A dozen companies could have built the iPhone X. Why did they wait for Apple?

“Over the past decade, we’ve pushed forth with innovation, after innovation, after innovation,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said as he described the 10-year history of the iPhone in Apple’s brand-new Steve Jobs theater, at its new Apple Park headquarters in California. He’s right. More than any other company, Apple has defined the modern smartphone. It pulled the rug out from companies like BlackBerry and Nokia in 2007, and has added new features like clockwork each year. That brings us to 2017 and the iPhone X, a phone that scans your face, wirelessly charges, and has a screen that curves around every inch of its own glossy, glass face.

Apple’s magic sauce is that it doesn’t let competition get under its skin.

As Cook boldly declared that the iPhone X will define the next decade of smartphones, I realized that’s not just bluster. He’s probably right. For a decade now, Apple has pushed forth with “innovation after innovation after innovation,” mostly unopposed. It’s difficult to imagine this changing in the next 10 years. Anything can happen, but no other smartphone company currently looks poised to dethrone Apple anytime soon. When you think about it, that’s sad.

Apple’s magic sauce is that it doesn’t let competition get under its skin. It’s choosey about the tech innovations it picks for its devices, and artfully creates use cases for all of them.

But as expertly crafted as Apple products are, the company also has slow, predictable annual release cycles (or longer) that competitors can rely on to try and gain an edge, and it often waits two or more years to unveil a truly new product design. On paper, winning over Apple users looks easy; yet no company seems able to do it. Instead of Android phone makers speeding up Apple, it has slowed the rest of them down. The whole industry now follows its slow, plodding pace of innovation. Why can’t any of them rise to the challenge?

Samsung could have made the iPhone X

Take Samsung, for example. Why didn’t Samsung, Apple’s biggest smartphone competitor, debut the first completely edge-to-edge screen on one of its Galaxy phones? It had the technology. Samsung is the company manufacturing Apple’s new OLED iPhone X screen, which curves and takes up the entire front face of the phone. Somehow, it hasn’t yet pulled off this trick on its own phones. It got close with the Galaxy S8 and Note 8, likely because it knew what direction Apple was headed, but no cigar. (Andy Rubin’s Essential phone was also a near miss – it had a cut out up top, but just didn’t go far enough.)

Samsung Galaxy Note 8 (Photo: Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends)

Apple’s screen gives you an actual ‘wow’ moment when you look at it. It appears magical. The edges on the iPhone X screen are so rounded that they look like science fiction, and the curved cutout for the camera up top only enhances the effect. Apple has shattered the notion that phone screens must be perfectly rectangular. But it’s not like the technology for edge-to-edge screens is new. Hell, we were reviewing Sharp phones in 2014 with similar “bezel-less” technology. Apple just shaved off the corners, but by going that extra distance – by boldly taking it to the limit — it really set itself apart.

Samsung has taken it to the limit too, at times. Its biggest successes have come from lucky bold stances it took and stuck with, like its curved edge screens or the Galaxy Note line, which made big phones desirable. The Note led to enough market push that even Apple had to react to it. Sadly, Samsung doesn’t stick to its guns. It has its moments, but its focus and discipline wavers. Competition gets under Samsung’s skin. It is often noncommittal and flippant with its phone innovations, or relentlessly shotguns them out, not putting its true weight behind ideas. It often follows, rarely leads.

And yes, a company like Samsung can actually beat Apple to the market and still be a follower. Many phone makers study the many rumors that pop up online, and in the corporate and manufacturing worlds there are even more backchannels for companies to find out what Apple has cooking, months or years before those products hit shelves. But beating Apple to market doesn’t work unless you also make a much better, different product. That’s where competitors struggle. You likely can’t beat Apple by mimicking its design choices.

Apple creates fun reasons for features to exist

Let’s go back to the iPhone X again. It shouldn’t be the phone that makes facial recognition a thing on smartphones. Samsung also debuted an ‘Iris Scanner’ last year, but it didn’t put its weight behind the feature or perfect it enough to make it essential. Samsung’s Galaxy S8 Iris Scanner is easily fooled by a simple photograph. Apple is making it look silly by rolling out a version that’s actually secure. In its presentation, it showed how much thought it put into the feature by specifically spelling out how photographs, masks, and other tricks won’t fool its 3D depth-sensing Face ID. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, but judging from Apple’s track record, Face ID will probably work as advertised.

