Andrea Chang, reporting for the LA Times:

Apple has added public transit information for Los Angeles to its Apple Maps app.

The transit feature is now live, mapping bus and Metro routes for iPhone users as well as showing scheduled arrival times at different stops. The app also combines transportation options and shows what’s nearby, such as local restaurants and shopping.

More interestingly:

Besides L.A., transit information in Apple Maps is available in Baltimore, Berlin, Chicago, London, Mexico City, New York City, Philadelphia, the Bay Area, Toronto and Washington, D.C., as well as more than 300 cities in China.

A handful of worldwide cities and 300 cities in China. Is that right?

UPDATE: Got this from reader Alistair Freeman…

Apparently the reason there are so many Chinese cities included is that transit info there is presented by all cities in a standard way (plus Apple are sourcing the data from AutoNavi, a 3rd-party company) so it’s easier to get every city on-board compared to the rest of the world that has to be done on a city-by-city basis.

Makes sense.

Damn. That is really cool. While this is not really a practical substitute for a lightweight scale, if you’ve got a new iPhone, this is definitely worth trying. And it’s as simple as opening this link on your phone.

Chris Plante, writing for The Verge:

In theory, the Xbox One was an improvement on everything fans loved about the Xbox 360: a more powerful Kinect, new hardware that merged the console with your cable box, and lots of talk about the cloud. Microsoft only forgot one thing: the games. During the hour-long kick-off presentation, six minutes were allotted to new game announcements.

Fans felt betrayed and poured their fury into forums and game blogs; critics dubbed the event a disaster.

Leadership tried to pivot, using subsequent press events to announce the return of beloved franchises like Halo and Killer Instinct. But the messaging remained muddied and unfocused, requiring constant backpedaling. Because of the Kinect hardware, the Xbox One cost $100 more than its closest competition, Sony’s PlayStation 4. When Microsoft finally debuted the system on November 22nd, 2013, it landed with a thud. It’s been trailing PlayStation ever since.

This is a great read.

Kirk’s troubles aside, this is a pretty nice gift, especially as Apple retail employees also get a set of urBeats headphones.

Kirk McElhearn, writing for Kirkville, added the album Ultimate Sinatra to his Apple Music Library. He writes:

When I started listening to it, I noticed that I wasn’t hearing all the songs that I knew. I looked at this album in iTunes, and I was surprised to see how it displays.

This is a single album, yet iTunes shows it as a number of different albums with different titles. I’ve sorted by album so each title should be grouped, but you can see there are four different titles for tracks in the first grouping. And that first group of tracks, which is hanging together as an album, has track numbers in a seemingly random order.

This is typical behavior for Apple Music when it comes to a greatest hits or collection album. Apple saves space by storing a single copy of a track in the cloud, then points all references to the same song to that stored version, even if it is not the exact same copy.

But Kirk’s problems go deeper than this. Read his post for details. What a mess.

Neil Cybart, writing for Above Avalon:

One noticeable trend evolving over the past few weeks in the U.S. has been significant sales on Apple products at some of the country’s largest brick and mortar retailers. Best Buy and Target have offered sales on Apple products in the past, but this year feels different. While some have looked at these promotions as signs of waning Apple product demand and a directive by Apple to push excess supply through the distribution channel, the reality is much different. Retailers are positioning Apple Watch and iPad as the top gifts of the year, betting discounts for those two products will drive foot traffic into stores and page views to online stores. The end goal for retailers offering Apple Watch and iPad discounts is to generate the needed buzz and revenue to better compete with one of the best performing retailers: Amazon.

Interesting to see this effect. Apple product discounts used by retailers to fend off Amazon.

I did a little price checking, looking up the price of a 42mm space gray aluminum Apple Watch with a sport band.

• On Amazon: $380, with free shipping for Prime members
• On Best Buy’s site: $299, free shipping
• On Target’s site: $399, free shipping, includes $100 Target Card

Yup, those discounts would be enough to move me from Amazon to Best Buy or Target.

Great find by Tina Roth Eisenberg. I have cables everywhere that could benefit from this.

Jim and Dan talk about the new Apple Smart Battery Case for iPhone and more Apple news.

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You can get the new Sonos Controller app from the App Store and try Apple Music on your Sonos system beginning today. I’ve been testing it out for the last couple of weeks and it works just like the other services on Sonos.

Speaking on a Pandora conference call, Pandora CFO Mike Herring said:

Apple has a unique advantage of being on hundreds of millions of phones and having 800 million credit cards or whatever they do and stuff. But if they didn’t have that, they would have to – and they spend a lot of their real estate on this phone trying to drive people to music. You can’t even get it off – it’s like a permanent thing on there and still no one subscribes.

And:

I mean Steve Jobs eviscerated the music industry with the launch of iTunes and it’s been downhill ever since. And the download was supposed to save it, that didn’t happen.

You can read a transcript of the call here [Free REG-WALL].

Several days later, Mike posted this tweet:

Offering sincere apologies for my recent careless and inappropriate comments about Apple and Steve Jobs.

One could argue that Pandora would not exist if it were not for Steve Jobs and iTunes. At least he walked it back.

