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Is Apple the Company That Can Transform the AR Industry?

Andrew Orr ·

Lucas Matney wrote for TechCrunch and asked if Apple can keep the AR industry alive.

AR startups have already been struggling and hardware efforts have largely cratered. The software platforms have had some success building what Apple hasn’t or won’t for niche enterprise customers, but as the economic realities shift, all bets are off.

First, I don’t think there’s much of an AR industry right now to keep alive. We have a scattering of AR features on iPhones and Androids, but right now it still seems niche. Second, in my biased opinion as an Apple blogger, I think Apple is the one to truly make AR mainstream. As an example, Apple didn’t invent the cellphone, but the iPhone transformed our lives and the cellphone industry. For the company to do the same with AR, we need an AR headset.

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Bryan Chaffin ·

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Craig Federighi Demonstrates Trackpad Support in iPadOS

Charlotte Henry ·

Apple’s Senior Vice President, Software Engineering, Craig Federighi stars in a new video, published on The Verge. In it, he demonstrates trackpad support in iPadOS. The way the cursor changes is particularly clever, I think.

The iPad’s UI is powerful, but in many ways it’s difficult to learn, in part because so many of us still have desktop UI paradigms in our heads. One interesting thing you can’t do is just have a bunch of traditional windows like you’re used to having on a desktop or even a Windows tablet. Apple is sticking to its guns on its attempt to rethink how we move and rearrange windows on the iPad screen, with stuff like split screen and Slide Over. For better or worse (and I think for the better), the new trackpad features don’t turn the iPad into a Mac. Whether any of that radically changes this year with iPadOS 14 is anybody’s guess. Federighi himself recently said, “If you like what you’ve seen us do with iPadOS, stay tuned, we’re going to keep working on it.”

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Coronavirus Outbreak Might be Actually Reducing Music Streaming

Charlotte Henry ·

In a somewhat counterintuitive development, the coronavirus outbreak may actually be reducing the amount of music people stream. Quartz had a look at the data.

In Italy, one of the countries hardest hit by coronavirus, the top 200 most streamed songs on Spotify within the country averaged 18.3 million total streams per day in February 2019. Since Italy’s prime minister announced a national quarantine on March 9th, the total streams for the 200 most popular songs have not topped 14.4 million. There was a 23% drop in top 200 streams on Tuesday March 17th compared to Tuesday, March 3rd… The trend is similar in the US. On March 17th, total Spotify streams of top 200 songs fell to 77 million streams. This was the lowest number of top-200 streams in the US for any Tuesday in 2020, and about 14 million streams fewer than just a week before. Total top-200 streams are also down in the UK, France, and Spain as well.