TidBITS:

I fully understand the drive and motivations the law enforcement community has to maintain access to our devices.

But law enforcement needs to understand that technology companies aren’t trying to protect the bad guys, but stop them. That until iOS 8, I had to walk my clients through the iOS security loopholes that made it difficult to protect corporate and personal data. That such back doors are already used to suppress free speech throughout the world, sometimes fatally. That without this encryption, we are all less secure.

As always, I like reading Rich Mogull’s take on these kinds of security issues.

My thanks to Magic Script Creator for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. Magic Script Creator lets you experiment with creating custom AppleScripts by just answering a few questions. No prior knowledge of AppleScript is needed in order to use this application. Included in Magic Script Creator are 24 different examples that you can configure hundreds of different ways. Most examples contain UNIX command line tools, combining their power with AppleScript’s strengths.

Version 4.0 contains two new major features. First, you can choose to compile your scripts with line by line remarks. This will help you understand what each line of code is executing. Second, for those examples containing UNIX command tools, you can export the MAN (or manual) page in an easy to read PDF. No more trying to read these manuals in a tiny terminal window! To learn more about Magic Script Creator, watch an instructional video, purchase the application, or try a demo version, please visit our homepage.

Digg:

While comics may have started as disposable entertainment, it’s no secret that many books can fetch a hefty sum based on their rarity, CGC grade, illustrator, and/or characters that may have first appeared in them. We talked to the people working every collectibles booth at this year’s New York Comic Con and asked them what their most expensive item is, and what made these items so astonishingly valuable.

Makes me wish I had kept those comics I had as a kid. Some of them might be worth something today.

New Republic:

In confronting what to do about Amazon, first we have to realize our own complicity. We’ve all been seduced by the deep discounts, the monthly automatic diaper delivery, the free Prime movies, the gift wrapping, the free two-day shipping, the ability to buy shoes or books or pinto beans or a toilet all from the same place. But it has gone beyond seduction, really. We expect these kinds of conveniences now, as if they were birthrights. They’ve become baked into our ideas about how consumers should be treated.

These expectations help fuel our collective denial about Amazon.

I don’t know that I agree with the central premise but the consolidation in Amazon is something to be concerned about and keep an eye on.

Type more with less effort on your iPhone or iPad! Expand custom keyboard shortcuts into frequently-used text snippets. Grab your favorite snippets from your Mac.

Such a great app made by a great company that cares about its users.

Interesting choices to carry the larger iPhone 6 Plus. Mine fits in my pocket, but I’m a big guy, so I suppose that’s not an option for everyone.

It’s a crime that it took them so long to nominate Stevie.

From Apple’s press release:

Apple® today announced that iPhone® 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, the biggest advancements in iPhone history, will be available in China beginning Friday, October 17 from the Apple Online Store (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores, and an expansive network of retail stores through all three major carriers and Apple Authorized Resellers. With support for TD-LTE and FDD-LTE, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus provide customers access to 4G/LTE networks from China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom across mainland China. Customers can pre-order iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus from the Apple Online Store beginning Friday, October 10. Beginning Tuesday, October 14, customers can reserve the new iPhones for in-store pick-up starting Friday, October 17.

“We are thrilled to bring iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus to our customers in China on all three carriers at launch,” said Apple’s CEO Tim Cook. “With support for TD-LTE and FDD-LTE, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus customers will have access to high-speed mobile networks from China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom for an incredible experience.”

Bummer. She was comedy glue, helping hold together some wildly irreverent and complex sketches, giving them a center.

Satya Nadella was speaking at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference on Wednesday. He was asked to offer advice to women who are uncomfortable asking for a raise. His response opened up a viral firestorm of criticism. Before you move on, take a minute to listen to what Nadella actually said, starting at about 1:33:56 in the video below.

Even better, go to about 00:28:00 to learn about the BRAID initiative, launched by Harvey Mudd College, “an initiative to work with computer science departments at 15 universities across the U.S. to increase the percentage of their undergraduate majors that are female and students of color”. BRAID is sponsored by Facebook, Google, Intel and Microsoft. Anyone at Apple pursuing this? If you are interested but need contact info, ping me, I’ll be happy to connect the dots.

But I digress. By now, you’ve watched the Nadella comment. Ham handed, but I don’t get the sense from context that this was meant in the way it came across. To his credit, Nadella followed up with an apology, sent it out to the entire company and posted it here for public consumption. From the letter:

Toward the end of the interview, Maria asked me what advice I would offer women who are not comfortable asking for pay raises. I answered that question completely wrong. Without a doubt I wholeheartedly support programs at Microsoft and in the industry that bring more women into technology and close the pay gap. I believe men and women should get equal pay for equal work. And when it comes to career advice on getting a raise when you think it’s deserved, Maria’s advice was the right advice. If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.

I take him at his word.

Om Malik:

The combination of Facebook and anonymity is as awkward as the marriage of Michael Jackson and Lisa Presley — farcical, comic and an act undertaken for the express purpose of deceit. Anonymity and privacy are not part of Facebook’s DNA.

Boom!

