mobile browsers than ever before—more than 50 percent. For many people, the mobile Internet is the real Internet.

This is the Apple Watch Charging Dock Apple should have released, check xylum out here.

Jim and Dan talk about the upcoming Apple event next week in San Francisco, the Apple Watch, the Apple TV, Apple Maps, DVDs vs. buying movies online vs. renting movies, bylines on The Loop, and more.

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