Solid trailer. The energy feels about the same as the ones in the Late Late Show with James Corden. From the video’s info page:

Based on the segment that has become a global, viral video sensation on The Late Late Show with James Corden, the new CARPOOL KARAOKE series features 16 celebrity pairings riding along in a car together as they sing tunes from their personal playlists and surprise fans who don’t expect to see big stars belting out tunes one lane over.

And:

Featuring James Corden, Will Smith, Billy Eichner, Metallica, Alicia Keys, John Legend, Ariana Grande, Seth MacFarlane, Chelsea Handler, Blake Shelton, Michael Strahan, John Cena, Shaquille O’Neal, and many more.

Here’s a link to the series home page.

Chris Hauk, MacTrast:

You can, in fact, make phone calls from your Mac. Wi-Fi (WiFi) calling is one of the perks you get when you choose to go with Apple’s complete eco-system. If you own an iPhone 5c or newer devices and one of the “Wi-Fi Calling” compatible devices (Mac, Apple Watch, iPod touch or iPad), you’re one step closer to making what Apple named “Wi-Fi calls on other devices.” It’s imperative that all your devices are properly registered under one Apple ID connected to one iCloud account.

If you own a Mac and an iPhone, this is worth setting up. It may already work and, if not, getting this to work may solve some other problems for you.

I actually prefer the audio quality of calls on my Mac. I find the sound subtle, nuanced when compared to my iPhone.

The Telegraph:

In an impassioned plea, Mr Cook, boss of the world’s largest company, says that the epidemic of false reports “is a big problem in a lot of the world” and necessitates a crackdown by the authorities and technology firms.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Telegraph, he calls for a campaign similar to those that changed attitudes on the environment to educate the public on the threat posed by fabricated online stories.

And:

“It has to be ingrained in the schools, it has to be ingrained in the public,” said Mr Cook. “There has to be a massive campaign. We have to think through every demographic.

“We need the modern version of a public-service announcement campaign. It can be done quickly if there is a will.”

Read the post, watch the embedded video, which shows Tim being asked some pointed political questions, handling each with some truly deft diplomacy.

Dan Moren, Macworld:

Even as the company continues to push its Apple Music venture, there are a few places where Apple would be better served by re-examining the way it approaches music. From services to software to hardware, Apple’s gotten pretty comfortable about where it stands with music—but not necessarily because it has the best solutions out there.

Dan digs into three specific areas: Fixing iTunes and Music apps, improving AirPlay, and improving the speaker situation.

One particular snippet I found intriguing:

Granted, perhaps it would be more effective to just snap up Sonos—especially if Apple could find a way to integrate Siri.

I can’t imagine this isn’t on an Apple drawing board somewhere.

Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:

While early rumors suggested that Apple was holding out for long-range charging, without the need to place the iPhone on a charging pad, those hopes appear to have been dashed by more recent reports. These suggest that Apple will, like other manufacturers, use simple inductive charging.

Apple is now listed as a member of the Qi Wireless Power Consortium. Qi is an inductive wireless charging standard that is already in use in more than a thousand products.

Ben quotes IHS Technology analyst Vicky Yussuff:

The success of wireless charging adoption from Apple’s competitors is something that Apple can no longer ignore. IHS Technology consumer survey data shows over 90% of consumers want wireless charging on their next device.

Note that the Apple uses Qi charging for the Apple Watch:

Apple already uses Qi charging for the Watch, but as The Register noted back in 2015, it uses a tweaked version that means you can’t use other Qi chargers. It seems likely it will do the same with the iPhone.

Conjecture, but reasonable conjecture.

Apple:

Few artists have created a body of work as rich and varied as Prince. During the ’80s, he emerged as one of the most singular talents of the rock & roll era, capable of seamlessly tying together pop, funk, folk, and rock. Not only did he release a series of groundbreaking albums; he toured frequently, produced albums, wrote songs for many other artists, and recorded hundreds of songs that still lie unreleased in his vaults. With each album he released, Prince showed remarkable stylistic growth and musical diversity, constantly experimenting with different sounds, textures, and genres. Occasionally, his music was inconsistent, in part because of his eclecticism, but his experiments frequently succeeded; no other contemporary artist blended so many diverse styles into a cohesive whole.

I know what I’ll be doing for the rest of the day.

Today:

U.S. News & World Report just unveiled their list of 2017 Best Places to Live in America after ranking the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas.

