Linked List: August 26, 2016

Friday, 26 August 2016

Unique ‘Celebration’ Apple I Sells for $815,000 

Apple hardware is overpriced.

Spotify Is Burying Musicians With Apple Music Exclusives 

Lucas Shaw and Adam Satariano, reporting for Bloomberg:

Spotify has been retaliating against musicians who introduce new material exclusively on rival Apple Music by making their songs harder to find, according to people familiar with the strategy. Artists who have given Apple exclusive access to new music have been told they won’t be able to get their tracks on featured playlists once the songs become available on Spotify, said the people, who declined to be identified discussing the steps. Those artists have also found their songs buried in the search rankings of Spotify, the world’s largest music-streaming service, the people said. Spotify said it doesn’t alter search rankings.

Hardball.

Update: Spotify is not diddling with search results. Promotion, yes. Search, no.

Frank Ocean’s ‘Blonde’ Amplifies Discord in the Music Business 

Ben Sisario, reporting for the NYT:

Despite its idiosyncratic format, “Endless” — one long streaming film, whose songs (different from those on “Blonde”) were not available separately — fulfilled Mr. Ocean’s contractual obligations to Def Jam, enabling him to release “Blonde” through Apple without any involvement from the label, according to three people with knowledge of Mr. Ocean’s deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. The financial arrangement between Mr. Ocean and Apple is not known. Apple, Def Jam and a representative for Mr. Ocean’s managers all declined to comment.

Record labels, more and more, are unnecessary middlemen, especially for well-known acts.

Nikkei Asian Review: ‘Intel Aims to Challenge TSMC Over Apple Chip Orders by 2018’ 

Cheng Ting-Fang, reporting for Nikkei Asian Review:

Intel’s recent pledge to expand its business making chips for others highlights its ambition to snatch chip orders for Apple’s popular iPhones from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. as early as 2018, industry experts said.

Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker by revenue, announced earlier this month that it will license technology from British mobile chip designer ARM with the aim of securing more business from smartphone companies. LG Electronics will become the first smartphone company to adopt Intel chips following the ARM deal.

Would be a crazy story if Apple switched from Intel to AMD for x86 CPUs for the Mac, but switched to Intel for CPUs for iOS.

(Via MacRumors.)

Intriguing Rumor: ‘Apple Could Use Custom x86 SoC Made by AMD’ 

Gian Maria Forni, writing for Bits n Chips, back in October:

According to our sources, Apple is pondering about using custom x86 CPUs in its next iMacs and MacBooks, during 2017-2018. Nowadays it’s hard to avoid the use of x86 ISA in high end and professional personal computers, but at the same time Intel CPUs are too expensive if we compare these with ARM SoCs.

So, Apple’s target is to realize a complete x86 custom SoC family, like Sony and Microsoft did with their consoles. AMD is the perfect partner to do this.

Most of the speculation about Apple taking control of its Mac CPU is about switching the instruction set to ARM. That’s possible, of course, but problematic in many ways. (You wouldn’t be able to use Boot Camp to boot into Windows, for example.) This is just an idle rumor from a year ago, but it’s intriguing to think about Apple designing their own SoCs for Mac with the help of AMD.