From Musically’s live blog of Spotify’s Stream On event:

Hellman talks about ‘Discovery Mode’ – the feature where artists or labels can pay to have songs surfaced in Spotify’s radio and autoplay features, in exchange for a lower royalty rate. That caused some controversy when announced, so it’s interesting to hear Hellman’s claim today: labels taking part in the tests have “been able to find new listeners and grow audiences for artists on their roster: during pilot testing, on average Discovery Mode has helped these labels grow streams by 30%, resulting in higher royalty payments for artists opted into the test”.

“Hellman” is Charlie Hellman, part of Spotify’s artist tools team.

Discovery Mode sounds like a great deal, on the surface. Take a lower royalty rate, and you’ll get more plays. Even if you get more money in the short term, this seems like a bad thing for artists.

Here’s why: As artists take the lower royalty rate, especially if they get a lot of plays, the overall royalty rate will go down. This hurts artists as a whole. And saves Spotify money. Their total payout pool for artists goes down.

And what if an artist takes the chance, opts in to the lower royalty rate, and they end up not getting more plays. Will Spotify move them back to the higher default royalty rate in that case?

One more concern here is a lack of transparency to the listener. If you are listening to a Spotify stream, will you hear a disclaimer on a playlist for songs that take the lower royalty rate for the promotion of Discovery Mode?

Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac:

We today got a more detailed report about what to expect in terms of 2021 MacBook Pro ports, with noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo saying we should expect both an HDMI port and an SD card slot. Coupled to his earlier report of a new MagSafe power port, that’s a pretty dramatic change to the current models, which have just USB-C ports and a headphone socket.

If Apple adds any/all of MagSafe, SD Card slot, HDMI to the rumored 2021 MacBook Pros, I can imagine they’ll sell more units (rumor mill says 25%-30% expected sales increase). And I can’t imagine someone turning away from the new MacBook Pros because they have too many ports.

Back to Ben:

But whether that’s an IO dream or nightmare depends on how Apple plans to implement the change.

Where’s the down side?

So one very real possibility, as raised by my colleague Benjamin Mayo earlier, is that the new ports come at the cost of reducing the number of USB-C ones. In which case I and others like me will be unhappy, as we’d be swapping out one or more multifunction ports – whose abilities include power and video connections – for single-function ones.

That’s a fair concern. But I think that ship has already sailed. I’ve been living with a 2020 MacBook Air with only two Thunderbolt / USB 4 ports. While I would like more ports, I’ve gotten used to living with two. I’ve got a hub that adds more ports that I rarely touch (mostly comes up when I want a peek at an SD card or flash drive). When I plug in my external display, I use the display’s built-in ports instead of a hub.

I can live with two USB-C ports. As long as Apple doesn’t go lower than two, but adds in extra ports, I’ve got no complaints. Though that does add more places for spilled coffee to go where it shouldn’t, but that’s on me.

Would I pay more for four USB-C ports, plus the extra ports? Not sure. An embarrassment of riches, that.

Howard Oakley:

One document every serious Mac user should read and refer to repeatedly is the Platform Security Guide, which Apple has just revised to give all the gory details of how M1 Macs start up. In the course of doing that, it reveals that these new models have a boot mode which doesn’t appear to be documented anywhere else, but which could prove a Mac-saver: Fallback Recovery OS.

Here’s a link to Apple’s Platform Security user guide.

More from Howard:

If you need your M1 Mac to enter 1 True Recovery (1TR), Recovery Mode, but that fails, there’s a second copy of the software required for 1TR “for resiliency”. To boot into that, instead of just holding the Power button until 1TR starts loading, you should “double-press and hold the power button”, according to the guide.

In practice, I’ve found this requires you to press the Power button twice in rapid succession, and on the second press, instead of releasing the button, hold it pressed until recovery options are reported as loading. This works reliably on an M1 MacBook Pro, but I’ve so far been unable to get it to work at all on my M1 Mac mini, but maybe I’m just not doing it right.

