Two notes:
- Apple University is now officially acknowledged by the company in public
- It’s great to see new faces that aren’t more middle age white guys
Category: Apple
Apple publishes diversity figures⇢
Tim Cook:
Apple is committed to transparency, which is why we are publishing statistics about the race and gender makeup of our company. Let me say up front: As CEO, I’m not satisfied with the numbers on this page. They’re not new to us, and we’ve been working hard for quite some time to improve them. We are making progress, and we’re committed to being as innovative in advancing diversity as we are in developing our products.
The Intel Problem
With lots of chatter this week about Apple and Intel, the costs of Apple switching to ARM have been on my mind.
I firmly believe Apple has ARM-powered Macs running ARM-ready OS X in a lab somewhere. This isn’t a technical problem; its a philosophical one.
With the platform transition from PowerPC to Intel, Apple had Rosetta, a software layer that let code compiled for PowerPC Macs run at neat-native speeds on Intel machines. It was an impressive feat, and one that Apple could certainly pull off again if OS X were to transition to ARM. However, I think there are three big reasons the Mac is going to stay x86-based for the foreseeable future.
The end of Macintel?
John Gruber, commenting on Jean-Louis Gassée’s essay about the possibility of ARM-powered Macs:
The delay in truly-new Mac hardware while waiting for Broadwell chips is exactly the sort of reason why Apple wants to own the whole stack. Anything they depend upon, they want under their control — and on the Mac, they depend upon Intel for CPUs. Maybe Apple will never pull it off and thus won’t ever make such a switch, but I’d be shocked if there isn’t a team inside Apple working on it already.
Beats officially part of Apple⇢
Apple:
Today we are excited to officially welcome Beats Music and Beats Electronics to the Apple family. Music has always held a special place in our hearts, and we’re thrilled to join forces with a group of people who love it as much as we do. Beats cofounders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre have created beautiful products that have helped millions of people deepen their connection to music. We’re delighted to be working with the team to elevate that experience even further.
Apple’s CDN goes live with ISP interconnect deals⇢
Dan Rayburn:
Since last year, Apple’s been hard at work building out their own CDN and now those efforts are paying off. Recently, Apple’s CDN has gone live in the U.S. and Europe and the company is now delivering some of their own content, directly to consumers. In addition, Apple has interconnect deals in place with multiple ISPs, including Comcast and others, and has paid to get direct access to their networks.
Modbook Pro X hits Kickstarter⇢
The original Modbook hails from 2008, when the company took plastic MacBooks, cut them in half and turned them into tablets.
Currently, you can just get a non-Retina MacBook Pro from the company. However, the company has launched a Kickstarter campaign is for a new product, based on the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro.
If the $150,000 goal is met, customers will be able to send in their own machines for conversion at $1999 or reserve complete systems directly from Modbook starting at $3999.
Apple revs MacBook Pro with Retina display⇢
8 GB of RAM is the new entry point. Finally.
On preparing for the OS X Yosemite beta⇢
If you’re waiting on the public beta to download, take a moment to prepare your machine and data for Yosemite.
OS X Yosemite public beta launches tomorrow⇢
Jason Snell:
On Thursday, fall will come early for hundreds of thousands of Mac users when Apple releases its first public beta of OS X Yosemite. The public-beta program, announced during Apple’s annual developer conference in June, lets regular users download and test pre-release versions of OS X. Apple says the first million users to sign up at the OS X Beta Program website will be able to test Yosemite before the OS is released to the general public in the fall.
Apple posts Q3 results⇢
Joel Mathis at Macworld:
Even in an era when critics complain the company has lost a step, Apple’s profits keep climbing. The company released its fiscal third-quarter earnings report on Wednesday, reporting revenue of $37.4 billion and a net profit of $7.7 billion.
Those numbers were up from the third quarter of 2013, when Apple tallied $35.3 billion in revenue and $6.9 billion in net profit.
That’s 35.2 million iPhones, 13.27 million iPads, 4.41 million Macs and 2.96 million iPods compared to 31.24 million iPhones, 14.62 million iPads, 3.75 million Macs, and 4.57 million iPods last year.
Stickers⇢
Apple’s new ad has someone in my life grinning from ear to ear.