Today Apple announced the dates for WWDC 2019. The annual developer conference will take place June 3-7, hosted for the third year in a row at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. [...] The conference typically kicks off with a keynote address where these software updates are previewed, so mark June 3 as the day to find out all about what improvements will come to your Apple devices later this year.
Apple connects Spotify to our users. We provide the platform by which users download and update their app. We share critical software development tools to support Spotify’s app building. And we built a secure payment system — no small undertaking — which allows users to have faith in in-app transactions. Spotify is asking to keep all those benefits while also retaining 100 percent of the revenue.
Spotify wouldn’t be the business they are today without the App Store ecosystem, but now they’re leveraging their scale to avoid contributing to maintaining that ecosystem for the next generation of app entrepreneurs. We think that’s wrong.
We share Spotify’s love of music and their vision of sharing it with the world. Where we differ is how you achieve that goal. Underneath the rhetoric, Spotify’s aim is to make more money off others’ work. And it’s not just the App Store that they’re trying to squeeze — it’s also artists, musicians and songwriters.
At a time when Apple and other tech giants are under scrutiny for a lack of staff diversity, experts say that Today at Apple's roster of local artists lends the company a valuable, socially responsible image while preserving their status quo, and at virtually no cost. Though some of the interviewees for this story expressed gratitude for the chance to work with a powerful brand, several came away from the experience questioning why Apple—the world's largest company by market value, with a revenue of $265.6 billion in 2018 alone—was unable to pay them for their labor.
In talking with more than a dozen people about Today at Apple's model, a nuanced portrait emerges of the artist's dilemma in the Bay Area. Apple's event programming thrives in a climate where artists are pressured to work for exposure, making it difficult to negotiate fair pay. While some interviewees were directly critical of being paid in merchandise instead of cash, others were hesitant to go on the record about Apple for fear of souring their relationship with the company. Meanwhile, experts maintain that a work-for-trade arrangement with a corporation as large and profitable as Apple reinforces a power dynamic that keeps artists at a disadvantage.
In a series of humorous vignettes, the message is driven home that sometimes you just want a little privacy. The spot has only one line of text otherwise, and it’s in keeping with Apple’s messaging on privacy over the long and short term. “If privacy matters in your life, it should matter to the phone your life is on.”
Halide’s creators successfully launched their new AI-powered long exposure camera app for iPhone called Spectre last month. Now they’ve released the first major update which brings stabilization support to iPhone 7, 6s, and SE, higher resolution for Live Photo mode, and more.
If you already have a favorite creative Mac app that you can’t live without, swear by the desktop experience, or are simply looking to upgrade from a less expensive Wacom tablet, you’ll probably be happy. The product is not without compromise, but it’s still the most affordable way to enter the Cintiq line.
The latest Shazam update is out now on iOS, giving users the ability to see exactly when they last searched for a certain song. Simply scroll through your history of Shazams and you’ll find a date and time alongside each entry.
Apple Inc. is targeting prestigious awards for an upcoming slate of original movies and TV shows, demonstrating grand Hollywood ambitions for a video streaming service that will compete with Netflix Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and established studios, according to people familiar with the plans.
Lott didn’t know it at the time, but the misnomer also revealed a great deal about the invisible process major tech firms use to put neighborhoods on their maps — and how decisions based off arcane data sets can affect communities thousands of miles away.
Who erased the Fruit Belt? Lott demanded of officials. What the hell is Medical Park? And how did it get on this map?
“There is nobody in City Hall who would dare utter the phrase Medical Park anywhere near the Fruit Belt,” Brendan Mehaffy, the city’s chief planner, told me recently. “So I really can’t tell you how this happened.”
But unbeknownst even to city officials, the city did have a hand in the Fruit Belt’s digital erasure — as did Google, two defunct mapping startups, and an ubiquitous, secretive data broker that claims to keep tabs on 100,000 neighborhoods.
Well... it is also unfortunate that Apple is penning its response to Spotify's complaint, just when KQED publishes its report.
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