A judge’s approval of T-Mobile US Inc.’s takeover of Sprint Corp. will usher in a new balance of power in the U.S. wireless market and test whether three giants will compete as aggressively for cellphone users as four unequal players once did.
And:
The opinion will leave most of the country’s wireless customers with three major network operators: Verizon Communications Inc., AT&T Inc. and the new T-Mobile. New entrant Dish plans to use the deal as a springboard for its mobile ambitions, while U.S. cable companies are stuck with existing providers’ networks for their fledgling cellular services.
And:
The judge was convinced both by testimony from Sprint executives that the struggling carrier was falling behind, despite what he described as “valiant attempts” to remain competitive, and from Dish that it would be able to operate a viable new carrier.
He also acknowledged the effort the FCC and Justice Department put into crafting a fourth nationwide carrier run by Dish. The agreement requires Sprint to sell airwaves and about nine million customer accounts to Dish.
The popular Edison email app, which is in the top 100 productivity apps on the Apple app store, scrapes users’ email inboxes and sells products based off that information to clients in the finance, travel, and e-Commerce sectors. The contents of Edison users’ inboxes are of particular interest to companies who can buy the data to make better investment decisions, according to a J.P. Morgan document obtained by Motherboard.
To keep our Edison Mail app free, and to protect your privacy by rejecting an advertising-based business model, our company Edison Software, measures e-commerce through a technology that automatically recognizes commercial emails and extracts anonymous purchase information from them. Our technology is designed to ignore personal and work email, which does not help us measure market trends.
Edison puts privacy first in everything we do as a company and that includes making our users aware of how we use their data in our products.
If the product is free, you are the product.
Back in the ’70s, someone made this observation about television being free. Prescient.
Pro tools for iPadOS and iOS? You betcha. Video and Film makers can create pro storyboards fast with Previs Pro, then share in AR, digitally or in print. Get the Free trial here.
The night sky turned to daylight briefly as an epic boom echoed throughout the valley in Steamboat Springs Saturday night. The world’s largest single firework had just exploded.
At 7:56 p.m., fireworks expert Tim Borden successfully captured the world record for the largest single firework when the 2,797-pound behemoth illuminated the crowd during the Night Extravaganza at the annual Steamboat Springs Winter Carnival.
The 62-inch shell was launched from a 26-foot long mortar from atop Howelsen Hill, reaching nearly a mile in the air when it detonated, putting on quite the show.
That was one hell of a blast. I hope everyone in the area knew about it because that would scare the bejesus out of you if you were just out walking the dog.
People in France remember the summer of 1997 for the deaths of Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, and Jeanne Calment. The first became a household name by marrying into royalty; the second, by caring for the world’s sick and poor. Jeanne Calment, however, was an accidental icon, her celebrity the result of a form of passivity. For a hundred and twenty-two years, five months, and fourteen days, Calment managed not to die.
She was born at home on the Rue du Roure, in Arles, one of only four addresses she ever held. That February morning, in 1875, lavender smoke commingled with the cold in the tight streets of La Roquette, a traditional neighborhood of fishermen and the maritime trades. Plastic, tea bags, public trash cans, and the zipper had yet to come into the world. The life expectancy for a French woman was forty-five. Approximately one billion five hundred million people walked the planet, and Calment would outlive them all.
This is a long but fascinating story about a woman some of you may have heard of and whose life and death and age are still in dispute.
Yesterday, Shawn posted a link to FastCompany’s Mythic Quest review. They appreciate it technically, but did not get the funny. Fair enough.
One particular line paints the picture for me:
I am not a gamer, so I can’t speak to the precision and accuracy of every detail.
And there’s the rub. You don’t have to be a gamer to get the humor, but it does help. There’s a lot of context in many of the jokes.
Personally, I absolutely love the show. I found it funny, insightful, irreverent, and clever. It worked for me and for my wife, a rare comedy in that regard.
No complaints about the FastCompany review. It was, overall, very positive. The reviewer just didn’t find it funny. I’ve read a number of reviews that shared my love for the series. So do give it a chance. It’s on my short list of the best shows on any streaming platform, period.
