The world of quotes is a poorer place without Steve Jobs, who was a quote machine. Nonetheless, plenty of people talked about Apple this year, whether lauding the company’s successes or damning its strategies.
Here are the most memorable Apple quotes of 2016.
To promote his new design book, Jony Ive has made a video giving a very rare peek inside Apple’s ultra-secretive design studio.
The video is only the second one that I know of that shows the inside of the “studio behind the Iron Curtain” — so called because it’s so sealed off from the outside world. (The other was last year’s 60 Minutes episode).
While watching it, I recognized a lot of details that I mention in my book about Jony Ive but I don’t think are generally well-known. So I screenshot the video and made a few notes. Warning: This one’s for the design nerds.
Wireless speakers tend to be cheap and nasty — or fantastic and expensive.
There are exceptions, though, and Moshi’s Spatia wireless AirPlay speaker is one of them.
At $399, the Spatia isn’t cheap by any means, but its sound and features rival systems costing much more.
And does it sound sweet. With five drivers, including a subwoofer, the Spatia serves up a rich, wide soundstage. Lots of speakers claim “room-filling sound,” but the Spatia truly fills the bill.
In the last decade or so, lots of companies have gotten design religion. Design has been brought in-house, where it can shape products from the very get-go. There’s an obvious source for this idea — Apple.
This week on the Kahney’s Korner podcast, I talked to Oliver Seil, senior design director of Belkin International’s Innovation Design Group. We discussed Belkin’s products and design process; the surprising complexity of USB cables (and why they cost so much); and why Apple has had such an enormous influence on design and manufacturing.
You can listen to the podcast or read a full transcript of the interview below. (Or dive into the show notes.)
The tech industry appears to be nice and clean, but it has a long and toxic history of environmental damage. Silicon Valley is home to the most Superfund cleanup sites in the country.
A new film, Death by Design, takes a sobering look at the electronics industry and its toxic environmental legacy — both in the United States and in China. The film offers a behind-the-scenes look at the cost of the devices we consume in some measure of ignorance.
Apple features heavily in the film, though it’s not the only tech company implicated.
This week on Kahney’s Korner, I talk to the documentary’s director, Sue Wiliams, about Apple, pollution and Silicon Valley.
For many ugly years, manufacturers considered industrial design an afterthought. They would outsource the task to a contractor or neglect it altogether, in an effort to get products out quickly and cheaply.
The result: hideous-looking products that didn’t work well or proved difficult to use.
Nowadays, companies like Apple are changing the game when it comes to incorporating industrial design and user experience into product engineering.
On this episode of Kahney’s Korner, I talk with Oliver Seil, senior design director with Belkin International’s Innovation and Design Group. Seil is Belkin’s Jony Ive, the top designer who overseas the company’s diverse array of products.
Belkin specializes in mobile accessories, from power packs and iPhone cases to WeMo home automation products
Increasingly, some Apple fans think Jony Ive has lost it.
He’s killing ports and headphone jacks left and right. The latest MacBooks value form over function. He’s designing gold watches for the 1 percent.
And now his glossy new photo book, Designed by Apple in California, looks like a $300, linen-bound ego trip.
Looking like something Elvis Presley would rock, the Shure MV51 is a handsome, retro-styled microphone well-suited to podcasting with an iPad or iPhone. Sturdy and portable, I find it great for recording on the go. It’s small enough to throw into a jacket pocket and, because it’s made of all metal, it’s nigh indestructible.
Paired with an iPhone and Shure’s well-designed recording app, it’s a lot more compact than most podcasting rigs, and versatile enough for most recording situations. Best of all, the audio it captures sounds great.
In the early ’90s, Pixar was in the middle of creating its first movie, Toy Story, but the company was in disarray. It was bleeding cash and floundering around looking for a business model.
To help turn it around, Steve Jobs hired Lawrence Levy, a former corporate lawyer, to help figure out how to make Pixar a real business.
In this week’s episode of Kahney’s Korner, I talk to Levy about how exactly he and Jobs made Pixar into one of the most successful movie studios in history.
