Apple Insider – Page 99

Posted on January 9, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Masimo sues Apple over Apple Watch patents, alleged theft of trade secrets

Medical technology company Masimo on Thursday filed a legal complaint claiming Apple infringes on 10 owned patents with its Apple Watch device, and stole vital trade secrets through the hiring of key personnel.

Lodged with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, the suit alleges Apple Watch, including the latest Apple Watch Series 4 and Series 5 models, leverages technology covered by ten Masimo patents. Specifically noted in the case is intellectual property detailing Apple Watch health features like heart rate monitoring.

According to the filing, Masimo is a pioneer of non-invasive physiological monitoring techniques having developed a wide range of technologies to track patients’ pulse rate, arterial oxygen saturation and other parameters using nothing more than transmitted light.

In particular, Masimo invested heavily in the evolution of photoplethysmograph, or PPG, technology. While exact methodologies differ, PPGs at their most basic level sample readings from light transmitted into, and subsequently reflective off of, body tissue. Results can then be obtained by calculating attenuation of light from constituents in the human body, specifically blood.

The company’s Signal Extraction Technology (Masimo SET) solved a variety of problems that plagued traditional PPG hardware, improving reliability and accuracy of reporting of physiological signals derived from the PPG, the suit reads. Masimo went on to develop other non-invasive technologies measuring total hemoglobin, carboxyhemoglobin, and methemoglobin.

In 2013, prior to the launch of the original Apple Watch, Apple approached Masimo with a potential deal that would integrate the medical firm’s technology into an as-yet-unreleased product. Following what appeared to be fruitful initial talks, Apple stepped back and in 2014 began to hire key Masimo personnel including former Chief Medical Officer and Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs Michael O’Reilly and Cercacor CTO Marcelo Malini Lamego. The tech giant has adopted identical strategies in the past.

Cercacor is an offshoot of Masimo, having been spun out from the main company in 1998 as “Masimo Labs” and later renamed. While the two companies share a cross-licensing agreement, Masimo does not own Cercacor.

Masimo and Cercacor warned Apple about potential legal violations, but the iPhone maker went on to pursue patent applications covering topics similar to those already patented by the medical technology firms. Lamego, named as an inventor on many of these patents, was “intimately involved” in the development of corresponding technologies at Cercacor and Masimo, suggesting the executive aped the sensitive IP on behalf of Apple.

In addition to infringement and trade secrets claims, plaintiffs seek correction of inventorship on five patents, the subject matter of which Lamego allegedly obtained from discussions with Masimo or Cercacor employees Ammar Al-Ali, Mohamed Diab and Walter Weber. The suit claims Al-Ali, Diab and Weber are inventors of the IP “regardless of patentability.”

Masimo seeks an injunction against Apple Watch Series 4 and Series 5, damages for patent infringement and theft of trade secrets, and court fees, among other relief.

Posted on January 9, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

TiVo app for Apple TV ‘in limbo’ due to technical issues, strategy shift

By Mikey Campbell
Wednesday, January 08, 2020, 04:19 pm PT (07:19 pm ET)

TiVo owners looking to stream live and recorded video to Apple TV through an official app could be in for a long wait, as the company on Wednesday said a tvOS version of the promised release is “in limbo.”

TiVo app for Roku seen at CES 2019. | Source: Zats Not Funny

Speaking with TechHive at CES, TiVo VP of consumer products and services Ted Malone said the company’s plans to launch streaming apps on Apple TV and Roku have changed.

Announced during CES 2019, the project was originally designed to answer longstanding customer requests for a native app capable of feeding TiVo content to third-party streaming devices. For example, a tvOS iteration would enable Apple TV owners to access live and recorded content from a TiVo set-top box without investing in multiple devices.

Beyond a brief mention of potential specifications last January, TiVo has remained mum on the initiative over the past 12 months.

According to Malone, the delays for Apple TV and Roku boil down to limited resources, technical challenges and strategy changes, the report said. The company has yet to work out quality and performance issues stemming from the video transcoding process, which is required to stream TiVo content to non-TiVo hardware.

“My bet is we’ll get Android, and because of that we’ll get the Fire TV, because it’s the same app, just different qualifications,” he said. “I think Roku and Apple are in limbo.”

An Android variant of the app is likely in the offing because TiVo’s new TiVo Stream 4K device runs on the operating system. For now, however, the company is concentrating on more lucrative undertakings like the buildout of its streaming platform.

“If we really believe the streaming market is where it’s at, we need to double down on that and not get distracted by a bunch of things that other people want, but aren’t really going to move the needle,” Malone said.

