[Of Course Steve Jobs Would Have Released Apple Maps
Tilo Chopin
Of course, everything was perfect when Steve Jobs was CEO, and if Steve were still alive, everything would be perfect once again because Steve was a visionary. After all, Steve cared about you personally and called you on your birthday every year, but Tim Cook is a cold, calculating robot who you secretly suspect wants to harvest your organs.
And Adobe learned the hard way not to mess with Apple. A few years back, Adobe announced they would no longer develop Photoshop, etc. For Macs and they would never begin developing Premier or After Effects for Macs, but they would for Windows. So Apple developed Photos and then iPhoto, at first pricing it much lower then Photoshop Elements and then giving it away for free, doing major damage to the PS bottom line. Apple also developed Final Cut Pro, pricing it at about $1,000 when After Effects started at out at way over $20,000. And Apple also began giving away copies of FCP for free to declared film majors and film professors at colleges and universities; they still do. And FCP was built to run on the very first Intel Macs, including MacBooks, when the Windows stuff needed big iron. And they developed iMovie for non professionals, charging around $15-20 for it, then giving it away for free.
The moral of the story: Adobe started Mac versions of Premiere and After Effects, and have student/teacher rates at 50-60% off. Apple not only did mega damage to their sales, Adobe earned significantly less revenue per sale.
Meanwhile, I will just keep submitting my bug reports on Catalina and iOS 13. Over 70 so far. Quite a few have quietly been fixed or just stopped occurring. There are still a lot of bugs, some of them nasty and crippling. Some of them have been found by other testers, but others I am the only one reporting them.
If the correction is the location of the pin or the dot or the x that marks the spot (and not textual data like a street address, hours, phone number, etc.) and it is in the wrong place, they request the user put it in precisely the correct spot.
In Google Maps, the red pin or dot remains stationary and the drawn map can be moved underneath. If you are there or know the area, all the street names and points of interest are shown on the map. So locating the dot is easy.
Now, Apple maps wants you to move the pin to the correct location on a satellite map. No other points of interest shown except tiny colored dots. Lines are overlayed for the streets but no street names. The biggest problem is one that Apple should have recognized immediately and is why I correctly call Apple stupid.
In between the satellite in space and terra firma there are these things called CLOUDS. Now, Apple, where in this sea of white do I drop the pin that was in the wrong place. Now, OK, Apple, you think using the satellite is cool and differentiates you from Google. Well, if you are not being stupid, you recognize the problem and write an AI program to never use images obscured by clouds. Or you use a hybrid map of a drawn map superimposed on the satellite.
That is what happened to me. My so-called friend, who I had known six months and who had been to my house ten times, put some sedatives in my food or drink. She was cooking dinner for us. She kept filling my glass with more Pina Colada.
Now we get to the good part. Apple wants to make it so easy to get into your account there is something in settings that will allow you to change your Apple ID password offline using only the 6 digit device unlock code. You know, the code your friend asked for to order some more pizza. Or play your favorite song? Or check their Instagram. Because their phone is in their coat pocket and the coat is in the back closet.
So using this Apple provided criminal support tool, the pico second the thief took my phone online the password was instantly changed. And Find My phone was turned off. Meaning the thief could then reformat the storage on the phone and sell it or pawn it.
You cannot change the AppleID password so easy on Mac OS. You need the current password to get into your account. If you forgot your credentials, you can go to Iforgot.apple.com and change your password. But they ARE GOING TO SEND A 2FA CODE to one of your registered devices. Since once I discovered the theft I contacted my carrier and shut the stolen phone down. The thief never gets the 2FA code.
Remember NOTHING that came from the App Store works if the password to your AppleID has been changed. And Apple makes it super easy to change the password on iOS. So no contacts, no Uber, no online flight check in, no dictionary, no iCloud, no online banking, no nothing. You have a phone that makes phone calls, takes photos, and has Safari barely.
