By Jason Snell

July 28, 2021 3:41 PM PT

Cutting the cord: Apps, savings, and a networking headache

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

I cut the cord this week.

After several years of very slowly inching my way toward the precipice, it all happened in a hurry this summer: A discovery that I preferred to watch shows via Apple TV apps, even if they were also available on my TiVo. The realization that other than “Jeopardy!” and live sports, everything I watched was streaming. Wanting to simplify my TV (and remote control) setup when a TiVo was stuck in the middle of it all.

Finally, I broke down and did the math: I could replace my Xfinity cable TV and internet with AT&T gigabit fiber internet and an over-the-top TV service. And, after swapping a few streaming service freebies (Comcast gave me Peacock, AT&T gives me HBO Max), I’d get faster internet and everything running on the Apple TV—for $65 less every month.

For TV—because, yes, I’m not giving up live sports—I went with Fubo TV. I’ve already got a long, long, long list of ways the Fubo TV app could be improved—and I am going to test drive YouTube TV, which lacks a single channel that would’ve made it my choice over Fubo—but it will serve my baseball and football and “Jeopardy!” needs just fine.

In truth, even after consulting the excellent site Suppose, which lets you compare over-the-top TV services, I was disappointed to find that essentially no service offered all the channels I wanted.¹ However, Fubo offered everything but TBS, which broadcasts baseball playoff games in October. So for one month, I’ll also subscribe to Sling Blue, just to get TBS, and then I’ll turn it off when the playoffs are over. Annoying, but also sort of freeing.

After years of dreaming about fiber being available in my neighborhood, the installation itself was easy. The hard part was adapting my home network to the new fiber gateway. While AT&T’s included Arris router is nifty—the optical terminal is built in, so it’s a single box—it is like every other cable box in wanting to provide firewall, routing, and wi-fi. There was no way the AT&T router’s wi-fi was going to cover my whole house the way that my two Eero boxes do, so I didn’t need its wi-fi. But I was willing to give it a try as my router.

So I switched my Eero into bridge mode, and used the AT&T box’s web interface to set up port forwarding to my server. It all worked pretty well, with one fatal exception: lack of support for an esoteric feature called “hairpin NAT.” I run a server at my house, and want it to be accessible both inside and outside my network. Hairpin NAT is a feature that realizes when you are trying to connect to an internet server (let’s call it snell.zone) that’s inside your network, and routes your outbound request back to the right place. With it, my scripts and widgets that reference snell.zone work everywhere. Without it, they only work outside my home network.

So I decided to go back to the network setup I was using with Comcast’s router—no wi-fi, no routing, just a dumb pass-through to the Eero, which would do all the routing. I set it up using the AT&T router’s clever Passthrough mode, and… everything failed. Couldn’t load a single thing inside the house.

After an hour of pulling my hair out and trying any number of different network configurations, I finally realized what the problem was: While my Eero router was running my entire network and piping it through the AT&T router, it was relying on the AT&T router for a bunch of its network information, including DNS server addresses. While Comcast’s router was happy to tell Eero the addresses of Comcast’s servers, AT&T’s router prefers to list itself as the DNS server of record. The result: all the devices on my network tried to connect to a server that they couldn’t actually see, because the Eero stood in the way. Once I realized this, I entered AT&T’s actual DNS server addresses in Eero’s settings and rebooted, and everything fell into place.

What I’m saying is, networking is dumb.

In any event, now everything is working, our entertainment flows only out of apps on our Apple TV, and things are good. While I’m going to keep my eye on the over-the-top competition, Fubo TV gets the job done—at least well enough to make me confident in calling Comcast today and canceling my account. It’s the end—I’ll miss you most of all, TiVo!—but the moment has been prepared for. I’m ready for the future.

By Jason Snell

July 27, 2021 2:31 PM PT

Last updated August 16, 2023

This is Tim: Apple’s Q3 2021 call with analysts (transcript)

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

Here’s a complete transcript of Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri’s call with financial analysts following Apple’s record third-quarter results.

Continue reading “This is Tim: Apple’s Q3 2021 call with analysts (transcript)”…

By Jason Snell

July 27, 2021 1:47 PM PT

Last updated August 16, 2023

Apple posts $81B quarterly results: Charts

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

Apple posted record third-quarter results on Tuesday, featuring $81 billion in revenue. Here are the charts….

