Apparently the Space Gray HomePod is in short supply in the U.S. Dave and I talk about that before moving on to a Safari message that people sometimes get alerting of them of tabs using significant memory. Dave also explains how a piece of digital art sold for $69 million.
Uber for Business: Right now, Uber for Business is offering companies a $50 voucher credit when you spend your first $200 with vouchers. Go to Uber.com/dalrymple to learn more.
Until October, the most Mike Winkelmann — the digital artist known as Beeple — had ever sold a print for was $100.
Today, an NFT of his work sold for $69 million at Christie’s. The sale positions him “among the top three most valuable living artists,” according to the auction house.
The record-smashing NFT sale comes after months of increasingly valuable auctions. In October, Winkelmann sold his first series of NFTs, with a pair going for $66,666.66 each. In December, he sold a series of works for $3.5 million total. And last month, one of the NFTs that originally sold for $66,666.66 was resold for $6.6 million.
The full-size Space Gray HomePod is currently unavailable from Apple in the United States for purchase and delivery, as first spotted by French site Consomac.
Yup. Just checked. Though there is some inventory available in my local Apple Store, I can’t order a space gray HomePod for delivery from Apple.
I can order a white HomePod, and apparently Apple is still shipping space gray outside the US.
What can this mean? Much ado about nothing? The language on Apple’s site says “Currently unavailable”. And the iMac Pro, which MacRumors reported as officially as end-of-lifed, is still available to order.
Normally wouldn’t care about stuff like this, but there’s rumored to be an Apple Event in our near future, so my antennae are up.
This happens to me a lot, on Intel and M1 Macs. And to be fair, this is Safari looking out for me, stopping a page from spinning into infinity, potentially wreaking memory havoc.
Can’t help but wonder if Safari might offer a preference here to limit that behavior, at least on the frontmost tab, a switch that says, if I’m using the tab, and there’s still enough memory left to keep running, let me know the problem, perhaps with a “reload” button in the interface, but in a non-modal way, so I can keep that page humming if I so choose.
Also, I’d wager the culprit here is more often than not the page creator or a plugin (think advertising), not a flaw in Safari.
In the charts below, you’ll see four computers listed: M1 Mac mini (Apple Silicon), M1 Mac mini (Rosetta 2), 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Dell XPS 17. The idea was to show how x86 Photoshop runs on Intel hardware (13-inch MBP and XPS 17), via Rosetta 2 emulation on the M1 Mac mini, and then compare those three scores against the Apple Silicon-optimized version running on the same Mac mini.
Perfect set to really get a sense of real world Photoshop performance, at least with a high demand test like Photomerge.
Follow the headline link, scroll down to the charts. As you might expect, the M1 loses when it comes to raw GPU performance (it’ll be interesting to see where Apple is going with GPU on the next generation of Apple Silicon, but no way for the M1 to compete with an external dedicated GPU, at least not yet).
But GPU aside:
None of the computers we’ve reviewed, not even the most expensive 16-inch MacBook Pro you can buy or the Razer Blade Studio Edition, has ever broken the 100 mark on the PugetBench Photo Merge test. Running optimized Photoshop, the M1 Mac mini hit 130+ in run after run after run.
And:
To see the scores jump this much, when Rosetta 2 was already doing such a great job with the x86 version of Photoshop, was frankly mind-blowing.
The headline to the linked post is “Corporations That Use The Most Solar Power”. While that might be accurate, I think the kudos shouldn’t be about sheer usage, but rather about Apple’s success at shifting to environmentally sustainable operations.
Apple might use more solar power than any other company, but it’s about their commitment to powering their operations through solar, creating a model for other companies to follow.
Apple has given a straight-to-series order for “Lady in the Lake,” a new limited series directed and co-written by Alma Har’el that will co-star Academy Award winners Natalie Portman and Lupita Nyong’o.