Kyle Russell has a nice article about Jony Ive’s panel at the Vanity Fair Summit talking about design. It’s a very interesting process. Then someone asked Jony about Xiaomi:

When a member of the audience came up to ask a question about Xiaomi and their unofficial tagline of “the Apple of China,” Ive was very straightforward with his response: “I’ll stand a little bit harsh, I don’t see it as flattery. When you’re doing something for the first time, you don’t know it’s gonna work, you spend 7 or 8 years working on something, and then it’s copied. I think it is really straightforward. It is theft and it is lazy. I don’t think it is ok at all.”

Fucking right!

Much respect bearded ones.

The site, set to open in time for the holiday-shopping season on Manhattan’s busy 34th Street, would mark an experiment by Amazon AMZN, -2.27% to connect with customers in the physical world. Amazon has built its business on competitive pricing and fast shipping. Until now, though, it couldn’t compete with the immediacy of a traditional store.

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure this makes sense to me. Amazon has a strong brand, but this doesn’t seem to do anything to strengthen its core business.

New York Times Magazine:

Americans tend to lack imagination when it comes to breakfast. The vast majority of us, surveys say, start our days with cold cereal — and those of us with children are more likely to buy the kinds with the most sugar. Children all over the world eat cornflakes and drink chocolate milk, of course, but in many places they also eat things that would strike the average American palate as strange, or worse.

Really interesting to read about the variety of foods these kids eat and a lot of it is food most of us have never even heard of. But the pictures are even better. The kids are so cute. The article highlights how breakfast traditions differ from one culture to another — from rice porridge in China to savory beans and plantains in parts of Africa and South America. It’s a reminder that breakfast doesn’t have to be sweet, processed, or fast. In some countries, children begin their mornings with soup, vegetables, or even fish, meals that provide real nourishment and balance for the day ahead. Seeing these global breakfast plates side by side shows just how narrow our view of the “morning meal” can be and encourages us to think beyond the cereal box. In fact, exploring options like fresh milk in Sydney can inspire healthier and more authentic breakfast choices that celebrate natural flavors and local ingredients.

It’s very sad. Glenn is a great guy and friend, but I understand the issues of being an independent publisher on Apple’s Newsstand—it’s not fun. Apple should just admit that they don’t give a shit about digital magazines and be done with it.

Yesterday, investor Carl Icahn tweeted a promise to post an open letter to Tim Cook. Today, he posted that letter.

The letter is long, so follow the link if you want to read the whole thing. At the heart of the matter, Icahn is asking Tim Cook to buy back more shares:

Described in more detail below, these factors combine to reflect a massive undervaluation of Apple in today’s market, which we believe will not last for long. Therefore, given the persistently excessive liquidity of $133 billion net cash on Apple’s balance sheet, we ask you to present to the rest of the Board our request for the company to make a tender offer, which would meaningfully accelerate and increase the magnitude of share repurchases.

Icahn owns 53 million shares of stock. He offers this statement to diffuse any cynicism:

To preemptively diffuse any cynical criticism that you may encounter with respect to our request, which might claim that we are requesting a tender offer with the intention of tendering our own shares, we hereby commit not to tender any of our shares if the company consummates any form of a tender offer at any price. We commit to this because we believe Apple remains dramatically undervalued.

This does not diffuse my cynicism. This strikes me as a simple push to build demand for the stock and increasing the value of his holdings. Not a new strategy for Icahn.

A one minute movie, based on a short (and I mean teeny) story suggestion from Reddit, winner of the Filminute International Film Festival. Something about this just grabbed me.

Josh Carr (really, that’s his name!) does an incredibly detailed walkthrough of one of Pioneer’s new in dash CarPlay compatible receivers. He starts off by building an install disc, then does the install itself. But the real value is the third video, where Carr puts CarPlay through its paces. Great job.

A lot has been written about Jony Ive, much of it biographical and centered on his design milestones. This piece is different. It paints a picture of Ive, does a better job capturing his spirit.

Here’s an example:

> Perhaps it is this drive to understand design with his own hands that keeps Ive grounded. “He’s not distracted by any veneer of glamour,” says Tang, who remarks on his friend’s thoughtfulness. On a recent birthday, Tang received two finely crafted wooden boxes containing large, engraved, Ive-designed ashtrays—Tang loves cigars similar to the ones on Smoking-hub.com—constructed from the next-generation iPhone material. “It was like getting the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Tang says. Ive likes nothing better than to come up with mischievously inventive ways to use the technology at his fingertips. When a presenter from Blue Peter—Britain’s longest-running children’s TV show, known for encouraging kids to craft utilitarian designs from household objects—came to present him with its highest honor, a gold Blue Peter badge depicting a ship in full sail, Ive was delighted. In repayment, he fired up a Mikron HSM 600U, a computer-controlled machine that can cut up a chunk of aluminum like an origami flower, and in a mere ten hours created a Blue Peter badge that looked a lot like a not-so-distant cousin of the MacBook Air.

I enjoyed the whole thing, but this sentence really brought it all home for me:

> Design critics now look back at the birth of the Jobs-Ive partnership as the dawn of a golden age in product design, when manufacturers began to understand that consumers would pay more for craftsmanship.

