There may not be new iPads, but if you’re in the market for an Apple Pencil, well, it’s your lucky day. Apple took the wraps off its new stylus, the most affordable model yet, which replaces the Lightning port with a USB-C option.
This pencil is clearly designed for use with the tenth-generation iPad: while it attaches magnetically to the long edge of the iPad for storage, it still charges via a physical port. Unlike the old Lightning model, which had a removable (and easily lost) cap hiding its charging and pairing connector, the new Apple Pencil features an innovative sliding design that reveals a USB-C port into which you can plug a cable (which, naturally, is not included). Its design is otherwise very similar to the second-generation Pencil.
At $79, this Pencil is cheaper than both the first-generation model at $99 and the second-generation model at $129. But that’s because it doesn’t have all the features of either of them: it lacks the pressure sensitivity of either of the previous models, as well as the double-tap controls, wireless pairing and charging, and free engraving of the second-generation. However, the new Pencil does support the “hover” feature on M2 iPad Pro models.
Apple’s very clear about not calling this the “third-generation” Apple Pencil, rather pitching it as part of a more complete Apple Pencil lineup. The new model works with any iPad equipped with a USB-C port. It also appears that though rumors suggested a new Apple Pencil might use a magnetic system for attaching replacement tips, that this version uses the same tips as previous models.
Education customers can get the new Pencil at a mild discount of $69. Apple’s also offering a $9 USB-C to Apple Pencil Adapter for owners of the first-generation model who want to keep using it.
The new Apple Pencil will be available starting in early November.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
Will Apple introduce new iPads this month? A new Apple Pencil? Nothing at all? We grapple with some conflicting rumors. Also, Jason gives up on the iPad-only lifestyle and reviews a supremely weird E-Ink device (that he actually kind of likes).
This week Piper Sandler takes on the most harrowing task of all while Google makes it rain on Cupertino. And if you’re waiting to buy the latest Apple kit this year, your wait will soon be over.
The scariest time of year
Say, how are the kids these days? Has anyone checked on them? Are the kids… all right?
Well, I kind of meant more emotionally. But I guess that works, too. It’s certainly more pertinent to this column.
This is, of course, Piper Sandler’s annual survey of teens across America, and hats off to them for doing this every year because teens are frightening. You ever see a group of them at the mall?
As a native Safari extension, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – letting you experience a faster, cleaner and more secure experience across all your devices.
Thus was the beginning of my pain. While I had suffered from iCloud Drive synchronization problems in the past, I’d never had such a sustained and resistant issue as over the last five months. That’s right—five months. Worst of all? The problem is now solved, but I don’t know what caused it nor how to avoid it in the future. Apple’s engineering elves fixed it without sending information back through the super senior Apple technical support person I dealt with across many emails, calls, and hours of troubleshooting.
Yes, the old iCloud black box strikes again. Since posting my story, I’ve gotten a ton of emails and social media messages about people with iCloud problems, and while I’d expect any service with as many users as Apple’s offering to have a fair number of edge cases, it does at times feel like the whole thing is made out of edge.
Technology issues aside, Apple does need to do a much better job about communicating with its users, especially in regards to services. These are customers contributing to one of the company’s most important (and profitable) segments, and it’s a fundamentally different proposition than Apple’s usual transactional business of having somebody buy a product and walk away. If the company wants to retain these customers for the long run—not to mention bring in additional customers—then support needs to be job one.
Boox Palma (center) surrounded by more traditional Kindle and Kobo e-readers.
As a big fan of e-readers, I’ve been experimenting with Android-based alternatives to the dedicated Kindle and Kobo hardware for a few years now. The advantage of an Android E-Ink reader is that it can run any app—Kindle and Kobo, but also Libby and third-party ebook readers and newspaper apps and RSS readers. An Android-based E-Ink reader offers the promise of a single device for E-Ink reading from disparate sources.
E-readers from Boox have offered appealing hardware, but keep letting me down with inferior software. But now, at last, I’ve gotten perilously close to finding an alternative to dedicated E-Readers.
And it’s shaped like a phone?
One handed E-Ink
The $280 Boox Palma is slightly smaller than an iPhone 15 Pro Max, with a 6.13-inch E-Ink screen. It doesn’t have cellular connectivity, but otherwise it feels like a generic Android (version 11) phone, with four different side buttons, a USB-C charging port, and a camera on the back that Boox says is for “document scanning,” though it feels more like it was part of a reference phone design that had to come along for the ride.
