ZDNet:

Apple has a new iPhone Upgrade Program that’s worth the look. And it may be even more disruptive than the technologies found in the company’s next iPhones.

At this point, all of the four major U.S. carriers have installment plans available for handsets. Enter the iPhone Upgrade Program.

It’s very similar to what the carriers offer today but it might actually be a bit cheaper.

This has the potential to not only save the average consumer a little bit of money but also to undercut (and possibly upset) the traditional carriers. It will have the added benefit of getting the iPhone into many more hands, not just in the US but around the world.

If you couldn’t watch the event live this morning, Apple has posted the video on Apple.com. Apple hasn’t yet added it to iTunes but it will appear shortly. I think this was one of the strongest product launches in a long time.

Ars Technica:

Apple officially announced iOS 9 at WWDC in June, and adventurous users could start playing with the public beta in July, but today the company announced a public release date for the finished version of the operating system: Wednesday, September 16.

The software update will arrive a couple of days ahead of Apple’s latest iPhones, which was to be expected given Apple’s past behavior. An unexpected benefit of this release is that it won’t drop support for any device currently running iOS 8—iOS 9.0 will run on iPhones as old as 2011’s 4S, iPads as old as 2011’s iPad 2 or 2012’s iPad Mini, and both the fifth- and sixth-generation iPod Touch.

I’m really looking forward to iOS 9 and the new features, especially split screen. Apple also quietly announced the release date for OS X 10.11 El Capitan – September 30th.

Polygon:

In a blog entry posted shortly after today’s event, Activision announced its slate of games headed to Apple TV. Among them are Skylanders SuperChargers, Guitar Hero Live and Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions Evolved writes communications manager Scott Lowe.

“We’re continuing to offer new ways to play Skylanders and other games,” Lowe wrote, “whether you’re at home or on the go.” The titles will also be available on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices.

We’ll see more and more of these announcements in the coming weeks. It’s an exciting time for gamers, casual and otherwise. Less so for makers of dedicated consoles.

Bloomberg:

Apple has made many things over the years, but its process has remained essentially the same: Find something ugly and complicated and make it prettier and easier. Prettiness, in brushed aluminum, is more or less a permanent state. Ease, however, is constantly evolving, which is why a few days before the geek hootenanny known as Apple’s September Event, Jony Ive’s focus isn’t on a new version of Apple TV or an iPad the size of a doggy door, but on a feature. It’s called 3D Touch, and it makes using an iPhone even easier. “Ultimately, this is our focus,” says Ive, squeezing a new iPhone 6S. “This is what galvanizes our efforts right across the company.” And 3D Touch, he adds with emphasis, “is something we’ve been working on for a long time—multi, multi, multi years.”

Some great insider details in this piece. I know people at Apple who work behind the scenes and they’ve told me the months before an event like this are stressful, nerve-wracking, exciting and exhausting – and they love it.

CNET:

The new Apple TV, which ships in October and costs $149 (32GB) or $199 (64GB), comes with a Siri Remote that doubles as a game controller, with the Touch surface acting as a virtual directional pad.

It also has a built-in accelerometer and gyroscope, much like Nintendo’s motion-sensing Wii remote.

However, Apple says, “For serious gamers, the new Apple TV supports MFi-based controllers that let you run, jump, shoot, kick, throw, punch or just about any other verb you can imagine.” (MFi is Apple’s Made for iPhone/iPad/iPod licensing certification program).

I can’t wait to see how game developers take advantage of the ability to use third-party game controllers.

Apple:

iPad has always offered a uniquely simple yet immersive experience. And now with its expansive 12.9-inch Retina display, nearly double the CPU performance of iPad Air 2, and refined Multi‑Touch technology, iPad Pro adds another dimension to that experience. It’s not just larger. It’s an iPad that lets you be more creative and more productive — at a whole new scale.

For me, the new iPad Pro was the biggest deal of the Apple Event and the one product I’ll be saving my next to useless loonies to try and afford. The screen size is massive, the new Pencil looks better than any stylus I’ve ever tried and, along with the processing power and new iOS 9, the Pro looks promising as a mobile photo and maybe even video editing device.

Apple:

TV is a major part of our lives. We gather together around our big screens to watch big shows and big events. Yet somehow, the overall experience of TV has continued to stagnate. Until now. It all starts by recognizing that apps are the future of television. HBO NOW, WatchESPN, Netflix, Hulu, iTunes — apps are quickly becoming how we watch today. So we built a new foundation around this vision — with a new operating system called tvOS, innovative ways to connect with your screen, and a smart use of Siri to search for something to watch. This is the new Apple TV. This is where television is headed.

As expected, Apple finally gave us a significant upgrade to the Apple TV. While not many will say it’s the end of traditional TV and the ways we view it, I certainly believe this might be a step along that path. And I think most will agree apps and games will be a huge driver for Apple.

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.