Rob Richman, writing about Apple Watch for Opinion8td:
As an early adopter it reminds me of when I got my first iPod back in 2002. It’s not yet perfect but in my opinion it’s worth its weight in gold aluminium. I remember those halcyon days in my late twenties listening to Coldplay on my way back from work on the London Underground with those striking white headphones in my ears and my iPod hidden in my pocket.
A year later that innocence came to bite me when I was mugged for my iPod. Admittedly I was an easy target being 158cm, of very slight build and carrying a £400 music player that was being ‘advertised’ by those white headphones. Once I got over the shock of being mugged it was a hassle getting my insurance to pay out for a replacement but a few weeks later everything was sorted and after putting my music back on the new iPod I was very careful about where and when I used the iPod. If memory serves me right I used a cheap pair of black headphones to disguise the fact I owned an iPod like many others in the years ahead.
Bringing this back to my Apple Watch I am beginning to feel scared of people seeing me while I’m out walking. The weather in London is warming up and there are days that it’s even t-shirt weather making my Apple Watch permanently visible. I want to check notifications as well as finding out whether I have hit my activity goal but I feel more of a target now I am wearing this expensive and desirable ‘fashion’ tech accessory.
I remember when this wave of anxiety passed through the iPhone community as iPhone mugging became a thing. I don’t carry this concern personally, but I’ve never been mugged before either.
I don’t believe Rob is being a fear monger here, and I do think there’s a legitimate potential concern, given the iPhone’s history.
Fear aside, I think Rob makes another interesting point. Apple produces iconic products and they are styled to stand out from the crowd. Those iconic white headphones tell folks your brand of choice and send a signal as to the valuable tech you are carrying.
Now we’ve got a new signal. No longer hidden, the distinctive strap and rectangular face are unmistakable, even from across the room. There are not a lot of watches that can so quickly achieve that iconic status, that across-the-room recognizability. That’s Apple.
John Biggs, Tech Crunch’s resident (and self professed) watch nerd, talks about why the Apple Watch has convinced him to move on from the world of mechanical watches he’s worn and loved his whole life.
In one of its latest efforts to bolster its mapping capabilities, Apple appears to have acquired Coherent Navigation, a Bay Area GPS-related firm founded in 2008 by engineers from Stanford and Cornell.
One of Coherent Navigation’s areas of focus was High Integrity GPS (“iGPS”), a system that combines signals from the traditional mid-earth orbit GPS satellites with those from the low-earth satellites of voice and data provider Iridium to offer greater accuracy and precision, higher signal integrity, and greater jam resistance. Iridium touts iGPS as having the potential to provide location information accurate to within centimeters.
That “appears to have” was converted to “confirmed” in this New York Times article:
To that end, Apple confirmed on Sunday that it had purchased Coherent Navigation, a Bay Area global positioning company, further bolstering Apple’s location technology and services.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” the company said in an email.
Not sure how that quote is a confirmation. Perhaps there was more to the email. But the founders now appear to be Apple employees, so it really does seem like a done deal.
Universal pictures has unveiled the “first look” clip from the upcoming movie about Steve Jobs. It’s just a teaser but it looks interesting. Fassbinder was an odd choice to portray jobs but he is a very good actor and the rest of the cast is equally accomplished.
One of the odd things about getting older is movies are being made about the times I’ve lived in and, in the case of parts of this movie, events and presentations I was at and tangentially involved in. It’s kind of a weird feeling and I don’t know how unbiased I’m going to be watching this film. But I am looking forward to seeing it.
Tim Cook was George Washington University’s Commencement Speaker for Spring 2015. He goofs around a bit, gives some of the usual graduate advice and talks about his early years at Apple.
For many of the largest Silicon Valley technology companies, mapping software undergirds numerous software applications and features in their products. For Apple, it is little different. To that end, Apple confirmed in an email on Sunday that it had bought Coherent Navigation, a Bay Area navigation company, further bolstering Apple’s mapping technology and services.
This is obviously a move by Apple to continue to improve its Maps app. The Sunday confirmation from Apple is interesting too. Another sign of its softening of its former hard line position with regards to PR.
The entire article itself is fascinating, especially if you are a fan of spirits (the alcoholic kind), but what I found most interesting was this:
As bourbon enthusiasts realized their favorite products were becoming harder to find, they started purchasing multiple bottles: two, three, six, why not 12. They then bunkered that bourbon in their basements, for the day when they couldn’t find their preferred dram, or, I suppose, the day when the apocalypse comes. Liquor store owners noticed. Though wholesale costs have only crept up slightly, retailers’ prices have skyrocketed for any bottle with even a slight smell of scarcity about it.