Samsung hasn’t officially posted the ad on YouTube yet, but that hasn’t stopped any number of people from capturing and reposting the ad themselves. One such capture is embedded below.
A pretty good ad, though two things stick out in the fine (tiny and blurry) print, there at the bottom of the screen:
You may notice a small crease in the center of the main screen, which is a natural characteristic of the screen.
And:
Screen images simulated.
The ad ends with, “Unpacked 02.11.20”. That’s tomorrow.
Makes me wonder if Apple will release a foldable that requires a public caveat about a crease in the screen.
When Apple rolled out the Pro Display XDR, they compared it to the much more expensive Sony Reference Monitor ($43,000). Reviewer Vincent Teoh digs in.
Backstage at last night’s Oscars, writer/director (and winner of Best Adapted Screenplay for Jojo Rabbit) Taika Waititi was asked what writers should be asking for in the next round of talks with producers. His response was all about the Mac keyboard.
Watch for yourself. I’m guessing a number of you will be nodding your head in agreement.
Backstage at the #Oscars, Taika Waititi says that the WGA should ask Apple to make the MacBook keyboard easier to type on. pic.twitter.com/mpwSFDPplO
This insider access seems to help Mythic Quest nail its authenticity. I am not a gamer, so I can’t speak to the precision and accuracy of every detail. As an outsider, though, I will say that Mythic Quest certainly feels real, in the way that The Larry Sanders Show did for late-night talk shows.
The show even covers an admirable range of issues affecting the industry, like the “bro monoculture” of it all, and it’s nice to see the Sunny team take on progressive topics in a new venue.
This is all fertile ground for TV comedy, and considering how mind-bogglingly popular gaming is, it’s about time there was a TV comedy set in this world.
It’s just a bummer that the comedy isn’t funnier.
My wife and I watched the first episode last night and this review is pretty much how we felt about it. I’m not saying it’s a bad show but we didn’t laugh once during the first episode. Laughter should be a given in a sitcom.
Wacom has responded to allegations drivers for its tablet line are collecting data on its users and passing it on to Google, including the names of macOS applications being used, by claiming it has no access to personal data and what data it collects is anonymized before it is seen by the company.
“We apologize for any confusion regarding data collection being done by the Wacom software driver,” the firm states, “and the unclarity about the actual information collected.”
Wacom claims it collects data “for quality insurance and development purposes only,” with the driver collecting a “sample of information” such as the model, hardware usage, and the names of apps. The company does not collect MAC addresses nor serial numbers.
Hey Wacom – if you had thought about this to begin with, you wouldn’t be in this trouble now. Companies need to learn what “opt-in” means.
Most college students today have only known Apple as the fashionable, popular, commercially competent, and trend setting global technology giant it is today. However, 23 years ago Apple Computer, Inc. was struggling to survive while trying to sell Macs in a PC world centered around Microsoft Windows. Things began to change after Apple acquired NeXT in a surprise deal that was announced in the last week of 1996 and was completed on February 7, 1997.
Apple’s acquisition of NeXT Software 23 years ago most obviously provided the company with a modern operating system foundation. NeXT’s advanced software and development tools promised to replace the old Mac System Software that had debuted back in 1984. The “classic” Mac software platform had grown outdated and difficult to modernize without breaking the software that ran on it.
More importantly, however, the infusion of new management from NeXT served to clear out the unfocused fiefdoms at Apple that each sought to promote their own pet projects, often at the expense of other parts of the company.
With the way Jobs took over and made wholesale changes as well as inserting NeXT employees into almost every facet of the company, I always say today is the day NeXT acquired Apple.
Dave got his new AirPods Pro this week, so we spent some time talking about our thoughts on the product. We also discussed the improved Apple Maps, and share our thoughts on Apple News+.
Apple has been fined 25 million euros by a French consumer fraud group for intentionally slowing down some iPhone models with a software update.
