Charlotte Henry

A great feature on AppleInsider tracked Apple’s dramatic rise. It also showed how that rise helped counter the myth that the OS platform was the only important factor in picking who won the tech wars.

Apple somehow regained market power and began selling new volumes of Macs, assisted by the support of new sales of mobile devices. That dramatic shift, which resulted in Apple completely turning the tables on Microsoft, began in less than a decade after Windows 95. In the early 2000s, Apple’s iPod made an appearance that many discounted as irrelevant. Just as Windows 95 couldn’t immediately compete in Apple’s core markets, iPod similarly wasn’t competing with Microsoft’s bread and butter Windows PCs; instead, it was opening up a new market for very personal mobile devices, with media features and prices Microsoft and its licensees were unprepared to match. By 2004 iPod had trampled Microsoft’s Windows Media Player and PlaysForSure “Portable Media Player” platforms. Three years later iPhone similarly crushed global Windows Mobile handsets almost immediately out of the gate. Three years after that, the iPad not only crushed the emergence of Windows Tablet PCs and netbooks but also destroyed any future growth of PC sales.

Facebook announced Monday that it will update its branding across its range of products. The company said the move is a bid to provide greater clarity.

People should know which companies make the products they use. Our main services include the Facebook app, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Portal and Calibra. These apps and technologies have shared infrastructure for years and the teams behind them frequently work together. We started being clearer about the products and services that are part of Facebook years ago, adding a company endorsement to products like Oculus, Workplace and Portal. And in June we began including “from Facebook” within all our apps. Over the coming weeks, we will start using the new brand within our products and marketing materials, including a new company website.

Apple is said to be developing an AR headset with Valve, the game developer behind the Steam platform. MacRumors picked up on a report from DigiTimes:

DigiTimes is reporting this morning that Apple has partnered with U.S. game developer Valve to develop its rumored AR headset, which is expected to launch next year. ‘Apple reportedly has partnered with US game developer Valve to develop AR head-mounted display devices, which may be released in the second half of 2020 at the earliest, with Taiwan’s ODMs Quanta Computer and Pegatron said to handle the assembly job, according to industry sources.’ Creator of the popular Steam digital storefront and delivery platform, Valve launched Steam machine consoles in 2015 and released its first VR headset, Valve Index, in April 2019. Notably, Valve worked with Apple in 2017 to bring native VR headset support to macOS High Sierra, leveraging the operating system’s then-new eGPU support with a Mac version of Valve’s SteamVR software. However, Apple’s latest partnership with the company is said to be focused on AR, not VR.

Google is looking to create a high-powered medical record search tool for doctors, The Next Web. Hard to see anything going wrong here…

In a logical next step to make its search products the access point for all content on the web, the internet goliath is turning its focus to healthcare. David Feinberg, the recently appointed head of its Google Health initiative, outlined plans to make it easier for doctors to search medical records, and improve the quality of health-focused search results across Google and YouTube. “Imagine a search bar on top of your EHR (electronic health record) that needs no training,” Feinberg said at the HLTH health care conference in Las Vegas last week. According to Feinberg, the search bar will supposedly allow doctors to type into it, with the system automatically displaying appropriate responses to the queries. For example, a doctor could just type the number “87” to return details about an 87-year-old patient with a history of stomach cancer.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden told Recode’s Kara Swisher that he thinks social media giant Facebook is as untrustworthy as the NSA. He made the claims in a soon to be published podcast interview.

“Facebook’s internal purpose, whether they state it publicly or not, is to compile perfect records of private lives to the maximum extent of their capability, and then exploit that for their own corporate enrichment. And damn the consequences,” Snowden told Swisher. “This is actually precisely the same as what the NSA does. Google … has a very similar model. They go, ‘Oh, we’re connecting people.’ They go, ‘Oh, we’re organizing data.’” Although, Snowden said, these companies still don’t know as much as the government, which can gather information from all of the many tech platforms.

Facebook is under increasing pressure regarding its approach to content moderation. On the Lawfare blog, Hilary Hurd explored how international law might provide a solution.

But there is a potential middle course in the diverging paths to principle and profit. Through the establishment of its new Oversight Board, Facebook could bolster its commitment to free expression globally by requiring governments to justify their take-down requests in keeping with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Article 19 specifically lays out three conditions for when—and under what circumstances—governments can restrict speech. By insisting governments frame their take-down requests in keeping with Article 19’s requirements before removing any content, Facebook would honor its stated goal of promoting free expression globally while shifting the burden to governments to justify their actions. The Oversight Board could in turn make this commitment credible by promising to restore any content removed because of a government take-down request, unless the government adhered to Article 19’s formal steps.

Mario Kart Tour has proved exceptionally popular on iOS, and it looks like the game is going to expand further. AppleInsider reported that Nintendo plans to introduce real-time multiplayer gameplay, initially as a beta test.

The Japanese gaming giant announced the forthcoming test in a tweet on Thursday, saying access will initially be limited to subscribers of the Mario Kart Tour Gold Pass. “A real-time multiplayer beta test is planned for December and will be available to #MarioKartTour Gold Pass subscribers,” Nintendo said. “Stay tuned here for more details coming soon.” Multiplayer gaming has been a defining feature of Mario Kart since the franchise launched on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1992, and its absence on mobile is viewed by some as a hindrance to adoption. Currently, players are limited to racing against AI bots, with in-game incentives like character unlocks and parts pushing users to continue play.

There has (rightly) been a lot of praise for the cameras in the iPhone 11 family of devices. However, on Cult of Mac, David Pierini, argues why a third-party lens still beats the ultra-wide camera on the entry-level model

 if you are a pixel-peeping stickler for quality, the ultra-wide camera may disappoint. The ultra-wide camera does not support RAW shooting or Apple’s new Night Mode. It also has a slow aperture at f2.4, meaning the lenses will not allow in as much light as the iPhone’s standard camera. Zoom in to see how the details are soft and surrounded by digital noise. The higher quality shot will come by placing one of these third-party ultra-wide lens attachments to the standard camera, which has a focal length of 28 mm.

TikTok has 1.7 billion active users and features videos of teens and tweens lip-synching. And, according to Wired, it has broken rap music, infantilizing a genre once built on rebellion.

“Rap has always had a playful way of delivering lyrics. We’re seeing a renaissance of humour being put back into the music,” says Isabel Quinteros, senior manager of music partnerships and artist relations at TikTok. “TikTok is filled with light-hearted content from people having fun with their videos, and we’re excited to give these artists a platform to directly connect with their fans.” Since TikTok and rap music both grew out of a practice of remixing and re-contextualising music, it’s fitting that rappers seem to be profiting most from this new interaction. Lil Nas X’s completely clean and cowboy cosplay track ‘Old Town Road’ is still by far the most famous example.