Apple today unveiled HomePod mini, the newest addition to the HomePod family that delivers impressive sound, the intelligence of Siri to get things done, and a smart home experience that offers comfort and convenience without complexity. At just 3.3 inches tall, HomePod mini is packed with innovative technologies and advanced software that together enable computational audio to deliver breakthrough audio quality wherever it is placed. HomePod mini will be available in white and space gray at a great price of just $99.
Great pricing. Preorders start on November 6th, shipping starts November 16th.
There are two kinds of 5G networks: mmWave, which is the super-fast 5G that most people are talking about when they talk about 5G speed improvements, and sub-6GHz, the 5G that most people are going to experience for the time being.
This is a great explainer, to help you wrap your head around what’s coming, the terribly named mmWave and sub-6GHz.
Apple employees that have been testing the 5G iPhones recently (and confidentially) told Bloomberg that the 5G speeds have been disappointing as the current 5G networks are not “improving connection speeds much.” Most people who are expecting their iPhones to deliver super-fast mmWave speeds will likely end up similarly disappointed when they find that mmWave networks just aren’t available in most places.
Set your expectations accordingly. At least in the US. The way I read it, this is about telecomm infrastructure rollout, not Apple’s hardware.
The “five nanometre process” involved refers to the fact that the chip’s transistors have been shrunk down – the tiny on-off switches are now only about 25 atoms wide – allowing billions more to be packed in.
And:
Moving to smaller transistors helps because they use less power than larger ones, meaning they can be run more quickly. On this basis, TSMC has said that its 5nm chips deliver a 15% speed boost over the last 7nm generation while using the same power.
And:
Apple has already claimed its A14 chip will do machine learning tasks “up to 10 times faster” than the A13.
All of this is important, important across the product line, including the up and coming Apple silicon powered Mac, said to ship by the end of the year.
What makes this article so interesting is that it gets into the details on how the 5nm process was achieved, using a technique called “extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography”. Great read.
Covering 13,000 miles over 100 days through 16 border crossings and 13 countries, starting from the city of Ushuaia at the tip of South America, Ewan and Charley journey through the glorious and underexposed landscapes of South and Central America in their most challenging expedition to date, using cutting-edge technology on the backs of their prototype electric Harley-Davidsons in order to contribute to the sustainability of the planet.
If you’ve not yet given Long Way Up a look, check out the video embedded below. It gives enough of a taste that you’ll know if it’s for you. I found the series riveting, each episode better than the last.
Long Way Up takes us on an epic journey, one where the risk of getting stranded in the middle of nowhere, or taking a spill at high speeds, has your nerves on knife edge throughout the ride. At the same time, it rewards the senses, with thrilling panoramas and visits to exotic locales, exploring cultures a long way from home.
And every bit of it done with strong bonds of friendship, laughter and charm. A great series.
Eddie Van Halen died this week at the age of 65. He was one of the best guitarists the world has ever seen, so Dave and I wanted to talk about his impact. We also touched on the upcoming Apple event, which should give us a new iPhone, as well as talking about the new Mac, and how to check your Apple TV subscriptions.
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If you started a free year of Apple TV+ between November 1st and January 31st, your end date for your free trial will now last until the end of February, giving you up to an extra three months of free access. If you signed up in February or later, there will be no change as your trial already lasts beyond the February date.
There’s more to this (read Benjamin’s post), but in a nutshell, the soonest your free year of Apple TV+ will expire is February 28th. Especially good news for folks who grabbed their free year back when Apple TV+ first started, last November 1st.
Upon claiming the offer, you commit to a $4.99/month subscription that starts immediately after the 1 year free and automatically renews until cancelled.
Presumably, this part of the terms will be updated and your commitment won’t start before March 1st. But that aside, there’s a line in the sand for all free Apple TV+ subscriptions to translate into a paid monthly sub.
Unless…
Here’s where bundles come in. We know the bundle pricing. What we don’t know is when they will start. I originally thought we’d see bundles turn on by November 1st so everyone would have the bundle option when faced with their subscription flipping to paid.
When I heard about the February extension, my immediate thought was that this had something to do with bundles and season 2. The availability of both the bundle and the appearance of new seasons of favorite content would ratchet up the pressure to make the leap to paid. Bundles are a no brainer for some, and the actual availability of new seasons of shows you love gives more immediate value to the equation, more so than if you had to make a decision in 2020, before the new seasons drop.
