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This week Jason tells Myke about his experiences at an Apple event as an independent writer, before going on to discuss the new products announced and day-one impressions of Apple Pay.
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October 20, 2014 4:04 PM PT
Last updated August 16, 2023
Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.
After Apple announces its quarterly earnings as it did today, there’s a conference call between Apple executives and financial analysts. These calls are generally preceded by a bunch of prepared statements that can provide a little bit of insight into how Apple’s business works, but is mostly focused on things most Apple watchers already know.
Then comes the question-and-answer session, which while hardly extemporaneous—you get the sense that most of the questions have been anticipated and talking points formulated—lets Apple CEO Tim Cook provide a level of detail into how Apple’s business is shaping up that can be illuminating.
And so, presented with minimal editing, here’s a transcript of how Cook answered the analysts on Monday…
Continue reading “This is Tim: Apple’s CEO answers the analysts”…
October 20, 2014 1:40 PM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Apple has just announced its quarterly financial results. Revenue was $42.1 billion, with a profit of $8.5 billion.
This quarter was a record for the Mac, with 5.5 million Macs sold, and iPhone continues to grow. The iPad, on the other hand, continues in the doldrums. In fact, this is the first quarter since Q2 2011 that Mac revenue has been greater than iPad revenue.
“On the Mac, it was just an absolutely blow-away quarter,” Tim Cook told analysts. “Our best ever. It will result in our higher market share since 1995. It’s just absolutely stunning. The back to school season voted, and the Mac won and carried the day, and we’re really proud of that… Being up 21 percent in a market that’s shrinking, it just doesn’t get better than that.”
Continue reading “Apple Q4 2014: $42.1B revenue, $8.5B profit, record Mac sales”…
October 20, 2014 10:49 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
So I updated my iPhone 6 to iOS 8.1, typed in my credit card number (my iPhone wouldn’t recognize the nonstandard design of my card—the number’s printed on the back), and walked over to my local Whole Foods to try out Apple Pay. In a sign that this is truly a brave new world we’re living in, it rained the entire way. I know, rain in California seems like an impossibility, but I assure you it’s true.
After a visit to the Honey Roasted Peanut grinder—50 percent off in late October!—and to the meat counter to pick up some chicken breasts for dinner tonight, I went to an empty checkout line that was being attended to by a nice young guy named Tyler.
I pulled the iPhone 6 out of my pocket and before I could even move it closer to the payment terminal—newly festooned with a Now Accepting Apple Pay tag—Apple Pay appeared on my phone and asked me to verify my purchase via Touch ID.
“Oh, you’re going to try that?” Tyler said.
“Yep, I’m one of those people,” I said, and habitually placed my thumb on the phone, as if I was going to unlock it. Which was what I was going to do, but instead of doing that, I paid for groceries.
“Whoa, I don’t know what just happened,” Tyler said as the paper receipt popped out of the cash register’s printer.
As I left the store and walked home with my iPhone-purchased items, it wasn’t raining. Brave new world indeed.
October 20, 2014 10:01 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
As promised during last week’s Apple event, Apple released iOS 8.1 Monday at 10 Pacific, the traditional Apple software roll-out slot.
The big change is support for Apple Pay on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in the U.S. The Camera Roll is also back, and iCloud Photo Library has been added in beta. There are plenty of other changes, so check out the change notes to see if your favorite bug is being addressed. (And if you want to wait to see if the update does something weird to some people’s phones, no one will blame you.)
This week’s Incomparable is a nice, spoiler-light tour through urban fantasy novels set in London, including works by Neil Gaiman, Paul Cornell, and Ben Aaronovitch. I got some great reading suggestions out of it and I think you will, too.
London is a thriving modern metropolis, but beneath its streets and behind its doors are ancient, magical secrets. In this episode, a group of (North) Americans discuss some of our favorite London-based urban fantasy novels. This is a spoiler-light episode, so listen in and get ready to add a whole bunch of books to your to-read list. Plus, what are we reading?
Also this week on The Incomparable:
Another installment in our D&D podcast, Total Party Kill.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Tim Goodman gave me his list of what shows are worth watching right now, night by night. Saturday is for streaming.
Comedian Jordan Cooper joined Scott McNulty on Random Trek to talk about that episode where Captain Picard has to be like Bruce Willis in “Die Hard,” except with less swearing and broken glass and shooting, and on the Enterprise.
Thanks to Many Tricks for sponsoring Six Colors this week. They make a bunch of excellent Mac utilities, and have for more than a decade.
The new Many Tricks app—just released this week!—is Resolutionator, which lets you change your monitor resolution quickly, and to a shocking number of different resolutions. It supports making changes via the menu bar or the keyboard, and can even let you set “silly” resolutions that you might actually find useful—like a larger display scaled down to work on an 11″ MacBook Air screen.
Other Many Tricks apps: Moom makes moving and sizing windows a snap, Witch lets you easily switch between all open windows, Name Mangler handles batch file renaming tasks, and Desktop Curtain covers your clutter.
And Six Colors readers can save 10% on anything they buy from Many Tricks for the next 30 days by using discount code SixColors10.
October 17, 2014 2:57 PM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Apple’s often been a company that leads by example. When a new version of OS X was released, developers would often take cues from the design and functionality of the operating system and Apple’s own bundled apps. In its designs, Apple was demonstrating to all the other developers about how this generation’s apps should work, what metaphors to use, what approaches were consistent with the design philosophy behind the current release.
