Apple makes money, releases betas, does not reveal roadmap.
Also: We did a live stream about Apple’s financial results and the audio’s tacked on the end of this episode in case you prefer to hear us talking in podcast, and not live stream, form.
I ran out of ways to summarize Apple’s quarterly results a while ago. When they’re all records, all-time greats, rolling up numbers so big it’s hard for the human brain to quantify them, what can you say? My wife comes home on days Apple releases its quarterly results and asks me, “So, how’s Apple?” And I respond with some variation of, “Apple’s just fine.”
Here’s the news about Apple’s fiscal first quarter of 2022, covering the holiday season of 2021: So many of Apple’s arrows are pointing up that, due to issues with the global supply chain, they’ve run out of arrows.
Tim Cook: Thank you Tejas and good afternoon. Today, we are proud to announce Apple’s biggest quarter ever. Through the busy holiday season, we set an all time revenue record of nearly $124 billion, up 11% from last year, and better than we had expected at the beginning of the quarter. And we are pleased to see that our active install base of devices is now at a new record, with more than 1.8 billion devices. We set all time records for both developed and emerging markets and saw revenue growth across all of our product categories, except for iPad, which we said would be supply constrained. As expected, in the aggregate, we experienced supply constraints that were higher than the September quarter.
Apple’s latest quarterly results are out. And they’re big. It was an all-time revenue record, at $123.9 billion. The company made a record $34.6 billion in profit.
Mac revenue also reached a new all-time high at $10.9 billion, and iPhone revenue also peaked at $71.6 billion. The iPad’s revenue was $7.2 billion, down sequentially and year-over-year, but still among the five best iPad quarters in recent years.
Services kept its upward growth path, setting a new record at $19.5 billion, and Wearables/Home/Accessories likewise set a new record at $14.7 billion.
Helpful charts are appended below. Or check out our video coverage of the results, in which we talk about these very charts, in detail!
This will be the results from Apple’s holiday quarter just gone by, which is usually the company’s largest quarter. Despite expecting some lost sales due to a lack of inventory due to global supply chain issues, Apple suggested it will likely be the company’s single largest quarter ever.
In a break from tradition, Dan and Jason will also be live streaming after the conference call with a tour through the results and what we gleaned from the call. We expect that live stream to begin around 3:30 PT, 6:30 ET.
When you’re automating something, sometimes you run into a roadblock. On iOS, that roadblock is often impassable, though that happens less often now than back in the day. On macOS, there’s usually a way around if you know the tricks.
Yesterday (and I swear this is not going to turn into yet another post about that podcast note script Dan and I keep bashing around) I decided that there was a feature I could more easily implement in Shortcuts… but that meant that I would need to abandon my original AppleScript script and change how I was kicking off my automations by pressing a button on a Stream Deck.
The current Stream Deck plugin for Shortcuts doesn’t let you pass input on to the Shortcut, which is how I pass text to my note script. So I had to find another way. I ended up using the Run OSA Script Stream Deck plugin to activate my shortcut… via AppleScript.
This is what I mean by getting around roadblocks.
One of the many ways you can activate Shortcuts on the Mac involves using a system app provided by Apple called Shortcuts Events. Shortcuts Events is completely invisible, and always available. It lets you run shortcuts from any AppleScript script, without launching the Shortcuts app.
So I wired my Stream Deck button up to this one-line AppleScript script:
tell application "Shortcuts Events" to run the shortcut named "Podcast Note" with input "cough"
Would it have been simpler if the Shortcuts plugin for Stream Deck supported this natively? Sure. And it probably will, eventually. But for now, there’s a workaround.
Similarly, if I had wanted to control Shortcuts from the Terminal, I could do it there, too. In macOS Monterey, Apple provides a command called shortcuts that lets you list and run shortcuts. This is another way around a roadblock.
There’s one catch with shortcuts, though—its -i flag to supply input only accepts files, not text. So this command will fail:
shortcuts run "Podcast Note" -i "test"
That’s kind of a bummer. I don’t want to save text to a file and then attach it, I just want to pass my text in the same command.
But it turns out you can pass text to shortcuts — you just need to use the <<< operator (which I was informed about by Dr. Drang, with my memory jogged a lot later by John Gruber) to feed input right into the shortcuts command.
Which means that, if I had wanted to, I could have wired up my Stream Deck button with this one-line AppleScript script:
do shell script "shortcuts run 'Podcast Note' <<< 'test'"
Among the roadblocks modern Mac users face are apps, like my Stream Deck plugins, that only offer a single pathway out—whether it’s AppleScript or shell script or something else. But if that pathway will let you run an AppleScript script or a command-line command, you can run a Shortcut from there.2
And, conversely, if you’re using a Mac app that only supports Shortcuts, you can use that path to execute AppleScript scripts or command-line scripts. (And yes, you can run AppleScript scripts from the Terminal too, using the osascript command.)