TiVo initially planned to make its app lineup free to use as an add-on to typical monthly rates, with an estimated launch in the second and third quarters of 2019.

Posted on January 8, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Apple privacy exec lauds company initiatives, defends stance on encryption

By Mikey Campbell
Tuesday, January 07, 2020, 04:54 pm PT (07:54 pm ET)

Jane Horvath, Apple’s senior director of global privacy, took part in a privacy-centric panel at CES in Las Vegas on Tuesday, where she lauded the company’s initiatives to protect customer data and defended its stance on hardware encryption.

Jane Horvath participates in privacy roundtable at CES 2020. | Source: Parker Ortolani via Twitter

Apple’s staunch belief that customer data should remain obfuscated — even from Apple itself — was questioned during the roundtable, as Horvath was asked about recent revelations regarding a Federal Bureau of Investigation request for assistance in an ongoing investigation.

On Monday, the FBI sent a letter to Apple asking for help in the extraction of data from two iPhones believed to have been used by Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani. Alshamrani is suspected of killing three people in a shooting at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla, in December.

Horvath toed the company line, defending Apple’s implementation of strong hardware encryption, reports CNBC.

As she explained, iPhone’s encryption mechanism is designed to keep personal information safe from prying eyes.

Once a device is locked, data stored within cannot be accessed without successful entry of a predetermined passcode or password. While Apple can with a proper warrant delve into data stored offsite, such as its iCloud cloud storage service, the company is unable to break into an iPhone without writing custom software, also known as a backdoor.

Apple vehemently argued against the creation of backdoors when the FBI requested assistance in accessing an iPhone tied to the San Bernardino terror attack in 2016. Horvath repeated those vows on Tuesday, saying strong encryption is an effective method of ensuring sensitive information stays private.

“Our phones are relatively small and they get lost and stolen,” Horvath said. “If we’re going to be able to rely on our health data and finance data on our devices, we need to make sure that if you misplace that device, you’re not losing your sensitive data.”

While Apple offers assistance to law enforcement agencies, and fields a team to specifically handle such requests, Horvath does not support the creation of backdoors.

“Building back doors into encryption is not the way we are going to solve those issues,” she said.

Horvath went on to tout Apple technologies like differential privacy, user randomization for first-party services like Maps, and minimal data retrieval for Siri.

Facebook VP of Public Policy and Chief Privacy Offer for Policy Erin Egan, Procter & Gamble Company Global Privacy Officer Susan Shook and Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter were also on stage during the discussion moderated by Rajeev Chand, Partner and Head of Research at Wing Venture Capital.

Horvath began work as Apple’s privacy czar in September 2011 and entered the public eye when she attended a so-called “spy summit” to discuss data privacy and mass surveillance issues in 2015. It was around that time that Apple began to ratchet up its rhetoric on privacy in consumer tech. Prior to Apple, Horvath acted as Google’s Global Privacy Counsel.

Posted on January 7, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Samsung expected to unveil Galaxy S11 on Feb. 11

By AppleInsider Staff
Monday, January 06, 2020, 04:42 pm PT (07:42 pm ET)

Samsung plans to hold its first Galaxy Unpacked event of 2020 on Feb. 11, where the company is expected to unveil a new flagship handset and, potentially, a fresh foldable design similar to the Motorola Razr.

Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked teaser.

Announced on Saturday, Unpacked is set to take place at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts on Feb. 11 at 11 a.m. Pacific, and promises to deliver “new, innovative devices that will shape the next decade of mobile experiences,” according to Samsung. The company will live stream the event on its website.

Samsung is widely rumored to unveil three new smartphones with Galaxy S11 branding. Like the current Galaxy S10 line, Samsung’s 2020 lineup is expected to arrive with three distinct screen sizes — 6.4, 6.7 and 6.9 inches — and borrow heavily from existing hardware, but each will share a number of technological improvements including 5G connectivity and a massive 5,000 mAh battery.

Camera specs will undoubtedly improve, as insiders suggest the new hardware to feature a 108-megapixel rear-shooter, 5x optical zoom at certain focal lengths and next-generation video software. A front-facing camera is anticipated to reside in a “hole-punch” cutout in the S11’s edge-to-edge display, which itself could see an upgrade with support for 120Hz refresh rates.

There are rumblings that Samsung could expand its foldable phone slate with a new model that bends along its x-axis, similar to the recently resurrected Motorola Razr. The company last year introduced Galaxy Fold, a half-phablet, half-tablet device that folds in two like a book.

