Little attention has been given to the role of game controllers in AR navigation, but Apple's patent filings and its recent announcements suggest that its next new play in hardware could be an advanced gaming controller, perhaps even a wearable one.
Apple TV hardware hasn't been updated for two years-- which just so happens to be the typical length of time before a new model is introduced. This year, Apple could have a special impetus to update Apple TV based on its new Apple Arcade gaming subscription and the availability of the faster, smaller A12X chip. Here's why.
Less than a week before Apple unveils its latest "by innovation only" iPhones, Apple bloggers are sifting through iOS betas and searching the supply chain for clues that could be used to support their efforts to spoil every last surprise the company could possibly introduce at the Steve Jobs Theater.
When you upgrade to a new iPhone -- as millions will next month at the unveiling of the "A13" powered iPhone 11 -- you're voting with your dollars for a future driven by advanced new silicon with incredible sophistication. There is no way Apple or any other company could design and manufacture this future without you. The recent history of Google's Pixel Visual Core explains why.
For years, this new Apple product was derided as too expensive to compete against cheaper alternatives. Yet by targeting the premium high end first, it was able to establish itself and then attract an even broader audience of users at broader price points in the future. No this isn't about iPod, or iPhone, or iPad or Apple Watch. It's a look at HomePod, Apple's home audio device featuring HomeKit and Siri functionality, often confused with merely being a WiFi microphone.
Apple Card is all over the news, in part because the physical legacy card it ships with can be scuffed up if you throw it in your jeans pocket with coins and keys. There are thousands of other card issuers globally that wish the inherently fragile nature of a pristine credit card was also capable of driving free global advertising of their brand as well. Why does Apple get so much free press?
Apple pioneered the concept of making its products accessible to users with disabilities back in the 1980s. It has made environmentally sound manufacturing and supplier responsibility a key aspect of its global operations. It has taken a public stand for inclusion and diversity and has made privacy and security primary features of its products. Why haven't other tech giants offered more than a meek "me too" in these areas?
Since 2012, Apple has been buying back shares at the extraordinary rate of around $10 billion per quarter. A year ago it picked up the pace to around $20 billion per quarter. After a reprieve in the March quarter, the company has resumed its buyback frenzy with its largest ever quarterly funding: $24 billion in the June quarter. Here's why.
Apple's reported operational expenses for research and development in the June quarter hit a new all-time high of $4.257 billion, well over twice the quarterly spending it reported in 2015. Apple's aggressive expansion demonstrates the company is building for the future even as its rivals retreat from tablets and smartwatches and fail to keep pace with Apple's aggressive OS updates and custom silicon work.
When Apple entered the smartphone market in 2007, it didn't do so to lose money making most of the world's smartphones as a public service. All these years later, a shocking number of analysts and reporters still seem to be confused about this.
Apple's continuing performance as a market-responsive, commercially savvy innovator is destroying feebleminded media narratives that seek to portray the company as helpless and befuddled. It also demonstrates that the real incompetence lies in bad reporting by sloppy journalists seeking to deliver titillating headlines rather than accurate, factual portrayals of the industry.
Microsoft is running a retro-styled advertising campaign tied into the new third season of Netflix's "Stranger Things" TV series, which is set in 1985. It promotes fake nostalgia for a romanticized Windows launch that in reality was only scoffed at as underpowered, poorly-architected vaporware at the time.
The magic behind Apple's subtlety flattering new FaceTime feature in iOS 13 beta 3 has incrementally developed across years of evolving software and hardware advancements, offering some interesting insight into how Apple uniquely charts out the future with its products.
The Wall Street Journal crafted the "Big Hack" of Apple clickbait: a high drama tell-all that insulted everyone at Apple, mocking its departing design chief, his boss, and the team that worked with him. As fictional drama it was Netflix-caliber entertainment, but to insiders it was so bad it was hard to finish.
As Apple prepares the release of iOS 13 and splits off the new iPadOS 13 for specialized mobile tablets, Microsoft's former chief executive Bill Gates mused this week that it would have been the "natural thing" for Microsoft to have been the "standard non-Apple phone platform." But he's wrong, here's why.
The news that Jony Ive is leaving his Chief Design Officer position at Apple has fueled predictable handwringing. But while Ive's three decades of work at Apple put him at the top of a short list of "the world's most famous product designers," the company isn't facing a "crisis of design," but rather an opportunity.
In perhaps the cutest application of machine learning ever, Apple has included algorithms in its latest computer vision framework to enable iPhone and iPad apps to detect your furry friends in images and determine if they are fancy feline or a good doggo.
Apple's macOS Catalina is another ambitious refinement of the Mac featuring a fundamental rethinking of iTunes and an infusion of fresh ideas from iOS: from Sidecar to Continuity Sketch to Screen Time, a whole new world of Catalyst apps from iPad, and many more features under the hood. But note: Catalina is still in beta!
I talked to lots of developers at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, from fresh-faced scholarship winners entirely new to WWDC to an experienced veteran who reported having first attended Apple's annual dev event back in 1991. The unanimous answer to “what’s the most exciting thing you saw this week?” was SwiftUI, hands down.
In a perfect demonstration of how careless writers seeking to advance a narrative can take a molehill of flawed data and create a mountain of fearsome clickbait, Axios just dug up IDC’s "embarrassing" smartphone data from the March quarter in an effort to portray Apple as doomed.
Project Catalyst is designed to enable many of the existing one million iPad apps to also work natively on the Mac in a way that's effectively indistinguishable from existing Mac software and transparent to users. At the same time, it's also expected to help fuel the supply of iPad optimized apps. Here's how.
