Apple names Jeff Williams as its first COO since Tim Cook

Apple has just named its first Chief Operating Officer since Tim Cook took over as CEO in 2011. Longtime Apple veteran Jeff Williams (who joined the company in 1998) is now COO, reporting directly to Cook. Additionally, senior VP of marketing Phil Schiller has seen his duties expand, as well — he’s now the leader of the App Store, a responsibility that was previously under the purview of Eddy Cue.

Williams had previously worked as Apple’s VP of operations, so a move into the COO role is entirely logical. He’s been described as “Tim Cook’s Tim Cook,” a recognition of both Cook’s excellence in making Apple into product-shipping juggernaut it is now as well as Williams’ importance in continuing that as Cook moved into the CEO role. In addition to his operations duties, Williams also oversees the Apple Watch and health-related initiatives, including ResearchKit.

The expansion of Schiller’s duties is also a notable change at Apple — the company says that, with his leadership of the App Store, Schiller is in charge of “nearly all developer-related functions at Apple.” It sounds like the vision is to have Schiller help continue to unify Apple’s four platforms, including Mac OS X, iOS, WatchOS and the newly-introduced tvOS. Schiller will continue to keep his product marketing duties, so expect to see him continue to pop out onstage to introduce new Macs and iPhones at press events in the foreseeable future.

Schiller taking the App Store off Eddy Cue’s plate means Cue will likely be able to continue focusing more on Apple’s various commerce channels, including the iTunes Store, Apple Music and Apple Pay as well as Siri, Apple Maps, iCloud and various other Apple software and services. Cue has developed a reputation for being able to jump in and help improve whatever Apple-made internet service needs help, so taking the stable App Store off his plate seems like a logical move.

Lastly, Apple announced a few new members to its leadership team. Johny Srouji, an eight-year Apple veteran, is now the company’s senior VP for hardware technologies, and newcomer Tor Myhren will join in Q1 of 2016 as VP of marketing communications, reporting to Cook. While Srouji might not be a familiar name, his mark is all over the company — he joined in 2008 to lead development of the A4 chip, Apple’s first in-house silicon design for the iPhone. Since then, the A-series of chips has been a hallmark of the iPhone and iPad.

Myhren will be succeed Hiroki Asai, an 18-year Apple veteran who worked in graphic design and market communications. The press release says that he’ll be in charge of Apple’s advertising efforts, a pretty major responsibility for a company as well-known for its ads as Apple.

[Image credit: AP/Eric Risberg]

Source: Apple

NFL Solicits Apple to Stream ‘Thursday Night Football’ Next Season

The NFL has solicited Apple and other digital companies, including Amazon, Google and Yahoo, about streaming the full “Thursday Night Football” schedule online on a non-exclusive basis next season, according to SportsBusiness Daily.

The league also sent bidding proposals to CBS, ESPN, Fox, NBC and Turner Sports for traditional TV rights to the “Thursday Night Football” package, which is currently split between CBS and the NFL Network for the ongoing 2015 season.

The league’s initial plan would have the digital streams serve as a simulcast of the television production — with the same ads and in-game production features. […] It is not clear how much the league is expecting to make from the streaming rights, but several sources said the digital streams would not diminish the TV rights fee, especially if the digital streams carried the same advertising.

While there is no certainty that Apple is interested in the NFL’s digital rights, online streaming is inevitably the future of sports broadcasting as more cable subscribers cut the cord. NFL offers a live streaming app Game Pass, but it does not include “Thursday Night Football” and its selection of games is limited compared to rival platforms such as MLB At Bat, NBA League Pass and NHL GameCenter.

Yahoo could be a frontrunner to secure the digital rights, having paid an estimated $15 million to exclusively live stream a 2015 regular season game between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars at London’s Wembley Stadium. Yahoo said it saw 33.6M streams of the game and up to 15.2M unique viewers tuned in to the live stream on the web, tablets and smartphones.

CBS currently produces all sixteen “Thursday Night Football” games, anchored by sportscasters Jim Nantz and Phil Simms, as part of its estimated $300 million NFL deal. NFL Network simulcasts the games and carries eight games exclusively as part of its current partnership with CBS, which began in the 2014 season. Most games kick off at 8:25 p.m. Eastern Time.

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Jeff Williams Named Apple COO, Phil Schiller Takes Over App Store Leadership

Apple has announced an executive shakeup today that sees Jeff Williams promoted to Chief Operating Officer and marketing chief Phil Schiller taking over App Store leadership across all Apple platforms.

