Daily Pulse: Apple Hits Pause for Streaming TV, McDonalds' Most Important Meal, About 'Time' for Germany's Merkel

Station Break: Apple is pausing development of its not-quite-ever announced live TV streaming service. The hangup goes beyond money, reports Peter Kafka at <re/code> — it’s about disrupting the TV bundling model. Apple, Kafka says, wants a slim service of about 20 stations vs the “traditional pay TV package” of 100. “The TV Guys,” as Kafka calls them, might agree in principle but don’t want any of theirs to be among 80 dropped channels. Two things must be said: Steve Jobs managed to accomplish the impossible when he got The Music Guys to line up behind iTunes. And Why Not iTunes for TV instead? 

Break Dance: McDonald’s all-day breakfast strategy seems to be working: A solid ? of people buying breakfast outside “normal” hours hadn’t been to a McD in the month before the October 6 launch. “That’s pretty significant,” NPD restaurant analyst Bonnie Riggs told The Wall Street Journal.

Um, Yahoo? The plan is to spin off the core business and its stake in Yahoo Japan into a separate, publicly-traded company. That means Yahoo — which helped define the Internet era as the first portal to really rock search — would be reduced to a holding company with one asset: about $30 billion in Alibaba stock. It’s not difficult to see this is as a rebuff to CEO Marissa Mayer, whose crowning achievement was to have been arranging the opposite. Still, Chairman Maynard Webb said Mayer “absolutely” had the confidence of the board, which backed the plan unanimously. But Yahoo also disclosed that the first person Mayer had appointed to the board — PayPal co-founder Max Levchin — resigned last Friday as it completed work on the company’s new course. 

Person of the Year: Time tapped Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel, for shepherding Europe through a year that saw Greece threatening to leave the Eurozone to a flood of refugees trying to get in. She’s the fifth woman honored on her own, and only the first since “Man of the Year” became “Person” in 1999.

Wake Me When: I'm fond of saying that in tech, five years means "never." Five years is when Tesla expects to deliver an autonomous car and when we will have fusion power. So it's interesting that half of an enormous global sampling of consumers think smartphones will be a thing of the past "in just five years." The replacement will, of course, be artificial intelligence, which means ... The poll was commissioned by Ericsson, which used to be a big deal in mobile phones and is now betting on AI. 

Cover Art: German Chancellor Angela Merkel poses for a selfie with a migrant from Syria after she visited the AWO Refugium Askanierring shelter for migrants on September 10, 2015 in Berlin, Germany. Germany is expecting to receive 800,000 asylum applicants this year.

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