John takes a foray into smart home automation. Dan wonders about Apple’s rumored headset, and special guest James Thomson takes us to programming school.
Disney+ came out of the gate strong, but its growth is waning. What does it need to do to reach a broader audience? It’s all about the ‘Hamiltons.’ Also, ViacomCBS pulls the rug out from underneath international Star Trek fans.
Our computer speaker setups, the latest apps we’ve installed, whether we’re experiencing NFT FOMO, and the smart home gadgets we’d like to get this holiday season.
A year ago this week the era of Apple silicon truly began, as the first reviews of M1 Macs arrived, followed shortly thereafter by M1 Macs arriving in Apple Stores and in the hands of Mac users everywhere.
We had hope that the future would be brighter with Apple-designed processors, but that optimism was tempered by Apple’s recent Mac missteps. There were also a lot of questions about a processor that had only really seen success in iPhones and iPads. Would there be unexpected pitfalls of abandoning Intel? Could Apple pull off its latest Mac chip transition with the same skill that it showed during the two previous transitions?
Twelve months later, the answers are much clear: We’re in the brightest timeline.
Available first for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 lineups, and soon to be followed by Mac computers featuring M1 chips, Self Service Repair will be available early next year in the US and expand to additional countries throughout 2022. Customers join more than 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers (AASPs) and 2,800 Independent Repair Providers who have access to these parts, tools, and manuals.
Essentially, this will give end users the same access that Apple Authorized Service Providers get in terms of instructions, tools, and parts. Initially, this will involve the parts that are most commonly repaired: screens, batteries, and cameras.
In a nice move, Apple says that if you return the part you’re replacing for the company to recycle, you’ll get a credit towards your purchase.
Apple does emphasize that this is really aimed at folks with the technical know-how to replace their own product.
One chief impetus for this is no doubt the growing push for “Right to Repair” legislation across the U.S. (my home state of Massachusetts having been an early adopter of this movement).
Of course, this doesn’t mean that Apple’s products will necessarily become any easier to repair. iFixit—a longtime proponent of Right to Repair legislation—and others have long provided detailed teardowns Apple products, and while there has been some improvement in places, don’t expect Apple to let you, say, replace your own RAM (especially given that its now basically part of the system on a chip package).
At an investor conference in New York, Qualcomm executives said they expect to supply only 20% of Apple’s modem chips by the launch of the iPhone in 2023. Qualcomm Chief Financial Officer Akash Palkhiwala expects Apple to make up a “low single-digit” percentage of the company’s chip sales by the end of fiscal 2024.
We learned back in 2019 that Apple was buying Intel’s modem business and settling its lawsuits with Qualcomm. Clearly the next step was for Apple’s silicon team to build its own cellular chips—the only question was when.
Sounds like the answer is 2023—or maybe 2022, it’s hard to say. Apple sells older iPhones for a while, so Qualcomm chips will be in Apple products for quite some time to come. Does Qualcomm’s 20% figure (dropping throughout 2024) mean they’ll still own a segment of Apple’s business, or is that just referring to older models? And what exactly does “by the launch of the iPhone in 2023” mean? Fiscal years, extrapolations, it’s all a little murky.
But nobody knows better than Qualcomm how many chip orders it’s gotten from Apple for 2023, and the answer seems to be “not many.” The era of Apple-built cellular radios is coming. If it doesn’t begin next year, it will certainly be in full swing two years from now.
It’s been five years since Apple announced the TV app—auspiciously on the same day it unveiled the first-generation Touch Bar MacBook Pros. A year earlier, Tim Cook first declared that “the future of TV is apps,” but in short order Apple realized that the future wasn’t hunting for different TV shows and movies across a half-dozen different apps, all with completely different navigation experiences.
So in came the TV app. Apple was so confident about it, the company changed the behavior of its own remote control so that the home-screen button no longer went to a home screen full of apps, and instead just launched the TV app.
Unfortunately, the TV app still hasn’t replaced the home screen—in part because it still doesn’t represent all the content that is available on Apple’s devices. Some wheeling and dealing brought Amazon’s Prime Video app into the fold, but Netflix remains separate—probably forever. (Netflix knows that its subscribers will open up its app to browse and watch something, and sees only disadvantages in mixing its content in with other services and providing Apple with valuable viewing data.)
