I get all the Apple bashing, I really do. Blogs need eyeballs, pundits gotta predict stuff, doom and gloom sells papers. But that Apple bashing is tiring to read and saps the credibility of those who write it.
The linked article is Mike Wehner’s take on the question, “Is Apple thriving?” Short answer, yes.
I love lists. Love stepping through them, one at a time, especially with friends, arguing and discussing what’s been left out, what doesn’t belong, and what is in the wrong place.
As is usually the case, this list is not mine. In fact, I definitely don’t agree with a number of these choices. That is what makes this so much fun for me. C’mon, Jaws at #17? That’s insane. I think Jaws should be right up there in the top 3 at least.
One thing I love about lists like this is the new movies I encountered here. My Netflix queue has some terrific new entries. What’s your choice for the most suspenseful film ever made?
You’ve likely seen some of these, but most of these were new to me. Carve out a few minutes to dig through this page. Incredible collection of powerful, moving images.
We’ve all seen sushi restaurants where they put the food on a conveyor belt, you pick off what you like. But this restaurant takes that process to the next level.
So much to see in this video. Special orders on some sort of tablet. Looks like an iPad power plug, but where’s the home button? Is that an iPad?
Got to love the game you can play if you deposit 5 dishes at the end. Motivation to eat more, motivation to clean after yourself.
Kirk McElhearn argues that quitting an app might not speed up your iOS device, but it might make a difference to your battery life.
There is definitely room for improvement in the information Apple presents on background apps. As is, all you get is binary information, a scrolling list of apps that are running, in some form or another. At the very least, some kind of indicator that tells you that the background app is partaking in some battery sucking activity would be useful.
From doodle to IPO, from first CEO Jack Dorsey to Evan Williams and then former stand-up coming Dick Costolo, Twitter is a great story. Terrific read.
Reddit has 70 million page views per month. That’s a heady number. Someone somewhere is thinking of ways to turn this into big money.
I can’t help but wonder if Reddit will turn the corner and become a revenue pursuing entity, or keep their sights on providing the service they provide so well. A classic moment in a company’s life. Wonder which way they will turn.
Siri does a lot. But most of what Siri picks up follows some well defined rules.
“Siri, remind me to pick up some milk on the way home.”
There are primary and secondary verbs, as well as words that represent objects and locations. But this type of analysis is the tip of the iceberg in terms of natural language understanding.
A team at Stanford is working on the problem of neural analysis of sentiment.
During the summer the scientists started from a dataset of roughly 12,000 movie review sentences. They split these sentences into phrases, using automated techniques to “parse” groups of words into grammatical units of meaning. The result was 214,000 phrases and sentences. Each of these was read by three humans, who evaluated these expressions for intensity of like or dislike.
Computer scientists call this labeling the data.
Using the Stanford team’s NaSent algorithm, the machine “studied” this labeled data the way a student might study a grammar text.
Or, to be more accurate, the Deep Learning system assigned each labeled expression a set of mathematical attributes. Computer scientists call these numerical descriptions “feature representations.” They are roughly analogous to the concepts and definitions we understand as human beings.
This kind of analysis will move the ball forward, help make natural language systems like Siri much more sophisticated. Fascinating stuff.
There’s an emerging collectible market for new-in-a-box versions of the original iPhone 2g. I wonder where those units are coming from. Who buys an iPhone and doesn’t immediately use it? Visionaries, that’s who!
The mayor of Cupertino and Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer spoke glowingly about the new campus. Amazing to me that Apple got this done with so little friction.
The press conference really made 3 things clear. Apple loves Cupertino, Cupertino loves Apple, and everyone involved reveres Steve Jobs.
The headline says it all. Businesses are investing in the Apple ecosystem, building far more custom apps for iOS than Android.
As a developer, I think no small part of this trend is due to the ease of developing for iOS as compared to Android, as well as the lack of fragmentation device-wise.
This is a lovely bit of design.
Nanigans is an ad engine used by companies such as eBay, Zynga, and T-Mobile to advertise on Facebook. Though this article is based on a single report, this is a report worth paying attention to.
In their report, it was noted that, “For the first three quarters of 2013, RPC [revenue per click] on iOS averaged 6.1 times higher than Android and ROI [return on investment] on iOS averaged 17.9 times higher than Android.”
Why the huge difference? iPhone users represent a larger percentage of smartphone web traffic, and spend more money as a group.
Speaking to Businessweek about the mobile industry, Mr. Cook said, “There’s always a large junk part of the market. We’re not in the junk business … There’s a segment of the market that really wants a product that does a lot for them, [emphasis added] and I want to compete like crazy for those customers. I’m not going to lose sleep over that other market, because it’s just not who we are.”
This sounds like arrogance, but it’s really shrewd business. What Mr. Cook is telling us, in other words, is that Apple designs its products for people who aren’t buying bottom of the barrel smartphones. Apple implicitly designs its phones for people who can and do spend money.
Interesting speculation that the NFL is considering bringing in a streaming partner such as Netflix or Google Play for a Thursday Night Football package. That would be a huge move, with lots of obstacles to overcome.
One point to note is that DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket agreement expires at the end of the 2014-2015 season, so now would be the time to reshuffle the deck. I would love to see an online component to the NFL. I wonder if anyone at Apple is pursuing a relationship with the NFL.
To me, this is another sign of the slow transition from the network television broadcasting model to the inevitable internet based model. Very interesting.
Amazing to me that journalists (take the term with a grain of salt) like this keep their jobs.
In Apple’s January quarterly earnings conference call, Cook warned analysts, “the supply chain is very complex, and we obviously have multiple sources for things. Even if a particular data point were factual, it would be impossible to interpret that data point as to what it meant for our business.”