Pricing and full specifications have yet to leak, but the S11 will likely be positioned to compete with Apple’s iPhone 11 and 11 Pro smartphones.

Posted on January 5, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Internet Explorer 5 developer describes frustrations of working with Steve Jobs

On the 20th anniversary of Internet Explorer 5 for Mac, one of its key developers reveals how Apple’s Steve Jobs ignored agreements, and made Microsoft pull features from its browser.

Composite reconstruction of Internet Explorer 5’s splash screen on a typical browser window of the time.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 Macintosh Edition was announced on January 5, 2000 at Macworld Expo, where Steve Jobs demonstrated it alongside OS X. Now on the 20th anniversary of that demo, developer Jimmy Grewal has been describing both how the influential app was created —and how he and his team would come to regret giving in to Jobs’s demands.

“MacIE 5 was built by a team of [around] 40 talented & dedicated people in Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit (MacBU) based in San Jose, CA.,” says Grewal in a Twitter thread. “I joined that team fresh out of university in June ’99 and helped design some of the features of MacIE 5, and also managed the Mac OS X version.”

1/ Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the introduction of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5 for Mac. This was both the most important release of Internet Explorer for the Mac, and the last release. Here are some anecdotes and thoughts from an insider’s perspective. [thread] pic.twitter.com/TLiloQX0DU

— Jimmy Grewal (@jimmyg) January 5, 2020

Internet Explorer 5 for Mac featured a design highly reminiscent of the early OS X desktop, though Grewal says this was coincidence —at least on Microsoft’s part.

“This ‘new look’ had an uncanny resemblance to Apple’s later Aqua interface for Mac OS X,” continues Grewal. “However it was developed in complete secrecy within Microsoft. When we previewed MacIE 5… to Apple in the Summer of 1999, Jobs was not pleased.”

In an accompanying blog on the same topic, Grewal quotes a colleague, Maf Vosburgh, saying that their “new look” started with an idea to match hardware with software. Vosburgh says the idea was that if you had a Bondi blue iMac, then IE 5 would use that same color.

“So did Steve see our Summer 1999 New Look demo and tell his team to create Aqua?” says Vosburgh. “Who knows. Our stuff was in any case inspired by Apple’s hardware designs, so I can’t feel too bad about it.”

While Vosburgh says that Jobs was enthusiastic about Microsoft’s design, Grewal tells a slightly different story about what may have been a later demonstration.

“Since no one outside Apple was supposed to know about Aqua at the time, [Jobs] couldn’t say anything to us about the resemblance,” he says. “[And instead] he directed his ire at another new feature in MacIE 5 called Media Toolbar. This feature provided support for playing back MP3’s on websites.”

Media Toolbar was significant because it leveraged SoundJamp MP, the same software that Apple was in the process of acquiring to create iTunes.

“Jobs insisted we cut this feature claiming it undermined QuickTime,” continues Grewal. “Some time after the launch of MacIE 5, Apple acquired SoundJam and its development team. It was released by Apple under the name iTunes. We cut the feature and deeply regretted it.”

For that January 5, 2000 announcement, Internet Explorer 5 for Mac would be included in Steve Jobs’s keynote instead of getting a regular demo from a Microsoft executive.

“It was quite an unusual request. Talking points were agreed, but much to our dismay Jobs didn’t mention a single one,” says Grewal.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbO4lW-6_8E&w=560&h=315]

Instead, Jobs “implied” that the overall look of the browser was a result of it using Apple’s standards.

“But other than the scroll bars and window controls, the rest was generated by the UI code in the app and looked identical in the Mac OS 9 version,” says Grewal. “From the horizontal pin-stripped background of the toolbars, to the 24-bit semi translucent buttons and Gaussian-blurred menu backgrounds, none of it was part of Apple’s Aqua UI elements in the Carbon toolbox… yet to the casual observer they were almost indistinguishable.”

Despite Jobs ignoring the agreed points, and despite later regrets about cutting the Media Toolbar, Grewel says that he and the team were proud of the app.

“The response to MacIE 5 at Macworld and by the press was better than we had hoped, probably helped by the fact that it looked great and very similar to some of Apple’s own apps running under the yet-to-be-released Mac OS X,” he says. “We were all proud of the work we had done, the critical acclaim, and the enthusiasm of Mac users who had traditionally frowned upon Microsoft’s past efforts to build Mac software.”

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh was released on March 27, 2000. Its final version was released in 2003.

Shortly afterwards, Jimmy Grewal left Microsoft. Writing in 2005 about his experiences with Internet Explorer he said Apple “was a pain in the ass sometimes.”

