🍿 Watched: Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
Dan Moren’s The Back Page column this month, ‘Tim Cook’s busy schedule’, is worth the Six Colors membership price all on its own:
4:30pm: Afternoon stroll to close rings and use iPhone 16 Pro to track down AirTag that Phil Schiller hides daily on Apple Park campus. […]
11pm: Wake from dead of sleep to fumble for bedside Mac Studio and Pro Display XDR. Check email. Breathe sigh of relief and go back to sleep.
🤣🤣🤣
Joe Rosensteel masters the sub-tweet with this post throwing shade at Apple’s rollout strategy for Apple Intelligence, which is to get everyone talking about the next upcoming beta features just as the current stuff gets released.
‘The Pre-Taped iOS Call-In Show’:
Okay, okay, there you go. That’s boo-boo number one. If you wanted to talk about iOS 18.1, you should have called last week during the iOS 18.0 show. We’re talking about iOS 18.2 now. If you see me talking about the genmoji and Image Playgrounds waitlist then it’s too late to talk about those. We’ve moved on.
Chef’s Kiss
🔗
What this means is that you can now purchase a Mac mini with a 14-core M4 Pro for $1,599 in the U.S. and get similar to faster peak performance than a Mac Studio with the 24-core M2 Ultra, a configuration that starts at $3,999.
As for year-over-year performance improvements, the M4 Pro is up to 45% faster than the highest-end M3 Pro chip in terms of multi-core CPU performance, based on the Geekbench 6 results that are available so far.
Not bad when that beats the fastest chip in a Mac Pro, too.
I totally missed the 2-minute sketch at the end of today’s MacBook Pro video. So worth watching. 😆
Greg Morris on modern apps:
If I am a power user, I might also demand Shortcuts support, Siri integration and even a fancy API if the app calls for it. There are widgets to think about, live activities and in the near future, Apple Intelligence integration. Great apps don’t just exist as a square on your Home Screen, they extend into numerous areas and through different interaction methods. We expect them to be available everywhere we are, and still moan because the developer wants to make an income from their work. Worth bearing in mind next time an app you love asks you for a contribution.
🍿 Watched: Memento (2000) directed by Christopher Nolan 👍👍
It’d been a while since I saw this, and I got my wife to view it with me. Doing so while high really kept things interesting! We love a good time-based plot device.
Imagine being in a gym where accidents happen—maybe a stray elbow here, a bump there. Aurelius notes that in these moments, we don’t hold grudges; we simply acknowledge the mishap as part of the process and remain vigilant without bearing ill will. He suggests taking this approach into our everyday lives, dealing with emotional and social bumps with the same nonchalance. […] In the close quarters of life, just like in a gym, people might ‘collide’ with us unintentionally. According to Aurelius, we should view these incidents as neutral events, not personal attacks.
I’d both love and hate an M4 MacBook Air announced tomorrow. Love because I’m pretty sure that’s going to be my next computer as I slim down to a MacBook Air/iPad mini/iPhone setup. Hate because I was expecting it in the spring and need time to save up! 😂
Going for the hat trick tomorrow. M4 Pro/Max MacBook Pros, with a wild card M4 MacBook Air possible 👀
✅ Monday: M4 iMac and iOS 18.1
✅ Tuesday: M4 Mac mini
⬜️ Wednesday: M4 Pro/Max MBP
RE: https://www.threads.net/@stephenrobles/post/DBrMPpSxTRJ
Mac Week Day 2: It’s Mac mini’s turn with its third-ever redesign! Now it looks even more like Mac Studio’s little brother, with some serious performance to match. 🧵
Nick Heer, pxlnv.com:
The rollout of Apple Intelligence is uncharacteristically piecemeal and messy. Apple did not promise a big Siri overhaul in this version of iOS 18.1. But by giving it a new design, Apple communicates something is different. It is not — at least, not yet. Maybe it will be one day. Nothing about Siri’s state over the past decade-plus gives me hope that it will, however. I have barely noticed improvements in the things Apple says it should do better in iOS 18.1, like preserving context and changing my mind mid-dictation.