Cook continued to recommend that analysts not base their predictions on supply chain “checks” throughout 2013. However, a series of analysts have continued to issue “supply chain check” reports that fueled headlines despite being, more often that not, completely wrong.
And yet this habit continues. Yeesh.
I’ve been living with my iPhone 5s for about a week now. I have to say, the fingerprint scanner is incredible. I have two fingers registered, my left thumb (I am left-handed) and my right index finger (for when I use a two handed approach). About 80% of the time, I press and release the home button, and my phone recognizes my touch, opens up instantly. The other 20% of the time, I have to reposition my finger once or twice, and that does the trick. Even in that worst case, I’m in quicker than if I typed in my access code. This is some really well designed technology.
As has been widely reported, Touch-ID is based on technology developed by AuthenTec, a company Apple purchased in July, 2012 for about $356 million.
AuthenTec cofounder Scott Moody gave a presentation this week on the technology behind TouchID.
“We’re looking at pores, structures of ridges and valleys, and instantaneously tell who you are,” Moody said. “Every time you use it, it learns more about you. Because it knows, ‘This is Alex,’ every time you use it gets easier and easier.”
If you’ve ever played with any other fingerprint sensors, you can really appreciate the elegance of the AuthenTec solution. There’s no swiping, no awkward angles. As with all the best tech, it just works.
The folks at Bad Lip Reading have knocked another one out of the park, assembling five minutes of footage from Game of Thrones, dubbing in nonsense dialogue that matches the lip movements of the actors, and reinventing the show as a comedy set at a renaissance festival.
Via Buzzfeed
Nice exploration of some of the current advances in artificial intelligence.
I’m a real sucker for a good commercial, and this is better than most. I challenge you to come up with a better ad campaign for public transport.
With some new Mac hardware on the horizon, lots of folks will be replacing their existing machines with brand new gear. And some of them will be giving their existing machines to other folks. If that’s you, take a read of the linked Apple support article. This is the officially sanctioned way to erase and reinstall OS X.
The instructions show you how to erase your hard drive using Disk Utility (you can even do the DoD-approved wipe your drive 7 times method), then use OS X’s built-in recovery disk to reinstall OS X on the wiped drive.
Needless to say, be sure to back up your hard drive before you even read the instructions.
Good. I love this design, happy to see this project approved.
The approval came after more than six hours of discussion this evening, with many statements of support and some expressions of concern from members of the community, and the approval was met with significant applause by those in attendance.
Today’s approval is final pending any petitions for reconsideration, which must be filed within ten calendar days. If no petitions are received within that period, Apple will be granted ancillary permits to begin demolition of the former HP campus currently located on the site, as well as utility relocation, tree removal, and construction of a temporary sound wall. The formal agreement between Apple and the City of Cupertino must be given a second public reading, scheduled for the council’s meeting on November 19, and Apple’s full set of permits would go into effect the following day.
Sounds like bulldozers on November 20.
Apple on Tuesday announced a special event for October 22. The event will be held at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco and will begin at 10:00 am PT.
It is widely expected that Apple will update its iPad and iPad mini products during the event, although we could see the introduction of OS X Mavericks and other Mac products as well.
The Hartnoll lads talk about making Chime, Orbital’s first big hit, and also discuss their career, their favorite instruments and what they’re doing now. Finally, they offer advice for new music producers.
Via Synthopia
Professional photographer Austin Mann took an iPhone 5s and iPhone 5 to Patagonia and put both phones through their paces. A good number of side by side shots really tell the story.
The 5S dynamic range… that is, the ability to pull detail out of the shadows & highlights in editing, is remarkably better. I’m constantly sculpting images to bring out the details I want to see… that means bringing up shadows, recovering detail in skies, sharpening where needed and more.
If the camera part of your phone is important to you, read the review, look closely at the pictures. This is a realistic review.
This is breathtaking speed, crushing the previous record of 40 gigabits per second.
To achieve such a massive data rate, researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) used a massive swath of bandwidth at around 240 GHz — close to the terahertz frequency range. To create the signal, two laser beams (carrying the data) are mixed together (using a photon mixer made by NTT Electronics). An electrical signal results, where the frequency of the signal (237.5 GHz in this case) is the difference between the two optical signals. A normal antenna is then used to beam the signal to the receiver, where a fancy chip fabricated out of fast-switching III-V transistors is required to make sense of the super-high-frequency signal.
Imagine being able to copy a Blue-ray disc (that’s about 50 Gb) in just a few seconds. 50 gigabytes is 50×8 = 400 gigabits. That’s 4 seconds to copy a feature film Blue-ray. Impressive.
Connection to the phone will be via Bluetooth, initiated via the steering wheel voice activation button.
To help further minimize distraction, Siri takes hands-free functionality even further with an Eyes Free mode which enables drivers to interact with their iPhones using nothing more than their voice while keeping the device’s screen from lighting up.
Bypassing the screen entirely. Interesting.
Tim Cook announced that Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, will be joining Apple in a newly created position, as a senior vice president and member of the executive team.
Ahrendts will have oversight of the strategic direction, expansion and operation of both Apple retail and online stores, which have redefined the shopping experience for hundreds of millions of customers around the world. Apple retail stores set the standard for customer service with innovative features like the Genius Bar®, Personal Setup and One to One personal training to help customers get the most out of their Apple products.
Ahrendts will start in the Spring. Let’s hope she can bring some stability to the position. Ron Johnson really built the retail foundation at Apple, leaving in 2011 for an ill-fated run at JC Penney. John Browett replaced Johnson, but was at Apple less than a year.
Hey, you can understand all the words now!