WWDC, digital photo frames, and automaker arrogance
Finally we can make our June travel plans. Dan admires a digital photo frame. Jason shakes his fist at General Motors. And somewhere in there, a dog steals two shoes.
Of all the standalone devices that I couldn’t imagine I’d need in the year 2023, I would have put a digital picture frame near the top. To me, they’re a device that seems to belong in that mid-2000s era where people switched to digital cameras, one of those weird bits of translation that supposes that every analog device needs an exact digital counterpart, rather than acknowledging that we simply treat our photos differently now.
But then I had a kid.
Suddenly I found that, despite the thousands of photos I’ve already taken of this child in the first eight months of their life, I had no easy way to display them around the house. I could, of course, always have some digital photos printed out and hung in various places, but that would only allow for a subset of all the great pictures I’d taken.
Suddenly a digital photo frame didn’t seem like such a wild idea, so when the opportunity arose for me to check one out, I didn’t hesitate. What I discovered is that there is definitely a niche for this digital spin on an old favorite, but that even a good entry falls short in a few ways.
Hey there, I’m Shelly Brisbin and I’m here to demo a new feature in iOS 16.4. Specifically, it’s in the Weather app, and even more specifically than that, it is for people who use the VoiceOver screen reader that’s part of iOS.
VoiceOver is a tool used by blind and visually impaired folks to hear the contents of the screen rather than viewing them. So using a combination of speech and touch, you can find out what’s under your fingers. That’s pretty easy if the content is text or even something that can be described pretty easily like a button, something that you can label. But if you have something like an overlay from inside the Weather app, it’s a little harder to use VoiceOver to describe it because it’s visual and it’s color coded. So what I’m going to show you is what I call “sonic overlay.” It’s an overlay that uses pitch to indicate the level of rain that an area is having right now.
In 2021, device-management startup Kandji approached Six Colors to commission a new entry in our Report Card series focusing on how Apple’s doing in large organizations, including businesses, education, and government. We formulated a set of survey questions that would address the big-picture issues regarding Apple in the enterprise. Then we approached people we knew in the community of Apple device administrators and asked them to participate in the survey. We are especially grateful to the members of the Mac Admins Slack for their participation.
This is our third year doing the survey. Over the last few weeks, we took the temperature of 117 admins, roughly half of whom report that they manage more than a thousand devices. They rated Apple’s performance in the context of enterprise IT on a scale from 1 to 5 in nine broad areas.
Below, you’ll see the survey results, plus choice comments from survey participants. Not all participants are represented; we gave everyone the option to remain anonymous and not be quoted. Though Kandji commissioned this survey—and we thank everyone there for doing so—it had no oversight over the survey results or the contents of this story, which was compiled by Jason Snell and the Six Colors staff.
Overall scores
Apple’s strongest scores came in hardware—Apple silicon Macs are a big winner—and in the company’s commitment to security and privacy.
In most categories, our panel’s view of Apple in the enterprise was on an upswing. The company made large gains in the categories of enterprise service and support and in macOS identity management (its 3.3 average was still fairly low overall, but up a whopping 0.4 from last year). However, Apple took a big hit in the deployment category, which dropped 0.2 to become the lowest scoring category in the survey.
We also asked a couple of questions outside the traditional set. For the second straight year, we asked about the pace of operating-system adoption. There was a big change here, with “quicker than usual” moving from 37% last year to 51% this year. (A decision by Apple to force a Ventura update as a “minor” upgrade may be at least partially responsible—see the comments in that category for the gory details.)
With numerous reports that Apple might be forced to open up iOS to third-party app stores, we asked our panel about what their policy might be toward such app stores. Were they open to supporting them under some circumstances, would they reject them outright, or are they in an environment that doesn’t even allow use of Apple’s own App Store?
More than half of the people who answered said that while they allowed the App Store, they wouldn’t want to allow third-party app stores. In their detailed comments, several expressed concern that any policy ruling that forced Apple’s hand might make it harder for admins to block third-party app stores, which would make them very unhappy. Only 21% of respondents said they would be open to the idea of third-party app stores.
Here’s what Tom Bridge of the Mac Admins Podcast had to say about this year’s results:
“It’s no surprise that folks are thrilled with hardware and appreciative of the privacy work Apple continues to do. I love to see that, good feedback for Apple around that.
“Deployment and Software Reliability take a hit this year. Software Update was a disaster, and that is firmly reflected here. Apple had every opportunity to make that a gain this year, but a late mistake in last year’s 12.3 release which went unnoticed til 12.6 meant a lot of updates were extremely confused this year.
