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The Shifted-Focus Edition Sunday, March 12, 2023

Cook Bets On Apple’s Mixed Reality Headset To Secure His Legacy, by Patrick McGee, Financial Times

In deciding to press ahead with a debut this year, Cook has sided with operations chief Jeff Williams, according to two people familiar with Apple’s decision-making, and overruled the early objections from Apple’s designers to wait for the tech to catch up with their vision.

Just a few years ago, going against the wishes of Apple’s all-powerful design team would have been unthinkable. But since the departure of its longtime leader Jony Ive in 2019, Apple’s structure has been reshuffled, with design now reporting to Williams.

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Apple’s 12-person executive team reflects how the company’s focus has shifted under Cook, himself a former operations chief. Four of the 12 members have risen through Apple’s operations ranks, whereas nobody has succeeded Ive as chief design officer, who steered the development of the iMac, iPod and iPhone and Watch.

Stuff

How To Edit ProRAW Photos On Your iPhone, by Allison Johnson, The Verge

ProRAW files are saved in Adobe’s ubiquitous DNG format, which is compatible with virtually every RAW photo editing app under the sun. That means you have a lot of options, including just sending the file to a computer and using desktop software. But you don’t need access to a computer — you can process your image right on your phone, either using a third-party app or Apple’s own editing tools. Here’s how to go about it.

Yes, Paper-feel Screen Protectors For The iPad Are Good, by Dan Seifert, The Verge

Apple’s iPad and Pencil combination makes for an excellent note-taking or digital drawing solution. But even though writing notes or creating art on the iPad has a lot of advantages over using analog pen and paper, the actual feel of writing with a plastic-tipped stylus on the iPad’s smooth glass isn’t great. The hard plastic of the stylus hitting the hard glass of the iPad can be noisy, slippery, and just unpleasant to use if you’re used to writing on paper.

Yet it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. There is a small cottage industry of paper-feel (or paperlike or paper-type) screen protectors for the iPad that address this issue directly. And as someone who takes handwritten notes on the iPad every single day, I now swear by them.

Notes

Streams Are Made Of This: Will Digital Platforms Change Our Musical Memories?, by Jude Rogers, The Guardian

I also know that my experiences were very different to his. At his age, I had to hang around the radio for hours or wait until Top of the Pops every Thursday, hoping that a song I loved would appear. These days, my son just asks Alexa.

By my early teens, if I wanted to own an album, the process was a little more convoluted: save £9.99 of pocket money, beg my mum to drive me to Woolworths five miles away, pray that they had it, and if they did, play it until its tape was run ragged or the vinyl was jumping with scratches. Now kids find any album online, in seconds, for free – or find a million tasters on TikTok in a fraction of the time. I worry that music is no longer rare and precious, but something we take for granted.

Bottom of the Page

Now, I am intrigued. What have Apple not shipped in recent years due to objections of the design team over the operations team? Are there still new products sitting inside Apple's labs, awaiting the green-light of the design team?

We probably may never know, but I have one guess. I suspect it was the design team who insisted on continuing revising and using the butterfly keyboard in Apple's laptops, over the objections from operations team. And this fiasco may have caused the design team to lose their clout within the company.

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Thanks for reading.