We don’t love paying through the nose for the ink, and the arrangement means that at the first sign of printer trouble, many of us just dump the thing and buy a new one.
Epson’s new move is a sly one. Rather than compete on price, the printer maker is dropping the cartridge issue entirely.
When you buy an EcoTank printer — for instance, the ET-2550 — you fill up its four-chambered reservoir with ink from plastic containers included with the printer. There’s a satisfying feeling of dumping all of that ink into the tubs. You then let the printer prime itself and your ink worries are over.
Fast forward two very print-productive years. You and your family have churned out more than 35 black-and-white and 60 color pages every week. Finally, you need more ink. Epson will sell you a whole set of replacement canisters for $52. That same amount of Epson ink, in XL cartridges, would cost more than 10 times as much.
I’m a big fan of my Epson R2000 photo printer but I dread using it knowing how much I’m going to be spending on ink. I don’t know if higher upfront costs will be a game changer but it’s good to see Epson (and undoubtedly other manufacturers) stepping up to change the economics of printing.
“The writing has long been on the wall for any premium Android maker: as soon as low end hardware became ‘good enough,’ there would be no reason to buy a premium brand,” said Ben Thompson, an analyst at Stratechery.com in Taipei.
Wired has reported on new research being presented at this week’s Black Hat security conference on a proof-of-concept Mac worm that could spread through the Mac’s firmware, rather than software. While Wired’s piece makes this sound like a super worm capable of leaping through air gaps and infecting the world’s Macs, the reality is more mundane. The research itself is excellent and fascinating work from Trammell Hudson and Xeno Kovah, and as always we hope Apple patches all the flaws quickly, but this isn’t something most Apple users need to lose any sleep over.
Here are the answers to your most pertinent questions about this vulnerability.
As always, Rich Mogull is the guy I trust the most for any Mac security issues. Rich’s level headed expertise is why I know the vast majority of the Tech Media’s reporting on these issues is always blown completely out of proportion to the threat. I’d encourage all of you to follow Rich on Twitter so that the next time this happens (and, because it’s the Tech Media, it will happen again), you’ll be able to confidently ignore the Chicken Little’s.
Taylor Swift’s recent missive to Apple—the one that caused the tech behemoth to reverse course, once again demonstrating her world-beating pop power—came after some late-night soul searching, the singer tells Vanity Fair writer Josh Duboff, in the magazine’s September cover story.
“I wrote the letter at around four A.M.,” Swift says. “The contracts had just gone out to my friends, and one of them sent me a screenshot of one of them. I read the term ‘zero percent compensation to rights holders.’ Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll write a song and I can’t sleep until I finish it, and it was like that with the letter.”
As whiny as I find her music, this story shows a very self-aware young woman who knows what she wants.
Here is how it works: When someone using iCloud Voicemail is unable to take a call, Siri will answer instead of letting the call go to a standard digital audio recorder.
iCloud Voicemail can relay information about where you are and why you can’t pick up the phone to certain people. But the coolest feature of the service is that Siri will transcribe any incoming voicemails, just as it does with anything else you say to it.
This makes sense to me. Google’s been doing this for quite a while now, but the service is surprisingly bad, considering how good Google voice is. Hopefully Apple will be able to figure out how to make the service work reliably.
Struggling to return strong profits, Samsung has slashed the retail price of its flagship smartphones — the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge — by €100. After the deduction, the revised cost of the 32GB variant Galaxy S6 is €599, whereas its Galaxy S6 Edge counterpart will slightly break the bank at €699. The smartphones were launched just four months ago.
[…]
The company is also rumored to launch two new smartphones, namely the Galaxy S6 Edge+ and the Galaxy Note 5 in the coming days.
There’s been a lot written lately about Apple Music, iTunes Match, and the threat of one or the other deleting your music from your music library.
This issue has turned into a perfect storm of fear, uncertainty and doubt. At the end of the day, I believe an understanding of the basic mechanics at work here will make it easy to keep your music library 100% rock solid safe.
First, some background.
For starters, there’s iTunes Match, a service that puts all your music in the cloud, then makes that music available on all your devices.
In order to avoid storing five million copies of a particular track in the cloud, iTunes Match uses a combination of metadata (artist name, track name, etc.) and acoustic fingerprinting (the Shazam technique) to identify a track.
