Jean-Louis Gassée:

A short five years ago, the BlackBerry was sine qua non in the smartphone world. Today, the future looks gloomy.

Alex Brooks has a nice look at what he expects for future Retina Macs.

Jackie Dove has a look at some services that can replace what you had with MobileMe.

AppleInsider:

The 65.27 percent share of Apple’s iOS platform, which is found on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, was up from 62.65 percent in May. Apple’s share has steadily risen, growing from a 53 percent position in August of 2011.

Apple’s next closest competitor in mobile browsing marketis Google’s Android platform, which took 19.73 percent in the month of June.

I’m not going to say it, I just won’t. (Android is winning)

Incredible.

Avid has agreed to sell its consumer audio and video product lines. The company’s consumer audio products are being sold to inMusic, the parent company of Akai Professional, Alesis and Numark, among others.

The products involved in this transaction include M-Audio brand keyboards, controllers, interfaces, speakers and digital DJ equipment and other product lines. Avid will continue to develop and sell its industry-leading Pro Tools line of software and hardware, as well as associated I/O devices including Mbox and Fast Track.

Separately, the company’s consumer video editing line is being sold to Corel Corporation.

Tough times.

That’s when the real sneaking around began. For the next two months, Avitzur had to find new ways of getting into the building. He kept his canceled badge around his neck and timed his arrival for when he knew there’d be crowds coming through the front door.

What a fascinating story. A must read.

We took Chrome for iOS for a spin this weekend, tucking Safari into a folder and using Chrome exclusively on the iPhone and iPad. By Monday morning, Safari was back in the dock.

It’s the details that frustrate people.

Associated Press:

A Chinese court says Apple has agreed to pay a local company $60 million to settle a dispute over ownership of the iPad name. The Guangdong High People’s Court said Monday that Apple and Proview Technology reached the settlement through mediation. The court said that ended the legal case.

The Next Web:

Twitter’s success has long been intertwined with the independent developers that have chosen to use the platform. The third-party ecosystem made Twitter what it is in the most literal fashion possible.That’s why there has been some consternation over a post on Twitter’s developer blog today. The gist of the posts was that Twitter was cracking down on how third parties were using its APIs.

Along with GigaOM’s “Careful, Twitter — remember what happened to MySpace and Digg”, there is growing concern the folks at Twitter are doing what is best for their short term economic interests – and those actions may kill the service in the long term.

Imagine the stories this guy could tell.

Some nice choices from Matt Gemmell.

An explanation of how HTML5 differs from previous versions of the language.

Matt Gemmell:

There’s nothing to be gained from engaging with people at that level. Here we come to the nub of the matter: I’m not saying we shouldn’t be able to engage with customer reviews. We should be able to. Google understands that, but they’ve (as usual) chosen an odd and poorly-considered mechanism of encouraging app devs to air dirty laundry in public, and burn out due to having an additional public support forum over which they have zero control. That’s horrible. Count me out.

Gemmell takes a hard look at Google’s new reviews system which allows developers to talk with users; the renewed calls by iOS and Mac developers for a similar way to interact with customers on their stores; human nature; and what really can be done to affect positive change.

Judge Lucy Koh of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California has just granted Apple a preliminary injunction against the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, an Android-based smartphone co-developed by Samsung and Google.

GALAXY S III became smarter. It reads you and understand what you need. Smart Stay, Smart Alert, Direct Call, Double tap to top, S Voice will make you more convinient. What is your most wanted?

First of all, I think you meant “convenient.” Please tell me how a phone makes “you more convinient.” Samsung, you make my head hurt.

You have to love these pups.

Many thanks to Indev for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.

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Matt Richman takes a look at how far the average selling price (ASP) has fallen.

Apple:

Apple today announced that Bob Mansfield, Apple’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will retire and the role will be transitioned to Dan Riccio, Apple’s vice president of iPad Hardware Engineering, over several months. The entire hardware engineering team will continue to report to Mansfield until his departure.“Bob has been an instrumental part of our executive team, leading the hardware engineering organization and overseeing the team that has delivered dozens of breakthrough products over the years,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We are very sad to have him leave and hope he enjoys every day of his retirement.”

Elisha Marquez has been accepted to Ivy League schools and is on her way to Stanford in the fall. The 18-year-old has already nabbed an engineering internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and earned a scholarship through the Gates Millennium Scholars program.

But her GPA wasn’t high enough and she got beat. These parents need to chill out.

Revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2013 was $2.8 billion, down 33% from $4.2 billion in the previous quarter and down 43% from $4.9 billion in the same quarter of fiscal 2012. The revenue breakdown for the quarter was approximately 59% for hardware, 36% for service and 5% for software and other revenue. During the quarter, RIM shipped 7.8 million BlackBerry smartphones and approximately 260,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.

Just brutal.

Google on Thursday announced that its Chrome browser will launch in the App Store for iPhone and iPad, as well as a native iOS application connected to the Google Drive service.

Part of what makes Safari so fast on iOS is the Nitro engine. I wonder how Chrome will compete with that.

I loved Billy Mays.

TJ Draper:

I can see how this is a major improvement if you have been using iTunes to manage podcasts and syncing them from iTunes to your iDevice. But while this is a major improvement over that scenario, this is by no means a good app.

Great news from Aspyr. I love Call of Duty.

At the heart of BlueStacks is a multi-OS runtime with breakthrough virtualization technology. Apps developed for different operating systems can execute simultaneously, side-by-side, on the same computer.

There is a kickstarter-like page allowing people to donate to have Mosspuppet come out of retirement. He’s a funny little man.