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Apple Refreshes MacBook Air With Faster Processor, Cuts Prices In Some Countries

Apple this morning refreshed their MacBook Air models with the latest generation of Intel’s Haswell processors. The new processors give the MacBook Air a slight speed bump, taking them from 1.3GHz to 1.4GHz (and Turbo Boost from 2.6GHz to 2.7GHz). The refreshed models are otherwise the same, offering 128GB or 256GB storage, 4GB of RAM and Intel HD Graphics 5000. Built to order machine options are also unchanged, with upgrades of 8GB of RAM, 512GB storage and a 1.5GHz i7 Processor available.

“With MacBook Air starting at $899, there’s no reason to settle for anything less than a Mac,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Macs have never been more popular, and today we’ve boosted the performance and lowered the price of MacBook Air so even more people can experience the perfect everyday notebook.”

The four preconfigured models have all taken a $100 price cut in the United States - but those price cuts have not translated to every region, with Australia being one region where the prices of the models stay the same. But that can be explained by the recent weakness in the Australian dollar. The below graph illustrates the comparison between US prices and Australian prices, after converting the Australian prices to a 2014 average of the US Dollar and removing GST (which are included in the Australian prices).

The new MacBook Air models are available for purchase now. You can read Apple’s press release here.

The iPad, The Software, and The Screen

Following a lack of growth for the iPad line in Apple’s latest quarterly report, I’ve seen a number of articles suggest the idea that, in spite of Apple’s best efforts to establish a third product category between the smartphone and the laptop, the iPad is done. That people, after an initial fad of high iPad sales, are showing “no interest” in the tablet form factor because they’re now served well enough by laptops, desktop computers, and larger smartphones. I think that ascribing slower iPad sales in the past few quarters to a generalized lack of interest shows an understandable kernel of concern among tech writers, but also a misunderstanding of the iPad as a device.

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Tweet Library 2.5→

Manton Reece’s Tweet Library remains my favorite app to find old tweets from my account directly on iOS (it works with any Twitter Archive). Tweet Library isn’t a full-featured Twitter client: it does come with basic tweeting and timeline functionalities, but it’s made for retrieval of tweets and organization in collections.

This week, Manton released a 2.5 update that fixes bugs and adds a URL scheme to launch Tweet Library searches from other apps. The URL scheme makes it easy to trigger searches from Drafts and Launch Center Pro, and I’m also happy about the CSV export option for collections.

Here’s Manton on the update:

When I gave up on Twitter as a user, many people asked if I would abandon Tweet Library. I wasn’t sure at first, but the answer now is a clear “no”. In fact, since my last personal tweet in 2012, I’ve released new features and even redesigned the app for iOS 7.

But I do need to start consolidating my work on Tweet Library and Watermark, because the apps share so many concepts around archiving and search. To that end, this week I’m retiring tweetlibrary.com as a way to browse and publish collections. The site will now redirect to a special landing page on Watermark. Published collections from Tweet Library also go to a public page on Watermark.

Tweet Library is $4.99 on the App Store.

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The Past, Present And Future Of Apple’s Aqua User Interface→

Stephen Hackett:

Building a new operating system is a monumental challenge, and in January 2000 when Aqua was introduced, Apple was in the thick of the transition to OS X.

Beyond the staggering amount of development work taking place to smash Mac OS and NeXTSTEP together, Apple was hard at work on the user interface of OS X. But to understand what OS X would become (and how it would look), it’s important to remember where the company had been before.

Well-researched retrospective of Apple’s work on the Aqua interface over the years. I enjoyed the collection of screenshots and links, and it’ll be interesting to see where Apple will take Aqua with the next OS X.

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Facebook Acquires “Activity Diary” App Moves

In a blog post published on their press website, Finnish company ProtoGeo Oy has announced that Facebook has acquired their fitness and activity tracking app for iOS and Android, Moves.

Today, we’re delighted to announce that Facebook has acquired our company and the Moves app. Since we launched Moves, we’ve been focused on running a simple and clean activity diary that millions of people have enjoyed using.

Now, we’re joining Facebook’s talented team to work on building and improving their products and services with a shared mission of supporting simple, efficient tools for more than a billion people.

According to the company, Moves will continue to operate independently as a standalone app, with “no plans to change that or commingle data with Facebook”.

