Wednesday, 20 November 2019

Elon Musk’s Starlink Satellites Are Already Causing a Headache for Astronomers

Astronomers at a Chilean observatory were rudely interrupted earlier this week when a SpaceX satellite train consisting of 60 Starlink satellites drifted overhead, in what scientists are apparently going to have to accept as the new normal.

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Apple Testing 'Apple Music for Business' Plans at Retailers Like Harrods and Levi's

Apple has been trialing a new version of Apple Music, dubbed ‌Apple Music‌ for Business, which will provide retail partners with access to streaming music for their stores. The company has been testing out ‌Apple Music‌ for Business for the last six months (via The Wall Street Journal).

Apple is partnering with PlayNetwork Inc. for the project, which specializes in providing music for commercial use by handling licensing and operating the service for Apple. In turn, Apple contributes by creating hundreds of unique playlists for each client.

Image via Harrods/WSJ

Special business contracts must be made to use certain pieces of music in retail areas because of the high cost of licensing fees. PlayNetwork tackles these issues for clients such as Starbucks and Estée Lauder.

In these retail spaces, there are currently a few streaming services that offer business contracts for retailers, including Soundtrack Your Brand (formerly Spotify Business), Sirius XM Holdings, and more. These services cost between $25 to $35 a month per retail location.

‌Apple Music‌ for Business will now be a player in this space, but there is no indication yet as to how much Apple will charge for its service. In its six months of operation, Apple has landed 25 clients, which are estimated to deliver music to more than 10,000 store locations, including Apple's own retail stores.

One client includes Harrods in London, which had its own custom "Harrods Playlist" built by Apple. The retailer advertises this list of classical, ambient, and electronic music on screens in its stores, which users can search for and listen to in the consumer version of ‌Apple Music‌.
“We were captivated by their proposition that we could have our brand reflected in our own curated playlist,” said Guy Cheston, Harrods’s director of partnerships.

‌Apple Music‌ for Business has so far focused on retail chains with 100 stores or more. But it plans on expanding into small and midsize businesses.
On the regular version of ‌Apple Music‌, the company just launched a "Replay" feature, which provides subscribers with a way to track the artists, albums, and songs they listen to the most every year. This has been a long-awaited feature on ‌Apple Music‌, and one that many of the service's rivals, like Spotify, have been doing for years.

‌Apple Music‌ still trails behind Spotify in terms of paid subscribers, with 60 million paid subscribers as of June 2019 compared to Spotify's 113 million Premium subscribers as of September 30, 2019.


This article, "Apple Testing 'Apple Music for Business' Plans at Retailers Like Harrods and Levi's" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Consumer DNA Testing May Be the Biggest Health Scam of the Decade

At the start of this decade, the federal government called out consumer DNA testing as a burgeoning scam industry. Little did we know how it would explode in popularity.

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'The Morning Show' Producers on Negative Reviews: 'There Were a Lot of Apple Haters and Wanting Apple to Fail'

A few weeks after the premiere of Apple TV+, the executive producers of "The Morning Show" have decided to respond to the show's more negative critics at the Recode Code Media conference in Los Angeles (via Recode).


According to Mimi Leder and Kerry Ehrin, many of the negative reviews came from writers who went into the show with the purpose of hating it, due to Apple. Leder summed this up by stating that some reviews "felt like an attack on Apple."
“When those reviews came in, I didn’t know what show they were watching. And I just kind of thought they were nuts,” said Leder, director and executive producer of the show, who is known for her previous work on shows like ER and The West Wing. “I just felt there were a lot of Apple haters and wanting Apple to fail.”

“We’re focused on the story we’re telling, the characters. We’re inside of it. So when you see reviews that are looking at it from the whole business aspect, like, ‘What is Apple doing?’ and, ‘They spent this much money on it’ — it’s kind of separate from us.”
"The Morning Show" has its fair share of both critics and fans, currently sitting at a 63 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with a more favorable 95 percent audience score. Leder referenced statistics like these and said, "The good news is that people love the show, and we love the show, and that's what matters."

At the same time, another ‌Apple TV‌+ show is getting ready to launch on the service in just over a week. On November 28, Apple will debut the first three episodes of "Servant" from producer M. Night Shyamalan, and afterwards new episodes will debut every Friday, similar to the current release schedule of "The Morning Show," "See," and "For All Mankind."


Ahead of the streaming launch, "Servant" premiered at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House in Brooklyn, New York, where stars Toby Kebbell, Lauren Ambrose, Nell Tiger Free, and Rupert Grint were in attendance. The show's writer and creator Tony Basgallop was also at the premiere, as well as Shyamalan, who will direct the series.


The first full trailer for "Servant" premiered a few weeks ago. The show follows a Philadelphia couple who are in mourning after a tragedy strikes their family. Soon after, they hire a young nanny to take care of their child and unknowingly set a series of strange events into motion.

Head to the MacRumors Apple TV+ forum to join in discussions for all of the new shows that have launched, and will soon launch, on Apple's streaming service.


This article, "'The Morning Show' Producers on Negative Reviews: 'There Were a Lot of Apple Haters and Wanting Apple to Fail'" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Apple Begins Production of New Mac Pro in Texas, But U.S. Assembly Possibly Limited to Americas

In addition to breaking ground on a new $1 billion campus in Austin, Texas, Apple today announced that its new Mac Pro is now in production at a nearby facility in the city. The computer is set to launch in December.

Notably, Apple says the Mac Pro units in production in Austin will soon ship to customers "across the Americas," suggesting that the Mac Pro units assembled in Texas will only be shipped to customers in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and other countries across North and South America.


It is possible that Apple plans to assemble the Mac Pro in China for orders placed outside of the Americas, but the company has not commented.

Apple and its manufacturing partners have invested over $200 million in the Mac Pro facility in Austin. The manufacturing plant is UL Zero Waste to Landfill Gold certified, and has been recognized by Austin Water for Excellence in Water Conservation and Excellence in Environmental Stewardship.

The new Mac Pro contains hundreds of components from suppliers in 19 states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont, and Washington.

In a press release, Apple CEO Tim Cook said "building the Mac Pro, Apple's most powerful device ever, in Austin is both a point of pride and a testament to the enduring power of American ingenuity."

The new Mac Pro will be the fastest Mac ever, with up to 28-core Intel Xeon processors, up to 1.5TB of ECC RAM, up to 4TB of SSD storage, and up to AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo graphics with 64GB of HBM2 memory. The computer also has eight PCIe expansion slots for maximum performance, expansion, and configurability.

Apple has yet to announce a specific release date for the new Mac Pro in December. Pricing will start at $5,999.

Related Roundup: Mac Pro
Buyer's Guide: Mac Pro (Don't Buy)

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