Luke Dormehl - page 359

As a great man once said, “Can’t we all just get along?”

Sadly when you’re talking about tech companies, and products worth billions of dollars, the answer is a resounding “no”.

Wireless phone carrier Consumer Cellular has announced a deal that will allow it to start carrying the new model iPhone 5c and 5s.

Breaking with the tradition of Friday launches in India — and despite rumors that it would take place on November 29 — Apple has announced that customers in India will be able to buy the iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina Display as of Saturday, December 7.

When University of Michigan medical student Paul DeWolf was shot to death earlier this year, police had few leads.

That all changed when a stolen MacBook Air revealed a key piece of information — and helped police track down the alleged killers.

The euphoria of Black Friday is over, and like the comedown after any spend-heavy holiday it’s time to look at the receipts.

According to analytics firm InfoScout, the iPad Air and iPad mini were two of the day’s big winners.

Back in early 2008, “Dogfight” author Fred Vogelstein wrote an article for Wired that still ranks as one of my favorites of recent years. Called “The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry” Vogelstein told — with characteristic aplomb — the story of how the iPhone rose from top secret research project to industry-changing device. (Cult of Mac talked to Vogelstein about the iPhone wars in our interview.)

No doubt that article, along with Vogelstein’s other pieces of reportage over the past several years, made him long for a larger canvas upon which to tell not just the story of 21st-century Apple, but also its complex changing relationship with Google: a rivalry that Steve Jobs once predicted would end in nothing less than (hopefully metaphorical) “thermonuclear war.”

Vogelstein clearly recognizes the importance of this feud and observes that Apple vs. Google (or, more specifically, Apple vs. Android) is in this regard the latest era-defining tech rivalry: the successor to previous clashes of the titans including Apple vs. Microsoft in the 1980s, and Microsoft vs. Netscape was in the 90s. Like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Google and Apple started out as friends and allies, and one of the strands this book tugs on is the degree of collusion which existing between both companies as they pared down the competition, before eventually turning on each other.

“Vogelstein clearly recognizes the importance of this feud”

As companies, the differences between Apple and Google are both legion and fascinating. Although both grow out of the same libertarian Silicon Valley impulse, their mission statement and subsequent outlook on the world is very different. Apple, Vogelstein posits, has prospered because of its Jobsian focus on form and function; a company built by marketers. Google, on the other hand, is a company in thrall of engineers, whose “zaniness and embrace of chaos” makes it the ideological opposite of the ordered, secretive Apple.

With Apple as a Fordist company making physical products, and Google as an informational one specializing in search, if they were modest companies Google and Apple need never clash. But of course they aren’t, and their eventual collision is made inevitable by both companies’ ultimate mission statement of expanding to fill the role of operating systems of our lives — a one-stop tech shop of the type most recently explored in Dave Eggers’ latest novel “The Circle.”

It is the lack of this larger story — about what Apple and Google say about the modern digital world — that I felt most wanting in parts of “Dogfight.” Vogelstein tells the company vs. company narrative compellingly, but having introduced Apple and Google’s personalities — and then illustrated them with plenty of anecdotal tidbits, many taken from testimony given in the 2012 Samsung vs. Apple patent trial — he doesn’t always do enough to push the implications as far as he might. The disappointment of this is made all the more tangible by virtue of the fact that these “big picture” demands are exactly the thing that Wired (where Vogelstein presently works) typically does so well.

“There can be few who will fail to be gripped by the author’s ability to take potentially dry information and present it in the manner of a fast-moving cinematic narrative”

Whatever criticisms can occasionally be leveled at it, one thing that absolutely can’t be said about is that Wired fails to appreciate technology’s grand narrative — with every minuscule or infinitesimal advance lauded as part of an overall march toward a utopia staffed by machines of loving grace.

As companies that embrace their role as purveyors of digital ideology (Google’s promise to not be evil, compared with Apple’s stated desire to think different), both Apple and Google could be used as the vessels through which to explore the modern digital age; serving as a cliff notes primer on the big tech issues of the day — as well as its major players. At its best, “Dogfight” hints at this idea; stringing together the basis for a compelling argument as to why the smartphone and tablet should be “an inflection point, such as the moment when the PC was invented, when the Internet browser took hold, when Google reinvented web search, and when Facebook created the social network.”

That it doesn’t do this consistently most likely has as much to do with the book’s timing (coming very much in the midst of proceedings, before enough time has elapsed to draw overarching conclusions) as it does with Vogelstein’s (considerable) talents as a tech writer.

