Apple:

Apple today announced Apple Watch Series 7, featuring the largest and most advanced Apple Watch display ever — and a reengineered Always-On Retina display with significantly more screen area and thinner borders — will be available to order beginning Friday, October 8, at 5 a.m. PDT and available in stores starting Friday, October 15.

Given the steadily slipping shipping dates of the iPhone Pro (as of this writing, the iPhone I ordered shows a delivery date of November 4-11), and the fact that Series 7 pre-orders have already been pushed back more than 3 weeks (the announcement was September 14th), if you want a Series 7, I’d get on it as soon as the doors open.

From the footnotes:

Customers can buy Apple Watch (GPS + Cellular) directly from apple.com/store or at an Apple Store and get $100 back when they activate it with T-Mobile/Sprint or Verizon.

Good to know.

John Gruber:

Our long national iOS 15 Safari nightmare ended last month, praise be, but the lesser of the two bad Safari designs unveiled at WWDC persists and actually shipped: the new tabs in Safari 15 for Mac. Safari 15 on iPad suffers similarly, but it’s the Mac version I’ll concentrate on here.

This is an excellent showcase of Safari’s broken tab metaphor. Don’t miss the short little video in the middle highlighting the jarring look of shifting from one tab to another and back again.

John focuses on the Mac in his post, but his comments might just as well apply to Safari for iPadOS 15. Though there are differences between the two implementations of Safari tabs, both joyously break the tab metaphor. If you think about the origins of the tab model, it’s a drawer full of vertical files, where the tab juts up, attached to a specific folder. As you paw through the folders, it’s clear which folder the tab is attached to. The tab and folder are clearly part of the same object, visually connected.

In this new model, the tabs are floating on their own, no longer physically connected to the pages they represent. This new model breaks the physical tab metaphor in a number of ways, chief of which is the lack of a unifying block of color attaching the tab and the page. For most pages, the current tab is one shade of grey, and the other tabs a slightly different shade of grey. Occasionally, the background color will bleed through the tab, offering another tab color to confuse your brain even more.

I see the iPad tab model and Mac tab model as being equally broken. The iPhone model, with the address bar at the bottom, really works well for me. I especially love the hint to the right and left of the address bar, letting you know you can slide side-to-side to get at adjacent pages. This “hidden tabs” model feels like an improvement over previous models.

The iPad and Mac Safari tabs have lost touch with the functionality of the tab metaphor. Color me disappointed. Props to Gruber for taking the time to dig into such detail on each individual point.

The “cat /dev/brain” blog:

iOS 15.0 introduces a new feature: an iPhone can be located with Find My even while the iPhone is turned “off”. How does it work? Is it a security concern?

This is a bit of a techie rabbit hole, but I found it fascinating.

At its core is a discussion of the AOP, or Always On Processor:

All chips and various embedded devices Apple manufactures run a real-time operating system, called RTKitOS. The AOP on the iPhone is no exception. However, the AOP has a special role. It connects to almost every other chip in the iPhone. For some chips, it only does basic tasks like power management, and for other chips, it acts as a transparent proxy that wakes up iOS when needed.

This way, a processor that is always on actually saves energy. iOS can go to sleep while the AOP waits for hardware events. A simple example is the motion sensor. Without touching any button on the iPhone, the display wakes up.

If this sort of technical arcana is of interest, follow the headline link and dig in. Skip the stuff you don’t understand. After each technical deep dive, the author returns to the surface before discussing the next bit.

Follow the headline link for the September 27th episode of Smartless, wherein hosts Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Bojack Horseman Lego Batman Reeses shill Will Arnett bring on a mystery guest to faff around with.

In this case, it’s Jon Stewart, here to pitch his new Apple TV+ show, “The Problem with Jon Stewart”. If you want to skip the intro, jump to about 3 minutes in.

I’m a long-time fan of Smartless’ profound silliness and goofing around, your mileage may vary. But this is specific to Apple and I thought it might be a good fit for readers of The Loop. Don’t miss how everyone refers to Apple TV+ streaming service (Stewart’s show is “on Apple”) as well as the anecdote wherein Jason Bateman skips the line for the very first iPhone.

Variety:

Apple TV Plus will not be moving ahead with a second season of “Mr. Corman,” A24’s schoolteacher drama starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the streamer has confirmed.

As far as I know, this is the shortest run of a show on Apple TV+. Even Planet of the Apps (technically not an Apple TV+ show, but still) was alive for a full year, premiering in June 2017, officially canceled in July 2018.

Apple’s relationship with Joseph Gordon-Levitt continues with his exec produced, animated “Wolfboy and the Everything Factory.”