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Apple’s Newest Holiday Video Will Make You Cry

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

Apple’s newest holiday video is a real tearjerker. A family goes to grandpa’s house for the holidays, and during the trip the parents give the kids an iPad as a way to keep them occupied. When they get to grandpa’s house, it’s a somber atmosphere. We learn that grandma is no longer with them, but the two girls make something special with the iPad as a present. The song is Married Life by Michael Giacchino, from the Up movie.

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How a Phone Call Led to OS X And The Return of Steve Jobs

Charlotte Henry · · Add Comment

It was a not particularly interesting phone call between an Apple exec and a midlevel manager at NeXT. However, as Cult of Mac’s ‘Today in Apple History’ noted, it started a chain overs that led to the creation of OS X and the return of Steve Jobs.

Garrett L. Rice’s communication with Ellen Hancock, Apple’s chief technology officer, is the first formal step in a long process. It ultimately leads to Apple buying NeXT, the creation of OS X, and Steve Jobs returning home to the company he co-founded… By November 1996, Jobs was speaking with Amelio again (albeit only very recently). Jobs advised that Be was not the right choice for Apple. The November 25 phone call from NeXT’s Rice presented the option Jobs surely wanted all along: that Apple acquire the rights to put a version of OpenStep on Macs. By early December, Jobs visited Apple HQ for the first time since his ouster. A deal would bring both NeXT and Jobs aboard — the best decision Apple made in years.

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Plan to Save The Web

Charlotte Henry · · Add Comment

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founders of the web, launched The Contract for the Web on Monday. It is his plan to save the internet, according to The Guardian. However, a number of organizations were involved in the project.

The contract, which has been worked on by 80 organizations for more than a year, outlines nine central principles to safeguard the web – three each for governments, companies and individuals. The document, published by Berners-Lee’s Web Foundation, has the backing of more than 150 organizations, from Microsoft, Google and Facebook to the digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. At the time of writing, neither Amazon nor Twitter had endorsed the principles. Those who back the contract must show they are implementing the principles and working on solutions to the tougher problems, or face being removed from the list of endorsers.

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What Google Stadia Means for the Future

Andrew Orr · · Add Comment

Alex Cranz reviewed Google Stadia, a game service where games are streamed to you instead of you loading them onto your device.

With Stadia, you can slip into a game typically found on a PC or console using almost any device. It makes you wonder why we’ve tethered ourselves to hardware for so long when the internet can give us all of that power at a considerably lower cost (and smaller energy bill). The problem is that Stadia rarely works perfectly. Instead, it offers us a glimmer of the future before crashing back down into the muddy present.

”It makes you wonder why.” Here’s why we’re still tethering ourselves: Because arguably you own physical copies of media like games, books, and movies. The “future” that Mr. Cranz’s headline alludes to is the Ideal Corporate World in which no one owns anything because it’s all a subscription.