“Continued gains in MDM are the result of Apple making big moves for the future. And last but not least, the future is bright. A solid grade on the hopefulness of admins.”
Read on for detailed results from each category, with unvarnished commentary from panel participants.
Kirk McElhearn, longtime Macworld contributor and classical music aficionado, has taken an in-depth look at Apple Music Classical over at TidBITS:
I’ve long complained about the way iTunes, then the Music app and Apple Music, have dealt with classical music. The earliest such articles I can find on Macworld date back to 2005. In Corral your classical music, I wrote, “If you’re a fan of classical music, then you’ve probably, at some point, become frustrated with iTunes and the iPod. Track information from the Web is inconsistent, pieces are difficult to tag and categorize, and imported songs don’t flow seamlessly into one another.”
I’m happy to say that Apple has finally solved many of these problems. It’s a shame that it took so long.
Kirk has written more about dealing with classical music on Apple’s platforms than anybody I know, and I’m glad to hear his experience mostly mirrors mine. But he also talks about a lot of things that I wouldn’t have even thought to look into (how good search actually is, for example), which makes it a solid read if you’re wondering how good this app really is for classical music fans.
The apps we use for taking notes, the iOS 16.4 features (and emoji) we’re excited about, our thoughts on Apple Pay Later and installment payments, and what we hope — and expect — to hear about at Apple’s WWDC.
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference now has a date for 2023: June 5-9. The company’s developer site announced the dates on Wednesday, along with a few more details. As in previous years, the event will be free and online, but like last year there will also be an all-day event for select developers and students at Apple Park, which will involve watching the keynote and State of the Union, along with some meet and greets and other activities. You can request to attend and people will be picked randomly and notified next week, on April 5.
Apple also announced the Swift Student Challenge for 2023, which lets eligible students submit an interactive scene for the chance to win prizes.
Expectations are high for 2023’s WWDC, which is thought to feature the unveiling of Apple’s mixed reality headset, as well as annual updates to the rest of the company’s platforms. Let the countdown begin!
When Apple announced the Apple Watch Ultra, I was especially interested in its introduction of an Action Button, an additional bit of hardware that could be set to trigger just about anything on watchOS. I began to wonder if future regular Apple Watches might get their own Action Buttons, too.
Now I’m starting to wonder if the Action Button might have been a sign of a major new Apple feature to come. What if the Action Button… came to the iPhone? It might happen as soon as this fall.
• Break Passwords out into a standalone app, with an actual fully resizable window (!!), and full, proper UI for most of its features
• Make Passwords a toolbar item in Safari for easy access and to be top-of-mind for the user
• Stick to a basic feature set, but do that well
I use both Apple’s built-in passwords feature and 1Password, but I prefer Apple’s because of its seamless integration. To Cabel’s point, though, it’s not publicized nearly well enough: I’ve tried to nudge many people towards setting up 2FA codes in Apple’s Passwords tool, but anything that starts with telling someone to tap down several levels into Settings tends to make their eyes glaze over.
Unlike Cabel, however, I would like Apple to implement some sort of family sharing feature for Passwords. I share a bunch of logins with my wife, and while I can share them with 1Password, there’s an additional hurdle to getting someone on a third-party app that requires their own account, etc. Especially as we shift more and more to passkeys, where traditional methods of sharing will be impractical, it’s more important that Apple make it easier to share credentials.
It may not have made Apple's self-imposed 2022 deadline, but three months into 2023, the new Apple Classical app is finally taking its bow.
The result of Apple's acquisition of Primephonic back in August 2021, Apple Classical is a bit of a strange beast. It's best thought of as a different window through which you can view Apple Music, as from what I can tell all the tracks here are also available in the standard Apple Music library. And, indeed, it's part and parcel of an Apple Music subscription: no extra cost, just another app.
So why an entirely separate program? Apple Classical is clearly intended to provide a better way to browse, find, and listen to classical (and adjacent) music. That's a welcome addition for many classical music fans, who have long complained about how Apple Music (and its predecessor, iTunes) have handled—or failed to handle1—the genre.
At the root of the issue is that classical music has its own peculiarities that diverge from contemporary music: at the most base level, consider that most classical music isn't performed by the artist who wrote it, given that in many cases they were long dead before the advent of recording technology. Thus listeners may want to look for performances by certain artists…but that's complicated too, given that many are performed by orchestras, which might also mean looking for a specific conductor. That's not even including other oddities, like the arcane cataloguing system of opus numbers.
