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In several notable cases, Apple appears asleep at the wheel. Image credit: Shutterstock. Apple's executive team of senior vice presidents calls all the shots. While there may be many distinguished and capable (ordinary) vice presidents, sometimes a few get into trouble by believing they have more authority than they really do. The VP job is…

Your next iPhone could have a 12 megapixel camera. Is that a big deal? What's a Megapixel? A megapixel is a million pixels, and each pixel makes up a single point in your photographs. That means an 8 megapixel camera, like the one used in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus captures images with…

I'm very pleased to welcome – and thank! – Macphun to TMO as this week's sponsor.  Macphun has been creating software for the Mac and iOS for a long time and has earned “best-of App Store” honors for all of the last 3 years. Right now they're featuring their Creative Kit, a suite of 5…

HTC system flaw left user fingerprints open to hackers Researchers from FireEye Labs discovered the vulnerability (PDF) in HTC's One Max smartphone. “One example is HTC One Max—the fingerprint is saved as /data/dbgraw.bmp with 0666 permission (world-readable). Any unprivileged processes or apps can steal user's fingerprints by reading this file,” they said. They went on…

The move is essentially a restructuring of the company we know as “Google” today—Larry Page will be CEO of Alphabet, while Sergey Brin will be president, and Eric Schmidt will be executive chairman. Shares of GOOG and GOOGL will be turned into shares of Alphabet, with all the same rights (and lack of rights), and…

Verizon ditches old-school contracts and subsidized iPhone deals The little guy in this case is T-Mobile, the third largest U.S. cell service provider well behind Verizon and AT&T. T-Mobile started shaking up the smartphone market by offering no contract deals for its customers, along with monthly payment plans for new phones instead of the traditional…

ZeoBIT agrees to $2M settlement in MacKeeper lawsuit MacKeeper is billed as a utility for keeping your Mac running in tip-top shape, although enough people felt ZeoBIT overstated the its claims enough to warrant a lawsuit. The company ultimately agreed to the $2 million settlement, but won't have to admit to any wrongdoing. A third…

A question then arises. When Apple made this design and business decision, was it because Apple's executive team, led by Steve Jobs back then, believed in the importance of the customer experience or because Apple was trying to maximize revenue? After all, previous experience with the Macintosh showed that a closed system would probably suffer…

Where did the Online Apple Store go? In a word, away. Apple created a unified website where researching and buying products doesn't require jumping between the main site and a subdomain where the shopping part actually happens. Assuming Apple did a good job with the redesign, looking for and buying new iPhones, Macs, and other…

It might be a chance meeting between two people, like when Steve Jobs met Steve Wozniak, or a decision, like when Larry Page and Sergey Brin realized they needed “adult supervision” in the form of Eric Schmidt, or an infinite array of other situations that can define or redefine someone's life or the direction of…

iOS 10 may turn your voicemails into text Insider sources speaking with Business Insider said Apple is already testing iCould Voicemail internally, and if it works as the company hopes, will launch next year most likely as a part of iOS 10. Voicemail transcription isn't a new idea, and compared to Google, this is another…

Yup, time to turn on the sprinklers (unless you're in drought-stricken California, of course). We head outside to tackle that task which we dread doing every year – setting the schedule on our sprinkler controllers (because for some reason, we have to do it every year). As we fiddle with the knobs and buttons of…

T-Mobile CEO John Legere iPhone 6 Swap The big news on Tuesday is the offer to let customers who buy a new iPhone 6 now swap it out for whatever Apple announces this fall (likely the iPhone 6s). Customers will pay nothing more and their monthly bills won't change. “Yeah, that's what I said,”Mr. Legere…

Nike FuelBand settlement value is in education, not money. In the Nike case, consumers complained about inaccurate fitness tracking data such as calorie counts were wrong, and that the FuelBand was marketed and sold as if the information it logged was correct. They sued Nike and Apple because both companies were marketing the device. Apple…

Sen. Franken thinks Apple has an unfair advantage in streaming music In his letter to the FTC, Senator Franken said, I am writing to encourage you to examine Apple's current dealing with app developers to determine whether the company is engaging in anticompetitive behavior in the music streaming market. As the digital music industry continues…

Symbolic: iOS unit sales are now matching Windows PCs. pic.twitter.com/4qsNg3ntYW — Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) July 22, 2015 TMO is an Apple-centric publication, and you may be wondering why the lede isn't that iOS overtook Wintel. It is, after all, kind of a delicious moment of comeuppance. The great Wintel hegemony, the arch enemy of Mac…

User data from affair site Ashley Madison was stolen. So that's awkward. Ashley Madison is a website and service that connects people in relationships who want to have an affair. Avid Life Media (ALM), the parent company for Ashely Madison, Established Men, and Cougar Life, confirmed the data breach and said it is hard at…

Apple isn't saying how many Apple Watches have been sold At the high end, Jeffries analyst  Sundeep Bajikar estimates Apple sold 5.7 million smart watches. At the low end sits Turley Muller from Financial Alchemist at 2.85 million units. Several analysts are clustered around 5 million, and another group has gravitated towards 3 million. The…

According to Judge Wu's ruling, FilmOn should be considered the same as traditional cable television for transmission even though all of its content is delivered through broadband Internet, reports Reuters. Broadcasters have aggressively resisted giving Internet-based companies licensing even before FilmOn's case landed in Federal court. Aereo was at the center of a high profile…

The GSMA is a trade organization representing wireless carriers around the planet. Hardware makers including Apple, Samsung, and a host of others have long been jockeying to get their pet SIM project included in industry standards, but en electronic SIM could truly change the way devices are manufactured, sold, and dealt with after the sale.…

Facebook wants an official end date for all Flash support In a post on Twitter Mr. Stamos said, It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day. He added that setting an official end date for all Flash support would…

The original Internet address space, referred to as IPv4, provides for 232 (4.29 billion) addresses. You've probably seen examples of those addresses on your Mac and iPhone, for example, 192.168.1.1, where each of the numbers can be from 0-255. With the Internet of things, the proliferation of small Internet devices and the adoption of smartphones…

Episode #131   A long time ago I bought a small mesh bag and packed it with all things I like to have when I travel. After a few years I had filled it completely so I bought a second mesh bag, which is now almost full as well. Last week I tried to pare…

Episode 130 I was really starting to like Apple Music. I had none of the metadata scrambling I’ve heard about and was just starting to fall in love with the new, human-curated playlists that seem to read my mind. Then I encountered my first (and so far, only) problem… I ask Siri to play music by…