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The Park-Opening Edition Saturday, May 18, 2019

Apple Holds Apple Park Opening Ceremony And Tribute To Steve Jobs, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

Apple yesterday held its formal opening of Apple Park, including a concert on the rainbow stage at the center of the campus. Lady Gaga performed at the event, with Apple Park employees taking to Twitter and Instagram to share photos and videos.

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Tim Cook took to Twitter to express his love for Steve Jobs. He thanked Lady Gaga for her performance in a separate tweet. “We came together today, in the home you imagined for us, and celebrated your spirit. We love you, Steve,” Cook wrote.

Everybody Complains Apple Isn't Innovating, But R&D Spending And Patents Tell A Different Story, by Kif Leswing, CNBC

The amount of money going into R&D in Cupertino shows that Apple is spending heavily both to fend off new technologies which could threaten its dominance in smartphones and tablets, as well as investing in technologies that could help the iPhone maker enter into new product categories, such as wearables, fitness and health.

"The patents around wearables suggest that Apple could be targeting AirPods with biometric sensors, Apple Watch with UV monitoring, gesture recognition for AR/VR applications, machine learning projects to enable autonomous driving and integration of various existing devices with a car," according to the note.

Apple Promotes Music-Making On Mac In New Ad, by Joe Rossignol, MacRumors

"From bedroom studio to stadium tour, the British music scene is alive," the video description said. "See the emerging and the iconic, the graft and the glory, a glimpse behind the scenes and behind the music."

Stuff

Discovering Apple TV Channels, by Josh Centers, TidBITS

Apple TV channels are, in the end, largely uninteresting apart from some slight integration benefits of keeping multiple subscriptions within Apple’s walled garden. There aren’t even significant user interface advantages because the Apple TV app already lists the content in these channels, and Netflix remains an outsider.

Powerbeats Pro Are The Bluetooth Earbuds To Beat, by Brian Heater, TechCrunch

Removable silicone tips offer a more adaptable fit, coupled with a better seal. That, in turn, means less sound leak. The headphones might be tuned a little high for some tastes, but it honestly beats the old days when the company leaned entirely too heavily on bass to make up for other shortcomings. As is, the sound is quite good, so far as fully wireless Bluetooth earbuds go.

I will say that the design wore on one of my ears a bit after a marathon listen while working at my desk, but I was able to wear them for a lot longer than most of the earbuds I’ve tested, with minimal annoyance.

Fiery Feeds Adds iCloud Accounts, Three-Pane iPad View, New Customization Tools, And More, by Ryan Christoffel, MacStories

Fiery Feeds, the modern, flexible RSS client for iOS, was updated today with a variety of new features that take the app to new heights: enabling iCloud-based accounts for RSS and Read Later so you don’t need third-party services, adding a three-pane layout on iPad, offering new, configurable methods for navigation, and a lot more.

Notes

Google Uses Gmail To Track A History Of Things You Buy — And It's Hard To Delete, by Todd Haselton, Megan Graham, CNBC

Last week, CEO Sundar Pichai wrote a New York Times op-ed that said "privacy cannot be a luxury good." But behind the scenes, Google is still collecting a lot of personal information from the services you use, such as Gmail, and some of it can't be easily deleted.

A page called "Purchases " shows an accurate list of many — though not all — of the things I've bought dating back to at least 2012. I made these purchases using online services or apps such as Amazon, DoorDash or Seamless, or in stores such as Macy's, but never directly through Google.

But because the digital receipts went to my Gmail account, Google has a list of info about my buying habits.

In San Francisco, Tech Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness, by Anna Wiener, New Yorker

Almost everyone I know is down on San Francisco these days, and for good reason. Few can envision a future here. The city is undergoing an accelerated identity transformation. On pastel blocks, developers are gutting elegant Victorians and mid-century homes and painting them staid shades of gray. Traffic congestion is spiking, boosted by rideshare vehicles. Fundamental civic infrastructure is in crisis, despite the city’s new wealth: teachers are leaving, and the 911 dispatch center is understaffed. The emerging city is a tapestry of boutique fitness studios and finicky New American restaurants, of private clubs (including one for dogs) and cryotherapy spas. Fast-casual restaurants cater to the efficiency-oriented; a newly opened salad shop, Mixt, offers a mood-lit, wallpapered “salad lounge.” Upscale cafés proliferate, some of them backed by venture capital: investors have put seventy-five million dollars into Philz, a local third-wave coffee chain.