The new list took into account several factors, including affordability, job prospects and quality of life. A public survey of thousands of individuals across the country was also used to determine which qualities people consider important in a hometown. Then, data from the United States Census Bureau, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Labor Statistics — as well as U.S. News rankings of the best high schools and best hospitals — were considered to make up the final ranking.

These lists are always wonderfully subjective. Did your city make the top 20?

PBS:

The “In Memoriam” segments made for the major televised award shows are usually notable for their exclusions. The Grammys are no exception, as perceived “snubs” draw commentary the next morning.

On average, two and a half to three minutes are set aside during the hours-long telecast to pay tribute to the late-greats of the music industry. And, inevitably, it’s a bit of posthumous politics that decides who wins a spot in the photo-and-film sequence.

This is always the saddest part of the show. This year’s segment will be especially poignant for me.

Basement Geographer:

Generally, left-driving countries are isolated from right-driving countries by water, mountains, desert, or large stretches of deep forest. While this provides for relatively little traffic crossover between the two mode, there are still numerous roads (about 86 or so) where the issue of having to exchange lanes due to crossing over a border exist. These occur mostly in Africa and Asia, along with a handful of roads leading out of Guyana and Suriname in South America. To ease the transition for drivers so that they don’t suddenly find themselves hurtling headlong into oncoming traffic, there are a number of ways of handling the issue.

This is an old article but it talks about something I’ve never thought about. I’ve driven in countries that are right-hand drive but never had to cross a border and make the described transitions.

Wired:

Move 37 showed that AlphaGo wasn’t just regurgitating years of programming or cranking through a brute-force predictive algorithm. It was the moment AlphaGo proved it understands, or at least appears to mimic understanding in a way that is indistinguishable from the real thing. From where Lee sat, AlphaGo displayed what Go players might describe as intuition, the ability to play a beautiful game not just like a person but in a way no person could.

But don’t weep for Lee Sedol in his defeat, or for humanity. Lee isn’t a martyr, and Move 37 wasn’t the moment where the machines began their inexorable rise to power over our lesser minds. Quite the opposite: Move 37 was the moment machines and humanity finally began to evolve together.

Fascinating article about the rise of AI and what it means for humanity.

Rogue Amoeba:

The Mac App Store previously made up about half of Piezo’s unit sales, so we might have expected to sell half as many copies after exiting the store. Instead, it seems that nearly all of those App Store sales shifted to direct sales. It appears that nearly everyone who would have purchased Piezo via the Mac App Store opted to purchase directly once that was the only option. Far from the Mac App Store helping drive sales to us, it appears we had instead been driving sales away from our own site, and into the Mac App Store.

Obviously, this is not applicable to every developer or every app but it is interesting nonetheless.

Amateur Photographer:

The orcas were now very close and fast approaching a small group of eider ducks on the water. I realised there could be the potential for an action shot, so I tried to concentrate my attention on the eiders, which is easier said than done with five or six black dorsal fins cutting through the water and getting closer. I moved my focus point low in the frame and focused on the closest duck (in AI servo/continuous focus mode).

Suddenly, the eiders looked panicked and scattered in all directions.

This is a great example of something I teach in my class – great photographs often take a combination of hard work, knowledge, skill and luck. This story combines all of those elements.

Food and Drink:

We asked some whisky experts from across Scotland (and beyond) to help us pick ten of the best (reasonably priced) Scotch whiskies.

Just in time for the weekend. It’s easy to find good, expensive Scotch but the “reasonably priced” stuff is a lot harder. Spending $50-75 bucks on a bottle only to find out it’s not to your taste sucks. I’ve tried about a quarter of these and agree with the reviews of the ones I’ve tasted.

Zdziarski’s Blog Of Things:

With the current US administration pondering the possibility of forcing foreign travelers to give up their social media passwords at the border, a lot of recent and justifiable concern has been raised about data privacy.

What few protections citizens have in their home countries end at the border.

I am not a lawyer, and I can’t provide you with legal advice about your rights, or what you can do at a border crossing to protect yourself legally, but I can explain the technical implications of this, as well as provide some steps you can take to protect your data regardless of what country you’re entering.

The security issues he is discussing have always been in place for those who travel to more dangerous parts of the world. But there are some things every international traveler, regardless of where they are going, should keep in mind as well.

Thanks to Daylite for sponsoring The Loop this week. If you’re struggling to juggle business coming in while managing current projects, then Daylite is a tool you definitely want to check out.

