This is what it really looks like to “change the world.”
Apple, a company founded 42 years ago in a Santa Clara Valley garage to make personal computers, is now worth $1 trillion. It becomes the first American company to achieve that feat. A trillion is an unimaginably big number no matter what you’re counting—but especially when it’s money. It’s the kind of number usually reserved for measures of aggregated national… read more
The company’s slick, wireless earbuds work great, but they foreshadow startling changes to the social fabric.
The moment I put the Apple AirPods in my ears, I feel like I’ve already dropped them in the toilet. They are so small and slippery. The mere act of removing these precious, wireless ear buds from their lozenge-shaped case makes them feel like a futuristic cure to unknown ills. I am late to adopt them, so I indulge a… read more
The company’s new iPhone and retail “town centers” presage a future of Apple as global infrastructure—one that may already have arrived.
For two decades now, Apple has been fighting a battle between attention and disregard. In 1997, when Steve Jobs returned as interim CEO, the company was a struggling maker of personal computers with limited market share. Then came the iMac, a Mac computer people finally wanted to own again. Then the iPod, which transformed the company into a maker of… read more
The company’s new “spaceship” headquarters shows how its beauty has always been skin deep.
Apple has great design is the biggest myth in technology today. The latest victim of this ideology comes in the form a remarkable report on the late Steve Jobs’s final project, still in production: a new, $5 billion Cupertino headquarters for Apple Inc. Writing for Reuters, Julia Love outlines the campus’s “astonishing attention to detail.” Vents and pipes remain obscured… read more
The company’s controversial design choices make it hard to imagine the alternatives they preclude.
“Our lightest product ever,” the page announces. Lithe and sleek like all Apple’s wares, the Apple Plug is a small, aluminum stopper meant to seal up the “archaic headphone connector” in your iPhone 6 or 6s. Machine-rounded at the end to match the device’s curve, it comes in gold, rose gold, and space gray to match every iPhone finish. Once… read more
I use Apple Mail instead of competing products like Microsoft Entourage or Google Gmail. I don’t use Entourage because I try not to use Microsoft products if I can help it, not just as conscientious objection but also because they are bloated. I refuse to use Gmail because I try not to use Google products if I can help it,… read more
Free software to make Aperture understand your M8, and to automate imports
Download for Mac OS X 152 kb – Mac OS X 10.4+ Apple Aperture is a digital photography post-production tool for Mac. Apple bills it as a professional-grade product on par with Final Cut for video or Logic Pro for audio. Digital camera technology advances quickly, espeically at the high end of the market where Aperture is supposed to complete.… read more
A federal judge has declared Google a monopolist. In a 277-page decision released yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta concluded that the online-search company abused its dominance and suffocated competitors—in part by paying Apple and Samsung tens of billions of dollars a year to make Google the default search engine on mobile devices. Does this mean curtains for… read more
Lithium-ion batteries are miraculous. They’re strong enough to run a vehicle, and they can be recharged at any outlet. Their commercial debut, in 1991, and popularization over the next two decades, has helped create a golden age of high-end consumer tech: We now have plenty of e-bikes and electric cars, and also phones, smartwatches, computer mice, and earbuds that can… read more
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. This year marks the tenth Prime Day, the shopping holiday that Amazon invented for itself in 2015, in honor of the company’s 20th anniversary. The marketing effort was so successful, according to Amazon, that sales exceeded those from the previous year’s record-breaking Black… read more