Moves is the latest in a series of acquisitions that have seen Facebook expanding towards established markets (messaging and WhatsApp) as well as new categories (VR and Oculus Rift). Moves used sensors on a smartphone to keep track of a user’s location during the day, building a visual log of places through a “bubble UI” that indicated for how long users stayed in a specific location and when they left. Moves was capable of associating standard GPS coordinates with relevant points of interests, and it could also guess whether a user walked, ran, or used other transportation systems to arrive at a location. With that information, Moves’ diary counted steps taken and estimated calories burned, allowing users to browse a visual timeline that also contained data about their physical activity throughout the day with the possibility of expanding the UI to show entire weeks and months.

Last year, Moves launched an API to allow third-party apps to access collected data, with a dedicated website highlighting iOS, Android, and Web clients with Moves integration. Moves also added support for Apple’s M7 co-processor for the iPhone 5s, which helped the app collect motion data with higher accuracy and lower battery consumption. Moves couldn’t automatically determine a user’s activity (such as “excercising” or “watching a movie”) based on location alone, but it featured an intuitive interface to add context and verbs to tracked locations and times.

Amid rumors of Apple looking to enter the wearable and fitness tracking space with a standalone device later this year, Moves poses an interesting acquisition for Facebook, which has built a large location database over the past several years and recently rolled out a feature to let users easily discover friends nearby.

Following today’s news, Moves is currently available on the App Store for free.

Visualizing The Addition Of Apple TV Channels Over Time

The Apple TV is a curious product. It has been called a hobby product by Apple; rumors constantly suggest a ‘groundbreaking’ new Apple TV is imminent, and Apple has chosen to add features to it on a more frequent, but irregular, schedule than their other products. What I mean by this last point is that unlike other products and services such as iOS, iCloud and even Apple Maps, Apple has not seen the need to wait for a keynote to update the Apple TV with new services.

In fact, since the Apple TV (second generation) was released in 2010, Apple has added new ‘channels’ to the Apple TV on 18 seperate occasions. Excluding Apple’s own channels, the Apple TV now has 33 third party channels in the US, with a handful of other channels only available in countries outside the US. Even more interesting is the fact that in the last 12 months Apple has rapidly increased their pace of adding new channels, with 26 being added in that time period.

I did this research after noticing a more frequent and steady stream of news about new channels being added to the Apple TV. I don’t have any explanations or theories for this recent acceleration of channel additions, but am curious as to where the next few months will take us. Will the pace continue, will Apple slow down, or will they eventually open the Apple TV up with an App Store? Of course, the even bigger question is whether the Apple TV will ever really become more than an accessory to your TV or iOS device and become a so-called “revolutionary” device that challenges ‘the status quo’. Only time will tell.

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Beats Music’s First 100 Days→

Yinka Adegoke, writing for Billboard:

Two of music’s most successful brand marketers, Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, are in the hot seat as label sources grouse that the first 100 days of the duo’s subscription streaming service, Beats Music, has been a disappointment and soon will face competition on the mobile platform when Sprint begins bundling Spotify with its “Framily” plans.

According to Beats Music CEO Ian Rogers, the company is doing fine and the problem has been converting iOS users to paid subscriptions.

I still believe that the human curation Beats is doing for music recommendations offers great value, but the service needs to be available internationally and on more platforms. Spotify is available in several countries outside the United States, has desktop and mobile apps, and, more importantly, it has mindshare after years of existence. For some people, Spotify is synonym of “legal music streaming” (when I was using Rdio, I would always introduce it to my friends as “an app like Spotify”).

If Beats Music doesn’t want to offer a free plan, they should aim at people willing to pay for streaming services through new software, international rollouts, and exclusives. Last week, they released an update to their iPhone app with better social integrations and App Store subscriptions. iTunes will undoubtedly make it easier to subscribe to Beats Music, and I’m hoping that the company will find a way to grow its userbase quickly without compromising on the original vision.

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Apple Q2 2014 Results: $45.6 Billion Revenue, 43.7 Million iPhones, 16.4 Million iPads Sold

Apple has published their Q2 2014 financial results for the quarter that ended on March 29, 2014. The company posted revenue of $45.6 billion. The company sold 16.4 million iPads, 43.7 million iPhones, and 4.1 million Macs, earning a quarterly net profit of $10.2 billion.

“We’re very proud of our quarterly results, especially our strong iPhone sales and record revenue from services,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re eagerly looking forward to introducing more new products and services that only Apple could bring to market.”

We’ve been a bit busy today with the launch of MacStories 4.0 so we weren’t able to do our usual ‘notes from the call’. But we do have our usual graphs below, so that you can quickly digest this quarter’s earnings results.

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