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The Apple-Store Edition Friday, August 19, 2016

Apple Drops 'Store' From Apple Store Branding, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

Apple appears to be making a slight branding change to its retail business, dropping the "Store" moniker when referring to its Apple Store locations. Apple has already made the change online, and all of its store pages now refer to stores by names like "Apple Union Square" or "Apple Valley Fair" or "Apple The Grove," instead of "Apple Store, Valley Fair" or "Apple Store, The Grove."

Deleting Now

New York Times Closing Free NYT Now App At The End Of The Month, by Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac

The New York Times has announced that its NYT Now app is to be withdrawn as of 29th August. The app, which provided a curated selection of stories from the paper aimed at younger readers, was launched at South by Southwest back in 2014.

The New York Times Is Shutting Down Its Lauded, Younger-reader-seeking NYT Now App, by Joseph Lichterman, Nieman Lab

While NYT Now may not have attracted a large enough audience to make it sustainable — and, as Levy wrote, much of its DNA lives on in the main Times mobile app — users on Twitter nonetheless lamented the app’s closure.

News Apps Are Dying Off. But In A Way, They’ll Live On, by Klint Finley, Wired

These days, most people only regularly interact with a handful of apps. Facebook and other social media apps monopolize the public’s attention, making it hard for publishers to build audiences for their standalone apps. That imbalance also puts immense pressure on news outlets to make their stories shareable on social media.

Deleting Cellular

Apple Hits Roadblocks In Cutting Watch Ties To iPhone, by Mark Gurman, Bloomberg

During the discussions, Apple executives expressed concern that the cellular models may not be ready for release this year and that the feature may be pushed back to a later generation, according to the people. Apple warned that, even on an aggressive schedule, the earliest possible shipment time-frame for cellular models would have been this December, one of the people said.

The source of the delay is that current cellular chips consume too much battery life, reducing the product’s effectiveness and limiting user appeal, according to three of the people. Apple has begun studying lower-power cellular data chips for future smartwatch generations.

Using It Wrong

Taking CarPlay For A Spin, by Khoi Vinh, Subtraction

CarPlay’s inherent flaw is that it’s a software solution that’s intended to work with a variety of hardware configurations, none of which are controlled expressly by Apple. This is the antithesis of what Apple prefers to do, and it shows.

11 Dumb Things You May Be Doing To Your Smartphone, by Jake Swearingen, New York Magazine

If you want to Marie Kondo your phone’s background apps, feel free — it certainly doesn’t hurt to swipe away that untouched game of Candy Crush from a certain dark period of your life. But it’s not going to give you any extra battery life, or speed up your phone’s performance in any appreciable way. In fact, because your phone will have to restart the app fresh when the siren call of Candy Crush becomes too strong, you may be forcing it to use a little more battery power than needed.

Stuff

6 iPhone Apps That Turn Your Photos Into Art, by John Patrick Pullen, Time

Another latte art shot? Sure, everyone loves a masterfully poured tulip doodle in their morning brew, but there’s no need to photograph it for your friends — again. It’s alright, everyone runs out of photographic inspiration from time to time. But instead of boring your Instagram followers, up your game with the latest wave of photo art apps.

Faster RSS Subscribing With Feed Hawk, by John Voorhees, MacStories

The Feed Hawk app can be used to add feeds to your service, but its real power is in the extension.

Microsoft Brings OneNote Importer To Evernote For Mac Users, by Emil Protalinski, VentureBeat

Microsoft today launched its OneNote-to-Evernote tool for Mac. [...] Once your notes have been imported, you can access them in OneNote on your computer, phone, and the web.

Notes

Counting Apple’s Customers, by Horace Dediu, Asymco

Even though it has not happened yet, the trend is pretty clear. Apple will at some point in time have a billion paying customers.

What is more significant that the specific count is that these customers mostly chose to be customers individually. Some may be have been given the products as gifts, but the vast majority bought the items for themselves. Apple benefitted from hundreds of million of individual purchase decisions.

Australia Denies Banks Interim Approval To Jointly Negotiate With Apple On Payment Apps, by Matt Siegel, Reuters

Australia's three biggest banks, including the number one lender National Australia Bank (NAB), last month lodged a joint application seeking permission to negotiate as a bloc from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

The ACCC said that its decision not to grant the banks the interim ruling was not indicative of whether the full ruling, expected in October, would be successful or not.

Bottom of the Page

So now that Apple is dropping the word 'Store' in the brand, will the upcoming Apple Store in Singapore's Orchard Road be called "Apple Orchard"? I really really hope so. Steve Jobs -- not known for nostalgia -- may or may not approve of this name, but I will be delighted.

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Thanks for reading.