Microsoft has created a new Media Player app for Windows 11, and it's beginning to test the app with Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel today. The redesigned Media Player app will support both audio and video, and it includes a design that better matches Windows 11's UI improvements. From a report: "At the heart of Media Player is a full-featured music library that allows you to quickly browse and play music, as well as create and manage playlists," explains Dave Grochocki, a senior program manager lead for Microsoft's Windows inbox apps team. "The update to the new Media Player will replace the Groove Music app."

The playback view in this new Media Player app includes album art or artist imagery, which will appear both in full-screen modes and the mini player option. Media Player will also support video, which is usually handled in Windows 10 and Windows 11 in a separate Films & TV app. "All your content in the music and video folders on your PC will appear automatically in your library, but you can also tell Media Player where to look for additional content in app settings," says Grochocki.

The TV maker released its latest earnings report on Tuesday and revealed that over the last three months, its Platform Plus segment that includes advertising and viewer data had a gross profit of $57.3 million. That's more than twice the amount of profit it made selling devices like TVs, which was $25.6 million, despite those device sales pulling in considerably more revenue. The Verge reports: When Vizio filed to go public, it described the difference between the two divisions. While Devices is easy to understand -- 4K TVs, soundbars, etc. -- Platform Plus is a little more complicated. It counts money made from selling ad placements on its TV homescreens, deals for the buttons on remotes, ads that run on streaming channels, its cut from subscriptions, and viewer data that it tracks and sells as part of the InScape program.

The company says shipments of its TVs fell to 1.4 million in 2021 compared to 2.1 million in 2020, a drop of 36 percent. CEO William Wang told investors on the call that he sees "pretty healthy inventory" going into the holiday season, so anyone planning to pick up a value-priced TV or soundbar should have some decent options available. That spike in Platform Plus revenue, which shot up 136 percent compared to last year, did a lot to help Vizio make up the difference as profits from TVs dipped compared to last year. Supply chain and logistics problems affecting many companies hit Vizio hard, too, but execs also said the company is working with its third-party partners to help find warehouse and trucking employees.

Where the numbers keep growing is in its number of active SmartCast accounts, which are now over 14 million, and how much money it makes from each user on average. That number has nearly doubled from last year, going from $10.44 to $19.89. On the call with investors and analysts, Vizio execs said 77 percent of that money comes directly from advertising, like the kind that runs on its WatchFree Plus package of streaming channels, a group that recently expanded with content targeting. The next biggest contributor is the money it makes selling Inscape data about what people are watching.

Last month 49-year-old Glen de Vries travelled with William Shatner into space with two other crewmembers on Blue Origin's sub-orbital capsule.

Today NBC News announced de Vries "was one of two men killed Thursday in a plane crash in New Jersey, officials said." Glen de Vries, 49, of New York City, and Thomas P. Fischer, 54, of Hopatcong, New Jersey, died following the small aircraft crash shortly before 3 p.m. in Hampton Township, according to New Jersey State Police...

De Vries co-founded software company Medidata Solutions, which specializes in management of electronic data from clinical trials. He also served as a trustee for Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "We will truly miss Glen, but his dreams — which we share — live on: we will pursue progress in life sciences & healthcare as passionately as he did," Medidat said in a statement.
Newsweek reports that upon his return to earth, de Vries told a Pittsburgh TV station that space travel "is something we need to make accessible in an equitable way, to as many people on the planet as possible." In a tweet on Friday, Blue Origin wrote, "We are devastated to hear of the sudden passing of Glen de Vries."

"He brought so much life and energy to the entire Blue Origin team and to his fellow crewmates," the tweet continued. "His passion for aviation, his charitable work, and his dedication to his craft will long be revered and admired."