Wholesale prices crept up only slightly, but retailers artificially inflated their selling prices, sometimes at five times their standard price. And because of the rumored scarcity, bourbon enthusiasts leapt in, eager to buy in before prices rose even higher.
Artificial markets are everywhere. You see them at the end of every year on places like eBay as perceived scarcity impacts the sales price of holiday gifts.
Another example is a cut-in-line market, where you can pay to move up in line, perhaps paying for better seats at a concert than the folks who camped out all night to wait for their seats, or paying for the latest Apple product so you don’t have to wait for yours to ship. Cut-in-line markets come with their own premium pricing.
From today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, a poignant, thoughtful read about a woman determined to take her own life before Alzheimer’s can rob her of her mind.
Be warned that this is dark at times, a tough read, so be on solid mental footing before you dig in.
Mike Bloomfield used this historic guitar to record the guitar leads on Bob Dylan’s seminal album Highway 61 Revisited, source of the classic Like a Rolling Stone.
In this video, Dan Erlewine talks about the history of this guitar and then takes you on a detailed tour, completely disassembling this classic guitar (very carefully) and walking you through all the elements.
There’s been a wave of sentiment over the past few days about the Apple Watch as an invitation to thieves. Many people share John Gruber’s take:
I really don’t get the hysteria over this as an invitation to thieves. This is no less secure than every single other wristwatch ever made.
This isn’t about the value of a single watch. It’s about a combination of large enough market size, high desirability, and relative rarity.
When the iPhone first emerged, the market was relatively small and theft was not a big problem. As the iPhone took off, the market for iPhones achieved critical mass, new releases were highly desirable and supply was constrained (new models achieved relative rarity). That combination triggered a wave of iPhone thefts, including some dangerous and brazen robberies, all triggered by a need to feed the hunger for the iPhone.
Apple responded to this crime wave by making their products useless if they were stolen. The approach clearly worked and iPhone theft plummeted.
The Apple Watch is not an invitation to thieves. Yet.
There are not enough Apple Watches in the wild yet to be a large enough market. The desirability might be there for early adopters, but it’s still too early in the adoption cycle for desirability to be high enough to trigger a large enough black market to entice this sort of thievery.
That said, if the Apple Watch catches on (and I think it will), then that wave is coming. If and when Apple Watch thefts become a large enough problem, it would be better if there was already a solution in place, a switch all ready to flip. After all, this lesson has already been learned.
According to the complaint, he registered the Celluride website in 2003 and developed a mobile phone prototype in 2006. It was then, the complaint said, that he encountered Kalanick at an office Kalanick was renting from his friend in San Francisco.
Halpern said in the complaint that with Kalanick’s promises to keep the information confidential, he shared his concept, designs and prototype.
I’m not sure of the legal issues here, but if Halpern’s company was public at the time, didn’t Kalanick just launch a competing service, Uber, and win?
Can you imagine the backlash and media uproar we would see if Apple ever sold an accessory that ruined iPhone displays? “Casegate” would be sung far and wide, and even your local news anchor would demand on air that Apple take action. Well, you won’t see quite that amount of attention in this case, but it look like Samsung is selling shoddy protective cases that leave customers with badly damaged smartphones.
Zach is right, the uproar would be amazing if this was Apple.
Audio latency is the phenomenon of sound reaching the ear at some point after it was created. In the natural world, latency is caused by physical distance from the sound source. The further away the sound source, the more latency. With digital audio there is also latency, and in this case it’s caused by buffering. MainStage (or any other audio software) needs some time to process audio data before it can be passed on to the Core Audio driver.
“HomeKit has been available for just a few months and we already have dozens of partners who have committed to bringing HomeKit accessories to market and we’re looking forward to the first ones coming next month,” Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said in a statement.
Jim and Dan talk about Pixelmator for iPhone, Scott Forstall is producing a Broadway musical, Apple Pay is creaming Walmart in the mobile payment war, how to back up your Apple Watch, Facebook begins testing instant articles from news publishers, the American Deluxe Stratocaster HSS Shawbucker, and more.
Sponsored by Squarespace (Use the code GUITARS for a free trial and 10% off).
It will be interesting to see if Apple ultimately adds in an Activation Lock feature for future versions of Apple Watch. I suspect this will become more likely if we start seeing a wave of Apple Watch thefts.
No regular watch has a passcode or password, much less online theft-deterrent system, including those sold by Seiko, Timex, Omega, or Rolex. Because the Apple Watch stores some amount of personal data on it, it however, it does have value and risk beyond a regular watch. To mitigate that, you can set the Apple Watch passcode/password system to erase all data after 10 failed attempts.
