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iPad ~ small, lightweight' slim. But can you swim with it?

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Author Topic: iPad ~ small, lightweight' slim. But can you swim with it?  (Read 849 times)
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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #25 on: September 29, 2012, 11:37:13 am »


Apple CEO apologises for Maps flaws

Reuters | 11:13AM - Saturday, 29 September 2012

SORRY ABOUT THAT!SORRY: Apple CEO Tim Cook has apologised to customers frustrated with glaring errors in its new Maps service. — Photo: Reuters.
SORRY: Apple CEO Tim Cook has apologised to customers frustrated with glaring errors in its new Maps service.
 — Photos: Reuters.


APPLE INC. Chief Executive Tim Cook has apologised to customers frustrated with glaring errors in its new Maps service and, in an unusual move for the consumer giant, directed them to rival services such as Google Inc's Maps instead.

The rare apology follows Apple's launch of its own mapping service earlier this month, when it began selling the iPhone 5 and rolled out iOS 6, the highly anticipated update to its mobile software platform.

Users complained that the new Maps service — based on Dutch navigation equipment and digital map maker TomTom NV's data — contained geographical errors and gaps in information, and that it lacked features that made Google Maps so popular from public transit directions to traffic data and street-view pictures.

"We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better," Cook said in a letter to customers released on its website, adding that the company "fell short" of its commitment to deliver "the best experience possible to our customers."

Unusually, he suggested that customers download rival mapping services available in Apple's App Store while the company improves the product.

"While we're improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app," he said in the letter.

Apple is typically loathe to tout rival services and the contrite apology by Cook is an indication of how Apple is changing under the chief executive who took over last year from co-founder Steve Jobs just before his death. It also took the additional step of prominently displaying the rival services on its Apps Store.

"It is a bit unusual but at the same time, Tim is keeping Apple's commitment to provide the best user experience for customers," Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu said. "A key reason for Apple's success is keeping customers happy so we think this is a good move."

"People forget that Google Maps started out inferior to Mapquest and Yahoo Maps," he added.

Apple's home-grown Maps feature — stitched together by acquiring mapping companies and data from many providers including Waze, Intermap, DigitalGlobe and Urban Mapping — was introduced with much fanfare in June by software chief Scott Forstall. It was billed as one of the key highlights of the updated iOS6 software.

But errors and omissions in the maps service quickly emerged after the software was rolled out, ranging from misplaced buildings and mislabelled cities to duplicated geographical features.




NEW APPLE

The last time Apple faced such widespread criticism was in 2010, when users complained of signal reception issues on the then-new iPhone 4 model.

A defiant Jobs at the time rejected any suggestion the iPhone 4's design was flawed, but offered consumers free phone cases at a rare, 90-minute press conference called to address those complaints.

While Apple fixed the issue, Jobs had apologized to users only after he was specifically asked if he was sorry. He also said the issue was shared by all the major manufacturers, naming rivals Research in Motion, Samsung Electronics and HTC Corp.

Cook himself played a key role in convincing Jobs to tackle the negative publicity that arose around that issue, something he was initially reluctant to do, according to his biographer.

"Finally Tim Cook was able to shake him out of his lethargy," Walter Isaacson said in his biography on the late Silicon Valley icon. "He quoted someone as saying that Apple was becoming the new Microsoft, complacent and arrogant. The next day Jobs changed his attitude."

It remains to be seen how fast Apple can fix the mapping glitches. Jobs had been in a similar position when he allowed email synchronization software MobileMe to launch in 2008, to deadly reviews. The mercurial CEO took the group to task for it and replaced the group's head. The service is now folded into the iCloud product.

Mapping is a complex process that takes a lot of resources and years to perfect, said Marcus Thielking, co-founder of Skobbler, maker of the popular GPS Navigation 2 app, built using the crowdsourced OpenStreetMap platform.

"It helps a lot if you have great data to start with," he said, adding that it appears that different database were thrown together in building Apple Maps. "They (Apple) can offer incremental updates and that's what they will do."

Cook said that more than 100 million iOS devices are using the new Apple Maps and that the more people use Maps, the better it will get. He also offered some hints on why the company decided to remove Google Maps.

Apple launched the Google-powered Maps "initially with the first version of iOS" and created a home-grown version of the service as it wanted to provide more features, Cook said.