If your track is identified, the copy in the cloud is used instead of your local copy. If iTunes Match does not find a match in the iCloud Music Library, it uploads your copy to the cloud. Either way, the cloud copy of your track is then made available to all your other devices logged in with your AppleID.
A key point here is that the root of the tree here is the iTunes library on your Mac. You MUST start the iTunes Match process from a specific iTunes library. All the other devices will either merge the original Mac’s music with music already on the device, or replace existing music with that Mac’s music.
This is a critical point. Your music library starts life on your Mac, then is supplemented with music you buy elsewhere. As your devices sync, the tracks you buy elsewhere, make their way back to your Mac and are added to your original library. This scenario can get more complex if you have your root music library distributed across multiple Macs, but that is a topic for another day.
Here’s the key issue:
iTunes Match will never delete music from your Mac. NEVER.
So if you back up your Mac on a regular basis using Time Machine, your music is never in any danger.
Apple Music is a slightly different beast, but does follow the same prime directive. Back up your original iTunes Library, just as you would your photos. And never delete music from your Mac, unless you are absolutely certain you don’t want it any more.
To be clear, I am not saying the folks who report bugs with Apple Music and iTunes Match are wrong. I’m just saying that, assuming you’ve backed up your original iTunes Library, those bugs won’t cause you to lose music.
Put another way, I’m suggesting that anyone who lost music did so because they accidentally/inadvertently deleted the music themselves and didn’t have a backup.
One more point, then I’ll let you go. Kirk McElhearn wrote an excellent post on Friday pointing out a bug in the iTunes Match matching system. If you haven’t seen it, definitely do take a minute to read it through.
Here’s what Kirk did:
I changed its tags to Can’t Feel My Face, by The Weekend. (I picked this track because it’s one of the best selling tracks on the iTunes Store; I could have picked any track in the Apple Music catalog.)
Then he did this:
I waited for Apple Music to match the file, deleted my local copy, and then downloaded it from the cloud.
At the end of this process, Kirk’s original song was gone, replaced by Can’t Feel My Face.
Kirk did find a bug. Since Kirk had iTunes Match enabled, matching should have made use of acoustic fingerprinting, a la Shazam. iTunes Match should have detected Kirk’s ploy and returned the proper file. If you are interested in learning how iTunes Match and Apple Music do their matching, read this excellent post.
Unfortunately, many people saw this as Apple Music and iTunes Match deleting Kirk’s music. That did not happen. Apple didn’t delete Kirk’s music, Kirk did.
Here’s that last bit again:
I waited for Apple Music to match the file, deleted my local copy, and then downloaded it from the cloud.
Kirk deleted his local copy. Kirk’s post is absolutely valid and valuable, a real public service. He found a bug in Apple’s matching system, one that Apple needs to find and fix. But Kirk’s music was never in danger from Apple. And this is a key difference.
Back up your music. Make a second copy and keep it in a safe place (I actually have a backup of my music and photos in a safe deposit box, safe from fire). And don’t delete music from your Mac’s iTunes Library.
My point is, optimism is not the shining light of the enlightened human being. I’m tired of reading “inspirational” quotes on Facebook about how optimism is a goal we should all strive toward. Optimism and pessimism are not light and dark sides, they’re complementing halves of the same token. We need each other, you and I.
When I first wrote my review of Apple Watch and follow-up in June, I had lost 40 pounds. I noted that I still had a little way to go to reach a goal I had set about 11 months ago—today, I made it.
As of this morning I lost 47.1 pounds. It was a ridiculous goal that I never thought I’d get to, but here I am. The only reason I set a goal was because the apps I was using wanted a number—any number—so I chose a nice even number and kept using it.
I thought I may lose a few pounds using HealthKit and Apple Watch, but with almost 50 pounds shed from my body, I’m still going. Doctors say my ideal weight is 10 pounds less than I am now. That is my new goal, but I’m going to tackle that the same way I lost the initial weight—slow and steady.
I’m still walking, lifting weights, and watching what I eat. I still drink beer and enjoy food, but thanks to Apple Watch and HealthKit, I’m more aware of what’s happening with my body.
Apple Watch and HealthKit have truly changed my life.