Williams, who joined Apple in 1998 as head of worldwide procurement, becomes Apple’s fourth C-level executive alongside CEO Tim Cook, Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and Chief Design Officer Jony Ive.

As vice president of operations since 2004, his responsibilities included overseeing Apple’s supply chain, service and support, and the company’s social responsibility initiatives protecting its employees worldwide. He also continues to supervise development of the Apple Watch and ResearchKit.

Cook called Williams “hands-down the best operations executive I’ve ever worked with.”

“We are fortunate to have incredible depth and breadth of talent across Apple’s executive team. As we come to the end of the year, we’re recognizing the contributions already being made by two key executives,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Jeff is hands-down the best operations executive I’ve ever worked with, and Johny’s team delivers world-class silicon designs which enable new innovations in our products year after year.”

App Store leadership previously belonged to Apple services chief Eddy Cue, who continues to oversee the iTunes Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, Apple Maps, iAd, iCloud and iWork apps. Schiller’s expanded role will be focused on strategies to extend Apple’s ecosystem across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV, alongside his traditional marketing responsibilities.

Cook continued, “In addition, Phil is taking on new responsibilities for advancing our ecosystem, led by the App Store, which has grown from a single, groundbreaking iOS store into four powerful platforms and an increasingly important part of our business. And I’m incredibly happy to welcome Tor Myhren, who will bring his creative talents to our advertising and marcom functions.”

Apple also announced that Johny Srouji is joining the company’s executive team as Senior Vice President for Hardware Technologies, and that Tor Myhren will join Apple from Grey Group in the first calendar quarter of 2016 as Vice President of Marketing Communications, reporting to CEO Tim Cook.

Srouji joined Apple in 2008 to lead development of the A4 chip, and now oversees the company’s silicon and hardware technologies, including batteries, application processors, storage controllers, sensors silicon, display silicon and other chipsets across Apple’s entire product line. He previously worked at Intel and IBM in the areas of processor development and design.

Myhren will be responsible for Apple’s advertising and marketing communication efforts across a range of creative disciplines, including video, motion graphics, interactive web design, packaging and retail store displays. The experienced advertising executive will succeed Hiroki Asai, who is retiring after 18 years in graphic design and marketing communications roles at Apple.

The leadership changes are reflected on Apple’s executive profiles page.

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Apple Music Estimated to Have 8M Paying Subscribers, Predicted to Hit 20M by End of 2016

Apple’s streaming music service Apple Music will have 8 million subscribers by the time 2015 comes to a close, according to music business analyst Mark Mulligan (via Music Business Worldwide). Mulligan also forecast that Apple Music should hit 20 million total users by around this time next year, ultimately making it the second most popular streaming music service behind Spotify.

“Apple might not have found the subscription market quite the plain sailing it had anticipated but it has still managed to establish itself as the second player with astounding pace. Its platform and marketing assets are well known, but its clear commitment to making Apple Music work have surprised some.”

As Mulligan pointed out, however, the exact numbers in his prediction can vary as we head into the new year. With Apple Music’s three-month free trial that could have led to some accidental paid subscribers and Spotify Premium’s $1 a month three-month trial system, the analyst stated that there are enough “wildcards” in the equation to unbalance his prediction.

If the analyst’s estimation of 8 million Apple Music subscribers by the New Year becomes true, that would be about 1.5 million growth during the fall, after Tim Cook confirmed the service had 6.5 million in October. Normally $10/month, Mulligan believes if Apple has trouble with getting subscribers to stick around, they could return to convincing record labels in lowering that monthly cost.

“If Apple finds growth tough going, expect it to throw everything it has got at getting the labels to agree to lower price point products so it can open up large chunks of the iTunes music customer base.”

In the meantime, Apple is pushing Apple Music onto more supported third-party products, including a beta for Sonos speakers that brought support for the streaming music service onto the speakers for the first time. The Cupertino company is also still dealing in exclusives, recently announcing a project with Taylor Swift that will include a made-for-Apple Music concert film debuting on the service this Sunday, December 20. Recently, Apple began rewarding its retail workers with gifts for the holidays, which included a free nine-month subscription to Apple Music.

