Leander Kahney - page 5

This post was going to be part of my new book, Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level, but was cut for length or continuity. Over the next week or so, we will be publishing several more sections that were cut, focusing mostly on geeky details of Apple’s manufacturing operations.

Apple is famous for design and marketing, but a large part of the company’s success is due to the incredibly complex and efficient manufacturing organization Tim Cook masterminded with Steve Jobs.

No matter how beautiful its products are, the company would go nowhere without a world-class manufacturing and distribution operation that can make millions of devices in the utmost secrecy, to the highest possible standards, and deliver them efficiently all over the globe.

It’s an operation unprecedented in the history of industry. When Jobs and Cook started in 1998, Apple was doing $6 billion in business annually. It now does that every 10 days.

This post was going to be part of my new book, Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level, but was cut for length or continuity. Over the next week or so, we will be publishing several more sections that were cut, focusing mostly on geeky details of Apple’s manufacturing operations.

Apple is a functional organization. It’s not organized along business lines, split into divisions like the iPhone division, the Mac division and the Apple TV division, the way, say a company like Ford has the Lincoln division for its luxury cars, a trucks division, a parts division and so on.

Instead, Apple is organized around functions: design, hardware, software, internet services. In this way, Apple operates like the biggest functional organization on the planet: the military.

This post was going to be part of my new book, Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level, but was cut for length or continuity. Over the next week or so, we will be publishing several more sections that were cut, focusing mostly on Apple’s manufacturing operations.

This is Part 2 of a two-part section on Apple’s misadventures in manufacturing. Part I is here.

Steve Jobs carried his dream of end-to-end control over manufacturing to NeXT, the company that Jobs founded after being booted out of Apple in 1985. It was here that he learned a tough lesson about manufacturing: that sometimes it’s more trouble than it is worth. Or, perhaps more kindly, that great manufacturing capabilities mean nothing if you don’t have a product people want to buy.

This post was going to be part of my new book, Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level, but was cut for length. Over the next week or so, we will be publishing several more sections that were cut, focusing mostly on Apple’s manufacturing operations.

Steve Jobs always had a deep fascination with automated factories. He was first exposed to them during a trip to Japan in 1983. At the time, Apple had just created a new floppy disk drive called Twiggy. During a visit to Apple’s factory in San Jose, however, Jobs became irate when he discovered the high failure rate of Twiggy drives Apple was producing. More than half of them were rejected. Jobs threatened to fire everyone who worked at the factory

Now that Apple’s AirPower charging mat has been cancelled, this dual iPhone and Apple Watch charger is perhaps the best alternative.

Like the AirPower, the Dual+Watch Aluminium Wireless Charger can charge three devices simultaneously, including the new wireless AirPods.

Here’s your chance to get a signed and personally-engraved copy of my new Tim Cook biography.

If you preorder a copy of Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level, I’ll sign and inscribe the book for you.

Tim Cook is seriously underrated. Seven years after taking over as CEO from Steve Jobs, the narrative that he’s riding his predecessor’s coattails needs to change. It’s just not true.

Cook is his own man, transforming Apple in his own way. See Monday’s Apple credit card and subscription News+ app as examples, which are centered on customer privacy, a big Tim Cook mandate.

The company today is a better corporate citizen than it was in the past. And as a business, it’s firing on all cylinders. Cook is doing almost everything right. Some pundits are beginning to argue he’s Apple’s best CEO yet.

Watching Monday morning’s “It’s show time” keynote, I was struck by how much Tim Cook is stamping his values on what Apple is doing.

While writing a book about Cook last year, I accidentally stumbled on six values he has been championing at Apple:

• Accessibility
• Education
• Environment
• Inclusion and diversity
• Privacy
• Supplier responsibility

These are the things Cook has been pushing internally since taking over from Steve Jobs in 2011. These are the priorities of his leadership, reflecting the things he wants to get done and the internal values that guide what Apple employees do and how they do it.

Monday’s keynote was a chance to witness these values in action, to see the kinds of products and services his priorities are helping to create.

Over the years, Apple took heavy criticism for employing an offshore supply chain rife with abuse. The company is still stained by the rash of worker suicides in 2010 at Foxconn, its main supplier.

But as Apple’s latest Supplier Responsibility report shows, the company continues to make remarkable strides to improve conditions for workers and the environment.

This post is brought to you by Wondershare.

PDFs are an increasingly common way to share documents of all kinds. From résumés to entire e-books, PDFs are as common as Word documents are. But unfortunately, they are not always easy to edit.

To really grapple with PDFs, you need good PDF-editing software. Introducing PDFelement 6 Pro for Mac, a powerful and easy-to-use PDF editing app that makes working with PDFs dead easy.

Check out our video below for a quick look at how PDFelement 6 Pro for Mac works. (We also have an exclusive 40 percent discount for Cult of Mac readers.)

What’s the very first app you should download onto a brand new iPhone?

The first app you get should be Dashlane, a rock-solid, easy-to-use password manager that is Cult of Mac’s official security app.

When you start from scratch, you face a big problem — passwords! Dashlane solves that.

When Apple fires an executive, the company is rarely straightforward about the situation. Apple never puts out a press release stating plainly that the executive was canned. So Tuesday’s unexpected announcement that Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s head of retail, is leaving in April led many to suspect she was fired.

That’s because the announcement came as a surprise and seems rushed. She’s certainly not retiring or quitting to join another company. The press release phrase “new personal and professional pursuits” sounds like code for “canned.”

My mom, who is 75, loves her Apple technology. She’s a full-fledged member of the Cult, with an iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac and Apple TV. She uses them all, all the time, to do everything, just like the rest of us.

But she always had trouble with passwords — at least until I introduced her to Dashlane, the official password manager of Cult of Mac.