What I’m saying is, no matter what task you’re trying to perform, in macOS Monterey there are many paths. As long as there’s some way to run something, you can probably get to everything else. Yes, it might be ridiculous to run an AppleScript script that runs a Shortcut that runs a command-line command… but if it helps you do your job, who cares?
Okay, not exactly. It appends a newline to the end of the input, which the shortcut has been altered to detect and remove. ↩
In fact, just yesterday I discovered that in order to use a Keyboard Maestro variable inside an AppleScript script, I needed to script Keyboard Maestro itself from within AppleScript! Ridiculously recursive. ↩
How Apple should address AirTag misuse, the techniques we use for cleaning out our inbox, whether Twitter’s “Close Friends” feature interests us, and our applications for a smart foot pedal.
Rogue Amoeba has announced that my favorite audio utility, Audio Hijack, is getting a huge update:
Perhaps the single most notable change, however, is something making a return from years back: scripting support. In the years since Audio Hijack Pro 2 was replaced by Audio Hijack 3, we’ve never stopped getting requests for some type of scripting to make a return. After much research and experimentation, we’ll soon be providing a from-the-ground-up JavaScript-based scripting system, as well as Shortcuts support.
I’ve been sworn to secrecy on this for a while, but this is the start of something really great for people who use Audio Hijack. JavaScript scripting plus Shortcuts? Can’t wait.
Netflix’s latest quarterly report makes us wonder: Is it a tech company or an entertainment company? Julia experiences live sports streaming success—and failure. HBO Max takes a victory lap. And why does Showtime still exist? Plus, your letters!
Most of Apple’s software is proprietary. Some of it, though, is based on open-source projects. WebKit, which powers Safari, is an open-source project. Which means that Apple is not the only source of contributions to the code that powers Apple’s web browser. Indeed, the entire web development community can contribute WebKit code that can be integrated into the core of WebKit. Many (most?) other browser engines are similarly open-sourced.
Which led to the open-source consultancy Igalia creating an experiment called Open Prioritization, which let members of the community to crowdfund features they’d like to see added to prominent browser engines like WebKit, Chrome, and Firefox. (Igalia already did this work for paying clients, by the way—deep-pocketed companies that want a particular feature added to all the browser engines can, and do, pay developers to get it done. What was different here was the crowdfunding and crowdsourcing of the priority list.)
Unfortunately, this led to some people in the web-development community to complain that Apple, the richest company in the world, was relying on crowdfunding in order to implement features in its web browser. Funny, right? Except, as Meyer1 writes:
The addition of :focus-visible to WebKit was lead by the community, done by Igalia, and contributed to WebKit without any involvement from Apple except in the sense of their reviewing patches and accepting the contributions. Many of us are mad at Apple for a lot of good reasons, but please don’t let the process of venting that anger tar the goals and achievements of Open Prioritization. The future browser-feature priority you save may be your own.
So let me decode this: Some people in the web development community have different priorities than Apple does. And it makes them grumpy. Because they think that there’s only one correct priority list—theirs. And when one of their priorities is crowdfunded into existence, because Apple had a different priority list, their reaction is not delight at finally getting a much-desired feature, but outrage. The issue isn’t the thing getting done, not really. It’s Apple choosing to not put its vast corporate resources behind their personal priority list.
Meyer continues:
This is also why I’m not getting into Apple’s funding levels and priorities for WebKit and the web. Yes, there is much Apple-the-company can be criticized about, and personally, I am one of the biggest fans browser-engine diversity ever had, but that is a different conversation. Even if you could somehow wave a magic wand and open all platforms everywhere to engine diversity, and simultaneously cause a thousand browsers to bloom, we would still have the same basic problem. Open Prioritization would still need to exist.
WebKit is an open source project w/ many contributors. Igalia is one – they work on all the browser engines. They crowdfunded a feature, and included the other browsers in their crowdfunding. We didn’t ask them to do it, and can hardly ask them not to.
Their attempt to explore new funding models shouldn’t be taken as a pretext for cheap dunks on Apple.
That said, Apple is in fact looking to spend more on WebKit directly. If anyone sincerely wants to help with that, please help spread the word that we are hiring!
I sure wish I could crowdfund features that Apple doesn’t care about in my favorite apps and have Apple add them to its code base! But only in very particular circumstances—when there’s an open-source project at the core—can it happen. And yet when it happened in this case, the reaction in some quarters was to complain. Why am I not surprised?
