As can be seen everywhere from Xiaomi’s not-so-original smartphone designs to the number of knockoff Apple Watches already available for sale, Apple has a problem with ripoffs in China.
But having recently unveiled its stunning new West Lake store in Hangzhou — featuring an all-glass facade and floating second floor — the company’s taking no chances: it’s filed (and been granted) a design patent to make sure that no-one tries to mimic its iconic design.
The Food and Drug Administration is in a tough spot when it comes to health-tracking wearables. As the U.S. government agency in charge of regulating medical devices, it can’t promote health-oriented technology that doesn’t do what it claims, but it also doesn’t want to stifle innovation at a time when Silicon Valley is finally turning its attention to the field.
That’s why, according to a new report, the FDA is giving the tech industry, and particularly tech giants like Apple, leeway to develop new products without aggressive regulation.
I pretty much love Apple and Lego in equal measure, so the idea of somehow combining the two is never going to fail to win my approval.
Assuming that I’m not the only person to feel this way, allow me to introduce the Brik Case: a fantastic Kickstarter campaign intended to raise the cash needed to manufacture a MacBook case that can be decorated with Lego bricks, to create any design of your choosing.
If you’re in the market for an Apple Watch, and you live in London, Paris or Tokyo, consider yourself in luck: Apple will be opening mini store-within-store kiosks in luxury local department stores, dedicated to selling its eagerly-anticipated smartwatch.
The pop-up stores are planned to open Friday, April 10, when the Apple Watch first goes on preorder, which means you can be among the first to see the Apple Watch in person.
This weekend is WrestleMania and, even as a kind of lapsed fan, I still can’t help but be excited about the prospect of Daniel Bryan, Brock Lesnar, Antonio Cesaro, Dolph Ziggler and pals plying their trade on the grandest stage of ’em all.
Which, of course, makes this the perfect time for Warner Bros. Interactive and WWE to update its WWE Immortals card-based fighting game for iOS — adding the characters “Macho Man” Randy Savage and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, plus an all-new Events System, to what was already a fun gaming experience.
When I think of young Steve Jobs, I typically picture the long-haired hippie who worked at Atari or the brilliant-but-immature co-founder who started Apple with Steve Wozniak. But here’s something I’ve not seen before: a photo of Jobs as a cherubic-but-undeniably-recognizable high school freshman.
The photo comes from the Homestead High yearbook from 1969, when Jobs was 14, and is far less well-known than the high school senior picture with which I’m already familiar.
Much has been made of the managerial differences between Tim Cook and predecessor Steve Jobs, and unsurprisingly that extends to their respective approaches to recruitment, too.
Jobs famously recruited Apple engineer Bob Belleville by telling him that, “Everything you’ve ever done in your life is shit, so why don’t you come work for me?”
Tim Cook, on the other hand, takes a slightly softer tack — as evidenced by a new Fortune article, revealing how Cook recruited Apple’s retail guru Angela Ahrendts to join the company from her previous prominent role as CEO at Burberry.
Steve Wozniak seems to have a complex relationship with both modern-day Apple and, particularly, the Apple Watch. In an interview at the Automate/Promat Show in Chicago yesterday, Apple’s co-founder said Apple’s foray into high-end wearables marks a very different turn for the company he helped to found.
“It didn’t seem like the company we started,” he said. “That’s not the Apple that moved the world forward.”
By now, you’ve almost certainly heard of Meerkat: the live-streaming social media phenomenon. Well, Twitter has too, because today it launched its own would-be Meerkat killer: a standalone live-streaming video app called Periscope.
Currently available only for iOS devices, the app was acquired by Twitter back in January for a reported $100 million. Unlike Meerkat, which works on the same disappearing media idea as Snapchat, Periscope allows users to save live streams and then replay them later.
Rightly or wrongly, iCloud is one of Apple’s most regularly criticized products (speaking personally, I’ve never had any major problems with it, but I use Google’s rival service far more.) It seems that Apple is more than aware of the negative feedback, however, because it’s in the process of improving the back-end infrastructure needed to support its cloud-based services.
Firstly, the company bought FoundationDB, a Virginia-based startup, which specializes in handling large chunks of data very quickly. Now a separate report claims that Apple acquired U.K.-based big data analytics firm Acunu sometime in late 2013, with the likely effort of using its database technology for providing analytics related to iCloud services.
Apple’s doing everything it can to push its brand in China, which Tim Cook is convinced will soon take over from the U.S. as the company’s primary market.
Having recently taken the top spot for smartphone sales in the country for the first time ever, and also beaten out the likes of Gucci and Chanel to be named China’s favorite luxury brand, Apple is now teaming with manufacturer Foxconn to introduce a trade-in program for iPhones — letting customers exchange their older iPhone handsets for credit against other Apple products.
The program is set to go into action next week, on March 31.
Whispers about three new iPhones set to arrive this September are emanating from Apple’s Chinese supply chain — suggesting that we may be set to receive the expected iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, alongside a 4-inch iPhone referred to currently as the iPhone 6c.
Check out details about internal components, possible pricing and projected sales below.
The new Steve Jobs biography, Becoming Steve Jobs, rests on the premise that Jobs’ wilderness years outside Apple somehow helped turn a once-reckless co-founder into a seasoned leader.
Just how accurate the book’s kinder, gentler portrayal of Steve actually is, is something that will be discussed over the coming days and weeks — but a new study from Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management backs up the idea that brash, narcissistic qualities can be a “net positive” for CEOs, so long as they are counterbalanced by an added dose of humility.
The study’s illustration of the perfect mixture of these qualities? None other than Jobs himself.