“For a company with such great PR, they really were very unprofessional and treated developers poorly. I know that the OS X transition was tough, but there are so many stories I could tell of stupidity at Apple and policies which made no sense,” he wrote.

“There were times during the last two years of working at Microsoft that I really hated Apple’s management,” he continued, “which was very difficult for me being such a loyal fan of their products and having so many friends who worked there.”

Posted on January 4, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

After two months, Apple TV+ lacks a breakout hit

As Apple’s largest ever new service launch, Apple TV+ has brought us a strong stable of good shows. It just hasn’t had that all-important breakout hit yet —but that could be about to change.

Apple TV+ being promoted at an Apple Store

You can’t say that Apple TV+ started quietly. Except that after Apple spent most of the year hyping it up, the service ultimately launched with just a few shows —and they haven’t been gigantic successes.

That’s not to say that the shows are poor, or that they haven’t been recognized by the likes of the Golden Globes or the Screen Actors Guild.

Out of the whole slate of series that Apple TV+ has rolled out in its first two months, though, none of them have yet become breakout hits. None of them have crossed that line into being talked about in mainstream media.

Dickinson

This is because, in most ways, it’s one thing to have a good series like “Dickinson.” It’s another to have one that is watched by a lot of people. And it’s yet another to have a show that breaks out into being part of the culture. In other words, there is no Baby Yoda on Apple TV+ yet.

Those breakout hits did happen more often when there were just ABC, CBS and NBC to watch. And it’s incredibly rare now that we instead have hundreds of places to see TV.

Only, if you can’t manufacture a cultural icon, and if you can only try to persuade enough people to watch your show, both of these things do depend on the series being good. And here, Apple is doing well.

Apple TV+ has plenty of good series

Compare it to any broadcast network’s September season, ever, and it’s actually quite remarkable how consistently good Apple TV+ series are. The whole reason we all got so used to mid-season replacements every January was that so many September launches would fail.

The definition of a failure on network TV, though, is and always was entirely in the viewing figures, not at all in the quality of the series. Very good shows died on the air before they found their audience. It could be such a fast and ruthless process that producer Alan Spencer, creator of ABC’s “Sledge Hammer!,” once joked that his show was cancelled during its first ad break.

Now if the sheer volume of choices mean it’s harder to find an audience, Apple is not so frantically chasing ratings, it is not trying to win its hour slot against its rivals.

The Morning Show

Apple does know precisely how many people watch any given show, but it isn’t then trying to deliver that audience to advertisers. No one sets out to make a poor series, but if Apple TV+ has a dud, it does not have the same urgent reason to pull it after a couple of episodes and burn off the rest on late nights in the summer.

The odd poor series sitting in Apple TV+’s library isn’t going to cause a problem. A lot of poor series would. If all you ever saw when you turned on Apple TV+ was dud after dud, each bad show would be cumulatively damaging.

Whereas it only takes a single great show to make a service a success.

Previously on TV

We forget this now, but “House of Cards” was not just a very good Netflix series, it was an advertisement for the service. The success of that single show, the amount of buzz it created, lifted the whole of Netflix and helped get it noticed.

To a lesser degree, “Transparent” did the same for Amazon Prime.

This uplift from a single show is not limited to streaming services, either. HBO has been around since the early 1970s, but the reason you’ve heard of it is “The Larry Sanders Show” in the 1990s. You may not have seen that series, perhaps you don’t even know the name now, but what it did back then was ignite the cable service.

“The Larry Sanders Show” attracted viewers to the service, and the presence of viewers meant that HBO was then also attracting talent. Producers would already have known that HBO supported more interesting fare than network TV, and now they could see that there was an audience.

Apple has attracted talented creatives right from the start. You can be certain that Oprah’s phrase of “a billion pockets y’all,” or something similar, was said by Apple at every first meeting with every producer.

And you can be certain that every producer was already conscious of how much money Apple has.

No guarantees

The money, the audience, and the lack of adverts interrupting shows, all mean that the Apple TV+ service launched with very good people doing their best to make very good television.

It does not follow automatically that they succeed, but you don’t get a hit without trying.

See

Right now, Apple TV+ has the likes of “For All Mankind,” “Dickinson,” and “Snoopy in Space” that are well-received. It’s got “See,” which has had perhaps the weakest reviews of them all so far, and it has “The Morning Show.”

That series is the closest Apple TV+ has to a hit, and it’s the only one to be nominated for any awards so far.

Everyone wants a hit

“The Morning Show” is not a breakout hit, though. It is getting mentioned on other TV talk shows, it is getting some news value from its awards and reviews. It’s just not yet making such a noise that “Entertainment Tonight” is desperate to feature exclusive news from the set.

