Marco Arment:

Having four USB-C ports is awesome.

Having only four USB-C ports is going to hurt the versatility requirement of pro gear, because there’s a very real chance that you won’t have the right dongle when you need it.

This is going to happen a lot, because even though USB-C is the future, it’s definitely not the present. We’ve had the standard USB plug (USB-A) in widespread use for 18 years, and it’s going to take a few more years for USB-C to become so ubiquitous that we can get away without USB-A ports most of the time.

A pro laptop released today should definitely have USB-C ports — mostly USB-C ports, even — but it should also have at least one USB-A port.

I currently have dongles to plug in my existing Time Machine drive (USB-C to USB-B, picture here) and another to plug my Cinema Display into my new MacBook Pro (USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 to Mini Display Port/Thunderbolt 2, picture here). Tap both pics to embiggen.

Will I need more dongles? Undoubtedly. Marco is arguing that the MacBook Pro is too forward thinking and should have been designed for the present. My machine will arrive in a few weeks. I’ll stew in the soup, have a better sense of things once I live in the brave new dongular world for a while.

From the beautifully laid out CNET interview:

“Doing something that’s different is actually relatively easy and relatively fast, and that’s tempting,” says the man who’s had a hand in every major Apple product design — from the colorful iMac and iBook to the iPod, iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch.

“We don’t limit ourselves in how we will push — if it’s to a better place. What we won’t do is just do something different that’s no better,” Ive said in an interview earlier this week to explain the design of the MacBook Pro, a major reboot of Apple’s most powerful laptop line.

And:

Our starting point, from the design team’s point of view, was recognizing the value with both input methodologies. But also there are so many inputs from a traditional keyboard that are buried a couple of layers in. We have that ability to accommodate complex inputs, mainly out of habit and familiarity.

So our point of departure was to see if there was a way of designing a new input that really could be the best of both of those different worlds. To be able to have something that was contextually specific and adaptable, and also something that was mechanical and fixed, because there’s truly value in also having a predictable and complete set of fixed input mechanisms.

Read the interview. Some great insights into the birth of Touch Bar and Jony’s way of thinking. Kudos to the CNET team that pulled this together.

The Boulon Blanc table quickly transforms from a coffee table to a full-height kitchen or dining room table in just a few seconds. The table is expensive, no doubt (about US$700), but spend a minute watching the video at the top of the kickstarter page.

Terrific design.

UPDATE: Bad time stamp on the article. My bad for not checking another source. Story is valid, just old, happened in June.

Finews:

The worst nightmare of Swiss banks has become a reality: starting Thursday, a heavyweight outsider begins offering a payment service in their home market. Apple has brought its payment app, Apple Pay, to Switzerland.

In June, finews.ch reported the imminent launch of Apple Pay in Switzerland. The introduction of the service is now being announced by Apple Pay’s partners in Switzerland, for example the kiosk operator Valora. Also on board from the financial world are the Ticino Corner Bank with the Cornercard, as well as the credit card operators Visa, Mastercard and Swiss Bankers.

And:

Apple Pay’s main local competitor, the payment app Twint, which is backed by banks like UBS, Credit Suisse, Zuercher Kantonalbank, Postfinance and Raiffeisen, as well as the retail giants Coop and Migros, will only be available in its new form in the autumn.

Twint faces another significant disadvantage against Apple Pay: Apple blocks NFC (Near Field Communication) technology in its smartphones for other payment operators. With a 50 per cent share of the smartphone market, that is a serious obstacle. It was already enough to cause the Swisscom payment app Tapit to fail.

In the meantime, Apple Pay can connect with the payment terminals of most Swiss retailers. The Bluetooth technology, which Twint relies on, is not yet widely used in stores.

The banks rolled their own payment app, Apple brought the phones and Apple Pay. Looks like Apple Pay’s tech is proving the winner here.

[H/T Robert Walter]

In the Quartz review, Mike Murphy gives the Google Pixel its due, highlighting the camera, digital video image stabilization, endless photo space, rapid charging as positives, but then read the rest of the article.

