Apple today announced the Apple Music Voice Plan, a new subscription tier for Apple Music designed around the power of Siri. The Apple Music Voice Plan offers subscribers access to the service’s catalog of 90 million songs; tens of thousands of playlists, including hundreds of brand new mood and activity playlists, personalized mixes, and genre stations; as well as the award-winning Apple Music Radio — all through Siri for just $4.99 per month.
And:
Users can subscribe to the Apple Music Voice Plan through Siri by saying “Hey Siri, start my Apple Music Voice trial,” or by signing up through the Apple Music app. Once subscribed to the Apple Music Voice Plan, users can request music be played across all of their Siri-enabled devices, including HomePod mini, AirPods, iPhone, or any other Apple device, and when using CarPlay.
And:
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. Subscribers to the Apple Music Voice Plan will also have access to Apple Music’s entire lineup of playlists, including favorites like New Music Daily, Rap Life, Today’s Hits, Today’s Country, A-List Pop, R&B Now, and more.
And:
The Apple Music Voice Plan will be available later this fall in 17 countries and regions, including Australia, Austria, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
That’s a significant discount from the Apple Music Individual Plan, which is $9.99 a month. The difference? The Individual Plan adds in lyrics, music videos, spatial audio, lossless audio, and support of non-Apple devices. This new Voice Plan offers a lot, and undercuts Spotify Premium, which is $9.99 a month.
I did all the normal stuff one should do when your car’s stolen. I called the police and filed a report. They reported the car stolen but didn’t seem optimistic much could be done.
And:
I remembered then, after the dust settled, that I had put a spare AirTag in the sunglasses holder of my car. I’d bought a 4 pack and figured there might be an off chance it could potentially help me find the car. There’s millions of iPhones in Chicagoland too, so I figured the chances of it getting pinged were decently high.
Follow along as this Reddit user marks their AirTag as lost, and follows the pings to find their car. An interesting read, raises some questions about how far to go to get your stolen stuff back, what you’d do if you caught someone stealing from you and had them arrested.
Came across this on Reddit over the weekend. Officially, it is titled, “Obtaining service for your Apple product after an expired warranty”. But dig in, start scrolling.
This is a fantastic dive into a deep rabbit hole of obscure Apple products, like the Tape Backup 40SC, the External SCSI Hard Drive, the StyleWriter, and the UniDisk, just to name a few.
Enjoy, especially as you wait for this afternoon’s Apple Event and the new goodies Apple has up its sleeve.
I’m new to this YouTube channel, but they have some very interesting videos. This one explores the evolution in iPhone photography, from steady camera hardware/sensor changes to a focus on software, with the rise of computational photography.
Don’t be put off by all the fooling around in the video. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here. A few highlights, if your time is limited:
At about 3:30: iPhone life with that original interface, before the App Store existed. Only one page.
At about 4:27: All about “rolling shutter”
And, at about 12:18: The core of this video, comparing the old and the new
I enjoyed the whole thing. Obviously, you’ll want to watch this in 4K for maximum effect.
For more than 20 years, mobile devices have made use of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) codes. They look like a series of numbers interspersed with hashtags and asterisks that you enter like a telephone number.
Secret codes seems a bit of a reach. But these USSD codes are definitely worth knowing about. Scan the post, just to get a sense of the functionality you can access via your dialer.
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Apple announced another event this week, which will happen virtually next Monday. Dave and I discuss what we think we be announced at the event, including a new Mac. We also talk about AirPods Max and what price point would make them more attractive to more people—or is price even the issue? We finish off talking about some of the shows we are watching on Apple TV.
Last month, FCC filings revealed that Apple Watch Series 7 models are equipped with a new module that enables 60.5GHz wireless data transfer. This module is not advertised on Apple’s website and is likely for Apple’s internal use only.
And:
It’s also worth noting that Series 7 models feature IP6X-rated dust resistance, so perhaps the diagnostic port’s removal helped with that to some degree.