Having grown up in a household with a classical music aficionado, I was steeped in the genre: Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, Prokofiev—all of these were in regular rotation in my home. Even though I didn't have the same passion for classical music as my father, I know the importance of finding precisely the work you want to listen to. Anybody who's ever asked their HomePod to "play Beethoven" knows that you often end up with a weird selection that's not really what you wanted, and trying to get more specific is often a fool's errand. The question is whether Apple Classical solves this problem, or merely compounds it.
With WWDC (presumably) a couple of months away, we take time to list some of our wishes for iOS 17. There’s also a lot more noise about the forthcoming Apple VR headset, and the entertainment industry and Apple are having communication issues.
What have we learned? This week, it’s that Russia is not happy with iPhones, the iPhone 15 will not be the same as the iPhone 14, and that Apple has reported to Spring Training in the best shape of its life and is ready to play ball.
Jokes that date to the Cold War
The word from the Kremlin this week is that Apple can’t quit Russia, it’s fired! Due to the upcoming Russian elections (gosh, I wonder what the results will be!), the government has banned officials from using iPhones. Their suggestion for what officials should do with them? ”Either throw it away or give it to the children.”
And, if you don’t wipe them, the kids will get their very first lesson in collecting kompromat! Training the next generation for a future in politics: it’s a win-win.
What exactly is Russia’s problem with iPhones, you may ask? Well, the official line is that the ban is “because of concerns that the devices are vulnerable to Western intelligence agencies.”
Really? The smartphone from the company that the FBI tried to strong-arm into creating a back door to is vulnerable to Western intelligence? OK. Surely this doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that Apple stopped selling iPhones in Russia because of the country’s invasion of Ukraine. (Russians can still buy iPhones via parallel importing from other markets without Apple’s consent, but at a greater price and with a longer wait time.)
Apple previously capitulated to Russia by adding a step to the setup process to install apps preferred by the government (apps would be installed by default, but users could individually select to not install apps). But based on the comments above it seems like we’ve gone from detente to just taunt.
Buttoning up the iPhone 15 rumors
iPhone 15 rumors continue to churn like a stomach in an ad for Pepto Bismol. Current rumors suggest the upcoming line of smartphones will feature a new unified volume button and that the mute switch will be replaced by a button.
Depending on who you ask, this is either a godsend that will finally usher in a new era of 100 percent iPhone satisfaction or a devastating reversal in usability akin to removing the thumbs of every iPhone user in the world. (Look, if God did not want me to make such lazy strawmen, then he wouldn’t have made them burn so beautifully.) Whichever the case, I’m sure we can all solve this by arguing in forum threads before anyone has actually held one of the new devices if we just keep at it.
Meanwhile, another rumor has it the iPhone 15 Pro Max will strip the Thinnest Bezel trophy away from Samsung by shaving a gigantic two-thirds of a millimeter off the bezel of its iPhone 14 version. This is assuming you don’t count phones like 2019’s Xiaomi Mix Alpha, which wrapped around the sides of the phone but was considered a “concept smartphone” and sold for about $2,800.
The concept that phone seems to have proved is that, yes, bezels can be too thin if moving them into negative territory makes the phone cost more than twice as much as the most expensive mainstream phone.
Sportsball corner
Friday Night Baseball is back and, as Jason details, it features some changes this year. First, broadcasts will now be limited to Apple TV+ subscribers. This is disappointing, but not surprising, as Apple paid a lot for those rights. Now it’s your turn.
On a happier note, starting this season viewers can choose between listening to the national broadcasters or home team broadcasters. Is this what they call selection bias? Of course, sports rights wouldn’t be sports rights if there weren’t some special licensing deals in there that will put an asterisk on this. Sorry, Rangers and Blue Jays fans.
That’s not all the news this week related to Apple and sports. According to Bloomberg, the company is considering a bid for the rights to stream the English Premier League football games. We in the United States may know the English Premier League better as the league Ted Lasso’s Richmond Greyhounds start out in. And we may know “football” as “English football”, “soccer” or “Falling down dramatically and clutching at your knee.”
If Apple were to secure the rights which are currently held by NBC, it would be ironic because it was NBC securing them that created Ted Lasso in the first place. Jason Sudeikis originally created the character to promote NBC’s coverage before pitching it as a show. The rest is history. Bidding for these rights is expected to be as hot as Jamie Tartt in a calendar shoot, though, so don’t hold your breath waiting for Apple to walk away with it.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
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At that time, our sales were slow enough that we often skimmed incoming orders to learn about who was buying. On September 30, 2003, exactly one year after we opened our virtual doors, an order with an RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America] email address came through. That put a damper on our first anniversary celebrations, as we had full knowledge of the organization’s litigious history. We were naturally concerned that they were aware of our product. Unfortunately, there was nothing for us to do but feel uneasy and await their next move.
