Month: February 2019

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  Apple Senior Vice President Angela Ahrendts presents at an Apple event in October of 2018. [credit: Valentina Palladino ]

Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts will vacate her position and depart the company in April. A press release on Apple’s website says Ahrendts is leaving “for new personal and professional pursuits.” She holds the title of Senior Vice President, Retail, and reports directly to CEO Tim Cook.

In 2014, Ahrendts joined Apple from Burberry, where she had been CEO. She had been credited with reversing negative trends and with Burberry transforming its business. She did this by devising a playbook that was inspired in part by Apple. Before that, she had worked in other executive, operational, and marketing roles in the fashion industry since the ‘80s.

In a statement about Ahrendts’ departure, Cook said, “I want to thank Angela for inspiring and energizing our teams over the past five years. She has been a positive, transformative force, both for Apple’s stores and the communities they serve. We all wish her the very best as she begins a new chapter.”

Enlarge / Google wants less of this. (credit: Vegansoldier / Flickr)

Since Chrome's very first release, performance has been one of Google's top priorities. But Google is against a competing force: Web developers. The Web of today is a more-complex, bandwidth-intensive place than it was when Chrome was first released, which means that—although Internet connections and the browser itself are faster than they've ever been—slow pages remain an everyday occurrence.

Google engineers have been developing "Never Slow Mode" in a bid to counter this. Spotted at Chrome Story (via ZDNet), the new mode places tight limitations on Web content in an effort to make its performance more robust and predictable.

The exact design and rationale of Never Slow Mode aren't public—the changelog for the feature mentions a design document but says it's currently Google-internal. But taken together, that design and rationale will ensure that the browser's main thread never has to do too much work and will never get too delayed. They will also ensure that only limited amounts of data are pulled down over the network. This should make the browser more responsive to user input, lighter on the network, and a bit less of a memory hog than it would otherwise be.

(credit: EA)

BFV's sales to date, according to EA COO and CFO Blake Jorgensen, have reached 7.3 million copies across all platforms worldwide, which the company says is "one million less" than it had indicated in previous Q3 2019 guidance. Jorgensen didn't mince words: he blamed the drop in the series' uptake by the developers' focus on a single-player campaign, as opposed to having a promised battle royale mode ready for fans in time for the game's launch.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson took the opportunity to confirm that BFV's battle royale mode, currently dubbed Firestorm, will launch in March of this year. Wilson did not offer further details about any monetization strategy for that mode; it currently requires that consumers buy the game's retail edition, much like the battle royale mode found in Activision's multiplayer-only game Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. (That Activision game includes additional microtransactions in its battle royale mode.)