Interesting. Surprised that Apple would get rid of that port. A sign that they might be willing to remove other ports?
At a glance, all Apple Watches — from the original “Series 0” in 2015 to the new Series 7 models shipping this week — have more or less looked the same. Unlike any other product Apple has ever made, they really nailed the basic shape and look, the gestalt, on the first try. It was birthed as an iconic design.
This review is a joy to read, full of details that stem from someone who has lived with the Apple Watch since inception.
Worth the read, for the insight and for the prose. One highlight:
The knock on Series 7 is that there’s nothing new but a bigger display. But it’s a much bigger display. It’s the one new thing that everyone will notice, and it’s very noticeable. Nothing new but a bigger display is enough to establish Series 7 as a landmark new design.
MKBHD starts the video by calling the Apple Watch Series 7 a Series 6S, meaning it’s a minor update.
But keep watching. He really dives deep into all the things that distinguish the Series 7 from its predecessor. This is my kind of review, highlighting the subtle details in a way that really makes it easy to see what I’m missing with my Series 6, easy to decide whether those details matter enough to upgrade.
In iOS 15, Apple added separation alerts to the Find My app, which let you know when you leave an AirTag or other Apple device behind. Thanks to an October 2021 firmware update, AirPods Pro now also support separation alerts. This article explains more about how they work and how you can set them up.
Nice writeup, easy to follow. Key bit is setting up a Trusted Location, a place you can leave your AirPods Pro behind without a notification.
If you are new to iPad multitasking, or if you’ve been confused by the interface, or support someone in one of these categories, the video below is a brilliant explainer.
If you are a regular user of the three dots Split View interface, the first half of the video will be old hat to you. But watch the video anyway, stick around for the second half. It dives a little deeper, into the subtlety of opening (in this case), multiple notes at once, organizing the notes you have open.
Another well done video from the Apple Support team.
Apple Inc. is likely to slash its projected iPhone 13 production targets for 2021 by as many as 10 million units as prolonged chip shortages hit its flagship product, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The company had expected to produce 90 million new iPhone models in the last three months of the year, but it’s now telling manufacturing partners that the total will be lower because Broadcom Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc. are struggling to deliver enough components, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the situation is private.
This is big news. We’re already seeing this report impact the stock price of companies in the Apple iPhone supply chain.
Whether or not it’s related to this specific “chip crunch”, we’re also seeing shipping delays for orders of most new Apple product. For example, the iPad mini 6 is pushed out more than a month. The Apple Watch Series 7, which is still in pre-order, is pushed out more than a month in the best case, with many models out much further.
It remains to be seen how this will impact a new M1X MacBook Pro, assuming that’s what’s coming in Monday’s event. But if I wanted one, I’d definitely be ready to go as soon as that pre-order window opened.
Apple largely avoided the need to combat online piracy until the launch of Apple TV+ in November 2019. Since then, Apple TV+ shows and movies have proliferated throughout piracy sites across the internet.
And:
From MacRumors’ findings, some of Apple’s most popular shows and movies have at least 2,000 active seeders on each major piracy site, going up to as many as approximately 125,000 seeders per title. Download trends broadly map to the popularity of Apple’s various shows and movies, with the likes of “Ted Lasso,” “The Morning Show,” and “SEE” garnering the most downloads.
A definite sign of traction for Apple TV+, a problem the Apple TV+ team is glad to be forced to deal with.
Enter the piracy enforcement partners:
Streaming production studios and distributors, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+, have attempted to curtail the illegal sharing of movies and TV shows using specific enforcement partners who flag stolen content on their behalf. Apple has followed suit, inking working deals with multiple firms specializing in digital copyright protection, including Corsearch Inc. and OpSec Security. They operate by issuing DMCA takedown orders for pirated online content.
And:
According to information accessed by MacRumors, Corsearch has issued more than 320,000 DMCA orders to Google, citing copyright infringement for Apple TV+ content. These orders only stop Google from indexing flagged piracy sites and do little to curtail the actual hosting of pirated content. Delist requests on Apple’s behalf reached an all-time high on August 16 this year, with more than 8,500 requests to Google in a single day.
