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LONDON – There are over 6,000 traffic lights in London, which both pedestrians and drivers need to navigate as they make their way around the city. Wired has a fascinating feature on how the city’s transport authority, Transport for London, is hacking this network of traffic lights to make London more pleasant for pedestrians. What is more, AI and autonomous vehicles is likely to have a huge effect on how this all works in the future.

Such ideas don’t necessarily require technology, new innovations could further change our roads and the signals managing them. For example, researchers are working on ways to get rid of traffic lights entirely, with autonomous intersection management. Rather than wait at a red light, connected, self-driving cars schedule a route through a junction; because speeds and therefore positioning can be perfectly managed, all the cars can go at once, choreographed like a horrifying traffic ballet.

Lots of recent Apple coverage focussed on iPhone sales figures, Apple’s decision not to reveal iPhone sales figures, and the knock-on effect this has all had on the firm’s share price. However, Bloomberg reported that investors may have something to cheer about. It revealed positive sales numbers from Taiwanese firms that make components for the iPhone. Notably, it included data from Hon Hai Precision Industry, owned by major iPhone manufacturer Foxconn.

Revenue at the two main assemblers of iPhones showed growth that may surprise bears. Across a collection of Taiwanese suppliers, including component makers, November sales climbed 9.3 % from a year earlier, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News. Taiwan requires companies to report revenue monthly, giving the market unique mid-quarter insight into the hardware supply chain. At Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the flagship of Foxconn Technology Group, combined October and November sales grew 12.9% while Pegatron Corp. posted a 25% uptick.

Having mocked Apple for years for scrapping the iPhone’s headphone jack, Samsung has followed suit. Its new Galaxy A8s phone does not have the component. Instead, users need a USB-C to 3.5mm jack adapter to plug in headphones. Given the taunting adverts and on-stage jibes from Samsung executives about the lack of a headphone jack in the iPhone, I’m sure nobody at Apple will mention this…from MacRumors:

Samsung today introduced its latest smartphone, the Galaxy A8s. It is Samsung’s first smartphone with an Infinity-O display, which has a nearly edge-to-edge, uninterrupted design beyond a small hole for the front-facing camera. It is also Samsung’s first smartphone without a headphone jack, much to the amusement of iPhone users, as Samsung has mocked Apple for over two years over its decision to remove the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 in 2016, a trend that has continued through to the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR.

At ars tecnnica: “Manufacturing is in the early stages of a state of disruption brought on by technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and 3D printing.” This fascinating discussion lays out a future in which humans and AIs partner to design machines which, in turn, redesign themselves on the job.  Amongst all the other possibilities, this would come in very handy for remote space probes and landers.

For example, a robot on Mars might detect very loose sand and determine it cannot move about efficiently to complete its mission,” explains Ben Schrauwen, co-founder and CTO of Oqton, an autonomous manufacturing platform.”The robot could learn to suggest different modalities on how to move in that environment, and, with 3D printing technology and some local robotics, it’s very conceivable that the robot could reconfigure itself at a distance to continue its mission unimpeded.”

Could Siri, someday, rewrite parts of iOS on the fly?

LONDON – The Apple Store in Bordeaux, France, was robbed and vandalized on Saturday by rioters involved in the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ movement. These protests were originally against a new motoring tax but have morphed into a larger movement. There have been protests in France over the last 4 weekends.  9to5Mac reported that protestors also damaged two Apple Stores in Paris, including the new Champs-Élysées flagship.

Apple Sainte-Catherine in Bordeaux, France was robbed and looted Saturday night by French “yellow vest” protestors. The vandals smashed the store’s windows before flooding through the building and ripping MacBooks, iPhones, iPads and more from product tables. While the rioters refrained from completely destroying the property, the damage done will require extensive and time consuming repairs. By Sunday morning, plywood sheeting had been placed over the store’s windows to prevent further attacks.

LONDON – The introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe brought the issue of data transparency to the fore. Not all firms handled this change as well as others. Apple, however, is an example of a company that improved its data transparency, launching a portal that made it easier for customers to find out what data the company has on them. The stance also had commercial benefits, according to IT Pro. Here’s a snippet:

Apple is a prime example of a major tech giant taking steps to improve data transparency for its users. It recently launched a portal where customers can sift through all the data the company has on them, and CEO Tim Cook has been very vocal about data protection. He recently called it a “fundamental human right” and commended the implementation of GDPR, calling on tech companies to not only embrace the spirit of the EU laws, but to support the introduction of similar legislation across the US.

