Jeremy Burge had written up what seems to be an on-going change when it comes to iOS apps and how developers can use Apple’s emoji set:
It’s understandable there is much confusion about this right now, especially as the Apple Color Emoji font until now has been treated by many as a font like any other. If this is thought about as “a set of images created and owned by Apple”, the terms for what seems reasonable do shift.
An unnamed writer, publishing as Instapaper on Tumblr: 1
On January 28, 2008, Marco Arment announced a new side project called Instapaper. Ten years and billions of articles later, we’re thrilled to be helping our readers learn, research and experience the Internet removed from the typical distractions.
First, we want to thank all of our users. Whether you’ve been around since the Marco days, joined us when betaworks took over the development or signed up after our acquisition by Pinterest, thank you! We wouldn’t be anywhere without you, and we look forward to incorporating your requests into our 2018 updates.
In Internet years a decade is a century. Instapaper predates the App Store, Google Chrome and the entire Android OS, so we wanted to take this opportunity to look back on some of our product and business milestones.
Instapaper has been on my iPhone’s first home screen since the day it launched in the App Store. It’s so engrained into how I consume articles and other web content, I really can’t imagine my work without it.
I can’t think of anything more ironic. ↩︎
Early HomePod reviews are out. The TL;DR seems to be “It sounds great, you’re locked into Apple’s ecosystem and Siri isn’t great.”
None of that is surprising. Here are some highlights:
It feels like it was designed for a very demanding person to use while living alone entirely inside Apple’s ecosystem. It’s tied more closely to a single iPhone and iCloud account than any other smart speaker, and Siri has none of the capability or vibrancy of what’s happening with Alexa. Apple can try to move mountains by itself, or it can recognize that the HomePod is a little iOS computer for the home and let developers build on it as they have for so long and with such great success with the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
The HomePod is a remarkable new kind of audio device. It does more to make music sound better than any other speaker of this kind has ever done before, and it really, truly works. But unless you live entirely inside Apple’s walled garden and prioritize sound quality over everything else, I think you’re better served by other smart speakers that sound almost as good and offer the services and capabilities that actually fit your life.
Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch:
As a smart speaker, it offers best-in-class voice recognition, vastly outstripping the ability of other smart speakers to hear you trying to trigger a command at a distance or while music is playing, but its overall flexibility is stymied by the limited command sets that the Siri protocol offers.
Buy a HomePod if you already have Apple Music or you want to have it and you’re in the market for a single incredibly over-designed and radically impressive speaker that will give you really great sound with basically no tuning, fussing, measuring or tweaking.
It’s hard to explain the sound of HomePod, but you get a feeling that the sound is enveloping you, even when using just one speaker. There is a sense that this is how the songwriter and producer wanted the song to be heard when they recorded it.
The other speakers gave the feeling that music was just being blasted straight at me and not allowing me to become part of the experience. HomePod sounds great wherever you are in the room—there really is no particular sweet spot to hear the music, it just sounds great everywhere.
Megan Wollerton at CNET also wrote about this sound separation:
With the HomePod in the center of the room, for example, I heard distinct wedges of good (and less good) sound around the speaker. Sometimes the front sounded great and the back not so much. Sometimes the best sound came from 90 degrees on either side.
Apple says the speaker adjusts itself based on room position, and as I moved the speaker around I could hear the difference as it recalibrated. Overall I found that the HomePod sounded best placed against a wall or in a corner, which is fine since that’s where most people will probably place it anyway.
I’m picking mine up on Friday. I’m looking forward to hearing the thing, but I have my doubts that it will displace the Amazon Echos in our house.
This article comes with some fine text:
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Dieter Bohn at The Verge got an exclusive look at Intel’s smart glasses project:
The most important parts of Intel’s new Vaunt smart glasses are the pieces that were left out.
There is no camera to creep people out, no button to push, no gesture area to swipe, no glowing LCD screen, no weird arm floating in front of the lens, no speaker, and no microphone (for now).
From the outside, the Vaunt glasses look just like eyeglasses. When you’re wearing them, you see a stream of information on what looks like a screen — but it’s actually being projected onto your retina.
I think friend of the show Steve Troughton-Smith summed it up well:
Intel have created a Pebble for your face; it will be fascinating to see what the ‘Apple Watch’ is in this analogy — a full iOS-powered device that can avail of all the technologies developers need to make amazing things. AR is going to be huge
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) February 5, 2018
Last month, I shared a little bit about Operation Broken Silence, and about how I wanted to help them fund an 8th grade classroom in a school they sponsor in the Yida refugee camp in South Sudan.