And:
“Lady in the Lake” is an adaptation of Laura Lippman’s New York Times best-selling novel of the same name. The limited series takes place in ’60s Baltimore, where an unsolved murder pushes housewife and mother Maddie Schwartz (Portman) to reinvent her life as an investigative journalist and sets her on a collision course with Cleo Sherwood (Nyong’o), a hard-working woman juggling motherhood, many jobs and a passionate commitment to advancing Baltimore’s Black progressive agenda.
Natalie Portman won the Oscar for Best Actress for Black Swan. And is the rare actor who crossed streams from Star Wars (Queen Amidala) to Marvel (Jane Foster).
Lupita Nyong’o won the Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, but also grabbed the Star Wars / Marvel crossover achievement, doing motion capture as Maz Kanata in the Star Wars sequel trilogy and as Nakia in Black Panther. But one of my favorite Lupita Nyong’o roles was the lead in Jordan Peele’s Us.
Huge win for Apple here. Can’t wait to see how this series turns out.
New displays rolling out to Apple Stores across the world highlight the Apple Music catalog and give AirPods Max a true home. You can preview the display yourself with an interactive augmented reality model.
Follow the headline link, scroll down to the “Launch The AR Experience” button, give it a tap. Now double-tap the downloaded file to launch the .usdz file and walk around to find a proper landing spot (you’ll need some space for the display). You can also experience this on your Mac, especially if you have Xcode installed.
I love the effort Apple puts into these AR tidbits. Apple’s teams are learning how to bring AR to life, we’re learning how to work with AR.
Having once upended the market with its AirPods, Apple Inc. looks likely to again change the course of the $35 billion advanced headphones arena with its $549 AirPods Max and inflict pain on incumbents from Bose Corp. to Bang & Olufsen A/S.
And:
Between Apple’s new over-the-ear play at the high end and aggressively priced incursions from below, firms like Sennheiser are struggling to compete with the wireless expertise, app ecosystems and global reach of phone makers.
Apple is great at disruption. They’ve upended the mechanical watch, traditional camera, and now headphone marketplaces. Cars next?
From the linked post, the video embedded below shows the dock “poof” at work. Follow the headline link to Gruber’s post about this. And don’t miss this video interview with Jim Reekes with anecdotes of iconic Mac sounds.
If you don’t already know/follow him, Matthew Cassinelli was part of the original Workflow app that Apple purchased and turned into Siri Shortcuts. Since then, he’s gone independent and shares all sorts of wonderful Shortcuts content.
Matthew’s newly revamped site is definitely worth a few minutes of perusal time, just to get a sense of what’s there. A great resource.
Apple Podcasts will no longer use the word “subscribe” in a few weeks. Listeners will be invited to “follow” their favourite podcasts instead. The new wording will be in iOS 14.5, which should be released later this month (and is available in beta). We expect Apple to communicate further with creators, and listeners, when this version of iOS is released.
And:
Tom Webster from Edison Research says 47% of people who don’t currently listen to podcasts think that ‘subscribing’ to a podcast will cost money, describing it as a stone in the shoe of podcasting’s growth run.
In an internal AppleCare email this week, obtained by MacRumors, Apple said the new serial number format will consist of a randomized alphanumeric string of 8-14 characters that will no longer include manufacturing information or a configuration code. Apple said the serial number format transition is scheduled for “early 2021,” and confirmed that IMEI numbers will not be affected by this change.
Just as predictable file names make hacking and discovery easier on a web site (once you know the name and path of an existing file, you can guess others based on the scheme), randomized serial numbers make guessing/faking a serial number that much harder.
In 2019, an article in The Washington Post by Geoffrey Fowler described the author’s shock when he discovered just how many of his iPhone apps were collecting and uploading information about his usage while he slept.
And:
As Fowler’s article demonstrated, iPhone users are not immune to this. Since his article was published, Apple has made some laudable changes to its privacy policies. But it’s still a good idea to take charge of your own data. There are some simple ways to minimize the amount of tracking that app vendors can do and the amount of data they can access.
The whole article is worth scanning, just to get a sense of all the options.
