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“The Mac mini is BYODKM,” Steve Jobs said, in front of a crowded and slightly confused audience at Macworld 2005.
“Bring your own display, keyboard and mouse,” he continued. “We supply the computer, you supply the rest.”
The Mac mini was designed to lure switchers to the platform. A new customer could simply unplug their desktop PC and hook a new Mac mini up to their existing peripherals.1
The original machine started at just $499, making the Mac mini the lowest-cost Mac Apple has ever sold.
Today is Martin Luther King Day in the United States, a holiday dedicated to celebrating the life and legacy of the civil rights leader. Last night, Apple CEO Tim Cook posted a tweet honoring King:
This morning, Apple has dedicated its homepage to a full-page image of Dr. King that includes the quote:
“Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.”
Evidence continues to mount that Apple’s video streaming ambitions for Apple Music extend beyond the occasional music-related project. Last week, The Wall Street Journal cited unnamed sources that claim Apple is looking to acquire original television series and movies for the service. That story was given weight by comments made by Jimmy Iovine on Saturday at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour that was covered by The Hollywood Reporter:
At Apple Music, what we’re trying to create is an entire cultural, pop cultural experience, and that happens to include audio and video.
We’re fighting ‘free.’ So a simple utility where, ‘here’s all the songs, here’s all the music, give me $10 and we’re cool,’ is not going to scale.
That certainly sounds like someone intent on broadening the scope of Apple Music’s video offerings. To date, Apple has produced primarily music-related video content, including a Taylor Swift concert and music documentaries. However, upcoming projects, like Planet of the Apps, Carpool Karaoke, and Dr. Dre’s drama Vital Signs, have already begun to veer away from a strict music oriented focus. If the speculation is accurate, Apple Music’s moves could open a whole new dimension of competition among streaming music services.
Update: Apple has posted an additional video featuring the AirPods called ‘Stroll,’ which is a longer version of the Siri video described below. You can watch the video at the end of this article.
Apple posted three 15-second advertisements featuring AirPods. Each video is black and white, except for the screens of the iPhones that make an appearance in two of the clips. All three also features the single ’Down’ by Marian Hill.
Two of the videos start with a man walking down the street of a city. In the first spot, the lead character taps his AirPods twice to activate Siri and says ‘Play Marian Hill,’ which starts the music. The second spot opens with another person flipping open his AirPods case to pair his AirPods, then immediately cuts to him dancing down the street and horizontally along the side of a car. Both ads close with the taglines ‘AirPods on iPhone 7’ and ‘practically magic.’
The third ad substitutes musical notes on a staff with AirPods scrolling by as ‘Down’ plays. The clip concludes with AirPods emerging from their case and the pairing interface opening on an iPhone 7.
These are the first advertisements to focus on AirPods. The first two ads do a great job of quickly showing off a feature then focusing on the freedom of movement afforded by AirPods. The final spot that substitutes musical notes with AirPods is more focused on showing off the product, delightfully linking the AirPods with the music they play.
The long-anticipated iOS version of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is now available on the App Store roughly one year after it was rejected by Apple. Isaac is a rogue-like, dungeon crawler game that was originally released in 2014 by indie game studio Nicalis. Apple rejected the iOS version of Isaac in early 2016 for depicting violence against children. Late yesterday, the game appeared on the App Store with a 17+ rating.
Apple isn’t the first platform owner to reject Isaac. In 2012, Nintendo initially blocked Isaac from its 3DS eShop, but ultimately relented, publishing the game for the 3DS and Wii U.
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is available on the App Store for $14.99.
Update: Chris Lattner has landed at Tesla Motors according to this Tesla blog post and the following tweet from the official Tesla account:
Chris Lattner designed and built most of LLVM as a graduate student. In 2005, he joined Apple where LLVM was integrated into Apple’s developer tools. Beginning in 2010, Lattner designed and built much of Swift, which was introduced to the world by Apple at WWDC in 2014.
