Apple has opened its public beta program for iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8 and tvOS 15 on the Apple Beta Software Program website. macOS Monterey is not yet publicly available, but Apple’s beta site says it is ‘coming soon.’
Last year, Apple announced that it would be directing 100 percent of eligible proceeds from (PRODUCT)RED purchases to the Global Fund’s COVID-19 Response to “provide critical support to health systems most threatened by the outbreak” in sub-Saharan Africa until June 30, 2021. Now, the company has extended the period until December 30, 2021.
Despite calls from the press and some members of the public for Apple to merge iOS and MacOS, the tech giant continues to plug its fingers in its ears and insist it’s not happening. And you know what? It’s the right approach. But weirdly, Apple is accidentally demonstrating what a disaster this merger would be using one of its own products: Apple Arcade.
There’s a semantic element of truth to this — if a company with hundreds of thousands of employees never made a decision without a full worker vote, very little would get done. But the semantic argument obscures the truth. Apple’s employees aren’t asking for voting control of the board of directors. They’re asking for some flexibility. In truth, they’re asking for management to listen to their concerns.
Even if Apple is able to emerge from its antitrust fights relatively unscathed, dissatisfied developers could eventually pose a more existential problem for Apple.
It turns out that link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has “billions of books and no central filing system.” Imagine if libraries didn’t exist and there was only a “sharing economy” for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It’s no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be—especially if someone reported a book being in someone else’s home in 2015, with an interested reader seeing that 2015 report in 2021 and trying to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That’s what we have right now on the web.
If I can travel back 30 years to meet my younger self, here are some things that I can tell him that he will not believe:
In 2021, the majority of my entertainment are radio programmes.
In 2021, the majority of my television viewing is on a small 10-inch screen.
In 2021, there are still new episodes of "The Simpsons."
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