But if this is what “Dogfight” sometimes fails to do, what does it succeed at? Long-time Wired readers will know what to expect here. Although there are parts of the book where reader interest flags — such as a history of patent infringement suites that reads like an unnecessary excerpt from a first-year legal textbook — there can be few who will fail to be gripped by the author’s ability to take potentially dry information and present it in the manner of a fast-moving cinematic narrative à la “The Social Network.” These “character moments” and fun pieces of behind-the-scenes trivia proliferate. It hardly takes me to point out that Vogelstein has a great eye for detail — and he pulls out fun factoids from well-trodden ground, such as the fact that the iPhone building was labeled “Fight Club” on account of Apple’s secrecy and the fact that the first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club.

Ultimately, if there is a challenge to the book it might simply be the familiar one in today’s age of digital overload of too much available information. “The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry” was published in 2008; less than a year after the iPhone made it to market. At the time, not only was the smartphone war a hot new topic, but there was still a slew of new details about its back story unfamiliar to most readers.

To paraphrase Dinah Washington, “what a diff’rence several years make.” Since then we have had Walter Isaacson’s well received (and widely read) Steve Jobs biography, as well as Steven Levy’s “In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives” — to name just two of the volumes written about Apple and Google and the changing nature of digital media in general. As Vogelstein will know from his years of solid tech reporting, latecomers entering an entrenched marketplace can have difficulty cementing themselves, regardless of the quality of what they have on offer.

If you’re a regular consumer of tech news, or even one who glances, perhaps, just once a week at Cult of Mac or Cult of Android and has done with it (shame on you!), you’re still likely to know a lot of what is reported here. Because of Apple’s secrecy it is their side of the story (as opposed to Google’s) that likely holds the most tantalizing revelations and unsurprisingly this is the side that Vogelstein didn’t have ready access to, as he acknowledges in his afterword.

That’s not to say that you won’t get some value out of “Dogfight,” but it is likely the kind of “completist” value you might get from finding a deleted scene to a familiar film as opposed to uncovering a whole new narrative you didn’t know existed.

If you’re a tech newbie, on the other hand and are looking for a swift read that sums up the Google vs. Apple story in as to-the-minute detail as possible — and don’t want to pick up two books (Isaacson and Levy) which are now two years old — this book comes recommended. If you enjoy Vogelstein’s writing and want something that reads like an expanded Wired article (no bad thing in itself) this may be the book for you.

Just be aware that while it tells the story of battles, no one has yet won this particular war.

Product Name: Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution The Good: Vogelstein can spin a compelling narrative out of potentially dry news events The Bad: Much of the information will already be well known to readers The Verdict A lively, if occasionally lacking, summary of the Google vs. Apple clash Buy from: Amazon.com

[rating=good]

Yahoo! has released its list of top searches for 2013 and, when it comes to tech, Apple is once again leading the way.

The iPhone had the most searches (the second most searched subject overall), with the iPad making it to fourth place — ahead of PS4 and XBox One — and the iPod to eighth, above the Nokia Lumia and just below the Blackberry.

Practically everyone reading this will have heard the reports about the lengths Apple will go to in order to ensure that its products are on the cutting edge of industrial design.

Well, to those reports you can add the one which suggests that Apple recently paid a total of $578 million — more than half a billion dollars — to GT Advanced Technologies to speed up “the development of its next generation, large capacity ASF furnaces to deliver low cost, high volume manufacturing of sapphire material.”

This move is designed to help keep down the costs of the Sapphire Glass screen rumored to be featured as part of the iPhone 6 — along with a redesign and bigger display.

When you’re among the world’s most sued companies, we imagine that you get used to some pretty hefty legal fees from keeping lawyers on retainer.

Even Apple has kicked up a fuss, however, when its court-appointed “monitor” — given the job of ensuring Apple’s antitrust compliance concerning e-book price fixing — handed in what the company considered a fairly outrageous time sheet.

There are different ways to measure the success of a tech company — thing like how many lucrative patents it’s sitting on, how much money it’s giving back to shareholders, and what its overall market penetration is in whatever area it’s operating in.

Well, there’s another way also: how much do its product launches correlate with a spike rates. You can keep your reports about Apple’s recent financial quarters disappointing Wall Street analysts — as far as San Francisco’s criminal element is concerned, Apple is doing better than it has in years.

It’s Black Friday everyone, and Cult of Mac is here to tell you that Apple has kicked off its sales across retail outlets in Europe (including the UK). We’re not just talking about gift cards being on offer, either — but real cash savings.