The tech has been floating around for years, yet no one else spent the time to nail it.

Facial recognition tech has floated around for years, yet no one else spent the time to nail it. All Apple had to do was present it onstage like it’s a big deal and show us how it makes the iPhone more secure and easier to use. Now even I can’t wait to use it. As a bonus, Apple even added facial-tracking Animojis. Yet another small delight that came from Face ID.

Apple played the same game with Touch ID fingerprint sensors in 2013. Fingerprint sensors fluttered around in laptops and some phones, like the Moto Atrix and old Windows Mobile devices, for years. Apple made them essential by stuffing one into the iPhone 5S and every iPhone/iPad since. It gave the tech two thought-out purposes (unlocking and buying things) and integrated it deeply into the iPhone, just as it’s done with Face ID. Within a month of Touch ID debuting, HTC had a phone with a crappier, insecure fingerprint sensor, and Samsung sloppily added the feature to its next flagship phone (the Galaxy S5). Somehow, neither of them took the time to make it work for their users.

The iPhone X also added wireless charging, a ‘meh’ feature Samsung and select phone makers have included for years, but it’s upping the ante, releasing a single wireless charging pad that you can plop a couple iPhones and Apple Watches down on, eliminating the mess of cords you may have on your nightstand or desk.

Finally, look back at the double rear cameras that debuted on the iPhone 7 Plus — another feature many devices have. LG at least tried to make its dual cameras useful by enabling wide angle shots, but only Apple thought to include a beautiful, simple background blurring ‘bokeh’ effect for portraits and use the second camera to let users 2x optical zoom. There is now a real benefit to the camera on the iPhone 7 Plus, and a story to tell. It’s sad that only Apple succeeded in giving that second camera meaning and purpose.

All Apple does is give these technologies useful, thought-out purposes. Why is that such a hard thing for competitors to pick up on?

A graveyard of good ideas

Apple’s competitors have given up on many promising ideas because they didn’t boost quarterly profits fast enough or work out immediately. Modular phone designs, LG’s G5 mods and “Friends,” HTC’s amazing Boomsound speakers, Nokia’s incredible 41-megapixel camera … these are just a few game-changing features that sunk because they weren’t part of a fantastic overall package or weren’t given a use case where they could shine.

Apple is the only company that seems able to introduce new device categories, too. Despite years of effort, Google failed with its Glass eyewear and augmented reality (it’s now trying again). Now Apple seems poised to jump in and make it a feature people actually want with iOS 11.

You could fill a graveyard with all the tablets and smartwatches that tried to compete with the iPad and Apple Watch. Android makers knew Apple was making a watch for four years before it came out, and began releasing them more than a year before it, yet they still struggle to showcase the appeal of a smartwatch. Meanwhile, Apple’s Watch is now the top selling wristwatch in the world.

Did Apple have to be the first major tech company to introduce fully wireless, working earbuds (AirPods)? The tech was there, but only Apple put in the time to make it work and focus on it. It was even willing to eliminate its own audio jack on the iPhone 7 to push this, and other innovations, forward – despite blowback from its own users. And it’s stuck with its decision. There are no audio jacks on the iPhone 8 or iPhone X phones this year. That commitment has given it an 85 percent market share in the growing wireless headphone market a year later, and hasn’t impacted iPhone sales much, if at all.

It’s baffling that no iPhone competitors have figured out a long-term vision strong enough to give Apple a run for its money.

Companies can beat Apple, if they stop playing by its rules

Apple isn’t invincible. There are cracks in its armor. Just look at Spotify, which is the reason Apple Music exists, or Amazon’s Echo smart speaker, which has become so popular that Apple plans to counter it with a late-to-the-game HomePod speaker. Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is slowly becoming ubiquitous while Siri, the smart assistant that started it all, is fading away, directionless. With Alexa, Amazon pulled an Apple, and we’re all winning because of it. Apple is likely working on much-needed upgrades to its voice assistant in response, which will benefit everyone.

Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is slowly becoming ubiquitous while Siri, the smart assistant that started it all, is fading away, directionless.

Amazon is quickly becoming a powerful voice in devices, and is beginning to shape the smart home of the future. It’s not wasting time kicking rocks around, waiting for Apple to do it first. It’s showing leadership, commitment, and vision. (Let’s just hope it thinks through its next Fire Phone, should it get the urge to try again.) Roku is another great company that has pushed forward its vision while Apple has neglected the Apple TV, which just got its first update in two years.

When he was done showing off the iPhone X, Tim Cook also quoted a Wayne Gretzky motto Steve Jobs loved to repeat: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Apple has long followed this motto, but it skates a lot harder and a lot faster when it’s on the ice with skilled players. In the mobile space, it hardly needs to think about the puck, because it’s already scoring most of the goals.

I look forward to the day when more of Apple’s rivals start skating to where the puck is going to be, and push that puck of innovation their own direction.

‘How not to land an orbital rocket booster’ – Elon Musk shares blooper video

Why it matters to you

The video shows us just how far Elon Musk and his SpaceX team have come with the development of their reusable rocket system.

“Failure is an option here,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in an interview in 2005, adding, “If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

In the years that followed, as his team of crack engineers endeavored to perfect its reusable rocket system, we saw boosters not only flying off course, but also blowing up in mid-air, landing in a fireball, and exploding on the launchpad. You name the calamity, and the calamity pretty much happened. For Musk, failure isn’t only an option, it’s a downright necessity.

In a tongue-in-cheek nod to those fiery failures, the billionaire entrepreneur on Thursday posted a blooper video  (below) showing, as he describes it, “The sordid history of how the SpaceX Falcon 9, the first fully reusable, orbit-class booster rocket, eventually managed to land in one piece and stay that way.”

The sordid history of how the @SpaceX Falcon 9, the first fully reusable, orbit-class booster rocket, eventually managed to land in one piece and stay that way … maybe Falcon realized it still loved us or finally read the instructions…

A post shared by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on Sep 14, 2017 at 12:21am PDT

Titled “How not to land an orbital rocket booster,” the video is a 60-second string of spectacular disasters set to Sousa’s Liberty Bell March, better known by many as the Monty Python theme tune.

Some of the extremely expensive mishaps featured in the video include a “hard impact on ocean”; an engine sensor failure resulting in a dramatic mid-air explosion; and a loss of balance where the rocket landed before toppling over and blowing up.

There’s also a clip showing Elon Musk nonchalantly inspecting the smoldering wreckage of a mangled Falcon 9 with the caption, “Rocket is fine? It’s just a scratch.” And another showing a fireball as the rocket came down too hard, with the accompanying comment, “Well, technically it did land … just not in one piece.”

If all of SpaceX’s launches and landings were still ending in disaster, it would’ve been someone other than Musk posting a blooper video like this. But because the team’s tireless efforts over the years have resulted in major successes, Musk is happy to share his company’s ongoing story with some humor mixed in.

After its first successful launch and landing in December, 2015, SpaceX is moving toward perfecting its system, enabling it to reuse boosters for repeat missions to drastically reduce the cost of space travel. And with Musk insisting that failure is an option as he continues to innovate, we’ll likely get to enjoy a few more of his blooper videos in the years to come.

The Morning After: Thursday, September 14th 2017

We made it past hump day. Two to go. We’ve now had time to mull over Apple’s big iPhone announcements and the results are… inconclusive. Maybe you should get the iPhone X. No, you should get the iPhone 8. It just depends. There’s also more tone-deaf ideas from Silicon Valley, and a sudden torrent of Nintendo news.

The Impossible Project is dead, long live Polaroid Originals.
The original instant camera is back.

Sure, you have Instagram now, but there’s nothing like snapping a picture and watching it develop on real film before your eyes. After a decade of trying to revive Polaroid photography, the Impossible Project has renamed itself Polaroid Originals and launched its second device, this $100 OneStep 2. It’s paying homage to the original Polaroid OneStep from 1977.

