Apple Hires Former Tesla Designer Andrew Kim, Probably Not for an Apple Car

Apple has hired designer Andrew Kim. Mr. Kim first got traction back in 2012 for creating a design language for Microsoft as an experiment.

His LinkedIn profile says that he joined the company in December of this year, while his Instagram confirms that his first day working at Apple Park was last Tuesday. Along with the recent news of Tesla’s chief vehicle engineer returning to Apple, Kim’s move will certainly stoke speculation that Apple is once again working on an actual car.

While his hiring is certainly interesting, I personally don’t see this as evidence of Apple’s car project, at least not a consumer car. I think the project was for their fleet of Apple Maps vehicles.

Here's How iOS Push Notifications Work

There’s a short article on Medium where the author explains how iOS push notifications work. Apple added push notifications in 2009.

Push notifications were introduced to the greater public by Apple in 2009 to solve the problem of wanting to receive messages in real time without having to run the entire app in the background. Until then, there were two predominant methods of sending notifications to applications.

There aren’t a lot of technical details but that makes it easier for people to understand.

The End of an Era: Cydia App Store Shut Down

If you’ve ever had a jailbroken iOS device you’ll be familiar with the Cydia app store. But Cydia’s creator Saurik says it’s being shut down after a bug was discovered on the platform that put user data at risk.

The reality is that I wanted to just shut down the Cydia Store entirely before the end of the year, and was considering moving the timetable up after receiving the report (to this weekend); this service loses me money and is not something I have any passion to maintain…

Nowadays I’m surprised to hear that people still jailbreak. But back in the day it was a bit more relevant. I remember jailbreaking my 5th gen iPod touch back in 2011.

Why Apple Computers are no Longer Built in the U.S.

Steve Jobs was fascinated by the automobile manufacturing process masterminded by Henry Ford in Detroit. He was similarly taken with the Japan-based system implemented by Sony. Jobs tried to build a similarly successful domestic manufacturing system at both Apple and Next, but it turned into one of his rare failures. On Saturday, the New York Times explained what went wrong.

So, the story of Silicon Valley’s success turned out to be the ability of a company like Apple to devise manufacturing supply chains that stretch all the way around the globe, taking advantage of both low-cost labor and lax environmental regulations. “We don’t have a manufacturing culture,” [former Apple executive Jean-Louis] Gassée said of the nation’s high-technology heartland, “meaning the substrate, the schooling, the apprentices, the subcontractors.” It took Mr. Jobs a bit longer to grasp that idea, however.