Last week, we linked to a post from Daniel Pasco on updating a 2009 Mac Pro:
I turned a 2009 Mac Pro I picked up off of Ebay for $1300 into a superb professional workstation, gaming, and VR platform, simply by adding an SSD drive and a new video card.
Here’s a follow-on post with all the detail on the build, really well written with lots of pictures. Thanks for this Dan, a real service to the community.
Lots and lots on the New York Times profile of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and accusations of Uber illicitly fingerprinting users’ iPhones. Be sure to read the very last paragraph in the Loop Post. This make sense?
TechCrunch:
Apple is finally adding transit options to its Maps app for the city of Paris. Starting today, you can use Apple Maps to calculate itineraries using public transportation.
You’ll find subway, RER and bus lines, and even Transilien lines. Just like in Google Maps, you can look around the map with a new subway layer or you can calculate an itinerary from A to B. If you tap on a station, you can see all the lines leaving this station as well as real time information about the next departures.
Finally, you’ll also find Autolib car sharing stations as well as Vélib bike sharing stations. Unfortunately, it doesn’t say if there are bikes or spaces available.
Surprised that this took so long, but glad the data is finally available.
The whole thing is fascinating, but the Apple/Steve part kicks in around 4:20. Love how they refer to him as Steven Jobs. It was before he was Steve to all of us.
Note: Someone sent this to me, but can’t for the life of me remember who. Was doing some heavy traveling when it came in. Apologies for the lack of a hat tip.
Wired, talking about Steve Lacy:
Last year, he was nominated for a Grammy for executive-producing and performing on the 2015 funk-R&B-soul album Ego Death, the third release from The Internet and Lacy’s first with the band. He’s a sought-after producer, featured on albums like J. Cole’s “4 Your Eyez Only” and Kendrick Lamar’s new “Damn.” Earlier in 2017, he released his first solo material, which he’s playing as part of the setlist for The Internet’s worldwide tour. (Somewhere in there he also graduated high school.) The only connection between his many projects? All that music is stored on his iPhone.
And on his process:
He paged through the drum presets in GarageBand for a while before picking a messy-sounding kit. With two thumbs, he tapped out a simple beat, maybe 30 seconds long. Then he went back to the Rickenbacker. He played a riff he’d stumbled on while tuning, recording it on a separate GarageBand track over top of the drums. Without even playing it back, Lacy then reached down and deleted it. It took three taps: stop, delete, back to the beginning. He played the riff again, subtly differently. Deleted it again. For the next half hour, that’s all Lacy did: play, tap-tap-tap, play again. He experimented wildly for a while, then settled on a loose structure and began subtly tweaking it. Eventually satisfied with that bit, he plugged in his Fender bass and started improvising a bassline. A few hours later, he began laying vocals, a breathy, wordless melody he sang directly into the iPhone’s microphone. He didn’t know quite what he was making, but he was feeling it.
All night, Lacy goofed around. He found a sword in the studio, and made up a shockingly catchy song called “Sword in the Studio” that’s still rattling around in my brain.
This really resonated with me, a terrific read. Steve Lacy sounds like a bunch of people I know, kicking around in GarageBand, laying down a base track, then layering in guitar, vocals, what have you. But while most of this work ends up in a far corner of some hard drive or SoundCloud, Lacy’s efforts got him nominated for a Grammy and a bunch of high profile gigs.
And much of it done on an iPhone. Amazing.
Daniel Pasco, renegade polymath:
I use a 5k iMac for work and am interested in VR production and gaming. Some friends told me to build a dedicated Windows box and others suggested building a Hackintosh, but I was sure there was a better way to get what I wanted.
So I turned a 2009 Mac Pro I picked up off of Ebay for $1300 into a superb professional workstation, gaming, and VR platform, simply by adding an SSD drive and a new video card.
This is a pretty cool idea. Read Dan’s post to see how the machine stacks up as a VR platform (spoiler: very, very well).
But read on, as Dan shifts gears, focusing on the Apple’s coming Mac Pro:
I realized that the corner that Apple has painted us into is just another “sweet solution” (similar to Jobs proposal that we develop web apps for iPhone instead of native apps).
I can do the work that Apple feels is appropriate with a 5k iMac, but the massive pile of external disks and their power supplies stacked up behind it speaks to the adaptions I’ve quietly had to make in order to get it to meet my basic needs.
