Twitter is mulling the possibility of making promoted videos automatically play 6-second previews when they pop up in people’s feeds, according to people briefed on the company’s plans. If the autoplay previews were to catch someone’s eye, that person could click to watch the full video.

I think I speak for the world when I say, NO!

Karissa Bell:

In the back of one of the smaller halls at CES, a Chinese company was showing off fake Apple Watches. So, naturally, I bought one.

I remember seeing the whale quite often years ago.

Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery.” Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins.

That’s just awful.

The residents of Green Bank, West Virginia, can’t use cell phones, wi-fi, or other kinds of modern technology due to a high-tech government telescope. Recently, this ban has made the town a magnet for technophobes, and the locals aren’t thrilled to have them.

Fascinating story. I had never heard of “electrosensitives,” but it’s becoming a thing.

I agree with Ben Brooks here. I am forever trying to find the best in everything I do—there is always something better.

The Verge:

On January 9th, 2007, Steve Jobs took to the stage to announce the first iPhone, in a keynote that would revolutionize the industry and set the tone for every major tech announcement since.

I’d been to every Steve Jobs keynote after he came back to Apple but this one was special. Even sitting in the audience, you could feel the excitement and the anticipation. Best Keynote ever.

Carlos Ribas is an indie developer. His app is called HoursTracker. HoursTracker went live in July, 2009 and has been a work in progress ever since.

The linked story lays out Carlos’ experience with the App Store from a financial perspective. He shares his revenue figures and his experience with iAds versus in-app purchase.

Bottom line, with a broad enough customer base, he makes more money with the App Store than he could with a full time job. And for many people, that’s the dream.

[Via MacStories]

The Guardian:

When the Charlie Hebdo website, which was down for much of the day, came back online it carried the phrase Je Suis Charlie in bold letters, with Charlie written in the font of the publication’s masthead. Viewers who clicked on the link below saw the same poster, repeated again and again in languages including Arabic, German and Spanish.

Apple ran the same message in a stark black and white banner at the bottom of the front page of their French language web site.

Follow the link to an interactive page listing a number of historic figures along with their daily regimen. It might sound dull, but it is fascinating, especially if you have an interest in history or design. The history part is obvious, but if you spend a few minutes hovering over different areas of the chart and reading, you’ll see a terrific interactive design at work.

The data is culled from the highly regarded book Daily Rituals by Mason Currey.

Take a minute to check it out. I found it well worth the time.

[Hat tip to ParisLemon]

I really like Mayer, but I’m not sure she can turn things around quickly enough for the critics.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco said the plaintiffs, Uriel Marcus and Benedict Verceles, failed to show that Apple made “affirmative misrepresentations,” despite citing online complaints and Apple marketing statements calling the laptops “state of the art” or the “most advanced” on the market.

People have to stop these bullshit lawsuits.

CNET:

Smartphones are a top choice for today’s street criminals, especially teenagers. In the year ending in June 2013, nearly two-thirds of robberies by minors in San Francisco involved cell phones, according to the city’s public defender.

Government officials have called the trend an epidemic. One in 10 smartphone owners in the United States have had their phone stolen. More than 3 million were pilfered in 2013, nearly double the number nabbed the year before.

A reminder to always be aware of your surroundings and how you use your iOS device, or any device for that matter, while out in public. I’m always intensely aware of how I use my iPhone, iPad and DSLR while out and about.

Vancouver Sun:

Get your 99 cent apps while you can, iPhone and iPad users.

Apple will soon hike the prices in its App Store for Canadian customers, according to an email sent to software developers.

The email, sent out on Wednesday, said the unspecified price increase in Canada, Norway and European Union countries would take effect within 36 hours.

Apple said foreign exchange rates were triggering the increase in Canada.

I wonder how it’s going to affect sales? The 99 cent price point is generally thought of as a no brainer but even a small increase in the price sensitive App Store can significantly lower sales.

Tech in Asia:

Fresh research from UBS estimates Apple sold 69.3 million iPhones in the last quarter of 2014, setting an all-time record for the company. China accounts for more than a third of those shipments.

A delayed release for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in China doesn’t seem to have put much of a dent in the devices’ sales figures, which don’t even account for grey market units brought in from Hong Kong and other countries.

As (easily) predicted by many. And it will only increase from here going forward. China is the new centre of Apple’s iPhone sales.

Apple:

Tim Cook: “We’re proud to create 1M+ US jobs in all 50 states and ring in another record-breaking year for developers globally.” iOS developers were paid at the average rate of $28 million/day in 2014. $25 billion dollars cumulative has been paid to developers.

Little bit of well deserved back patting from Apple.

The Internet Archive:

The collection includes action, strategy, adventure and other unique genres of game and entertainment software. Through the use of the EM-DOSBOX in-browser emulator, these programs are bootable and playable.

I never had a computer that could play any of these games but I recognize many of the names as classics of the genre.

Pacific Standard:

It’s no secret in the jewelry industry that retail demand for fine jewelry is slipping. As Forbes reports, the demand for gold jewelry has dropped 30 percent since last year, and continues to fall. Even diamond behemoth De Beers had to admit in their 2014 Insight Report that “retailers have faced pressures from a weak economic environment and strong competition from branded luxury goods and experiential categories, as well as the low-price models of e-commerce companies.”

Simply put: There are better things to spend money on, often at better prices, than jewelry.

