Apple has opened a new lab that will study how it can expand upon its current recycling processes through machine learning and robotics. The company announced the news today, along with other environmentally-focused updates, including that it will quadruple the number of locations where United States customers can send their iPhone to be disassembled by its recycling robot Daisy in a major expansion of its recycling programs.
AirPods have taken off as the latest must-have technology gadget. They’ve shown up in celebrities’ ears, become a status symbol, and inspired meetups. But their ubiquity isn’t all upside. They’re also introducing awkwardness to once-standard human interactions — largely because some people never seem to take them off.
Unlike traditional headphones, AirPods are the kind of things you can keep in your ears at all times, and many people do. Their sleek design and lack of wires make it easy to forget they’re resting in your head. And their status symbol shine doesn’t exactly scream “take me out.” This may be great for Apple and its bottom line, but it’s making life weird for people interacting with those wearing them. Are they listening to me? Are they listening to music? A podcast? Just hanging? It’s tough to know.
Apple Music subscribers can now control music playback on Sonos speakers using voice control through Amazon Alexa. The feature works in the US and UK on the Sonos One and Sonos Beam smart speakers, joining Amazon Echo speakers, based on the Apple Music skill in the Alexa app.
I have a lot of thoughts, sometimes they’re important, sometimes they’re not. They might be clear, or just a jumble of words with no point yet, however something inside of me wants to write it down. Drafts (for iOS and macOS) has become my app of choice for capturing these — and for much more as well.
Drafts is much more than a quick way to take a quick note and has become the app I go to for all my writing because it’s easy, simple, but still powerful when I need more features.
CalZones, available today on the App Store as a Universal app, is based on a simple, ingenious concept that, to the best of my knowledge, has never been done on the App Store before: the app combines a time zone viewer with a calendar client, enabling you to compare times across multiple cities as well as view and create calendar events that display start/end times in multiple formats. By fusing time zone comparisons and calendar events into one product, Smith was able to create an app that is greater than the sum of its parts because it solves a problem that neither traditional world clocks nor calendar clients could fix before.
There’s a saying in software that all bugs are eventually user interface bugs, because someone has to see them to report them. In organizations, it often seems like all problems are eventually communication problems, because communication is the way we interface with each other—and the way most problems surface.
There are a lot of reasons why communication within a company can break down. Here are some of the most common.
I can imagine a future where we all wear AirPods and Google Glasses (or Apple's 'upcoming' AR glasses) and just converse with robots and Siri the entire day.
After all, human interactions are so overrated.
:-)
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Thanks for reading.