But note that things are changing, and will continue to change. For example, there’s a new setting in the iOS 14.5 beta at Settings > Safari > PRIVACY & SECURITY called Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement, which is enabled by default.
With the increasing number of services around who can provide you with lossless music, both streamed and downloaded, it is worth asking: do you need it? In this edition of our online ABX tests, you can try your ear (and your equipment) at distinguishing Spotify’s streaming high quality from lossless audio.
I took the test, could not tell the difference. But I would argue that the choice of music is not quite right for this sort of test. For me, lossless becomes more apparent when the mix is not crowded, when the focus is on an individual instrument or sound, like a breathless whisper or a fingernail scraping on a guitar string.
That said, follow the headline link, give the test a try yourself. The idea is, there are three versions of a song to choose from. Click A, B, or X to switch between each version. Either A or B matches X. Once you think you know, make your choice, move on to the next song.
Apple plans to release its long-rumored mixed reality headset “in mid-2022,” followed by augmented reality glasses by 2025, well-regarded analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said today in a research note with TF International Securities, obtained by MacRumors.
And:
“We predict that Apple’s MR/AR product roadmap includes three phases: helmet type by 2022, glasses type by 2025, and contact lens type by 2030–2040,” wrote Kuo. “We foresee that the helmet product will provide AR and VR experiences, while glasses and contact lens types of products are more likely to focus on AR applications.”
Mixed reality is unique in that the term usually refers to artificial products that interact with users in the real world. Augmented virtuality (AV) is a subcategory of mixed reality that refers to the merging of real-world objects into virtual worlds.
I think more about augmented reality (look at a building, see an artificial address imposed on it) versus virtual reality (the building, along with all you see, is artificially created).
Very much looking forward to taking these products for a spin, assuming they ship.
MKBHD shares a long form (really long form, 48 minutes worth) deep dive into the iPhone 12 Pro.
The video is interesting all the way through, but even if you are not in the mood for iPhone coverage, or long, long videos, spend the time to watch the first few minutes. Fascinating thoughts on how much goes in to making all those short videos short, and living with Apple embargoes.
Joe Rossignol, who scooped this, reporting for MacRumors:
Apple on late Friday evening added a “while supplies last” notice to its iMac Pro product page worldwide, and removed all upgrade options for the computer, leaving only the standard configuration available to order for now.
And:
We’ve since confirmed with Apple that when supplies run out, the iMac Pro will no longer be available whatsoever.
As I tweeted when I first read the news, the M1 is a hard reset on the Mac. The leap in performance from Intel to the M1 is just so great, with a massive improvement in battery life as well, the end-of-life of every Intel Mac is writing on the wall.
And if you have thoughts of selling your Intel based Mac, expect less, as a replacement that does more (at least for most models) is relatively inexpensive.
Fatemeh Ghodsi was skeptical at first when she got a text from someone saying they found her phone nearly six months after she lost it in Harrison Lake.
Ghodsi, who lives in Vancouver, was confused and thought one of her friends might be playing a prank on her. But she was soon convinced and made the trip to Chilliwack to collect the phone, which amazingly still works.
Clayton Helkenberg and his wife Heather found the lost iPhone 11 during a sweep of the lake bottom under the water park at Harrison Lake — part of a hobby that includes the odd treasure find, but mostly just lots of garbage clean up.
Amazing that a previous generation iPhone could live under water for 6 months and still work perfectly. That’s a pretty solid waterproof test.
Here is the straight news headline: Square, the financial services company run by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, is buying Tidal, the streaming music service founded by Jay-Z.
And here is the question you, a normal person, may have about this deal: WTF?
I had that exact reaction. WTF?
Kafaka follows with some speculation that really clicked for me:
It doesn’t take much imagination to come up with Square + Tidal rollouts in the future: A Square-enabled way for artists to sell T-shirts on tour, or even when they’re not on tour, for instance.
Yeah, I do see the fit there, but seems like there’s got to be more oomph there.