Today, Lattner announced on the Swift mailing list that he is leaving Apple:
Since Apple launched Swift at WWDC 2014, the Swift team has worked closely with our developer community. When we made Swift open source and launched Swift.org we put a lot of effort into defining a strong community structure. This structure has enabled Apple and the amazingly vibrant Swift community to work together to evolve Swift into a powerful, mature language powering software used by hundreds of millions of people.
I’m happy to announce that Ted Kremenek will be taking over for me as “Project Lead” for the Swift project, managing the administrative and leadership responsibility for Swift.org. This recognizes the incredible effort he has already been putting into the project, and reflects a decision I’ve made to leave Apple later this month to pursue an opportunity in another space. This decision wasn’t made lightly, and I want you all to know that I’m still completely committed to Swift. I plan to remain an active member of the Swift Core Team, as well as a contributor to the swift-evolution mailing list.
Working with many phenomenal teams at Apple to launch Swift has been a unique life experience. Apple is a truly amazing place to be able to assemble the skills, imagination, and discipline to pull something like this off. Swift is in great shape today, and Swift 4 will be a really strong release with Ted as the Project Lead.
Note that this isn’t a change to the structure - just to who sits in which role - so we don’t expect it to impact day-to-day operations in the Swift Core Team in any significant way. Ted and I wanted to let you know what is happening as a part of our commitment to keeping the structure of Swift.org transparent to our community.
Lattner’s contribution to Apple’s developer tools has been enormous. His departure is a big loss for Apple.
Shortly before the winter holidays, Consumer Reports announced that the new MacBook Pro had failed to earn its ‘recommended’ rating due to poor battery life caused by Safari. Apple disputed the testing done by Consumer Reports and worked with it over the holidays to track down the discrepancy between its testing and Consumer Reports’ results. Today, Apple released the following statement to a handful of outlets, including iMore and The Loop:
“We appreciate the opportunity to work with Consumer Reports over the holidays to understand their battery test results,” Apple told iMore. “We learned that when testing battery life on Mac notebooks, Consumer Reports uses a hidden Safari setting for developing web sites which turns off the browser cache. This is not a setting used by customers and does not reflect real-world usage. Their use of this developer setting also triggered an obscure and intermittent bug reloading icons which created inconsistent results in their lab. After we asked Consumer Reports to run the same test using normal user settings, they told us their MacBook Pro systems consistently delivered the expected battery life. We have also fixed the bug uncovered in this test. This is the best pro notebook we’ve ever made, we respect Consumer Reports and we’re glad they decided to revisit their findings on the MacBook Pro.”
There have been reports of battery life issues with the MacBook Pro that are unrelated to Safari, but this should put the Safari issues raised by Consumer Reports to rest.
Steve Jobs’ introduction of the iPhone to the world 10 years ago was captivating:
today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products…. The first one: is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second: is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.
So, three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and a breakthrough Internet communications device. An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. An iPod, a phone … are you getting it? These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.
In retrospect, it’s hard to believe just how cobbled together and buggy that demo iPhone was:
Only about a hundred iPhones even existed, all of them of varying quality. Some had noticeable gaps between the screen and the plastic edge; others had scuff marks on the screen. And the software that ran the phone was full of bugs.
Despite the unfinished state of the iPhone, the onstage demonstrations at Macworld Expo went smoothly. Jobs told the cheering crowd that the iPhone would be available in six months’ time in 4 and 8 GB models for $499 and $599 on a sole US carrier, Cingular. Jobs also revealed something that would have a much bigger impact on the iPhone’s long-term success: its operating system was built on a foundation of Mac OS X.
Apple released a new ad in its ‘practically magic’ series featuring the iPhone 7 Plus Camera app’s Portrait mode called ‘Take Mine.’ Set in Greece, the video starts with a young woman arriving to visit her grandmother. They sit in a cafe where the young woman takes a photo of her grandmother using Portrait mode, which simulates a shallow depth of field.
The grandmother gasps when she sees the photograph exclaiming ‘What a great photo!’ which gets the attention of others nearby. That leads to the young woman being asked to take portraits of people all over her grandmother’s village. The action cuts between the woman taking photos and the portraits she takes, ending with the tagline ‘Portrait mode on the iPhone 7 Plus.’
