MyAppleMenu - Mon, Nov 9, 2015

Mon, Nov 9, 2015The 12.9-Inch Edition

Apple’s 12.9 Inch iPad Pro Goes On Sale Wednesday In 40 Countries, Available At Retail Stores Later In The Week, by Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac

Apple has announced that the iPad Pro will go on sale in 40 countries on Wednesday, November 11th. The ‘epic’ 12.9 inch device will also be available in Apple Retail Stores later in the week. [...] The iPad Pro will be available to buy in 40 countries, including the US, UK, Canada, China and Japan.

Follow Up Culture

Killer Cultures, by Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note

None of these examples are the result of laziness or incompetence. The people involved sincerely thought they were doing the right thing – but they were betrayed by their culture. They got the right raw data about technology and markets but, unbeknownst to them, their emotional taste buds pre-processed the information and passed a distorted picture to their consciousness, leading to bad decisions made in good faith.

A group of execs can easily be lured into thinking they have the money, people, technology, and time for an ambitious, transformative project, only to be subtly undercut by their culture, by an unstated, unseen reality distortion field.

The Test Of Apple’s Different Political Thinking, by Zoya Sheftalovich, Politico

Company executives rarely visit the European Parliament or Commission. Apple spends a fraction of what its biggest rivals do on lobbying. It doesn’t throws parties for politicians and Eurocrats; its biggest event in Brussels was this summer’s opening of a flagship retail store. It only recently hired a top lawyer and got swankier digs.

At all signs of political trouble in the last few years, Apple caved and changed its ways, shunning the confrontational approach with European regulators taken by Microsoft, Uber and Google, all three with limited success.

Soon Apple will find out if its different political strokes work any better.

Stuff

Guess What's The Lowest Rated Apple Product In Apple's Online Store? (Hint: It's A Tie.), by David Carnoy, CNET

Most people are simply upset that the cable broke sooner than they thought it should.

Guess the two products.

Why Fitness Apps Have Been Slow To Adopt watchOS 2, by Caitlin McGarry, Macworld

“It was a large amount of work,” Runkeeper cofounder and CEO Jason Jacobs said via e-mail. “It involved a complete rewrite of our watchOS 1 app. We had to figure out the communication between the watch collecting data and the iPhone collecting data, and how to handle discreprancies.”

Play Video As Screen Saver In Mac OS X, by Paul Horowitz, OS X Daily

Develop

Star Wars Characters Will Now Teach Your Kids To Code, by Issie Lapowsky, Wired

Computer science may be critical to careers of the future, but kids today don’t much care about it. For the most part, they still need convincing that coding is cool.

A new partnership between Code.org and Lucasfilm should help.

Notes

We Shouldn’t Have To Fear Apple And Microsoft Updates, by Paul Venezia, Infoworld

I don’t want to reboot my laptop -- ever. The current uptime on my MacBook Air is 54 days, and 54 days ago, I was pissed when I had to reboot it. We are long past the days when Windows needed to be rebooted every few hours due to leaking apps, overtasked hardware, crap drivers, and other horrors of the era. It’s possible to travel across the globe with a laptop and never even think to reboot. This is what maintaining a workspace is all about. We should be striving to maintain that level of stability and consistency, not pushing out updates that constantly require disruption.

Shopping Season

So many things I want, so little things I need.

~

Thanks for reading.