Follow the headline link, start scrolling for a walk through all the different default macOS wallpapers, going all the way back to Mac OS X Tiger, which dropped back in 2005.

See something you like, click the download link. Enjoy.

Thanks to BZG for sponsoring The Loop this week. Unite 4 for macOS allows you to turn any website into an app on your Mac. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.

Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, M1 support, and much more. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.

Some examples of apps you could create in mere minutes with Unite:

• A Gmail web client that behaves like a native mail client.
• A status bar app for Apple Music or Overcast
• An isolated workspace for apps that may track you like Facebook
• A lightweight and power efficient version of Slack, Discord, or Whatsapp with full notification support
• A fully featured Instagram app that has a resizable window, unlike the M1 version.
• A Robinhood, Figma, or Roam Research app for your desktop.

The Loop readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 or when you use the promo code ‘LOOPINSIGHT’ at checkout.

You can also try Unite for 14 days absolutely free or use it as part of your subscription if you’re a Setapp subscriber!

Some apps, especially those with a lot of menus and custom menus have run into problems with the notch on the new MacBook Pro. Here’s a Twitter thread with a few examples (sound on).

If you do run into this issue, Apple offers an app-specific fix:

You can adjust an app’s settings so that it uses the whole display or uses only the area below the camera housing.

Follow the headline link for details but, in a nutshell, Apple added a “Scale to fit below built-in camera” checkbox to the app’s Get Info window. Check it, and the app will run with the menu bar below the notch.

Good to know.

Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:

In macOS Monterey, you can use an animated Memoji as your Mac user profile instead of a standard static image. Of course you could always use a still photo of yourself to welcome you at startup and on the Lock Screen, but where’s the fun in that?

And, once you’ve made the change:

Next time you login to your Mac, you’ll see your animated Memoji avatar there to welcome you. And if you get your login password wrong a few times, just watch the expression on their face go from mildly irritated to thoroughly irate.

I followed Tim’s instructions, made the change, can confirm the various “wrong password” interactions. Fun!

iFixit:

Normally we get to the battery last because, well, they suck to remove. But as we peer into the guts, we notice something we haven’t seen in a long time in a MacBook Pro, three words that make our hair stand on end: battery pull tabs.

Even better, it appears the battery isn’t trapped under the logic board. That could mean battery swaps without removing all the brains first—a procedure we’ve been dreaming about for a while.

And:

The four outer battery cells have easily-noticeable pull tabs, which are the typical thin white strips we know and love from the iPhone and MacBook Air. But wait, we don’t see any pull tabs on the middle cells. Are we screwed—or, worse, glued?

Not entirely! We removed the trackpad and, lo and behold, there are cut-outs to access the pull tabs that hold the middle battery cells in place.

And:

We’ve still got a long way to go with disassembly, but this new MacBook Pro has, at the very least, the first reasonably DIY-friendly battery replacement procedure since 2012.

Great news! I’m looking forward to the detailed teardown.

Variety:

Comcast struck a deal with Apple that will bring the Apple TV app, which includes access to the Apple TV Plus subscription service, to the cable giant’s Xfinity X1, Flex, XClass TV and Sky Glass platforms, CEO Brian Roberts announced on the company’s Q3 earnings call.

That’s already big news, with the Apple TV app coming to Comcast set top boxes, much in the way the Apple TV app is available on Roku devices, but with a far more massive reach. This feels like a mighty domino, with the potential to bring Apple TV (and Apple TV+) to other major cable providers. A tipping point for cord cutters, as well.

But there’s more:

In turn, under the pact, Comcast’s Stream app will be launching on Apple TV set-top boxes, Roberts said. A Comcast rep said the Apple TV app would launch on Comcast video platforms in “the coming months” but didn’t have specific dates.

This is great news for Comcast subscribers who own Apple TVs. Interesting news for the Apple TV device itself. More and more TVs are being sold with the Apple TV app built right in. This feels like it will shrink the demand for actual Apple TV boxes.

PlayStation blog:

PS5 offers seamless integration with the Apple Music streaming service with background music and music video playback, so players can listen before, during, or after their gameplay session.

How’s it work?

