Back when Apple unveiled the iPhone X, it was positioned as the future of iPhone design. The new iPhones, the Xs, Xs Max and Xr, bear that out. But the future of Apple shifted a bit on its axis yesterday. The Apple Watch is, with cell service, a device capable of working as a stand-alone communication, activity, health, contact and information device. Yes, the screen is too small to interact with extended periods of time (though, yes, I have read quite a few emails on mine), but is there any product that points to Apple’s future ambitions as clearly as the Apple Watch Series 4?
Apple has been interested in the health market since Steve Jobs and iOS 3.0 when Apple sought to connect the mobile platform to third-party medical devices. Now they can build their own medical devices.
An ECG is used by a physician to see how the electrical system of your heart is working, Andrew Moore, an emergency department physician at the Oregon Health and Science University, told Quartz. In a health care facility, a patient would have 12 different stickers, or leads, placed all over her chest and on certain spots on her arm and leg, to give doctors a clear picture of the four chambers of her heart’s movement.
The new Apple Watch, however, has the equivalent of one lead on your wrist, the company’s website says. “The tech that Apple is working with is very rudimentary compared to what we’d do for someone in a hospital or health care setting,” Moore said. Although the watch can detect changes in the patterns of a person’s heart rate, these changes really only show a user if she has a heart rate that is too fast, too slow, or beating irregularly—signifying AFib. The watch won’t necessarily give the full picture a doctor would need to diagnose a medical issue.
Much of the attention and anticipation around the annual event is wrapped up in Apple’s best-selling device, the iPhone. There is a new line of them again this year, bigger and more expensive than before. But the watch, which isn’t even four years old yet, has established itself as a significant adjacent business. Apple doesn’t break out sales numbers, but said its device is the best-selling watch in the world.
The increasing popularity of the watch, which Ive has set up as the cornerstone of wearable technology, is critical to Apple as the iPhone sales growth wanes. “Apple’s inception was about making tech useful and relevant, in a very personal way. And the watch is unambiguously the most personal product we make,” said Ive, who joined Apple more than 25 years ago and first made his mark with the candy-colored iMacs of the 1990s.
This is a hardware-as-platform and hardware-as-subscription model that no other hardware company can match. It is not only highly responsible but it’s highly defensible and therefore a great business. Planned obsolescence is a bad business and is not defensible.
Therefore the statement that Apple now prioritizes device and software longevity is very important and I consider it one of the most important statements made during the 2018 iPhone launch event.
Apple clearly intends to maintain its position in the high-end segment with the release of the iPhone XS and XS Max, but with price cuts for older models and the addition of the iPhone XR, CEO Tim Cook signaled designs on a bigger share of Asia's growing market.
"We want to serve everyone," said Tim Cook in an interview with Nikkei. "We understand that there is a wide range of what customers are looking for and a wide range of prices that people will pay."
With its relentless touting of the new and improved, Apple makes it easy for consumers and the tech press to forget its products’ past. The pricing of the XS and XS Max might seem reasonable enough if you compare them only to last year’s X. But rewind a few years and the scope of Apple’s marketing coup becomes apparent.
As widely expected, Apple have designed the iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR and iOS 12 to behave in a backwardly-compatible manner for apps that were built with Xcode 9 and can’t reasonably be expected to be able to handle the new devices. Even apps that use auto layout and have launch storyboards will be shown zoomed to fill the larger screen. Rebuilding with Xcode 10 opts the developer into the new screen design.
One of the toughest problems in machine learning, within the broader field of AI, is to to figure out what problem the computer should be solving. Computers can only learn and understand, if they understand at all, when something is framed a matter of finding a solution to a problem.
Apple is approaching that challenge by hoping to lure developers to use its chips and software programming tools to supply the new use cases for neural networks on a mobile device.
That little 3.5mm headphone jack might be the most obvious reason some users are holding onto their iPhone 6S. The removal of the headphone jack starting with iPhone 7 was a big deal when it happened, and judging by every model since, there’s no going back.
The opening video that it used to kick off the event shows a woman wearing AirPods. Stopping in front of a pond, she says, "Hey Siri," but doesn't tap either earbud to activate Apple's digital assistant.
The project, which will involve both planting trees in degraded areas and preserving the trees that still exist, will help capture an estimated 1 million metric tons of CO2 emissions over its lifetime. In its first two years, it will reduce emissions around 17,000 metric tons–roughly the same amount as the emissions from the cars that will update Apple Maps over the next decade, making the program carbon neutral for the company.
Although federal law doesn’t provide many digital privacy protections for adults, there are safeguards for children under 13. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act protects them from being improperly tracked, including for advertising purposes. Without explicit, verifiable permission from parents, children’s sites and apps are prohibited from collecting personal details including names, email addresses, geolocation data and tracking codes like “cookies” if they’re used for targeted ads.
But the New Mexico lawsuit and the analyses of children’s apps suggest that some app developers, ad tech companies and app stores are falling short in protecting children’s privacy.
“These sophisticated tech companies are not policing themselves,” the New Mexico attorney general, Hector Balderas, said. “The children of this country ultimately pay the price.”
Questions being asked in the podcasts that I've listened today, as well as my answers:
1) Who will buy the XS?
If I didn't already have the X, I may consider the XS instead of the XR, just because of the zoom.
2) Do you want to live forever?
Forever is just so... infinite. Especially considering I may still have to live among humans, one of the most horrible living beings in the world.
If I die, I can still hope that I get reincarnated as a tree.
3) Where is Larry Page?
I don't know, either. He didn't tell me.
~
Thanks for reading.