The Directorate General for Competition, Consumption and the Suppression of Fraud (DGCCRF), which is part of the country’s economy ministry, concluded that Apple had failed to inform users that iOS updates to older iPhones could slow down their devices.
The investigation followed Apple’s admission in 2017 that it slows down some older iPhones with degraded batteries during times of peak power usage in order to prevent unexpected shutdowns.
Apple was damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. The biggest error was in not being more open and forthcoming about this decision as it was happening. That being said, this fine is likely an intentional slap on the wrist.
The chairman of Disney said on Thursday that the company is apologizing to a California elementary school that was asked to pay for a license after it showed “The Lion King” at a fund-raiser organized by students’ parents in 2019.
Robert A. Iger, the chairman, said in a post on Twitter that the company “apologizes to the Emerson Elementary School P.T.A. and I will personally donate to their fund raising initiative.”
The event on Nov. 15 was meant to be a fun night at the movies for students at Emerson Elementary School in Berkeley, Calif., with pizza and a showing of “The Lion King.” Students were encouraged to bring blankets and wear pajamas to the fund-raiser.
But on Tuesday, Emerson’s parent-teacher association said it had been asked by Movie Licensing USA, a licensing company representing Disney, to pay $250 for a screening license, a request that pitted the school against a corporate behemoth and set up a broader conversation about public school funding.
There’s just so much dumb in this story. The school should have known better (you can’t just publicly show a movie without paying the rights holder) and Disney’s legal department handled it in the worst possible way. They could have simply said, “Don’t do it again.” but they ended up embarrassing their company and causing a lot of ill will and hurt feelings.
“The identity plays upon the three aspects of the restaurant’s name by unifying the swan and the mallard through the positive and negative space within the ampersand. A limited colour palette and minimalistic style helps create a simple yet balanced feel.”
I saw this absolutely stunning graphic design on Twitter yesterday but I can’t find the tweet anymore.
I posted a link to this a while back. It’s an AI that generates computer-generated faces.
In the last incarnation, the faces are realistic, but I could easily pick out artifacts from each face, blurry hair, odd shapes, unrealistic facial features.
That has all changed. To my eye, these artificial people are eerily perfect. Fake people, for your consideration.
Ryan Christoffel, MacStories, lays out his fix for iPad multitasking. This is some thoughtful, detailed feedback for Apple, a proposal to fix a system that is certainly problematic.
Personally, I find iPad multitasking to be confusing at best. So much so, I’ve just avoided it. There have been times when I’ve gone to swipe a second app off the screen, only to have the swipe get processed by the app and, on more than one occasion, swipe-deleted something from an app accidentally.
That said, I see the massive potential in iPad multitasking. It’s not an easy system to design, and I hope the team at Apple takes Ryan’s thoughts to heart, is willing to take a step back and consider some design changes to address user confusion.
A collaboration between Michael Tompert and photographer Paul Fairchild with this special tribute to the Apple brand. A destruction of products such as the iPad, iPhone and Macbook, presented destroyed or crushed in the form of 12 large format photographs.
Just what it says. A dozen photos of destroyed Apple products. It’s art.
1.Illumination of the part of the facility, located at 1 Apple Parkway, Cupertino, CA with a GPS signal to allow for the testing and experimentation indoors for continued exploration of utilizing GPS technologies within their devices to provide innovative applications and continue to provide safe products.
2.Further design, development and enhancement of existing GPS applications to provide greater efficiency and more effective means of utilizing GPS derived information.
Came across this on Reddit this morning. Wonder what this is for?
Recently, Motherboard obtained a copy of the contract businesses are required to sign before being admitted to Apple’s IRP Program. The contract, which has not previously been made public, sheds new light on a program Apple initially touted as increasing access to repair but has been remarkably silent on ever since. It contains terms that lawyers and repair advocates described as “onerous” and “crazy”; terms that could give Apple significant control over businesses that choose to participate. Concerningly, the contract is also invasive from a consumer privacy standpoint.
