Apple has asked its suppliers to make up to 80 million iPhones over the first half of this year, people familiar with its planning told the Nikkei Asian Review, a rise of over 10% on last year's production schedule that could boost the company's near-record share price.
[...]
However, suppliers warned that blistering pace of production could be complicated by the outbreak of the coronavirus in China's Hubei Province, given that their main manufacturing centers are in nearby Henan and Guangdong provinces, with more than 100 confirmed cases as of Monday afternoon, and in Shanghai, with over 50 confirmed cases.
The US government is once again reviving its campaign against strong encryption, demanding that tech companies build backdoors into smartphones and give law enforcement easy, universal access to the data inside them.
At least two companies that sell phone-cracking tools to agencies like the FBI have proven they can defeat encryption and security measures on some of the most advanced phones on the market. And a series of recent tests conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reveal that, while there remain a number of blind spots, the purveyors of these tools have become experts at reverse engineering smartphones in order to extract troves of information off the devices and the apps installed on them.
But the [iPad] camera is super funny. That's the other thing that we didn't anticipate being so big. But it was a segment of the population at the time that really was using the camera more than anything else. So I remember very clearly at the 2012 Olympics in London, if you looked around the stadium, you saw a lot of people using an iPad as a camera and generally that was people that just needed to have a bigger viewfinder for vision results, etc. Then seeing that, we went back in and redesigned the camera experience on the iPad — recognizing that this is going to be a thing that we just can't get people away from because they want this larger viewfinder.
Software is where the iPad has gotten lost. iPadOS’s “multitasking” model is far more capable than the iPhone’s, yes, but somehow Apple has painted it into a corner in which it is far less consistent and coherent than the Mac’s, while also being far less capable. iPad multitasking: more complex, less powerful. That’s quite a combination.
Filmic today released its DoubleTake camera app, which allows iPhone users to shoot with multiple cameras at the same time. An early version of the app was demoed during Apple's iPhone 11 Pro media event back in September.
MGM has held preliminary talks with a number of companies, including Apple and Netflix, to gauge their interest in an acquisition, two of the people said. MGM owns the James Bond catalog and its studio has made several current hit shows including "The Handmaid's Tale," which streams on Hulu, and "Live PD," a reality police show that has frequently been the most watched show on cable TV and airs on A&E. It also owns premium cable network Epix.
In the 1930s, at the time of the writing of the Wagner Act—the law which grants workers the right to form unions and collectively bargain— union organizing took place during shift changes on factory floors and over beers in union halls. The law protected workers from retaliation for this type of in-real-life organizing, and it still does.
But times have changed, and often the only points of contact for workers at any given company are email, Slack, and Facebook groups. Today, it’s difficult, even dangerous, to organize when you don’t know who is lurking in your emails or secretly spying on your social media groups.
When the Mac turned 10 years old, it was in a world, for many people, where there was only a single idea of what a computer was: A monitor, a CPU, and a keyboard and mouse that all sat on a desk. (Or a lap, for those who could afford.) It was likely that all computer-y stuff were all done on that single computer. (Or maybe just two computers: one at work, and one at home.)
That one computer had to be all things to all people. And if something cannot be done on that one computer: well, that spelt 'third-party oppurtunity'. Someone will rush in to fill that space.
Today, when the iPad turned 10 years old, the world is different. Many of us has multiple computers that we use at the same time. On the very desk that I am typing right now, I have a laptop, an iPad, as well as an iPhone. Many of the computer-y things that I do are already working well on at least one of the three computers.
If something doesn't work well on an iPad, for example, chances are the same task is already working well on the Mac or the iPhone. There isn't that much of a 'third-party opportunity', nor an incentive for Apple to fill the space. The 'good-enough' bar for any solution to exist has been raised much higher, because any computer is not the only computer.
Perhaps, the Mac in 1994 was so much more advanced than the Mac in 1984, when compared to the decade of iPad, is because there is less of an urgency and motivation.
The story is probably going to be very different if Apple's objective for the iPad is to completely replace the Mac. But, as far as I can tell, that is never Apple's objective. On the other hand, that was Microsoft's objective for a long time: One Windows.
~
Thanks for reading.