After his death, Steve Jobs became mythic. He’s remembered as an asshole and a technology seer: a Tony Stark-like figure who could uniquely divine the sci-fi future, conjuring magical products from whole cloth almost single-handedly.
He’s also seen as infallible: a business and technology genius with powers of divination beyond those of us mere mortals.
But To Pixar and Beyond, a new book by Lawrence Levy, the former CFO of Pixar, paints a very different picture.
While Apple is touting the new MacBook Pros as a major evolution of the laptop, the internet is in open revolt over the cost of the new machines.
The new MacBook Pros will set you back at least $200 more than last year’s models, and sometimes much more.
The top-of-the-line 15-inch MacBook Pro, for example, costs an eye-popping $4,299 — without tax, and with no preinstalled software.
Prices are even worse in Europe and Asia, where potential buyers are wondering if it would be cheaper to fly to the U.S. to buy a new machine than get one at home.
David Bunnell, the founder of Macworld and all round good guy, died Tuesday night at age 69 at his home in Berkeley, Calif.
There’s a constant war in our house for charging bricks and cables. I like to keep chargers in certain places so I know where they are — beside the bed for example. But they constantly disappear, thanks to my light-fingered kids.
It drives me bananas, which is why I like the Udoq, a universal charging stand that neatly organizes and charges between two and eight devices. It can’t be easily half-inched.
It’s true: music can put you in the mood for love. A Spotify survey found that music is more arousing than touch. That’s why OhMiBod’s iPhone-connected sex toys make sense; they enhance the mood as well as buzzing in time to the beat.
“Our massagers offer an unrivaled sensory experience that allows singles and couples to not only hear their favorite music, but feel it as well,” says the firm’s website.
In this week’s episode of Kahney’s Korner, I talk to Suki Dunham, cofounder of OhMiBod, a female-owned and operated company that makes a line of iPhone and iPad controlled female pleasure products.
Suki used to work at Apple, where she learned a lot about product design, packaging and marketing, which she applies to her business selling high-tech vibrators.
iFixit’s iPhone 7 teardown involved 30 people in three countries, an X-ray machine and lots of sleepless nights. Thanks to iFixit’s hard work, iPhone teardowns have become a tech-culture phenomenon. Millions of fans eagerly await details of the internal components of Apple’s latest devices.
A lot of this has to do with Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, the second-biggest supplier of Apple parts after Apple itself, and publisher of the huge and amazing iFixit repair wiki.
In this week’s episode of Kahney’s Korner, I talk with Wiens about all the work that goes into making the iFixit teardowns for a massive global audience, and the hardware secrets of the iPhone 7.
With the new iPhone 7 Plus sold out worldwide, some owners are turning a pretty profit on Craigslist and eBay.
There’s a brisk trade in brand new iPhone 7 devices, especially the Plus models in jet black, with many selling for almost twice their retail value.
This premium jet black 256GB iPhone 7 Plus, for example, just sold for $1,775 on eBay, with 29 bids. That’s $806 above retail.
Thirty minutes into Apple’s special event last week, one tidbit of information blew my mind.
Onstage, Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams was talking about the Workout app on the new “swim-proof” Apple Watch Series 2 and the effort the company put into advancing the software that makes the fitness device tick. The amount of research deployed, all in the pursuit of updating a segment of an app many Apple Watch wearers will never use, offers a peek into the enormous resources that Apple R&D commands.
It paints Apple, with its enduring emphasis on developing new materials, manufacturing processes and sophisticated software, as a scientific force to be reckoned with — a new NASA for the 21st century.
Apple has opened up Siri to third-party developers, which means we’ll soon be able to do a bunch of things — like ordering pizza or sending money — simply by speaking to Apple’s intelligent assistant.
It’s a big change, and another step toward a friction-free future in which we will talk to our devices instead of poking at them with our fingers.