An excellent suggestion. Some people have pointed out that regular watches have as much street value (at least for now) as a high end Apple Watch and yet no one complains about a lack of some form of theft deterrence on those watches. This is true, but the Apple Watch is a different beast altogether. Over time, we’ll likely store more and more private data on our Apple Watches and the need to protect that data and the need for some form of theft protection will increase.
Activation Lock and Find My Apple Watch will solve both problems, if and when it ever arrives.
The frustrating part here is that the Apple Watch has all the elements in place to offer Activation Lock, and so the potential to offer even better security.
Apple knows this, of course. They’re the ones who put it all there. My strong suspicion is that they simply have implemented the Watch-specific process for it all just yet. The Watch is unique in several ways — it’s brand new, it has more limited input options, and it requires a paired iPhone to go online.
Your iPhone has an IP address and can communicate with all your other internet connected devices, as well as with Apple’s security systems.
Your Apple Watch does have WiFi, and a device specific address that can uniquely identify your Apple Watch to the universe. I’ve been talking with the twitterverse and, so far, can’t see anything specific preventing Apple from implementing Find My Apple Watch. There’s no GPS, but there is WiFi and location services can use WiFi to home in on an approximate location. And WiFi can be used to check in at a server to see if a particular Apple Watch has been reported stolen and should be deactivated.
This is all conjecture on my part. Not sure if and when Find My Apple Watch and Activation Lock are coming, but certainly an interesting discussion.
My thanks to Hullo for sponsoring The Loop this week. Have you ever slept on a buckwheat pillow? It’s kind of like a beanbag for your head. Hullo includes…
Quality construction & materials.
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American-made craftsmanship.
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Drop what you’re doing—go and check out Hullo. Try it for 60 nights. If it’s not your favorite pillow, return it for a refund. No-brainer!
When we started designing the world’s first fully self-driving vehicle, our goal was a vehicle that could shoulder the entire burden of driving. Vehicles that can take anyone from A to B at the push of a button could transform mobility for millions of people, whether by reducing the 94 percent of accidents caused by human error (PDF), reclaiming the billions of hours wasted in traffic, or bringing everyday destinations and new opportunities within reach of those who might otherwise be excluded by their inability to drive a car.
Now we’re announcing the next step for our project: this summer, a few of the prototype vehicles we’ve created will leave the test track and hit the familiar roads of Mountain View, Calif., with our safety drivers aboard.
We’ve been running the vehicles through rigorous testing at our test facilities, and ensuring our software and sensors work as they’re supposed to on this new vehicle. The new prototypes will drive with the same software that our existing fleet of self-driving Lexus RX450h SUVs uses. That fleet has logged nearly a million autonomous miles on the roads since we started the project, and recently has been self-driving about 10,000 miles a week. So the new prototypes already have lots of experience to draw on—in fact, it’s the equivalent of about 75 years of typical American adult driving experience.
A big step for self driving cars. Eventually, this will lead to self-drinking coffee and self-petting cats. The future. Should be good.
“Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon,” he said. “I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.
“I’d have me a hat or box or something in front of me. People that would request a gospel song would always be very polite to me, and they’d say: ‘Son, you’re mighty good. Keep it up. You’re going to be great one day.’ But they never put anything in the hat.
“But people that would ask me to sing a blues song would always tip me and maybe give me a beer. They always would do something of that kind. Sometimes I’d make 50 or 60 dollars one Saturday afternoon. Now you know why I’m a blues singer.”
It was while playing in one of the clubs that a fight broke out over a woman, causing a fire. After rushing out of the wooden building, he realised that he had left his guitar behind.
He risked his life by going back in to rescue his instrument. He named it after the woman whose charms had been behind the trouble: Lucille.
Hosted by longtime Objective-C hacker, Pixarian, and CAM board member (in order of seniority: 26 yrs, 22 yrs, 13 yrs) Dr. Michael B. Johnson, this lively evening will feature a number of special guests from back in the day, including former solidThinking developer and current VP of Tools at Pixar Guido Quaroni, ur-NeXTSTEP developer Andy Stone, and several others too shy to let us give out their names (some of whom might work at a local fruit company).
I went to this event last year, and will try again this year.
“What is this a picture of?” Humans can usually answer such questions instantly, but in the past it’s always seemed out of reach for computers to do this. For nearly 40 years I’ve been sure computers would eventually get there—but I’ve wondered when. I’ve built systems that give computers all sorts of intelligence, much of it far beyond the human level. And for a long time we’ve been integrating all that intelligence into the Wolfram Language.