At the core of the article is Apple’s choice to adopt the speedy PCIe SSD bus technology along with the NVM Express device interface.

By adopting the PCIe/NVMe standard, Apple has been able to deliver higher performance in terms of read/write speeds and latency when compared to traditional SATA-based PC designs.

And:

It’s not a surprise, Handy said, that Apple settled on PCIe, as the price for the controllers are already approaching those of SATA controllers.

“If they both cost the same, then why use SATA?” [industry analyst Jim] Handy said in an email reply to Computerworld.

Interesting.

OS X Daily:

Siri has the ability to read anything on the screen of an iPhone or iPad to you. And yes, that means Siri will quite literally read aloud whatever is open and on the display of an iOS device, whether it’s a web page, an article, an email, a text message, anything on the screen will be read out loud by Siri, and you’ll even have controls for speeding up and slowing down speech, as well as pausing and skipping sections.

Pretty cool. To enable this feature, you’ll need to enable the Speak Screen switch in Settings > General > Accessibility. Once you do that, you can get Siri to speak your screen by telling Siri:

Speak screen

You can also get the same result by using two fingers to swipe down from the top of the screen.

Try this out. I think this is a fantastic accessibility feature. Try tapping the rabbit/turtle on the control panel that appears to speed up/slow down Siri’s voice. Nicely done. Note that this will only work in iOS.

[Via iHeartApple2]

Six months ago, we launched Talkshow in the App Store, with the goal of giving people an easy way to have simple, uncluttered conversations in public. Today we have some tough news: on Thursday December 1, we’re shutting down the Talkshow app and website. While we have enjoyed the conversations that have happened on Talkshow, and are grateful for the community that has formed around the product, we don’t see it getting big enough to have the impact we had hoped for. We’re sorry, and we’re going to try to handle this transition in the right way.

This is the manifest of things I’ve learned about managing CSS in large, complex web projects during my many years of professional web development. I’ve been asked about these things enough times that having a document to point to sounded like a good idea.

The New York Post:

Goldman is trying to persuade Apple to make a rival bid for Time Warner, a source with direct knowledge of the situation said.

“They are freaking out trying to convince Apple to come in,” the source said. Goldman has been left on the sidelines in advising on AT&T’s $85 billion agreement to acquire Time Warner.

And:

Cook’s company has expressed interest in buying Time Warner in the recent past, and there is some belief that judging from his comments this week, he will not let AT&T carry the day.

To me, this would be a dizzying purchase, one that would dilute Apple’s and Tim Cook’s attention, steer focus from their core business. True, there’d be a lot of new elements with which to experiment, but there’d be an awful lot of cleanup to do.

My two cents? Buy Netflix.

Chuq Von Rospach, writing on his blog:

Here’s a basic reality: criticizing and second-guessing Apple is a hobby for many of us, and a profession for more than is probably healthy for the Apple ecosystem. That is a basic reality that isn’t going to change any time soon.

And:

A lot of it boils down to this concept: We demand Apple innovate, but we insist they don’t change anything.

And:

I think these computers are taking some valid criticism, but much of that criticism is ignoring a lot of the positives that these new computers have, including nice improvements in CPU and GPU speed and faster RAM, all indicating nice bumps in overall performance.

But having said that, the fact that so much of the Mac product line is such a cluster and Apple didn’t acknowledge that makes the criticism understandable and deserved. What we got from Apple was good; what we needed from Apple was that and more — and it didn’t happen.

This is a long read. Chuq captures a lot of the thoughts that have been flying around in response to the new MacBook Pro reveal. Thoughtful, and well worth the read. Great job, Chuq.

Kirk McElhearn shows you how to re-enable the star ratings in the Music app (Settings > Music > Show Star Ratings) and how to actual rate your songs (which is more complicated than it used to be).

This change just appeared on the just-released beta of iOS 10.2.

Yesterday, we posted about the new MacBook Pro’s removal of the iconic startup chime.

Pingie.com, the site that posted the original note, followed up with another post showing how to restore the startup chime.