MacRumors tracked numerous domains and URLs used to pirate Apple TV+ content and found that none were taken down by Apple or its partners over the course of a week. On the contrary, during this period, the website’s catalog of stolen Apple TV+ content grew, sometimes within just hours of new episodes being released on Apple TV+ itself.
Lots more detail in the article. A whack-a-mole problem with no real solution. But it shows there is a dedicated audience for Apple TV+ content.
From The Hollywood Reporter podcast interview with Ted Lasso creator Bill Lawrence:
“I’d love to the show to keep going but it’s going to only keep going as long as [Jason Sudeikis] feels like it’s a cool thing for him, not only to do creatively and professionally, but personally. People forget, it’s a dude with two kids and he is a great dad and to up your life over to London for half the year is tricky,” he says. “The cool thing about this show is when we started, we plotted out everybody’s beginning, middle and end of a three-season arc. I would say that this story is going to be over next year, regardless — even if the show finds another story to tell and goes on.”
That last bit seems a pretty big hint. The show was pitched as a three season arc, has always been seen as ending after that three season story ended. But now, sounds like we might see a new story arc emerge in a possible season four and beyond. Wishful thinking on my part?
Apple on Tuesday announced a special event on Monday, October 18, 2021. The virtual event will be broadcast from Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA. at 10:00 am.
Dubbed “Unleashed,” the invite contains no further information on what could be announced. Although in the September event Apple held, the company released new iPhones and iPads, so this event could focus on Macs and possibly peripheral devices like AirPods.
We’ll keep you informed when the event happens next week.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro (which if you’ve lost track still uses Intel and hasn’t been updated in *2* years) is showing unavailable for pick up at many Apple stores plus shipment delays. pic.twitter.com/vPpTLxXIUz
You can buy a 16″ MacBook Pro (Intel inside) from Apple, have it in your hands in a week or two. But every Apple Store I’ve checked shows the 16″ Intel MacBook Pro unavailable for pickup.
It’s no secret that there’s rumored to be a new M1X MacBook Pro on the immediate horizon. Again, it’s a rumor, but a strongly held rumor. If that’s the case, this in-store unavailability might be the strongest sign yet.
And the shipping delay (a week or two to get it) is another clue. If I order an M1 MacBook Pro, I can have it in my hands in 2 hours, if I’m willing to pony up $9 for courier delivery.
Jony Ive and Marc Newson were the life blood of Apple’s design sensibility for a long time. They left Apple a few years ago to form a new design firm, called LoveFrom. Somewhat famously, they started work and did not put up a web site. Until now.
Follow the headline link, load the site. It’s simple, but with a signature minimalist design.
Take a look. Pay attention to the animation (typing “LoveFrom,”) when the page loads. Don’t miss that whimsical detail as the comma animates into place. Now reload the page. There are a number of different comma sequences. A tiny, but fun detail.
The page is signed, “love & fury”. Not sure what this signifies, but it is the title of a book about Mary Wollstonecraft (Frankenstein author Mary Shelley’s mother). Not sure there’s a connection, but an interesting choice.
A few weeks ago, we posted about this fake LoveFrom web site. Wonder if that site had anything to do with coaxing the real site into existence.
Apple sells the AirPods Max for $549. Amazon has them on sale (see the headline link) for $449. That’s a pretty steep discount.
Though it is interesting to wonder why this price discrepancy exists (Inventory clearance? New model in the offing? Neither of those seems likely to me), more interesting to me is the price point itself.
Is $449 low enough to bring you into the fold? If not, why not? Is the increase in functionality over your existing setup not worth the price? Are the AirPods Pro good enough? Is the issue that you just don’t have a real sense of how good the AirPods Max really are?
What is the highest price that would draw you in? Would you snap a pair up for $299? $399?