A new version of a lawsuit accusing Subway of deceiving the public about its tuna products said lab testing shows they contain animal proteins such as chicken, pork and cattle, and not the advertised "100% tuna." From a report: Karen Dhanowa and Nilima Amin filed a third version of their proposed class action this week in the federal court in San Francisco, near their homes in Alameda County. Subway said in a statement it will seek to dismiss the "reckless and improper" lawsuit. The chain said the plaintiffs have "filed three meritless complaints, changing their story each time," and that its "high-quality, wild-caught, 100% tuna" was regulated strictly in the United States and around the world. Since the case began in January, Subway has run TV ads and launched a website defending its tuna. It also revamped its menu but not its tuna, saying an upgrade wasn't needed. The original complaint claimed that Subway tuna salads, sandwiches and wraps were "bereft" of tuna, while an amended complaint said they were not 100% sustainably caught skipjack and yellowfin tuna. Further reading, from last year: Irish Court Says Subway Bread Is Too Sugary to Be Called 'Bread'.

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has again raised the stakes as to which city in the U.S. will become the country's crypto hub. From a report: Suarez announced today on CoinDesk TV that the city would be staking (i.e. locking up cryptocurrencies to earn yield) a large portion of its native cryptocurrency, MiamiCoin, to earn yield in Bitcoin. What's more, he said Miami will be "the first city in America to give a Bitcoin yield as a dividend directly to its residents." Previously, only holders of MiamiCoin could earn any kind of crypto return, be it STX, the native cryptocurrency for the Stacks protocol on which MiamiCoin is built, or Bitcoin. Now, according to today's announcement, residents will be given a Bitcoin wallet and receive free BTC regardless of whether they hold MiamiCoin or not.

This week, following successful tests on Android smartphones and tablets, Netflix has announced that it will bring AV1 to TVs. 9to5Google reports: In a blog post this week, Netflix confirms it will start using the AV1 codec on some TVs. AV1, which has been available since 2018, allows for the more efficient encoding and decoding of data for streaming, leading to higher quality for the end user and better use of bandwidth for providers. However, the codec relies on hardware support. To ensure that TVs using AV1 streams will provide a good experience, Netflix says it analyzes the steam to ensure the device is spec-compliant for AV1 decoding.

For the time being, Netflix isn't specifically announcing which devices will support AV1 outside of the Netflix app on Sony's PS4 Pro console. On other TVs, support is only specified as working on "a number of AV1 capable TVs." In theory, this should include a considerable number of Android TV models.

First it was called Freedive, then it was dubbed IMDb TV. Now, less than three years after launching its free ad-supported video-streaming service, Amazon is looking to rename it, The Information reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the situation. From a report: Amazon executives believe the existing name is too hard for people to pronounce, which hurts its popularity, said people familiar with the situation. Several alternatives have been tossed around in internal discussions, including Zon -- short for Amazon -- as well as Free TV and Free Streaming TV. The Zon idea was shot down but otherwise Amazon is yet to make a decision about the new name, the people said.

Andreas Kolbe is a former co-editor-in-chief of The Signpost, an online newspaper for (English-language) Wikipedia that's been published online since 2005 with contributions from Wikipedia editors. Kolbe has been contributing to it since 2006.

Last week he returned to the Signpost to share a cautionary tale. Its title? "A photo on Wikipedia can ruin your life."

Also a long-time Slashdot reader, Andreas Kolbe shares this summary with us: For more than two years, Wikipedia illustrated its article on New York serial killer Nathaniel White with the police photo of an African-American man from Florida who happened to have the same name. A Wikipedia user said he had found the picture on crimefeed.com, a "true crime" site associated with the Discovery Channel, which also used the same photo in a TV broadcast on the serial killer.

During the two-and-a-half years the Wikipedia article showed the picture of the wrong man, it was viewed over 125,000 times, including nearly 12,000 times on the day the TV program ran. The man whose picture was used said he received threats to his person from people who assumed he really was the killer, and took to dressing incognito.

His picture is now all over Google when people search for the serial killer.
"Friends and family contacted Plaintiff concerning the broadcast and asking Plaintiff if he actually murdered people in the state of New York," adds a legal complaint the man eventually filed against the Wikimedia Foundation. "Plaintiff assured these friends and family that even though he acknowledged his criminal past, he never murdered anyone nor has he ever been to the state of New York...."