First things first, the Macworld article linked by this post will autoplay a video and, on top of that, has an ad that makes noise if you accidentally (no way to avoid it, really) mouse over it. Obviously, I would never have linked to it if I didn’t think the post was worth it.

Moving on.

Glenn Fleishman, answering some Macworld reader mail, talks you through the process of hiding apps in iTunes. In a nutshell, if you go to the iTunes view that shows you all your apps, you can hover over the corner of an app’s icon until the cursor turns into a pointing finger. On my Mac, the finger appears when I hover on the upper-left corner of an app icon. Click the finger and Apple will prompt you, asking if you’d like to hide the app.

It’s not clear if hiding an app icon in this way will prevent that app from reloading on your device the next time you sync. Even if it does, having the jump through the “hover, click, click hide in the dialog” sequence for every icon you want to get rid of is cumbersome at best.

There is another option, one that actually deletes the app from your list. In your list of all apps in iTunes, control click on an icon and select Delete. That will actually delete the app from your iTunes library (but not from synced devices). Also cumbersome and more permanent.

Of course, you can also add and remove apps on a per-device basis by selecting the device in iTunes, then clicking Apps in the list of options for that device. You’ll get a potentially huge list of every app you’ve ever purchased, with an option to remove or install for each app.

Finally, you can also add and remove apps on a per-page basis by double-clicking on one of the screen shots for your device. Hover over an app icon and click the x that appears to remove the app from your device.

My two cents: All of these options exist, and they all feel a bit weighty, cumbersome. How about a redesign here that folds all this under a single, lighter interface, one that is preloaded and lightning fast?

The App Factor:

Long exposure photography lets you capture light trails, motion blur, and better low light shots. While the built-in Camera app doesn’t let you control shutter speed and light sensitivity, there are lots of apps available in the App Store that do.

The iPhone is a great camera – for a phone. It’s low light capabilities aren’t very good. But, with proper technique and some clever apps, you can create pretty good low light images with your iPhone.

To be clear, the Supreme Court does not have a Samsung appeal on its docket. Samsung is asking the Supreme Court to hear their appeal of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals decision by filing a petition for writ of certiorari (request for Supreme Court review). The Supreme Court will review the petition and then decide whether or not to hear the case.

If you find this sort of thing interesting, Florian Mueller does an excellent job of laying out the ins and outs of this case in this article from FOSS Patents.

Chris Palomares tweeted this:

Can someone explain to me what the default #iOS9 default wallpaper is supposed to be? Looks like a sand dune, maybe?

Jason Snell responded:

Yes, it’s a sand dune—on Mars! Many iOS 9 wallpapers are actually images from the HiRISE instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Pretty cool. Here’s a link to Jason laying this out via Twitter back and forth, and here’s a link to the HiRISE catalog.

Here’s a link to the interview itself (where John Gruber and Craig Federighi talk about the open sourcing of Swift and other things) and a link to the transcript.

Big thanks to whoever took the time to type all this in.

The BBC announced availability of the BBC iPlayer app on UK Apple TVs. I wish they would bring the iPlayer app to the US. I’d gladly pay a monthly fee, as I do with Netflix, Hulu, and HBO. International media distribution agreements being the complicated beasts that they are, I’m not holding out too much hope. I’m thankful for the shows that come across the pond via Netflix and BBC America.

Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi joins the show for a wide-ranging half-hour discussion about Swift.

Great job.

iMore:

If you’re a big fan of comedic fairytale-esque stories (who isn’t?), or just want to catch up on one of ABC’s generally well-praised outing from 2014, you can currently grab the first season of Galavant for free on iTunes.

Galavant stars a hero of the same name as we follow his humorous journey to get his “happily ever after.” The story sees Galavant going after King Richard, who stole his love, with characters breaking out into musical numbers along the way.

Sadly, this isn’t available on the Canadian iTunes store so I can’t grab it but for our American readers, go get it now. No telling how long it will be available.

What if you could get 5% of your day back? What would you do?

You already have enough work to do today and shouldn’t have to waste time looking for the things you need to do your job.

Igloo makes it easy to find what you need, when you need it. And it’s not just for locating your traditional intranet stuff like HR policies and expense forms. It also helps you find experts, talk about problems and share content with your team. So stop digging through your inbox for that file from 3 months back and give yourself the tools you need to do your best work.

Try it yourself or send your IT guy to investigate Igloo, an intranet you’ll actually like.

This is a great idea. I love Pandora’s service—whenever I play a station, I get hit after hit after hit. Brilliant service.

This is a very cool idea. I’m not sure how I feel about having it stuck to the fretboard or what residue might be left over, but this would allow you to make some cool sounds.

Christopher Mims from the Wall Street Journal wrote this:

Given the size of its current battery, a little back-of-the-envelope math reveals it’s more than reasonable that if the iPhone 6 were as thick as the iPhone 4, the iPhone 6 could have double its current battery life.

Rene Ritchie, writing for iMore responded:

It sounds great in theory, but if you take an iPhone 6 as thick as the iPhone 4 and start to imagine how heavy it would be, you can start to see where it breaks down.