In a nutshell, go into Terminal and enter this line:

sudo nvram BootAudio=%01

Good to know.

The song is “Alberta,” which the album’s liner notes credit to blues guitarist Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. The suit notes that the song is actually based on the blues song “Corrine, Corrina,” which was written by singer Armenter Chatmon, popularly known as Bo Carter, who recorded it in 1928.

I don’t even know what to think about this. Clapton is being sued for $5 million.

Brilliant.

I love the implementation. I hope to see it in an update soon.

My thanks to Hullo for sponsoring The Loop this week. That sorry old pillow on your bed is long past its prime. It wasn’t even the right pillow for you to begin with. It collapses under the weight of your head at night causing neck pain in the morning. It retains your body heat, forcing you to repeatedly flip it to the cool side in the middle of the night. Your pillow totally sucks, but it hasn’t exactly been nagging you to be replaced like your cracked iPhone 4. It’s time to treat yourself to better rest–you deserve it! Try a Hullo buckwheat pillow. Hullo’s buckwheat hull fill provides unique and firm support that simply can’t be matched by traditional pillows; it will perfectly conform to your head and neck. Hullo buckwheat pillow also:

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Just start scrolling down. A pretty solid list. The biggest movie missing from this list, for me, was 2003’s Oldboy, in my opinion, one of the greatest horror films ever made.

On Friday, we ran a post titled There’s all kinds of love for the new MacBook Pro.

To balance that out, spend some time reading Machael Tsai’s blog post, which gathers a long list of negative comments about the new MacBook Pro and Apple’s Mac direction in general.

If this were simply a bunch of curmudgeonly complaints, we’d have skipped the post entirely. But there are a lot of fair complaints in this list, insights that are worth paying attention to.

Jason Snell, writing for Six Colors:

My first impression of the Touch Bar is that the “keys” looked… like keys. It didn’t feel like I was looking at a screen, but at an extension of the keyboard. That was an intentional choice on Apple’s part. Unlike the display and the keyboard, the Touch Bar’s brightness is not manually adjustable.

Instead, the Touch Bar’s brightness varies based on lighting conditions, using the light sensor. I wasn’t able to try and trick it or confuse it, but the entire time I was using it—in a dark room and in a much more brightly lit one—it seemed to match the keyboard well. This is not a bright, glowing screen above a dark keyboard—it’s an extension of the keyboard.

And:

The trackpad on the 13-inch model is more than half again as big as on its predecessor, and on the 15-inch model it’s doubled in size. As Phil Schiller said on stage Thursday, Apple can make the Trackpad bigger now that it’s a Magic Trackpad rather than an older hinged model because even at large sizes the entire surface is clickable.

And (this next one answered a big question for me):

The trackpads are large enough that Apple has had to build in more palm-rejection intelligence, because when you’re typing on these things, you’re going to inevitably slide your palms across them. In my experience writing this article on a 13-inch MacBook Pro, the palm rejection worked well—I never felt that I had to change my typing approach just to avoid weird mouse movements.

And:

Well, it’s my sad duty to report that the MacBook Pro keyboard has the same key travel as the MacBook. Apple says the stainless steel dome switch beneath each key has been honed to give you a more responsive feel, but to me it feels just like the MacBook’s keyboard.

Plenty of divisiveness on the keyboard feel. Many people like it, many don’t. Your mileage may vary.

Lots more chewy goodness in Jason’s review. Read it.

Great look back by Jean-Louis Gassée.

Pingie.com:

Hidden in a tech note for the new MacBook Pros is a death notice of the infamous Mac startup chime. (Update: It is more then confirmed as I own the laptop. There is no chime.)

Here’s a link to an archive of all the Mac startup/crash sounds. Click the link, open the zip file, use Quick Look to listen to each of the sounds. How many of these do you recognize?

Thanks to Mountain Duck for sponsoring The Loop this week.

Mountain Duck – based on the solid open source foundation of Cyberduck – lets you mount server and cloud storage as a disk on your desktop. Open remote files with any application and work like on a local volume without synchronising files.

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