New biography Becoming Steve Jobs attempts to answer an important question: What happened to Steve Jobs during his wilderness years outside Apple that turned him from a gifted-but-impossible-to-work-with youngster into the seasoned digital emperor he would be following his return to the company he founded?
It’s a question that’s crucial to understanding Apple’s rise back to prominence from the late 1990s onward — but one that was ignored by previous Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson, whose 2011 book Steve Jobs sold a gajillion copies, but is now (perhaps unfairly) being recast as an unqualified failure.
In Isaacson’s book, these crucial years away from Apple take up just five chapters out of 42 — and that section also includes Jobs’ marriage to Laurene Powell and the birth of his children. In Becoming Steve Jobs, the lessons from that era permeate almost every page.
Steve Wozniak thinks he and co-founder Steve Jobs could never have found employment at the company they created together, had they been in their twenties in 2015.
“I look at the experience and education levels you need to get a job at Apple today and I think, ‘Well, Steve Jobs and I never could’ve gotten a job at Apple today,'” Woz told The Australian Financial Review in an interview.
The reason, he says, is that the rigorous Apple hiring process (like the ones at other tech giants like Google and Microsoft) would never have favored two college dropouts like himself and Jobs. This bias means the companies are potentially missing out on finding the next person to come along with a world-changing idea.
Apple’s spaceship-style Campus 2 isn’t the only impressive Apple building on the horizon. The first render for the company’s giant R&D center in Yokohama, Japan, is out — and it looks spectacular!
I’ve always found the people who work in Apple Stores to be incredibly helpful and, considering that their job is to sell you on expensive products, honest. One thing that’s never happened to me, however, is having an Apple Store employee suggest that I consider choosing a Samsung handset or Windows Phone over an Apple device.
But that’s exactly what happened the day that YouTube pranksters NelkFilmz dressed up as Apple employees and hit their local Apple Store, with the aim of selling Surfaces instead of iPads. They’re quickly weeded out by the real store employees, of course — at which point things just get awkward.
You can check the video out below.
Tim Cook wasn’t lying when he claimed Apple’s new spaceship-style Campus 2 would be the company’s most cutting-edge, environmentally friendly construction to date.
A new $17.5 million project — approved by the Santa Clara Valley Water District board Tuesday night — will involve the laying of 13,300 feet of pipeline that will pipe recycled water to both Cupertino and Apple’s Campus 2 HQ.
“Apple drove this project,” said Katherine Oven, deputy operating officer of the water district, describing it as “a true partnership of both public and private agencies.”
You just knew that when Apple announced its new “Shot on iPhone” ad campaign — crowdsourced from the millions of photos shot by regular iPhone owners each year, and displayed on billboards and bus stops around the world — it wouldn’t take long for someone to parody it.
Well, that day has come, thanks to a Tumblr parody page called “Also Shot on an iPhone” which shows an array of oddball bathroom selfies and other images blown up to poster size and displayed around San Francisco by a pair of local guerrilla street artists.
The results are suitably hilarious.
The 650 politicians who win seats at the U.K.’s House of Commons on May 7 are set to be given iPad Air 2 devices as part of a new deal.
Not everyone is happy about it, though. Shadow Cabinet Office minister (and possible Android user?) Chi Onwurah has attacked the plan — saying that, “Locking some of the most powerful people in the country into a platform that most of my constituents can’t afford seems like a mistake.”
Lesser brands like Samsung have to splash some serious cash to give the impression that they’re cool pieces of technology, but Apple’s so ubiquitous that pop stars are seemingly lining up to feature its products in their music videos.
The latest to create an unofficial Apple ad is pop songstress Charli XCX (a.k.a. the girl who sang the hook on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy”). In her new video “Famous” — debuted as part of this week’s YouTube Music Award Show — Charli dances around her bedroom texting and watching videos on her iPhone and iPad, before both devices run out of battery, at which point she’s whisked off on a surreal adventure.
Check it out below:
Steve Jobs may have had an astonishing ability to predict where tech was going next, but he very nearly missed out on the iPhone and iPad altogether.
That’s because — according to a quote from Jony Ive in today’s freshly-released biography, Becoming Steve Jobs — Apple’s late CEO didn’t see “any value to the idea” of multi-touch: the breakthrough touchscreen technology which makes iOS regulars like “pinch-to-zoom” possible.
And it was left up to Ive and a few other core Apple employees to save it.
Apple may not sell close to the number of Apple Watches it wants to in the coming months — and it’ll have nothing to do with lack of demand on the part of customers.
According to a new report, Apple’s plans to manufacture between 2.5 and 3 million smartwatches every month could be cut by as much as half thanks to supplier yield problems, which mean that only 1.25 – 1.5 million watches are being churned out every four weeks.
You may have suspected that the new biography Becoming Steve Jobs had Apple’s official endorsement the moment it was revealed that Jony Ive, Tim Cook, Eddy Cue, Pixar’s John Lasseter and Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, offered their participation.
However, with just one day to go until the book’s release, the word is now officially out: This is Apple’s sanctioned version of the Steve Jobs story.
“After a long period of reflection following Steve’s death, we felt a sense of responsibility to say more about the Steve we knew,” Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said. “We decided to participate in [the] book because of [author Brent Schlender’s] long relationship with Steve, which gave him a unique perspective on Steve’s life. The book captures Steve better than anything else we’ve seen, and we are happy we decided to participate.”
Sure, Steve Jobs might not have been quite the one-man-temper-tantrum he was portrayed as for much of Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography, but he still wasn’t someone you wanted to get on the wrong side of.
According to authors Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli in their new book Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader, Jobs flipped out after former Apple exec Jon Rubinstein decided to join Palm in 2007: never again speaking with a person he had been close to for years.