Continue reading “Apple posts $81B quarterly results: Charts”…

By Jason Snell

July 27, 2021 12:27 PM PT

Live Text comes to Intel Macs in macOS Monterey beta 4

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

In a surprise twist, a macOS Monterey feature previously advertised as being available only on M1 Macs will now be available on Intel Macs as well.

The feature, Live Text, uses the Neural Engine on Apple-designed processors to convert text in images into text you can select and copy. But in the just-released fourth beta of macOS Monterey, Live Text has also been enabled on Intel Macs.

My understanding is that on Intel Macs, Apple is using GPU-based processing power to do the analysis of the images. Unlike iPhones and iPads, which are commonly used to take pictures which might immediately need to be analyzed for Live Text, on the Mac there’s a little more leeway for slightly less-than-instantaneous processing of text.

That said, my understanding is that Live Text—on M1 or Intel—is never intended to present any sign that you need to wait while text is being processed. The feature should be identical on both architectures.

It seems likely that this feature was original targeted for both architectures, and then disabled on Intel Macs in early betas because it just wasn’t good enough to release. Its appearance in this beta is perhaps a positive sign that Apple isn’t rushing Intel Macs into obsolescense.

(Live Text also gets my vote for this OS update cycle’s best stealth feature. It doesn’t seem like much when it’s described, but when you use a device with Live Text enabled, it changes how you see and interact with images. It’s instantly useful in numerous contexts.)

By Dan Moren

July 20, 2021 8:36 AM PT

How concerned should you be about Pegasus, the latest iOS spyware?

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

A few big stories in the news over the weekend disclosed the existence of a piece of spyware called Pegasus, developed by NSO Group, which has hacked a number of phones—including iPhones—belonging to journalists, politicians, activists, and so on. It’s frightening stuff, but should you be concerned?

The short answer: probably not? Tech Crunch’s Zack Whittaker linked to a tool that can help you check if your phone was compromised.

I downloaded and tried out the Mobile Verification Toolkit so you don’t have to and, well, it’s definitely not user friendly. I had to install some command line updates via Homebrew, which took a little bit of trial and error after the instructions proved to not be exactly correct for my system, then had to make a decrypted copy of my iPhone backup, plus had to make sure I’d downloaded the correct definitions file to compare it to.

In the end, it popped up warnings about a couple dozen cases where my web browsing in Safari had been redirected, all of which appeared to be innocuous (things like being redirected from strw.rs to starwars.com), and one warning of a “known malicious file” that appeared to be a Crash Reporter preference file.¹

That’s not surprising to me, given that even with the widespread nature of this spyware, since, again, it seems to generally be of concern to those who are high-profile opponents of hostile regimes or companies. The average user is probably not going to be the target of very expensive and resource-intensive attacks like these.

However, it should still be of some concern that spyware now exists which can use previously unknown exploits to compromise a device without requiring users to take any action. That’s a new level of capability that, for obvious reasons, makes it difficult to take steps to protect yourself: you can’t even avoid opening suspicious links, for example.

The exploit was confirmed to work on iOS 14.6; as of this writing, Apple has not yet posted the details of the security updates in iOS 14.7, released yesterday, so it’s unclear whether or not this exploit still works. (One would hope that the timing of stories about it were concurrent with the vulnerability being patched, but it entirely depends on when Apple learned of it.)

Phones remain attractive targets, given the amount of personal data we keep on them, so there’s going to be more and more money and resources poured into finding ways to compromise them. Here’s hoping the companies that make them can keep up.

[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.]

By Jason Snell

July 19, 2021 4:59 PM PT

Coming home to Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

On July 16 Team Alto¹ released Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City on Apple Arcade. It’s a sequel of sorts to Alto’s Odyssey, released three years ago on the App Store.

In both games, you’re a sandsurfer endlessly sliding down mountainsides, doing backflips and grinding on cables and ruins for points while collecting coins and other items hidden along your path. Yes, it’s an “endless runner” of a sort—but what makes it special is its relatively simple mechanic and its gorgeous graphics and music, which end up making the game much more peaceful and calming than you’d expect.

And let me put my cards on the table: Alto’s Odyssey is my favorite iOS game ever.

Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City is the original brought to a new audience via Apple Arcade—but with a new biome, featuring new graphics, music, and challenges. If you’re a newbie to Alto’s Odyssey, you can play the entire game from the beginning and get the whole experience. If you’re a veteran like me, there’s a button you can tap in the app’s settings to import all of your information from Alto’s Odyssey, letting you concentrate on the added content and challenges of the new game.

It’s still great. As a fan of the PlayStation game Journey (available on iOS, by the way), I’m amused by just how many homages to that game are contained within Alto’s Odyssey. The music and graphics in the original game were immaculate, but The Lost City just adds more.

When you arrive at the Lost City biome—which requires you to find ten map fragments scattered across the sands—you’ll see new background images, be able to interact with a few new object types, and of course the music will shift, too. Rather than add on to the old game’s existing level system, Team Alto has also introduced a new set of challenges, which you pick up as you explore. In a new mechanic, you can only “arm” a single challenge at any time, so there’s a single task you are trying to accomplish as you slide, flip, and grind.

And of course, there’s still Zen Mode, which lets you enjoy the sound and sights of this beautiful game without having to worry about scores or the game ending when you crash. I find it therapeutic. I wish more games would embrace the “you can’t lose, we’re just here to have a good time” ethos in more places.

When I completed my final tasks on Alto’s Odyssey, it was a bittersweet ending: I had conquered the game, but it also felt like a goodbye to something I loved. I’ve revisited the game a few times over the last couple of years, usually in Zen mode. Discovering The Lost City has given me a reason to revisit an old favorite, and I’m so glad I did.

And I’m also glad that Apple and Team Alto found a way to bring this game—plus a little bit extra—to a new audience. If you’ve got Apple Arcade, drop everything and get to the sandy slopes of Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City.

By Jason Snell

July 19, 2021 3:13 PM PT

BBEdit 14.0 arrives with Notes and LSP support

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 14.0, a new version with a whole bunch of new features. (Even the oldest software dogs are fully capable of learning new tricks.)

The biggest new feature in BBEdit is Notes, a persistent collection of casual documents. Yes, there are other places you can leave yourself notes—but those places aren’t BBEdit. As a BBEdit user, I frequently find myself with a very large number of untitled documents full of stuff. Notes are the solution, since they’re automatically saved and viewable in a new Notes browser. Just as I was writing this story, I ended up on a phone call and needed to take some notes. Rather than naming and saving the file somewhere or switching to a different app, I just opened a note in BBEdit (where I was already writing) and took notes there.

For programmers, the biggest BBEdit 14 addition is support for the Language Server Protocol, a standard originally developed by Microsoft for Visual Studio Code and now available for pretty much any developer tool out there. Different editors can access a local language server to provide consistent autocompletion, definitions, and documentation. It’s still a bit early days for LSPs, both within BBEdit and without. I used the Python language server Jedi and sometimes it worked flawlessly, but other times it was a bit buggy. My understanding is that many of these language servers are still built with some very specific development tools in mind and that there may be bugs when trying to use them with a tool they didn’t even know about, like BBEdit. But I would be shocked if this wasn’t all working a lot better a few months down the road, now that BBEdit 14 is out in the world.

As someone who has been experimenting with writing code in Python, JavaScript, and PHP, I am intrigued by the LSP features but also am not the best person to judge how well they’re implemented. But I love the idea that BBEdit is trying to play ball with tools that are popularly used in other development tools—and I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to use the feature more in the future.

In the meantime, most of what I edit in BBEdit is in Markdown. Maybe someone will decide it’s time to make a linter/syntax checker for Markdown, designed for BBEdit’s new features.

But there are some new Markdown features, regardless! Dragging an HTML file or an image into BBEdit will now generate appropriately formatted Markdown. Markdown footnotes are now properly syntax colored, for those monsters who put footnotes in their Markdown.¹

Also, a new feature that I inspired makes its debut: BBEdit now lets you attach a script in order to provide control over the text generated when you drop an image file into a BBEdit editing view. In short, I have modified the AppleScript script that I use to upload images to Six Colors so that if I drag an image into my story in BBEdit, the image is automatically resized, uploaded, and the proper HTML is inserted at that point in the document. (It’s magical.)

A BBEdit 14 license is free for users who bought BBEdit this year, $30 for those who bought it last year, $40 for users of older versions, and $50 for brand-new purchasers. And of course, a large swath of BBEdit’s features are available for free without a license.