Selling the AirPods Max is like selling a high resolution TV. How do you advertise it? You can describe it, but showing video is limited to the potential buyer’s existing display. Like a new TV, the sale depends on a leap of faith on the buyer’s part.
This year’s new iPhone 13 series have been extremely promising in terms of battery life as Apple has improved this aspect of the devices through a slew of different improvements. All the new phones feature new generation displays, most notably the new Pro models which have new variable refresh displays, along with increases in battery capacities. After a few arduous days of battery life testing, we can come to some very positive conclusions.
There’s a detailed discussion of LTPO VRR. If that’s just alphabet soup to you, here’s a bit from this discussion of LTPO:
LTPO is the snappy acronym that stands for low-temperature Polycrystalline oxide. In short, it allows for a display to dynamically change its refresh rate without needing any additional hardware components to sit between a device’s graphics processing unit and the display controller.
And VRR is variable refresh rate, which is being branded as ProMotion. Apple’s rates vary from 10Hz to 120Hz.
If the screen discussion doesn’t grab you, scroll down the the section labeled “Bigger Batteries”. The first table compares battery capacity of all the iPhone 12 models to that of the iPhone 13s. Big jumps (ranging from 8% to 18% across the board) in every model.
Next up is a bar chart showing web browsing battery life (in hours) for a variety of phones. From. the description:
All the new phones showcase extremely large generational gains compared to their predecessors. For the iPhone 13, we’re getting results that are 34% better than the iPhone 12, which exceeds the +14.6% battery capacity increase. The new SoC efficiency as well as increased display power efficiency would explain the remainder of the difference.
Follow the headline link, maximize your window size (large display, if possible). Tap each of the controls on the upper right of the current sample image, just to get a sense of what each does. I’m a big fan of the loupe (click to turn it on, then drag the mini-window around the image).
I love this interface, wish there was a version that laid on top of a public, crowd-sourced gallery, with the favorite images rising to the top.
Detailed video, filled with great looking shots of all the various lenses and modes, giving you a sense of what you might produce if you have an iPhone 13 Pro (or iPhone 13 Pro Max).
One of the many highlights in this video is at about 36 seconds in. Check out the sharpness on the jacket pocket seams, then look at the background. There’s a subtle sharpness adjustment as he moves, Cinematic Mode at work. It wasn’t so long ago that Portrait Mode and bokeh were brand new concepts. Apple’s iPhone camera team continues to push the ball forward.
The embedded video is 4K. If you have the ability to watch in higher resolution, here’s a link to an HDR version of the same video.
Although the show’s superficial focus over the first two seasons has been on Ted as a “nice guy,” that’s not really what the show is about. It isn’t a happy-go-lucky dramatization of optimism, but about the work and necessity of building communities in which we draw strength from one another. The show’s tension and success stem not from its oft-touted emphasis on kindness, but from its ability to embody something that in the past would have been called caritas.
Pretty good read. Homes in on a subtle point (embodied by the latin term caritas), really captured the spirit of the show, at least for me.
A dispute over wearing a face mask led to the stabbing of an Apple Store security guard Friday, a spokesperson with the New York City Police Department told CNN.
Apple TV+ today debuted the teaser trailer for the new highly anticipated murder-mystery comedy series, “The Afterparty” from Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award winners Chris Miller and Phil Lord (“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” “The Lego Movie,” “21 Jump Street”). The eight-episode series will premiere globally in January 2022 on Apple TV+.
Watch the trailer below. If the sense of humor woven into Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Lego Movie worked for you, make a note to watch for the Afterparty Apple TV+ premiere in January.
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This week Dave and I talk about Steve Jobs and what he meant to us, Apple and the world, on the anniversary of his death. We also talk about some iOS 15 tips and the introduction of Legacy Contacts in the operating system. Finally, we posted a song created by James Dempsey called “One More Thing,” written as a tribute to Jobs and played on by more than 30 musicians, including Dave and I.
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Compelling headline. I was skeptical. But it didn’t take long for me to be glad I dug in. This is a rich collection, efficiently presented, worth your time.