Side note: Jim and I talk about this issue on the Dalrymple Report episode that will drop later today, but it was before we knew about the extension, so keep that in mind if you are a listener.
As an Apple software engineer, I worked on the first two releases of watchOS, so I’m familiar with many of the Apple Watch’s internal trade-offs. While I don’t have any inside information about current versions of watchOS and Apple Watch hardware, there are at least four reasons to think Apple won’t support third-party watch faces any time soon, if ever.
Read for the details, but:
Battery life
Buggy code
Apple’s image
Copyright worries
In a nutshell, handing control of Apple Watch faces over to developers would put the Apple Watch quality experience at risk.
On the only road trip I’ve taken since the whole world situation went to pot, we ran into a strange issue where Google Maps wanted to take us on a bizarre route that would have taken an hour longer than the normal route, for reasons that we still don’t understand. I encouraged my wife, who was driving, to use Apple Maps instead, but she was annoyed by the way the Apple Watch taps her wrist to alert her even though CarPlay is already showing the directions onscreen.
And:
While I was pretty sure that there was an easy way to turn off those alerts altogether, I felt like they could still be useful sometimes, so disabling them entirely seemed like it might be throwing the baby out with the bath water. But, lo and behold, Apple has—at some point in the past—improved its options, and you can now disable the alerts on a granular basis, depending on what kind of directions you’re using.
If you use Apple Maps and wear an Apple Watch, take a read for the setting changes. Worth knowing about.
Between the period of July 6th to October 6th myself, Brett Buerhaus, Ben Sadeghipour, Samuel Erb, and Tanner Barnes worked together and hacked on the Apple bug bounty program.
And:
During our engagement, we found a variety of vulnerabilities in core portions of their infrastructure that would’ve allowed an attacker to fully compromise both customer and employee applications, launch a worm capable of automatically taking over a victim’s iCloud account, retrieve source code for internal Apple projects, fully compromise an industrial control warehouse software used by Apple, and take over the sessions of Apple employees with the capability of accessing management tools and sensitive resources.
Most importantly:
As of October 6th, 2020, the vast majority of these findings have been fixed and credited. They were typically remediated within 1-2 business days (with some being fixed in as little as 4-6 hours).
This is a fascinating read, filled with detail. Work like this finds the vulnerabilities before they can be used against us. There’s also a bit of insight on Apple’s bug bounty program.
Gallaudet University has always been a center of advanced learning and teaching approaches. From its founding in 1864 with 8 students who are deaf, to its thriving university community of over two thousand students and faculty today, Gallaudet has become the premier higher education institution for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community.
With that as background:
This summer, Gallaudet University students and faculty received a special welcome kit. Inside, they found some essential Bison gear — the school’s mascot — including a sweatshirt, stickers, and a notebook. There were also a few powerful learning tools that would be essential for the remote fall semester. Every student and faculty member was equipped with a new iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, and Smart Keyboard Folio.
And this:
Apple is also giving students opportunities in technology after they graduate from Gallaudet. Apple Carnegie Library, in Washington, D.C., holds several recruiting efforts with Gallaudet, and currently employs more than 30 team members of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community. Many are Gallaudet alumni.
This is a side of Apple that I absolutely love. Sure, it’s good business, good publicity, but I believe the drive to do this is what sets Apple apart from so many other companies. Good on you Apple.
It was a hot summer morning in Taipei when several officials from the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto U.S. embassy, visited the top management of a major tech company, a key supplier to Apple.
It was immediately apparent that this was unlike previous courtesy visits, where U.S. officials stop in from time to time to hear what’s happening in the industry. This time, they cut the chitchat and threw out a blunt question soon after they sat down: “Why aren’t you moving more of your production capacity outside of China?” they asked. “Why aren’t you moving faster?”
Participants described the conversation as “serious and unsettling.” “We felt uneasy,” said one. “They asked many questions that we didn’t know if we could answer. The answers would have involved unreported strategies about ourselves and our clients.” But the message was unambiguous: The U.S. government was directly appealing to his company to cut its ties to China, he said.
And:
The idea of unpicking the sophisticated tech supply chain that has grown up in China over the last two decades would have been unthinkable just two years ago. But pressure from the Trump administration has made this a reality, with companies from Apple to Google decamping from China to Vietnam, India, Thailand and Malaysia in the last 36 months. For the global tech industry, the question is whether the alternative supply chain that emerges can match the efficiency of the one in China that builds more than 200 million iPhones a year.