Apple’s agenda has been to stay focused on its cash cow: the iPhone. As a result it has quietly mothballed some amazing products and technologies along the way, seriously impaired the economics of commercial software sales, and neglected macOS in their efforts to homogenize it with iOS.
Who is this guy? Daniel Pasco is the CEO of Black Pixel, a top development shop. So in my book, he’s earned his opinions.
Mark Gurman and Min Jeong Lee, Bloomberg:
Apple is preparing three iPhones for launch as soon as this fall, including upgraded versions of the current two iPhone models and a new top-of-the-line handset with an overhauled look, according to people familiar with the matter. For the redesigned phone, Apple is testing a new type of screen, curved glass and stainless steel materials, and more advanced cameras, the people said. Those anxiously awaiting the redesigned iPhone, however, may have to wait because supply constraints could mean the device isn’t readily available until one or two months after the typical fall introduction.
Lots of fascinating details here, all provided by people familiar with the matter.
I’ve become a fan of Brian Sutich’s new guitar blog, Chasing Sound. In this post, Brian takes a look at some of the top guitar-related iOS apps.
Glenn Fleishman pulled together this reasonably comprehensive look at options for capturing over the air TV signals and recording them on your Mac. If you’ve thought about cutting the cable cord, this is for you.
Don’t do this. But it is an interesting read. But don’t do it. And go back up your Mac.
Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note:
When I was selected to run Apple France more than three decades ago, I had a disdainfully Parisien attitude to customer service. You inserted an interface card backwards and your Apple ][ no longer boots? Well of course it doesn’t…you did it wrong.
After a few combative customer service encounters, I experienced an epiphany: No matter how “wrong” they may be, we’re a prosperous business, we can afford to take care of these situations, but we can’t afford to let unhappy, affronted customers damage our reputation.
The flip side of this Parisien approach?
Whenever a call was escalated to my office, I would immediately offer to buy back the customer’s machine. The offer was always emphatically declined, so we moved on to arrangements for shipment or perhaps a personal appointment at our service shop. Our business concluded, I would ask if the happy caller had children: “Yes…but why?” “For the t-shirts, of course, a small thank-you for bringing your problem to our attention…what sizes would you like?”
Carrots instead of sticks, then bigger carrots. Great read from Jean-Louis. He knows of what he speaks.
Thoughtful post from Marco Arment on the current Mac Pro design, with collected thoughts on where Apple should go with the model currently in the works.
This particular paragraph captured my feelings about the 2013 Mac Pro design:
While minimalism is one aspect of one view of good design, it’s often overused, underconsidered, and misunderstood, resulting in products with surface-level appeal that don’t actually work very well because they were optimized for visual design and minimalism rather than overall real-world usefulness.
And from the wrapup:
There is no single design, no single set of trade-offs, that addresses a large set of pro users: they all want different things, and the only way to serve that with one product line is to have it be extremely versatile and offer a wide variety of configuration options. You can’t do that with a minimalist industrial-design indulgence like the 2013 Mac Pro.
Good read.
Michael Potuck, 9to5Mac:
There are several reasons it may be helpful to track your cellular data usage. You might not have an unlimited cellular data plan right now and may be wondering if you should switch to one, you may be trying to cut down on overage fees, or you might want to discover if you could reduce your current plan and save some money.
You also might be having issues with applications that are using more cellular data in the background than expected. Let’s take a look at a few different ways to track and manage your cellular usage.
Take a few minutes to scan through the post, get a sense of what’s covered. Then pass this along to the folks you support to show them how to keep track of their data usage.
Wow. Take a moment to click through and check out the pictures. This is some beautiful work.
Thoughts on Apple’s new Clips app, with a short sample I pulled together.
Dan Moren, writing for Macworld, starts with this Phil Schiller comment:
“The Mac mini remains a product in our lineup. Nothing more to say about it today,” Phil Schiller told reporters, according to John Gruber.
and then digs into the past and potential future of the Mac mini. Good read.
Jeff Benjamin, writing for 9to5Mac:
I’m currently in the process of building a new Hackintosh rig for 2017, so imagine how surprised and happy I was to hear that Nvidia is working on beta drivers for its GPUs with the latest Pascal architecture. Up until today, I had just settled on being relegated to a Radeon RX 480, or a Maxwell-era Nvidia card.
