A 3 percent climb in share price made Apple the world's first trillion-dollar publicly-traded company.

Apple’s ascent from the brink of bankruptcy to the world’s most valuable public company has been a business tour de force, marked by rapid innovation, a series of smash-hit products and the creation of a sophisticated, globe-spanning supply chain that keeps costs down while producing enormous volumes of cutting-edge devices.

That ascent has also been marked by controversy, tragedy and challenges. Apple’s aggressive use of outside manufacturers in China, for example, has led to criticism that it is taking advantage of poorly paid workers in other countries and robbing Americans of good manufacturing jobs. The company faces numerous questions about how it can continue to grow.

Gas giant Saudi Aramco has twice Apple's revenues and is valued at up to $2tn. But you can't buy yourself a chunk of it—not yet, anyway. Read the rest

As reported here earlier this week, Apple's newest MacBook Pro laptops had been reported to be having issues with heat throttling with the highest end i9 processors installed. Read the rest

I'm writing this on a 2015 MacBook Pro. It's an i5 with 8GB of RAM. It's adequate for most of what I do, but, as I've mentioned in the past, it's been kind of a lemon since I picked it up. It's out of Apple Care now, and that's a concern. I am not made of money. Sooner or later, I'll wind up buying a new laptop.

For the past year, I've been considering moving entirely over to Windows as Apple's been doing some weird stuff: keyboards that break down if you get dust in them, processors that are antiques even when the Macs they're in are brand new. Oh, and dongles, so many dongles.

When I saw that they were doing something about the keyboards baked into their MacBooks and have begun to spring hardware with the latest chip sets in them, I was hopeful: I've used Macs for close to two decades. I have so much cash sunk into software, I don't want to switch platforms if I can help it. Then I saw that the high end iterations of this year's MacBooks are being throttled--slowed down--because they can't handle the heat generated by their gloriously speedy internals.

Sigh.

From Apple Insider:

Technology-centric YouTuber Dave Lee claims the thermal design of Apple's latest 15-inch MacBook Pro does not provide sufficient cooling for Intel's Core i9 processor, causing the chip to throttle down performance to prevent serious damage.

Intel's 2.9GHz six-core Core i9 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 4.8GHz is offered as a premium $300 option on Apple's 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, but according to Lee, the chip is unable to reach its full potential due to the laptop's design.

Markets for video-game assets, sanctioned and unsanctioned, are a major target for credit-card scammers, who use bots to open fake Apple accounts using stolen cards, which are then used to buy up in-game assets that are flipped for clean, untraceable cash to players. Read the rest

iJustine and MKBHD opened a sealed iBook G3 from 2000 and started it up. It took a while to configure it to go online, but they were finally able to use Netscape Communicator to browse the Web. Then they used the World Book Encyclopedia CD-ROM to listen to animal sounds. Read the rest

Four men snatched $27,000 in laptops and iPhones from a busy Apple Store in Fresno, California.

They were going through people and just grabbing stuff," Beckwith said Sunday.

Police initially got a report that the incident was an armed robbery, but later determined that the alleged heist was quick and no weapons were used.

(Fresno Bee)

Read the rest

In progress: Capturing Donald Glover dance in This Is America video. Using Macintosh SE computer, MacPaint software & MacroMind software. Currently: 375 frames.

A post shared by Pinot W. Ichwandardi (@pinot) on Jul 4, 2018 at 4:18pm PDT

New York City animator and illustrator Wahyu Ichwandardi (aka @pinot) is currently animating Childish Gambino's "This is America" music video in MacPaint (software from 1984) and MacroMind VideoWorks (1985) on a Macintosh SE. On Thursday, he was 375 frames in. He's been sharing his progress on Twitter since June 9:

Trying to capture Donald Glover’s motion in MacPaint. pic.twitter.com/gL7JErrJpN

— Wahyu Ichwandardi (@pinot) June 9, 2018

Synchronizing. pic.twitter.com/7GgGFn4Htz

— Wahyu Ichwandardi (@pinot) June 18, 2018

MacPaint doesn't have layers for onion skin drawing. But at least it has copy paste o/ pic.twitter.com/97fKtf0FFX