Last month the legal director of the Wikimedia Foundation and a Legal Fellow co-authored a blog post pointing out the lawsuit "was filed months after Wikipedia editors proactively corrected the error at issue in September 2020." The blog post celebrates a judge's dismissal of the suit as "a victory for free knowledge," and acknowledges the protections afforded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. "Our ability to maintain and grow the world's largest repository of free knowledge depends on robust legal immunity.... The Wikimedia Foundation applauds this ruling and remains committed to protecting global exchange of knowledge and freedom of expression across the internet."

But the blog post also argued that "the many members of our volunteer community are very effective at identifying and removing these inaccuracies when they do occur." Andreas Kolbe disagrees. "The photo was in the article for over two years," Kolbe writes on Signpost. "For a man to have his face presented to the world as that of a serial killer on a top-20 website, for such a significant amount of time, can hardly be described as indicative of 'very effective' quality control on the part of the community." The picture was only removed after a press report pointed out that Wikipedia had the wrong picture. This means the deletion was in all likelihood reactive rather than "proactive"...

The wrong photograph appears to have been removed by an unknown member of the public, an IP address that had never edited before and has not edited since. The volunteer community seems to have been completely unaware of the problem throughout...

It would seem more appropriate -

- to acknowledge that community processes failed Mr. White to a quite egregious degree, and
- to alert the community to the fact that its quality control processes are in need of improvement....

Surely Wikipedia's guidelines, policies and community practices for sourcing images, in particular images used to imply responsibility for specific crimes, would benefit from some strengthening, to ensure they actually depict the correct individual.
Pondering the dismissal of the lawsuit, Kolbe ultimately asks if there's a deeper moral question in a world where a man was "defamed on our global top-20 website with absolute impunity, without his having any realistic hope of redress for what happened to him." While to the best of my belief the error did not originate in Wikipedia, but was imported into Wikipedia from an unreliable external site, for more than two years any vigilante Googling Nathaniel White serial killer would have seen Mr. White's color picture prominently displayed in Google's knowledge graph panel (multiple copies of it still appear there at the time of writing). And along with it they would have found a prominent link to the serial killer's Wikipedia biography, again featuring Mr. White's image — providing what looked like encyclopedic confirmation that Mr. White of Florida was indeed guilty of sickening crimes...

On the very day the picture was removed from the article here, a video about the serial killer was uploaded to YouTube — complete with Mr. White's picture, citing Wikipedia. At the time of writing, the video's title page with Mr. White's color picture is the top Google image result in searches for the serial killer. All in all, seven of Google's top-fifteen image search results for Nathaniel White serial killer today feature Mr. White's image. Only two black-and-white photos show what seems to have been the real killer.
A comment on the Wikimedia Foundation blog adds, "What I'd much rather see is an acknowledgement that the community process failed Mr White to an extreme degree and that steps will be taken to prevent recurrence of such cases."

Why didn't the European Union drop its annual observation of Daylight Saving Time? ABC News reports: [I]n 2018, the European Parliament voted to end the practice after a poll of 4.8 million Europeans showed overwhelming support for scrapping it. Critics of the ritual have pointed to scientific studies showing the negative physical and psychological effects of switching back and forth to mark daylight saving time. "The time change will be abolished," the European Commission's then-president, Jean-Claude Juncker, told German public broadcaster ZDF in 2018. "People do not want to keep changing their watches."

Although the decision was supposed to take effect in 2021, the coronavirus pandemic has delayed its implementation, pushing it to the bottom of the political agenda for many countries. The fate of daylight saving time in Europe remains unclear.

Member states of the European Union are also struggling to agree on which time to adopt.