If you are responsible for the maintenance of an M1 Mac, this is worth a read and a bookmark.

Google blog:

Starting today, the Apple TV app, including Apple TV+, is now globally available on the new Chromecast with Google TV, with more Google TV devices to come.

And:

With Google TV in the U.S., you can browse Apple Originals in your personalized recommendations and search results. And with Google Assistant, you can also use your voice to ask Google to open the Apple TV app or play an Apple Original title. If you aren’t ready to watch right away, you can add Apple Originals to your Watchlist for later. These features will roll out globally in the coming months.

This does raise the question: Is there still a reason to buy an Apple TV?

One clear reason, for me, is trust. Do you care what Google does with your tv viewing habits? Do you trust them with your access credentials? If trust is not an issue for you, take a read of this Twitter thread from Steven Aquino, one of the first takes I’ve seen on the move from tvOS to Apple TV on ChromeCast.

I’m definitely going to give this a try.

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

The new Thunderbolt 4 and USB-C cable from OWC connects with USB-C on both ends and is certified for Thunderbolt 4, Thunderbolt 3, USB 4, USB 3.2, USB 3.1, USB Power, and more. The company also says that you get 100% of both the maximum power allowed and the full data capability supported from/between any USB-C port-equipped device and host.

This is one of the things I dislike about USB-C and HDMI. Two identical looking cables can have wildly different innards, vary widely in the functionality they support, data they transport.

I wish the connectors supported some form of color coding (think RGBIV resistor color bands) that tell you at a glance what functionality the cable will support.

This is just super fun. Follow the headline link, scroll through the list of cities, pick one, and you’re instantly driving around the city.

If sound is on, turn on street noise and click through the local radio stations. So great!

Jason Snell:

One of its most colossal flops, the Power Mac G4 Cube, was famously put “on ice” rather than retired, in a press release that fantasized that it might eventually return.

And:

Considering that pride, what happens when the company decides that many of the decisions it made a few years earlier were mistakes, actually? What does it look like when Apple makes a strategic retreat?

It feels like we’re about to find out.

And:

So here we are in early 2021, with a strong possibility that Apple is about to undo most of the big changes it made to the MacBook. The Touch Bar is rumored to be a goner, MagSafe is reportedly returning, and Apple may be adding other I/O—HDMI? an SD card slot?—to the MacBook Pro as well.

A very interesting look at Apple’s history of handling product retreats. Will we see the return of MagSafe for Mac? Will non-USB-C ports return to the high-end MacBook line? Will a new generation of M1 make its debut at this year’s WWDC? Good times for the Mac.

Gambling Industry News:

Apple faces a new $5m class action lawsuit filed by a group of over 100 social casino game players, many whom are fans of Canada sports betting apps. This is the second lawsuit of its kind filed against Apple so far this year, however, this particular lawsuit is focused on Zynga’s poker and casino apps.

The lawsuit was filed in US District Court for the Northern District of Columbia and alleges that Apple is making a profit from illicit gambling apps that have in-game purchases.

Lots of lawsuits filed against Apple. This one struck me as particularly interesting in that it attempts to pierce Apple’s App Store protections, protections that shield Apple as a vendor of goods, not a creator of those goods.

If they lose this lawsuit, will that open a liability crack for those scam subscription apps that make their way into the App Store?

YouTube blog:

Every year, increasing numbers of people come to YouTube to launch their own channel. But we know there’s still a huge amount of people who find the bar for creation too high. That’s why we’re working on Shorts, our new short-form video tool that lets creators and artists shoot snappy videos with nothing but their mobile phones.

Here’s a link to the Shorts blog announcement from last September.

