iTunes Movies is turning 10. To celebrate they’ve released six bundles from a variety of studios each containing ten movies for ten bucks each. There’s some good movies in quite a few of these (and some really bad ones). Worth giving a look at least.
Early reviews for the new Apple AirPods seem to be pretty good. Here’s Susie Ochs, from Macworld:
Not only did I dance, I headbanged. I shook my head side to side, I tossed my hair, I jogged in place, and I looked silly doing all of it. The AirPods stayed put, and they stayed loud. The music (more Sia, naturally) sounded full and lush and I couldn’t hear a single word anyone around me was saying, as if I was completely sealed off in a bubble of rock and roll. Pretty impressive.
My dream has always been to walk around and talk to my computer like Ender, so I’m probably going to give these a shot.1 For those interested in being able to charge your phone and listen to audio with a cord at the same time, it looks like Belkin has released a $40 “audio + charge” dongle, and Apple’s own dock comes with a 3.5mm headphone jack on it. I charge my iPhone in an Elevation dock so I’ve never really charged my phone and listened via headphones with a cord anyway, but, it does look like there’s a couple solutions here.
I’ll write something up about what I think, in October, on how they work for music and podcast listening.↩
John Paczkowski, writing at Buzzfeed about Apple killing the headphone jack:
“It was holding us back from a number of things we wanted to put into the iPhone,” Riccio says. “It was fighting for space with camera technologies and processors and battery life. And frankly, when there’s a better, modern solution available, it’s crazy to keep it around.”
It’s hard to imagine Apple’s hardware design team hamstrung by a diminutive legacy port. But when you’re dealing with a computing device with extraordinarily tight dimensional tolerances, there are bound to be challenges. Riccio spends a good 15 minutes explaining them. I’ll try to do it in two.
Like it or hate it — the decision making process really is interesting.
Apple has announced the iPhone 7. It does not contain a 3.5mm headphone jack, instead including lightning headphones in the box, and an adapter for your old headphones. The adapter is also available separately for $9. Apple has also announced their new wireless headphone solution, dubbed “AirPods.” Those will be available in October and cost $159.
The pitch was actually pretty simple: wireless is better. The devil will be in the details of implementation, but they touted a simple pairing method that looks impressive. If I had to guess, I’d say that as battery life in wireless headphones improves, and as they become more popular and costs drop, wireless will be ubiquitous. Being a 90’s kid will be talking about how you used to have a wire running from your phone to your head all the time. It’s going to be an interesting transition to watch.
Apple will be, presumably, debuting new iPhones tomorrow at their annual September event. Jason Snell, at Six Colors, has a good run down on what to expect, and what to look for:
Is there an additional wireless audio story? There have been rumors swirling around for a while that part of the headphone-jack removal would be a new set of Apple-branded wireless headphones, dubbed EarPods. Whether or not that rumor is true, I’m curious how Apple promotes wireless audio. Does it highlight Beats? Does it unveil new Apple-branded headphones? Does it use an alternative technology to Bluetooth?
The Apple thread in our forums is always a fun place to talk about the announcements when they drop. So, if you’re watching tomorrow morning at 10:00am (PDT), come join in while we complain about our headphone jack-less future.
Apple Music has added two new weekly playlists to the “For You” section of the service. The first comes out on Wednesday and is a “My Favorites Mix” that is based on songs you love. The second is a “My New Music Mix” that comes out on Friday and contains new music from artists that Apple thinks you’ll like. It looks like, currently, this is only available on the iOS 10 beta version of the service, but I hope they end up bringing it to the desktop as well.
This story of Siri’s transformation, revealed for the first time here, might raise an eyebrow in much of the artificial intelligence world. Not that neural nets improved the system — of course they would do that — but that Apple was so quietly adept at doing it. Until recently, when Apple’s hiring in the AI field has stepped up and the company has made a few high-profile acquisitions, observers have viewed Apple as a laggard in what is shaping up as the most heated competition in the industry: the race to best use those powerful AI tools. Because Apple has always been so tight-lipped about what goes on behind badged doors, the AI cognoscenti didn’t know what Apple was up to in machine learning. “It’s not part of the community,” says Jerry Kaplan, who teaches a course at Stanford on the history of artificial intelligence. “Apple is the NSA of AI.” But AI’s Brahmins figured that if Apple’s efforts were as significant as Google’s or Facebook’s, they would have heard that.
Bill Marczak and John Scott-Railton of the Citizen Lab:
Ahmed Mansoor is an internationally recognized human rights defender, based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and recipient of the Martin Ennals Award (sometimes referred to as a “Nobel Prize for human rights”). On August 10 and 11, 2016, Mansoor received SMS text messages on his iPhone promising “new secrets” about detainees tortured in UAE jails if he clicked on an included link. Instead of clicking, Mansoor sent the messages to Citizen Lab researchers. We recognized the links as belonging to an exploit infrastructure connected to NSO Group, an Israel-based “cyber war” company that sells Pegasus, a government-exclusive “lawful intercept” spyware product. NSO Group is reportedly owned by an American venture capital firm, Francisco Partners Management.