Google announced that it is shutting down its Allo messaging app. Analyzing the development, Engadget’s Nick Summers noted that Allo “has struggled to coax users away from established messaging apps such as iMessage and Facebook Messenger.” The app will stop working in March 2019.

Google’s new lineup will be simpler, but not necessarily better. There’s a chance, of course, that every carrier and OEM will add RCS support before March 2019, making Messages a viable option. The uptake over the last seven months, however, doesn’t fill me with confidence. If RCS remains a niche, I’ll have to stick with Whatsapp to communicate with most people. Which is a shame, because I liked Allo and believe a semi-popular, Google-run messaging app could be good for the wider industry. It would give Apple and Facebook some much-needed competition in the West, at least.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber noticed something interesting when he was going through Apple’s Best of the Year awards. When talking about its iOS app of the year, Procreate, Apple had to explain how to Undo and Redo. This would not be necessary on a desktop – there are established conventions for these functions. While there are conventions iOS, they are not implemented with anywhere near the force they are on desktops and so for some apps something so seemingly basic required explanation.

What it comes down to, I think, is that the menu bar has become a vastly underestimated foundation of desktop computing. Once heralded, the menu bar is now seen as a vestige. I’m not arguing that iOS should have a Mac-style menu bar. I’m simply pointing out that without one, iOS is an 11-year-old platform that is still floundering to establish consistent conventions for some basic features, let alone complex ones, that are simple and obvious on the Mac.

Ever since Satya Nadella took over Microsoft as CEO, the company’s mantra has been to bring its tools and solutions to all popular platforms, not just Windows. This will be the case in 2019 with Microsoft’s Edge browser coming to macOS. It’s going with the Chromium flow. TechCrunch explains.

Jonny Evans at Apple Must reports on the recent findings of Mixpanel. The results are interesting. Quoting author Evans:

1. Apple’s iPhone 7 series smartphones remain the most widely used model of the company’s smartphones even as iOS 12 adoption across the iPhone user base is around 75 percent, according to the latest Mixpanel data.

2. A cursory glance at the company’s iPhone model data seems to prove what I’ve been hearing anecdotally myself: Apple’s iPhone users are navigating to a 2-3-year upgrade cycle.

3. Mixpanel claims around 1/20 iPhone users are now on an iPhone XS/Max with around one-third of that number now on the recently-released iPhone XR.

Item #3 appears to contradict Apple’s assertion about the relative sales of iPhone XR. Fascinating.

There has been a lot of Apple Store news recently – from major new openings in Bangkok and Paris to makeovers at Covent Garden in London. On Tuesday, the Guardian published an interesting extract of an article that appeared in Logic, a new tech magazine. It puts forward a more uncomfortable view of life in an Apple Store and the psychology behind the hugely successful retail outlets.  I don’t buy the author’s argument entirely, but it certainly got me thinking.

When we think of “tech,” we rarely think of retail stores, and when we think of “tech workers” we rarely think of the low-waged “geniuses” who staff them. Most media coverage of tech companies encourages us to forget that the vast majority of their employees are not, in fact, coders in Silicon Valley: they’re the suicidal assemblers of your phone, the call-center support staff, the delivery drivers and the smiling shop floor staff who make up the majority of Apple’s workforce.

For years Apple led the race to be the world’s most valuable public company thanks to the huge profits it generated. However, powered by cloud computing, its competitors are now in hot pursuit. As Therese Poletti points out in her latest MarketWatch column, both Microsoft and Amazon have recently managed to take the lead, albeit briefly. Google-owner Alphabet is not far away either. The battle between “steady and solid cash and earnings” from Apple and potential growth from the cloud is then in full swing, but what will investors back?

Investors betting on Apple’s competitors for the top spot are not looking at results, however, as much as growth rates and tech trends. Namely, the growth of cloud computing, which is dominated by the other three companies at the top of the valuation list. The two companies closest to Apple’s spot are reporting huge growth in their cloud-computing businesses, where they offer cloud services for a huge range of customers, large and small. Staid old Microsoft, which has never been an official part of the much-vaunted FAANG grouping of tech stocks, surged into a zone of its own this year, propelled by hefty growth in the cloud.