PS5 users can either start the Apple Music app before hopping into a game, or during gameplay by pressing the PS button on the DualSense wireless controller to access the Control Center and select the Music Function card.

And:

From there, Apple Music subscribers can find recommendations that match the game they are currently playing, or choose from a playlist in their library or other Apple Music-curated playlists for gaming.

This is far more integration than I was expecting when I first heard about this. What about Xbox?

From Digital Music News:

You can listen to Spotify, SoundCloud, and Pandora on Xbox using an official app – but not Apple Music. However, that’s not to say you can’t enjoy the service using your Xbox Series X console. A third-party application called “AirServer” hooks into AirPlay and allows Apple Music content to be remotely cast to an Xbox device from an iPhone or iPad.

The PlayStation Apple Music integration is head and shoulders better.

Tom Warren, The Verge:

Apple hit Intel hard with its first M1 chips, offering a rare step-change improvement in performance with its 2020 MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. Less than a year later, according to many small business cyber security companies – it’s already starting to compete with the best GPUs from AMD and Nvidia as well. The new MacBook Pros with M1 Pro and M1 Max offer a first glimpse at how well Apple’s M1 chips can scale to provide raw performance that rivals the discrete graphics cards we typically find inside Windows-powered laptops.

This walkthrough highlights the incredible performance gains made by Apple’s M1 series, especially where the GPU is concerned.

At the core of the review is AnandTech’s Apple’s M1 Pro, M1 Max SoCs Investigated: New Performance and Efficiency Heights. Jumping to the GPU analysis page:

Traditional OEMs have been fine with a small(ish) CPU and then adding a discrete GPU as necessary. It’s cost and performance effective: you only need to add as big of a dGPU as the customer needs performance, and even laptop-grade dGPUs can offer very high performance. But like any other engineering decision, it’s a trade-off: discrete GPUs result in multiple display adapters, require their own VRAM, and come with a power/cooling cost.

And that’s where Apple’s gains are coming from: The new M1 series, by being incredibly space efficient, runs much more coolly than a traditional discrete GPU laptop can, and consumes far less power.

The gains here are obvious, especially when Apple’s pro apps, or third party apps specifically built for the M1, are involved. As to PC gaming, Apple is still not there. Scroll through the AnandTech post for benchmarks to get a sense of this. But my gut (I’m no expert) tells me that if game developers make it their mission to develop with the M1 Max in mind, that could change.

One last bit from the AnandTech post:

Overall, it’s clear that Apple’s ongoing experience with GPUs has paid off with the development of their A-series chips, and now their M1 family of SoCs. Apple has been able to scale up the small and efficient M1 into a far more powerful configuration; Apple built SoCs with 2x/4x the GPU hardware of the original M1, and that’s almost exactly what they’re getting out of the M1 Pro and M1 Max, respectively. Put succinctly, the new M1 SoCs prove that Apple can build the kind of big and powerful GPUs that they need for their high-end machines. AMD and NVIDIA need not apply.

Last week, Apple announced the new Apple Music Voice Plan, designed exclusively for Siri, priced at $4.99 a month.

From the press release:

Apple Music is also adding hundreds of new mood and activity playlists created by Apple Music’s editorial experts that are fully optimized just for voice. Subscribers can ask Siri to “Play the dinner party playlist,” “Play something chill,” or even “Play more like this” for a truly personalized music experience. These new playlists are available to every subscriber of any Apple Music plan — and make using Apple Music, together with Siri, even better.

This raised the question, where are these playlists?

John Voorhees, in the headline linked MacStories post:

The playlists have begun showing up on Apple Music, so last night, Federico and I began searching the streaming service to see what’s new. What we found was over 250 playlists each designed to fit a mood or activity that use animated cover art with simple line drawings to set them apart from Apple’s other playlist. Although they were announced as Siri playlists during the event on Monday, anyone with an Apple Music subscription can view and play the new playlists in the Music app like any other playlist in the service’s collection.

Follow the link, scroll down, tap on any of the playlist links to start them playing in Apple Music.

Alternatively, you can launch any of the playlists via Siri (especially useful if you are a Voice Plan subscriber), like so:

“Hey Siri, play the Feeling Good playlist”

Nice work by the MacStories team.

Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac:

Apple has finally released macOS Monterey to the public. The update comes with several new features, including Focus mode for notifications, SharePlay, Live Text, and more. Another new feature is the ability to AirPlay from an iPhone or iPad to a Mac without having to install any third-party apps, so read on as we detail how to use this feature.

If you’ve ever used AirPlay, you can probably figure this out by yourself, but nice to know this exists, and nice to have the walkthrough handy.

I gave AirPlay from iPhone to M1 MacBook Air a try and it was flawless and easy.

The Verge:

A decade before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a tiny team of renegades imagined and tried to build the modern smartphone. Nearly forgotten by history, a little startup called Handspring tried to make the future before it was ready. In Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone, The Verge’s Dieter Bohn talks to the visionaries at Handspring and dives into their early successes and eventual failures.

This documentary grabbed me. I remember the heady days of the Apple Newton, followed by Palm and PalmPilot. Handspring was founded by the Palm founders, with the goal of building a better mousetrap. That road ultimately yielded what is billed as the “first real smartphone”. See the trailer below.

The documentary is about 30 minutes long and (to me) worth the watch. To watch it on Apple TV, go the the Apple TV App Store and search for “Verge”. Download the app, launch it, and watch the documentary.

Scroll down that linked first page to the Table of Contents to get a sense of where to focus on this massive Monterey review. So much to process, but it’s all linked on separate pages, so it’s easy to navigate.

Also, here’s a link to Apple’s official macOS Monterey landing page, which is also worth your time, an easy, beautifully drawn quick trip through Monterey’s new shiny.

Brian Sozzi, Yahoo Finance:

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger says the ball is in the chip giant’s court to win back lost business from the Mac making Apple.

“My job is to win them [Apple] back and to deliver products that are better than they can do themselves. We also want to win them over to more of our foundry offerings over time. And that just makes sense, right? Everybody wants to have multiple suppliers. And if we have the best process technology in the industry, of course, they’ll come our way,” Gelsinger said at Yahoo Finance’s All Markets Summit.

Not sure how to react to this statement. Is Gelsinger unaware of the brutally dumb anti-Apple campaign in high gear? Here’s a link to this high profile page on your web site, Pat.

Don’t miss that Apple-bashing video right towards the top. Way to win friends, there. Yeesh.

Unite 4 for macOS allows you to turn any website into an app on your Mac. Using a lightweight, WebKit powered browser as a backend, you can easily create isolated, customizable apps from any site.

Unite 4 includes dozens of new features, including support for native notifications, new customization options, M1 support, and much more. Unite apps also serve as a great alternative for resource hogging Electron apps or half-baked Catalyst apps.

Some examples of apps you could create in mere minutes with Unite:

• A Gmail web client that behaves like a native mail client.
• A status bar app for Apple Music or Overcast
• An isolated workspace for apps that may track you like Facebook
• A lightweight and power efficient version of Slack, Discord, or Whatsapp with full notification support
• A fully featured Instagram app that has a resizable window, unlike the M1 version.
• A Robinhood, Figma, or Roam Research app for your desktop.

The Loop readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Unite 4 or when you use the promo code ‘LOOPINSIGHT’ at checkout.

You can also try Unite for 14 days absolutely free or use it as part of your subscription if you’re a Setapp subscriber!

Rogue Amoeba blog:

Back in mid-2018, there wasn’t a single Macintosh computer that was free of major drawbacks or otherwise ridiculously out of date. After yet another disappointing WWDC, I took to my keyboard to air some grievances, with a lengthy complaint entitled “On The Sad State of Macintosh Hardware“. That post was written out of a deeper frustration with Apple’s failure to keep the Mac product line current.

Here’s a link to that original disappoint WWDC post.

Oh, how times have changed:

Apple in 2018 was at the height of their quest to remove every port, selling a MacBook that offered a pitiful single USB-C port (which was also needed for charging). Other laptops were besmirched by TouchBars and faulty butterfly keyboards. Apple is not a company to change its mind lightly, but nevertheless they’ve corrected every single one of these missteps.