Back to the YouTube blog:

Currently, Shorts is available in beta in India. Since the beginning of December, the number of Indian channels using Shorts creation tools has more than tripled, and the YouTube Shorts player is now receiving more than 3.5 billion daily views globally. In the coming weeks, we’ll begin expanding the beta to the US, unlocking our tools to even more creators so they can get started with Shorts.

3.5 billion daily views. That’s no small competitor for TikTok. Especially considering Shorts is an India-only beta.

Follow the headline link for the full list, or this link to get right to the decade old Apple front page.

Just me, or did Apple use to have much more focus on beautifully manicured hands?

This is fun. In the latest iOS beta, fire up Music and bring up a song’s lyrics. You can tap to select multiple chunks (here’s a tweet with a couple of screen grabs from my explorations), then use the share interface to send the lyrics on your favorite social media.

Even better, check this out:

You can also select multiple lines of text from the special share lyrics screen and create longer cards for Instagram/iMessage. (Up to 5 lines.) This is really well done. pic.twitter.com/Z8VFOpe6iZ

— Federico Viticci (@viticci) February 17, 2021

If you share on Messages/Insta, a playable version of the song centered on those lyrics will appear on the receiving end, assuming the recipient has the latest beta.

Love this.

Gruber:

I’d like to think that no one has made more hay over Ed Colligan’s infamous “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in” quote — just a few weeks before the unveiling of the iPhone — than yours truly.

Absolutely fair.

So I feel like I’m in a position to declare that these remarks by Herbert Diess are not an Ed Colligan moment. Ed Colligan, as the CEO of Palm, should have known that in 2006, the future of phones was gadget-like computers, not the computer-like gadgets the industry (including Palm) had been making until then.

And:

Apple hasn’t shown anything that suggests they’ll be good at designing and producing cars. The dashboard interface? Sure. But the car part of the car? Nothing Apple has ever done is like that. I’m not betting against them, but I don’t think Diess’s remarks are the least bit clueless.

Also fair. To me, complex as the car market is, if Apple does dive in, I’d suggest that all these years of rumored behind the scenes learning will emerge as a brand new take, unlike anything that already exists.

If you are interested in a potential Apple car, take a few minutes to read Gruber’s post. My favorite bit is his quote of this Robert Cassidy tweet:

Apple doesn’t do overnight. They walk into your market, and a few years in you realize they’ve quietly redefined your market and now you’re years behind.

That’s the part that VW should be afraid of.

Take a look at the new emoji coming with iOS 14.5.

Two notable highlights:

• The blood is removed from the syringe emoji, making it more representative of vaccines
• The headphone emoji moves from a more generic headphone to a very specific AirPods Max

One thing I find interesting about moments of emoji change is that if I text, say, a headphone emoji from the new beta and you receive it on the latest public iOS release, you’ll see the old headphones even though I sent the AirPods Max.

If you are interested in the history of Apple emoji, you might enjoy Emojipedia’s Who Created The Original Apple Emoji Set?

Follow the headline link, click the play button, then make your way around the planet checking out all the radio stations.

I’m currently in La Paz, Bolivia, listening to Radio Cumbia. Radio Garden is a great little rabbit hole.

John Voorhees, MacStories, digs into a new game from the creator of The Oatmeal.

If you are a fan of The Oatmeal, read the review, take the game for a spin. The onboarding and the artwork alone are worth the download. It’s free to try, in-app purchase if you like the game, want to take it further.

You can immerse yourself in the official Oatmeal game page, or watch the video embedded below to get a sense of the game mechanic. It’s whimsical as hell.

Take a look at the video embedded below. Obviously, the concept is designed to work with some form of Apple AR glasses.

Need some extra screen real estate? No problem with AR glasses!#xcode #arkit #apple #AugmentedReality #appleglass pic.twitter.com/fsYhxdtHTR

— Dominik Hofacker (@domhofdesign) February 10, 2021

Makes me wonder about the future of devices with screens, if Apple glasses ship and gain enough traction to become widely used. The glasses themselves are screens. Presumably, in addition to adding overlays to real life and existing screens, they could implement the Mac or iPad screen in the glasses interface, no need for the hardware at all, beyond the glasses themselves.

