Month: April 2019

Guy Kawasaki: Steve Jobs divided people into two groups at Apple: ‘Insanely Great’ and ‘Crappy’

CompuScoop Staff April 8, 2019 0

“I’ve had a long and exciting journey — full of failures and successes — since I first started working at Apple in 1983,” Guy Kawasaki writes for CNBC. “Ask people who worked at Apple when Steve Jobs was around, and they’ll very bluntly tell you it wasn’t easy. There were days where he was impressed by my work, and there were days when I was certain he would fire me. But it was always exciting because we were on a mission to prevent totalitarianism.”

“I wouldn’t trade working for him for any job I’ve ever had — and I don’t know anyone in the Macintosh Division who would, either,” Kawasaki writes. “Jobs elevated women to positions of power long before it was cool or socially responsible to do so. He didn’t care about gender, sexual orientation, race, creed or color. He divided the world into two groups: ‘Insanely great people’ and ‘crappy people.’ It was that simple.”

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So, why did Apple scrap plans for the AirPower?

CompuScoop Staff April 8, 2019 0

”At the unveiling of the iPhone 7 in September 2016, Apple design chief Jonathan Ive declared it the beginning of a ‘wireless future — a future where all of your devices intuitively connect,'” Tim Bradshaw writes for Financial Times. “However, there has been turbulence on the path to Sir Jonathan’s untethered future. Last month’s cancellation of Apple’s AirPower wireless charging mat was a painful moment for a company that prides itself on creating technology that ‘just works.'”

“AirPower was unveiled in September 2017, alongside the tenth-anniversary iPhone X, as part of one of Apple’s biggest product launch events for years,” Bradshaw writes. “But while the latest iPhones can typically be ordered within days of the new upgrades being unveiled on stage, AirPower’s release was slated vaguely for sometime in 2018. By the end of last year, Apple had gone ominously quiet on AirPower. Most mentions of the product disappeared from its website.”

“Then last month, AirPower suddenly made a reappearance — on the packaging for the new AirPods. The second generation of the popular headphones now sported a case that could be charged wirelessly. An illustration on the AirPods box clearly showed them sitting on the clean oval outline of AirPower,” Bradshaw writes. “But those hopes were soon dashed. Apple announced on a Friday afternoon that AirPower had been cancelled, after all.”

Designs in patent filings from Apple point to more than a dozen overlapping coils inside a single AirPower mat, which could alleviate the need for such precise placement. But such a design could also create multiple ‘harmonic frequencies’ which could cause electromagnetic interference with devices such as pacemakers, according to iFixit,” Bradshaw writes. “Another problem may have been with overheating — not just of the iPhone, AirPods or Watch, whose batteries can be put under strain by excessive heat, but also of nearby metal items such as coins or keys.”

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Piper Jaffray: 86% of U.S. teens plan to choose iPhone as next Smartphone

CompuScoop Staff April 8, 2019 0

A newly-published survey of 8,600 U.S. teens found that a higher number than ever, 86 percent, are hoping to make Apple’s iPhone their next smartphone,” Roger Fingas reports for AppleInsider. “That percentage — gauged across 47 states during the fall of 2018 — ranks against 84 percent last spring, investment firm Piper Jaffray said on Monday. The average age of those surveyed was 15.9, and the average household income $68,300.”

“Elsewhere in the survey, Piper found that Netflix was the most popular source of daily video consumption, coming in at 38 percent,” Fingas reports. “It surpassed YouTube’s 33 percent, despite the ubiquity of the free Google platform.”

“Snapchat was the top social media platform for teens, favored by 46 percent, followed by Facebook’s Instagram at 32 percent,” Fingas reports. “Though popular among adults, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest managed just 6, 5, and 1 percent, respectively.”

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Apple Watch Heart Rate Monitor credited with saving another life

CompuScoop Staff April 8, 2019 0

The Apple Watch has saved another life, according to a post made to Reddit, where the Apple wearable is credited with alerting its owner to heart issues and prompting a call for assistance, shortly before a medical emergency took place.

The heart rate monitoring functions of the Apple Watch provides a number of ways to alert the user in the event of an irregularity, including if the heart is beating at an unusually high or low rate, or in the case of the Apple Watch Series 4, when the electrocardiogram function detects an atrial fibrillation (Afib) state. The notifications have led to a number of reports where users are warned of a problem that became more serious, with one surfacing on Saturday continuing the trend.

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