And:
With today’s announcement, the Hackintosh just got exponentially more appealing. Nvidia’s announcement is positive for a variety of reasons: there’s the prospect of using an eGPU setup with a MacBook Pro, along with future prospects of Nvidia cards powering future Mac Pro hardware.
As I’ve mentioned before, if you do decide to build a Hackintosh, start here.
A solid list. Got more of these? Leave them in the comments.
From long time macOS and iOS developer Panic (the folks who produced the excellent Firewatch game, mentioned yesterday):
If you remember, 2016 was the year we killed Status Board, our very nice data visualization app. Now, a lot of it was our fault. But it was another blow to our heavy investment in pro-level iOS apps a couple years ago, a decision we’re still feeling the ramifications of today as we revert back to a deep focus on macOS. Trying to do macOS quality work on iOS cost us a lot of time for sadly not much payoff. We love iOS, we love our iPhones, and we love our iPads. But we remain convinced that it’s not — yet? — possible to make a living selling pro software on those platforms. Which is a real bummer!
The macOS marketplace is so much smaller than that for iOS, it’s much easier to stand out in the crowd, get the word out on excellent work. In addition, the smaller market allows for higher prices, so you can break even selling fewer copies.
Reuters:
The U.S. technology giant “bricked” – or disabled with a software update – hundreds of smartphones and tablet devices, and then refused to unlock them on the grounds that customers had had the devices serviced by non-Apple repairers, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said in a court filing.
And:
The regulator said that between September 2014 and February 2016, Apple customers who downloaded software updates then connected their devices to their computers received a message saying the device “could not be restored and the device had stopped functioning”.
Customers then asked Apple to fix their devices, only to be told by the company that “no Apple entity … was required to, or would, provide a remedy” for free, the documents added.
From the ACCC’s official post on the matter:
The ACCC alleges Apple represented to consumers with faulty products that they were not entitled to a free remedy if their Apple device had previously been repaired by third party, “unauthorised repairers”. However, having a component of the Apple device serviced, repaired, or replaced by someone other than Apple cannot, by itself, extinguish the consumer’s right to a remedy for non-compliance with the consumer guarantees.
“Consumer guarantee rights under the Australian Consumer Law exist independently of any manufacturer’s warranty and are not extinguished simply because a consumer has goods repaired by a third party,“ ACCC Chairman Rod Sims said.
Tricky issue. Do I have the right to repair my own goods, or have them repaired by a third party of my choosing? If I do go the third party route, should Apple be able to void my warranty? Did Apple intentionally brick the iPhones in question? Core questions.
While you chew on that, consider the related controversy concerning John Deere’s tractor repair policies.
And, more recently, the account of the WiFi garage-door-opener seller who bricked a customer’s garage door after a bad review.
Interesting stuff. Welcome to the future.
Firewatch is an excellent game. If you’ve never played it, consider carving out some time. It’s US$19.99 and available on Xbox One, PS4, and on Mac/Linux/PC via Steam. Here’s a link to the website.
If you are familiar to the game, you’ll appreciate this tweet from Cabel Sasser, co-founder of Panic, the folks who published Firewatch, upon encountering an iOS game called New Firewatch:
https://www.twitter.com/undefined/status/849319016418209793
Watch the video. This sort of thing is like weeds in a garden. If there’s no attempt to get rid of them, they overtake and destroy the garden.
I dug into Christoph Kabisch’s new iBook with zero expectations. A look back at the original iPhone? How good could this be?
As it turns out, the book was a fascinating read with lots of detail, both in word and images. I owned the original iPhone, was there when it was announced and rolled out. I thought I remembered the details, but this book made it clear how much slipped out of my memory.
When you read it, be sure to tap on each image. Some move to a larger frame, others are 3D models that rotate.
The book is only 99 cents. Here’s a link. Worth it for the pictures alone. A terrific journey back in time.
UPDATE: Don’t miss the iPhone OS simulator on page 40. Incredible.
Patently Apple:
In the future, if Siri doesn’t recognize the voice of the owner of the device, accessing Siri or the computer associated with it will be impossible.
