Quick Takes: Apple Celebrating Women's Week, The Road to Swift 5, and New macOS 11 Concept

In addition to our standalone articles covering the latest Apple news and rumors at MacRumors, this Quick Takes column provides a bite-sized recap of other headlines about Apple and its competitors on weekdays.

Thursday, March 1

Apple celebrating International Women's Day and Women's Week with in-store events: Apple Orchard Road in Singapore will be hosting Today at Apple sessions over the next week in celebration of women who inspire the community. Apple Marché Saint-Germain in France will be hosting a recruiting event on March 8, billed as an evening of inspiration, participation, and celebration.

Commentary: International Women's Day is observed on March 8 to celebrate the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. Apple has honored the day in previous years with featured content in iTunes and Apple Music.

macOS 11 concept reimagines Apple's desktop operating system: Spanish graphic designer and University of Navarra student Álvaro Pabesion has shared a macOS 11 concept on Behance. The mockups visualize how Apple's desktop operating system could look with a simpler design.

Commentary: While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it's hard not to drool over the idea of a more systemwide dark mode and iTunes being easier to navigate. macOS last received a major redesign as part of OS X Yosemite in 2014.

"Apple Is Going to Be the First Trillion-Dollar Company": A bold headline from Bloomberg View columnist Barry Ritholtz, who believes Apple will achieve the milestone at some point this year. He considers share repurchases, continued investments from Warren Buffett, index buyers, and several new products being on the horizon as four factors key to Apple's continued upward momentum.

Commentary: Apple is certainly leading the race to a trillion dollar valuation, with a market capitalization hovering around the $900 billion mark. Google parent company Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft are next closest, each with market caps approaching the $750 billion mark. AAPL is down nearly two percent today.

Apple outlines release process for Swift 4.2, introduces SwiftNIO: Apple has shared a blog post that describes the goals, release process, and estimated schedule for Swift 4.2. Apple has also introduced SwiftNIO at a conference in Tokyo, described as a low-level tool for building high-performance networking applications in Swift.

Commentary: A couple of notable items for developers who use Apple's open source programming language. Today is also the cutoff date for proposing ideas for Swift 5.0, expected to be released in late 2018.

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