In order to join the program, the contract states independent repair shops must agree to unannounced audits and inspections by Apple, which are intended, at least in part, to search for and identify the use of “prohibited” repair parts, which Apple can impose fines for. If they leave the program, Apple reserves the right to continue inspecting repair shops for up to five years after a repair shop leaves the program. Apple also requires repair shops in the program to share information about their customers at Apple’s request, including names, phone numbers, and home addresses.
Anyone involved with Apple’s “Authorized Service Provider” program will recognize some of the restrictions here. Apple is notorious for the stringency of its terms and the unequal restrictions placed on those who want to do business with the company.
Pro tools for iPadOS and iOS? You betcha. Video and Film makers can create pro storyboards fast with Previs Pro, then share in AR, digitally or in print. Get the Free trial here.
You can quibble with the grades, but no doubt the discussion of each category is worth the read.
Two A’s, deserved in my opinion: Wearables (AirPods and AirPods Pro are home runs) and Hardware Reliability (surprising A, but my experience in recent hardware has been rock solid).
I think Jason Snell and John Gruber should consider adding Apple Store/Customer Service grades. Lots to discuss there.
I’ve seen a few apps do similar things, but this is now baked into macOS.
Makes me think of possibilities, of future AirPods that pick up your brain’s alpha waves, let you move your cursor, or control your iOS device with your mind.
The ability to use your mind to control a mouse has been around for a long time, but requires very specialized hardware. Imagine if Apple could find a way to embed that hardware in your AirPods or, perhaps, in an AppleHat?
Anyone who is interested in learning how to play chess, who’s just getting started, or who already loves to play: Watch The Magic of Chess. This charming short film by Jenny Schweitzer Bell, presented by The US Chess Federation, was filmed at the 2019 Elementary Chess Championships at the Nashville Opryland resort.
The short film is filled with excellent advice, “uninhibited, philosophical insights” by kids who seem to love playing chess
I learned how to play chess when Bobby Fischer was World Champion (yes – I’m old) but I bet every one of these kids could still beat me.
I love the first beta of a new iOS version. It’s where you get a peek at the newest features. Some good stuff here, beyond the CarKey API covered in the last post.
iOS 13.4 contains references to a “CarKey” API, which will make it possible to use the iPhone and also the Apple Watch to unlock, lock, and start a car. According to the system’s internal files, users will be able to use CarKey in NFC-compatible cars, as they only need to hold the device near the vehicle to use it as a key.
I would absolutely love this feature.
I recognize this might not be possible with existing hardware, but imagine if you could get a text or your phone could ring if someone unlocked your car and your keys were nowhere near the car.
Or how about a camera built into the car that took a snapshot every time your car was unlocked? If you live in or near a city, car break-ins are a way of life, and these two features might help reduce these.
The unification of the car and the smartphone ecosystem moves ever closer.
Maps is one of the very few products I use, equally, in both the Google and Apple ecosystems. Apple doesn’t have a counter to Google search. I use Gmail, not Mail. But I use Google and Apple Maps interchangeably.
I definitely prefer Apple Maps, purely for the ecosystem support, and especially for those turn-by-turn Apple Watch taps that I don’t get with Google Maps.
But I am not a fan of Yelp, and I find Google Maps’ crowd-sourced restaurant reviews more accurate than what I experience with Apple Maps’ Yelp tie-in.
So a Google Maps update is nice news. Follow the headline link to scan through the new features. A welcome redesign, some nice new ideas.
Last week I set up my tablet on my new laptop. As part of installing its drivers I was asked to accept Wacom’s privacy policy. Why does a device that is essentially a mouse need a privacy policy? I wondered. Sensing skullduggery, I decided to make an exception to my anti-privacy-policy-policy and give this one a read.
In section 3.1 of their privacy policy, Wacom wondered if it would be OK if they sent a few bits and bobs of data from my computer to Google Analytics.
Wacom didn’t say exactly what data they were going to send themselves. I resolved to find out.
Wacom will undoubtedly offer a heartfelt apology and explanation as to why they do this but the big question will be, for how long have they been doing this and what do they do with the data? The other part of this is I wish I had half the technical chops this guy does.