This isn’t to say that all developers slavishly followed Apple’s lead. Some would break with Apple’s examples and create things that were idiosyncratic and sometimes downright amazing. (Loren Brichter, author of Tweetie and Letterpress, is a great example.) But many others would diverge from Apple’s example and the result would just feel wrong. Apple’s designs would set the tone for the platform, and if you diverged too much you were taking a risk.
But the vast majority of apps wouldn’t diverge too much from the examples. I think most developers welcomed the hints that Apple would give with their designs. Those hints give them a starting point, a base design that can then be diverged from as necessary.
I bring all of this up because with the release of Yosemite, I feel like Apple’s not sending such clear signals to developers. And the two most glaring examples are the title bars of windows and the new dark Dock and menu bar option.
Yesterday I likened the A5-based original iPad mini to a horror movie monster. App developer Allen Pike likens it to a zombie, and then to Internet Explorer 6—I don’t know which one’s scarier.
This year Stephen Hackett’s written an excellent review of Yosemite’s design:
At this point, I’m not sure referring to Yosemite’s UI as Aqua is even correct. If Aqua defines the structures and underlying philosophies that shape OS X, then it’s still present, despite the ever-growing number of changes from those original lickable buttons. However, if Aqua is just a collection of colorful buttons, windows with title bars and a predictable color scheme, it may have died the second Craig Federighi showed off Yosemite this summer.
Aqua is gone. We lick the interface no more.
Current-generation Mac Pro owner Marco Arment is psyching himself up to buy a Retina iMac:
The 5K Retina iMac is out, and it looks incredible so far on paper — so incredible that I’m seriously considering selling my new Mac Pro to get the Retina iMac instead. In fact, the case for the Mac Pro for anyone but advanced video editors, 3D modelers, and heavy OpenCL users is now weaker than ever.
As I said yesterday, “It’s a screen so good, people who have Mac Pros are going to want to replace them with an iMac.” Marco’s one of those people.
Maybe Apple should have waited a little bit longer to hold another event. John, Lex, and Dan discuss (read: complain about) the latest announcements.
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October 16, 2014 4:24 PM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I just got back from Cupertino, barring a stop at my local In N Out Burger for a post-event treat. Here’s a quick take on the aftermath.
I took a bunch of pictures at the Apple event today. Here they are on Flickr, including the lousy blurry ones, so be warned.
October 16, 2014 12:00 PM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Mac users fearing a merger between iOS and OS X are going to have to wait a little longer—perhaps a lot longer. With OS X Yosemite, Apple’s latest free update to OS X, the company has focused on connecting its two device ecosystems without turning either into a slavish copy of the other.
Sure, Yosemite (named after California’s majestic national park) takes cues from iOS—these are two operating systems issued by the same company, after all. But this release is more about linking the two systems together rather than adding a thin veneer of iOS dressing over the 30-year-old mouse-and-keyboard interface that makes a Mac a Mac.
Yosemite’s marquee features are probably Continuity and iCloud Drive, and while they can work if you’re exclusively a Mac user, they’re obviously at their best when providing bridges between OS X and iOS. This is a release that’s designed to let the Mac and iOS work better in tandem, but it’s still the same familiar Mac OS you’ve come to know, albeit with a few variations that will feel familiar to iOS users.
October 16, 2014 9:51 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
With Dan Moren and Jason Snell!
October 15, 2014 5:27 PM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
So don’t forget there’s an Apple event on Thursday, October 16 at 10 a.m. Pacific. That’s 1 p.m. Eastern. I’ll be there, and will be liveblogging (sort of) via the new @sixcolorsevent Twitter account. My old liveblog pal Dan Moren will be joining me from his mountaintop redoubt for color commentary.
New iPads, Yosemite, and a few surprises in store? I’m not sure if there are many surprises at Apple events anymore, unfortunately, but here’s hoping. Regardless, it should be fun.
If you want to follow on Twitter, follow @sixcolorsevent or come back Thursday and we’ll embed a Twitter stream on the front page of Six Colors.
See you from Cupertino!
October 15, 2014 11:11 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
[Glenn Fleishman is the editor and publisher of The Magazine, which is currently crowdfunding an anthology of the best work of its second year in publication. He writes regularly for the Economist, Boing Boing, and Macworld, and tweets incessantly—oh why won’t he stop?—at @glennf.]
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, unless you’re a poodle, and then everyone is talking about you. The latest massive security exploit affecting a large swath of websites is called “Poodle,” and has to do with backwards-compatible support for secure connections between browsers and web servers. An attacker watching browser/server connections can effectively “sidejack” a connection, stealing an authentication cookie that would allow access to an active session.
That dog’s gonna hunt: It may finally be the thing that sends ol’ Internet Explorer 6 to a farm upstate, if you know what I mean.
I’m more of a Marvel guy (though I’m liking The CW’s “The Flash”), but the DC Comics superhero movie franchise finally seems to be moving at full speed. As Josh Lasser at Hitfix reports:
Following “Batman v Superman,” the next title up will feature Suicide Squad. Then, in 2017, we’ll get “Justice League Part One” and a stand-alone “Wonder Woman” movie. The next year, 2018, will offer a movie version of “The Flash” with Ezra Miller and “Aquaman” with Jason Momoa. A “Shazam” movie, which has Dwayne Johnson as Black Adam will come out in 2019 as will “Justice League Part Two.” “Cyborg” with Ray Fisher will hit in 2020 and a new “Green Lantern” as well. Stand-alone Superman and Batman films are also in the works.
The new Harry Potter-universe prequel series screenwritten by J.K. Rowling will also feature at least three movies, and multiple Lego-themed movies are also in the works.
No word on if Warner Bros. or any other major film studio will be releasing any non-franchise movies between now and 2020…