Apple March 2016 Keynote – 10am PDT
apple.com
apple.com
EDIT: I did not mean that in an Apple-bashing way. But I wonder what Elon Musk would come up with if he had time and - let's say - 100 billion USD at his disposal.
As Steve Jobs famously said, "customers don't know what they want." This change of motivation in their product development is a significant one.
"But in the end, for something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." (Businessweek, 1998)
The point is that Apple is VERY concerned about what customers want, and listen to customers, and usually achieves that through an engine of incremental improvement once the product is out there. They just don't believe in a focus-group approach to new products.
Secondly, the current internet meme is that Apple needs to slow down and make their products more stable. Yet we still want our innovation "drug hit" from their announcements. This is hard to balance.
I wonder... What visionary, long term, skunkworks projects did Steve initiate into the pipeline before he fell ill? It should be safe to assume there were a number of secret exploratory rods into the fire, if the end of his career there was similar to the rest of it. Some should be emerging from dev right around now.
Where are they now and why aren't we seeing them? Did Steve run out of ideas? Or did they all get mothballed in favor of safer alternatives?
I'd like to see client-side encrypted iCloud sync and either adopt Signal's encryption protocol for iMessage or at least disable iMessage sync by default and give the user control over iMessage sync alone (as opposed to being an all-or-nothing solution as it is now).
There were a few major innovations--some of which, like the iPod, have an impact that is only visible in retrospect (it was met largely with question marks at the time). Others, like the iPad or watch, have a mixed record since then.
But in terms of groundbreaking, huge, obvious innovation, I think there are probably only a couple keynotes that meet that bar: the iMac, and the iPhone. The former rescued the company and set them on a new path; the latter transformed the entire mobile computing market.
For me, the biggest announcement today was the health stuff. It feels like a thin wedge under the huge load often known as "health IT." I think it's fair to say that so far, the promise of technology to revolutionize health care is mostly unfulfilled. And who knows whether Apple will have a real impact. But the work they are doing now seems to be connecting good technology with the right people.
So, the iPhone SE is great for Apple because they are about to extract $$$ from me.
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Non safari users, you can change your user agent to Safari for live stream.
Chrome extension- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/user-agent-switche...
Firefox extension- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-sw...
I was rather hoping for a small refresh to include the new Skylake processors, it's certainly due one: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac
- There's no big redesign planned this year, and the Macbook and Macbook Pro will see press-release releases with updated guts (most notably Skylake) before too long.
- There is a significant redesign of the Macbook Pro coming up, and it'll be announced at WWDC.
They don't have an incentive to support open computing, and for the first time in years IBM and Microsoft have better products (Carbon X1, Surface book) while OSX haven't seen a major update and MacBook Pros that once were the best professional laptops are really past generation hardware and software.
Am changing jobs and will be using my own laptop from now on, but guess I'll have to dust off eek a bit of life out of my aging MacBook Air - as I resent spending that much money on a laptop with year old hardware.
On the plus side Apple did just save me from spending £2,000 ;)
It was the same issue last year. I need an Apple product (or a Windows 10 PC with Microsoft Edge) to watch a livestream on the internet. Odd for 2016.
Is this really a technical barrier or a marketing/strategic barrier?
PS: Wiki [1] says Apples's HTTP live streaming is supported on Chrome 30 and onwards.
But yeah, browser support is very poor – I had to use a Flash fallback for browsers that didn't support it (which was basically everything but Safari at the time... looks like that sadly still hasn't changed).
At the time it was the best thing for the job, but I haven't done anything with video lately. What would be the best tool for the job these days? Regarding browsers support, etc.
To be fair, when they first implemented it MPEG DASH was a long way off.
If you paste the playlist URL from another subthread into an open-source HTML5 player [1], it works perfectly. There's literally no reason that Apple couldn't embed this on their home page except stubbornness.
http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1603kjbnadc...
1) They have a limited streaming capacity.
2) They gave up on expanding their user base.
Seriously Apple ...
'Apple refuses to stream on your browser' would be a better message
Apple in one of their previous press events enabled support for the Microsoft Edge browser.
To that end, Apple improves their ecosystem by making good features standard. Tim Cook mentioned that there were 1 billion Apple devices in circulation. How many of those do you think have users that were even aware of the existence of those two apps? Or even the problem that they address?
I'm not a fan of any bigCo squashing innovative software (and I'm certainly not defending it), but there's no question that in cases like this bringing that feature into the fold leads to a better user experience across the board. To those of us who knew the circumstances it might be cringeworthy, but for the other 98% of users it's just another advance in a progression of features that keeps the ecosystem's user-experience better than any other.
Only if you buy their latest devices. Case in point: I just updated to iOS 9.3 for the hue feature and I come to find out (by the fine print on their website) that it's not available for iPhone 5 users for no reason other than to force upgrades.
If they handled the Flux app situation fairly I wouldn't need to buy a new phone for such a simple but important feature.
Apple has such a limited number of products that they can build robots to disassemble said products piece-by-piece, which is arguably a more efficient manner to recycle individual parts. Other companies that have a zillion products would likely find it difficult to achieve the same level of efficiency, because they basically have to "shred" their products and sort the bits out later.
EDIT: Do you have a source on Apple using "Bangladeshi children" for disassembly before today?
I think it makes a great deal of sense to consolidate the upgrades and repairs - they can do it far more efficiently at scale.
Yes really.
> The products aren't upgradable or repairable by the end user
See? Yes really indeed.
> as they demonstrated today, they are upgradeable (to brand new things like solar panels) and repairable by Apple themselves.
Recycling is neither upgrading nor repairing.
> I for one hate the idea of an end-user upgradeable smart phone. That sounds like a minefield of driver issues and the like that I just don't want. Its why I moved away from Windows in the first place.
I'm not talking changing GPU (which doesn't really make sense on a laptop let alone a cell phone), I'm talking about soldered RAM and non-standard SSD connectors on laptops, and heavily glued batteries behind tons of odd screws on both phones and laptops. No drivers involved, and the ability to increase device lifespan by years.
> I think it makes a great deal of sense to consolidate the upgrades and repairs
Again, recycling is not upgrading or repairing, it's taking waste and re-making into product, that requires more materials and energy than not having to do that and being able to keep using the product in the first place.
> they can do it far more efficiently at scale.
That makes literally no sense. Recycling, even at scale, can't be more efficient than not making product into waste in the first place. You can't recover as much matter and energy as was put into building the product to start with unless you've found a way around everything we know of thermodynamics, and if you have what are you commenting on internet forums for? You've basically solved all the world's problem!
http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1603kjbnadc...