If you need to be able to share client and project information, delegate tasks, share calendars and emails, and track projects – Daylite can help you do this all in one app.

Daylite is used by lawyers, consultants, real estate agents, photographers, designers, and other small businesses all over the world. It helps you organize and share information so you save time and get more done.

The best part about Daylite is it’s not a web app, so you can keep working even when you don’t have an Internet connection.

Try Daylite free for 30 days!

Dan Counsell:

I don’t usually write articles like this, but every so often something comes along that changes, or shifts the way things are done. Setapp from MacPaw is that something. I believe it has the potential to change the Mac app market in a big way, for better or worse.

So, what is Setapp? Basically at its heart, Setapp is a Mac app subscription service. Very much like Netflix, but for apps. The twist here is that it’s based on quality, not quantity. For a fixed monthly fee you get access to over 60 Mac apps. Sounds pretty good, right? Let’s dig a little deeper and find out.

The author is a developer himself (Product Designer and Founder of Realmac Software), so his thoughts on this subscription-based service are from a different perspective.

Interesting tip. The QuickType solution doesn’t seem to work for me. This a setting of some kind? Seems to me, the (c), (r), and TM shortcuts used to work, at least on the Mac. But no more.

The emoji solution always works. Copy and paste works too, especially if I do the copy on my Mac and paste on my iOS device.

UPDATE: Thanks to a big wave of Twitter response, I can see that there are some iOS installs with default text substitutions for (c), etc. But others do not have these substitutions. Perhaps they were replaced? Regardless, you can add them back in via Settings > General > Keyboards > Text Replacement.

Jason Snell, writing for Macworld:

Look out to 2025 and imagine a futuristic computing device made from Apple that’s larger than a phone, filling the ecosystem that currently is filled by laptops and iPads (and maybe even desktop Macs). This is a thin, light device, with battery life and sensors and other features that we can only dream about today.

And:

Apple seems to see the Mac as a rock-solid platform for laptop and desktop computers that people depend on to do their jobs. The Mac is, in many ways, defined by the fact that it’s a keyboard-and-trackpad-driven system with a windowed user interface. If you take that away and simplify the Mac, you might be able to get to something a bit closer to the iPad–but you risk losing some of the key attributes that make the Mac what it is.

And:

The iPad, on the other hand, seems not too far away from that 2025 device already. What’s required is an evolution of the very simple touch interface pioneered by the iPhone in order to provide the tools that sophisticated and demanding users need to get their jobs done. With the addition of iCloud Drive and support for other cloud services, Apple basically gave the iPad a browsable file hierarchy.

For the iPad to get there, however, Apple will need to up its game when it comes to growing iOS. After all, 2025 is only eight years away; a new iPad feature or two every other year between now and then won’t get it done. iOS needs better peripheral support, more sophisticated windowing and multitasking, improvements to file handling, better support for application and system automation, and a whole lot more. But if Apple puts the work in, the iPad could be that device in 2025–and still clearly be recognizable to a visitor from 2017 as an iPad.

Is the iPad the future? Will we continue to live in a hybrid world, with the Mac on the desk, the iPhone in pocket, and the iPad the larger portable device in between? Or will the iPad evolve into a device capable of filling its current slot as well as replacing the need for the Mac?

Interesting questions. Clearly, the answers will depend on the technology that comes our way over time. Will we see power sipping flexible screens that can fit into our pockets and unfold into large screens as needed? Will battery life become indefinite? Will quantum computing significantly raise the performance bar? Will gesture detection become sophisticated enough that our computers will allow us to type even if our hands are in our pockets?

If the answer to those questions are true, the computing devices of the future might bear little resemblance to what we have now. Though I’d bet that the Apple brand will still be just as strong.

Ian Bogost wrote an article for The Atlantic with the provocative title The Myth of Apple’s Great Design.

Here’s a quote:

Apple has great design is the biggest myth in technology today. The latest victim of this ideology comes in the form a remarkable report on the late Steve Jobs’s final project, still in production: a new, $5 billion Cupertino headquarters for Apple Inc.

And:

But if Apple designs at its best when attending closely to details like those revealed in the construction of its spaceship headquarters, then presumably the details of its products would stand out as worthy precedents. Yet, when this premise is tested, it comes up wanting. In truth, Apple’s products hide a shambles of bad design under the perfection of sleek exteriors.

There’s a lot more of this. Luckily, I will not have to take this article apart, point by point. Nick Heer, keeper of the blog Pixel Envy, does this job nicely, in a post titled Sufficiently Great.

