Marco Arment supplements his wired headphone review with this for Bluetooth headphones:

My criteria for this review is what someone seeking good all-around headphones today probably wants:

• Bluetooth
• Closed-back for isolation, ideally with active noise cancellation (ANC)
• Portable enough to fit in a small bag; suitable for listening at a desk, bringing on an airplane, and wearing outside
• Definitely under $500, and ideally under $300

Bookmark this, pass it along.

I found the whole article fascinating, but this part in particular grabbed my attention:

Macrae and Curran’s arcade route – a series of machines they owned and operated both for their own profit and for the benefit of students – quickly expanded to three dorms, but they soon had trouble with declining revenues as people began to master the games. As arcade operators themselves, they had a direct financial stake in making the games more interesting. So they did what any clever MIT student would do in that situation: confront the problem with mathematical precision.

And:

At this point in the video game world there were these kits called speed-up kits or enhancement kits that were being sold directly to arcade owners. The first really successful one was for Asteroids because people learned how to beat Asteroids, and they could play forever on a quarter. So somebody game up with a little circuit that you could clip on, and wow, it made the game much more difficult.

I had no idea that was a thing. Amazing little nugget of video arcade history.

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.

The Wirecutter:

Everyone can benefit from an increase to their privacy and security, and reliable services are available for less than $4 per month. Setup is automated, too—you need only install a small application. To track down the best advice about what a VPN can and can’t do for everyday people, we rounded up research and advice from around the Web, and we spoke with Rich Mogull, the CEO of security consultancy Securosis.

Mogull is my favorite guy to talk to about Mac security issues. With all the talk about ISPs (potentially) selling your browsing data, there’s been a lot of talk of VPNs and what they can (and can’t) do for you.

Ars Technica:

Thanks to the success of Guardians of the Galaxy, blockbuster sci-fi adventures can be trippy again.

That’s what you’ll see in this first full-length trailer for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, the tale of Valerian and Laureline, two spacio-temporal agents hired to guard the universe’s only intergalactic library in the insanely colorful cosmopolis Alpha. The film is directed by The Fifth Element mastermind Luc Besson, whose most recent movie was the transhumanist hit Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson. As for Valerian’s plot, there’s some kind of vague menace threatening not just the future of knowledge, but all of space-time.

The story looks fun, but the backstory is downright fascinating.

I loved The Fifth Element for its visuals and even enjoyed the utter goofiness of the movie. And I’ve been a fan of Besson since I saw “Léon: The Professional” so I’m really looking forward to this movie.

Time:

NASA made photography a high priority during the Apollo missions, redesigning cameras that could operate in the punishing environment of space and inventing ultra-thin film that would allow a single roll to contain 200 exposures. Of the thousands of pictures taken, only a comparative few were chosen for the public to see. They were the best of the images, no surprise, and that made sense. But their very perfection sometimes made them seem almost sterile. It was the outtakes—the astronaut in the clumsy pose, the litter left on the lunar surface, the too-bright sun flaring off the lens—that revealed the missions to be the often unglamorous, often improvisational camping trips they were.

Now, a team of four European designers have chosen 225 of the least seen—and in some cases least polished—of the Apollo trove and released them in a dazzling book titled “Apollo VII – XVII.” The wonderfully imperfect collection provides an entirely new perspective on the flights we thought we knew.

I love these photos. Make sure you watch the associated video as well.

Which?:

When it comes to laptops, battery life can be a key buying decision. But Which? has discovered that the battery life claimed by laptop manufacturers rarely lives up to reality, with our tests finding it often falls drastically short. Which? testing has shown that almost all laptop manufacturers overstate their battery claims. In some cases, the battery life estimates were double what we achieved in our lab testing.

It’s not all bad news, however – our tests found that with Apple MacBooks, you could meet or even exceed the claimed battery life, according to Apple.

Good news for Apple but shameful that other manufacturers’ stated claims fall so far short.

Backchannel:

Over the past several years, the conventional wisdom has been that cruising the net would yield the best prices in the travel, hotel, and car rental spaces. There’s been a tidal shift in the travel industry, to a point where most of us use aggregators to book our trips.

Over time, however, the convention has flipped. And as the business models that on which these aggregators rely are getting tighter, the deals are getting worse. How can you be certain you’re getting the lowest quote? The short answer is, you can’t.

I haven’t had to travel for a while but, when I did, I used aggregator sites heavily. But I always checked with the individual airline before I made the sale just in case. Looks like that’s even more true now.

Mic:

April 1 is widely known as April Fool’s Day, the day when friends prank each other and companies scramble to show off just how “fun” they can be.

But the foolish celebrations have a longer history than you’d expect. According to the Museum of Hoaxes, clear references to the holiday date back to at least the 1500s, when Flemish writer Eduard De Dene published a poem in 1561 about a nobleman who plays an April 1 prank on his servant.

And the references could date back even earlier. A line in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale by Chaucer referencing “Syn March began thritty dayes and two” — which could refer to the 32nd day of March, i.e. April 1 — has some speculating that the passage, written in 1392, could be the first reference to April Fool’s Day.

In the days before widespread internet, April Fools Day was kind of fun. Granted, I was much younger then. But now, it’s just tedious, lame, and unfunny.

