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Inside Apple’s Controversial Relationship With the Chinese Government

Andrew Orr ·

On Monday, the New York Times published an investigative piece about Apple’s relationship with the Chinese government, and how it has to comply with its laws there.

Internal Apple documents reviewed by The New York Times, interviews with 17 current and former Apple employees and four security experts, and new filings made in a court case in the United States last week provide rare insight into the compromises Mr. Cook has made to do business in China. They offer an extensive inside look — many aspects of which have never been reported before — at how Apple has given in to escalating demands from the Chinese authorities.

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Foldable Flat Metal Laptop Stand: $21.99

Bryan Chaffin ·

We have a deal on the Foldable Flat Metal Laptop Stand by Fescony. It comes with 6 adjustable handles and soft pads for finding the right viewing angle for you. It’s $21.99 through our deal, and as you can see in the photo, it works with laptops and iPads, too.

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How Music and Sound Influence the Endel App

Charlotte Henry ·

Endel is an app that is meant to help users focus, sleep, and relax. Apple published an interview with one of its co-founders, CEO Oleg Stavitsky, in which he described the importance of music and art to the company and its products.

The unexpected makeup of Endel’s founding team — which Stavitsky emphasizes is more of an artist collective than a traditional app development team — provided a certain synergy around the power of sound. The collective’s first foray into app development was BUBL, a suite of digital art apps for kids blending abstract design, sound, and a carefully crafted user interface, launched on the App Store in 2013. “They almost looked like Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings that sort of came to life,” he says. “I was always fascinated with the correlation of color, form, and sound,” Stavitsky says. “That has everything to do with Kandinsky, who is one of my favorite painters, and then at the same time, with the minimalist composers of the ’70s, like Brian Eno, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich. And so even for our BUBL apps, we built a lot of technology that would generate musical composition in real time, depending on what someone was doing in the app.”