Interesting premise. While I’m sure there are many contributing factors, I wonder how much the “rise of the machine” has contributed to this decline.

Fast Company:

In the last 10 years, Lego has grown into nothing less than the Apple of toys: a profit-generating, design-driven miracle built around premium, intuitive, highly covetable hardware that fans can’t get enough of. Last year, fueled in part by The Lego Movie’s Pixar-size popularity, the privately held company briefly surged ahead of rival Mattel to become the biggest toy manufacturer in the world, reporting first-half profits of $273 million on revenue of $2.03 billion.

An interesting read. Three things I see that changed the arc of Lego’s fortunes: First, there was the Star Wars marketing deal that allowed Lego to create an incredibly popular series of Star Wars-themed kits.

Second, there was the move into video games with Lego Star Wars, Lego Harry Potter, Lego Batman, etc. These games also saw the emergence of Lego’s sense of humor.

Finally, all of these marketing deals came together (along with that tongue in cheek sense of humor) to create the “Everything is Awesome” Lego Movie.

Fans adore the brand. Just like Apple.

Jim and Shawn talk about Apple’s 2014, Amplitube and guitars!

Sponsored by Audible (Visit the link to get a free audiobook of your choice and a free 30-day trial membership), Squarespace (Use code GUITARS for a free trial and 10% off), and Yosemite by Cocoa Conference (Visit the link to learn more about this conference for Apple enthusiasts, designers, and developers! Seating is limited so the sooner you get your tickets, the better).

Sounds great, but…

You have to hate it when the first words of something you expect to be good end in “but.”

Waterstones has admitted that sales of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader had “disappeared” after seeing higher demand for physical books.

The UK’s largest book retailing chain, which teamed up with Amazon in 2012 to sell the Kindle in its stores, saw sales of physical books rise 5pc in December, at the expense of the popular e-reader.

Kindle sales had “disappeared to all intents and purposes”, Waterstones said.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know how to explain this shift in sales. While I think it’s good that people are buying physical books, I think it’s way too early to say that e-books are dead.

With seventeen of the most amazing people in the Apple community—some developers, but most not—Yosemite is a conference for the Apple community. Our speakers are some of the best and most-loved writers, designers, philosophers, and developers working in the Apple ecosystem.

I’ll be speaking at CocoaConf’s Yosemite Conference this year. I’m really excited about the line-up of speakers and meeting the attendees. I hope to see you there!

Fast Company:

Introduced with grand ambitions last summer, the Fire Phone is widely seen as a fiasco. Originally priced at $199 and intended as an iPhone competitor, it now sells for 99 cents, and Amazon has taken a $170 million write-down largely attributable to unsold Fire Phone inventory.

Yet Bezos finally answers the question with the kind of reasoning that investors, customers, and pundits have come to expect from him: Amazon is going to pour more resources into its phone. Defending the Fire Phone as a “bold bet,” Bezos argues that it’s “going to take many iterations” and “some number of years” to get it right.

I don’t think the Fire Phone will be around in two years.

Gruber summed up my feelings on the MacBook Air.

Whatever, the reasons, my mind keeps going back to the number — approximately $20 billion dollars of iPhones — roughly 34 percent of Apple’s total sales for the three months ending December 31, 2014. It explains everything about the company, its priorities and why it is starting to show signs of wear and tear across its other product lines.

Om brings up a good point—Apple’s focus is, and has been, on the iPhone for quite a while. Let’s not forget the record Mac sales over that period of time, though. Perhaps it’s the halo effect, but the Mac is doing better than ever.

Update: Om’s original article stated $20 billion, but it’s actually $43 billion.

Marco Arment was the voice behind the Apple has lost the functional high ground blog post that has gone viral over the past few days.

With the benefit of hindsight, Marco updated his post with a link to What it’s like to be popular for a day:

You might think this is a dream come true for a blogger, but it’s horrible.

Instead, I looked back at what I wrote with regret, guilt, and embarrassment. The sensationalism was my fault — I started it with the headline and many poor word choices, which were overly harsh and extreme. I was being much nastier and more alarmist than I intended. I edited some words to be more fair and accurate, but it was too late. I can’t blame the opportunists for taking the bait that I hastily left for them.

Whether you agree with Marco’s post or not, there’s no doubt it started a lot of good conversation about the state of Apple software and, hopefully, it raised awareness within Apple of the growing perception that there are fit and finish issues.

I continue to feel the same love for Apple products. My sense is that the world came rushing to Apple’s door (when they had relegated Apple as a niche player for such a long time) and pushed them into a new role, that of a world leader. As the requirements, demand, and pipeline grew, Apple had to grow rapidly to fill this new role. A tough adjustment for anyone to make.

At the same time, Apple was in a brand new kind of horse race, with Android and Samsung. The kind of horse race that rewards quick reactions and short term thinking and brings about feature cram. Tough to resist. Feature cram places incredible stress on testing and QA, especially when the calendar drives the release schedule (as opposed to, “we’ll ship when it passes all its tests”).

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, one of the first things he did was simplify the product line. Whatever his intent, this ended up reducing the demands on QA and testing, giving them more bandwidth to do their jobs right.

Not sure if simplifying is the right answer here, but I can only imagine that the best minds at Apple are working on this problem.

Apple updated their iOS adoption pie chart on Monday. iOS 8 adoption is at 68%, iOS 7 is at 29%, pre-iOS 7 at 4%. Obviously, these numbers include some slight rounding up.