More intriguingly, given Dorsey’s love of All Things Blockchain, and the current mania over NFTs, it won’t be surprising to see Square + Tidal work on their own NFT scheme.
And:
So you can picture the Jay-Zs of the world selling songs, or snippets of songs, or the digital version of a lyric scribbled on a napkin, as NFTs, in deals that let Square and the artist get part of the deal.
Boom. This makes so much sense. Are NFT’s a way for digital artists to better capitalize on their work? A backroom bubble, cooked up by billionaires to create new revenue streams? Why can’t it be both?
The Apple TV+ comedy sensation “Ted Lasso” triumphed at the 2021 Critics Choice Awards, winning the coveted Best Comedy Series, Best Actor in a Comedy Series for Jason Sudeikis, and Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for Hannah Waddingham, sweeping all categories in which the widely acclaimed series was nominated.
After Dave takes a few minutes to talk about his stupid hockey team, we dive into the price differences of the Apple TV compared to its competitors, as well as the Apple remote. We also look at Google’s announced touting changes in its overall privacy policies.
This is a fair amount of work, but I think it’s an excellent learning exercise and you’ll end up with some Terminal experience, an install of Homebrew (a package manager that comes up a lot if you want to install open source stuff), and some info on the health of your Mac’s SSD.
The third-generation Apple TV streaming media box continues to lose access to its limited collection of apps, and there’s no replacement product from Apple in the sub $100 part of the market.
Apple released the first 1080p Apple TV set-top box for $99 many, many, many moons ago in 2012. Three years later, Apple dropped the cost to the nice price of $69 before discontinuing it a year and a half later.
The lowest end 4K Apple TV sells for $179. Some other Apple TV+ friendly options:
And there are others. Is Apple TV the best privacy option? Sure. But the leap from $40-$50 all the way up to Apple’s $179 cost of entry is a big one. More and more, the Apple TV box feels like a big markup without big benefits.
Streaming TV hardware is being commoditized. Hoping Apple has something stylish and splashy up its sleeves.
Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry.
The Alphabet Inc. company said Wednesday that it plans next year to stop using or investing in tracking technologies that uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the internet.
The decision, coming from the world’s biggest digital advertising company, could help push the industry away from the use of such individualized tracking, which has come under increasing criticism from privacy advocates and faces scrutiny from regulators.
So much to unpack here. Start with the obvious: This is a good thing.
Google accounted for 52% of last year’s global digital ad spending of $292 billion, according to Jounce Media, a digital ad consultancy.
That 52% is a massive number. Imagine the impact on journalism if you could remove Google and Facebook from the advertising equation. Advertising dollars wouldn’t go away, they would flow to many more places. And journalism would flourish.
“If digital advertising doesn’t evolve to address the growing concerns people have about their privacy and how their personal identity is being used, we risk the future of the free and open web,” David Temkin, the Google product manager leading the change, said in a blog post Wednesday.
Um. Not sure Google is leading the privacy charge there. Just a guess, but Apple’s move to ensure transparency might have something to do with this.
Still, glad to see this. Question is, is this very public move by Google because they have found another path to make sure their ownership of the ad space is secure?
Apple TV+ today announced an expansion of its sweeping international slate with a series order for “Dr. Brain,” a new sci-fi thriller based on the widely popular Korean webtoon that will be written and directed by visionary filmmaker Kim Jee-Woon (“A Tale of Two Sisters,” “I Saw the Devil”), and star SAG Award-winner Lee Sun-Kyun (“Parasite”). The series marks the first Korean-language project for Apple TV+.
And:
“Dr. Brain” is an emotional journey that follows a brain scientist who is obsessive about figuring out new technologies to access the consciousness and memories of the brain. His life goes sideways when his family falls victim to a mysterious accident, and he uses his skills to access memories from his wife’s brain to piece together the mystery of what actually happened to his family and why.
On my list. Can’t wait. I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with Apple’s dubbing and subtitling. A good dub makes all the difference if the movie is in a language I don’t speak.
