Apple on Wednesday announced that its Apple TV app, including its Apple TV+ streaming service and MLS Season Pass, is arriving on Android devices. While the company previously offered a version of its app for Google TV, the newly released app will support a broader range of Android-based devices, including phones, tablets, and even foldables. In addition, Google customers on both living room and mobile platforms will now be able to subscribe to Apple TV+ and MLS Season Pass through Google Play billing.
This new longitudinal, virtual study aims to understand how data from technology — including Apple and third-party devices — can be used to predict, detect, monitor, and manage changes in participants’ health. Additionally, researchers will explore connections across different areas of health. The study spans a number of health and disease areas, including activity, aging, cardiovascular health, circulatory health, cognition, hearing, menstrual health, mental health, metabolic health, mobility, neurologic health, respiratory health, sleep, and more.
As Apple itself points out in its press release, a lot of health and scientific studies are limited by the number of subjects they can track or the amount of time for which they can be tracked, but by using devices that millions of people carry with them all the time, the possibilities expand greatly.
While it’s tempting to wonder if Apple’s research robot hints at a revival of product personality, I’m not holding my breath. Apple’s target market is now literally everyone in the world, leading to designs that prioritize universal appeal over distinct personality. Here’s hoping I’m wrong and that an upcoming personable tabletop robot brings some character back to Apple’s product line.
The implementation of Image Playground gives me some hope that Apple still understands its biggest advantage when it comes to building AI: a focus on making users’ lives easier. But the rest of Apple Intelligence has me quite concerned that we’re in for a messy few years.
The heart emoji has clearly become a default way of subtly communicating with each other. The question is, communicating what? Its meaning seems to shift with the context to the point that it no longer has a fixed meaning at all—except when you use it wrongly.
Small steps can lead to big changes. Start with a glass of ice water.
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