"As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better Maps including features such as turn-by-turn directions, voice integration, Flyover and vector-based maps," he said in the letter.

Google provides turn-by-turn navigation on Android-based devices but the popular feature was not available for Apple devices. Apple Maps replaced Google Maps in iOS 6 and the Google service is now only available through a browser.


http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/gadgets/7747268/Apple-CEO-apologises-for-Maps-flaws
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Magoo
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« Reply #26 on: September 29, 2012, 04:31:43 pm »

Whatever rips your shorts TJ.  Never mind the width, feel the quality.  Grin Wink
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« Reply #27 on: September 29, 2012, 05:20:36 pm »


Portable Apple products (iWANT for suckers) aren't even capable of handling uncompressed Linear PCM audio files.

What sort of mickey-mouse devices can only handle compressed audio crap?

Answer: Apple products.
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« Reply #28 on: September 29, 2012, 06:54:44 pm »


Spending money on iTHINGIES is like....


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« Reply #29 on: September 29, 2012, 11:49:37 pm »



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dragontamer
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« Reply #30 on: September 30, 2012, 12:15:31 am »

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Newtown-Fella
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« Reply #31 on: September 30, 2012, 12:27:44 am »

well when i was upgrading recently i asked the guy in the store about an ihone ....

he rolled his eyes so we continued discussing the Samsung Galaxy S 3 which i was given for free and in very happy with ....

friends with iPhones have dropped them and gone Samsung Galaxy S 3 as well

apparently the Apple operating system is slower than Android  and Windows phones ...

now they cant get maps to work properly whats next ...... ?

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dragontamer
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« Reply #32 on: September 30, 2012, 12:38:23 am »

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Magoo
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« Reply #33 on: September 30, 2012, 08:21:39 am »

 Grin Grin Grin   Good one DT.
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« Reply #34 on: September 30, 2012, 12:29:41 pm »


I don't do Facebook (I have a Facebook account, but that is only to stop anyone else from using my identity); I don't have an iPhone (or any smartphone); I do use WiFi, but I turn it off more often than I have it turned on, and although both of my laptops can Skype, I don't.

I can easily escape from the bullshit & get lost....and I do it all the time....




From the Los Angeles Times....

Hard to escape in a world of Facebook, iPhones, Wi-Fi and Skype

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:03AM - Wednesday, August 08, 2012



IN OUR connected world, you can’t hide unless you run.

On Tuesday, a good friend of mine got an email from the chairman of the Washington state Democratic Party informing her that county records showed her mail-in ballot for the primary election had not yet been received. Clearly, turning out the vote is no longer just a generalized effort of making phone calls or walking door-to-door. Now, each one of us is a virtual GPS point on a political grid and the decision to vote is not a private affair.

Politics is no different than any other realm of activity in our connected world. In this new world, there are a host of advantages provided by the communication tools we employ — Wi-Fi, Twitter, Facebook, iPads, smartphones and all the rest. If there is a downside, it is that there is no escape. Or, more precisely, we forget how to escape and why we should.

Right now, I am on a short vacation with good friends. Outside, there is a beautiful lake. Boats and jet skis are cutting through the water. The air is warm; the sun is bright. But here I am sitting inside typing away on a laptop. One of my friends is downstairs calling into a meeting at the Gates Foundation. Another friend just posted a column for the New York Times. Two decades ago when we started vacationing together, we were forced to leave our jobs behind. Our only access to the outside world was a pay phone up the hill. Work had to be completed before we left home. Now, we just pack up our computers and bring work with us.

When I was in graduate school in England back in the mid-1980s, my only contact with my parents was through an occasional letter and a very occasional and expensive telephone call. I felt very far away, which could be lonely, but also liberating. When my own daughter lived in Argentina a couple of years back, we could email, text and skype, plus I could follow her exploits on Facebook and read her blog posts. It was great for me, but I wondered if she might have missed the full benefit of being distant from home.

For the most part, I do not mind the way easy connections have altered my life. I like the idea that I can work from almost anywhere. I like knowing I can stay in touch with my daughter or son when they are far away. But that sense of the remote, lonely and exotic that once defined travel is harder to find. And, on vacation, it is harder to vacate our everyday lives.

If someone wants to tell us to vote, we can be tracked down. If a girlfriend or boyfriend or spouse or parent or child or editor or boss wants to find us, they assume they should be able to do that right now — immediately, instantly. It used to be easy to go off the grid because the grid had plenty of holes. Now, the grid binds us together — which is good — and tethers us — which is not always so great.

