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Apple's antitrust monitor is out this Friday The DOJ filed a letter requesting Judge Cote let Mr. Bromwich's two-year position end without any extension. He had been charged with monitoring Apple's activities to ensure the company didn't engage in anticompetitive practices, and that it set up training programs to teach employees how to avoid anticompetitive…

Elon Musk and Tim Cook Taking a Ride in TMO's Rendering of an Apple Car  “Important engineers?” Mr. Musk told Handlesblatt when asked about Apple poaching employees from Tesla. “They have hired people we've fired. We always jokingly call Apple the 'Tesla Graveyard.' If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple.…

________________________ The sensational, on the surface, news is what Elon Musk said about Apple hiring away his important engineers. Forbes told the story. Important engineers? They have hired people we’ve fired. We always jokingly call Apple the ‘Tesla Graveyard.’ If you don’t make at Tesla, you go work at Apple. However, all that is just…

There are two things that are important to know. First, there is no one true source. That fact will become more and more clear as time marches on. 20 years from now people won't care about that. My second item is far more important, though: the number of people that knew and experienced Steve Jobs…

Apple buys AI company Perceptio The company has been working on an image recognition system that uses deep learning. For those that aren't in the know, deep learning is an artificial intelligence system where computers are capable of identifying and classifying sensory input. In other words, Apple could take Perceptio's work and make an iPhone…

James Bell joins Apple's board of directors Apple CEO Tim Cook seemed pretty excited to have Mr. Bell on the board. He said in a press release, “James brings a wealth of global, financial and industrial experience from his successful career at Boeing as corporate president and CFO. I am thrilled to welcome him to…

The emoji in question are cartoon-like graphics depicting men holding hands, women holding hands, and same sex couples as families. Those emoji are available along side similar graphics of mixed sex couples. Apple's emoji collection caters to the openminded and tolerant crowd You can see the mixed sex family emoji in one column, followed by…

Let’s all agree that Wi-Fi is a marvelous thing. It sets us free, untethered — literally — from cables and walls. It’s usually easy to set up, too — plug a router in, connect your cable modem (or whatever gets you to the Internet), answer a few questions and boom — you’re good to go.…

Apple: We'll put Xcode on servers in China The malware, dubbed XcodeGhost was added into the Xcode installers developers were getting from non-Apple servers inside China. The malware was injected into the iOS apps they compiled without their knowledge, and then managed to get past Apple's screening process and onto the App Store. XcodeGhost wasn't…

“First half (1H) revenues from music streaming services surpassed $1 billion for the first time,” the report said, “growing 23% in 2015 to $1.03 billion – up from $834 million for 1H 2014.” Total sales were up 0.8 percent year-over-year to US$2.3 billion. All told, streaming music accounted for 32 percent of revenues, while physical…

Apple is refunding all Peace app purchases “Apple notified me this afternoon that they’ll be proactively refunding all purchases of Peace,” Mr. Arment said in a blog post. “As far as I know, this effectively never happens. When I decided to pull the app, I asked some Apple friends if this was even possible, and…

Peace was an app that enabled iOS 9's Web content blocking feature. It sped up website loading by using Ghostery's database to block superfluous content which includes some on-site ads, but didn't offer fine-tuned controls for choosing exactly which content would be blocked. Mr. Arment said in a blog post on his website, Peace required…

Neither company is officially in the car business, but both companies are on everyone's lips at this year's event. Google has been openly working on autonomous vehicles since 2009, but Apple is technically only rumored to be working on a car. Apparently, even knowing that Apple has a team working on this project has “changed…

Part of what I'm happy about is the change this will bring to our industry as a whole. I'm also happy about some of the specific changes it will bring to TMO.  Ad blockers are, of course, a slippery slope. It's easy to start by saying, “well, I'm going to use it on sites that…

Apple buys another map company: Mapsense Mapsense is a San Francisco-based company founded in 2013. Here's how it describes itself: There are over 10 billion devices on the planet streaming location data on a daily basis. While collecting location data has become mainstream, the traditional tools to visualize, understand, and harness it have been hampered…

Episode #141   The theme for Apple’s event in San Francisco last week was, “The only thing that has changed is everything.” It sounds like marketing hype, but by the end of the event most of the audience (including me) seemed to agree. You’ve surely heard about the announcements: a collection of Apple Watches from…

Steve Wozniak Here's the comment in full, which was made on Robert Scoble's Facebook post about the movie: One thing nobody likes to point out is that John Sculley himself, as well as almost all of us at Apple, believed that the Macintosh was Apple's future. We all sacrificed the growing personal computer market (10x…

Note that most folks can get more by selling their devices themselves to friends or family, or through Craigslist or Ebay, many others prefer the ease of the hassle-free mail-in programs. Your mileage will vary considerably on that assessment, but either way the following chart can help you make your decision. The chart below shows…

Image credit: Apple Writing for The Verge, Mr. Mossberg delights us with several crisp insights here: “What I learned this week about Tim Cook’s Apple.” For example: 3D Touch on the iPhone 6s is going to change the way we use our iPhones. Siri's voice control is maturing and can do a lot of things…

_______________________ iPhone 6s/Plus. While the list of enhancements for each new iPhone to the next may not seem spectacular, the thing to remember is that Apple's messaging is also directed towards all the owners of previous models. In that case, the quantum leap from, say, an iPhone 5 from 2012 will be compelling. That's especially…

Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs The film, which is based on Mr. Isaacson's biography in the loosest sense, includes a powerful cast and is the “monstrously sel-aggrandizing movie [Steve Jobs] deserves.” Variety goes on to offer up the obligatory comparison to the two year old Steve Jobs movie starring Ashton Kutcher, and gives us the…

Episode #140 Most companies, including Apple, do their best to attract media attention when announcing a new product. But Apple isn’t like most companies when it comes to product announcements. Instead of using press releases, trade shows, press conferences, and other traditional forms of media outreach, Apple typically introduces its new products at extravagantly-produced invitation-only…

His expectations for the next generation iPhone models are in line with other analysts. Mr. Um said, “We expect the biggest internal hardware addition to be Force Touch alongside memory, CPU, and camera upgrades and capacity to remain unchanged at 16GB, 64GB, and 128GB.” He expects we'll also see a refresh for the iPad mini,…

We've come a long way since Steve Jobs told us we already have ten styluses on our hands thanks to the creative efforts of many companies. Over time, iPad and iPhone styluses have become more complex, gained pressure sensitivity, and trimmed down the size of their tips. Adonit's latest addition to the stylus world is…