So Stacey, a mother of four, made a decision: Not her kids.
“If they want one when they turn 18 and they have a job and they can afford it, that’s their choice,” she says.
Stacey is a hard-liner in a war being waged in homes everywhere as grown-ups attempt to limit smartphone use that they believe can be harmful to kids, even as they struggle to establish healthy habits with their own phones. And, big surprise, the parents aren’t winning. Because it’s not just their children they’re up against, but also a tech industry pushing products that insiders say are designed to be addictive and a society that has largely capitulated to the norms and urges and expectations all those phones and apps have created.
Meet the people toting their portable music players against the barrage of smartphones: students trying to work around classroom regulations on electronic devices, audiophiles on a hunt for superb audio quality, and Type A podcast listeners looking to curate their content consumption. Turns out, there are tons of good reasons why people are still pressing play on their MP3 players.
The Apple manager had been profuse in his apologies, but Son wanted more than words. When he was a salesman, and something got badly messed up, Son tried to make it up to his customers. And so he told the manager that Apple owed him something.
[...]
It pleases me that Son got something for all his aggravation. But what really troubles me is the likelihood that the vast majority of consumers finding themselves being bounced between giant corporations, give up and wind up losing money, let alone getting compensated with a “gift” for their lost time.
Fresco is adding a magic wand selection tool that allows selections to be made based on color. A slider adjusts the color that defines the selection, which gives artists fine-grained control over what is selected.
[...]
The Photoshop update has added a new AI-based Content-Aware Fill tool that can use surrounding parts of an image to remove and fill unwanted sections of an image with a single tap. Content-Aware Fill is one of the marquee Photoshop features on the Mac, so it’s nice to see it added to the iPad now too.
It now supports Sleep Apnea analysis, which is a sleep disorder in which pauses in breathing or period of shallow breathing during sleep occur more often than usual.
Both Choudhury and Bloom suspect that Apple and other similarly inflexible companies will see high levels of attrition if they don’t adjust their policies. Ideally, they say, in-office and remote-work days should be determined by managers after consulting with their direct reports in order to understand what makes the most sense for the team, given both employees’ individual situations and the nature of the work at hand. That’s pretty much what Apple employees’ latest letter is asking for.
Apple's Eddy Cue is discussing restructuring its $76 billion services business to make a bigger push into lucrative areas like streaming and advertising, and has already elevated executives to that end, sources said.
Basically, there are four different audio programming that I listen on my iPhone: audiobooks, podcasts, music, and radio. They all come from different apps, each with their own user-interface, and different ways of 'managing' content. In fact, even though there are four different types of content, there are actually more than four different apps here. I do listen to audiobooks on both Audible and Libby apps, and radio programmes come from the BBC Sounds, WNYC, KCRW, and Apple Music apps. All of them have different methods of browsing, searching, and playing programs.
So, perhaps this is nostalgia through rose-colored glasses, but I do miss the old iPod+iTunes just a little bit, with its simple and unified interface to play all sort of audio programming.
(Okay, there weren't internet radio on iPods.)
On the other hand, I do not miss the old iPod that much. :-)
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Thanks for reading.