This article lists the materials included in the eMate Connectivity CD package:
Before Federico heads to the beach for many months of vacation, the guys talk about iPad keyboards, Dropbox Paper and Instagram Stories before answering listener questions.
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Wonder what’s going on at your local newspaper? John Oliver is on the case.
I’m a sucker for re-issued space books,1 and this Kickstarter project looks great:
The flight plan was a minute-by-minute time line of activities for the Apollo 11 mission crew. We are reproducing this plan..perfectly.
My copy of the NASA Graphics Standard Manual re-issue is amazing. ↩︎
Rick Tetzeli has published a wide-ranging interview with Tim Cook, Craig Federighi and Eddy Cue.
At the heart of the article is the concern that Apple is stretching too thin, moving far beyond it’s old scope of projects and products:
Steve Jobs had been the company’s editor, proud of saying no to features, products, business ideas, and new hires far more often than he said yes. Apple’s seemingly diffuse product line reinforces the argument that Cook is not as rigorous. (The fear has a worrisome precedent: During the early and mid-1990s, Apple’s product line was a mess of marketing-inspired offerings, and both its reputation as a unique manufacturer and its business suffered.)
I don’t know if Apple’s doing too many things or not, but I think it’s worth keeping in mind that the company isn’t led by the bozos that ran it in the 1990s. Tim and company know what they’re doing.
In addition to predicting an all-new Apple Watch 2 with a GPS, barometer, larger battery, and more, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo 2016 today claimed that upgraded first-generation Apple Watch models with faster TSMC-built processors and superior waterproofing will likely launch in the second half of 2016.
For several years, Apple has kept old iPads for sale at lower price points, demoting them when a new device is announced.
This rumor is different from even that strategy. Kuo is saying that the Apple Watch as we know it today will be updated and kept on sale.
Either this would allow Apple to drop below the $299 price point, or leave a product in that slot if the Apple Watch 2 can’t hit that price.
I think Apple’s done a pretty good job at being upfront with customers that their lower-cost products are often older products.
It’s still a little confusing, though, and any time there’s a cheap option, that’s what a subset of uses will automatically buy. Just look at how many “free on contract” iPhones have been purchased over the last six or seven years. I think that’s hurt the iPad ecosystem a little bit from the nerd perspective, but without a doubt lower costs allow more people to become customers. That’s a good thing, and something the Apple Watch would benefit from having.
At a media event Thursday, Aug. 4, in Seattle, Amazon took the wraps off its first “Prime Air” branded plane, a Boeing 767 owned by Atlas Air that has been converted into a freighter. Amazon announced deals with two aircraft leasing companies — Atlas, and another called Air Transport Services Group, or ATSG — earlier this year to fly as many as 40 dedicated cargo planes over the next two years. Eleven are already in operation; this is the first one that’s been painted.
No doubt this is a sign of Amazon’s ever-growing dominance, but I can’t help but think of UPS and FedEx. Both have large presences here in Memphis; FedEx’s headquarters is 20 minute drive from my house. Will Amazon eventually control the entire shipping chain? Here’s Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Operations Dave Clark, as quoted in Frommer’s article:
We have the ability, with our own planes, to create connections between one point and another point that are exactly tailored to our needs, and exactly tailored to the timing of when we want to put packages on those routes — versus other peoples’ networks which are optimized to run their entire network. We add capacity, we add flexibility, and it gives us cost-control capability as well.
Today, it seems that Primer Air is just to make as-needed connections, but I can’t help but think this is just the start.
DC Agle, writing on the JPL blog:
NASA has selected five science investigations for refinement during the next year as a first step in choosing one or two missions for flight opportunities as early as 2020. Three of those chosen have ties to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The submitted proposals would study Venus, near-Earth objects and a variety of asteroids.
One or two of these will be funded for future missions. I think I’m partial to the VERITAS and NEOCam missions myself.
I haven’t seen this video before, but it’s pretty interesting:
There’s more to the Newby-McMahon Building in Wichita Falls, Texas than meets the eye.
This is a fun one, despite dozens of people being conned out of a pile of cash.
Did you know there’s a limit to what iCloud can hold?
Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, and Bookmarks might have issues keeping changes up to date across your devices if you exceed one or more of the limits listed below.
This writer is using a PowerBook G4 to blog. I’ve always liked the idea of a “minimal writing machine,” a computer set up for writing and not much else. When I’ve tried similar things in the past, I always end up frustrated that I’m using a computer without all my stuff on it.
In many ways, the iPad has taken over this roll for me. I can write without a lot of on-screen distractions, but the rest of my data is just a few taps away. Still, this experiment is tempting, and I do have many PowerBooks I could choose from.