My thanks to Hullo for sponsoring The Loop this week. You already know the ergonomics of your desktop workstation are important; have you considered your sleep ergonomics? Hullo customer Matt writes:
“I’m kind of shocked myself at how big a difference it’s made, and surprised to find myself writing one of those seemingly overenthusiastic reviews, but Hullo deserves it. So worth it—the ability to precisely shape the pillow so that it supports my neck just right is something I’ll never want to give up!”
Check out Hullo for 60 nights. If you don’t like it, just send it back for a refund.
Apple Pay usage in the US is growing, driven by both increased frequency of transactions and the expanding base of iPhone 6 owners, according to The Auriemma Consulting Group (ACG) Apple Pay Tracker, which interviewed 500 iPhone 6 and 6+ owners between May 29 and June 15, 2015. Forty-two percent of US Apple 6/6+ owners reported having used Apple Pay, virtually identical to the proportions reported in two previous waves of the study conducted in February and April 2015. “While the proportion of users has remained stable, the denominator has grown through new iPhone and Apple Watch sales and the upgrade cycle. We’ve also seen the average number of transactions increase both in-store and in-app,” says Marianne Berry, Managing Director of ACG’s Payment Insights practice.
So the proportion of iPhone 6 users using Apple Pay is staying constant, but as the number of iPhone 6 users increases, Apple Pay use increases proportionately.
Imagine one thousand musicians all playing at the same time, all in sync, singing in perfect rhythm and harmony. The goal was to convince Foo Fighters to come to Cesena, Italy and play for them.
Not long after, this appeared on the Foo Fighter’s official Twitter account:
Ci vediamo a presto, Cesena…. xxx Davide
Roughly translated, that’s: See you soon, Cesena…. xxx Dave
A friend of mine recently gave me a stack of old Apple documents, and included were scripts for three Apple-approved radio ads pushing the Apple IIc for the holiday season of 1984.
The three ads — titled 20 Gifts, Christmas Card and Perfect Present — extol the virtues of the machine, including its compatibility with programs written for the IIe. Dealers also promised easy credit and help with the purchase of accessories such as a modem or mouse.
If you’re a MacBook user, you’re losing an average of 1 hour of total battery life by using Chrome. Firefox is a little better, but Safari is the clear winner. You’ll want to use Safari if you want to get the most battery out of your laptop.
Wow! An hour of laptop life is a huge difference. There’s a lot more to the study, worth a scan.
Using insights from our more than 500 million Shutterstock downloads, discover which emotions businesses, marketing agencies, and media organizations are using to design an ongoing relationship with their customers.
I’m not a fan of infographics, but I did find this fascinating.
As security researcher Nicholas Weaver put it in a (now deleted) tweet, ”Imagine if Windows patches had to pass through Dell and your ISP before they came to you? And neither cared? That is called Android.”
The way Android users get updates is just so screwed up.
I’ve been playing with a replacement calculator for the Mac. Magic Number has been out for a while, but is new to me. There is an incredible amount of functionality built into the calculator, yet it is incredibly easy to use.
To get a basic sense of Magic Number, spend a few minutes going through the Getting Started page. Note that a number of the screen shots are short little animations (start them by clicking the classic play triangle).
The thing I like the most about Magic Number is that the math looks like math. For example:
Even after you enter a calculation, you can edit individual elements and recalculate. This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg here. Magic Number is incredibly robust, chock full of features. And a new, free update is coming in mid-August, supposedly full of new stuff. Can’t wait.
Apple has been criticized for the curvaceous project being closed off and suburban in its orientation (large earthen berms will block the public’s view of the campus from bordering streets). But the new public visitor’s center shows Apple is at least making a concession to the public’s great interest in the Spaceship.
The plans show a super-modern glass-walled structure topped by a carbon-fiber roof with extended eaves, punctuated by large skylights. On the ground floor: A 2,386-square-foot cafe and 10,114-square-foot store “which allows visitors to view and purchase the newest Apple products.” Stairs and elevators take visitors to the roof level, about 23 feet up. There, they’ll be able to behold the multi-billion-dollar campus.
There was never any doubt that Apple would have some sort of area for the general public, similar to the present Employee Store. Whether it will be a full blown Apple Retail location where you can buy Apple’s hardware (unlike the Employee Store where the general public can only buy accessories and Apple-branded merchandise) remains to be seen.
