The news of Google re-entering into China has already created many controversies, even within the company resulting in a mass protest by its employees. Now again Apple, an American company is facing some regularity issues in China.
Noticeably, the State media broadcaster CCTV had recently criticised Apple for allowing many illegal apps on the App Store. The media has been giving a negative feedback to Apple for its no control over such apps. Apple has removed over 25000 apps from its App Store and allegedly, 4000 of them, were based on gambling. With the removal of these illegal apps, Apple has also removed those developers that distribute them.
Gambling is not allowed in China and most of these apps had used Gambling as a keyword. China media had criticised Apple for not doing enough to stop this kind of illegal activities. Apple has even made guidelines for uploading Apps on to the App store and has restricted these type of apps.
“Gambling apps are illegal and not allowed on the App Store in China,” Apple said in an emailed statement sent to Bloomberg on Monday. “We have already removed many apps and developers for trying to distribute illegal gambling apps on our App Store, and we are vigilant in our efforts to find these and stop them from being on the App Store.”
It is a tough task for an American company to maintain a business in world’s largest economy and Apple is trying hard to fall in line with Chinese authorities. Last year Apple pulled out nearly 700 VPN apps from its App Store. Apple has been entangled in conflicts with China in the past. Also, the growing friction between Washington, D.C. and Beijing is also causing the American companies in China to follow all the rules carefully to keep China on their side.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
It has been more than three years when Apple had launched its last Mac Book laptop in 2014. Also, the MacBook Air was upgraded with a faster processor last year, remaining the cheapest laptop by Apple. The MacBook Air is the only laptop by Apple, without a high-resolution screen, costing about $1000.
Reportedly, Apple is about to launch a new upgraded version of its MacBook, or it can be the upgraded version of MacBook Air. The launch may be by the end of this year, with the launch of other Apple products including the new iPhones and iPad.
Last year the MacBook sale went down by a large scale as the upgraded MacBook cost higher and could not meet the professional needs of the consumers. Since 2010, it sold the fewest number of its MacBooks in a quarter this year. The other companies like Lenovo and Acer also launched high-end laptops that attracted the customers with their new features.
By looking at the reduced sale of the MacBooks and desktop computers, last year, MacBook was planning to launch the new MacBook at the beginning of the year but got delayed. Later, it was set for June and July of this year, but again due to some production issues, the launch is now delayed for October 2018.
The new Apple laptop is going to be similar to the MacBook Air, but, added with a high-resolution, Retina-version display. The screen will be about 13 inches and will include thinner bezels around it. It will including the 14nm Kaby lake processors from Intel. The new MacBook is expected to be cheaper, that may result in the reduced storage for the basic models, up to 128 GB SSD reduced from 256 GB.
Apple considers its laptop and computer lineup as an important part of their company and will continue its production and sale. For now, Apple has not declared anything officially. But the trusting the sources, we can expect the launch of new MacBook by the fall of this year.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
A passion to do something and following your heart can take you places. Who would have thought that just being fond of designing would make Jonathan Ive the Chief Design Officer of the world’s most leading tech giant: Apple? he is serving the company for last 22 years and has designed some beautiful and innovative products.
Early Life
Ive was born in Chingford and raised in Staffordshire on 27th February 1967 under the guidance of his father Jonathan Jony Ive who was a lecturer and silversmith by profession. Ive got interested in drawing at very early and tender age of 14. Inheriting the skills from his father he started designing from jewelry to furniture and cars to boats.
Finally, after meeting few experts Ive decided to take a product designing course and joined industrial design at Newcastle Polytechnic. A hearing aid designed by Ive is kept on display in the London Museum of Design. Ive slowly started getting into technology and especially designing products using a Mac computer.
Beginning of Career
After the completion of his course Ive co-founded Tangerine – a London based design firm designing household products like kitchen and bathroom appliances. And Ive’s journey for Apple began from here. As Apple was one of the client’s at Tangerine they wanted him to join Apple after being impressed with his work. Robert Burner, the industrial design chief of Apple, hired Ive in 1992 and just in the next five years became the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design. Ive worked hard on the products such as the Newton MessagePad 110, which was one of the forgotten Apple products. Ive was on the verge to quit Apple but Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president of hardware engineering, gave him a raise and persuaded him to stay.
The Leap
Good that Ive took Rubinstein’s advice and stayed because in the coming years he would design some of the most famous Apple products like 1998’s iMac, 2001’s iPod, 2007’s iPhone, and 2010’s iPad. These were the groundbreaking designs by Ive which raised the bar of his reputation higher and higher. The uniqueness of the designs brought by Apple made them stand out in the market and a lot of other companies even copied the designs. Ive’s latest design is the Apple Watch.
Under Steve Jobs, Ive was given complete freedom to explore new ideas and designs. After the death of Jobs, some additional responsibility was put on Ive’s shoulders including the handling of software along with the hardware. He also has a personal design lab and is one of the most secret areas at Apple’s headquarters. And only a handful of people can actually enter this personal lab.
Ive holds more than 730 US design and utility patents as of 2014. Many more patents are yet to arrive in the future. He was awarded various awards recognizing his work in the design field. Ive lives with his wife Heather Pegg and twin sons in the Pacific Heights district of San Francisco, California.