I’ll admit that I didn’t expect to like a phone-shaped e-reader. I’ve really come to love the design style shared by the Kindle Oasis and Kobo Libra 2, both of which feature seven-inch displays with physical page turn buttons you can rest your fingers on. And to be fair, I was less comfortable while reading on the Palma, since I needed to grip the device more tightly with my whole hand and stretch my grip to reach the volume buttons (repurposed as page-turn buttons) on the device’s side. But on the other hand, this was a supremely portable reader, like a beat-up paperback you can take just about anywhere.
It’s on the software side that I feel like Boox has taken a big leap forward. Part of that is that Boox’s own software game appears to have elevated. In the past, using Boox products was like wading through mud. On early models, I had to use workarounds to even enable the Play Store, and the Boox add-ons to manage the unique needs of E-Ink devices felt clunky.
Boox lets you optimize Android apps for E-Ink reading.
All that’s pretty much gone. While I don’t love a lot of the Boox-written software that’s preinstalled on the device, I was able to log into the Play Store with ease and download other apps. And Boox’s system utilities worked wonderfully to let me map the device’s volume buttons to support page turns and its side button to force a refresh of the E-Ink screen when things would occasionally get dingy. Boox offers per-app overrides to modify Android apps to be more E-Ink friendly, and they almost always did the job. (Boox also seems to have made some strides in regulating battery life. Some of its early devices felt like they’d die after a few hours, on or off, but with Wi-Fi off the Palma can last for weeks while asleep and offer dozens of hours of illuminated reading.)
I do think that in the case of the Palma, the strengths of Android itself are also coming to the fore. Previous Boox devices I’ve used have tablet-sized screens, and many Android apps still don’t run well at those sizes. But they’re all optimized for phones! As a result, the third-party app experience felt a lot better on the Palma.
Disappointingly, the biggest app failures on Android are the apps for the big e-reader companies. I found reading in the Kobo apps, as well as the Libby app for library e-books, to pale in comparison to using a more generic e-reading app such as Moon+ Reader. The Kindle app for Android was fine, once I configured it properly.
One of the challenges of E-Ink screens is that they don’t refresh as fast as the LCD or OLED screens that most devices use. This means that scrolling on the Palma is manageable, but imprecise—and leaves the display looking a bit smeared. Ideally, Boox could override every app to support page turns on the press of a button and to reduce contrast so that text will pop on the E-Ink screen. Some apps were better at this than others.
Crossing a threshold
Palma on top of larger e-readers.
But after testing numerous Boox readers before ultimately putting them back in their boxes and concluding they just didn’t do it for me, I find myself feeling different about the Boox Palma. Maybe some of that is its solid support for Moon+, which is a very good ebook reader. I was able to plug the Palma into my Mac and sync it with Calibre, loading it up with books and short fiction, and then read all of it in Moon+. (I also sideloaded Georgia, my preferred e-reading font, which Moon+ was happy to display.)
No, not all of the Android apps I used were perfect fits for the E-Ink screen, but all of them were at least functional enough to use. I’m most disappointed in Kobo and Libby, since those ecosystems are my top sources of books. Perhaps unsurprisingly, decent Android apps supporting open standards like ePub and RSS adapted better to the Palma.
Though I didn’t write a review of it, I also have spent some time with Boox’s Tab Mini C, which is a 7.8-inch color E-Ink reader. Color E-Ink is extremely strange, but the refresh rate was good in color and spectacular in black and white. Unfortunately, the Tab Mini C is a lot heavier than a Kindle or Kobo reader, and lacks page-turn buttons. But its software is solid, just as it is on the Boox Palma.
In the end, I think Boox is nudging closer to making a good Android replacement for a Kindle or Kobo, one that would let me add RSS and newspapers to my dedicated reader. The Palma’s size may be perfect for some users, but I’d prefer a larger screen. The Tab Mini C is more like it, but it lacks those physical buttons. If Boox were to create a new version of its Leaf reader (which is the right size and has page-turn buttons) with the software that runs the Palma, it might be right in my sweet spot.
But that shouldn’t take anything away from the Boox Palma, which is a simply wild idea for a product… that pretty much delivers on its promise. E-reader fans who can be comfortable with Android and wish they could read on a compact device that doesn’t have a phone screen, it may be time to slip the Boox Palma into your palm.
Due to an extremely weird series of troubleshooting maneuvers, I recently found myself having to set my Mac up from scratch without migrating any of my preferences for the first time in longer than I’d like to admit. Think decades, not years.
This meant that I had to experience every single Apple software default, enter license numbers into software not bought in the Mac App Store, and generally need to re-make every decision that I had taken over the last few years in order to get back where I wanted to be.
More than anything else, though, the experience reminded me that Apple has a lot of work to do when it comes to making the experience of upgrading or migrating to a new Mac more pleasant—and that its Security and Privacy team clearly has too much say in the overall macOS experience.