The TV app experience is also subpar. It’s largely presenting links to other apps, meaning the other apps need to properly handle your login status and play back video. I still periodically run into dead-ends, where an app just dumps me onto its home screen rather than playing what I selected. But more often than not, you’ll eventually get to the video you selected, after your TV flickers and makes you choose a user profile (because most of these apps don’t integrate with tvOS’s user profiles system).
There are also occasions where these linkages just completely break. Recently, HBO Max stopped being integrated with my TV app and wouldn’t display anything in the Up Next area, or show any suggestions. It turns out that HBO Max had been disabled in Settings, but I don’t recall doing that. It seems to have just happened. And what’s worse, I only figured this out by digging down several levels in the Settings app. (It’s also a completely different path from how the same authorization handled on iOS.)
Speaking of inconsistencies, the TV app provides information about suggested programming based on what apps you have installed on your device. If you have apps on one device and not another, the TV app will make different suggestions.
Then there’s the inconsistency of video playback across apps. Apple’s fancy jog-wheel-like ring on the new Apple TV remote hasn’t been adopted by most of Apple TV apps five months after it was made available. The TV App has unified content on the Apple TV, sort of, but playing back, pausing, and scrubbing through your video will be different on almost every app.
To get around a lot of these app issues, Apple took a page out of Amazon’s playbook and announced Apple TV Channels in 2019. (“The future of TV is one app!” Tim Cook didn’t declare.) A provider could elect to not build an app at all, and instead supply Apple with video and data that would populate the TV app for anyone subscribed. All payment processing and everything else would be handled by Apple. This is theoretically a way to offer a better experience to subscribers if the content provider—let’s say Paramount+ (née CBS All Access)—happens to be pretty terrible at building apps, and isn’t really a destination for browsing.
It’s not a bad idea, but Apple TV Channels hasn’t replaced apps. Every content provider with an Apple TV Channels subscription still maintains a separate app, and HBO abandoned ship when it launched HBO Max. Also if you choose to use an app, you’ll still see offers to subscribe via Channels inside of the TV app alongside the material you already have access to. To Apple, the app and the channel are separate products.
Despite swimming in an ocean of data, the TV app’s suggestions are often for things that are for a broad audience rather than being targeted to individual tastes—and often feature content you’ve already watched. This is like opening up a TV Guide, or a newspaper, not like a 21st century app for managing your TV viewing experience.
That brings us to the one Apple TV Channel that has some, shall we say, special privileges: Apple TV+. Apple’s own streaming service was announced at the same event as Apple TV Channels. I mentioned earlier that the TV app is very sensitive about what you do and don’t have installed. But after my Apple TV+ subscription lapsed the other day, more than half of the TV app is still guiding me toward content available on Apple’s service.
After five years, it’s a letdown to have this universal menu of offerings not be universal, not accurately represent what’s available to the user, provide links to inconsistent and unreliable apps, and be skewed by promotion of for Apple TV+. It’s enough to make you wonder why any video provider would want to participate in an app that buries its best content under a giant carousel of buttons devoted to promoting “The Line,” coming November 19 to Apple TV+.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
Apple’s done releasing products for the year, but that hasn’t stopped the company from revising a child-protection feature, trying to avoid letting developers add links to their apps, launching a new service targeted at small businesses, and welcoming a new Netflix game catalog to the App Store. If you like that sort of thing.
It seems that Apple has quietly added a new tool in macOS Monterey for measuring your device’s Internet connectivity quality. You can simply call the executable networkQuality, which executes the following tests:
Upload/download flows, this seems to be the number of test packets used for the responsiveness tests
Upload/download responsiveness measured in Roundtrips Per Minute (RPM), which according to Apple, is the number of sequential round-trips, or transactions, a network can do in one minute under normal working conditions
As Petrov points out, this is pretty similar to speed tests available from Fast.com or Speedtest.net, but it is useful to have access to it on the command line—plus there are some advantages to the fact that the Monterey tool by default tests upload and download simultaneously, as well as providing you with a qualitative assessment of your connection. Another handy tool for your kit.
One of Apple’s best qualities is the time and energy it spends on pushing the envelope of technology. In recent years, it’s debuted impressive camera features, world-class tablets, amazing processors, and much much more.
