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When Apple stores opened their doors nearly 15 years ago, they looked like nothing else in U.S. malls. The sleek, hardwood floors and spare design gave them an aspirational sheen, while shared tables for testing the gadgets made the experience feel communal and accessible. If you needed a reminder that Apple was foremost an innovator, you got it from the absence of traditional cash registers and checkout lines.

But with the arrival of the Apple Watch on Monday, the company is poised to revamp this successful formula. Given that some versions of the smartwatch are expected to carry four- or possibly five-figure price tags, Apple is reimagining its stores to make them attractive to the wealthiest shoppers.

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas. Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked. Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest. The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products. Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google. However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Luca Maria Aiello and a few pals from the University of Turin in Italy began studying a social network called aNobii.com in which people exchange information and opinions about the books they love. Each person has a site that anybody can visit. Users can then choose to set up social links with others

To map out the structure of the network, Aiello and co-created an automated crawler that starts by visiting one person’s profile on the network and then all of the people that connect to this node in turn. It then visits each of the people that link to these nodes and so on. In this way, the bot builds up a map of the network

people began to respond to the crawler’s visits. That gave the team an idea. “The unexpected reactions the bot caused by its visits motivated us to set up a social experiment in two parts to answer the question: can an individual with no trust gain popularity and influence?”

Legend has it that a young Isaac Newton was sitting under an apple tree when he was bonked on the head by a falling piece of fruit, a 17th-century “aha moment” that prompted him to suddenly come up with his law of gravity. In reality, things didn’t go down quite like that.

Four years later, following an outbreak of the bubonic plague, the school temporarily closed, forcing Newton to move back to his childhood home, Woolsthorpe Manor

It was during this period at Woolsthorpe (Newton returned to Cambridge in 1667) that he was in the orchard there and witnessed an apple drop from a tree.

Allow me to ask a wild question: What if we played games, shopped, watched Netflix and read news on our smartphones — without using apps?

the downsides of our app system — principally the control that Apple and Google, the dominant app store owners in much of the world, exert over our digital lives — are onerous enough to contemplate another path.

in recent months, Microsoft’s Xbox video gaming console, the popular game Fortnite and other game companies have moved ahead with technology that makes it possible to play video games on smartphone web browsers.

we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought

if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I

The FBI has a court order demanding Apple helps unlock an iPhone used by the gunman behind the San Bernardino terror attack, Syed Rizwan Farook.

Apple has argued that the move would jeopardise the trust it has with its customers and create a backdoor for government agencies to access customer data.

Apple has appealed against the court order, arguing that it should not be forced to weaken the security of its own products.

Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business

Amazon is not just the “Everything Store,” to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about.

It wasn’t a love of books that led him to start an online bookstore. “It was totally based on the property of books as a product,” Shel Kaphan, Bezos’s former deputy, says. Books are easy to ship and hard to break, and there was a major distribution warehouse in Oregon. Crucially, there are far too many books, in and out of print, to sell even a fraction of them at a physical store. The vast selection made possible by the Internet gave Amazon its initial advantage, and a wedge into selling everything else.

That’s the approach Google appears to be taking with the launch of Android Pay, a new mobile-payments system that closely mimics the Apple Pay platform launched last fall.

Scrambling to play catch-up, Google crucially has cut partnerships with a slew of big retailers including Macy’s, Best Buy, Walgreen, Whole Foods and McDonald’s

That list of retailers looks a lot like Apple Pay’s, and cutting those partnerships is something that the search giant’s flopped Google Wallet system failed to do when it was launched in 2011.

For $9.99 a month, News+ gives you access to more than 300 magazines, along with news articles from The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times.

if you want to find a specific magazine within the News+ tab, be prepared to give that scrolling finger a workout. There's no search field in the News+ tab for typing in a magazine title, so you've got to tap on Apple's catalog and scroll until you find what you're looking for

You can browse by category from the home screen, which reduces the number of covers you have to sort through a little bit.

I hate the new Apple Watch. Hate what it will do to conversation, to the pace of the day, to my friends, to myself. I hate that it will enable the things that already make life so incremental, now-based and hyper-connected. That, and make things far worse.

People check their phones about 150 times a day. Now, imagine how many glances they’ll take with all the information in the world on their wrists.

To the complaints that our smartphone addiction has produced a world where nobody talks much anymore, nobody listens and nobody reads, you can add a new one with the smartwatch: nobody makes eye contact.

“Soon, customers can leave only with their keys and smartphone to shop at their local Walmart,” said Neil Ashe, Walmart’s e-commerce chief. “It’s fast, easy and secure.”

“When Apple released Apple Pay, the idea was that we’re now moving forward with N.F.C., and that’s the way all mobile payments will be transacted,

“But now, we’re beginning to see that no, that’s probably not the way it’s going to develop, and it’s not something we’re just going to give over to Apple or Google,”

Could technology companies have monitored ominous messages made by a gunman who Texas authorities say massacred 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school? Could they have warned the authorities? Answers to these questions remain unclear

But if nothing else, the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, seems highly likely to focus additional attention on how social platforms monitor what users are saying to and showing each other.

Shortly thereafter, Facebook stepped in to note that the gunman sent one-to-one direct messages, not public posts, and that they weren’t discovered until “after the terrible tragedy”.

the brief return of one of my favorite discursive topics—are the kids all right?—in one of my least-favorite variations: why shouldn’t each of them have a smartphone and tablet?

One camp says yes, the kids are fine

complaints about screen time merely conceal a desire to punish hard-working parents for marginally benefiting from climbing luxury standards, provide examples of the moral panic occasioned by all new technologies, or mistakenly blame screens for ill effects caused by the general political situation.

California’s Internet companies may have once dreamed of liberating China through technology, but these days they seem more willing than ever to play the Communist Party's game

"This is a restoration of the Cultural Revolution or another historical retrogression," said another.

The Washington Post is one of many Western newspapers that carries a regular paid supplement by China Daily, another Communist Party mouthpiece.

SAN FRANCISCO — Fingerprint sensors have turned modern smartphones into miracles of convenience.

While such wizardry is convenient, it has also left a gaping security hole.

Still, the findings raise troubling questions about the effectiveness of fingerprint security on smartphones.