As Eric Meyer discloses in his post, he works for Igalia but wasn’t involved in this particular project. ↩
Myke and Jason discuss the mysteries of Apple’s car project, and express confusion about Apple’s 2022 product release schedule. And at last, France makes a big box-related move.
Communication has always driven technology forward. From the telegraph to the telephone to the internet, it’s regularly been one of the killer apps for every technological development of the last century-plus. And Apple’s devices are no exception to that. When Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone, he described it as a revolutionary mobile phone, but he also called the device that would go on to dominate Apple’s business was as a “breakthrough Internet-communication device.”
Fifteen years later, we use the iPhone to talk with others in a variety of ways, of which the phone capability may ironically be the least. But while Apple’s spent a lot of time investing in the communications powers of its platforms, it has a tendency to let those technologies languish once it’s rolled them out.
As Apple potentially preps a headset device for an announcement later this year, one of the key areas it’s reportedly looking to concentrate on is also communication. Might this signal a renewed interest in the company’s investment in this category? If so, here are a few ways that Apple could improve its current communications options.
This post is a basic who-what-why primer on the controversy involving new 5G wireless networks, and airline operations at major U.S. airports. It’s not meant to be conclusive but instead an introduction, with links to more detailed discussions.
In short, new 5G radio bands potentially conflict with critical flight-safety radio bands, and U.S. regulators have done a comparatively bad job of figuring out the rules. It’s more complicated than that, though—read Fallows for lots of great info and links.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
Kolide believes that the key to unlocking a new class of security detection, compliance, and threat remediation is the “average” person. So do the hundreds of organizations that send important security notifications to employees from Kolide’s Slack app.
Kolide knows that organizations can dramatically lower the risks they face with a structured, message-based approach. More importantly, they’ll be able to engage end-users to fix nuanced problems that can’t be automated.
Kolide’s “Honest Security” is part guide, part manifesto. It’s a user-first approach to security and IT compliance. Kolide doesn’t like the current trends toward human-hostile security and device management. That’s why you should check out Kolide today.
January 21, 2022
When to repair and when to retire old tech, networking adventures, and green bubbles.
With the advent of Shortcuts on macOS, automation on the Mac has become more accessible than ever. There is no part of our workflows that we can’t automate and thus there is no part of our workflows that we cannot overautomate.
While developing the Podcast Note shortcut that Jason and I collaborated on, I ran into a dilemma. I had just recently adjusted all my Audio Hijack sessions, where I maintain separate instances for most of my regular shows, to save audio files within corresponding subfolders in my Podcasts folder.1 (The impetus was to get those hefty files off my Desktop, which is now synced via iCloud. No need to have several hundred megabytes uploaded to the cloud only to be removed within the hour.)
But that made my Podcast Note shortcut tricky, because it assumes the files it’s looking for will be in a single folder, not strewn through any of several subfolders.
There were a few different ways this could have been solved—I’m sure I could have adjusted the Podcast Note shortcut to search through all the subfolders and find the most recently modified file, for example, but there’s a risk of error, and it feels like at that point I’ve adjusted it to be too specific to my workflow.
So the answer, for the moment, was a combination of adjusting my current workflow and, you guessed it, building another automation.
I started off by creating an In Progress subfolder in my Podcasts folder, and adjusting all of my Audio Hijack sessions to put the recording files there. And while I could just collect those files at the end of a recording session and put them in the appropriate show-related subfolder, that sure seemed like a job automation could handle.
At first, I figured that Noodlesoft’s Hazel might be the right tool for this task, since it excels at watching folders and then dealing with files. But after playing around with it for a while, I couldn’t quite get it to handle all the correct conditions without creating multiple rules, and that quickly got out of hand.
But, while perusing the menu of actions available, I noticed the most recent versions of Hazel have added the ability to run a shortcut as the action part of a rule.
Back to Shortcuts we go!
In Shortcuts, I created a new Podcast Sorter workflow, in which it looks in the In Progress folder for audio files that haven’t been modified in the last minute (to avoid moving any files that are part of a current recording), then grabs an MP3 file from that files (all my sessions save audio from my mics and remote ends as WAVs, but record the whole shebang as an MP3 for convenience).
Here’s where I had to make another adjustment to my workflow. In order to have the file identified as part of a specific show, I had to alter my Audio Hijack sessions to use the name of the show as the first part of that MP3 file. Fortunately, Hijack allows you to use tokens representing the name of your session in your file name, so I just made sure that all my sessions were named consistently with the the subfolders in my Podcasts directory.