But one challenge with continually moving the state of the art forward is that sometimes it comes at the expense of making sure the technology that’s already here works as well as it can. After all, if you have to add a dozen new features in a year, that could mean taking away from work enhancing reliability, and squashing bugs in existing features.
We’ve all encountered a slew of problems—some simple (if ridiculous) to fix, others are maddeningly difficult to troubleshoot. As our devices get more and more complex, it’s all too easy for some of those problems to persist for years. And though the best part of the Apple experience has long been “it just works,” the question is…what happens when it doesn’t?
Being able to control your lights from your devices or enjoy audio in every room are great goals for a smart home, but smart tech isn’t just about the things you can do, but what your smart home can do for you.
That’s one reason I’ve been experimenting with smart home sensors over the last few years. At the moment, my setup is still pretty limited—I haven’t yet delved into water leak sensors or door sensors—but I have invested pretty heavily in temperature sensors, which I’ve deployed in several places in the house. More often than not, this is just for my own edification, but there are also a few instances where there are specific usage cases.
First off, when I installed a new furnace in the house last year, I had an ecobee3 lite smart thermostat put in too. It’s a huge upgrade over my old apartment’s thermostat, which was nothing more than a temperature dial with a few opaque buttons on it and could only be programmed (in a rather complex fashion) from the furnace unit itself.
The ecobee, by comparison, has a great display that lets you see and adjust the temperature, features a powerful app, and plays nicely with HomeKit. But it doesn’t surmount all challenges. For example, our thermostat is located in our dining room, which is not a place that we spend a lot of time. It’s also a room with a lot of exterior wall (which probably isn’t very well insulated, given the age of the house) and several windows.
As a result, using that room as a proxy for measuring the temperature throughout the house is less than ideal. There’s nothing new there; it’s an age-old problem of thermostats. Fortunately, the ecobee system has the option to extend its reach with satellite SmartSensors1 that you can place in other rooms in your home. I bought a pack of two these little battery-powered gadgets, which not only measure temperature but can also detect whether or not a room is occupied. One has been placed in our bedroom, to help adjust the temperature at night, and another in my office, which is where I spend a lot of the day where I’m at home. Using the ecobee app, you can configure which sensors it listens to at which times of day. So, for example, I can tell it to only look at our bedroom sensor past 10pm, and to not fire up the heat based on the dining room.
The ecobee SmartSensor (and some friends).
In addition to a SmartSensor, the bedroom also has an Eve Degree, which I mainly like because it allows me to quickly see the temperature at a glance, without having to check my phone, and also because it logs historical data, so I can look up what the temperature was overnight—handy if I want to tweak the thermostat behavior.2
The Eve Degree acutally shows you the temperature (or humidity).
We also keep an Eve Degree in our basement, which has proved to be a bit on the damper side. While I don’t specifically have it hooked up to our dehumidifier (which has its own internal sensor), it’s again useful at a glance to tell what the current humidity of the basement is, and to log it over time.
Netatmo’s indoor module is out of the way in our living room.
In addition, I’ve got my Netatmo weather sensor, which I’ve written about before. Its indoor unit lives in our living room, helping monitor not only temperature and humidity but also air quality as well. (However, it only measures CO2 and uses that as a proxy for overall quality based on its assessment of ventilation, which is possibly helpful, but certainly incomplete.) Meanwhile, its outdoor unit hangs on the shed in the backyard, where it measures temperature and humidity.3
Finally, I have an older Philips Hue Motion sensor in our upstairs hall, which can also track temperature and light level. I haven’t figured out a great usage for this yet—originally I wanted to use it to activate a smart bulb in the nearby sconce if someone has to get up at night, but that proved to be more complex than simply buying a cheap light-sensing nightlight that plugs in to the wall.
There are a few other sensors on my horizon: I’d like to sub out one of the Eve Degrees for the Eve Room module, which measures indoor air quality (and actually can check levels of things like VOCs), and I’m intrigued about the Eve Weather, which is basically the successor to the Degree, but with Thread built in as well.
As interesting as I found all of the information that my sensors gather, at the moment it feels more academic than actionable. The Home app has gotten better about surfacing these details, and I do appreciate being able to ask Siri what temperature it is in specific rooms, but it would be cool if Home could provide some more insights, like, say, generating a real-time heat map of my home using all this combined information. But for the moment, I suppose I’ll have to be okay with this merely satisfying my curiosity and desire for data.
