Tag: apple

Corporations Are Not To Be Loved

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From Brent Simmons:

Apple doesn’t care about you personally in the least tiny bit, and if you were in their way somehow, they would do whatever their might — effectively infinite compared to your own — enables them to deal with you.

Companies like Apple love to fashion themselves as a lifestyle or an identity brand, because they know that if people watch their specific actions too closely they’ll be reminded they’re simply a business that needs to keep growing to keep their shareholders happy. I think it’s great to admire a company and certainly to have strong preferences about where you spend your money, but go into it with your eyes open.

I think Apple’s struggles with bringing 3rd party developers on board to build apps for the Vision Pro have a lot of causes but it certainly appears that the App Store chickens have come home to roost a bit. Gruber covered this a bit as well, but it just feels like we’ve hit an inflection point where Apple’s behavior is getting almost no support because there’s really no logical defense aside from the fact that Apple wants to make as much money as possible. Good for them.

WWDC 2023 Wish Lists

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Michael Tsai has posted his annual roundup of WWDC 2023 Wish Lists. As always, it’s a good mix of consumer facing and developer-centric asks.

The one common theme seems to be around quality and stability. iOS and iPadOS are nearly 2 decades old, MacOS is closing in on 25 years, and even WatchOS and tvOS are nearly a decade old. These are mature platforms that can stand to have a year of spit and polish applied while Apple (likely) rolls out a new OS. Let’s hope that’s the case.

WWDC 2023 Wishlist

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A few things I hope to see this year at WWDC: A general theme on speed and reliability at the OS and app level. Especially Mail and Music. iPadOS battery management (charge to 80% and hold) Siri audiobook integration. My kids have Alexa devices in their rooms and I’d love to upgrade them to HomePod […]

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Rendering Engine Diversity on iOS

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Last week, some interesting news broke about Google and Mozilla prepping versions of their iOS browsers to use their own rendering engines rather than simply being a wrapper around Webkit, Apple’s rendering engine. If you aren’t familiar, iOS has rules that prevent browser makers like Google and Mozilla from embedding the engine that handles layout […]

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Which Apple apps or services are truly great?

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I was recently reading this article about how Apple’s services are often creaky, slow and feel half assed and it got me thinking: for any given app or service, what is the best in breed for that area? I’ll skip some smaller utilities and such, and focus more on the core apps and services. Apple […]

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Albums 4.4 Released

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Albums 4.4 was released this week, and it’s another feature-packed one. The 2 biggest additions for me is the ability to rate songs from within the app and the last.fm history import. The last.fm import in particular is awesome, as it gives the app the ability to build up a list of albums you have played but aren’t in your library as well as build up a historical “top albums played” in years prior to you using the app. As you may know, the way Apple Music tracks plays is simply incrementing play counts by 1, so frequency of listens is hard to do without a custom database. Fortunately, Albums does just that, and now it can backfill previous album listens along with the way it already tracks listening frequency.

Over the past few years Albums has become one of my most-used apps and I’ve really enjoyed seeing all of the love and attention Adam Linder has put into the app. I wrote about this a little while ago, but for me the ability to work through albums and see stats on what I’ve listened to and when has really made Apple Music that much better of a service to me. I rediscover music I haven’t heard in a long time as well as get insight into my listening habits in a way I haven’t been able to in other apps/services.

Albums is free for most of the functionality, and a $0.99/mo subscription for all of the bells and whistles.

WWDC 2022 Wishlist

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Almost every year, I post a list of things I hope that Apple announces this year from the software side. Here is last year’s list, and I’ll be porting over a ton of the wishes from last year once again with the knowledge that they’re likely not going to happen this time, either. Without further […]

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How Apple could turn HomePod mini into a delightful and adorable smart display

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From Parker Ortolani at 9to5Mac:

Apple’s home strategy has been all over the place, but the company appears to finally have a hit with the HomePod mini. Rumors have been floated about Apple making a HomePod with a display, but word on the street is that the product being tested looks a lot like an iPad mounted to a speaker. Instead of making a Frankenstein product very similar to Google and Amazon’s products, Apple should take the blueprint it’s laid out with HomePod mini and use it as a basis for a unique ambient smart display.

Overall, an interesting take on what a HomePod Mini with a display could look like. From my perspective, I don’t know if it would really move the needle as I’d prefer something to replace what we have in our kitchen right now – a Nest Hub that can display family photos and still do the basic timer / music functions. I briefly touched on this a while back, mentioning something like a “HomePod Video” would be a game-changer for me.