— Wahyu Ichwandardi (@pinot) June 10, 2018

https://twitter.com/pinot/status/10099711558040084498 Read the rest

• It's about patents for smartphones & tablets • The legal battle began in 2011 • In May, jury said Samsung owed Apple $539M • Today, they settled. Read the rest

Pioneering engineer Bill Atkinson was the lead designer/developer of the Apple Lisa graphical user interface, creator of MacPaint and QuickDraw, and part of the original team that developed the Apple Macintosh. In 1985, Atkinson dropped acid and came up with HyperCard, the groundbreaking multimedia authoring program that was really a precursor to the first Web browser. Atkinson recently told Leo Laporte the story of this incredible LSD-fueled eureka moment. From Mondo 2000:

It seemed to me the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propagating to colonize the universe, and life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness....

The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance and different languages. Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathematicians, and economists all have separate pools of knowledge, but are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections...

Knowledge, it seemed to me, consists of the “How” connections between pieces of information, the cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result. Science is a systematic attempt to discover the “How” connections. Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed, the bigger perspective of the “Why” connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another?

I thought if we could encourage sharing of ideas between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually more wisdom might develop.

The Washington Post rounds up 15 privacy defaults that no one in their right mind would want to leave as-is, and provides direct links to change 'em (hilariously and predictably, Verizon/Oath/Yahoo's privacy settings dashboard times out when you try to load it) -- once you're done with that, go back and follow his links to unfuck the privacy defaults for Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and #DeleteFacebook. (via Reddit) Read the rest

Last April, the Kremlin ordered a ban on the private messaging app Telegram, blocking millions of IP addresses that formed Amazon and Google's clouds in order to prevent users from accessing the service; not only was it an ominous moment in the evolution of the internet as a system for oppressive control, it was also an object lesson in how internet concentration has made the internet more susceptible to censorship and control. Read the rest

I’ve used an Apple Magic Trackpad for the past eight years – basically since they became available in Canada. I love them for the fact that all of the muscle memory that I’ve developed using trackpad-based shortcut gestures with my MacBook Pro work exactly the same with the Magic Trackpad while I’m hooked up to an external monitor. What I don’t like is the price. Apple products typically cost more than their Windows or Linux-powered equivalents do. I remember telling myself as I bought my first Cupertino-designed trackpad that the +$100 price was cool because it was an investment in gear that I use, daily, for work. And besides, it’s made by Apple – it’ll last for ever!

Five years into owning my first Magic Trackpad, I found myself routinely tearing it apart in order to fix the wee button inside of it that registers clicks. It was a pain in the ass, but I couldn’t afford to buy a replacement. At the time, my wife was finishing her degree – what I pulled in was pretty much it for income. What I’d spend on a new trackpad would buy us groceries for a couple of weeks. My friend Susie found out that I was doing this and told me to cut it out: She had a new Magic Trackpad for me, still in the box, never opened. A week later and my first Magic Trackpad was out with the recycling.

Fast forward to 2018.

My second Magic Trackpad, which I had been so happy to receive, was on the fritz. Read the rest

One of the best reasons to buy a piece of Apple hardware, in my opinion, is the company’s history of protecting the privacy of its customers.

Provided you're not a customer living in China.

You may recall that, a while back, iOS users in China lost the ability to download most VPN clients to their phones and tablets from the iTunes App Store—the Chinese government doesn’t like their citizens to be able to anonymously access the Internet or view the world through the lens of unapproved news sources. So, Virtual Private Networks were kicked to the curb. According to 9to5mac, Apple is once again showing the Chinese government their soft underbelly, in the name of being able to continue to sell their hardware in the country.

