Tim Cook Visits Beijing, Shares Ride to Apple Store Using Didi Chuxing
As planned, Apple CEO Tim Cook arrived in Beijing on Monday for his latest visit to China, where the iPhone maker has experienced a turbulent few months. Earlier today, he caught a ride using Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-sharing service that Apple just invested $1 billion in, alongside the Uber rival’s president Jean Liu.
Cook meets with Liu, left, and developers at an Apple Store in Beijing (Image: CNBC)
While an earlier report said Cook plans to meet with senior Chinese government officials to discuss a range of issues, including iBooks and iTunes Movies store closures and a recent patent dispute, the CEO has thus far met with App Store developers at an Apple Store in Beijing for a seminar hosted by Liu, per CNBC.
At the Apple store, Cook attended a seminar hosted by Didi Chuxing’s President Jean Lui, also known as Liu Qing, and attended by the founders and CEOs of some of China’s top app providers, including Groupon-like Meituan, picture-editing app MeituPic, news content provider Toutiao.com, culinary app DayDayCook and game developer Tap4Fun.
Cook, who shared photos of his visit on Twitter and Weibo, understands the importance of Apple maintaining a positive image in China.
“Taxi!” Caught a cab in Beijing this morning with Didi Chuxing’s Jean Liu. pic.twitter.com/Sl2xnzXtNY
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) May 16, 2016
Greater China, including Taiwan and Hong Kong, is Apple’s second largest market by revenue after the U.S. Last month, the iPhone maker reported that sales dropped 26 percent in the region in the second quarter, primarily due to declining iPhone sales as China’s smartphone market becomes increasingly saturated.
Cook has made similar visits to Beijing to meet with Chinese officials, carrier partners, and customers in both 2012 and 2014.
Tags: China, Tim Cook, Apple, Beijing, Didi Chuxing
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The good and bad sides of Apple’s classroom hardware initiative
In late 2014, Apple announced that it would donate iPads, Macs and Apple TVs to 114 “underserved” schools as a way of getting more technology in the hands of those who don’t have as much of a chance to use it. With the program well underway, The Wall Street Journal published a report on the good and bad sides thus far. While some studies have shown that schools in which students that heavily use technology actually do worse than students who do so moderately, a big part of that problem comes from not having curriculum developed that the hardware can enhance. In the case of Apple’s trial, the company is providing an employee to spend 17 days per year at each school to help build lesson plans that take advantage of the company’s hardware.
While it’s too early to tell with hard data how the initiative is fairing, teachers the WSJ spoke with in Yuma, Arizona have positive feelings thus far. Fourth-grade teacher Blanca Rivera has overcome her skepticism to the value of using hardware in the classroom, saying that it has enhanced and motivated her students. She also said that the sessions with Apple’s guide have definitely been helpful.
Naturally, there are downsides as well. The students can’t currently take their iPads home, meaning they aren’t useful for homework. Even if the students were allowed to bring the tablets out of the classroom, many of them don’t have internet connections at home. And the teachers have concerns about what’ll happen when the three-year program ends and the district can’t afford to buy hardware itself. Apple’s Eddie Cue believes that if the program proves to be valuable, finding continued funding won’t be difficult. “You have to solve the problem you have today and not worry about the problem you’re going to have tomorrow,” he said to the WSJ.
Of course, Apple has non-philanthropic motivations for making these donations. Recent estimates shows that more than half of the hardware being purchased for schools at this point are relatively inexpensive Google Chromebooks rather than Apple devices. The company has never been about pure marketshare, but there’s undoubtably a benefit to getting its hardware in the hands of as many students as possible to help convert them to future Apple products down the line.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Apple says a bug in iTunes might be deleting user’s libraries
Last week, a blog post by a designer named James Pinkstone made the rounds; in it, the writer claimed that Apple Music and iTunes teamed up to delete his 122GB of local music files and basically cause havoc with his library. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of oddness around how Apple Music plays with your local files, but it sounded more severe than most other reports. Now, Apple has confirmed to iMore that it is working on a patch to iTunes to fix the issue.
In the statement, Apple acknowledged that an “extremely small” number of customers were having their libraries disappear without their permission. Apple hasn’t been able to reproduce the bug itself, but nonetheless it says a patch to iTunes next week should help solve the problem. That’s little comfort to those who lost their local music libraries (back up your files, people), but it does serve as confirmation that this isn’t expected Apple Music behavior — the service is not intended to to overwrite your personal music library. With 13 million customers now, we’d probably be hearing from more upset users if this was happening more frequently.