Here are the the most popular savings being given on Apple’s most popular products:

An astonishing 76 percent of new smartphone sales in Japan for the month of October were either iPhone 5s or 5c handsets, according to recent data.

The report comes from a Kantar World Panel, and demonstrates just how far Apple’s share of the Japanese smartphone market has increased over the present quarter.

Just when you thought you had heard every wacky app concept going, here’s another you might not have considered: Facebook for dogs.

Okay, it’s not exactly Facebook, but the free Woof iOS app (from developer Woof Labs) is pretty much that — describing itself as “an ecosystem to bring dog lovers closer to their dogs and local dog communities.”

“Great pen, lousy software” was the gist of our review for the Livescribe 3, a.k.a. “The World’s Smartest Pen” when we got the chance to use it recently.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, the Livescribe 3 is a so-called “smart pen” which takes handwritten notes and transfers them from paper to screen on the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. (In other words, it’s something of a next-generation Newton stylus for those old enough to remember Apple’s long-abandoned line of PDAs.)

There are few tech terms more loaded than “user privacy” here in 2013.

Back in January Cult of Mac reported that Apple had lost its spot on a list of the 20 most trusted companies when it comes to user information. That was long before the revelations of Edward Snowden and PRISMgate (the subject of an entire recent issue of our Newsstand magazine), which made everyone super-jumpy about data collection and what it means for personal liberties.

Apple is all about the dollars; something that usually pleases its shareholders no end.

However that same behavior may be exactly what has wound up getting the company on the wrong side of Brazil’s Consumer Protection Secretariat department.

It’s the third most asked question next to “did I make the right choice of next generation iPad?” and “why is it so cold at the moment?” (I’m writing this post from England) — but what exactly does Apple plan to do with PrimeSense?

Having acquired the Israel-based 3D-motion tracking company behind the original Xbox Kinect for an estimated $360 million, most people assumed that Apple would use the technology to incorporate motion tech into its long-awaited television-based hardware.

According to Washington Post tech journalist Jessica Lessin, however, that’s not right at all.

The question of whether she lives up to her enthusiastic advance billing as “the most important hire Tim Cook has ever made” and even the “future Apple CEO” is yet to be answered, but one thing’s for certain: outgoing Burberry CEO (and incoming Apple head of retail and online sales) Angela Ahrendts sure sounded like one of the Apple family when summing up her time with the fashion house recently.

Yesterday we told you that iPhone 5s finally had the supply it needed to match demand as we draw near to the holidays. Today we tell you why.

Having had limited availability in its first weeks, it seems that Foxconn has ramped up production of the iPhone 5s by running its factories around the clock — as well as adding more workers to its production lines.

San Francisco resident and Uber user James Alva has taken to social media to complain that not only did the car and driver he ordered using the app not match the description he was given — but also that the driver became both physically and verbally abusive.

Alva summoned an UberX ride (an app which connects passengers to third-party drivers) using his iPhone after leaving a bar in the early hours of Sunday. At this point the notification on his phone told him that the driver sent would arrive in a silver Toyota Prius.

A short time later, Alva reports that a blue Prius showing a different license plate turned up — along with what he thought to be a different driver.

To mark the release of Fred Vogelstein’s new book “Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went To War And Started A Revolution”, Cult of Mac chatted to the author to gets his thoughts on the iOS vs. Android smartphone wars, writing a book without Apple’s approval, and why both sides could stand to learn a thing or two from their rival.

Nuance Communications — best known as the software makers of Siri — saw a slump in profits below its forecast 2014 projections, thanks to a shift to a subscription-based business model.

The move, which brings in less money upfront and instead is spread over a longer period, ensures more predictable recurring revenue — but also means a short-term hit in profit margins.

Hong Kong-based Biel Crystal Manufactory Ltd — a company that makes iPhone screens for Apple — is violating workers’ rights at its Chinese factories, according to a rights group.

The Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior alleges that Biel Crystal demands that employees work 11-hour shifts, 7 days per week, with just one day off every month.

When the topic of Apple expanding into wearable computing comes up, few people are likely thinking that a logical starting point is a new hearing aid.

But according to numerous reports, that is exactly the direction Apple is heading in. The Danish-based, fourth-largest hearing aid manufacturer in the world has been collaborating with Apple to develop a device, called the LiNX, that will allow users to stream voice and music from their iOS devices without the need for an intermediary device.

It would be next to impossible to ever label an iPhone thief “thoughtful” — but a recent story coming out of China took a turn for the strange when the thief in question painstakingly wrote out eleven pages of contact details and sent them to the owner of the iPhone he had pickpocketed.