For the moment, though, two months into the service, Apple TV+ feels like HBO in its early days. It has a reputation for high quality, but it hasn’t had its Larry Sanders or Baby Yoda moment.

Let’s not downplay that point about quality, though. Making television is unlike anything Apple has ever done before.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8TsCQmngFk&w=560&h=315]

Since November 1, it’s brought us ten series across drama, comedy, children’s and Oprah’s Book Club. Assuming that Oprah Winfrey gets renewed, as her series surely must, then half of that slate is already coming back for a second run.

You can’t entirely trust that a show getting a second series got it through being a success. It can just be that the original deal was for more than one run.

Nonetheless, quantitatively it’s the sole metric we currently have or are even likely to get unless Apple decides to reveal its ratings.

Qualitatively, more visibly, and actually more surprisingly, none of the series so far have been complete duds.

And that’s what is going to get Apple success in television. Its shows are lacking buzz so far, but they’re not lacking in quality and we are already seeing how that has changed things.

AppleInsider sources in television long ago told us that Apple had been intent on signing exclusive deals with TV creators and, at launch, it had singularly failed to do that. Now, though, having seen how Apple TV+ works, and knowing from other creatives what is involved, it’s changing.

In late December, Apple signed comedy writer and star Sharon Horgan to a first-look deal. And around the same time, filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron similarly signed a multi-year movie deal with Apple.

Neither is as well known on screens as, say, the Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston partnership that produced “The Morning Show.”

But the shows and films they make are extraordinarily good, to the extent that both of these deals are true coups for Apple.

Apple TV+ just needs one great hit to get those billion people reaching into their pockets, and that first hit is going to come from attracting more and more talent to the service.

Keep up with AppleInsider by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube, Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos.

Posted on January 3, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Apple to hold annual shareholders meeting on Feb. 26

Apple is scheduled to hold its annual shareholders meeting in February at Apple Park’s Steve Jobs Theater, where stock holders will cast votes on measures ranging from the election of the company’s board of executives to three shareholder proposals.

The meeting is slated to take place on Feb. 26 at 9 a.m. Pacific, according to a proxy statement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. Shareholders of record, or those who owned Apple stock at the close of business on Jan. 2, 2020, are invited to participate in person, but anyone with stake in the company can vote online through proxyvote.com.

For 2020, the meeting will cover a total of six proposals involving the election of directors, ratification of Ernst and Young as the independent registered public accounting firm and approval of executive compensation. Three shareholder proposals covering proxy access, sustainability and executive compensation, and policies of freedom of expression are also up for vote.

Apple presents board nominees James Bell, Tim Cook, Al Gore, Andrea Jung, Art Levinson, Ron Sugar and Sue Wagner for consideration. Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, resigned from the company’s board last September, prior to the debut of the Apple TV+ and Disney+ streaming services. A longtime director at Apple, Iger later said the tech giant’s interest in entering the entertainment industry put the companies on “conflicting rather than converging” paths.

During 2019, CEO Cook once again netted the lowest payout amongst fellow C-suite executives at $11.5 million, including a $3 million base salary. Other executives, including CFO Luca Maestri, General Counsel Kate Adams, SVP of Retail and People Deidre O’Brien, COO Jeff Williams, and former retail chief Angela Ahrendts, reaped between $19 million and $25 million in salary, stock grants and incentives.

That said, Cook raked in $113.5 million in vested stock units and stands to gain hundreds of millions of dollars should Apple continue to perform at expectations, as he controls 1.26 million unvested stock units worth some $275.7 million, as well as 560,000 equity incentive plan awards worth $122.5 million.

Three shareholder proposals are on the docket for 2020, including yet another proxy access amendment that seeks a second shareholder-approved nominee to the board. Apple’s current proxy access regulations limit access to 20 percent of immediately serving directors rounded down to the nearest whole number, which comes out to one director. The proposal would change that language to reflect a 20 percent figure “or 2, whichever is greater.”

Apple has received proxy access proposals six years running and in each case recommended shareholders vote against the proposition on the basis that the existing method of proxy access has been deemed effective.

Proposal 5 requests the Board Compensation Committee to prepare a report “assessing the feasibility of integrating sustainability metrics into performance measures, performance goals or vesting conditions that may apply to senior executives under the Company’s compensation incentive plans.” While Apple touts efforts in the areas of environmental sustainability and human rights, directly tying specific metrics to executive compensation could “reduce reputational, legal and regulatory risks and improve long-term performance,” the proposal reads.

