“Before a meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron today, Apple CEO Tim Cook made a surprise visit to a small company that’s providing crucial optical recognition technology for the iPhone X,” Chris O’Brien writes for VentureBeat.
“Eldim, based near the Normandy town of Caen, has been making various types of display technology for more than 30 years,” O’Brien writes. “More recently, this has evolved into making components that allow for ‘optical analysis of angular characteristics.’ Apparently, a version of this technology is one of the critical components being used in the new Face ID system for the iPhone X.”
“Local reporters were invited to tag along for the visit, which they documented on Twitter and blog posts,” O’Brien writes. “Eldim CEO Thierry Leroux told reporters that working with Apple was ‘an incredible adventure,’ but added that there have also been huge technical challenges over the years. ‘For us, it was a little like sending someone to the moon,’ Leroux told reporters. Cook responded, ‘It’s great what you have done for us.’ The visit was no doubt a thrill for Eldim’s 42 employees. It was also likely a diplomatic move by Cook, who is scheduled to meet with Macron at 4:15 p.m. CET today.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Congrats, Eldim!
Here’re some tweets:
Visite surprise de #TimCook le pdg d’#Apple à la société #Eldim près de Caen. Elle fournit une techno pour le face ID de #iPhoneX pic.twitter.com/O63bklNqQg
— Philippe Lemoine (@PhLemoine) October 9, 2017
https://t.co/70JAao6sES pic.twitter.com/Xvfen3GN9r
— Philippe Lemoine (@PhLemoine) October 9, 2017
Thanks to my friends at Eldim, a team of talented engineers and craftspeople helping make iPhone possible. Bravo pour votre travail! 🇫🇷 pic.twitter.com/hEpxD3iBGf
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) October 9, 2017
In a capitalist economy, which one has more monetary value: An Apple facial recognition widget packed in a shipping box or a corpse from a heroic soldier rotting in a coffin?
While the Apple widget winds up in a distribution center, the corpse winds up in the cemetery. Both places are an intermediary. Then the widget gets subsumed into the iPhone until it’s recycled; The corpse is subsumed into the soil until it’s absorbed.
Lesson: If you buy an iPhone, you buy a future corpse. But at least in the meantime, you are delighted by its genuine beauty, this, unlike a wanabe Android.
I hope that the analogies implicit in your art are less morbid and less puzzling than this one.
Well, its saving grace is my mention of Apple, iPhone, and beauty.
I am combining ideas from disparate places to tell a story: What capitalism values, obsolescence for technology, Steve Job’s talk about the inevitability and rightfulness of death, Cook’s visit to the cemetery, and Apple Corp. I enjoy synthesizing stuff.
But, no, my art is not morbid at all. One of my latest series is joyful: “UFO Girl” and in lush color while “Prosectued Whistleblowers” is serious and in B&W. It honors the likes of Snowden, Manning, and Kiriakou.
UFO Girl sounds like someone I’d like to hang out with. And whistleblowers get less respect than they deserve. I’m in.
UFO Girl arrived from Zeta Reticuli as a naive girl but left a mature woman. In the meantime, as expressed in the eleven images, she gets entangled in Earth’s shenanigans:
1, She recognizes the risks from Planet X,
2. ISIS forced her to use Latin,
3. She becaumes a Fundamentalist and mistakenly wants to be Raptured first,
4. Satan hands her over to the more powerful NSA,
5. Satan consumes her for dinner,
6. She deplores US family values,
7. She declares that she’s an alien friend,
8. She convinces Trump to destroy the TPP, her greatest accomplishment,
9. Her space fleet evaluates human rights,
10. She says good bye.
In each painting her valeditction is something vulnerable and friendly. In the last one, she utters something like “I will always love you. Your compassionate UFO Girl, forever.”
Yes, a woman with her character would be fun to hang out with.
The first pict of Cook is one of his best portraits.
Look busy, Tim.