"We agree on the time change, but we are stuck on whether to stay on summer or winter time," Karima Delli, a French member of the European Parliament, told French broadcaster BFM TV in 2019. "We have a real problem." While Germany is calling for summer time, Greece and Portugal want to keep switching between the two. Forcing all member states to implement the same time would be complicated, as some would get less daylight than others. So the European Commission, tasked with executing the decision from Parliament, has asked countries to align with their neighbors. But even that would be tricky.

For instance, since the U.K.'s withdrawal from the European Union in 2020, the island nation is no longer concerned with the European Parliament's decision on daylight saving time. Yet neighboring Ireland, a European Union member state, will be impacted by a change to the current system, potentially complicating border crossings...

Only about 70 countries in the world still observe daylight saving time, but many are reconsidering it.

Fox plans to double down on its investments in blockchain technology by introducing more NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and digital collectibles for its shows and franchises in the coming months, a top executive tells Axios. From a report: Fox Entertainment was the first major TV studio to debut its own blockchain division in May. At the time, the company said it would put at least $100 million behind the effort to build what it hopes will become a major part of its top line revenue growth in the years ahead. "This is a revenue generating business," said Scott Greenberg, the CEO of Fox's Blockchain Reality Labs division. "There's a huge opportunity in tokenizing content."

Citing the success of gaming companies like Fortnite parent Epic Games and Roblox, he also noted, "there's a notion of creating digital economies around brands that we think that can apply." "Imagine earn-to-watch," he said. What the gaming world has shown is that "you can turn your time spent into earnings." Greenberg came to Fox in 2019 through Fox's acquisition of Bento Box Entertainment, the animation studio behind major animated hits, including "Bob's Burgers" and "The Great North." Fox put Greenberg in charge of its blockchain division, given Bento Box's expertise in digital art.

Ana Diaz writes via Polygon: Jack Morrison logs on to stream, he doesn't boot up Twitch, Streamlabs OBS, or speak into a fancy microphone. Instead, he grabs a basic circular mirror and sets it in front of his desktop monitor, facing the screen. Then he sits in front of his monitor, as usual, and plays the game, propping up his cell phone to face him and setting his camera live. When he boots up Apex Legends, viewers see the gameplay reflected in the mirror as they watch him play. This makeshift setup might have been surprising just a year ago, in an industry that seems to be more and more concerned with having the latest streaming technology. But it's become a rather common practice on TikTok, where video game streaming has picked up in the past few months. In September, the company said that one billion people in total use the app each month, and jokes and sounds riffing on video games have long proliferated widely across TikTok. Now, Morrison (JackMorrisonTV on TikTok) and other streamers with similarly crude setups have taken over the app's "LIVE" section, capturing as many as 2,400 viewers at a time.

These streamers are using low-key setups, in comparison to the complex (and expensive) setups that dominate Twitch, where a DSLR camera and the capture card to use it can cost over $800. The exact build of each TikToker's setup varies, but nearly all of them capture video via an external camera that's focused on a screen, or in Morrison's case, a reflection of a screen. A brief scroll through the gaming section of TikTok's live content shows these streamers' ingenuity; some will stream videos of tablets or phones as they play mobile games, while others will just put the camera in front of a screen. The games also vary widely, with people playing games like Snake, Minecraft, and Wordscapes in addition to shooters like Valorant.

The number of live streams is much smaller than the wave of short-form videos being pushed out every single day on the app, making them stand out more. It also feels like a more accessible platform, especially for people who are just getting started with streaming. TikTok streamers are using more basic technology, such as mirrors, cell phone stands, and the like. It's also less competitive than Twitch, which has over seven million unique streamers go live each month. [...] TikTok is also testing monetization features that might make it more appealing for streamers to use. [...] For now, streams seem like a quick and easy way to take advantage of TikTok's massive audience. Whether or not bona fide TikTok streaming stars will emerge on the platform or find a sustainable home there remains to be seen.