Source: iMore
Everything you love will die, especially in tech
A little over a year ago, Microsoft bought beloved calendar app Sunrise. For the past 14 months or so, things have been more or less business as usual… at least for customers. But this week, the other shoe finally dropped: August 31st will be the last day that Sunrise exists as a standalone app. Sure, you could use Outlook, which by now shares some of the same DNA, but it’ll never be the same. Indeed, some of us here at Engadget are pretty heartbroken about it. Which got us thinking about all of the other apps and services that we loved and relied on that ended up being unceremoniously shuttered.
Sunrise
My life runs on Google Calendar. I use it everyday, not just for work meetings, but also to manage my personal life — everything from my gym schedule, hair appointments and dinners out with friends. But for years now, I’ve been unable to make Google Calendar play nice on my iPhone. The default iOS calendar just doesn’t seem to work with all of Google’s multiple shared calendars. This is especially true of the calendars we have on our corporate Google Apps account, which wouldn’t show up at all. A few years ago, someone suggested Sunrise to me as an alternative. And my life was saved.
Sunrise was beautiful. The UI made so much more sense. I loved the ability to just look at the week’s calendar at a glance, and I loved that I could integrate my personal and work calendars in a single interface. Sunrise really was the perfect Google Calendar app for me. What’s more, because Sunrise also worked on Android and the desktop, I could switch up my devices and still keep all my settings. Oh, and the integration with Google Maps was a godsend; it saved me from getting lost several times.
So when I heard Sunrise would be going away, my heart shattered. I know, it’s now been phased into the new Outlook app, but it just doesn’t look the same. I could also just use the recently launched Google Calendar app, but I find it sluggish (it takes forever for my calendars to sync) and the design is garish. It feels weird to say this about a calendar app, but Sunrise will be hard to replace. It was one of the few reliable constants in my life. I guess I’ll just have to make do with the default apps for now.
-Nicole Lee, Senior Editor
Hopstop
Why did Apple have to buy Hopstop? Don’t answer that. I know why they did: to help make their crappy maps app better. But man, what a shame. I first heard about Hopstop, the website offering subway directions, back in 2006 — a time when the web itself was still quaintly referred to as “new media.” Even as a lifelong New Yorker, I found the site useful: Though I have a good idea of which lines cover which areas, I haven’t committed the exact schedules to memory, nor am I always aware of service disruptions. Even now, I need something like this to figure out exactly how late I can sleep in on a Monday morning and still make the subway for my 6:30am workout class. (Hashtag humblebrag.) Obviously too, I need subway directions when I’m traveling strange cities, though back in 2006, Hopstop’s selection was admittedly more limited.
After Apple bought the service in 2013, I could no longer use the app on my Moto X. The standalone website has been shut down too, which is a bummer when I’m using a desktop machine. (Using Maps for OS X is annoying, since it’s slow to recalculate my route when I plug in custom arrival or departure times.) I’ve since switched to the iPhone 6, but even now, there’s no standalone app; just Apple Maps, with transit directions built in. That’s a shame, because even after all the improvements Apple has made to its once-terrible maps program, it’s still not my go-to. Worse still, the transit directions in Apple Maps seem to offer less detailed information than I was accustomed to in Hopstop proper, especially where train timetables are concerned.
Fortunately, as a famous man once said, good artists copy, and great artists steal. Today, in the year 2016, Google Maps has detailed transit directions of its own — and I don’t need an Android phone to access them.
-Dana Wollman, Managing Editor
Glitch
Most of the staff here at Engadget was pretty pleased when we switched to Slack for our work chats. It has so many features baked in that I’m not sure that any of us could ever go back. And yet, there are moments where I’m nostalgic for a world without Slack, because it would mean we’d still have Glitch. Glitch was a browser-based MMORPG that eschewed combat in favor of exploration, crafting and just generally being a nice person. It made mundane tasks like mining and farming irresistibly adorable.
It was also super weird: You were living inside a giant’s brain. But there was a subway. And you could milk butterflies. You got butter by shaking the milk. Eventually you’d get cheese? Don’t ask me to make sense of the game’s world or mechanics; I just enjoyed wandering around planting and harvesting crops, shaking chickens for grain and just amassing massive piles of odd virtual crap. Alas, it wasn’t exactly the sort of runaway success developer Tiny Speck needed to stay afloat. So, it shut the game down and shifted its focus to a chat program the team created while developing Glitch. And, given how well Slack has worked out I don’t blame the company at all. But man, there are times when I really, really miss milking butterflies.
