Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference is over, and while they showed some slick new updates to the Mac OS and iOS, any new hardware announcements were noticeably absent.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and over-caffeinated presenter Craig Federighi tag-teamed the WWDC crowd Monday afternoon, revealing cool new things like using any of your Apple devices to answer phone calls, giving Siri a Shazam-based ability to recognize music and even a new programming language called Swift. This was a developers conference after all, so those things weren’t exactly unexpected.
But we were a bit disappointed that there was no new iPhone 6 introduced, and no mention of the unicorn-like iWatch or any other new toys to play with. Has Apple lost its innovation mojo? Tim Cook has said he won’t introduce any new hardware until it’s really ready to go, so here’s hoping we get “just one more thing” – or a bunch more – at the next Apple go-round later this year.
If you’re a fan of video games based around sports, EA is probably your main go-to player. But the video game giant is now on the hook for millions to compensate college ballplayers whose likenesses have appeared in EA games. The decision comes following an agreement reached with players after a long class-action lawsuit. EA says they will play college players whose faces appeared in video games dating back to 2003. Pro players already get paid for their appearance in the games.
That’s a lot of players, and the settlement may cost EA $40 million or more – small change really, for what they make on the games. A judge still has to sign off on the deal, but it looks like that will most likely happen.
Both Google and Facebook have talked about bringing the Internets to the approximately 4 billion people on earth still not online, though their methods differ at this point.
However, Google says they want to launch satellites – hundreds of them – to blanket the planet in gmail, cat videos and, of course, ads. Previous to the space missions being contemplated, Google has considered using balloons and drones to bring the net to the unteched masses. Between the three approaches, we’re confident that someday, you’ll be able to Google yourself from any corner of the globe.
Your host today is Caleb Denison.