Netflix, the video-streaming giant, began its expected foray into video games with the introduction of five mobile games to its users worldwide, playable initially on Android devices. From a report: The titles are included in a Netflix subscription, and there'll be no advertising or additional purchases required, Mike Verdu, Netflix's vice president of game development, said Tuesday. The streaming company has targeted video games as its next big thing -- it's an industry that's larger than the movie and TV businesses. Players logging in will see a dedicated games row and tab where they can choose which titles to play. Games for Apple's iPhone are also planned. The initial offering includes titles linked to Netflix shows, such as Stranger Things: 1984 and Stranger Things 3: The Game. Also included are Shooting Hoops, Card Blast and Teeter Up.

Something is slowing internet subscriber growth at Comcast and Charter, reports Bloomberg, "raising concerns about an end to what has been a huge growth business."

But why? Explanations ranging from a slowdown in consumer spending to competition from phone giants. Slashdot reader JoeyRox shared this report from Bloomberg: Charter on Friday reported 25% fewer new broadband subscribers than analysts estimated and said the overall number of new customers would fall back to 2018 levels. Comcast, which had earlier cut its subscriber forecast, reported 300,000 new internet customers Thursday, less than half the number added a year ago. Analysts were expecting some slowdown in demand coming off 2020, a year when broadband sign-ups spiked as the pandemic shifted people to working and schooling from home. Still, with Charter echoing Comcast's gloomy picture from Thursday, suddenly there's a chill on the cable broadband front, which became the most prized segment of the business as consumers cut traditional TV service.

Charter's shortfall raises "questions about whether this is the beginning of the end of the cable broadband story," said Geetha Ranganathan, an industry analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence...

Both Charter and Comcast blamed a slower new home market for some of the slack in demand, leaving the companies to try and squeeze more business out of their saturated markets. Other factors could include a dropoff in lower-paying customers as government assisted broadband funds dry up... New competition from phone companies certainly doesn't help. AT&T Inc. is expanding its network and added 289,000 new fiber internet customers last quarter. Meanwhile, T-Mobile US Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. are very excited about new wireless home broadband offers that aim directly at cable and outlying areas where cable could potentially expand.

Changes in TV viewing may also be a factor. For decades, cable companies sold TV and internet in discounted bundles. With rise of streaming video "the cable promos aren't as appealing for broadband only," Lopez said. Even as Comcast and Charter deploy new faster network technology to attract more lucrative customers, cable's share of the market is starting to shrink, according to Tammy Parker, a senior analyst with GlobalData.

The latest version of macOS, Monterey, is now available to download, according to Apple. The software has been available in public beta for several months, but today's release means Apple thinks the software is ready for everyday use. From a report: As is tradition, Apple announced its latest version of macOS at WWDC in June. New features include the ability to set Macs as an AirPlay target to play content from iPhones and iPads, as well as Shortcuts, Apple's iOS automation software. There have also been improvements made to FaceTime, as well as a new Quick Note feature. For a full rundown of what's on the way, check out our preview from July, as well as Apple's own feature list.

Unfortunately, some of Monterey's biggest new additions, Universal Control and SharePlay, don't seem to be available at launch. Apple notes that both features will be available "later this fall." Universal Control allows files to be dragged and dropped between several different machines, as Apple's Craig Federighi demonstrated at WWDC. It also will let you control multiple Apple devices including Macs, MacBooks, and iPads, with the same mouse and keyboard. SharePlay will enable shared experiences of music, TV shows, movies, and more while connected over FaceTime. Once it's available, Apple says you can use the feature with Apple Music, Apple TV+ and unnamed "popular third-party services." It's better news when it comes to Safari's redesign, which by default now uses a more traditional interface rather than the controversial new tab design introduced at WWDC.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In the early hours of Sunday morning, hackers took down the corporate servers and systems of Sinclair Broadcast Group, a giant U.S. TV conglomerate that owns or operates more than 600 channels across the country. Days later, inside the company, "it's pandemonium and chaos," as one current employee, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to speak to the press, told Motherboard. Sinclair has released very few details about the attack since it was hacked Sunday. On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that the group behind the attack is the infamous Evil Corp., a ransomware gang that is believed to be based in Russia and which was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury department in 2019.

