Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/02/thursday-morning-news090217/
Apple CEO Tim Cook is travelling the wide world, and part of that is an interview with a French newspaper. Cook’s interview with Figaro from last weekend tells us about Apple’s plans for France, moving production of products to Europe, Apple’s ongoing tax battle in Ireland, and commented on AR and AI with regards to Siri.
This week, it seems like Cook is is Scotland. At his ceremony for his honorary degree at the University of Glasgow, Cook spoke out against President Trump’s immigration ban, saying that Apple was not an activist company but spoke out when issues were relevant to the company as a whole. Cook described Steve Jobs as being a massive influence on his professional life and being a major source of inspiration.
Bloomberg reports Apple has hired the former head of the Fire TV at Amazon. Timothy Twerdahl is the new Vice President of Apple TV product marketing at Apple, reporting to Greg Joswiak. Their report also notes that Pete Distad, who previously occupied the role, can now move into a position to help with Apple’s content deal efforts.
In the ongoing comings and goings of VP-level employees at Apple, Apple’s VP of enterprise and government sales has left the company. John Solomon joined Apple in 2014 after leaving HP as their SVP of Printing and Personal Systems, and that’s about all we know about his departure.
In comparing the first seven years of the iPad and of the Mac, John Gruber writes that any good platform ought to be self-sufficient to a degree. While the Apple TV and Apple Watch aren’t suited to be general-purpose computing platforms, it almost feels like the iPad could have been, even if it was backed by the Mac as its main development platform.
MacStories points out that Touch Bar support for Office 2016 apps is now available in a beta format via the Office Insiders program. While support for the Touch Bar was first announced last October, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are the first apps to be supported by the Touch Bar, with Outlook and Skype coming soon.
AppleInsider shares Siri commands for AirPods. I’ve turned off Siri in favour of a double-tap for pause/play, but there are times when I want to skip the track that means I have to pull out my phone. Maybe I’ll switch back to Siri for this sort of thing.
Now that launching apps on the Apple Watch is much better than it was previously (especially if you have a Series 1 or 2 Apple Watch), The Mac Observer tells us about some great, single-task apps that work pretty well on the small screen on your wrist.
Estimates for Apple Watch sales last quarter put the figure at some 6 million units. If true, the numbers from analytics firm Canalys would account for 2.6 billion of Apple’s revenue for the quarter, and almost 80% of the total smartwatch market.