In this week’s episode of Kahney’s Korner, I talk with Adam Fingerman and Paulo Michels of ArcTouch, a mobile development company that works with big media companies like ABC, NBC and CBS. As they’ve explored the Siri API, they’ve gained insight into what we can expect when iOS 10 and macOS Sierra get released to the public this fall.
The old adage is that new cars depreciate the minute you buy them. However, the rumored Apple car might be the first vehicle to actually make you money after you drive it off the lot.
If Apple’s car is autonomous, it’ll earn its keep delivering people or goods when you’re not using it. So says Paul Godsmark, a robocar consultant and one of the leading experts on the upcoming autonomous vehicle revolution.
In this fascinating interview, Godsmark talks about the enormous changes that are coming up fast with self-driving vehicles, including Project Titan, the rumored Apple Car.
Buckle up! Everything is about to change dramatically — from the way we travel to the way we work.
Some new data-gathering vehicles are roaming the streets of San Francisco. They’re unmarked, but are suspected to be Apple’s. They are laden with sensors, but what kind of data are they gathering, and what for?
Experts contacted by Cult of Mac say the mystery vans are next-generation mapping vehicles capable of capturing VR-style, 360-degree street photos. Plus, the vans use Lidar to create extraordinarily precise “point clouds,” a prerequisite for self-driving cars. Mesh those two databases together and you’ve laid the groundwork for an autonomous vehicle’s navigation system.
The market for iPhone cases is worth billions of dollars. The first manufacturer with a case that fits a new device — say, the iPhone 7 — can make a killing in the days following an Apple launch.
For this week’s episode of Kahney’s Korner, I talked with industry veteran Tim Hickman, CEO of Gumdrop Cases. Over the years, he’s tried all kinds of tricks and strategies in the race to be first to market with new iPhone cases — including making thousands of cases that turned out to be wrong.
This time around, Hickman has received several CAD files from mysterious sources in China that supposedly show the exact dimensions of the upcoming iPhone 7. Will he bet his company’s fortunes on these files of dubious origin? Let’s find out.
There’s nothing more cryptic than someone else’s notes. Not so Andy McNally’s.
McNally, a senior UI design consultant from Memphis, Tenn., created several great “sketchnotes” of the talks at Apple’s WWDC.
Sketchnotes are a form of visual thinking that combine notes and sketches. They’re increasingly popular, inspiring an army of aficionados and books by noted practitioners. The Core77 design site has a whole Sketchnotes section that’s worth exploring.
McNally kindly allowed us to reprint his WWDC sketchnotes. Check them out:
Although WWDC is a developer event, Apple’s keynote today was chockablock with features for end-users. It came thick and fast, with updates for watches, TVs, phones and computers.
There’s lots to unpack. Some of it was ho-hum. Siri on the Mac? Meh. A new app called Breathe? To do what exactly — remind you to inhale?
But there was tons of great stuff. Here are the features big and small that we’re most excited about.
Big changes are coming to Siri, Apple’s intelligent voice-activated assistant. For the first time, Siri will be available on the Mac and will be opened to third-party developers on iOS.
While Siri was one of the first voice-controlled AI assistants on the market, it’s fallen behind competitors like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Now, largely because it was a closed system that worked only in Apple’s apps. Opening it to developers makes it much more functional, and presents a more serious challenge to upstarts like Viv that promise to help with a wide range of services and tasks.
Ken Segall is a former Apple ad man who worked closely with Steve Jobs for more than a dozen years. Segall is the guy who put the “i” in iMac and worked on the famous “Think Different” campaign.
The big lesson he learned from Steve Jobs was keeping things simple. But easier said than done. How exactly do you keep things simple?
Segall went out and found 40 business folks who keep things straightforward. His new book based on those interviews is called Think Simple:How Smart Leaders Defeat Complexity.
In a new podcast, Kahney’s Korner, Segall talks about some of those lessons, how Steve Jobs kept things uncomplicated and about how Apple is doing these days without him.
This episode of Kahney’s Korner is supported by TunnelBear, an award-winning service that gives you fast and private access to the internet.