The ransomware attack interfered with several channels' broadcast programming, preventing them from airing ads or NFL games, as reported by The Record, a news site owned by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. It has also left employees confused and wondering what's going on, according to current Sinclair workers. "Whoever did this, they either by accident or by design did a very good job," a current employee said in a phone call, explaining that there are some channels that haven't been able to air commercials since Sunday. "We're really running in the blind [...] you really can't do your job." The employee said that he was working on Sunday and was able to get two emails out to colleagues. "And one of them got it, and the other one didn't," they said.

Employees did not have access to their emails until Tuesday morning, according to the two employees and text messages seen by Motherboard. The office computers, however, are still locked by the company out of precaution, and Sinclair told employees not to log into their corporate VPN, which they usually used to do their jobs. Until Thursday, the company was communicating with employees via text, according to the sources, who shared some of the texts sent by the company. In one of them, they called for an all hands meeting. The meeting, according to the two current employees, was quick and vague. Both sources said that the company should be more transparent with its own employees.

Yesterday, Roku told customers that it's unable to strike a deal to bring YouTube and YouTube TV apps to its channel store, citing anti-competitive demands in carriage agreements. These included "asking Roku to create a dedicated search results row for YouTube within the Roku smart TV interface and demanding certain features on Roku that they don't insist on getting from other streaming platforms," reports Axios. Now, a leaked email has surfaced allegedly showing that Google did in fact ask Roku for special search treatment for YouTube, an allegation that Google had previously called "baseless." 9to5Google reports: CNBC reports that an email from a Google executive to Roku called a "dedicated shelf for [YouTube] search results" a "must." The email was sent in 2019, well before the current fight between the two companies went public. Prior to this report, Roku has said on multiple occasions that "Google continues to interfere with Roku's independent search results." Google, in response, has denied those allegations and called them "baseless" while also claiming that it was Roku who decided to renegotiate the contract between the two companies. A previous statement from Google reads: "To be clear, we have never, as they have alleged, made any requests to access user data or interfere with search results. This claim is baseless and false."

This email puts the statements of both companies in a new light. It's possible Google did end up dropping this request between when the email was sent in 2019 and when the contract negotiations started, but it's also very possible the company is bending the truth around this request. Whatever the case, Google said that it "never" made such a request, but this email allegedly proves otherwise. ["The email from the Google executive to Roku reads: 'YouTube Position: A dedicated shelf for YT search results is a must,'" reports CNBC.]

The Food and Drug Administration approved a virtual reality-based treatment for children with the visual disorder amblyopia, or lazy eye, the company behind the therapy announced today. The Verge reports: Luminopia's approach uses TV and movies to develop the weaker eye and train the eyes to work together. Patients watch the show or movie through a headset that shows the images to each eye separately. The images shown to the stronger eye have a lower contrast, and the images are presented with overlays that force the brain to use both eyes to see them properly. Kids using the therapy and wearing glasses had more improvement in their vision than a similar group of kids who did not use the therapy and just wore corrective glasses full time during a clinical trial of the technology. After 12 weeks watching the shows one hour per day, six days per week, 62 percent of kids using the treatment had a strong improvement in their vision. Only around a third of the kids in the comparison group had similar improvements over the course of the 12 weeks.

Luminopia has over 700 hours of programming in its library, and it partnered with kids' content distributors like Nelvana and Sesame Workshop to develop the tool. The authors of the clinical trial wrote that they think that the option to pick popular videos might be one reason users stuck to the program -- people followed the treatment plan 88 percent of the time. Less than 50 percent of patients stick to eye patches or blurring drops. With the approval, Luminopia joins only a handful of companies with clearance to offer a digital therapeutic as a prescription treatment for medical conditions. Last year, the FDA approved a prescription video game called EndeavorRx, which treats ADHD in kids between eight and 12 years old. Luminopia said in a statement that it plans to launch the treatment in 2022.