Apple walking a bit of a tightrope here:
A number of the biggest companies are doing their best to straddle the widening chasm between Beijing and Washington, in an effort to avoid picking a side. Apple, for one, has adopted a two-sided strategy to balance itself from the tech war. While it has been pushing suppliers to accelerate their shift away from China since late 2018, it has also been aggressively cultivating Chinese homegrown suppliers to play a more important role inside China, and secure continuous access to the 1.4 billion strong market.
Fascinating read. My gut reaction is that diversification is incredibly important, minimizing dependence on China is good for Apple, as long as they can still reach China’s billion-plus market.
I recently have been in a mode of deep (Windows-based) user interface focus at work, and was describing Panic to someone recently when something came over me. I love these guys. I love the attention to detail of every large, small and medium thing, the time put into making an application that feels right and flows right, that’s easy to use, that has just enough user interface that you can get done what you need to get done, that has style, function and whimsy.
And:
The Mac gets a lot of flack from people who are nose deep in technical specifications and price matchups. What they don’t see — or aren’t interested in — is the intangible: the culture that people with big dreams and small means have made the unconventional available, the complex seemingly simple and the advanced accessible. This culture doesn’t live or die by Apple in particular, although the original Macintosh being a product of a similar mindset helped set the tone. This culture produces things that are hard to find elsewhere, not because it’s technically impossible to do, but because the values that drive those other platforms produce different outcomes.
This entire post is a love letter and perfectly captures how I feel about the Mac and Apple in general, warts and all. I love the culture, love the attention to detail, in spite of the flaws. In spite of the App Store madness, Sherlocking, Steve Jobs horror stories, broken keyboards, etc. That love is just deeply, deeply ingrained.
The Piper Sandler Taking Stock With Teens® survey is a semi-annual research project that gathers input from thousands of teens with an average age of 15.8 years.
And:
86% of teens own an iPhone and 89% expect an iPhone to be their next phone, both all-time survey highs
Think about that for a moment. Many consider Apple and iPhone to be premier, high-end brands. And 86% of teens own one. That is remarkable.
Apple TV+ has ordered “The Supermodels,” an unparalleled event docuseries that will feature exclusive access to and interviews with Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington, who will revisit their iconic modeling careers and collective disruption of the ‘90s fashion scene, which continues to reverberate today.
And:
Hailing from Imagine Documentaries, the project will be directed and executive produced by two-time Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple (“Harlan County, USA,” “American Dream,” “Shut Up and Sing”), and executive produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, along with Campbell, Crawford, Evangelista and Turlington, who have joined in an unprecedented partnership on the series.
Interesting slice of the fashion industry, definitely something I’d watch.
Eddie Van Halen, whose innovative and explosive guitar playing kept the hard rock band that bore his family name cemented to the top of the album charts for two decades, died on Tuesday morning after a long battle with cancer. He was 65.
This is just heartbreaking news. Eddie was one of the few guitarists that literally changed the way we think about how the instrument is played. My condolences to his family.
Apple on Tuesday announced it will have a special event being held on Tuesday, October 13, 2020. While the iPhone wasn’t specially mentioned it is widely accepted that the iPhone would be announced in mid-October.
The event invitation itself just says “Hi, Speed,” so there isn’t a lot to go on in terms of clues for what exactly will be announced.
With the times we’re in it’s not surprising this will be a virtual event to be watched online.
Andy Miller, founder of Quattro Wireless, a mobile ad company that Apple acquired in 2010, describes his meeting with Steve Jobs to get Steve’s blessing on the acquisition.
For those who signed up for Apple TV+ right when it was available on November 1, 2019, those free year-long Apple TV+ accounts are expiring at the end of October. A year is a long time to remember to cancel a subscription, so we wanted to warn MacRumors readers not interested in keeping Apple TV+ that charges are imminent. The first subscribers will be charged for Apple TV+ on October 31, 2020.
Follow the headline link for instructions. Good reminder that once your free year of Apple TV+ ends, you will be charged for the subscription renewal.
Hopefully, the new Apple One bundles will kick in before folks start canceling.
The heart of Jacquard is the Jacquard Tag, a tiny computer built to make everyday items more helpful. We first used this on the sleeve of a jacket so that it could recognize the gestures of the person wearing it, and we built that same technology into the Cit-E backpack with Saint Laurent. Then, we collaborated with Adidas and EA on our GMR shoe insert, enabling its wearers to combine real-life play with the EA SPORTS FIFA mobile game.
Project Jacquard was announced back in 2015, and Google has touted it as a smart controller you can wear to control various devices.
