Apple

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A Closer Look at Apple's $20 Polishing Cloth

Jeff Butts ·

The folks over at iFixIt have done their traditional teardown of the new MacBook Pro. They also took the time to tear apart the $20 polishing cloth Cupertino has begun selling. The cleaning cloth feels like the inner lining of an iPad Smart Cover, they say. That accessory features a thin layer of microfiber on the inside. Both apparently have a synthetic leather feel to them along with a bit of fuzziness

The new Apple Polishing Cloth earns a 0 out of 10 on our repairability scale, for distracting us from a very important MacBook Pro teardown and not going back together after we cut it into pieces with scissors.

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Google Follows Apple And Slashes Play Store Fees

Charlotte Henry ·

Google is reducing the fees it takes from developers in the Play Store, CNBC reported. It is dropping the cut it takes from subscriptions from 30 percent to 15 from day one. The move from Google follows similar ones made by Apple.

Google also said on Thursday that it was introducing a program to allow e-books, music streaming services, and other apps that pay for content to access fees as low as 10%. Apple doesn’t make exceptions for those kind of apps and doesn’t offer a 10% fee to developers in its app store. Apple, which has received more regulator attention over its app store than Google, over the past two years cut its take from 30% to 15% in many cases, including for apps making less than $1 million per year, news apps, and certain premium video streamers that participate in an Apple program. But Apple still charges 30% for the first year of a subscription, meaning that Google’s app store may be more competitive for subscription-based apps.

 

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Is Apple Product Design Better Without Sir Jony Ive?

Charlotte Henry ·

It’s a heretical thought for some but…has Apple product design actually got better since Sir Jony Ive left? Writing for Bloomberg Businessweek, Alex Webb argues that devices now focus on function rather than form, to the benefit of the user.

Evans Hankey, who now heads the industrial design team, has overseen plenty of other tweaks that seem to indicate a change of philosophy. Take the iPhone. The latest iterations have ditched the curved edges that made the display liable to crack if dropped on its side. Or the Apple TV remote, whose symmetry made it visually appealing, but meant that users often inadvertently pressed the wrong buttons by holding it upside down. The design was revamped in May. “Since Jony Ive left, there’s not that gravitational force driving aesthetic before function,” Paul Found, a lecturer in industrial design at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, England. “Those who have taken over are now listening to what customers are saying.”

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Apple ML Study Compares Supervised Versus Self-Supervised Learning

Andrew Orr ·

A research team at Apple published a study in October examining supervised and self-supervised algorithms. The title is “Do Self-Supervised and Supervised Methods Learn Similar Visual Representations?” From the abstract:

We find that the methods learn similar intermediate representations through dissimilar means, and that the representations diverge rapidly in the final few layers. We investigate this divergence, finding that it is caused by these layers strongly fitting to the distinct learning objectives. We also find that SimCLR’s objective implicitly fits the supervised objective in intermediate layers, but that the reverse is not true.

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Dutch Regulator Demands Apple Makes Changes to In-app Purchases

Charlotte Henry ·

Regulators in the Netherlands have found that Apple’s rules around its in-app payment system are anti-competitive. It has ordered the company to make changes, Reuters reported.

The Dutch investigation into whether Apple’s practices amounted to an abuse of a dominant market position was launched in 2019 but later reduced in scope to focus primarily on dating market apps. They included a complaint from Match Group, owner of the popular dating service Tinder, which said Apple’s rules were hindering it from direct communications with its customers about payments. The Netherlands’ Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) last month informed the U.S. technology giant of its decision, making it the first antitrust regulator to make a finding the company has abused market power in the app store, though Apple is facing challenges in multiple countries. ACM has not levied a fine against Apple, but demanded changes to the in-app payment system, the people said.

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Tim Cook Writes Staff Memo as a Tribute to Steve Jobs

Andrew Orr ·

On the 10th anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death, Tim Cook wrote an internal memo to Apple employees. The full email has been obtained by Bloomberg.

I wish Steve were here to see the way his spirit lives on in all of your amazing work. But most of all, I wish he could see what you do next. Steve once said that his proudest achievements were the ones that were yet to come. He spent every day imagining a future that no one else could see and working relentlessly to bring his vision to life.

 

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Tim Cook Receive $36.51 Million of Apple Stock in Latest Pay Package

Charlotte Henry ·

Tim Cook has received his latest pay package, which includes 255,000 shares and lasts until 2026. That’s according to an SEC filing spotted by Appleinsider.

Back in August, Cook received more than 5 million shares of Apple stock and sold them for more than $750 million. The stock transfer was the final part of a compensation package that Cook received when he became CEO of Apple in 2011. On Sunday, Cook received 255,000 shares of Apple stock, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission posted to Apple’s website on Sept. 28. By a rough estimate, the stocks are worth about $36.51 million.

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Apple Should Scrap Leather if Its Serious About The Environment

Charlotte Henry ·

Apple is always keen to tout its environmental credentials. However, Adam Oram at iMore makes a really good point. If the company wanted to really improve the impact it has on the environment further, it would stop using leather.

One aspect of Apple’s product lineup no one appears to be looking at, though, is the use of leather. Environmentally, leather is extremely damaging, and it’s surprising to me that Apple has not pursued more eco-friendly alternatives. Apple has a long history with leather, having made a variety of accessories. Right now, in Apple’s product lineup, it has several leather items, including iPhone cases, folios, and sleeves, Apple Watch bands, iPad Smart Covers, MacBook sleeves, MagSafe wallets, and AirTag key rings. These are all supplementary to its hero products, but they are often sold as add-ons when picking up a new phone or tablet.