The late 90s and early 2000s were an interesting period when it came to Apple and the music industry. The rise of MP3s, CD burning, and peer-to-peer file sharing meant that piracy had gone digital—but many of those technologies could also be used for legal purposes, enabling iTunes and the iPod and creating mix CDs from your own music collection.
As is traditional, industries reacted to the new technologies with fear and tried to stamp them out. Which is why foundational podcast creator and former MTV VJ Adam Curry’s recent podcast interview, quoted by Kafasis, is so fascinating. Curry:
Steve asked: “How do you do your recording?” We didn’t really have any tools to record, there was not much going on at the time. But the Mac had an application called Audio Hijack Pro, and it was great because we could create audio chains with compressors, and replicate a bit of studio work.
Eddy Cue said: “The RIAA wants us to disable Audio Hijack Pro, because with it you could record any sound off of your Mac, any song, anything.” Steve then turned to me and said: “Do you need this to create these podcasts?” I said: “Currently, yes!”. So Steve Jobs told them to get lost.
This worldview was pretty much Apple’s take at the time when it was accused of encouraging piracy: While people might use its technology to violate licenses and break the law, the technology itself had valid, legitimate uses, and therefore Apple wouldn’t limit the utility of its products just because some people would do things with them that groups like the RIAA didn’t like.
Was Steve Jobs well aware that they were enabling piracy when they started the “Rip, Mix, Burn” ad campaign? Of course. Did the iPod make it easy to take songs downloaded from Napster on the go? It sure did. (So much so that at the iPod launch event, it literally gave journalists CDs along with their review iPods so that they wouldn’t be accused of pirating music.)
But Jobs and Apple also saw the bigger picture, and the world is better for it.
This Week In Apple columnist John Moltz joins Jason to talk about the “Rip, Mix, Burn” era of industry panic about piracy, the world of streaming services, and Apple’s new sporting ambitions.
Not too long ago I came the realization that I have a lot of camera equipment, and that I didn’t know where all of it was, or what condition it was in. Like most hobbyist photographers, it all starts with a low-end DSLR… and then flash forward 15 years and not only have you bought many cameras and lenses, but you have inherited even more.
I kept thinking I would track this with a personal, bespoke wiki, or Craft, or Obsidian, as nerds are wont to do, but they didn’t seem to fit the bill. I needed to be able to know not just their details on a page, but details across all of it.
Unfortunately, this meant spreadsheets. I work with really complicated, intricate software all day long, but I almost never do anything with office productivity software that’s more complicated than a 2nd grade book report, so this was admittedly a little humbling to fumble my way through this.
Kieran Healy and Dr. Drang can stop reading now.
The particulars
I needed to be able to sort and process the data in a non-destructive way, that would auto-update as new data was entered, or edited. I needed a solution that was going to be able to be used—not just read—on iOS and my Mac. It should ideally not cost very much, and not nag me to upgrade along the way.
When I posted about my needs on Mastodon, real professionals replied and suggested Google Sheets and AirTable. I immediately eliminated AirTable after going through its pushy account sign-up and intimidating set-up process. If you’re someone that uses AirTable for other things in your life, it’s probably great for the task. But it didn’t seem like a worthy investment of my time to watch a lot of how-to videos on AirTable for this one project.
Google Sheets certainly works on iOS and the Mac, and while I know there are many complaints about Google’s iOS apps, it’s easy to live with it as I’m not doing iOS-centric things that rely on share sheets and multi-app workflows.
At the same time, I tried Apple’s Numbers app, which no one suggested. I’m generally dismissive of Apple’s productivity programs (after ClarisWorks 2.0, that is) because they do weird stuff. I really don’t like the constant desire to show everything in the app as if I’m going to print it.
I’m not going to print it. Ever.
Can’t we have a display mode or something that kills all this extra white space? A mode for people that don’t have “Cyan Cartridge is Low” warnings?
And of course the iOS version on Numbers doesn’t seem to have a “paste and match style” option, so god forbid you only wanted to copy text and not the hot styling of Nikon’s archived spec sheets. When you paste a URL, the iOS clipboard actually includes the PDF object in addition to the URL—and Numbers helpfully decides that I want to embed a PDF in a spreadsheet cell.
I don’t want that. Ever.
Several months ago, when the updated version of Numbers that included pivot table support was released I had no idea what it was or why anyone would use such a thing. Plot twist! I love pivot tables in Numbers, and the feature works well on both my Mac and my iPhone… albeit a little better on the Mac.
With pivot tables I can do exactly what I wanted to do, making little reports that do things like count items in locations, or list which cameras are missing batteries. Or list which cameras are missing entirely! I can see a little list of just what cameras are ready to go on a trip.