In our video below, you can see exactly how easy it was for her to start using Dashlane.

The iPhone XR is typical Apple. It’s an entry-level phone with a bunch of premium features. Jony Ive just cannot cut corners, even if he wanted to. This is no plasticky, cut-rate phone built to meet a price point. It’s a primo phone with primo features (and a primo price tag, TBH). It just happens to be the cheapest new iPhone in Apple’s lineup.

The XR delivers everything customers care about: a big, beautiful screen; great cameras; long battery life; and Face ID.

The iPhone XR is arguably Apple’s most interesting smartphone of 2018 because of this slightly odd bundle of budget/premium features. It’s arguably a $1,200 phone in a $750 package.

For a chance to win a brand-new iPhone XR, enter our free giveaway here.

After unboxing the brand new iPhone XR, I can confidently say that this is a fantastic phone. Apple cut very few corners. The iPhone XR is beautifully designed, with a great big, edge-to-edge display. It’s incredibly fast, and camera performance is excellent. It looks awesome. The drawbacks are mostly minor.

Basically, it’s a $1,200 phone in a $750 package.

Check out the video to see our first impressions. Then read on to find out how you can enter to win the 128GB blue speed demon showcased in the video. Yep, it’s free to enter our iPhone XR giveaway. (Frankly, it’s going to be hard to part with this beautiful machine.)

Despite Apple’s denials, it’s “highly plausible” that secret spy chips could have been planted on the company’s servers, said a former Apple hardware engineer.

Anna-Katrina Shedletsky, who spent nearly six years at Apple helping build several generations of iPod, iPhone and Apple Watch, said spy chips could have been slipped into the design of servers used for Apple’s iCloud services, as alleged in a Bloomberg Businessweek story.

“With my knowledge of hardware design, it’s entirely plausible to me,” she said. “It’s very highly plausible to me, and that’s scary if you think about it.”

Having been the proud new owner of the iPhone XS Max for a few days, I’ve gotten a feel for the device.

Here’s a compressed iPhone XS Max review.

I have a new best friend. It’s the Apple Watch Series 4. Boy, do I love this miraculous little machine.

The new Apple Watch really is wonderful. As with everything else, speed makes it so much more fluid and seamless. The display is gigantic and awesome! There’s so much technology packed inside, it’s a sci-fi marvel.

I took it for a long bike ride to test it out. Here’s what I found.

It’s an incredibly big deal that Wednesday’s Gather Round keynote featured Lisa Jackson, Apple’s head of environmental initiatives.

The annual iPhone unveiling is Apple’s biggest product event of the year. Every single word and image is carefully calibrated to do one thing, and one thing only: sell as many of the new products as possible.

So why did Tim Cook turn over several precious minutes to Jackson to talk about renewable energy and recycling?

Why couldn’t you type the F-word on the iPhone? Why did Steve Jobs make weird eye movements during demos? What kind of manager was Scott Forstall?

These and other questions are answered in a new book by Ken Kocienda, a former iPhone programmer who spent 15 years at Apple helping to develop the first iPhone, iPad and Safari web browser.

Published this week, Creative Selection, Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, is a fascinating account of Kocienda’s career that focuses on how Apple makes great software. (read our review here)

Here are some of the most interesting things we learned from the book.

“It’s this long process of demos and decisions and feedback that creates this long, iterative progression … that leads you from not-very-promising ideas to products you can ship.”

Curious what it was like to work at Apple during its Golden Age of design? What exactly did the creative process look like? On this episode of the Apple Chat podcast, I sit down with Ken Kocienda, a programmer who spent 15 years at Apple during the Steve Jobs era. He worked on the first versions of the Safari web browser, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. His new book, Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, chronicles his experiences working at the company and offers an inside look at the creative process that made the team successful.

On the podcast, Kocienda discusses his role in the development of the iOS keyboard, explaining how text entry evolved and offering insight into the autocorrect algorithm. He walks us through the Darwinian process of creative selection, describing how the demo pyramid functioned to provide feedback and move an idea from prototype to product. Listen in for his experience presenting a demo to Jobs himself and learn how the original spirit of the Macintosh lives on at Apple today!

When Steve Jobs died in 2011, pundits wondered how the company would continue to make great products without him.

The question is partly answered by programmer Ken Kocienda’s new book, Creative Selection, which describes his 15 years working at Apple helping to develop the original iPhone, iPad and Safari web browser.

Kocienda’s book is a remarkable insider’s story that shows how Apple creates the software that it’s rightly famous for.

Apple’s autonomous vehicle program sustained its first crash last week.

A Nissan Leaf rear-ended one of Apple’s autonomous test vehicles, according to a filing with California’s Department of Motor Vehicles. The DMV licenses autonomous car testing programs in the state.

When traveling, if you forget your charger, you’re often hosed. Especially for the Apple Watch. That’s why I keep a Zens Powerbank battery pack in my bag. The Powerbank features a built-in charger for the Apple Watch, plus a USB port for plugging an iPhone or iPad.

It’s light and easy to carry around, yet has enough juice for recharging an Apple Watch almost 12 times. Best yet, the Zens Powerbank battery pack is available now in Cult of Mac’s Watch Store. 

Best List: FuelBox, a home and mobile charging system

There’s a secret magician lurking in our household. We never see them, but they somehow manage to disappear all our charging cables. It drives me batty. The kids, of course, deny any knowledge of the situation. Yet somehow it’s impossible to keep cables around the house. They just keep disappearing.

That’s why I like the FuelBox PowerStation, a charging system that combines a docking station/charging brick with a mobile battery pack. Both the docking station and the battery pack have built-in charging cables — both Lightning and mini-USB. No matter what, the cables can’t disappear.