Apple's buying Beats? For $3.2 billion? What?! It begs the question why Apple would be interested in purchasing a nascent streaming company instead of one of the bigger dogs, like Rdio or Spotify, but I'm sure Tim Cook et al have their reasons. Ostensibly the purchase price can't matter that much. So it must be something else. Beats also has a popular line of hardware, and two of the biggest names in music, Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, who would undoubtedly come along with the acquisition.
Apple could certainly use a streaming music service, but it doesn't seem like that's worth three billion dollars. Apple could certainly use better headphones, but those don't seem to be worth three billion dollars either. Does Apple need a couple superstars of the music industry? Perhaps Tim Cook thinks they do.
I can't imagine Steve Jobs ever specifically seeking out 'star power' to head up Apple. Frankly, I think his ego was too big for that. But Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs, and seems to be perfectly happy bringing in people that he thinks are best equipped to handle specific verticals, regardless of how famous they may be. For instance, Angela Ahrendts has a much higher profile coming into Apple than Ron Johnson did.
All of this raises the question of who else Apple might bring in, or which other companies they may acquire.
It also means that I'll be incredibly disappointed if Dr. Dre isn't the Thursday night performer at WWDC.
Best,
Aaron
What We're Reading
- Hybrid sweet spot: Native navigation, web content
- Working from home
- 2048, success and me
- App.net State of the Union
- Rethinking QA, Part I
- The Illusion of Life
- The Origin of the Hamburger Icon
- Friday Q&A 2014-05-09: When an Autorelease Isn't
- Three Lessons from Katie Cotton, Apple's Departing PR Boss
Control of the Week
TGLStackedViewController
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A stacked view layout with gesture-based reordering using a UICollectionView -- inspired by Apple's Passbook and Reminders apps. MIT licensed. |
Weekly Roundup
M13BadgeView
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A customizable implementation of badges for UIViews. MIT licensed. |
M13AsynchronousImageView
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An UIImageView category that loads images asynchronously from the web or the disk. MIT licensed. |
UzysAnimatedGifPullToRefresh
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Add PullToRefresh using animated GIF to any scrollView with just simple code MIT licensed. |
MessageDisplayKit
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A messages UI for iPhone and iPad,You can send txt, voice, image,video,emotion .etc messages. like WeChat App. MIT licensed. |
ASProgressPopUpView
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A progress view showing percentage complete in an easy to customize animated popup view. If you supply an array of UIColors, the popup view will animate the color change as the progress bar updates. MIT licensed. |
LPlaceholderTextView
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UITextView subclass with placeholder text BSD licensed. |
UINavigationControllerWithCompletionBlock
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The UINavigationController missing api! MIT licensed. |
TWRCharts
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An iOS wrapper for ChartJS. Easily build animated charts by leveraging the power of native Obj-C code. MIT licensed. |
MTZSplitViewController
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Fixing API of MIT licensed. |
NHLinearShadow
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You can add a near "Linear Shadow Color" choosing a color like [UIColor redColor] or you can use "Linear Shadow" based on a photo, this will find the average color and add a shadow. MIT licensed. |
GBSlideOutToUnlockView
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An "Inside-2-Outside Slide to Unlock" component for iOS MIT licensed. |
TNSexyImageUploadProgress
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An easy image upload visualiser for Objective-C MIT licensed. |
NSObject+CLFNotificationObserver
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A category on NSObject for creating NSNotification observers that handle the weakSelf/strongSelf dance for you. MIT licensed. |
ARCarousel
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Create a Carousel with paging gesture by custom UICollectionView. Feature: - Paging - Reuse cell by UICollectionView reusable cell - Infinity loop for cell - Package and flexible using MIT licensed. |
SANetworkTester
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Quick and Easy way to check for active network connection using Blocks or Delegate on iOS devices MIT licensed. |
Marvelous
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Marvelous is an unofficial native interface to the Marvel Comics API for OSX. It is built on top of the Foundation framework and it uses the high-level operation and networking abstractions built into the Cocoa framework. The design of this framework aims to be easy-to-use in your projects and semantically related to the API. MIT licensed. |
AFSQLManager
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SQL and SQLite database manage on iOS made easy. Create, open, rename and delete databases with AFSQLManager, a block-driven iOS SQL and SQLite manager class. Perform queries never has been that easy! MIT licensed. |
NHLocalize
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NHLocalize helps you localize your apps through storyboards. MIT licensed. |
BKPasscodeView
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iOS7 style passcode view - supports set password, change password and authenticate password. - customizable lock policy for too many failure attempts. MIT licensed. |
DKUserMessageView
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Simple iOS User Message View with Optional Loading. MIT licensed. |
LazyFadeInView
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LazyFadeInView is a cool way to animate the appearnce of a label. This effect is a clone of Secret app. MIT licensed. |
AdjustFontSize-Xcode-Plugin
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Increase Xcode font size with ⌘+. Useful for presentations. License unspecified. |