So now the shortcut can grab the first part of the MP3 name and check it against all the subfolders in my Podcasts directory to find the correct place for it to live. If it finds a match, it creates a new subfolder and moves all the files it found way back in the first step. (This ought to include any notes files created by the Podcast Note workflow as well.) If it doesn’t find a matching folder, it drops a subfolder called “Recording” appended with the current date into a generic Miscellaneous folder.
The one thing I wanted to do that I couldn’t quite make happen was use the current episode number of the shows I host. So, for example, if it were the latest episode of Clockwise, it would ideally create the subfolder as “Clockwise 435.” I could look for the most recently modified subfolder and pull the number out of the name, but that would only work in certain cases, which would mean more filtering on the Shortcuts end. For now, I’ve just named the folders the show and the current date, which I can edit later at my leisure, but I may go back to this in the future.
I still have to have the Shortcut itself triggered by Hazel, since Shortcuts on macOS doesn’t have any automation options, as on iOS.2 In this case, that’s by having Hazel watch the folder for files not modified in the last minute, then running the Podcast Sorter shortcut.
Hazel is still needed to have the shortcut run automatically.
If anybody’s interested, I’ve provided the shortcut here, though it’s so specific to my setup that I’m not sure it will be of use to others as is. As always, if you’ve got suggestions or ideas, let me know!
I.e. Clockwise recordings go into Podcasts/Clockwise. ↩
Even iOS doesn’t have an option to run Shortcuts at automatic intervals, for obvious reasons. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
The decommissioned weather station, with cloudy solar panel, spiderwebbed shield, and mossy anemometer.
It’s rare that a piece of technology lasts so long and serves you so well that it’s a big occasion when you finally decommission it. But that’s what happened earlier this month when, in a quiet ceremony, my weather station was retired.
Your correspondent installing the Vantage Pro in August 2004.
It certainly had earned its retirement. I installed it and several other weather stations in August of 2004 for a story in Macworld. I liked the Davis Vantage Pro so much that I sent Davis a check and kept it running.
Seventeen years is a long time when it comes to computer-related technology. When I first hooked up the weather station, it communicated wirelessly to a receiver that could be attached to a Mac via a serial cable and a USB-to-serial converter box. A Java app on the Mac logged the data and generated a web page.
As you might expect, things evolved over time. Davis’s Java app was awful and ultimately deprecated, but I replaced it with WeatherCat from Trixology, which I still use today. Davis eventually created an add-on product for the Vantage console that let me drop the USB connection and replace it with an Ethernet-connected logger that uploaded data to both WeatherCat and Davis’s own cloud-based logging service.
Even a device designed to live outside can take some body blows over 17 years. I had to replace the rain gauge a few years ago and disassemble the entire thing several times to clean out detritus and spider webs. At several points I thought it was on its last legs, and finally this winter, some of its sensors just started going dead for long stretches of time.
Your correspondent, with much lighter hair and a new weather station.
I decided it was time. And so the weather station, adorned with some moss that had grown on it over the years, came off the pole mounted on the back of my house.
Though I considered buying a Netatmo station, which seems to be the best “starter” home weather station on the market, I decided that I had to reward Davis for the fact that it made a weather station that was installed when my son was a newborn and removed as he was about to enter his final semester in high school. I bought a Davis Vantage Vue, mounted it on the very same pole the old station had been on, connected it to WeatherCat, and the data just kept on rolling in.
(I bought the Vantage Vue, which is several hundred dollars cheaper than the direct successor to my old weather station, mostly because of the price. It’s a simpler design, and while it lacks a few of the sensors of the Vantage Pro, it’s a much better value. My old weather station arrived a few years before the Vantage Vue was introduced. If you’re considering a Vantage Vue, I’d recommend the WeatherLink Live Bundle, which includes the weather station as well as a receiver that directly connects to the Internet.)
No, having a weather station isn’t for everyone, but I love it. The current temperature appears on a Lametric Time in my living room, in my Mac menu bar, in a shortcut on my Apple Watch, in a widget on my iOS devices, and complete historical data and charts—recently augmented by a bunch of python scripts I wrote to parse WeatherCat’s data file directly—live on my home web server. I love it.
So thank you for your service, old moss-encrusted, spiderwebbed Vantage Pro. And welcome to the new Vantage Vue. Long may you measure.
Apple has tapped a new head of PR: longtime company spokesperson Kristin Huguet. She’ll replace Stella Low, former communications chief at networking giant Cisco, who joined Apple in May of 2021.
It’s almost as if Apple’s corporate culture is so very particular that hiring a top-level person from outside the company is rarely a good idea.