Ever since I discovered screen sharing many many years ago, I’ve been an avid user of the technology. I’ve remotely accessed my machines while away from home, sometimes across the country or even from a different part of the world. And while the widespread availability of cloud services makes it somewhat less critical than it once was, I still rely on the feature.
For years, I’ve used Edovia’s excellent Screens on both macOS and iOS, but with Sonoma’s recent update to the built-in Screen Sharing app—including its new high-performance mode—I’ve decided to give Apple’s own solution a whirl.
However, one thing that I’ve gotten used to with Screens is the ability to quickly access my remote Macs via a handy little menu bar icon. Surely, I figured, there had to be an equivalent for macOS’s Screen Sharing feature.
After casting about for recommendations, a few people mentioned just what I was looking for: Stefan Klieme’s ScreenSharingMenulet. It’s a little no-frills menu bar app that just provides you with quick screen sharing access to other machines via macOS’s built-in Screen Sharing app. By default it detects Bonjour connections on your local network, but it also supports adding manual remote connections if you have other machines you want to log into.
(I will, of course, continue to use Screens on my iPhone and iPad, since Apple doesn’t by default offer screen sharing to or from iOS / iPadOS, an oversight I hope it corrects in the future. )
ScreenSharingMenulet is incredibly simple, which is fine by me because it just does what I want. I appreciate that you can even streamline the interface down to its bare essentials by hiding the About / Preferences menu. If I’ve got one nit to pick it’s that I don’t love the icon: it includes a little version of the cursor and every once in a while when I’m looking for the cursor1 I seize upon that one instead.
But other than that, for $1.99, ScreenSharingMenulet perfectly fulfills its purpose, and that’s a rare thing for software these days.
I’ve recently encountered a bug that makes the cursor disappear, which makes this extra annoying. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
I really enjoyed this post by Nick Heer about the complex topic of whether photographs represent reality or not, whether Google is pushing things further than it should, or if this is all just the latest chapter in a story that started long before Photoshop:
The criticisms I have been seeing about the features of the Pixel 8… feel like we are only repeating the kinds of fears of nearly two hundred years. We have not been able to wholly trust photographs pretty much since they were invented. The only things which have changed in that time are the ease with which the manipulations can happen, and their availability. That has risen in tandem with a planet full of people carrying a camera everywhere. If you believe the estimates, we take more photos every two minutes than existed for the first hundred-and-fifty years after photography’s invention. In one sense, we are now fully immersed in an environment where we cannot be certain of the authenticity of anything.
Then again, Bigfoot and Loch Ness monster sightings are on a real decline.
I am uneasy in how easy Google is making synthesized photography. But those who suggest that photography has been, up to this point, a trustworthy depiction of reality also need to think a bit deeper.
At TidBITS, Glenn Fleishman takes a deep dive into one of iOS 17’s best (and most carefully implemented) features, Check In. It’s a feature that could lead to enormous improvements in security for lots of people, so long as they know it exists and how to use it:
Life can be dangerous but, for most people, most of the time, only in sporadic, unanticipated situations. No one expects to be in a car crash, mugged while walking home, or caught in a wildfire. Nevertheless, there are occasions when harm is more likely, such as when you’re in a neighborhood in which criminals expect they can waylay people late at night or are driving a long distance alone. Check In is designed to help in exactly these situations, alerting your safety partner if you don’t respond to your timer or arrive as planned. It could be especially beneficial for children traveling without adults present.
Send Glenn’s story to people you know and love so that they can use Check In to stay safe.
The WGA strike is over, so what does it mean? Also, your letters! [Downstream+ subscribers also get: Don’t blame the writers for the end of Peak TV, Max gets interesting, Amazon adds ads, and Disney ♥️ Charter.]
We’ve got the hot news about search engines (I hear great things about that AltaVista), the woes of watch ownership, and we’ll catch up on all the -gates this side of Bill.
Browser’s Castle
Last week brought us the news that back in 2020 (is something that happened three years ago “news”?), Microsoft held exploratory meetings with Apple to discuss selling Bing. The deal did not happen largely because Google shoots a firehose of money at Apple in order to keep its search engine as the default on Apple’s platforms.
Also, something about “quality and capabilities”, yadda-yadda-yadda.
Apple, of course, didn’t let such trivialities concern it when it walked away from Google Maps back in 2012, but Google was demanding more user information. Which is why two years prior to discussing Bing with Microsoft, Apple was interested in making DuckDuckGo the default search engine for private mode in Safari, conducting around 20 meetings and phone calls with the company.…
