Almost every day there is a new rumor about what Apple is up to, so I very rarely discuss rumors on iPhone J.D. But lately there have been a huge number of reports that Apple is working on something brand new: an electric car. The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has hundreds of people on the Apple car team, 9to5Mac has pictures and bios of many of the senior employees, and as John Gruber of Daring Fireball notes, one of the new Apple employees is the former lead recruiter at Tesla, and “Why poach Tesla’s lead recruiter unless you were building an electric car?” Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that Apple plans to ship its first electric car in 2020. I’m sure that an Apple car would be a neat — and expensive — accessory for an iPhone. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- David Sparks is a California attorney who also publishes the MacSparky website and co-hosts the great Mac Power Users podcast with Florida attorney Katie Floyd. He always has great insights on technology, so I link to his posts almost every week. This week, Sparks announced that he is leaving his law firm to start a solo practice and focus more on his tech passions. I wish him the best of luck on this new chapter of his life, and I have no doubt that he will do great. But no, I don’t have anything similar planned. I really enjoy the work that I do at a large law firm — I have great clients, I’ve had the opportunity to work on interesting and challenging cases, and I’m privileged to work with lots of bright and friendly folks at my firm who I’d miss too much if I went solo.
- We are only two months away from the release of the Apple Watch. If you want to know all about the Apple Watch, Jason Snell of Six Colors prepared a great overview of all of the key information that we now know about the Apple Watch.
- Jeremy Scahill and Josh Begley of The Intercept report that, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, American and British spies hacked the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, giving them the ability to tap phones without getting a court order.
- Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac reports that Microsoft updated its OneNote for iPad app this week, adding OCR scanning of text within images and the ability to add handwritten notes.
- Jordan Kahn of 9to5Mac reports that Microsoft updated the Word, Excel and PowerPoint iOS apps to add support for additional cloud services including iCloud.
- Ian Parker of The New Yorker wrote an extensive profile of Jony Ive, the head of design at Apple and the second most important person at the company. Parker had extensive access to Ive himself and lots of folks who know Ive, and the resulting article is full of interesting information. Jacob Kastrenakes of The Verge notes some of the 15 most interesting tidbits in the article.
- Ben Patterson of Macworld shares advice for using the Messages app in iOS 8.
- Joseph Keller of iMore reports that you can now upload documents on your iPhone and iPad directly to Dropbox without having to first send the Dropbox app.
- And finally, you may remember that in the classic 1989 movie Back to the Future II, when Marty McFly goes to the “future” he goes to 2015 — October 21, 2015. If you want to feel like you are living the future, then you’ll want to check out the Delorean iPhone 6 case, which is being produced in Japan but can be preordered on the Bandai site for $50. Check it out in this video. (via AppAdvice)