I still loathe the printer-friendly, iPhone-unfriendly look of the document, but I couldn’t use Google Sheets because it only supports pivot tables in a desktop web browser. (Now I understand why the iOS-centric people are always annoyed by Google apps! I’m sorry for doubting you.)
How it’s organized
A big data table
In my Numbers document, I have a table that has all of my cameras, their location, battery type, a checkbox for if it has a battery, charger type, if it has a charger, camera type, lens system, film or sensor size, sensor resolution, spec sheet or manual URL.
A report filtered by camera type.
The second table is all of my lenses, with the minimum and maximum focal length, maximum aperture and maximum aperture zoomed (zoom lenses often have a lower maximum aperture at the highest end of their zoom range), mount type, autofocus checkbox, autofocus motor in the lens checkbox, vibration reduction/optical steady shot checkbox for stabilized lenses, and the location of the lens.
From the two tables I’ve been able to generate a pivot table that’s filtered by lens mount (F-Mount), and filters out any prime lenses (maximum focal length value has to be present). I can generate a pivot table of which cameras are missing batteries, and what those batteries are. I can even just count the number of cameras by type, and a grand total. All without doing any destructive operations or copying and pasting my original sheet to do edits on it. It’s all live updating and looks like the same printer-friendly document on my computer and my phone.
My next steps involve inventorying film (Kodak recently raised prices, so I bought up a big batch of film like a lot of other dorks) and adding formulas to do conversions (like focal length for lenses on APS-C sensors). A pivot table can’t do that math, it can just arrange, filter, and summarize.
I’ve also started entering the manufacturers manual or spec sheet URLs for cameras, but now that DPReview is going to shutdown and be wiped from the internet sometime shortly after, I also want to archive their camera and lens reviews for models that I have so I can add those file paths to the table.
All of this work means I no longer have to remember, or search the Internet, for all these little things like filter thread size and chargers. Which is good, since it’s been years since I was tracking one dinky camera—and while I might not be shooting with all of these cameras, they’re all important to me or someone else in my family. I’m glad to have all the data accessible in one place, at last.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
Hannah Miao, Gregory Zuckerman and Ben Eisen reporting for the Wall Street Journal (Apple News) about the last-ditch attempts to save Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) from running out of money:
The Fed needed a test trade to be run before the actual transfer could occur. That took time and the Fed didn’t extend its own daily deadline of 4 p.m. PT for collateral transfers to help SVB. Time ran out on the bankers and SVB couldn’t get the money that day…
The next day, the BNY transfer to the Fed went through, potentially allowing SVB to borrow from the central bank. According to people familiar with the matter, the San Francisco FHLB was still working on its transfer when executives saw an announcement from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.: The regulator had taken over SVB.
[Miao, Zuckerman and Eisen] have the actual, horrifying explanation, which is that the Fed’s computers go to bed at 4 p.m. and you can’t wake them up until the next morning….
I do not actually think that the banking crisis of the last two weeks… all could have been avoided if the Fed had said “hmm, normally we do a test transaction first, but you seem to be in a rush and it’s getting toward closing time so we’ll just skip that and go straight to lending you the money.” SVB’s problems were bigger than the Fed’s 4 p.m. transfer cutoff.
And yet! Man! What the heck! A lot has been written about how SVB was a bank run for a speedier, modern age. Instead of hearing a rumor at the coffee shop and running down to the bank branch to wait on line to withdraw your money, now you can hear a rumor on Twitter or the group chat and use an app to withdraw money instantly. A tech-friendly bank with a highly digitally connected set of depositors can lose 25% of its deposits in hours, which did not seem conceivable in previous eras of bank runs.
Or as Byrne Hobart of The Diff (quoted by Levine) put it, “when the user interface improves faster than the core system, it means customers can act faster than the bank can react.”
Back to Levine:
There will be all sorts of proposals for changes in bank regulation and supervision and deposit insurance and Fed facilities that come out of this crisis. [This] is probably not going to be top of the list: Again, I doubt it would have saved SVB, and I do not have any great technical insights into how it should be improved. But, I don’t know, wouldn’t it be a good idea? Wouldn’t you have more confidence in the banking system, if banks that had lots of assets could get money when they needed it?
It’s disturbing to think that the systems to save banks just don’t run as fast as the systems that have been built to streamline transactions that can lead to bank runs. More disturbing, perhaps, is to realize that this incident might not actually change anything.
The generative AI we’ve found the most compelling, our thoughts on Spatial Audio and surround sound systems, whether we think the game console is dying out, and our social media habits in the wake of the relaunch of Gowalla.
