My several-sentence review of the AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation (after about 60 minutes):
- They seem to fit well and are comfy! 🥳
- Sound is great! 🔊
- Noise Cancellation is quite good! 🔇
- Stem-squeeze controls aren’t so bad. 🤌
- Case is tiny! ◽️
- Contenders for Best AirPods Yet! 🥇
My several-sentence iPhone 16 Pro review (after about 30 minutes):
- Screen is amazing! 🤩
- Device is so big and heavy! 🙁
- Rails are shinier than I expected/wanted. 😕
- But the rounded edges feel great. 🙂
- Action Button & Camera Control quick-access will be nice. 👍
- Undecided on white color. 🤷♂️
We just made our Marco Offset™ donation to St. Jude. That leaves just $185.88 left to reach my campaign’s goal of raising $500! 🙏 (Thanks @rsilvernail!)
“Sick as hell” eh?
Sliding it on for a photoshoot, I feel something wash over me. No longer am I a sleep-deprived tech reviewer hunched over an overpriced coffee. I’m a leather-clad vampire assassin calmly sipping espresso on a cobblestone street. With the new Reflections watchface in black, I immediately level up 1,000 mystery points. When I switch to the Flux watchface, I’ve morphed into a tech-savvy corporate goth. A grown-up former emo gal who, by day, files taxes on time but still spiritually sticks it to the man because, look, I wore my combat boots to work.
Got out and enjoyed the sunshine at Sunshine City crag today with a new friend. Got in 7 or so pitches. Good day! 🧗
Oh hey, I’ve got my first pledgee for my St. Jude fundraiser! $5 per blog post I write this month. Moms are the best. 🥰
I’ve been trying iCloud Passwords over 1Password for about a year, but even with the new Passwords app it’s not (yet) quite what what I need. I’m headed back to 1Password for the time being.
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Roughly 25 years after it launched payment processing, PayPal is “ushering in a new era for customers” with some generic black text. The company has a new logo, designed by Pentagram, that looks incredibly plain — especially compared to previous iterations of the logo that featured a rakish slant, two shades of blue, and prominent PayPal P’s.
Yikes. Really lost all its flavor and personality here. I wonder when this trend will turn around.
It’s the end of an era as we say goodbye to @jamesthomson@mastodon.social’s excellent old-school PCalc widget. It’s been a staple in my Today View for six years as the most convenient way to do quick calculations. Let’s pour one out for the little guy who was early in pushing widget boundaries.
🆕📝 Crashing Clockwise #571: ‘I Am My Own Robot’
iPhone camera capturing methods, new Apple products purchases, robotic smart speaker appeal, a hypothetical third new iPhone button, our favorite kind of transportation, and task management.
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It’s not hard to imagine how Visual Intelligence could help you out on a device that sees everything you see. Take the idea of learning more about a restaurant, like Apple showed for Visual Intelligence on an iPhone: instead of fishing your phone out of your pocket to look up information about a new spot, with glasses, you could just look at the restaurant, ask a question, and have the glasses tell you more.
My Meta Ray-Bans do this but I never use it. Maybe if the info was actionable (add to a reminder?), that’d change.
A heartfelt congratulations to Jason Snell (and Dan Moren) at Six Colors for a decade of top-notch independent writing:
What I’m saying is, my last ten years in this business have been entirely happy. I didn’t need to take time away to go from purely miserable to happy. That iPhone 6 review, which was originally just a way to keep myself connected to the one work thing I actually liked, transformed into the whole thing. […]
I’m happy to be here. And happy you’re reading this. Thank you for the last ten years. Here’s to thousands of new posts and links and podcast episodes to come.
After last week’s keynote, the usual unimpressed reactions followed. John Gruber outlines why by comparing the Jobs and Cook eras:
Jobs was driven to improve the way computers work. Cook is driven to improve the way humans live.
The delight is still there, but there’s less amazement. It’s by design. They’re not trying but failing to reach the heights of the Jobs era’s ecstatic design novelty, because those peaks had accompanying valleys. Apple today is aiming for, and achieving, utterly consistent excellence. Quirkiness no longer fits.
Cook has patience where Jobs would grow restless.
Hey @HemisphericViews, we’re seeing some Wollongong love from @mkbhd@threads.net in his new AirPods video! 👀
This sounds promising! 😃
But the AirPods 4 with ANC are far and away Apple’s most compelling take on this open design yet. The noise cancellation isn’t on par with more expensive in-ear alternatives, but it’s easily good enough to ensure you can enjoy your music at a normal volume no matter where you might be. You can tell a difference when the ANC is working, which I can’t say of other open earbuds that have advertised noise cancellation. That, combined with the wireless charging, is the biggest reason I’d steer most people toward the more expensive model.
I’ve not written my Crashing Clockwise or 7 Things posts yet for this week, but I’m on the couch and not particularly motivated…so it’s going to have to wait at least one more day. Sorry if you’re waiting on them…
I haven’t seen anyone mention this, but it looks like folks like the guys on @connected@relayfm.social got their wish and 18.0 will ship with the old Siri orb UI while the glowy perimeter UI will wait for 18.1 and Apple Intelligence. Per MKBHD’s hands-on video at the event.
🎵 Hey this music thing is pretty great. Here are four singles I enjoyed tonight:
“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart (Dombresky Remix)” by Taylor Swift & Dombresky
“First Heartbreak” by Lauv
“Cleats” by FINNEAS
“Dancing In The Flames” by The Weeknd
Thank you @amerpie and @ericmwalk for your generous donations to my St. Jude campaign! 🥰🙏🎗️ I just figured out how to download the incentive reports, so Eric I’ll start working on your shortcut, and Lou, for sure you can bank it for whenever you have a need. You guys rock!
It wouldn’t be another week in Apple without some kind of EU-related action, would it? Apparently not.
“Apple told to pay Ireland €13bn in tax by EU”
That’s a lot of scratch, but as Dan noted, the money is already in escrow, leading me to wonder “Where is this ‘Escrow’? How securely is it guarded? How quickly can I assemble a team of elite misfits to infiltrate ‘Escrow’? Do I have to go to the airport to convert euros to dollars? Where do you do that now?” etc.
— John Moltz, Six Colors
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For maybe the first time ever, iPhone order day was totally chill. I put together the pre-preorder last night, woke up as normal for work this morning, realized at 8:08am that pre-orders had started, opened the Apple Store app on my phone (no wait), and like three clicks later I was done. No drama.