Stop using the financial services network for identity verification. There are better ways like hashing your FaceID or TouchID data string using that 6 digit passcode as the secret encryption key. Or obscure public record data not on your credit report. Which of these was the make of your first car? Which of these banks financed a home for you? In which of these hospital was your oldest child born?
On Friday, June 30, 2023, Apple became the first company in history to reach a $3 trillion market valuation. It stays ahead by half a trillion dollars from the second most-valued company on the planet- Microsoft. Apple is now the most profitable technology corporation in the world.
Vertical integration is another main reason that distinguishes Apple from the competition. It has reaped enormous benefits from the vertical model. It has always built, controlled, and manufactured all of its hardware and software. This inherent benefit assists the corporation in achieving a higher degree of synergy between its hardware and applications. Even the apps are tightly controlled to follow Apple policies. The company also increased its spending on the cost of sales and product R&D to $26,251 billion, which was less than 18% of its total expenditure.
By 2004, it had established a strong market leadership position in the worldwide digital music player sector. Apple spent a lot of money advertising the iPod. The advertising, which featured shadows dancing to the rhythms of their iPods, could be found in print, on television, and on billboards. In a relatively short period, Apple established an iconic image for the iPod that drew both young and old people. The iPod period, which began in 2001, ended in 2014.
With the introduction of iTunes in 2001, Apple opened up a vast new market sector in digital music, which it has now controlled for more than a decade. Customers worldwide flocked to iTunes because of the incredible value it provided, and music companies and artists benefited as well. Furthermore, Apple safeguarded recording companies by developing copyright protection that was not inconvenient for customers. While the company has dominated this blue ocean for more than a decade, as new online businesses entered the market, the issue for Apple has been to maintain its sights on the expanding mainstream market rather than competitive benchmarking or high-end niche marketing.
The iPhone was not the first smartphone to have a mobile Web, email, and touch-screen user interface, but it was intended to have a better experience than most smartphones. Another strategy was to have superior technology, which included the mobile operating system and the thousands of mobile applications available via the App Store.
Apple Inc. used the strong reputation of the Apple brand and the success of the iPod to penetrate the competitive cell phone market, a move that may have posed a possible challenge to the company as other firms launched smartphones with strong music storage and playback capabilities.
After the launch of the iPhone, the company adopted the strategy of patenting everything it does. The vigorous patenting helped shield Apple from competitors working on related technologies. It also provided Apple with a legal arm for the future.
Apple Inc. had invested in further expanding its research and development centers globally. The company had invested over half a billion dollars in research development centers in China alone. The company also concentrated on R&D centers in the United Kingdom, owing to their increasing emphasis on creating unique innovations to underpin its product designs, including A-series processors, W-series wireless chips, unique manufacturing, materials experience, speech recognition, machine intelligence, and many more.
Apple invests heavily in developing new hardware for its products. Their most recent and notable advancement has been with their M-series processors for computers to supplement their excellent A-series mobile chips. These have smashed benchmarks worldwide, delivering chart-topping performance and power efficiencies never seen before. They make some of the best pro-grade displays, too.
Moreover, Apple has focused on innovation outside the core by developing the infrastructure required to support this ecosystem safely and frictionlessly (Apple Pay secure payments or biometric facial recognition since the iPhone X).
We have mentioned before that Apple vigorously patented everything it did. After looking at the wide array of domains on which Apple works, it becomes important to examine the kind of patent portfolio Apple has accumulated over the years.
Looking at the filing trend, you can see the year 2007 saw a sharp increase. It was the same year they launched the iPhone. One can conclude that the iPhone is one of the reasons Apple invested heavily in securing its technologies.
The Apple vs Samsung lawsuit is still one of the largest patent infringement lawsuits that happened in the tech industry. And that further pushed the consumer electronic gadgetry pioneer to invest more in patents. (See the growth in 2012)
The US is the home market for Apple, so, naturally, the company has the most patents in the US. China is a crucial market for smartphone makers now more than ever. China has become more patent aware thus most of the big companies are trying to secure more and more technologies/patents in the country. Apple being one of the biggest technology companies, it makes sense that it has secured thousands of patents in China.
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