Apple recommends a vote against Proposal 5, noting existing programs like the yearly Supplier Responsibility Progress Report, Environmental Responsibility Report and Supplier Code of Conduct are already in place. Further, integrating the requested metrics into executive compensation would be redundant as they are already built in as core corporate values, the company says.

“An effective approach to “sustainability,” as that term is defined by the proponent, requires more than simply tying executive compensation to the achievement of environmental, social, and governance goals,” Apple says. “That is why, as a company, we already incorporate the Apple Values into our business strategy.”

Finally, Proposal 6 seeks a report on Apple’s policies on freedom of expression and access to information, “including whether it has publicly committed to respect freedom of expression as a human right.” The company’s dealings in China are specifically mentioned, with proponents noting Apple’s mass removal of VPN apps from the App Store in 2017, a takedown of at least 634 so-called “illegal” apps in 2018 and the ejection of The New York Times app in 2017. In each case, Apple acted at the behest of the Chinese government, a regime known to stifle free speech.

The company recommends voting against Proposal 6, saying it adheres to the laws and regulations of countries in which it operates.

“In these instances, we prioritize engagement, advocating for the outcome we believe is in the best interests of our users. And, while we may disagree with certain decisions at times, we do not believe it would be in the best interests of our users to simply abandon markets, which would leave consumers with fewer choices and fewer privacy protections,” Apple says. “We believe engaging and participating in markets enables us to advocate for policies and practices that are consistent with Apple’s values.”

Posted on January 3, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Tim Cook donates $2M to unnamed charity

By Mikey Campbell
Thursday, January 02, 2020, 04:11 pm PT (07:11 pm ET)

Apple CEO Tim Cook last week donated 6,880 in personally owned company stock to an as-yet-unidentified charity, an amount worth about $2 million as of the trading date.

According to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Thursday, Cook conducted the transaction on Dec. 27, when Apple shares were priced at $289.80. No shares were sold and a reporting price was not applied to the transfer, meaning the exact sum Cook donated will likely remain unknown.

Executives of publicly traded companies are not required to reveal the destination of charitable donations, but Cook has in the past made donations to the Human Rights Campaign’s Project One America, a gay rights initiative. The Apple chief in 2014 donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Pennsylvania’s Steel Valley School District, a gift that funded the purchase of iPads for students and teachers.

Cook routinely participates in philanthropic activities like auctioning off one-on-one meet-and-greets through CharityBuzz. In 2014, for example, a lunch with Cook at Apple’s headquarters sold for $330,000. Proceeds of the online sales typically go to the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights.

Like other tech executives — albeit not a multi-billionaire — Cook has promised to give a bulk of his money away to charity and in 2015 said he plans to take a “systematic approach” to philanthropy.

In addition to today’s reported donation, Cook made similar gifts to unspecified organizations over the past few years. He donated 50,000 Apple shares to an unidentified third party in 2015, 23,215 shares in 2018 and 23,700 shares in 2019.

Following last week’s trade, Cook controls 847,969 shares of beneficially owned Apple stock that, as of today, is worth $256.5 million.

Posted on January 1, 2020 by sick skills — Leave a comment

December 2019 in review: Apple releases the long awaited new Mac Pro

The Mac Pro and the Pro Display XDR dominated December, but there was also possibly, just possibly, an end to the year-long issues with China.

Apple’s Mac Pro at WWDC 2019

Buyers had barely got their hands on the new 16-inch MacBook Pro when suddenly it was December and all eyes were on how Apple was bringing out the Mac Pro. Yet before you could dismiss the MacBook Pro as last month’s news, some of those new buyers were finding fault with their machine. Overall the reviews and hands-on pieces that continued into December were overwhelmingly positive, but there was this one issue about sound.

If you were using certain applications such as Final Cut Pro X, Logic Pro X or just any app that played audio, you might hear a popping noise. It would appear immediately after you’ve stopped playing, but also cropped up for some people as they scrubbed through audio and video files.

Apple’s new 16-inch MacBook Pro

Apple confirmed that this was a software bug and that it was working on fixing it.

As AppleInsider pointed out, though, Apple has some history with this popping or sometimes clicking sound. We could trace back similar issues to even 2007, when Apple had to update the then-current OS X Tiger.

But come December 10, 2019, the superb new 16-inch MacBook Pro was eclipsed somewhat by the superb and costly new Mac Pro.

About that cost

The Mac Pro was the biggest Apple news all month, but it isn’t in any danger of eclipsing other products in the Mac line. It simply isn’t aimed at the majority of users. Surely no one was looking at their Mac mini and planning a tiny upgrade to the Mac Pro.