Ive believes in charity and has developed products like the Leica Camera and Jaeger-LeCoultre sports watch which were sold at auction for charitable trusts. He considered Steve Jobs to be his closest friend and Jobs considered him to be his ‘spiritual partner’ at Apple.
Harshal Pawar is an avid reader, a TV show addict, and a writer. He has a personal blog brainwork.wordpress.com where he jots down his articles and poetry about love and life.
He is currently pursuing film-making and wishes to bring the words written on a paper to the screen. More of all he is a scorpio.
It’s a real tough to hack into an iPhone or Apple ID and that’s well established. But hackers find a way to do it anyways. On March 21st, a group of hackers going by the name of ‘Turkish Crime Family’ claimed to have access to a large cache of iCloud and other Apple email accounts. The hacker group contacted Vice Blog Motherboard demanding $75,000 in Bitcoin or Ethereum, another form of popular crypto-currency, or $100,000 worth of iTunes gift cards in exchange for deleting the alleged cache of data.
“I just want my money and thought this would be an interesting report that a lot of Apple customers would be interested in reading and hearing,” one of the hackers told Motherboard.
They also shared a screenshot of their communication with Apple security team member and it seemed legit. There was a message in which security team member demanded for a sample of data set. In response, hackers uploaded a YouTube video accessing an old women’s iCloud account. As of now, they claim to have access to 559 million Apple emails and iCloud accounts in total and if their demands are not met, all the user data will be wiped out remotely by April 7.
In response to the threat, Apple contacted Motherboard assuring control of the situation and told: “There have not been any breaches in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud and Apple ID. The alleged list of email addresses and passwords appears to have been obtained from previously compromised third-party services.
We’re actively monitoring to prevent unauthorized access to user accounts and are working with law enforcement to identify the criminals involved. To protect against these type of attacks, we always recommend that users always use strong passwords, not use those same passwords across sites and turn on two-factor authentication.”
Since there was not much evidence proving the claim of hackers, so ZDnet decided to reach out to them. The Turkish Crime Family provided them a small sample of 54 IDs from their alleged 500 million or so. To check the validity of IDs, ZDnet tried contacting people linked with the accounts and found 10 passwords out of 54 were in use at present.
There was nothing common among the 10 verified accounts. The people were using different cellular networks and owned different Apple devices including, iPhones, Macs, iPads. This indicates that the data was not obtained from a particular network and was also not limited to single product line.
Although most of the them used same password for their iCloud account and other services, but there were few who assured that their iCloud password was unique and was not used anywhere else. So, in this case Apple’s statement “obtained from previously compromised third-party services”, might not be completely true.
After all this, one thing is for sure that with the advancement in security measures, hackers too are going a step ahead. It doesn’t matter how the hackers got all those credentials, you should take some measures for your own data security. Anyone with an Apple ID should change their passwords immediately to something that is more secure and complex and enabling two-factor authentication would be a good step. Go ahead and take the measures before something bad happens.
Anup Singh is a professional writer with a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from NIT Durgapur. His love for content writing started 2 years back with writing articles and paper descriptions for college magazine. From then on, he has developed his skills as a technical content writer. He is also a passionate lyricist.
Workflow is a name familiar to most if not all the iPhone users. It is a very useful iOS app which allows you to combine functionality of various apps as well as different steps required to achieve an action. In simpler words, it makes a button which does all the things for you in the background, you just have to press it once and your job is done. With Workflow, one can create GIFs out of camera photos, convert websites into PDF and what not by a single touch. Workflow, a kind of automation tool got so popular that Apple decided to acquire.
The acquisition of Workflow by Apple was in rumors for a while and finally on Tuesday, all the rumors were set to rest when TechCrunch confirmed the acquisition news for the first time. No financial details were revealed though. Complete team of founders- Weinstein, Conrad Kramer, Ayaka Nonaka and Nick Frey will be now part of Apple team and we might see inclusion of some of Workflow’s automation and productivity tools in upcoming versions of iOS starting with iOS 11.
“We are thrilled to be joining Apple. We’ve worked closely with Apple from the very beginning, from kickstarting our company as students attending WWDC to developing and launching Workflow and seeing its amazing success on the App Store. We can’t wait to take our work to the next level at Apple and contribute to products that touch people across the world. ” TechCrunch quoted Ari Weinstein, Co-Founder, Workflow.
Strangely, Apple did not remove the app from the App store, but made it available free of cost for everyone’s use. This sounds much merrier than it actually is. Although the app is free now, but several awesome automation features, which competed with Apple’s product, are removed from the latest update. Release notes inside the app show that only Apple Maps is supported in maps actions. Now, the Translate Text workflow is powered by Microsoft Translate, and workflows that involve Uber, Telegram, Pocket, Google Chrome or Google Street View are no longer supported.
“The Workflow app was selected for an Apple Design Award in 2015 because of its outstanding use of iOS accessibility features, in particular an outstanding implementation for VoiceOver with clearly labeled items, thoughtful hints, and drag/drop announcements, making the app usable and quickly accessible to those who are blind or low-vision.” Apple added while speaking about Workflow.