-Kris Naudus, Senior Database Editor
Google Reader
Nary a day goes by that I don’t mourn the loss of my beloved Google Reader. Sure, there are countless alternatives with annoyingly similar names — Digg Reader, AOL Reader, Inoreader, Old Reader, (just) Reeder — but none of them have really captured my heart the way Google’s RSS app did. There was something elegant about its simplicity. It was reliable, fast and made it easy to keep up on the hundreds of sites in my feeds (at its peak, somewhere around 480). I knew all the keyboard shortcuts by heart and could plow through thousands of articles, opening the interesting ones to read later in a background tab, in mere minutes. It was all just muscle memory.
But, Google didn’t love Reader the way I (or the rest of its fans) did. In July 2013 it died for good. In the aftermath those previously mentioned alternatives scrambled to pick up the pieces. I took my business to Feedly, but honestly it’s never felt like more than a rebound. I could never love it the way I loved Google Reader. It left me out in the cold and I’ve never really gotten over it.
-Terrence O’Brien, Managing Editor
Carousel
I loved Dropbox’s Carousel. Its auto-upload function spirited my photos from my phone once I connected to WiFi, and the app interface had a tantalizing dial that you used to literally roll back in time through your photos. It was far more visually appealing than the original Dropbox photo upload option — and so very scrollable. I already paid for plenty of storage and often used the app for work-based photo sharing. This just brought my world of ramen photography and karaoke videos into the same cloud space.
Long before Facebook made flashback pics a plague on all of our newsfeeds, Carousel would corral weekly selections of your snapshots from yesteryear. It launched on Android and iOS in September 2014 but, by mid 2015, Dropbox was already planning a funeral. The company said it was putting its energy into sharing and collaboration features in the primary app, as well as newer work collaboration-based apps like Paper. Dropbox could have left Carousel to stand on its own. It was less serious, less business-y than the company’s main app.
Whatever Dropbox’s reasons for ending the photosharing fun-fair, there’s was one rival that probably made the decision to pull the plug easier: Google Photos.
It offered free unlimited (with strings attached) photo storage, automagically backed up photos to your Google account, and crammed in a ton of sharing features that were easy to access — even on an iPhone.
Basically, it became a better Carousel. It pulled in geotag data, face recognition and other machine learning tricks to group your photos together. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty on-point. I didn’t have to scroll through my iPhone camera roll to find pics of my reclusive brother, Google Photo automatically pulled them all together. It would also auto-create gifs of burst photo sets.
They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. Well, Carousel was flattered to death.
-Mat Smith, Senior Editor
Apple’s bet on Uber’s Chinese rival makes plenty of sense
Early this morning, Apple announced it’s spending $1 billion for a stake in the Chinese Uber-like ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing, purportedly for “strategic reasons.” But what is Didi, and why is Apple investing so heavily to get a piece of it?
To call Didi Chuxing an Uber competitor would be selling it short. While it offers broadly the same service, Didi is far more successful than the American startup is in China. It currently has an 87 percent share of the market, while Uber has struggled to make a big impact. Didi has also made some small investments in Lyft, a US-based Uber rival. As Didi is valued at over $25 billion, this new investment isn’t necessarily a game-changer for either company, but its secondary effects might be far stronger.
China is Apple’s second-biggest market
Apple’s focus on China is clear. After a few years building its presence in the country, it’s now Apple’s second-biggest market. In its last quarterly report, Apple revealed that China accounts for 25 percent of its revenue, up from 19 percent just three years ago. With over 1.7 billion people calling the country home, Apple obviously thinks the figure has more room to grow, and this deal can help spur that expansion. Announcing the deal, CEO Tim Cook told Reuters it offered “a chance to learn more about certain segments” of the Chinese market.” It won’t cost the company much, either. Since it’s got plenty of cash stored overseas that’s too expensive (in tax) to bring back, spending a billion dollars on a reasonably safe investment is a sound use of funds.
Analysts speculate this investment might help quell some of Apple’s regulatory issues in the country. China recently pulled the plug on the iBooks and iTunes movie stores — which only launched last September — prompting suggestions that authorities were protecting local businesses from foreign elements. By investing in a local giant (that’s going to be fighting Uber for years to come) Apple ingratiates itself to government officials, important local business people and the population as a whole.
Of course, Apple’s also interested in another area right now: cars. Barely a week goes by between rumors of the company’s progress in the field, with more recent articles asserting that it will build its car in Germany. When that’ll be ready is all speculation right now, but The Wall Street Journal claims Apple is targeting a launch in 2019. It’s widely reported that any vehicle the company produces will have self-driving capabilities, and today’s Didi investment adds a twist to the autonomous Apple car story.