And:
Today a user will say “hey Siri” and Siri will respond. In the future, the command to call up Siri may be customized to your voice. For instance, a user sets up Siri to recognize the phrase “Hey there, Boss.” The customized phrase and the voice must match what’s in Siri’s database before the digital assistant will respond. The customized phrase is technically referred to in Apple’s patent filings as a “Lexical Trigger.”
And:
In the future, in order to access Siri, a person will have to know a passcode, use a fingerprint or be recognized by the system via face recognition. Unless your iDevice recognizes you on multiple security levels, Siri will remain unresponsive to commands or requests.
As long as I can turn this off via a setting, this seems like a natural evolution.
Wall Street Journal:
The National Football League has reached a deal to stream 10 Thursday night games with Amazon.com Inc., the online retailer that is aggressively trying to position itself as a premier source of entertainment content.
The one-year agreement is valued at around $50 million, according to people familiar with the matter. That price tag represents a fivefold increase over the NFL’s agreement with Twitter Inc. for the same number of games last season.
To me, this deal makes much more sense than last year’s Twitter deal. The Twitter deal seemed like dipping a toe in the waters, an experiment with no real end goal. With Amazon, the deal seems more practical, a move to drive traffic, to increase Amazon Prime signups. Note that the games will still be available on TV via CBS and NBC.
Not sure this kind of move would ever make sense for Apple, unless buying an Apple TV was the only way you could watch Thursday Night Football.
There’s a new Mac Pro coming, eventually, but there’s an interesting story that unfolds. Pop over to the main Loop post for all the details. My 2 cents? Well worth it.
Peter Kafka, Recode:
Apple isn’t done trying to sell you pay TV.
Here’s Apple’s latest proposal: It wants to sell consumers a premium TV bundle, which combines HBO, Showtime and Starz.
Apple already sells each of those channels individually. But it has approached the three networks about rolling them up into a single package, as conventional pay TV operators sometimes do.
No value in a bundle unless it is cheaper than the sum of its parts. And that’s been a tough thing for Apple to achieve, at least so far.
Jean-Louis Gassée offers a state of the union on the iPad past and near future, and the potential for the iPad to take more business from the Mac and PC. Very interesting read.
Imagination Technologies:
Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE: IMG, “Imagination”, “the Group”) a leading multimedia, processor and communications technology company, has been notified by Apple Inc. (“Apple”), its largest customer, that Apple is of a view that it will no longer use the Group’s intellectual property in its new products in 15 months to two years time, and as such will not be eligible for royalty payments under the current license and royalty agreement.
That is a major blow to the company. Their stock dropped about 60% on the news, shaving hundreds of millions off the market value in just one day.
But Imagination will not go quietly:
Apple has used Imagination’s technology and intellectual property for many years. It has formed the basis of Graphics Processor Units (“GPUs”) in Apple’s phones, tablets, iPods, TVs and watches. Apple has asserted that it has been working on a separate, independent graphics design in order to control its products and will be reducing its future reliance on Imagination’s technology.
Apple has not presented any evidence to substantiate its assertion that it will no longer require Imagination’s technology, without violating Imagination’s patents, intellectual property and confidential information. This evidence has been requested by Imagination but Apple has declined to provide it.
Seems clear that Apple is going its own way, that this is more of a license fee negotiation to avoid a complex and costly lawsuit. Though a custom GPU is no trivial task, Apple owns enough chip design experience and can hire any additional GPU-specific expertise they need to make this work.
Note that Apple owns 8% of Imagination and was reportedly in talks to buy the entire company in March 2016 but the talks are said to have ended without an offer. This does smell a bit like a hardball negotiating tactic, with Imagination going public they way they did. Apple’s long advance notification could be the first step in the dance to lower royalties.
Legal issues aside, if Apple and Imagination do part ways, this seems a positive move for Apple, a chance to control even more of the stack, reduce their fabrication costs, and add more graphics power across the product line.
[VIDEO] Three new iPad Pro ads, hitting themes that should resonate with students. The titles are “Light and powerful”, “All day battery”, and “All your school stuff”. Videos embedded in the main Loop post.
Samsung rolled out their latest and greatest smartphone yesterday, the Galaxy S8. Interesting phone, includes a new digital assistant named Bixby, a fingerprint scanner/encrypted facial recognition, and a desktop dock (a la Microsoft’s Continuum).
What does this have to do with the Mac? Click through to the main Loop post and follow along, see if you agree.