Decisions, decisions.
When there’s the iPhone X, why bother with the iPhone 8?

Apple, now that was courage. Announcing a pair of phones, then knocking them figuratively off the table to reveal the iPhone of the future — which will launch a month later. What’s an iPhone faithful supposed to do? Buy the iPhone X. No, wait. Buy the iPhone 8.

Mark your calendar.
Tesla’s electric truck will be revealed October 26th

Part of Elon Musk’s master plan is rolling out an all-electric big rig, and we’ll find out the details next month. Rumors have us expecting 200- to 300-mile range, and possibly autonomous capabilities that could revolutionize trucking. We’ll be first in line for a test ride.

Have they heard of Amazon Prime Now?
Bodega’s tone-deaf vending service won’t kill real bodegas

Just as Juicero exited stage left, Bodega stepped in to represent everything people love to hate about Silicon Valley startups. After Fast Company presented its glorified vending machine as an attempt to make your corner store obsolete, a wave of outrage followed, forcing an apologetic response from its founders. Of course, a critical look at the company’s business plan suggests that even with internet connectivity, computer vision and machine learning, it’s unlikely to succeed.

But wait, there’s more…

Watch SpaceX blow up a lot of rockets while trying to land them

During the early days of SpaceX’s rocket landing attempts failure was definitely an option, so instead getting depressed, Elon Musk embraced it. Knowing that everyone loves a good (harmless) explosion, he just released a full-on fail highlight reel of the early attempts, set to the Monty Python theme and accompanied by Arnold-like quips. “It’s just a scratch,” he said, after one booster was deliberately blown to pieces due to an engine sensor failure.

You can reminisce to all the greatest hits of those early days. That includes a last-minute fin failure due to a lack of hydraulic fluid (“technically it did land… but not in one piece”), throttle valve “stiction” followed by a painfully slow topple (“Look, that’s not an explosion, it’s just a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly (RUD)’”), landing leg collapse (“entropy… is such a lonely word”), a landing burn failure (“the course of true love never did run smooth”), and the final barge failure, when the booster ran out of propellant (‘#$@&%*?!^&^%^$!,” I think).

The video ends with the first successful pad landing and first successful droneship landing so we don’t finish with a bad taste in our mouths. In a tweet (below), Elon Musk recalls the “long road to re-usability of Falcon 9 primary boost stage,” and adds that “when upper stage & fairing also reusable, costs will drop by a factor > 100.”

Over a year has passed since the disastrous pad explosion that halted SpaceX flights for the better part of three months. Since then, the Falcon 9 has been flying at a breakneck pace (13 missions), and has landed its booster successfully in 10 consecutive attempts, including several with recycled boosters. WIth the video, Musk was no doubt using his mathematically-oriented mind to follow the formula: Comedy = tragedy + time.

Long road to reusabity of Falcon 9 primary boost stage…When upper stage & fairing also reusable, costs will drop by a factor >100. pic.twitter.com/WyTAQ3T9EP

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 14, 2017

Source: Elon Musk (Instagram)

Fox’s takeover of Sky referred to the UK’s competition regulator

It’s now been a full year since 21st Century Fox first confirmed its interest in buying out Sky. In that time, the deal has been referred to and cleared by the European Commission, scrutinised by communications regulator Ofcom and discussed numerous times in parliament without a firm approval or denial. The decision has now been pushed back even further after Culture Secretary Karen Bradley announced today that the merger will be passed to the the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) as part of a formal six-month review.

In a statement, the Culture Secretary said that the CMA will focus on “the genuine commitment to broadcasting standards as well as media plurality grounds.” Fox already owns 39% of Sky but announced in December last year that it launching a fresh bid to acquire the rest of the company.

Less than 48 hours earlier, Bradley had updated MPs on her findings — including 30,000 “representations” that produced evidence against a Fox-Sky merger — and hinted that she would defer the case to the CMA in order to identify whether the newly-formed mega corporation “might operate against the specified public interests.”

In Ofcom’s public interest report, concerns were raised over whether Fox had the necessary compliance procedures in place for the broadcast of Fox News in the UK. Other parties had also argued that Fox would “Foxify” its own news outlets outside of the US if the deal went ahead. Fox acted quickly by pulling the channel from UK screens at the end of August.