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Apple Seeds First OS X 10.11.3 El Capitan Beta to Developers

Apple today seeded the first beta of an upcoming OS X 10.11.3 El Capitan update to developers for testing purposes, just over one week after releasing the second OS X El Capitan update, OS X 10.11.2. OS X 10.11.2 was a minor update that introduced several bug fixes and performance improvements for Wi-Fi connectivity, Handoff, and Airdrop.

The new OS X 10.11.3 beta, build 15D9c, can be downloaded through the Apple Developer Center.

It is not known what improvements the third update to OS X El Capitan will bring, but like prior updates, it’s likely to focus on security enhancements, performance improvements, and bug fixes to address issues have been discovered since the release of OS X 10.11.2.

We’ll update this post with any changes that are discovered in the beta.

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Apple Encourages App Store Developers to Adopt 3D Touch

Apple has sent an email to its Developer Program members encouraging them to find out how their iOS apps can take advantage of 3D Touch on iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, signaling that the company would like to increase App Store adoption of the all-new pressure-sensitive feature.

3D Touch is a pressure-sensitive display technology that enables iPhone users to make “Peek” and “Pop” gestures to access Quick Action shortcut menus, preview content within apps or animate Live Photos. The feature is one of the biggest new additions to the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus released in September.

Nevertheless, nearly three months later, a number of developers are only now beginning to update their apps with 3D Touch support. 3D Touch is also not as natural of an experience as multi-touch for some iPhone users, and it could take some time before the new feature becomes registered in muscle memory.

MacRumors shared a poll with our Twitter followers asking if they use 3D Touch, and the results are expectedly mixed. The poll, which has received nearly 4,000 votes and counting, will be live until December 17 at around 10:30 AM Pacific, so be sure to participate if you own an iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus.

Do you use 3D Touch?

— MacRumors.com (@MacRumors) December 16, 2015

http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsRecently, a number of popular iPhone apps were updated with 3D Touch support, including Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Evernote, Facebook Messenger and Spotify. Other popular apps using 3D Touch are listed below, and more can be tracked on our sister website AppShopper by searching for “3D Touch.”

The list above will be periodically updated with other popular 3D Touch apps.

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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Facebook Messenger, and Evernote Gain 3D Touch in iOS Updates

A couple of popular iOS apps have been getting updates for 3D Touch over the past few days, introducing the new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus feature into experiences like Facebook Messenger, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, and Evernote.

Most recently, Facebook Messenger updated its iOS app with 3D Touch, letting users choose from a quick-select menu and jump directly into a message thread with the three most recent contacts that they have been chatting with, or create a new thread entirely. Along with a streamlined tweaking to contacts and some winter-themed stickers, that was the extent of Facebook Messenger’s 52.0 update. Evernote’s version update earlier in the week was similarly 3D Touch-focused, with Peek and Pop introduced on note lists and search results within the note-taking app.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for iPhone had a much larger spruce-up, with a new update that grants users direct access to the app’s camera thanks to 3D Touch. Adobe further expanded 3D Touch’s abilities to the inside of the app, granting users access to Peek and Pop when browsing their camera roll’s grid view. The 2.1.0 update also brought about various usability improvements, iPad Pro support, and even a new Notification Center widget.

Recent reports in the 3D Touch field have suggested that Apple is working on a scalable version of the tech to fit screens as large as the iPad Pro, but it still may not make it to the iPad Air 3. The feature was one of the selling points of October’s iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, granting users the first new input alternative since the original iPhone and fueling new software innovations like Live Photos.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for iPhone [Direct Link], Messenger [Direct Link], and Evernote [Direct Link] are all available on the App Store for free.

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Apple shutters Topsy, the social analytics firm it acquired in 2013

Apple is shutting down analytics firm Topsy Labs two years after snapping it up for over $200 million. Unlike Hopscotch, though — the mass transit directions and guides it bought in 2013 and shuttered in September — it’s not quite clear what Topsy’s technology was ever used for. The San Francisco firm created tools that allowed users to search and extract data from Twitter and other social media services. Those include keyword trackers and products that can determine whether a particular topic is being talked about positively or negatively on social media.

Due to the nature of Topsy’s work, it’s very much possible that Apple used its technology to improve the search function on iOS. As 9to5mac noted, Cupertino introduced “proactive” search with iOS 9 that enables Siri, Calendar and other third-party applications to conjure up more accurate results. Unfortunately, we might never know for sure what Topsy’s role at Apple was, as the firm has already said goodbye on Twitter.

We’ve searched our last tweet.

— Topsy (@Topsy) December 16, 2015

Via: MacRumors, 9to5mac