Posts tagged Apple
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.
First Day of Work
Not sure of the authenticity, but an interesting take on Work, Motivation, and Employer Brand from “Apple.”
The article can be found here.
10 plays
Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory
Mike Daisey was a self-described “worshipper in the cult of Mac.” Then he saw some photos from a new iPhone, taken by workers at the factory where it was made. Mike wondered: “Who makes all my crap?” He traveled to China to find out.
Enjoy!
@99GR81
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify and vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
Think Different. You Did. Thank you, Steve. RIP
@99GR81 - www.99GR81.com
The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.
The Real Music Man
Thursday, August 25, 2011 - 06:51 AM
Steve Jobs is not a musician, or a record producer, or a composer, at least not as far as anyone knows. But he has profoundly changed the way we hear music, the way music is produced, the way music is marketed. His twin masterstrokes, the iPod and iTunes, didn’t just make music more portable - we’d been heading in that direction since the Walkman 30 years ago. His innovations made music easy to find, to manage, to sort and re-sort, and to hear even in a noisy environment.
When Steve Jobs announced yesterday that he was stepping down as CEO of Apple, it marked the end of an era. You could argue whether the worlds of personal computing or communication would have been fundamentally different without Jobs and his steady parade of irresistible toys - desktops, laptops, tablets, phones. After all, other companies have been competing with Apple in these fields all along. But you simply cannot argue about his impact on the world of music.
Of course, this came at the cost of sound fidelity; you have to compress the sound quite a bit, meaning the lows become mediums and the highs also become mediums, changing the dynamic nature of the music dramatically. This in turn has affected how many modern recordings are made. But despite some inevitable pushback, it seems that most people are willing to give up the sonic purity of a beautifully-mastered recording with a wide dynamic range for a convenient sound file that they can actually hear in the car. And most record producers seem willing to follow suit.
Jobs’ inventions have helped make music an almost ubiquitous part of our lives. It’s a great irony that the cutting edge of Western technology has brought us closer to something that musicologists have long described, often with barely-disguised envy, in traditional cultures like those of sub-Saharan Africa or native Australians: the central role of music in daily life. Ancient cultures will have music for births, deaths, and every milestone in between. There are songs for chores, songs for hunting, songs for calling the livestock. Now, we have playlists for going into labor, for a long car ride, for a quiet date, for a hopefully hotter date, for hitting the treadmill. And don’t forget about marketing - there is hardly a better way to break a new band than to get their music onto an iTunes commercial.
Some say Jobs’ iWorld has cheapened music. Or they worry that the easy access to almost any music will make it less likely that people will MAKE music themselves. Well, there seem to be more bands then ever, and iTunes is a key way for artists and labels to actually make money; it offers an easy, relatively affordable, legal alternative to file-sharing.
For a guy who never recorded a song, or signed a band, or founded a label or a music festival, Steve Jobs has probably had more of an impact on the music world than any other person in the last quarter century - and possibly since Thomas Edison. Apple will no doubt continue, but what has distinguished Apple, and made it such a rarity among organizations of this scale, is that its corporate vision has essentially been a single individual’s vision - and that individual has just left the building.
Check out more from John Schaefer and the WNYC team here: http://www.wnyc.org
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What Can You Get Away With at an Apple Store?
Sure, the Apple Store looks like a zen-futurist’s ideal: clean, bright, orderly. But did you know beneath that icy veneer you can actually get away with pretty much anything? It’s true! And Mark Malkoff decided to prove it.
Malkoff’s goal: to see exactly how far Apple Store employees would let him go. We’re not just talking silly dance videos or—shudder—planking. We’re talking pizza delivery, goat-herding; pretty much anything short of actual fornication (which, in fairness, wasn’t attempted here so… maybe?). All kosher.
So, what have we learned? Feel free to treat the Apple Store like your home, especially if you walk around your home in a Darth Vader outfit.
@99GR81
Your iPhone is Secretly Tracking You
By Sam BiddleThis is a map of everywhere I’ve been for nearly the last year. Everywhere. I didn’t carry around a special tracking device. The FBI isn’t sending goons in unmarked vans to track me. All I did was use an iPhone. And if you have an iPhone, you’re being tracked right now, too, whether you like it or not.
It turns out that all our iPhones are keeping a record of everywhere you’ve been since June. This data is stored on your phone (or iPad) and computer, easily available to anyone who gets their hands on it.
You know, AT&T and other cellphone providers can always store this data, for any cellphone. And law enforcement can get to it when they need to. But I don’t want this information bouncing around on my computer and in pocket, too, for no good reason, with no way to opt out. That’s just not right.
The privacy startle, apparently enabled by this summer’s iOS 4 release, was discovered by two security researchers, one of whom claims he was an Apple employee for five years. They’re equally puzzled and disturbed by the location collection: “By passively logging your location without your permission, Apple have made it possible for anyone from a jealous spouse to a private investigator to get a detailed picture of your movements,” they explain. All it would take to crack the information out of your iOS device is an easy jailbreak. On your computer, the information can be opened as easily as JPEG using the mapping software that the security experts have made for download—Try it yourself.
The data itself is jarringly accurate. And even though it appears to rely on tower triangulation rather than GPS pinpointing (meaning you’re not safe with location services switched off), the map I was able to generate with mapping software the security duo released visualizes my life since the day I bought my iPhone 4 in July. Everywhere I’ve been. Bus trips home. Train trips to visit family. Vacations. Places I’d forgotten I’d even gone. Zoom in on that giant blotch over New York, and you can see my travels, block by block. My entire personal and professional life—documented by a phone I didn’t know was also a full time location logging device. It’s all accessible—where I’ve been, and when. (The animated software doesn’t show location linked to any duration of less than a week, so it can’t be used to snoop that closely. But the actual underlying database is timed to the second.) I don’t really have anything to hide, which is why I don’t mind sharing my map above. But at least let me turn this tracker off.
For now, there is no fix. The only way to remove it from your computer is to wipe your back up files from your computer. But then you have no back ups to restore your phone in case you lose it. And every time you sync your computer, though, it’ll create a new file. And if you do lose your phone, all your tracking data goes with it, right into the hands of whoever found it. And if you upgrade your phone to the next iPhone, the location tracking history goes with it.
Until Apple stops doing this, or explains why they are doing it, I don’t feel safe. I feel weird having all this data that I don’t want recorded on my iPhone, and so do others. Maybe they’re doing it for the government. Maybe they’re doing it because they’re forced to. So far, the researchers have found no proof that the information is being transmitted to remote servers hosted by Apple or the feds. Right now There’s no evidence of that at all—that’s the good news. But that’s still a lot of information on our phones about where we’ve been, whether or not we want it.
We have reached out to Apple for commentary and are awaiting a response. We’re also reaching out to Microsoft and Google to see what they do in this regard with their handsets.
Security expert Kevin Mitnick says he’s “Quite shocked and disturbed” by the revelation, noting that the logged data could be of great interest to a variety of entities—prying spouses, private investigators, and, he reckons, the government. He speculates that the existence of the log itself “could have been at the request of the government,” as such data is “can’t be used for advertisements. It seems to me more to be a governmental request.” He added, “I like to know what my device is doing.” And, that the phone’s logging of data was in this case like “carrying around a bug and a tracker at the same time.”
Ummm, yeah. @99GR81
Playmobil Apple Store
Happy April Fool’s Day!
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Fresh Apple
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