Because neither Fox or Sky had made their own “substantive representations” against the referral, the CMA will now be given 24 weeks (around six months) to conduct its own investigation into the buyout. It can’t approve or deny the deal, but only help Bradley reach her final conclusion. “We note the swift decision to now refer this to the CMA and will continue to engage constructively in this process,” Sky said in a brief statement.

Source: Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (Gov.uk)

Daimler eyes super-fast electric vehicle charging

Daimler, parent company of Mercedes-Benz (and others) is pushing to get the majority of its vehicles to run on electricity. But there’s still the issue of slow battery charging times that needs to be overcome if users are going to abandon gas. Which is why Daimler is throwing some of its cash towards Israeli startup StoreDot, which is working on a way to fully charge an EV in just five minutes.

The company has raised $60 million in investment, with other partners including Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovitch and Samsung. Although it’s the latter that’s more interesting, since it’s a company that knows a thing or two about the need for stable fast-charging batteries. StoreDot will spend the cash on developing FlashBattery, its replacement for Lithium Ion tech that will offer 300 miles of range on a single charge.

It’s hoped that, in the not-too distant future, FlashBatteries will be built into production EVs at source as a modern-day replacement for existing power-storage tech. The fact that Daimler’s backing the project makes that a little bit more likely, since the pair can develop automotive-friendly solutions together. Not to mention that it’s just one of several outlandish ideas that Daimler has written checks to of late, including the Volocopter drone taxi.

Jaybird Announces RUN True Wireless Headphones With Charging Case for $180

Sport headphone company Jaybird today announced two new pairs of wireless headphones, including its first pair of truly wireless Bluetooth earbuds.

The Jaybird RUN True Wireless Headphones feature a four-hour battery life and come with a pocket-sized charging case providing an additional eight hours, for a total of 12 hours of battery life on the go, while a five-minute charge gives around one hour of play time.

Jaybird says the buds have a “double hydrophobic nano coating” that protects them from sweat and water damage. There’s a single button on both earpieces that takes calls, starts and stops music, skips tracks, and activates Siri. The buds are also designed for one-ear use, allowing runners to stay more aware of their surroundings.

The Jaybird mobile app lets users adjust the sound signature of the earbuds in the lows, miss, and highs, and includes a Find My Buds feature if they go missing. The app also supports sharing of Spotify running-themed playlists with other Jaybird users.

At $180, the Jaybird RUN headphones are pricier than Apple’s AirPods ($159) and come in two colors: Drift, which has white and silver metal accents, and Jet, which is black with silver metal accents.

The company’s second new pair of headphones are basically a redesign of its miniscule Freedom buds and still have a wire that connects them behind the neck, but the Freedom 2 are said to have an improved fit and greater comfort, with double the battery life (up to eight hours) and water resistance.

The Freedom 2 headphones cost $149, and along with the new RUN earbuds should be available in stores in October, with pre-orders beginning today over on BestBuy, Amazon, and the Jaybird website.

Tags: AirPods, Jaybird
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iPhone 8 and 8 Plus Have Smaller Batteries Than iPhone 7 Models, But Similar Battery Life

Apple’s new iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus have smaller batteries than the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, respectively, according to details discovered today on China’s official communications certification board.

The TENAA listings were highlighted by mobile leaker Steve Hemmerstoffer in a tweet, revealing that the iPhone 8 comes with a 1,821mAh battery, while the iPhone 8 Plus has a 2,675mAh battery.

For those how cares about, Tenaa just confirmed #iPhone8 and #iPhone8Plus comes with 2GB and 3GB of RAM, reveals 1821mAh and 2675mAh battery pic.twitter.com/NnIvYkVuAk

— Steve H. (@OnLeaks) September 14, 2017

If the TENAA listing is correct, the iPhone 8 line-up therefore features smaller batteries than last year’s flagship Apple smartphones. In comparison, the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus feature 1,960mAh and 2,900mAh batteries, respectively.