Uber’s end-game is self-driving taxis
Closer to home, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has made no secret of the fact that the endgame for his company is self-driving taxis. Of course, we’re likely decades away from that happening on a global scale, but we could see small autonomous fleets operating in some areas far sooner. Google, a leader in publicly-visible self-driving tech, is also chasing the same goal. While the two are obviously competing right now, Google owns a sizeable — maybe two or three percent — stake in Uber after investing very early and has a place on the company’s board. The prospect of the two working together isn’t unthinkable, especially if one of the world’s largest companies is focused on the same market.
And Uber is looking for collaborators. According to a report from The Information, Kalanick had planned a meeting at Apple headquarters this week to discuss “future partnership opportunities.” Whether that meeting is still on the cards after Apple sided with its biggest competitor in China is unclear.
Regardless of what it’s planning with cars, Apple is definitely in the navigation business. It offers mapping services for iOS and OS X devices, and is very keen on you using CarPlay in your vehicle. And just as important as the algorithms that power navigation systems is the information they have access to. By partnering with Didi, Apple could potentially tap into billions of miles of Chinese driving data each year, which would allow it to offer improved navigation or other services in the future.
LeEco envisions its LeSEE self-driving car as a taxi.
The same algorithm/data principle also applies to self-driving cars. Google logs millions of autonomous miles not just to fine-tune its code, but also to gather data on road layouts, traffic flow and pedestrian or vehicular behavior. Obviously Didi’s taxis aren’t autonomous yet — although tech giant LeEco thinks it’s getting close — but they could nonetheless gather valuable data for Apple.
To be frank, a lot about this Didi deal is uncertain. But we know a few things for sure. We know that Apple wants to learn more about the Chinese market. We know that it’s spent $1 billion to do so. We know that that $1 billion went to a company that is currently beating Uber in China and has aspirations to do the same elsewhere, whether alone or through investing in companies like Lyft. Everything else is guesswork. Regardless, for speculators, and even those of us without a horse in the race, the next few years are certainly shaping up to be a fun ride.
Apple invests $1 billion in Chinese ride-hailing service Didi
In a bid to better understand China, Apple has announced a $1 billion investment in Chinese Uber-like service, Didi Chuxing. The country’s homegrown ride-hailing service already has plenty of cash, and was recently valued at over $25 billion. According to Reuters, it has 87 percent of the market of private car hailing across China. Apple CEO Tim Cook said the investment would help the company better understand the Chinese market — oh and it’s about cars.
“We are making the investment for a number of strategic reasons, including a chance to learn more about certain segments of the China market,” he said. “Of course, we believe it will deliver a strong return for our invested capital over time as well.” In case you forgot, Apple is also looking into cars, making several moves in auto technology — this could help in this regard. A major investment by Apple in a Chinese-based company could also help ameliorate the issues it’s had dealing with the country. Like this, this, or this.
The Chinese ride-hailing firm said it was the biggest single investment it’s ever received. Didi itself is the result of China’s two biggest ride-hailing services, Didi and Kuaidi, merging together. The company has also invested in Lyft.
Source: Reuters
Dark Sky brings its ‘hyperlocal’ weather forecasts to Android
Dark Sky has been a darling of the iOS app scene years. It has a nice design, and all the features you’d expect from a weather app, but its unique selling point is “hyperlocal” reports that can pinpoint rain to the minute. To do this, it “statistically aggregates” data from 19 meteorological sources, as well as from users themselves. Although the competition has improved in recent years, and despite being a paid app in a sea of free alternatives, it remains on many a “best weather app” list.
The Android app can offer everything the iPhone one does — barring the option to send barometric data to improve local reports — but whether it does will depend on if you pay or not. While the iOS app is a $3.99 one-off purchase, Dark Sky on Android is a free app with a paid subscription option. For free, you get current conditions, a 24-hour forecast, a 7-day forecast and weather maps. So… it’s basically any weather app.
If you’re willing to pay $2.99 per year, you’ll get access to the stuff that makes Dark Sky worth talking about in the first place: hyperlocal minute-by-minute forecasts, notifications and alerts. You’ll also get something that iOS users won’t: a weather widget for your home screen.
Dark Sky admits the pricing scheme is “a bit of an experiment.” In order to win users over, it’s offering a two-week free trial for the premium features, in the hope that they’ll be hooked by the time it comes to actually paying.