If there is a better way to end of the week than these pictures, I don’t know what it is.

Daniel Jalkut has been developing the app for ten years now—it’s quite an accomplishment. Every post I do publish on The Loop is done in MarsEdit.

Congrats, Daniel.

Thanks to Daylite for sponsoring The Loop this week.

Still digging through emails and passing around spreadsheets & notes? There’s a better way to manage leads & projects – with Daylite.

Daylite streamlines your lead management & project management process so you can win more business & get more done.

Integrate directly with Apple Mail to organize emails for clients, projects, and sales opportunities. Track your sales pipeline and set reminders when to follow up. Share projects, schedules, and tasks with others on your team – from your Mac or iPhone/iPad.

Whether you’re a sales team, real estate firm, or lawyer, Daylite can help you win more business and get more done.

Try Daylite free for 30 days!

Within days of Congress repealing online privacy protections, Verizon has announced new plans to install software on customers’ devices to track what apps customers have downloaded. With this spyware, Verizon will be able to sell ads to you across the Internet based on things like which bank you use and whether you’ve downloaded a fertility app.

Sigh.

I love this! Dave Mark sent it to me on Twitter this morning and I just sat there laughing.

Jeff Butts and Dave Hamilton did some tests on the new Apple File System (APFS) and posted the results. There’s certainly a lot to like, but as with most low-level systems there will be plenty of debate.

Bloomberg:

ESPN has lost more than 12 million subscribers since 2011, according to Nielsen, and the viewership erosion seems to be accelerating. Last fall, ESPN lost 621,000 subscribers in a single month, the most in the company’s history.

In some respects, the challenges facing ESPN are the same that confront every other media company: Young people simply aren’t consuming cable TV, newspapers, or magazines in the numbers they once did, and digital outlets still aren’t lucrative enough to make up the deficit.

But while most of ESPN’s TV peers have courted cord cutters—CBS and Turner Broadcasting, for instance, are allowing anyone to watch some of their March Madness games online for free—ESPN’s view cuts against the conventional wisdom in new media.

It was always assumed sports would be immune from cord cutters because there was no other way to get sports live. The pundits ignored the fact people simply aren’t watching live sports as much.

FreeCodeCamp:

How can we generate a uniform sequence of random numbers? The randomness so beautifully and abundantly generated by nature has not always been easy to extract and quantify. The oldest known dice (4-sided) were discovered in a 24th century B.C. tomb in the Middle East. More recently, around 1100 B.C. in China, turtle shells were heated with a poker until they cracked at random, and a fortune teller would interpret the cracks. Centuries after that, I Ching hexagrams for fortunetelling were generated with 49 yarrow stalks laid out on a table and divided several times, with results similar to performing coin tosses.

But by the mid-1940s, the modern world demanded a lot more random numbers than dice or yarrow stalks could offer.

This is another of those articles I love – ones that turn out a lot more interesting than they have a right to be.

If you have even the slightest interest in space and rocketry, take a minute to watch the latest SpaceX launch. This is the first time a previously launched rocket has been reused. This will change the equation, make it much cheaper to launch a satellite. Amazing accomplishment.

You can watch the launch here.

If you just want the launch itself, jump to about 18:45 in. The landing of stage 1 back on Of Course I Still Love You (the drone ship) is a little trickier, as the video feed was cut off due to a line of sight issue, but jump to about 27:30 in to get the crew reaction. First there’s a groan of disappointment as the folks watching find out the video cut out, but then…well, watch for yourself.

I absolutely love what SpaceX has accomplished here. They have changed the future of space exploration.

This is just hilarious. Much respect, Wendy’s.

Experience the peerless Strat style of Slowhand himself with the Eric Clapton Stratocaster, one of our most acclaimed and enduring artist signature models. With classic design and special features that give it exceptional tonal versatility and effortless feel worthy of one of the world’s greatest names in rock and blues, it puts pure Clapton Stratocaster tone and feel straight into your hands.

What a beautiful guitar.

Nearly a year ago, Twitter announced it would begin distancing itself from the requirement that all tweets could only contain 140 characters by no longer counting some things – like media attachments or @ replies towards the character count. However, it didn’t begin testing the change with @ replies until last fall. Today, Twitter says this change to replies is rolling out to all users across the web, iOS and Android.

Great news.

The built-in macOS app switcher is great if all you use are one-window applications. But you probably have many windows open in many apps, possibly with many tabs, and navigating them all is a pain. Enter Witch, with which you can switch everything.

These guys do a great job.

Wired:

I just Googled “alarm dust,” “alibi sweatshirt,” and “sleuth intelligence.” Then I shopped for industrial dehydrators, scanned a Pinterest page for concrete decks, and read something about nuclear war.

The thing is, I’m not in the market for a new dehydrator. Concrete decks aren’t really my style, and I still have no idea what “alarm dust” is. I didn’t visit any of these web sites of my own volition—a website called Internet Noise did, all to obscure my real browsing habits in a fog of fake search history.

This won’t actually “protect your privacy” but the idea is interesting – make your search history useless to advertisers. And, if you’re bored, watching the site do its searches is weirdly fun.