A great feature on AppleInsider tracked Apple’s dramatic rise. It also showed how that rise helped counter the myth that the OS platform was the only important factor in picking who won the tech wars.

Apple somehow regained market power and began selling new volumes of Macs, assisted by the support of new sales of mobile devices. That dramatic shift, which resulted in Apple completely turning the tables on Microsoft, began in less than a decade after Windows 95. In the early 2000s, Apple’s iPod made an appearance that many discounted as irrelevant. Just as Windows 95 couldn’t immediately compete in Apple’s core markets, iPod similarly wasn’t competing with Microsoft’s bread and butter Windows PCs; instead, it was opening up a new market for very personal mobile devices, with media features and prices Microsoft and its licensees were unprepared to match. By 2004 iPod had trampled Microsoft’s Windows Media Player and PlaysForSure “Portable Media Player” platforms. Three years later iPhone similarly crushed global Windows Mobile handsets almost immediately out of the gate. Three years after that, the iPad not only crushed the emergence of Windows Tablet PCs and netbooks but also destroyed any future growth of PC sales.

Facebook announced Monday that it will update its branding across its range of products. The company said the move is a bid to provide greater clarity.

People should know which companies make the products they use. Our main services include the Facebook app, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Portal and Calibra. These apps and technologies have shared infrastructure for years and the teams behind them frequently work together. We started being clearer about the products and services that are part of Facebook years ago, adding a company endorsement to products like Oculus, Workplace and Portal. And in June we began including “from Facebook” within all our apps. Over the coming weeks, we will start using the new brand within our products and marketing materials, including a new company website.

Apple is said to be developing an AR headset with Valve, the game developer behind the Steam platform. MacRumors picked up on a report from DigiTimes:

DigiTimes is reporting this morning that Apple has partnered with U.S. game developer Valve to develop its rumored AR headset, which is expected to launch next year. ‘Apple reportedly has partnered with US game developer Valve to develop AR head-mounted display devices, which may be released in the second half of 2020 at the earliest, with Taiwan’s ODMs Quanta Computer and Pegatron said to handle the assembly job, according to industry sources.’ Creator of the popular Steam digital storefront and delivery platform, Valve launched Steam machine consoles in 2015 and released its first VR headset, Valve Index, in April 2019. Notably, Valve worked with Apple in 2017 to bring native VR headset support to macOS High Sierra, leveraging the operating system’s then-new eGPU support with a Mac version of Valve’s SteamVR software. However, Apple’s latest partnership with the company is said to be focused on AR, not VR.

Google is looking to create a high-powered medical record search tool for doctors, The Next Web. Hard to see anything going wrong here…

In a logical next step to make its search products the access point for all content on the web, the internet goliath is turning its focus to healthcare. David Feinberg, the recently appointed head of its Google Health initiative, outlined plans to make it easier for doctors to search medical records, and improve the quality of health-focused search results across Google and YouTube. “Imagine a search bar on top of your EHR (electronic health record) that needs no training,” Feinberg said at the HLTH health care conference in Las Vegas last week. According to Feinberg, the search bar will supposedly allow doctors to type into it, with the system automatically displaying appropriate responses to the queries. For example, a doctor could just type the number “87” to return details about an 87-year-old patient with a history of stomach cancer.