Well said. There’s the return of the SD port, the return of the MagSafe connector, that gorgeous new Liquid Retina XDR display, and the scary fast M1 Pro and M1 Max with the unified memory and embedded GPU. The new Mac line is a whole new ball game.

Panic blog:

The iPod was one of the first times Apple showed up and did what we now think of as their standard move — they made The Apple Version®.

Great point. There were lots of other MP3 players out there. Apple took the concept, modernized and improved on the traditional components, then ran it through the Jony Ive design process. They Apple-ized it.

Now, there are a lot of mysteries in the Panic Archives (it’s a closet) but by far one of the most mysterious is what you’re seeing for the first time today: an original early iPod prototype.

We don’t know much about where it came from. But we’ve been waiting 20 years to share it with you.

Fantastic set of images. In that first pic, the tiny screen in the upper right corner of the giant box is the screen of the iPod prototype.

The prototype itself is shown in the third image. It has a date of September 3rd, 2001. That’s about 6 weeks before Steve’s iPod town hall keynote, and 8 days before 9/11.

Saturday was the 20th anniversary of the original iPod. Tony Fadell was a consultant hired by Apple to come up with some music player prototypes, presenting them to Steve Jobs. In the linked interview, Fadell talks about the experience with CNET’s Roger Cheng.

A few highlights:

When presenting the models, Fadell did as Ng coached, showing off the worst model first, then the second and, finally, his favorite as the last option.

Jobs seized on it immediately.

“Steve picked it up and he’s like, ‘we’re building this and you’re now going to join us to build it,’ and I was like ‘whoa whoa,'” Fadell said.

And:

After a few weeks of negotiations with Jobs, Fadell joined Apple in April 2001 and assembled a team made up of Fuse and General Magic employees to put together what would become the iPod. The project immediately faced an uphill challenge. The team needed to work with a lot of new components, including a brand new hard drive from Toshiba that Rubinstein, who oversaw the whole project, identified as the key ingredient for the iPod.

Other breakthroughs included new software for the user interface and a then-new kind of lithium ion pack, giving the device 10 hours of battery life that far exceeded anything else in the market.

Amazing that Fadell joined Apple in April and had a shipping product 5 months later. Mind boggling.

Fadell’s team worked with the industrial design group, led by famed Apple designer Jony Ive, to finalize the look of the iPod. Because the next wave of Macs would embrace white and clear plastic, Apple took the same design language and applied it to the iPod.

Along the way, Fadell saw two other projects at Apple scrapped, which fueled him to move even faster to finish (he wouldn’t comment on what those projects were). Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, freezing the nation even as he had to rally the team in that final stretch. “It was absolutely nuts.”

And:

When Jobs unveiled the iPod at an Oct. 23 Apple event at its Town Hall amphitheater in Cupertino, California, the device wasn’t technically done, according to Fadell. The software wasn’t finished, and the company hadn’t signed off on the manufacturing plan. But Jobs gave that pre-1.0 version out to the media in attendance, along with the 20 CDs containing the music that was preloaded on the device.

Imagine releasing a new product in the aftermath of 9/11. Amazing that the announcement didn’t get lost in the shuffle. The chaos of 9/11 was front and center in everyone’s mind at that time. But the iPod was revolutionary, and that was not lost on the Apple faithful. An invention that changed Apple’s fortunes.

iFixit:

Inside we found some surprising display technology that was probably a huge pain to manufacture at scale, likely causing a cascade of delays. When Apple finally unveiled it last month, the watch had no firm release date, a red flag that usually signals production trouble. (If you’re wondering how a bunch of ex-Apple engineers occupy their time nowadays, read on—this is exactly the kind of expensive manufacturing snafu they’ve banded together to solve.)

Follow the headline link for an interesting read, or just watch the teardown below. Both are full of closeup images and insights. My kind of fun.

Apple:

“Dr. Brain” stars LEE Sun-kyun, best known to global audiences for his supporting role in the Academy Award-winning film “Parasite.” The series also stars LEE You-young, PARK Hee-soon, SEO Ji-hye and LEE Jae-won.

Have you seen Parasite, the Korean language thriller that won the 2020 best picture Oscar? It’s excellent, available to watch free on Hulu, a few other streaming services.