Be that as it may, Apple claims its iPhone 8 devices offer “about the same” battery life as the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus when it comes to internet use, talk time, and audio and video playback over wireless.

It looks as if Apple has been able to eke out near identical battery life out of smaller batteries in the iPhone 8 devices thanks to the company’s new high performance A11 Bionic processor, which Apple claims is more power efficient than previous chipsets.

The smaller batteries also boast support for wireless Qi charging and a new fast-charge capability, which means the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus can be charged to 50 percent battery life in 30 minutes using Apple’s 29W, 61W, or 87W USB-C Power Adapters (sold separately and included with Apple’s latest MacBook and MacBook Pro models).

In addition to the battery details, the TENAA listings also appear to confirm the iPhone 8 has 2GB of RAM and the iPhone 8 Plus packs 3GB of RAM, as previously reported.

We’ll have to wait for the inevitable device teardowns for conclusive evidence about these specs. The new smartphones will be available to pre-order from September 15, with the devices launching on September 22. Prices start from $699 for the iPhone 8 and $799 for the iPhone 8 Plus.

Related Roundups: iPhone 7, iPhone 8
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Long range, low power sensors may lead to better health wearables

For small electronic devices and sensors like those found in wearables that can decipher biological information from sweat and contact lenses that can measure glucose levels, there are a couple of trade offs that limit their function. In order to be small and unobtrusive, they need to run on very little power. Otherwise, they require large batteries. But reduced power requirements also tend to limit how far these devices can send their signals, many of which have to be within a few feet of their receivers. But researchers at the University of Washington have overcome the need to compromise on communication distances and they presented the work today at UbiComp 2017.

“Until now, devices that can communicate over long distances have consumed a lot of power. The trade off in a low-power device that consumes microwatts of power is that its communication range is short,” Shyam Gollakota, an author of the paper, said in a statement. “Now we’ve shown that we can offer both, which will be pretty game-changing for a lot of different industries and applications.”

The team’s system is made up of three devices — one that emits a radio signal, sensors that can shove information into reflections of that signal and a receiver that can decode that information. And the innovation is in how they transmit those initial signals — spreading them across a range of frequencies. They show with this setup that their sensors can transmit data across a house, throughout an office area with 41 rooms and across an acre of farmland. They even put the sensors to work within a contact lens and in a patch that attached to the skin. They found they could reliably get signals from those sensors across a large room and a 3,328 square-foot atrium. The sensors use 1,000 times less power than similar current technologies and can be produced for 10 to 20 cents each. Further, because they designed the system to work with off-the-shelf receivers, that component remains inexpensive as well.

In theory, these sensors could be used to detect soil moisture across a plot of farmland or pollution in a city as well as in a number of biological- and health-related applications. The team is commercializing the system and hopes to have it ready for sale next spring.

Images: Dennis Wise / University of Washington

Source: University of Washington (1), (2)

Ford wants self-driving cars to communicate with flashing lights

Here’s a question: how does a self-driving car reveal its intentions to you without an audio cue? Humans can gesture when they let you cross the street, but autonomous vehicles don’t have that luxury. Ford and Virginia Tech think they have the answer. They’re testing a communication method that uses light signals from dedicated strips to indicate what self-driving cars are doing. If a driverless machine is yielding, for example, it could flash two white lights side to side. Ford has also developed cues for launching from a stop (a rapidly blinking white light) and an autonomous mode (a solid white light).

Ford chose this method in part due to familiarity. People are used to lights on cars, so it’s not a stretch to use them to indicate intent. And it’s learning this through first-hand experience on the streets. The automaker and Virginia Tech are collecting data on reactions by driving Transit Connect vans modified to look like they’re driverless (human pilots even disguise themselves as car seats) and record video from every direction to garner reactions.

This isn’t just a theoretical exercise. Ford is talking to multiple industry organizations and standards groups about formalizing these light signals so that every self-driving car could use them. And no, it hasn’t forgotten about the visually impaired — it has a separate project that would alert pedestrians who can’t see the signals. There’s no certainty that light signals will become ubiquitous, but conversations like this will likely be necessary as self-driving cars enter the mainstream and regulators call for safety measures.

Via: Reuters

Source: Ford