Mike Abbott, the former vice president of engineering for Apple Services, has departed to head up General Motors' newly created software department.Abbott, joining as a senior leadership team member, will head up a newly-integrated software department. The department will focus on developing vehicle and enterprise software technologies and solutions.The organization will deliver digital services and features to retail and commercial customers from start to finish. Read more...

Mike Abbott, the former vice president of engineering for Apple Services, has departed to head up General Motors' newly created software department.Abbott, joining as a senior leadership team member, will head up a newly-integrated software department. The department will focus on developing vehicle and enterprise software technologies and solutions.The organization will deliver digital services and features to retail and commercial customers from start to finish. Read more...

In Southern California’s Downey Unified School District, the Apple Learning Coach program is helping teachers supercharge their lesson plans with technology. Lewis Elementary School teacher Lindsay Barnes works with students in her first-grade classroom. Something transformative is happening in the Downey Unified School District in Southern California. “There’s a buzz,” says Allison Box, principal at Lewis Elementary School. “It’s exciting — there’s never a boring day here, and that’s because our kids are immersed in learning environments that are truly dynamic.” Across the district, students are using Apple technology to create projects as varied as podcasts with GarageBand, animations with Keynote, and movies with Clips — and these changes are reshaping classrooms. At the center of this transformation is a…

Jay Newman, a former senior portfolio manager at Elliott Management, wonders what will happen with Apple currently attempting to diversify production and assembly out of CCP-controlled China. Apple CEO Tim Cook Jay Newman for Financial Times: The world’s most valuable company makes great products, but it may turn out that the biggest driver of its share price has been the close relationship CEO Tim Cook has cultivated with China. Entente cordiale with the Chinese Communist party affords Apple a charmed existence when it comes to manufacturing and selling products in China. But scary data points keep popping up. Just in recent weeks, China has sanctioned Lockheed Martin and Raytheon; begun a probe of Micron; raided the due diligence firm Mintz…

Macworld When Apple’s M1 chip made its debut in November 2020, it not only shook up the Mac, it shook up the whole computer industry, outperforming chips from giants such as Intel (which Apple ditched) and AMD. Those companies have been doing their best to catch up and lo and behold, AMD now claims its latest laptop chip, the 7840U, is faster than Apple’s M2. According to AMD, its new Ryzen 7 7840U shows improvement over the M2 that ranges from 5 percent in web browsing to 75 in the Passmark 10 benchmark tool. (We wonder why it doesn’t supply specific numbers or use a more common tool such as Geekbench or Cinebench.) Macworld’s sister site, PCWorld, states that the…