As you can see by the trailer, Dr. Brain continues Apple’s SciFi push. The series premiers a week from Thursday, on November 4th. Looks right up my alley.

Follow the headline link to read the Anandtech take on CPU performance and power efficiency. I’ve never doubted that in those categories, the M1 chips would win, hands down.

What really interests me is the GPU performance. The original M1 stands toe-to-toe with traditional laptop GPUs, but falls well behind a PC desktop with a discrete GPU. Not a slam on the M1. That’s just to be expected with an integrated GPU.

But this from Anandtech:

> Apple’s GPU performance is claimed to vastly outclass any previous generation competitor integrated graphics performance, so the company opted to make direct comparisons to medium-end discrete laptop graphics. In this case, pitting the M1 Pro against a GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 4GB, with the Apple chip achieving similar performance at 70% less power.

And:

> While the M1 Pro catches up and outpaces the laptop competition in terms of performance, the M1 Max is aiming at delivering something never-before seen: supercharging the GPU to a total of 32 cores. Essentially it’s no longer an SoC with an integrated GPU, rather it’s a GPU with an SoC around it.

And:

> In terms of performance, Apple is battling it out with the very best available in the market, comparing the performance of the M1 Max to that of a mobile GeForce RTX 3080, at 100W less power (60W vs 160W). Apple also includes a 100W TDP variant of the RTX 3080 for comparison, here, outperforming the NVIDIA discrete GPU, while still using 40% less power.

Navigating the evolving tech landscape, I’ve been intrigued by the giant strides Apple has taken, especially in their GPU performance realm. For instance, their advancements could herald a new era where Macs can confidently rival PCs with discrete GPUs, a domain traditionally reserved for high-performance gaming and intensive graphics work. This is more than a technological leap; it’s a paradigm shift.

Such a feat could fundamentally alter the home computing landscape, including our reasons for maintaining a desktop PC. It’s about more than sheer power; it’s about the user experience. For instance, while exploring a 슬롯 사이트, I realized the importance of seamless performance and immersive graphics that were once exclusive to high-end PCs. These innovations present an exciting, necessary step, not just for Apple, but for users craving versatility without compromise. It isn’t just about playing games or running demanding software; it’s about a future where the boundaries between platforms blur, ushering in a new age of accessibility and performance.

And we’ll soon know how true those performance claims are as the graphics benchmarks start rolling in. From this first such report:

> The M1 Max looked pretty good beside the GeForce RTX 3080 Mobile or Radeon RX 6800M. Apple’s chip outperformed Nvidia and AMD’s GPUs in some workloads and stayed within a small margin in others. The M1 Max’s power efficiency was the most impressive feat, considering that the GeForce RTX 3080 Mobile and Radeon RX 6800M conform to TDP ratings of 160W and 145W, respectively.

Looking forward to more benchmark results, and hearing from experts on any caveats. But so far, so good.

On Monday, Apple showed it heard user complaints about the MacBook Pro, returning the SD card slot (UHS-II at 300 MB/s+), dropping the Touch Bar, and bringing back the long requested MagSafe connector with a new woven cable and its reassuring green power indicator.

In another sign of Apple hearing the madding crowd, the macOS 15.1 developer beta has restored the old Safari tab design, eschewing the poorly received bubble tab design that came with the latest macOS and iPadOS releases.

Great to see these changes. Feels like Apple has turned a corner, dialing back from the “we know best” position to allow a whisper of “what does the customer want?” in its design process.

Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. will begin to force unvaccinated corporate employees to test for Covid-19 each time they want to enter an office, a move that tightens its virus protocols while still stopping short of a vaccine mandate.

The new requirement will also apply to employees who decline to report their vaccination status to Apple, the company told employees this week. Vaccinated staff will be required to take rapid tests once per week.

And:

Apple retail store employees, meanwhile, will have slightly different rules. Unvaccinated staff will be asked to test twice per week instead of each day they come to work. Vaccinated workers will also need to take a rapid test each week.

Slowly but surely, Apple is tightening its vaccine stance, from booting antivax apps from the App Store, to requiring employees to report vaccination status, to these new testing requirements.