According to 9to5mac, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has decided that they’d like Callkit—a developer framework that lets devs bake VoIP capabilities into their apps for iOS—to not be a thing for applications available to its citizens. You likely use Callkit-backed apps on a regular basis, without even knowing it. When your iPhone displays you the name or number of who’s calling you on Skype? That’s Callkit, doing it’s thing. The Chinese government doesn’t dig on Callkit because of the fact that it’s difficult, if not impossible to intercept and monitor calls made using it. Last summer, Skype was removed from the Apple’s Chinese App Store portal, likely for this very reason.

Look. Before anyone swoops in to say that I’m anti-Apple I wrote this post on a MacBook. Read the rest

Programming legend John Carmack shares stories of working with Steve Jobs. Jobs, Carmack writes, disliked computer games and their early prominence on the Mac platform — “Steve doesn’t like blood” — and yet...

When my wife and I later started building games for feature phones (DoomRPG! Orcs&Elves!), I advocated repeatedly to Steve that an Apple phone could be really great. Every time there was a rumor that Apple might be working on a phone, I would refine the pitch to him. Once he called me at home on a Sunday (How did he even get my number?) to ask a question, and I enthused at length about the possibilities.

In Apple's early days, the swanky La Playa Carmel hotel was on the list of preferred venues for the company's offsite retreats. Carmel-By-The-Sea's quaint charm coupled with the property's privacy made it an ideal spot for their gatherings.

In fact, it was where the company's Macintosh retreat was held in late January of 1983. That's where Steve Jobs first revealed the team's Macintosh computer prototype, right there in the hotel's ocean-view banquet room.

I am just back from EG, a fantastic conference for/by/of creatives held in Carmel-By-The-Sea, and ate dinner in that room.

This room...

EG's director Michael Hawley pointed out this commemorative plaque, which resides on the room's back wall.

It reads, "In this room Steve Jobs unveiled the MacIntosh computer prototype during a development team retreat, and ceremoniously christened it with a bottle of La Playa Carmel water."

Hawley also shared the rest of the story. Apparently things got a little wild at this gathering, resulting in getting Apple banned from the hotel for 30 years. The team -- who were drunk -- stripped naked and jumped in the hotel's pool ("oblivious to the polite strangling sounds of the blue-haired ladies all around," according to author Frank Rose) and then headed to the beach to start a bonfire. The next morning the hotel politely asked them to not return.

In 2013, the hotel changed ownership and Apple was invited back with the message, "All is forgiven."

Read: Carmel hotel ends ban on Apple retreats 30 years after skinny-dipping incident (2013 article)

photos by Rusty Blazenhoff Read the rest

There's a huge sale on MacBook Pros right now at Best Buy, but Casey Johnston convinced me not to upgrade. The current models' keyboards have severe reliability issues, and are so badly-designed that service and replacement can take hours or days under warranty and cost hundreds of dollars out of it. And on top of that, you're paying a very expensive premium out the door to get a Touch Bar and to not get any useful ports.

I still had my 2013 MacBook Pro around, so I sold my 2016 MacBook Pro back to Apple’s refurb program, and now I just use the 2013 as my laptop (I used the recovered money to build a PC, lord help me). This old MacBook Pro is still fine, and most importantly, all the keyboard keys work. The new MacBook Pro is gone. When I started working at The Outline, I was offered a choice of a new MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air for my work computer, and I chose the MacBook Air, with its good keyboard that doesn’t break from dust. I’m fully committed to this bit.

I've noticed the growing cult of high-end 2015-ish MacBook Pros with the old keyboards and SD card readers and such. The whole situation has made me want to do something completely different, like give an iPad Pro a try as my main computer. Am I crazy? Read the rest

Apple's education-centric new Ipad is meant to be used in rambunctious classrooms where drops and other abuse will be commonplace; it is also meant to compete with relatively easy-to-service Pixelbooks that school district IT departments can fix themselves or get repaired by a wide variety of independent, local service depots whose community-based technicians do repairs onsite and also keep local tax dollars circulating in the community. Read the rest