Siri remains software I distrust.
John Voorhees tested the AirPods Pro 2’s new Hearing Aid feature and was thoroughly impressed:
My brief experience with hearing assistance has been wild and surprising in a very good way. I’m fortunate that my hearing loss is mild. At the same time, though, the difference from using hearing assistance is so noticeable that I don’t want to take my AirPods out of my ears. I’m sure the novelty of hearing assistance will wear off and become the ‘new normal,’ but I won’t forget the experience of those first hours using it. It was remarkable.
The “I’ll probably never need it” features stack up.
John Gruber loves his nano-texture display:
As a don’t-know-how-I-lived-without-it fan of the nano-texture Studio Display, I’m glad to see a nano-texture option available for the M4 iMacs. (It’s a $200 upgrade.) Fingers crossed that they offer a nano-texture option for the M4 MacBook Pros.
I’ve not seen any rumors for nano-texture on MacBooks, but they absolutely should do it! If an iPad can get it, it should be offered everywhere. I remember when getting “Glossy” instead of “Matte” on your MacBook was the new hotness for better colors. Now we’re back to wanting less reflective screens.
Paul Kafasis skewers WaPo for their spinelessly withheld endorsement:
Even in your piece, you said “in 1976 for understandable reasons at the time, we changed this long-standing policy and endorsed Jimmy Carter as president.”. What, in your mind, were those understandable reasons? Was Gerald Ford a fascist? Did he claim he would be a dictator on day one? Or seek to have generals like Hitler’s? Did he provoke an attempted coup? Did he do any of the incredibly long list of horrendous things Donald Trump has done? You know the answer, and I suspect in your heart, you know that this is wrong.
A quick reminder to folks on macOS Sonoma/Sequoia that using Discord as a Safari web app is so much better than their “native” app because it never has to install an update. Granted, I’m not a Discord power user, but I’ve found no downsides, and it never interrupts to update when I launch the app.
It’s been 1784 days and Apple still won’t sell a compact keyboard with black keys. I’m done waiting. I’ve got an orange one in my eBay cart. If something better doesn’t come with the Mac mini this week, I’m pulling the trigger. Lightning and white keys be damned.
Also, what the hell is this key?!
Holy smokes this finish on the Studio Neat pens/pencil looks amazing! I don’t need another, but wow!
Limited Edition 013 is here! Red has been one of the most requested colors, so we went all out with this edition. It’s vibrant, glossy, and has embedded metallic flakes for a glimmering effect. Available on all our writing instruments, for one week only! https://www.studioneat.com/products/limited013
New iMacs! But are those colors actually new? They look great, but I would have missed that they changed. I guess they definitely didn’t have pink before, swapped in from red. 🧵
🆕📝 PSA: Beware certain AirPods Max stands
My very expensive and already-not-the-most-comfortable headphones just got even more uncomfortable.
I just saw the use of “priority neighborhoods” instead of “troubled” or “impoverished” and, gosh, that’s so much better. Language is so important. 👍
I love the iPhone mini and this is exactly how Apple should prioritize for a new one. Battery life is paramount, regular performance is fine, and fit the best cameras you can with the space left. I’d love a Pro version, but it’s probably impossible to cram everything into a smaller chassis.
iOS 18.2 has a new ‘Copy Link with Highlight’ action in the text action menu! Via Federico Viticci:
I’m very happy to see this:
It’s a little hard to find, but Safari in iOS 18.2 beta now supports links with Text Fragments!
This feature has been in Chrome for a while, and it lets you link directly to a specific part of a webpage with a highlight.
I was going to try making a shortcut to do this, but built-in is much better! An example: heydingus.net/blog/2021…
Thanks to @connected@relayfm.social, I can’t stop thinking about this Mokibo keyboard which has keys that double as a trackpad. I don’t need it…I don’t need it…