There’s one other thing worth remembering about Dark Sky: it’s not a worldwide app. While it can offer basic forecasts for anywhere on the globe, its local reports are mostly restricted to the US, the UK, Ireland and parts of Canada and Australia. If you’re not sure if you’re covered, you can type your location into Dark Sky’s Forecast site — if you get a “local” tab, you’re good to go.
Apple Named World’s Most Valuable Brand Despite Recent Slowdown
Apple has been named the world’s most valuable brand in 2016, according to the latest Forbes rankings, despite posting its first negative-growth quarter since 2003 with declining sales across its iPhone, iPad, and Mac product lines.
Apple’s recent slowdown was not enough to prevent the company from securing the number one position in the list for the sixth consecutive year, ahead of rivals Google and Microsoft. Forbes placed Apple’s brand value at $154.1 billion, up 6-percent from 2015 and nearly double Google’s value of $82.5 billion.
Coca-Cola, Facebook, Toyota, IBM, Disney, McDonald’s, GE, Samsung, Amazon, AT&T, BMW, and Cisco rounded out the top fifteen. Apple Watch fashion partner Hermès ranked 48th on the list. Other notable companies listed include Intel (17th), Verizon (21st), HP (38th), Sony (76th), Netflix (79th), and T-Mobile (93rd).
Apple remains the world’s most valuable company with a market cap of over $510 billion, despite its stock being down around 30-percent from May 2015 highs. Google parent company Alphabet trails closely behind, and briefly surpassed Apple as the world’s most valuable company in February.
Apple also topped Interbrand’s most valuable brand list in 2013, 2014, and 2015.
Tags: Apple, forbes.com
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Apple Unable to Restore Data From iPhone of Florida Teen Lost at Sea
Apple has been unsuccessful in its attempts to retrieve data from a waterlogged iPhone that belonged to one of two Florida teens who were lost at sea last summer, reports ABC News affiliate WPBF 25.
14-year-old Austin Stephanos’ iPhone 6 was found in an abandoned boat off the Bermuda coast in March, eight months after he and friend Perry Cohen, also 14, went missing during a fishing expedition that began at Palm Beach County, Florida, in June 2015.
The two boys’ parents, who had been locked in a court battle over the iPhone’s fate, recently agreed to hand it over to Apple after the company said it would do everything it could to recover information from it in the hope that it would shed light on the circumstances of the teens’ disappearance.
With the iPhone in Apple’s possession, a dedicated forensics team disassembled the damaged device, cleaned its components and performed a chemical report as part of an exhaustive diagnostics and repair process. But despite the team of engineers working “around the clock”, Apple has been unable to glean any data from it.
The news was released by Austin’s father, Blu Stephanos, via a statement read by the family’s attorney, Michael Pike. “Although they were unable to restore the phone to a functional state, I want to thank Apple, Inc. for their hard work and generous assistance,” Stephanos said.
“If the FBI turned to Apple when they needed help, I see no reason to doubt that every possible means was employed to get Austin’s phone working again. It’s our understanding that Apple had a team assigned to the iPhone around the clock, and for that we are truly grateful.”
Stephanos’ statement went on to suggest he would keep the iPhone as a memento of his son, but the parents of Perry Cohen seem intent on exploring other options.
Pam Cohen, Perry’s mother, issued a subsequent statement which likewise thanked Apple for its efforts, but she also claimed that Apple had offered to hand the phone to other experts in the field who may be able to pick up where Apple left off and continue the work.
“We look forward to working cooperatively with Austin’s family toward this transition,” said Cohen. “We are not giving up on the iPhone’s potential for evidence until all viable efforts have been exhausted.”
Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
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One of Apple’s earliest Siri engineers reportedly leaves for GE
Apple hasn’t had a great time holding on to the original Siri team, and we don’t just mean the founders — there are precious few of those core members left. And today, we’re learning that one of those last remaining pioneers may have walked out the door. The Information’s sources claim that Darren Haas, a Siri co-founder and Apple’s head of compute-focused cloud engineering, has left the company to join GE a few weeks after one of his fellow Siri alumni, Steve D’Aurora, reportedly did the same. The two are believed to be working on a similar cloud platform at their new employer.
There’s no official confirmation yet (both employees still list themselves as Apple employees on LinkedIn), so take this with a grain of salt. We’ve reached out to Apple to confirm the move. If true, though, it’s not exactly heartening news for the team at 1 Infinite Loop. While this is unlikely to be a fatal blow when many people are still working on Siri, it’s a symbolic loss for a company that was one of the first to embrace intelligent voice commands in the mobile world.
Source: The Information
AIVAnet 