That’s not in any way to say that Apple was aiming at the wrong market, rather to explicitly say that it was aiming at a particular one. AppleInsider had already talked to potential buyers about their reasons. And as disparate as they all were, they were each desperate for the power that this machine was due to bring.

Then it’s not that anyone is going to casually drop the $5,999 base price for the Mac Pro, it’s that there are users for whom even the cost of the highest-spec model was financially worth it.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qza8iibuvPI&w=560&h=315]

We all went to Apple’s Build to Order page, got out PCalc on our iPhones, and totted up that you could spend around $53,000 on a Mac Pro. That was the maximum on launch day, and since then further storage options have been added.

In late-December, the most you can spend on a Mac Pro is $53,948, and there are still more graphics card options to come. Plus the regular base model is at some point going to be joined by one that’s built to be rack-mounted. That will start at $6,499 or a further $500.

Ultimately the price is easily going to crack $55,000 and still we’re going to say that’s worth it. Even if you then have to drop $5,999 for the Pro Display XDR and a grand more for the stand.

From the moment the base price and configuration were announced, there were people who wanted much higher specifications and a much, much, much lower price, please. More reasonably, there were people arguing that the equivalent Windows workstations were cheaper. But, they aren’t.

You could spec out an equivalent Windows PC —and we did —and you could examine the specifications of what we called the “fantastically fast” new Mac Pro.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3xiMpN3TKc&w=560&h=315]

Or you could ask buyers. The UK’s Lunar Animation studio, for instance, has had both the Mac Pro and a Pro Display XDR for the weeks when it was working on the film “Jumanji: The Next Level.”

Enthused by how the Mac Pro revolutionized their workflow compared to the iMac Pro machines they had previously been using, still the company zeroes in on the display as the true game-changer.

“It essentially meant that we now had a reference monitor in the studio,” continued the firm. “As a smaller studio without 30k to drop on a monitor, it’s allowed us to see exactly what the final deliverable looked like as it was intended to go to the client.”

That’s why this new Mac Pro isn’t overpriced.

Even if you can’t justify dropping the cash that would otherwise get you a high-spec Tesla Model 3 car, though, the work that Apple did on the Mac Pro is significant.

We might not see the new Afterburner card make its way into cheaper Macs, but you can be sure that lessons learned from keeping this machine cool will benefit us all.

The sheer incredible speed that it offers us now will also increase over time as hardware and software engineers exploit the features of the new Mac Pro.

A rack-mounted Mac Pro seen during testing

Apple stuck to its word about making this machine the best Mac ever, and it stuck to its promise of making it modular.

It just didn’t entirely stick to the idea that every Mac Pro would be made in Texas.

If you’re in the US, then then the Mac Pro you order will be assembled at the plant in Texas. But if you’re outside the US, the machine you get is likely to have been assembled in China.

China again

Barely a minute has gone by all year without China being an issue for Apple. Right from January, we had Apple reporting falling profits there, and throughout the months since, the US and China have been in a trade dispute.

What we learned about Apple’s profits in China this month was that nobody knows what’s going on —except that the game continues.

It’s a different situation with trade tensions and tariffs, though. It’s premature to say that all of this was utterly and finally resolved in December, but it was at least eased.

A further round of increased tariffs that would have affected the iPhone, iPad and Mac were dropped in the middle of the month as the two nations struck a trade deal.

The Pro Display XDR

That didn’t stop Tim Cook being continually pressed on the topic. In December, he visited Japan and while there, was asked about the whole issue of why Apple products are made where they are.

“The glass on this iPhone is made by Corning in Kentucky,” he said to the Nikkei Asian Review. “Several of the semiconductors in the iPhone are made in the United States. There’s enormous manufacturing happening in the US, just not the assembly of the final product.”

“The way that we do manufacturing is we look at all countries and look to see what skills are resident in each country, and we pick the best,” he said.

Worldwide

Apple is truly a worldwide company in terms of manufacturing and the supply chain, but it’s also a global sales operation.

In December 2019, we learned that it’s Apple that dominates the entire planet-wide wearable technology market, specifically because of the Apple Watch and AirPods.

You already know that in almost five years since it was announced, the Apple Watch has become an overnight sensation. But this device, which never gets as much mention as the iPhone or now even as much as Apple TV+, is even bigger than you think.

According to industry analysts, the Apple Watch has eclipsed the iPod in terms of sales.