I can also imagine a future with contact lenses, so all the AR is built right into your eye coverings. And, ultimately, Apple Eyes, Apple Eyes Pro, and Apple Eyes Pro Max.

If you are a fan of Ted Lasso, you might enjoy the linked review by Sara Stewart. And if you’re still not on board, do read the review. It does a great job capturing the magic that is Ted Lasso.

A taste:

The Apple TV sitcom, which arrived last summer, is a mental health stealth bomb. Dressed up as a sports comedy, it espouses a philosophy that’s hilariously antithetical to that genre: The notion that being a decent person, and treating other people with respect, is more important than who scored the most goals.

And:

While the character of Ted presents as unapologetically square, his origins are a little trippy: the show, Sudeikis has said, “grew from conversations he and Hunt had walking the streets of Amsterdam on mushrooms.” The experience stuck with Sudeikis, who name-checked the Michael Pollan book “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence” on Brown’s podcast. He and Hunt started writing the pilot shortly after Pollan’s book came out. “Ted is, in a … way, like mushrooms,” said Sudeikis. “He is egoless.”

Indeed. Production of Season 2 is underway.

EFF:

Almost one year after EFF called on Amazon’s surveillance doorbell company Ring to encrypt footage end-to-end, it appears they are starting to make this necessary change. This call was a response to a number of problematic and potentially harmful incidents, including larger concerns about Ring’s security and reports that employees were fired for watching customers’ videos.

And:

Videos taken by the Ring device for either streaming or later viewing are end-to-end encrypted such that only mobile devices you authorize can view them.

And:

Ring now has over a thousand partnerships with police departments across the country that allow law enforcement to request, with a single click, footage from Ring users. When police are investigating a crime, they can click and drag on a map in the police portal and automatically generate a request email for footage from every Ring user within that designated area.

The addition of one-to-end encryption adds another layer of protection to this model, presumably requiring a warrant to access your footage.

Read about the encryption model in this Amazon white paper.

If you own a Ring doorbell, here’s a link to Amazon’s instructions on enabling end-to-end encryption.

If you are in the market for a HomeKit video doorbell, check out this review of the Logitech Circle View doorbell. Still early days for HomeKit doorbells.

Sami Fathi, MacRumors:

During a 2018 interview in the midst of Facebook’s notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal, Cook was asked how he would lead Apple if it were to face a similar crisis. Cook responded by ruling the hypothetical situation out of the question, saying Apple would not be in the situation Facebook was in, thanks to its differing stance on privacy and user data. Zuckerberg shot back, calling Cook’s comments on TV “extremely glib” and “not at all aligned with the truth.”

If you had to pick between Apple and Facebook, which would you say is “not at all aligned with the truth.”

Back to the post:

Zuckerberg, outraged by Cook’s comments and public influence on Facebook’s reputation, reportedly told internal aides and team members that Facebook needs to “inflict pain” on Apple, according to sources who spoke on anonymity to The Wall Street Journal.

And:

Facebook is reportedly planning to take its disapproval with Apple to court, as it’s allegedly been preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against the Cupertino-based tech company over its “unfair” approach to privacy with ATT and iMessage. As part of its lawsuit, Facebook is considering partnering with other companies such as Epic Games, which is already embroiled in a massive legal battle with Apple, to propel its antitrust case forward.

Here’s a link to the paywalled Wall Street Journal post.

It is amazing to me how Apple’s efforts to promote transparency are being weaponized against it. To me, good for consumers trumps bad for business.

A dungeon crawler, best played on the Mac. Hat tip to John Kordyback.

This really takes me back. Back to my Unix sysadmin days, when I would while away the hours playing the original dungeon-crawler, Rogue, and the 3D multi-player, Maze War.