Read ’em both.

Carolina Milanesi:

Another common argument shared by some Apple critics is that the inability to deliver a killer product rests solely with Tim Cook. When we consider the two new lines of products Apple brought to market under Cook — Apple Watch and AirPods — I struggle to see how people could honestly believe Cook is failing.

And:

I have been wearing an Apple Watch every day since it first came out. Yet, whenever people ask me if I love it, I hesitate to say I do because it is hard to explain why. Apple Watch gives back what you put in. You need to invest some time in setting up your preferences when it comes to notifications, pick your apps, buy into fitness, and add your credit cards. Most importantly, you need to trust Apple Watch to pick up some of the responsibility you have given to your iPhone for so long. When you do so, Apple Watch becomes a trusted companion you will not easily go without.

And:

This is the slogan of Apple’s AirPod commercial and, if you ask anyone who has tried them, they will agree. The feeling of magic is not because the user is aware of Apple’s unique approach of having two separate streams of music play simultaneously into each AirPod. The magic is delivered as soon as you pair your AirPods by simply taking away any pain previously inflicted by Bluetooth-enabled headphones requiring you to pay attention to flashing colored lights while pressing odd buttons.

All solid takes. Apple products are at their bests when they focus on fit, finish, and fine details. For example, compare the AirPods pairing times with any other BlueTooth earphones. Apple clearly put a lot of work into the design of the W1 chip and pairing time, whittling it down to practically instantaneous.

Compare the AirPods pairing time to the BeatsX pairing time. BeatsX also uses the W1 chip, but is noticeably slower to pair. Not that BeatsX are slow, it’s that the AirPods are fast. Magically fast. And that’s the point.

Apple’s new BeatsX Earphones are now live in the Apple Store, both brick and mortar and online.

BeatsX are available in four colors: white, black, gray, and blue, all priced at $149.95.

The white and black models ship pretty much immediately. If I order them online today, I can have them by Tuesday for a $17 next day shipping charge, $19 if I want them before noon, or free two shipping if I am willing to wait until Wednesday. Obviously, depending where you live, your shipping charges may be different.

The gray and blue models are currently showing delivery dates of February 23-28 (13 to 18 days from now) with free two day shipping, one day sooner with the overnight shipping fees mentioned above.

As to reviews, Chance Miller, 9to5Mac did a nice job gathering a series of YouTube reviews comparing the BeatsX Earphones to the AirPods, looking at things like sound quality and fit.

If you are trying to choose between BeatsX and AirPods, watch the videos. Each has a slightly different take, as a whole they should help give you a sense of which appeals to you more.

Tim getting a tour by curator Chris Stephens to see a retrospective on David Hockney’s work on iPad and iPhone.

The Verge:

Mobile apps like Apple News, SmartNews, Google News, and others may be your favorite news aggregators. But I have always been partial to Flipboard, the beautiful and clever app which started off six years ago as a way to turn social media posts into handsome magazine-like articles on iPads.

Now, Flipboard is launching a major redesign, version 4.0, which is built around “smart,” magazines on topics you choose, tailored using highly granular choices of subjects or sources, and automatically updated as relevant new content is published online.

I like the idea of Flipboard and have a couple of “magazines” of my own but I don’t seem to find the time to use the app the way it is intended. It just isn’t as compelling or full featured as I’d like it to be.

The Week:

In 2016, photographer Vincent Tullo attended the 140th Westminster Dog Show. Photographing the behind-the-scenes action in stark black and white, Tullo artfully captured the triumph and the torment experienced by both the dogs and their human handlers.

In advance of the 2017 Westminster Dog Show, which begins Feb. 11, enjoy some of last year’s doggy drama.

I post this less about the dog show, which is great fun to watch and is on this weekend, and more about the choice of black and white for the photos. I love B&W photography but it doesn’t work in all situations. I think this is one of those times when it really doesn’t work.

If the music industry is indeed in turnaround, that’s in no small part due to the digital disrupter at No. 1, the live titan at No. 3, Alexa’s mastermind at No. 12 and the visionary label bosses, tech gurus, artist managers and media moguls (including 41 first-timers!) who comprise Billboard’s annual ranking of executive excellence.

Apple’s Eddy Cue, Jimmy Iovine, and Robert Kondrk are all tied at No. 4, while Larry Jackson and Bozoma Saint John are tied at No. 67.