I can’t help but see a parallel to Apple Watch. Apple pushed their remote control capabilities into the Apple Watch (think answering the phone, controlling music/podcasts, curating notifications, etc.), Google is going in a different direction, splintering the control into a sprinkling of Jacquard Tag embeds.
The newest of these is the just announced Konnect-I Backpack series:
Whether it’s touch or movement-based, the tag can interpret different inputs customized for the garments and gear we’ve collaborated with brands to create. And now we’re sharing that two new backpacks, developed with Samsonite, will integrate Jacquard technology. A fine addition to our collection, the Konnect-I Backpack comes in two styles: Slim ($199) and Standard ($219).
While they might look like regular backpacks, the left strap unlocks tons of capabilities. Using your Jacquard app, you can customize what gestures control which actions—for instance, you can program Jacquard to deliver call and text notifications, trigger a selfie, control your music or prompt Google Assistant to share the latest news. For an added level of interaction, the LED light on your left strap will light up according to the alerts you’ve set.
Will we see a similar device (the rumored AirTags) from Apple? If so, will AirTags parallel the Jacquard tag in functionality?
While you think about all this, here’s a commercial for the new Konnect-I backpack. So very odd.
Apple Inc. has stopped selling headphones and wireless speakers from rivals including Sonos Inc., Bose Corp. and Logitech International SA as the company gears up to launch its own new audio products.
The Cupertino, California-based technology giant has long sold third-party hardware on its website, one of the largest e-commerce operations in the world. All headphones and speakers from Bose, speakers from Logitech’s Ultimate Ears brand and Sonos’s latest smart speaker disappeared from Apple’s online store at the end of last month, according to checks by Bloomberg.
Check for yourself. Jump onto Apple.com and do a search for, say, “headphones”. Nothing but Apple and Beats.
A sure sign of coming Apple-branded over-ear headphones? And will we soon see a keynote invite for next week? October 13th has been rumored as a keynote date and it’s one week from today.
Bruce Springsteen fans around the world will get a behind-the-scenes look at the iconic artist’s creative process in the documentary feature film, “Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You,” from Apple Original Films, premiering Friday, October 23 exclusively on Apple TV+. The feature-length vérité documentary arrives the same day as Springsteen’s new album “Letter To You,” and features full performances from the E Street Band, in-studio footage, never-before-seen archival material, and a deeper look into “Letter To You” from Springsteen himself.
Continuing the Apple Original Films branding, this is a gift to Springsteen fans. I was raised just up highway 9 from Bruce’s old stomping grounds, required viewing for me, looking forward to this.
Nine years ago today, Steve Jobs passed away from pancreatic cancer at the age of 56, one day after Apple executives introduced the iPhone 4s at a media event on the company’s Infinite Loop headquarters campus.
Follow the headline link, scroll/search to find the character you need, including emoji, then click the character and it is copied, ready for pasting.
Similar to command-control-space on a Mac, which brings up the character browser, but this is much larger. And on the iPhone, it’s scalable, to make it easy to see more detail.
I did notice that some of the new emoji are not yet implemented (they appear as mystery squares). Still useful to me.
Apple marketing and hardware execs Bob Borchers and John Ternus jumped onto the Same Brain podcast to talk about the 2020 iPad lineup.
Of particular interest to me was the detailed discussion (jump to about 7:22) of the fingerprint scanner on the iPad Air’s power button. I would love to see this tech on an iPhone. Not sure if the footprint is large enough to allow this.
Benchmarks supposedly for Apple’s A14 Bionic processor in the iPad Air 4, first spotted by Twitter user “Ice Universe,” reveal that the A14 offers significant performance improvements over the iPhone 11’s A13 Bionic.
This is an 8-core device. With that in mind, scroll and compare all the various tests. The A14 Bionic in the new iPad Air kicks some serious butt.
Is this a fair comparison? For a strict CPU vs CPU comparison, seems like it does offer a level of insight. And makes me hopeful that the Arm-based Macs coming our way will significantly raise the bar for Mac performance.
I recently bought a macro lens and I’m simply amazed at the worlds it opens up to me. It has also brought me a deeper appreciation of the gorgeous photography in the Apple TV+ series Tiny World, which debuted last Friday.
Watch the “behind the scenes” embedded below. Wonderful work.
Dave made a trip to the Apple Store this week and gives us his opinion on how the company is doing when customers visit the store. We also touched on Amazon One palm reader and the upcoming anniversary of Apple TV+.
