Category: Apple
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What’s Next for Apple and Amazon?
The world’s most valuable company won’t buy Disney anytime soon, but there’s a giant caveat. Plus, what else will the ecommerce giant do with Amazon One, its new biometric payment platform? Being a futurist can be glum when other writers breathlessly announce new-to-them ideas that I’ve been talking about for years while missing the broader…
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The Hollywood Strikes, AI, Strategy, & Overfocusing
The organization on the other side of the negotiating table from the striking writers and actors is the AMPTP, but how can one organization represent studios with such divergent interests? The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) is a mysterious Hollywood trade association. Its website contains no list of member organizations: just some technical documents,…
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Ho Hum, Apple’s boring choices with TV+
There’s a passage toward the end of Walter Isaacson’s majestic biography, Steve Jobs, about what was on the Apple founder’s mind as he was dying of cancer: He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant. “I’d like to create an…
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Apple and original TV: a strategy teardown
The world’s most valuable company is spending more than a billion dollars on new TV shows. The question is why? Last week, the New York Times published, “Apple Goes to Hollywood. Will Its Story Have a Happy Ending?,” a useful but incomplete article by John Koblin. The article is useful because it describes how Apple…
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Playing “Whack-a-Mole” with Apple News on my iPhone
I love my iPhone. The dangerous problem is that while sometimes I love it the way a writer loves a favorite pen while at other times I love it the way an alcoholic loves beer. Or like Brokeback Mountain. I wish I knew how to quit you, iPhone. Today, I had a lovers quarrel with…
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Two Reasons iCloud Sucks
I’m an Apple user and ordinarily a happy one, but iCloud is an abject failure. Here are two (of many) reasons why. Reason #1: You can’t get there from anywhere intuitive or convenient. Apple insists that you access your iCloud files either through the application or through a browser. But I might not want to…