Now I’m excited to be able to say that we’ve reached a milestone: there’s finally a function called ImageIdentify built into the Wolfram Language that lets you ask, “What is this a picture of?”—and get an answer.
And today we’re launching the Wolfram Language Image Identification Project on the web to let anyone easily take any picture (drag it from a web page, snap it on your phone, or load it from a file) and see what ImageIdentify thinks it is.
Here’s a link to the ImageIdentify page. Drop some pictures on it, help it learn.
I dropped an image of Jim onto the page and it said Jim was a person (and not a bearded wonder, which is what I expected). I dropped an image of an Apple Watch and ImageIdentify called it an analog watch.
The Apple Watch contains security measures to prevent thieves from accessing your data, but it doesn’t include the necessary features to dissuade thieves from trying to steal your device to begin with.
The problem stems from the lack of an Activation Lock-like feature on Watch OS 1.0.
Unlike the iPhone, if someone steals your Apple Watch, they can easily reset the device (bypass the passcode), and pair it with a new iPhone logged in to a different iCloud account. In other words, it’s totally feasible to steal an Apple Watch and set it up on a different device as if you just purchased it from an Apple Store.
Caveat emptor. Know, going into this transaction, that there is no Find My Apple Watch and there is no Erase My Apple Watch. The good news is that your data is protected. It either lives on your iPhone and won’t disappear if someone takes your watch, or it is protected by a passcode lock, should you choose to enable one:
The positive spin that we can put on this is that the Apple Watch does protect your data. If you have a passcode lock on the device, which we wholeheartedly recommend, at least it will prevent the thief from accessing your personal data on the device.
It will be interesting to see if Apple ultimately adds in an Activation Lock feature for future versions of Apple Watch. I suspect this will become more likely if we start seeing a wave of Apple Watch thefts.
Apple’s upcoming Beats-based streaming music service will likely be named “Apple Music” and will have deep social networking integration for artists, according to industry sources briefed on the plans for the new service.
Taking a page out of the discontinued iTunes Ping feature from earlier this decade, the service will allow artists to have their own pages within the streaming music service that they can use to post track samples, photos, videos, and concert updates.
I liked the idea of Ping. Where it fell down was in implementation. Adding social to an app is tricky. Like the ability to design a beautifully crafted device, creating a social network requires insight and experience, as well as an intuitive sense of what and how much people want to see and share. In that regard, Ping was a swing and a miss.
Reading the 9to5mac piece, I get the sense that Apple is building a promotional vehicle for artists, more than a social network for the rest of us. Is this the right approach? Looks like we’ll find out in a bit less than a month.
Can your Apple Watch help prevent a heart attack? Surprisingly, the short answer is, it seems likely that the Apple Watch may help predict a coming heart attack so that preventative measures can be taken.
Christina Farr, writing for KQED Science:
We could send an alert to someone who is soon to have a stroke or heart attack if we do enough measurements of an ECG and we gather other data points about that person.
At my company, AliveCor, we are working to deskill the process of determining characteristics of Arrhythmia’s [an irregular heart beat]. On our app today, we have an FDA-approved algorithm that can detect the presence of Atrial fibrillation [an irregular, often rapid heart rate that can cause poor blood flow]. We are also logging the context around it: How is it linked to coffee consumption or stress?
In the next few years, I believe that the industry will be able to spot the characteristics of someone who’s likely to have a heart attack in the next three days.
The whole article is fascinating. Between the heartbeat sensor on the Apple Watch and the crowd-sourcing brought to the table by ResearchKit, Apple has pushed the practical side of medicine forward in a truly significant way.
When I first heard about the Blade, I was skeptical. It uses adhesive to attach to the underside of your MacBook, MacBook Pro, or iPad. That glued-on unit features a swing out arm that you can attach to most security cables.
The fact that is glues in place really gave me pause. The thought of permanently attaching something to my computer scares me a bit. And how good can an adhesive solution be?
If you have the need for a cable lock, take a look at the two videos on this page. The first shows someone trying to pull The Blade off a frame to which it was glued. Though I’m not sure this guy put in a 100% effort on trying to pry the lock loose, I think he might hurt himself if he tried any harder.
The second video is a review that shows how the product works. It really does look like a good solution.
I’m not a big fan of computer cable locks. A determined thief with a pair of loppers can cut through pretty much any cable, lock or no lock. That said, a cable lock does offer a certain level of security, especially if your back will only be turned for a short amount of time.
All that said, I am a fan of clever design, and I do think The Blade fits that description.
Stephen Orth lays out his Apple Watch experience, comparing it to his Pebble experience, and offering his take on the Apple Watch interface and its current level of waterproofing.