Right at the heart of it. Truth.

This Vanity Fair interview with Bill Gates and Satya Nadella for their upcoming November issue does a good job capturing both men’s personalities and, even more importantly, offers a sense of the nature of the challenge facing Microsoft 2.0.

“The way I think about success is our relevance,” says Nadella.

Relevance, however, is exactly what Microsoft doesn’t have, according to its critics. “The Irrelevance of Microsoft” is actually the title of a blog post by an analyst named Benedict Evans, who works at the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. On his blog, Evans pointed out that Microsoft’s share of all computing devices that we use to connect to the Internet, including P.C.’s, phones, and tablets, has plunged from 90 percent in 2009 to just around 20 percent today. This staggering drop occurred not because Microsoft lost ground in personal computers, on which its software still dominates, but rather because it has failed to adapt its products to smartphones, where all the growth is, and tablets. Even Microsoft’s new chairman of the board, a former IBM executive named John Thompson, told Fortune last winter that “there are some attributes to Microsoft today that do look vaguely like IBM circa 1990.” That is a particularly wounding comparison, because, as any tech person knows, IBM is the company that two decades ago an aggressive young Microsoft helped topple from the pinnacle of great technology companies.

The drop from 90% of all screens to 20% is both telling and subtle. That stat doesn’t take into account percentage of all data stored in Microsoft cloud solutions. Cloud is a perfect example of a business Microsoft originally missed, then pivoted to catch.

The Loop has been sold out of weekly sponsorships for the better part of two years, but we have some openings coming up in the next couple of months. There is only one sponsor a week, so you will have the exclusive spot to get your product or service in front of the fine, good looking readers of The Loop. If you would like to talk about a sponsorship or schedule a week, please Email Jim Dalrymple.

Jim and Shawn talk about Samsung, the Apple Watch and teens, Stevie Ray Vaughan and “Does the iPhone 6 get lost in The Beard?” Special guest appearance on this Amplified by a crow!

Sponsored by lynda.com (Visit lynda.com/thebeard to get access to all their courses FREE for 7 days).

I did an iTunes Festival wrap-up piece on Fortune today, which includes an exclusive interview with Oliver Schusser, Apple’s head of iTunes Europe.

Racked:

Neiman, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, Barneys New York, and Saks Fifth Avenue all have their own outlets; customers flock to these stores for the brand-name cachet and believe they’re shopping last season’s carefully curated inventory. However, this isn’t exactly the case.

Nordstrom Rack, for example, confirms to Racked that only 20% of what it sells is clearance merchandise coming from their stores and website, while the rest is bought expressly for the outlet.

I’ve gone to dozens of outlet stores and malls, sometimes involuntarily, and I’ve always thought they were a little bit fishy. Turns out, many are.

The Verge:

The first thing you notice about the IBM Model M keyboard, when you finally get your hands on it, is its size. After years of tapping chiclet keys and glass screens on two- and three-pound devices, hefting five pounds of plastic and metal (including a thick steel plate) is slightly intimidating. The second thing is the sound – the solid click that’s turned a standard-issue beige peripheral into one of the computer world’s most prized and useful antiques.

I used this keyboard so much in college, I can still hear that sound and feel that key pressure. Great keyboard.

Medium:

The physically and mentally exhausting nature of the Oktoberfest fortnight requires trust that’s cultivated in familiarity. Each server needs to know she can lean on her fellow team members when she’s endured so many boob ogles, grabby hands, and sawdust-covered blobs on the floor. Worming your way through 10,000 sweaty, beer-swilling revelers 12 hours a day for 16 days straight tests the limits of even the most crowd-loving extrovert.

Attending Oktoberfest in Germany has always been on my bucket list.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster dissected Piper Jaffray’s fall survey of 7,200 teens.

Response to the Apple Watch remains, in the words of Piper Jaffray technology analyst Gene Munster, “tepid.” Only seven percent of teens said they already own a smartwatch — and just 16 percent would be interested in shelling out $350 to buy the Apple Watch.

“The concept of wearing a watch for teenagers is foreign — and I think that’s part of what is reflected in that response,” said Munster. “The second piece is, it’s still something that people need to hear more about, beyond what Apple has to say about it, before people get interested in it.”

Seems to me, anticipating response to a product that has not yet hit people’s wrists is a fool’s errand. The market for the Apple Watch is divided financially, functionally, and stylistically. Add to that divisions for age and gender and you’ve got one complex beast of a market.

A survey given now may be good for product design and marketing folks but is useless as a predictor of specific market segment response to a product. It is too early to tell how people will respond once they see an Apple Watch in the wild, have the chance to try one on for themselves, experience the pros and cons in real life.

More importantly, the Apple Watch is currently a static, unchanging product. When it is officially released and people respond to it, Apple will have the opportunity to fine tune their product line. Part of the beauty of the Apple Watch is its modular design, offering different case styles and sizes, along with a plethora of watch bands and corresponding pricing models. Apple has a lot of tuning points to address both weak and strong points in the market.

The Apple Watch market is dynamic and unpredictable. Any survey this early needs to either be ignored or taken with a grain of salt.