Getting lost used to be easy; now it takes a plan of escape.


http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-hard-to-escape-20120807,0,33299.story
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« Reply #35 on: October 01, 2012, 11:34:58 pm »







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« Reply #36 on: May 23, 2013, 03:35:31 pm »


From the Los Angeles Times....

Apple slips billions through loopholes of U.S. tax laws

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM - Wednesday, May 23, 2013



APPLE, America’s richest, most innovative consumer technology company, is also the most creative in hiding billions of dollars in profits from the taxman, according to congressional investigators. But on Tuesday in testimony before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out that his company’s creative tax sheltering, far from being illegal, is made possible by the loophole-ridden tax laws of the United States.

Cook told the senators that Apple paid a $6-billion tax bill to the federal government last year. Not only does Apple pay everything owed to the IRS, Cook said, the company does not employ gimmicks to avoid required tax payments.

The subcommittee chairman, Senator Carl Levin (Democrat-Michigan), differed with that last point. "The company's engineers and designers have a well-earned reputation for creativity,” Levin said. “What may not be so well-known is that Apple also has a highly developed tax avoidance system — a system through which it has amassed more than $100 billion in offshore cash in a tax haven."

According to congressional investigators, Apple has developed an overseas network of obscure subsidiaries that are run by executives in Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, often with no employees in the locations where they are technically based. For the most part, the subsidiaries do not exist for any other reason than to have huge chunks of corporate earnings assigned to them on paper, thus making it possible for Apple to keep that money outside the reach of the IRS. One Irish subsidiary has paid almost zero tax on $30 billion in profits since 2009, according to investigators.

Before the hearing, Senator John McCain (Republican-Arizona) said, “Apple claims to be the largest corporate taxpayer, but by sheer size and scale, it is also among America’s largest tax avoiders.” When he was face to face with Cook, he said Apple had violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.

McCain’s fellow Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky took exception to the bullying tone of his colleagues. "What we're talking about is what every company in America does, and that's minimizing their tax," Paul said. He asserted that the real culprit was “the awful tax code” and that “Congress should be on trial” for failing to fix it.

Stated more gently, that was Cook’s ultimate point as well. He called for a lowering of the corporate tax rate and a simplification of the law. Such changes would likely mean Apple would end up paying more in taxes, Cook told the senators.

Cook may have a good idea, but it is preposterous to think the current dyspeptic Congress will get past its dysfunction and find common ground on the best way to reform the tax code. Too much ideology and too many lobbyists stand in the way. As a result, Apple and every other American corporation will continue to slip through the gaps in the outmoded law with big bags of cash bound for foreign lands.


http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-apple-tax-laws-20130521,0,862291.story
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« Reply #37 on: May 23, 2013, 09:37:27 pm »




you can have the Apple. I'd rather have the bite

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« Reply #38 on: September 13, 2016, 12:24:08 pm »


Mark Morford

Hi! No one cares about your headphone jack

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | 7:59AM PDT - Thursday, September 08, 2016

Oh no another minor change in how we use a very popular piece of technology! What's wrong with the world? Change! Exceedingly minor! Don’t freak out, K?
Oh no another minor change in how we use a very popular piece of technology! What's wrong with the world?
Change! Exceedingly minor! Don’t freak out, K?


YOU do not have any problems. You do not have a thing to worry about in your life, not really, especially not if you spent more than eight seconds this past month sighing out some snarky, pinched-mouth, head-shaking disapproval of Apple's long rumored and world-shattering (except not really) decision to eliminate the antiquated, horrible-sounding mini headphone jack from the new iPhone 7, and replace it with, well, nothing at all.

Yes, the mini jack is gone. In its place, just Bluetooth. Or an adapter that lets you use your old headphones via the Lightning port. OMG what a hassle! What is Apple thinking? What greedy, profiteering monsters they must be! Except not really.

Did you know this is what Apple (and every other self-respecting modern company in the world who wants to survive more than a year) has done for decades? Obsoleted various technologies at their own option and daring, because it was time, their designers and engineers saw a better way, the old tech was too slow or too ungainly or too unnecessary and you gotta change or die?

