Apple

Apple:

Apple and the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) today announced that veterans across the nation and surrounding territories1 now have access to the Health Records feature in the Health app on iPhone. The VA gradually launched Health Records to select patients this summer, and now veterans who are iOS users and receive their care through the Veterans Health Administration can see a fuller, more comprehensive picture of their health that includes information from multiple providers.

And:

The VA is the largest medical system in the United States, providing service to more than 9 million veterans across 1,243 facilities, including hospitals and clinics. Today, the VA joins Johns Hopkins, University of California San Diego, Quest Diagnostics, Allscripts and 400 other health care provider organizations, laboratory networks and electronic health records vendors who all support Health Records on iPhone.

Fantastic accomplishment. Here’s hoping this is a step toward unifying an extremely fragmented health records system. Certainly great news for the VA.

One of the things John Gruber and I discussed on my visit to The Talk Show last week was the concept of an Apple version of Amazon Prime. Pay one price, get a bunch of services in a bundle.

For Amazon, Prime includes free shipping, music, and Prime Video. What might an Apple Prime include?

This Reddit post asked if $2000 a year would be worth the price, if you got:

• New iPhone every year
• New Apple Watch every year
• New iPad Pro every 18 months
• New MacBook Pro every year
• All Apple services (Music, 2TB iCloud, Arcade, TV+, etc.)

An interesting proposition. One tweak I’d make to that model is to allow for different hardware levels. Price it to allow for a new base model iPhone 11, MacBook Air, and Apple Watch, for example. Then, you’d pay up to move to a Pro subscription, which would allow an iPhone Pro, MacBook Pro, perhaps a ceramic Apple Watch.

Difficult to price, difficult for a consumer to value properly. At the very least, I’d price it monthly, rather than yearly as Amazon does.

And more likely a reality, how about a yearly “all the services” bundle, which would include:

• Apple Music
• Apple News+
• Apple Arcade
• Apple TV+
• 2TB iCloud

Priced aggressively, that would bring subscriber numbers up for all Apple services, and also provide a predictable revenue stream. It also has the advantage of getting people to try out services they might not pay for otherwise.

Personally, I’d sign up for the services bundle right now.

ELLE Decor:

On a recent visit to New York City to be the keynote speaker at a gala for Ceres, a nonprofit focused on sustainability, Cook sat down with a small group of journalists, including ELLE Decor editors, to discuss his ambitious agenda for transforming Apple into a global leader in renewable energy and climate-friendly practices.

Here are our top 10 takeaways from the conversation.

Good read, combines well with Apple’s $2.5 billion commitment to combat California’s housing crisis and, ironically, arrives as the US formally exits the Paris climate agreement.

[H/T Dman]

Apple updated their support article for AirPods Pro water resistance.

I had a truly terrible experience trying to drop Adobe Creative Cloud. I ended up paying a monthly fee all the way through my yearly anniversary, then making a phone call to cancel in a specific window to prevent my subscription from rolling over.

I love Illustrator, miss it more than all the other Adobe apps. Hoping Adobe has changed their cancellation policy, and that Illustrator for iPad ships with a full feature set, offers a standalone subscription like Photoshop’s $9.99 a month.

Apple:

Apple today announced a comprehensive $2.5 billion plan to help address the housing availability and affordability crisis in California. As costs skyrocket for renters and potential homebuyers — and as the availability of affordable housing fails to keep pace with the region’s growth — community members like teachers, firefighters, first responders and service workers are increasingly having to make the difficult choice to leave behind the community they have long called home. Nearly 30,000 people left San Francisco between April and June of this year and homeownership in the Bay Area is at a seven-year low.

First things first: Bravo. I’m guessing we’re going to see a wave of responses to this announcement, some of it snarky, some calling for the money to be spent in different ways. But no matter the takes, Apple didn’t have to do this. That’s a big chunk of change for anyone to spend for the public good.

The breakdown:

• $1B, affordable housing investment fund
• $1B, first-time homebuyer mortgage assistance fund
• $300M, Apple-owned and available land for affordable housing
• $150M, Bay Area housing fund
• $50M, to support vulnerable populations

Well done, Apple.

This is a nice little writeup from a Redditor who picked up AirPods Pro from a New York City Apple Store.

Read the whole thing, but two snippets I had to post:

If you buy them in-store, set them up next to the line of display iPhones. Absolutely hilarious to watch a full line of iPhones pop up the setup box in sync. When you press connect on yours, all the other ones will switch to “Not your AirPods Pro.” If that’s not a “pro” experience, I don’t know what is lol.

I definitely want to see a video of this. If you are at an Apple Store and have a way to capture this, please do send it my way.

And this on sound quality, vs AirPods:

It’s actually a bigger step up than I thought previously (I was mostly paying attention to ANC quality). The seal makes a big difference but honestly the drivers are just better.

Was wondering if the drivers are new, and if they made a difference. If you care about the subtlety of the AirPods sound, here’s another, more detailed take on the difference.

Watch the 3D X-ray video in step 3. Very cool.

Looks like the battery is deep in a well of glue and solder, so about the same repairability as previous AirPods generations. Which is to say, 0/10. Feh.

Kif Leswing, CNBC:

Under the argument for an iPhone subscription, which some people call Apple Prime after the Amazon program of the same name, Apple would bundle hardware upgrades with services like iCloud storage or Apple TV+ content and hardware for a single monthly fee. This would let it switch iPhone sales from a transactional model to a subscription model, potentially driving the stock price up without having to increase product sales or prices dramatically.

And:

″In terms of hardware as a service or as a bundle, if you will, there are customers today that essentially view the hardware like that because they’re on upgrade plans and so forth,” Cook said during an earnings call. “So to some degree that exists today.”

And, most importantly:

“My perspective is that will grow in the future to larger numbers. It will grow disproportionately”

I had the chance to be on John Gruber’s show (recorded yesterday, guessing it’ll drop today or tomorrow, assuming John is not too horrified with the results), and we were talking about this, peripherally. John mentioned the future possibility of Apple Prime, a concept similar to Amazon Prime. From the article:

Under the argument for an iPhone subscription, which some people call Apple Prime after the Amazon program of the same name, Apple would bundle hardware upgrades with services like iCloud storage or Apple TV+ content and hardware for a single monthly fee.

I suspect we’ll all eventually be subscribing from a menu of services, including column A, software, column B, traditional services, and column C, hardware. Intriguing.

John Gruber:

Wearing noise-canceling earbuds on the subway and walking through the city is going to take some getting used to. It’s so good you really do lose sense of your surrounding aural environment.

And that’s a good thing. Combines with:

The “Transparency” mode is interesting and a little mind-bending. It really does make it possible to conduct a conversation while still enjoying the benefits of noise cancellation.

And:

Transparency lets you hear parts of the world around you. One obvious use case for this: jogging or running and maybe just plain walking on streets where you want to hear the sounds of traffic.

To me, this is a huge benefit. Traditional noise-canceling means, when walking, you won’t hear that car horn (or, at least it won’t be alarmingly loud, which is what you want in a car horn) or other sound of warning.

Another bit I like:

The force sensor — the flat section on the earbuds stem that faces forward when in your ear — is effectively a button. But it’s not a button. It doesn’t actually move, and it doesn’t provide haptic feedback. But it acts like a button and — most importantly — sounds like a button. When you press it, the AirPod Pro plays a click.

This is a great review. If you are considering AirPods Pro, John does a nice job painting a picture of what they’re like in real life.

Lots of changes. Worth the time to scroll through the linked post just to get a sense of what’s new.