Usually $100 for a pack of two, but I managed to snag a deal for two at $50, which was well worth it. ↩
In theory I could use this in a HomeKit automation to control the thermostat, but I prefer staying in the ecobee ecosystem, for simplicity’s sake. ↩
While I appreciate having the temperature in the backyard show up in the Home app’s summary, I wish it gave an option not to have the outdoor tempearture included in the overview of the entire home. (Or was smart enough to separate it out, realizing that it’s not in the house.) ↩
[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.]
Delightful video from the Wall Street Journal‘s Joanna Stern about trying to spend 24 hours in the metaverse.1 My eyes hurt just from watching.
Long story short: the metaverse is a ways from being a place most people are going to spend any time, but it’s quickly heating up as a battleground for tech companies. Expect to see a lot more about it in the next year.
Left to right: Kobo Libra 2, 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite, Kobo Sage.
I love e-readers, which explains why I write about them a lot. Earlier this year, I abandoned my Kindles and took up with a Kobo Libra H2O, and that’s been a pleasurable experience.
But change is coming to the e-reader world this fall, in the form of three brand-new readers. From upstart challenger Rakuten Kobo come the Kobo Sage and the Kobo Libra 2. And from the big dog, Amazon, comes the 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite.
They’re more different than you might think. I’ve read books on all three over the last few weeks. (So many books!) Here’s my complete review.
Advances in e-reader tech
USB-C, ahoy!
All of these devices have adopted more advanced technology than previous e-readers. They’ve got the latest E Ink screens, which look great. They’ve got faster processors, which makes a noticeable difference in terms of reducing lag when you turn pages, especially if you need to quickly flip back several pages. (And they’re all waterproof, of course, because you may want to read at the pool or in the bath.)
Though I never, ever use them, Amazon added audiobook support for Kindles a while back. With this round of updates, Kobo has matched them. You can connect Bluetooth audio devices to a Kobo reader and play back audiobooks. (I’d recommend you just use your phone or iPad.)
And most importantly, all of them use USB-C for power and data connections, rather than the old “standard” of micro USB. That alone would be reason enough to rejoice.
As our first 5,000 finished Playdate units arrived at our warehouse in California for 2021, we began to test a few of them. We quickly became concerned that some of them weren’t giving us the battery life we expected. Playdate’s battery is designed to last a very long time, and always be ready for you, even if not used for a while. But that was not the case: in fact, we found a number of units with batteries so drained, Playdate wouldn’t power on at all — and couldn’t be charged. That’s a battery worst-case scenario.
This quickly turned into a months-long, all-hands-on-deck research stress-ball, and we halted production at the factory.
Moreover, it turns out that the processors the device uses were backed ordered for two years, so Panic decided to make a change for later units that would allow them to use a similar chip that’s more easily available.
At least there is some good news: the public beta of the Playdate’s web-based game development tool will arrive in January 2022, with the full SDK available in February.
I’ve been looking forward to the Playdate since even before I got to try out a test unit a couple years ago at WWDC. It’s a bummer that it won’t arrive until next year at some point, but such is the way of pretty much all hardware at this point.
But of course, we now live in the era of Shortcuts on the Mac, and prompted by my Upgrade podcast co-host Myke Hurley, I considered whether I could rebuild the Template Gun in Shortcuts on the Mac. The answer is yes—I constructed a new version of Template Gun that never once resorts to AppleScript to do its job.
Here’s a guided tour through all 54 actions that make up the shortcut, which you can get for yourself here.
Our thoughts on Twitter’s new subscription service, the keyboards we’re using, how we feel about smart locks, and some thoughts on Apple’s new Communication Safety features for Messages.
With the removal of the Touch Bar from top-of-the-line MacBook Pro models-and make no mistake, the grim reaper is coming for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, too-Apple’s era of experimentation with the keyboard is over. Out with 2015’s “butterfly” keyboard, out with 2016’s Touch Bar, in with the Magic Keyboard and a row of full-height function keys.
For some reason, in the middle of the 2010s, Apple decided it was ready to reinvent how keyboards on laptops work. It was a bad decision that the company has spent years trying to fix. Of all the innovations from that period, the only one that remains intact is the Touch ID sensor on the power button. The rest of the changes are just a bad memory. So now what?
