I won’t take the time to rehash the details of Apple inexplicably throwing the book at Basecamp and their new email app Hey less than a week before WWDC. However, I don’t see how discussing it can be avoided with things shaping up the way they are. I will never understand how tone-deaf this company can be, at times.
With WWDC only a week away, there are a couple of new Apple deals that have come to light. The first is their new no-interest Apple Card payment plans for Macs, iPads and their accessories, HomePods, Apple TV, AirPods Pro, AirPods and other devices. These new plans, which are similar to one unveiled for the iPhone last year, were rumored last week. While the Apple Watch is strangely absent, these plans should prove to be very popular and get more Apple fans interested in the Apple Card.
The suggestion was made earlier this week that Apple should buy the privacy-centered search engine Duck Duck Go. It came from Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi, who believes that the company can use such a move to keep the pressure on Google to continue to work with them in the future. They could also use the move to break away from Google and try to compete head-to-head with them. However, while Apple and Duck Duck Go have a shared interest in user privacy, I have my doubts that such a marriage is in either company’s best interest.
News of Apple’s latest Siri/AI/Machine Learning acquisition has been making the rounds this week. The most recent lucky new company, Inductiv, was developing systems to identify and remove errors in data sets to make machine learning and AI analysis easier. That was then. Now they are Apple’s latest acqui-hire.
While shipments of all tablets, including Apple’s iPads, were down over the first quarter of 2020, Digitimes Research is predicting a big rebound coming up. We should know more about the last three months after Apple announces its earnings later today, but what’s coming up sounds pretty exciting for iPad users and fans.
For a solid year, there have been rumors of multiple iPad Pro releases in 2020. Early on, they seemed to conflict with reports of the new 11″ and 12.9″ Pros that were released a month ago, but it eventually became clear that this other device would be something different. It would come with 5G and a new Mini-LED screen. Some of the rumors said it would only be available in the 12.9″ flavor. However, despite the small variations, most of the reports of this device were pretty similar and all were clear about a release in late 2020.
Mark Gurman and Company at Bloomberg were back in a big way today, predicting the design of the coming premium iPhone 12 models, as well as delivering some additional details on AirTags and the HomePods 2. Several of these details have already been covered extensively elsewhere today, so won’t bother rehashing them again. I am only interested in one at the moment.
Some of you may have noticed this before, but for those who aren’t familiar with this site, let me start off this article by saying that I’m a lifelong Windows user on the desktop side. This makes me a bit of a rare bird as a writer for an Apple site, but if you look at device ownership statistics, I actually write from a perspective that is quite common among iPad and iPhone users, overall.
I use Windows for work because I don’t have a choice. The apps I need to use for work aren’t available for any other OSs, so moving isn’t an option. It is what it is. While I don’t dislike Windows, I also don’t have any great love for it or devotion to it. Windows 10 gets the job done for work and that’s fine. I do think Microsoft has at least done a good job of making Windows 10 more secure and stable over the last few years.
As for the Mac, since I use my iPad Pro and iPhone for anything personal and have a work laptop with me most of the time, including at home, I just don’t have any incentive to introduce yet another OS into my life. I may try out a MacBook one of these days, but it seems like a lot of money to spend on something I don’t need.
I bring all of this up to say that, despite what you may think of the title of this article, I’m not just an Apple fan taking a cheap shot at Microsoft. I write this as a long-time Windows user who has gotten very used to disappointment over the last 10 years.
There have been rumors of Apple-branded wireless, over the ear headphones around for over a year now. There was some evidence that they might arrive alongside the new iPad Pros and MacBook Air a little over a month ago, but they slid through Apple’s first release window of the year along with the coming AirTags tracking devices.
Reading between the lines of some recent news, I can’t help but think that these new headphones will be arriving sooner rather than later.
Acqui-hires are nothing new in Silicon Valley. In fact, it seems like they happen on a daily basis if you are paying attention. However, while many of them either go unnoticed or barely warrant a blip on the tech news radar, there are some that make some bigger waves. Apple’s acquisition of weather service and app Dark Sky is definitely among the latter.
The iPad officially turned 10 years old yesterday! Hurray! A full decade has now passed and so much has changed with the hardware and software of the iPad and how I use them. It’s natural to look back after a milestone, so now is a good time to do just that. (You can see my previous strolls down memory lane here and here.)