We’ve already raised over $2,000 for the classroom, and as my brother writes, work is already being done with those funds:
Last update, we announced that this year we would be adding the final grade and classroom to the primary school in Yida. That process is now underway and, at the moment, it appears we are on schedule!
Our education partner is currently shipping 60 chairs, 2 blackboards, and 96 school uniforms to Yida for the the P8 classroom.
There’s still a lot to be done to turn this classroom into a reality, and to do so, I need your help.
Craig Hunter has put the 18-core iMac Pro through its paces:
So in summary, we see performance increases ranging from 27% to 79% for the 18-core iMac Pro when compared to the 10-core model. I suspect many computations and applictions will be in the middle of that range depending on how well they can take advantage of multiple cores, but there will certainly be some hot rod uses that get closer to that 79% end of the scale (and may do even better). Though I haven’t mentioned it, if you look back through the various benchmark results, you’ll see that the 18-core iMac Pro shows no disadvantage for single-core performance, despite running at a lower clock speed (2.3GHz/4.3GHz) than the 10-core iMac Pro (3.0GHz/4.5GHz).
I figured the higher core count would come at a higher cost in terms of single-core tasks.
Hunter concludes that the 18-core machine, while expensive, is worth the upgrade over the 10-core if you’ve got the cash.
Apple has determined that a small percentage of iPhone 7 devices may show “No Service” in the status bar (even if cellular coverage is available), due to a component that has failed on the main logic board.
These affected units were manufactured between September 2016 and February 2018 and sold in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macao, and the U.S.
If your device exhibits the symptom described above, Apple will repair your device, free of charge. Your iPhone will be examined prior to any service to verify that it is eligible for this program. This program only applies to iPhone 7.
If you have an iPhone 7, you can check the support document to see if your phone is eligible for repair. If it is, and you’ve paid for this repair to be carried out, Apple will reimburse you.
Apple just posted its largest quarter ever, booking $88.3 in revenue:
“We’re thrilled to report the biggest quarter in Apple’s history, with broad-based growth that included the highest revenue ever from a new iPhone lineup. iPhone X surpassed our expectations and has been our top-selling iPhone every week since it shipped in November,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’ve also achieved a significant milestone with our active installed base of devices reaching 1.3 billion in January. That’s an increase of 30 percent in just two years, which is a testament to the popularity of our products and the loyalty and satisfaction of our customers.”
The company slightly exceeded its revenue guidance for the quarter.
That said, the iPhone shrank slightly year over year, missing Apple’s targets for the quarter. Of course, the year-ago quarter was an extra week in length, so keep that in mind when seeing these numbers. Apple says its revenue-per-week is higher than it was a year ago.
However, iPhone revenue is up, probably due to the iPhone X’s higher price, as Jason Snell pointed out on Twitter:
Apple’s holiday quarter in a nutshell: Not record iPhone unit sales, but look at the rise in average iPhone selling price. pic.twitter.com/RiVwHya934
— Jason Snell (@jsnell) February 1, 2018
Revenue from services was up year over year, but flat from the previous quarter. The Mac was down, but the iPad was up a touch over last year.
The big winner here is “Other Products,” which includes things like the Apple Watch, Apple TV and Apple’s various audio products like AirPods and Beats. Clearly people picked up a lot of these devices for gifts.
Apple has reached 1.3 billion active devices as of January, which is an increase of 30% in 2 years.
For next quarter, Apple is projecting between $60 and $62 billion in revenue, which is a big jump over Q2 2017, which clocked in at $52.9 billion.
Some tidbits from the call:
Here are some charts:
With a little over a week to go before shipping, Apple has finally cleared up what audio the HomePod can play, as noted by MacRumors:
It’s silly that there was so much confusion over this, but I’m glad Apple has documented this for customers. This whole product launch has been unusual.
It’s January, so it’s time to spin up the iPhone rumor machine, but first Stephen and Federico consider what a “Snow Leopard” iOS release could look like. Lastly, one of them has switched to DuckDuckGo.
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The Pacific Ocean may be home to a giant soupy mass of plastic and chemicals, but far more adorable litter has ridden its waves in the past, too.
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