The CD-ROM drive, the floppy drive, the beige PC, the 64-pin connector, flip-phones, Walkmans the size of your head, Microsoft, and many, many more — all made blessedly obsolete by Apple and, despite wails of resistance and how-dare-theys and the vacant threats of boycotts or people running back to old versions, no one misses any of them in the slightest. Not to mention the million or so functions Apple has eliminated/replaced over the years in the Mac OS itself, functions which everyone swore they could never live without but then suddenly did, because who cares.

Here's a fun mind game: Do you know what the iPhone would look like today if average consumers like you or me had our say about what to change and what not to change, as the product evolved?


Go ahead, pretend you're going to miss it. You won't.
Go ahead, pretend you're going to miss it. You won't.

That's right: Nada. Empty space. The thing wouldn't exist at all, because consumers are generally dumb and would never have imagined such a device in the first place, because everyone thought creaky flip-phones and miniscule gray LED screens and lumpish Blackberries were infallible hunks of genius when in fact they were clunky gallstones of prehistory.

Here's another, even more terrifying mind game: Try to imagine a modern consumer world without Apple in it, one largely “designed” by Microsoft and HP, GE and Nokia and, I don't know, Ford. Then smack yourself in the head with a brick, in unfettered gratitude for what Jobs hath wrought. Apple singlehandedly improved and beautified the functionality and design of the modern world, from staplers to sex toys, TVs to cars, home design to product packaging.

Do not misunderstand. Apple is far from perfect. Their famously easy-to-understand operating systems and quick-setup user interfaces are nearly long gone. iTunes, for one, is a nightmare hell-beast of inelegant, poorly designed bloat. The products are still uniformly gorgeous, but running them smoothly and linking them all together is increasingly insane.

But it's not really Apple's fault. Complexity of function and capability have increased exponentially, to ridiculous degrees. We are, after all, a whiny and demanding bunch. We expect our phones to circle the goddamn moon just to tell us what to have for dinner. And lo, they do. Things are a little confusing in the OS now? Oh, hush.

Steve Jobs famously hated focus groups. He believed, rightly, that you can't really innovate by listening to clumps of unimaginative yokels tell you what they think they want. They will only want the same thing they already have, only faster and cheaper and hey, can you make one in blue?


Another thing AirPods have made obsolete? Jawbones and other obnoxious Bluetooth earpieces. (You can use one by itself, and use it for calls and Siri, as well as music.)
Another thing AirPods have made obsolete? Jawbones and other obnoxious Bluetooth
earpieces. (You can use one by itself, and use it for calls and Siri, as well as music.)


To truly innovate, you hire genius designers and visionaries and trust raw instinct, throw out the old ways and take a major risk or ten, and see what happens. Doesn't always work. In Apple's case, it usually does.

So sure, there will be a blip of adjustment while people who like corded headphones lose their goddamn minds. There will be more jokes about Apple's new AirBuds — two separate, rechargeable Bluetooth earphones packed with some rather amazing tech — about how easy they can get lost and how annoying it is to charge them and how much some people miss the simple elegance of jamming a tiny metal pin into a little hole, never mind how the tech is ancient and the cords always got tangled and the plugs shorted out all the time and the sound quality was terrible and everyone always claimed to hate excessive cords sticking out of everything.

Do not listen to these people. Do not be one of these people. You have to take 37 seconds to figure out how to use new Bluetooth headphones in your new iPhone? You have to keep track of yet another adapter? You must ponder potential brain damage from all the electromagnetics hammering your cortex all the time every single day forever? Whatever. Repeat: You have no real problems.

I remember the banshee-like screams of protest when Apple eliminated the CD/DVD (optical) drive from their Mac lineup sometime back in 1937 (or whatever it was). “Now how am I going to watch scratchy DVDs or burn in all my old Dave Matthews CDs?” millions of humans did not shriek, before being slapped by fate, smacked by capitalism, and gently mocked by time. “Oh right. This is not a real problem. Also, I have terrible taste in music. What's on iTunes?”

Somewhere, Steve Jobs is smiling.


Email: Mark Morford

Mark Morford on Twitter and Facebook.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2016/09/08/hi-no-one-cares-about-your-headphone-jack
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« Reply #39 on: September 25, 2016, 12:45:58 pm »



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« Reply #40 on: September 25, 2016, 09:15:15 pm »


from The Telegraph....

Apple files new patent — for a paper bag



(click on the image to view the patent application details)
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