Roku on Thursday told customers via a post on its corporate blog that it has still not been able to strike a distribution agreement with YouTube TV, which has been removed from Roku's channel store for five months. From a report: It's the first time Roku has directly acknowledged the issue to its customers. Roku says YouTube TV parent Google has made anti-competitive demands in distribution negotiations, which still haven't been resolved. In the blog post, Roku says Google has made anti-competitive demands in carriage agreements, including asking Roku to create a dedicated search results row for YouTube within the Roku smart TV interface and demanding certain features on Roku that they don't insist on getting from other streaming platforms. Roku reiterated that "our concerns with Google are not about money," but striking an agreement with fair distribution terms. "We have not asked for a single change in the financial terms of our existing agreement," Roku writes in the blog post. " In fact, Roku does not earn a single dollar from YouTube's ad supported video sharing service today, whereas Google makes hundreds of millions of dollars from the YouTube app on Roku."

Bloomberg: There was a sense that, without the moderating influence of the late Steve Jobs, perhaps Jony Ive started to prioritize aesthetics a little too much. Since he stepped down as chief designer at the end of 2019, Apple seems to have reemphasized function. From the iPhone to Apple TV to the Macbook, gone are the days of "The user be damned, we think this looks cool." Monday's unveiling of a new Macbook Pro lineup of laptops provides evidence of the shift. Headline features released five years ago under Ive's aegis have been scrapped. Gone is the so-called "butterfly" keyboard, which rendered the device thinner but whose clunky mechanics made typing more difficult; farewell too to the Touch Bar, a touch sensitive strip display along the top of the keyboard which could show functions for the web browser one moment and mixing tools for music apps the next, but was almost impossible to use without looking; back are HDMI ports, which let you plug the computer into high-definition displays without using an adapter. Perhaps this would have happened under Ive, but Evans Hankey, who now heads the industrial design team, has overseen plenty of other tweaks that seem to indicate a change of philosophy.

[...] But there is merit in sometimes listening to your customers, particularly when the pendulum has swung too far away from function and towards form. After all, you're liable to lose professional customers -- architects, musicians, film-makers -- if they can't plug their laptops into external monitors. And professional users can afford to pay for the top-of-the-range devices that are more profitable to Apple. Dieter Rams, a significant influence on Ive, compiled 10 principles for "Good Design." Number three was "good design is aesthetic." Apple seems to have remembered numbers two and four: "good design makes a product useful" and "good design makes a product understandable."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Pricing right now on TVs is the highest since at least 2012," says Stephen Baker, vice president of Industry Analysis at NPD group. "Holiday pricing overall is likely to be at least $100 above normal. Last year the average price of a TV was $363 during the fourth quarter, which is fairly typical over the last few years. This year our forecast is for the average price to be approximately $500." For a lot of shoppers a $500 TV sounds pretty affordable, but that's the average of every TV sold in the US. The majority are entry-level models with small screens and modest features that bring down the average. [...] TVs come in a wide range of prices and sizes, and the higher average selling price will impact smaller, cheaper models more than larger, more-expensive ones. In fact, high-dollar TVs are selling better than ever, which of course helps drive up the average price. "Sales of TVs over $1,500 are at record levels, and sales of TVs 75-inch and above are performing much better than the overall market," says Baker.

The good news? Inventory this holiday season likely won't be a problem. "Right now we don't expect significant shortages in TVs," says Baker. "While the port blockages are a concern, there are a lot of choices in the TV market. So if consumers can be flexible around brand and screen size, availability should be sufficient." He adds that over the last few months TV sales have been tepid, which allows TV makers to build up enough inventory to deal with the holiday rush. So what does all of this mean for TV shoppers? Traditional holiday price drops will still happen, but maybe those $100 doorbuster deals won't be as common. "There will be price drops, there will be promotions, the calendar does not disappear," says Baker. "But all of those pricing activities will happen on products priced substantially higher than in previous years." In other words, midrange and higher-end TVs, the ones selling at a historic clip, are still likely to see plenty of price reductions in the next couple months. In fact, some are happening already.