What engineers at Apple were unable to do it better than a 3-membered team of smart technicians, so they decided to acquire the company and hired the whole team.
Anup Singh is a professional writer with a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from NIT Durgapur. His love for content writing started 2 years back with writing articles and paper descriptions for college magazine. From then on, he has developed his skills as a technical content writer. He is also a passionate lyricist.
Success and struggle are just like two sides of the same coin. A man who used to return Coke bottles to earn 5¢ to buy food, and walk 7 miles every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple created a legacy which is flourishing even after his death.
Steve Jobs the man behind MAC, iPad, iPOD and iPhone was abandoned by his biological parent, fired from his own company and suffered from cancer. Despite all these ups and downs he never lost focus and love for technology. Coming generations would hardly believe that it was one man who revolutionized music, smartphone and computer industry.
Steve always loved technology and even in college days he preferred practical knowledge over bookish knowledge. Jobs’ interest in electronics began to smoke up as he extended a helping hand to his father’s garage and began to befriend many engineers living in his neighborhood.
Love what you do
In his high school Steve Jobs approached Hewlett Packard and asked for some parts for his school project. The boy’s boldness impressed him and he not only agreed to provide the parts but also offered him an internship at his office. This was indeed a great opportunity for Jobs to formally step into the techno world. While interning for Hewlett Packard he met Steve Wozniak who worked as an engineer there. Wozniak was very passionate about technology like Jobs and they both became friends to change the face of technology in the coming future.
Jobs then got entangled with his higher studies and finally admitted himself in Reed College. But it seemed he could not find his place there and therefore dropped out from the college after first semester. His inclination towards spirituality tempted him to visit India, yet the love for electronics never faded away.
Beginning the journey with Apple
After he returned from India, Steve Jobs contacted Wozniak who then was busy in building a small computer. The idea caught up Jobs’ far sighted eyes and he proposed to take this computer into the business world with him. After convincing Wozniak they arranged to set up a shop at his father’s garage and named their business ‘Apple’. We therefore see how this topmost company sprouted from a garage. But as is the way of life, nothing goes smooth and easy and the task to collect seed money to start the business stood like a gigantic monster in front of them. Jobs sold his micro bus and Wozniak his calculator to make an investment of $1350. And this is how they introduced Apple I in 1975.
Although the computer could only get attention of hobbyists yet the sales collected decent amount of cash which gave them a way to redesign the computer into a better model. After 2 years, Apple II was launched in the market with coloured graphics and keyboard. The computer hit the market making huge success and made $3 million in its first year while the sales went up to $200 million in the next year. The success of Apple II marked a benchmark in the career of Steve Jobs.
Facing a downfall
Undoubtedly Apple II was a great success for Jobs but he failed to retain it for long. However, he did not put a pause to his efforts in introducing new designs and techniques to his computers but his efforts failed every time. The sales started decreasing with Apple III and LISA as new companies like IBM began to take over the market. But he never backed out and in 1984 Jobs brought another design in the market and named it as Apple Macintosh which came with a new user-friendly hardware, a mouse. But even this enhancement could not save him.
Jobs’ troubles didn’t seem to end here as the clash with his company’s board of directors in 1983 resulted in his losing of control over Apple in 1985. And eventually he had no other option than to sell his shares and resign. The irony of life could be exemplified best with this situation as Jobs was kicked out of the very company he founded.
NeXT
Stagnation was never meant for Steve Jobs and thus after resigning from Apple he launched another computer company named NeXT. But his aim to bring a revolution in the technical field did not come out as expected since the computers were highly expensive. Meanwhile, he also bought Pixar Animation Studios in 1986 which became the most important stepping stone in his career. With Pixar he made an animation film ‘Toy Story’ which was a smash hit. The great success of ‘Toy Story’ raised Pixar’s 80% shares to $1 billion.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish
Just after Pixar was made public, Apple bought NeXT for $400 million and gave Jobs a position as an advisor to the company’s CEO. But the company faced a failure in keeping up its old position and dealt with a quarterly loss of $708 million. As a result of this, the then CEO of Apple resigned from his position and Steve Jobs got back hold of the company by seating himself as the new CEO of Apple. He raised the company value by signing deal with Microsoft and also brought in new technology fronts in the computers. In no time the company’s sales revived and reached to $5.9 billion. Jobs then expanded the company with new products like iPod, iPhone and iPad. However, struggling with ill health Jobs resigned from his position as CEO in 2011.
Steve Jobs’ journey could be summed up in his own words uttered at Stanford University in 2005. His success could be traced by “connecting the dots” of the events that took place. Every turn of his life proved to be of immense importance at some point later. From taking the risk to drop out from the college to resigning from his own company, his decisions led him to better prospects. And his mantra of life, “keep looking, don’t settle” unless you are truly satisfied with what you are doing is worth adopting. It was his relentless efforts and uncompromising attitude that made him the pioneer of techno world. The legacy still continues with latest iPhone 7 and AirPods.
Jobs historic Standford address about life, love and loss
“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”