Apple is doomed

That’s still not as much as the iPhone continues to earn. It’s estimated that Apple earned some 66%, or two thirds, of the entire smartphone market’s profits in 2019.

Note that this figure is specifically profits, and it amounts to something in the order of $8 billion. It’s not the number of phones sold, as it’s easily arguable that assorted Android handsets outsell the iPhone.

However, for all the devices it may have sold, or at least shipped, Samsung reportedly only took 17% of the market’s profits. Significantly, that puts Samsung in second place. That’s how far ahead Apple is.

That was then, this is now

The Apple that is now headed into 2020 is a rather different company than the one it was a year ago. In this last year, we’ve had huge services launched —Apple Card, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade and Apple News+ —and we’ve seen a revamp of how the company even presents its news.

With all of these services in place, it’s going to be interesting to see if 2020 sees Apple returning to a more familiar pattern of events that are centered on hardware.

We’ll be crossing fingers that hardware updates will include a 13-inch MacBook Pro with that new keyboard. We’ll be counting on September 2020’s “iPhone 12” featuring 5G.

And we’ll brace ourselves for yet more global concerns that are far less technological and much more political. Such as Apple Maps, which should’ve rounded out 2019 in some triumph as the greater detailed updates now cover the entire US. But instead, it got embroiled in a debacle over the Crimea Peninsula, and specifically who that territory belongs to.

Politics, legal issues, and more episodes of “The Morning Show.” Apple never stops.

Posted on December 31, 2019 by sick skills — Leave a comment

Jimmy Iovine reveals what’s wrong with streaming music, talks Steve Jobs

Former Apple Music executive Jimmy Iovine says streaming services are all facing the same problems about differentiation, but notes it’s a great time to be an artist.

Jimmy Iovine launching Apple Music in 2015

Around 14 months after leaving Apple, record producer and Apple Music co-creator Jimmy Iovine talked with The New York Times about the state of streaming music services. He says each faces the same difficulties and describes what he learned from Steve Jobs, Apple and Napster.

“It’s all a response to Napster. I saw how powerful that technology was, and I realized we had to switch gears. The record companies were not going to exist without tech,” he told NYT. “Why I got into the music business originally was to be associated with things that were cool. And I realized that the record business at that moment, the way it was responding to Napster, was not cool.”

Iovine says that 20 years ago, the record industry was “putting up a moat” and suing people to protect its interests.

“So I said, ‘Oh, I’m at the wrong party.’ And I met a bunch of people in tech. I met Steve Jobs and Eddy Cue from Apple. And I said, ‘Oh, this is where the party is. We need to incorporate this thinking into [my record company] Interscope.'”

Iovine also wanted to work on how his music was being listened to, and says that he learned a lot from how Dr Dre was concerned with “cheap, inefficient equipment.” When he decided to form Beats music, he then learned from Apple just how complex hardware is.

“Steve Jobs used to sit with me at this Greek restaurant and draw out what I needed to do to make hardware,” explains Iovine. “He’d say, ‘Here’s distribution, here’s manufacturing,’ and he’d be drawing on this paper with a Sharpie. And I’d go, ‘Oh, [expletive].'”

Iovine says that his going from being a record producer to co-founding Beats, and then joining Apple, was not a case of jumping ship from music to technology. But also that while he sees technology and music as part of the same thing, others do not.

“The two sides don’t speak the same language,” he says. “Content doesn’t know what technology is building. And engineers are just going by the way they see a problem. The streaming business has a problem on the horizon, and so does the music business. That doesn’t mean they can’t figure it out.”

The problem for streaming, he says, is in the profit margins and how music services cannot really differentiate themselves.

“It doesn’t scale,” says Iovine. “At Netflix, the more subscribers you have, the less your costs are. In streaming music, the costs follow you. And the streaming music services are utilities — they’re all the same. Look at what’s working in video. Disney has nothing but original stuff. Netflix has tons of original stuff. But the music streaming services are all the same, and that’s a problem.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p8AsQhaVKI?start=5938&w=560&h=315]

He also sees a problem in how record companies no longer have a direct relationship with music consumers. But equally, this can be tremendous for musicians and performers.

“The artists now have something they’ve never had before, which is a massive, direct communication with their audience — from their house, their bed, their car, whatever,” he says. “And because of that, everybody wants them. Spotify wants them, Apple Music wants them, Coke wants them, Pepsi wants them.”

“So hail to the artists, because in the end they’re winning,” he continues. “It isn’t their problem to figure out how the streaming company and the record company are going to make more money. It’s the streaming company and the record company’s problem to figure out how to become more valuable to that artist.”