The ensuing investigation, a collaboration between researchers from Citizen Lab and from Lookout Security, determined that the links led to a chain of zero-day exploits (“zero-days”) that would have remotely jailbroken Mansoor’s stock iPhone 6 and installed sophisticated spyware. We are calling this exploit chain Trident. Once infected, Mansoor’s phone would have become a digital spy in his pocket, capable of employing his iPhone’s camera and microphone to snoop on activity in the vicinity of the device, recording his WhatsApp and Viber calls, logging messages sent in mobile chat apps, and tracking his movements.
If you’ve got an iPhone or iPad: upgrade it to iOS 9.3.5 as soon as possible.
Apple has announced their Apple Music Festival lineup: Alicia Keys, Bastille, Britney Spears, Calvin Harris, Chance the Rapper, Elton John, Michael Bublé, OneRepublic, Robbie Williams, and The 1975.
The full lineup was announced today by Julie Adenuga, the London voice of Beats 1, an Apple Music radio station that celebrates the best new music every day. Apple Music lets fans get even closer to their favorite performers during the Apple Music Festival with exclusive playlists, artist news and backstage interviews throughout September. The 10 spectacular nights of live performances will be made available live and on-demand to Apple Music members in 100 countries on their iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, PC, Apple TV and Android phones.
Fast Company has a fantastic, and in-depth, profile on Apple:
With Macs, iPads, and software applications and services, Apple isn’t a one-trick pony like BlackBerry, to use an example cited by those most freaked out about the recent iPhone slowdown. It recorded $50.6 billion in sales during that “disappointing” quarter, more than the combined revenue of Google parent Alphabet ($20.3 billion) and Amazon ($29.1 billion) over the same period. Its $10.5 billion in profits outpaced not just the combination of Alphabet ($4.2 billion) and Amazon ($513 million) but also Facebook ($1.5 billion) and Microsoft ($3.8 billion).
“I don’t read all the coverage on Apple that there is,” Cook tells me a few days after my lunch with Cue and Federighi. “The way that I look at that is, I really know the truth.” And he’s ready to talk about it.
The piece is written by one of the the authors of Becoming Steve Jobs, which is the book I most recommend (even over his own biography) people read to understand Apple and Steve.
Mark Sullivan interviewed Apple Music’s Bozoma Saint John for Fast Company:
We should be paying attention to all of the ways that people want to listen to music, I mean, truly. Each point of interest is equally important as the other. I really like R&B from 1993, but I really like R&B that I just heard last week, too. How do I get served both of those things, because I am a complex music listener? By the way, you don’t have to be a music-phile in order to have that experience. Even a casual listener at the end of the day does not want to listen to the same thing again and again and again. You do want fresh; you want to be served something. I have learned that the balance of all of those things between the security of listening, to everything I want to listen to, and being served something new, the experience of U.S. consumers or me as a consumer, all those things should be rated equally.
More than one hundred new and redesigned emoji characters will be available to iPhone and iPad users this Fall with iOS 10. This exciting update brings more gender options to existing characters, including new female athletes and professionals, adds beautiful redesigns of popular emoji, a new rainbow flag and more family options.
The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Apple has bought the rights to “Carpool Karaoke” and will be releasing episodes exclusively on Apple Music:
The viral segment that broke out on the Late Late Show With James Corden is being turned into its own series, which will air first exclusively for subscribers to Apple’s music streaming app.
Carpool Karaoke, which will be produced by CBS Television Studios and Fulwell 73, the production company of Late Late Show executive producer Ben Winston, will expand on the segment’s format with celebrity guests who sing along to their favorite songs and surprise fans during their ride. The host of the series is expected to be announced at a later date; Corden is not expected to take the wheel.
Jim Dalrymple, writing for The Loop, on how Apple Music has started to use fingerprint-based song matching to fix the (annoyingly bad) metadata-based system it was using before:
Apple has been quietly rolling out iTunes Match audio fingerprint to all Apple Music subscribers. Previously Apple was using a less accurate metadata version of iTunes Match on Apple Music, which wouldn’t always match the correct version of a particular song. We’ve all seen the stories of a live version of a song being replaced by a studio version, etc.
I can’t believe this isn’t what the service launched with. The key feature for me has been the combination of my library with a streaming library and every time this fucked up I wanted to randomly delete a line of code from whomever wrote the system so they could feel my pain.
Robert Levine, writing for Billboard, about Apple’s new proposed royalty structure for streaming music services:
Apple’s suggested royalty structure would make accounting simpler and more transparent, but it would also make it more costly to run a free service, since streaming companies would have to pay a minimum rate, rather than a percentage of revenue. The current system arguably benefits Spotify and YouTube, since their free tiers don’t generate much revenue compared to paid services.
Seems win/win for Apple here: They score points with artists, and they make Spotify look bad.