I saw this more than once in our regular marketing meetings. Someone would confidently present their ideas, Steve would ponder for a moment, and then let it out: “That’s it? You could have done this one day after our last meeting. What have you been doing for the past two weeks?” It would then fall upon the offending party to put up their best defense. I don’t remember that ever working. [...]
As much as I like the new MacBook Pro, I can’t help imagining Apple as a person making this presentation to Steve. When it’s finished, Apple sits back with a smug smile, expecting praise. Instead, it gets broadsided. “That’s it?” Steve says. “You could have done this one year after the last Mac event. What have you been doing for the last four years?”
According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, though, the issue sounds largely technical. Citing a “person familiar with the development of the AirPod[s],” the report suggests Apple is struggling to ensure that both AirPods receive a Bluetooth signal simultaneously, something that would help them avoid sudden connection dropouts.
It makes more sense to me that Apple has run into a manufacturing problem, not that they discovered a design defect after they were announced.
“More difficult to manufacture at scale than expected” is also what I’ve heard through the grapevine, from a little birdie who knows someone on the AirPods engineering team.
Just in time for the holidays, Apple on Friday debuted four short television commercials touting the benefits of its new Apple Watch Series 2, from longstanding features like Apple Pay integration to new functions like GPS tracking.
The ad shows no gameplay, but feels like a high-end TV spot for Mario’s first jump into mobile devices. Coupled with the game’s featured spot on a network late night show, it’s a sign that the marketing for Super Mario Run is aiming to cast a wide net.
While Dropa! probably isn’t going to be a wholly fresh gaming experience (unless you’re one of those terrifyingly young millennials who don’t remember the heady thrill of spending hours playing Tetris on the Game Boy), it is a neat remix of a proven entity — complete with a great original score.
While Swift Playgrounds will never be a tool to help you build a stonking new app, and become a coding wizard, it’s a really easy way of learning the basics. By gamifying the process, making input so easy to see and so visual, it’s about as user friendly as coding has ever been.
Zooming in and out, we can see the pattern emerge. Uber had created a rich, complex pool of opportunities, solving for the customer experience problem and—though they might not recognize it as such—for the taxicab owners’ outdated technology and the regulators’ restrictive business model. “We didn’t dream with [Kalanick] about what it could be, that it could transform transportation,” said Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia Capital, which funded Uber.
Indeed, it becomes clear that Uber’s promise wasn’t a well-designed mobile app. Uber had a certain x-factor—a set of qualities that was special and significant. If an x-factor wasn’t in play, then the copycat apps launched by the taxicab industry itself, such as Hailo, would have found big, captive audiences. To date, the industry has not been able to replicate Uber’s success. It hasn’t even come close.
The missing Airpods is an embarasseent for Apple -- especially since the company made such a big fuss over wireless audio in the iPhone. And I still don't know why Apple's Beats is not able to, or is unwilling to, release the least-expensive version of the headphones that carries the new Apple chip.
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Thanks for reading.