Apple was deliberate when they pointed out the iPhone 6 was actually lighter than the iPhone 4. They did that because, while thinness is nice and certainly improves the feel of the phone in both the hand and the pocket, it’s lightness that matters. Lightness improves usability.

Read the rest of Rene’s post. It’s spot on.

Matt Elliott, writing for CNET, lays out some solid tips here. My favorite:

Another way hackers can get into your iPhone or at least buy some time to find a way to circumvent your passcode is to enable Airplane mode via Control Center from the lock screen. Once it’s in Airplane mode, you won’t be able to track it via Find my iPhone.

To prevent Control Center from being accessible from the lock screen, head to Settings > Control Center and toggle the [switch] off for Access on Lock Screen.

This is a solid tip. Remember, all you are doing is removing Control Center from the lock screen. If you unlock your phone first, Control Center and the easy access to Airplane Mode, is still just a simple swipe-up away. And given how quickly Touch ID unlocks your phone, I don’t see any down side to making this change.

I’m a fan of any features that improve the usefulness of maps, both from Google and Apple. Their competitive position will push both teams forward.

And if you haven’t seen it yet, take a look at Poison Maps. Some solid UI ideas, worth experiencing.

Robin Harris, writing for ZDNet:

The Consumer Reports survey of 56,000 subscribers established, without a doubt, that MacBooks are more reliable than Windows machines. Is it because MacBooks cost more? I asked CR. Here’s what they said.

And:

If I were running Microsoft’s Windows customer sat group, I’d be on this like a dog on a bone. MS is only supplying the software, but their OEMs are killing the MS brand with reliability that is half of what Apple achieves.

Which has to be one of the reasons that Microsoft is getting into hardware like the Surface. They know what MacBook users like about their machines, and they know that their current OEMs are’t providing it.

Advice to Microsoft: take a close look at Tim Cook, supply chain guy extraordinaire. Apple insists on quality and – this is key – they get it.

There’s nothing like controlling the design and build of both the hardware and the software from top to bottom.

I’ve owned 6 or 7 Windows laptops. Every one of them broke (in a hardware way) and every one of them was cheaper to replace than fix. And recalling my feelings at the time, Microsoft got a black eye from me, right along with the OEM who made the laptop.

M.G. Siegler, writing for Medium:

The iPad Pro was supposed to be the laptop-replacing iPad. Yet, after a few weeks of solid usage, I wasn’t quite comfortable leaving my MacBook at home in favor of it. And it seemed silly to bring two devices with roughly the same-sized screen. So the iPad Pro was the first voted off the island.

While I like the iPad Pro, I don’t yet love the iPad Pro. Certainly not as my go-to computing device. I think there’s a chance it could get there, but it’s going to take some getting used to. I’m just not ready yet. Maybe others who already do the majority of their computing on the iPad are. I’m close, but something worried me about not having a MacBook with me. I’m not entirely sure what. But something.

Much has been written about the iPad Pro replacing/not replacing your laptop. In this piece, M.G. Siegler walks through his logic in leaving his iPad Pro behind in favor of his MacBook. This mirrors my own feelings exactly.

The short version of this: A security researcher claimed to have downloaded sensitive info from 13 million MacKeeper accounts.

I have recently downloaded over 13 million sensitive account details related to MacKeeper, Zeobit, and/or Kromtech […] stuff like names, email addresses, usernames, password hashes, computer name, ip address, software license and activation codes, type of hardware (ex: “macbook pro”), type of subscriptions, phone numbers and computer serial numbers.

The researcher, Chris Vickery, contacted the companies hosting the insecure data, and the companies eventually sealed up the security holes.

This story is receiving a lot of press, at least in part, because of the strong feelings people have about MacKeeper. From the MacKeeper Wikipedia page:

MacKeeper is a utility software suite for Mac OS X. It is heavily promoted and has been the subject of a class-action lawsuit for false advertising. Some reviewers say that MacKeeper secures and optimizes a system, while others say that crash-prone Macs can be cured by removing MacKeeper.

And:

In January 2014 a class action lawsuit was filed against Zeobit in Illinois. The lawsuit alleged that “neither the free trial nor the full registered versions of MacKeeper performed any credible diagnostic testing” and reported that a consumer’s Mac was in need of repair and was at-risk due to harmful error. In May 2014 a lawsuit was filed against Zeobit in Pennsylvania, alleging that MacKeeper fakes security problems to deceive victims into paying for unneeded fixes.

Karma.

Taylor Swift:

Taylor Swift is giving her fans on Apple Music a special surprise this holiday, The 1989 World Tour LIVE. The 1989 World Tour LIVE was filmed in front of 76,000 fans at the ANZ Stadium in Sydney, Australia on November 28, 2015. The 1989 World Tour LIVE captures Taylor’s entire performance from Sydney with never seen footage filmed backstage and during rehearsals with surprise musical and special guests that appeared on The 1989 World Tour.

Beginning Sunday, December 20, The 1989 World Tour LIVE will be available in its entirety exclusively to Apple Music members around the world

I expect this to be the first of many such exclusives. Apple has a lot of clout and can make these kinds of deals very lucrative for artists.