Another notable change mentioned in the update’s release notes is the ability for iPhone and iPad apps with non-resizable windows to enter full-screen mode on Macs with the M1 chip, which is particularly useful for video apps like HBO Max. macOS 11.1 also allows iPhone and iPad app windows to be switched between landscape and portrait orientations.
True story. macOS 11.1 does finally allow apps like HBO Max to go to full-screen, eliminating a major limitation.
Except…
The result is a “full screen” app that’s locked to the iPad’s 4:3 display orientation, meaning that while you can make the video playback bigger, it’s still going to be pillarboxed inside an old-school non-widescreen aspect ratio.
I know, I know, one step at a time. And at least HBO Max offers an app on the Mac, unlike most video streaming services out there.
ProRAW stores results of computational photography right inside the RAW… Apple worked with Adobe to introduce a new type of tag into the DNG standard, called a “Profile Gain Table Map.” This data gives your editor everything it needs to know to tone map your photo image and end up with results identical to the first party camera. Because it’s separate data, you can turn down its strength, or turn it off completely.
This is a great overview about why something like the RAW format was needed, why photographers use it, and how Apple has cleverly tried to bridge the gap between the principles of RAW and its own in-camera smart processing of images. Even if you never use Halide (which is a really great app, by the way!), this story is worth your attention.
Apple’s latest service, Fitness+, arrived on Monday, and over the last 24 hours I’ve pedaled to 80s hits, jumped around my living room in an introductory high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workout, and added a set of new exercises to work my core.
I am literally sweating the details for you, dear reader.
More seriously, I’m probably in the best cardiovascular shape I’ve been in since I was a student. This isn’t saying much, but after a couple of failed attempts at it, I’ve been running regularly for most of this year. I am the proverbial Couch to 5K person, having run two (virtual, alas) 5K races in 2020.
It’s the Apple Watch and AirPods that have really done the job for me. As I detailed during one of my first attempts to run regularly, I’ve managed to find a happy place running with just my cellular watch and AirPods, listening to podcasts via the Overcast watch app. I used the Couch to 5K schedule in Intervals Pro to guide my workouts until they transformed into “just run for X minutes,” at which point I switched over to Apple’s own workout app. These days I generally just try to go out into my neighborhood for two-mile runs two or three times a week.
The last couple of months, it’s been two times a week a lot more often than three, so I’ve begun wondering if I might want to officially replace that third run with some other kind of exercise routine. I have an old stationary bike, but pedaling idly while streaming “Deep Space Nine” wasn’t as great as I had hoped.
Fortunately, I have the AppleOne bundle, which is already saving me money on my existing Apple stuff—and Fitness+ comes with the bundle, free! (This is an interesting potential future path for Apple’s services strategy—loading more ancillary services that are tightly integrated with Apple’s other products into its services bundle, and perhaps being a little less concerned about how they fare as a standalone offering.)
This is all to say that I spent half an hour this morning pedaling my ancient recumbent exercise bike to the hits of the ’80s while being motivated by an extremely chipper trainer who was once a contestant on “The Amazing Race,” and I kind of loved it. This will not be news to anyone who has taken a spinning class or has become One With The Peleton, but it actually helps to spend your time exercising with someone who can guide you, motivate you, and make your endless pedaling feel like something more than a monotonous grind!
The Apple Watch feedback helps a lot, too. The service requires you to have an Apple Watch, and is integrated deeply with it. Seeing my heart rate appear live in the Fitness app was not only motivational but helpful in regulating my pace and my bike’s resistance level, keeping myself in the appropriate zone for whatever portion of the workout we were doing.
That was a full 30-minute workout, after which I needed to shower and change. But on Monday night I did a couple quick introductory courses on Core and HIIT, just on my living room floor, and I came away with the same impressions: Apple Watch integration is great, and having a good trainer to motivate you makes all the difference.
I’m really impressed with the production values of Fitness+ video courses, too. Not only are the presenters polished and friendly—I think they’ve been getting the same training as Apple’s tech executives—but the whole thing exudes the aesthetic we’ve come to expect from Apple. The videos look great, with brilliant lighting and a gorgeous set of backgrounds inside the Fitness+ studio in Santa Monica. So much wood! So many smiling, sweaty people! (Okay, maybe the WWDC presenters don’t glisten so much.)
The service comes with a free one-month trial, so if you’re an Apple Watch owner, it’s worth giving it a look and seeing if it might work for you. It’s definitely not for everyone—and there are also plenty of competitors out there—but it feels like Apple has made a credible entry that has the potential to help a lot of people become more fit.
I’ve already been doing my part while jogging around my neighborhood listening to podcasts—but maybe pedaling to The Fixx and The Go Go’s could be a nice addition to my routine.
On Tuesday Microsoft announced that it’s releasing new versions of Microsoft Office that run native on Apple Silicon:
The new Office apps are Universal, so they will continue to run great on Macs with Intel processors. The apps are not only speedy, but they also look fantastic as they have been redesigned to match the new look of macOS Big Sur.
If you have automatic updates turned on, you will start to receive these updates today. Otherwise, you can go to the Mac App Store and click the Updates tab, or with Microsoft AutoUpdate, you can go to your Office app’s Help menu and choose Check for Updates. Plus, find more commonly asked questions on our support page.
In other Office news, Outlook now supports iCloud accounts. Unfortunately, Teams isn’t yet native on Apple silicon, though Microsoft says it’s working on it.
There’s a lot of streaming-media news this week, as Warner Media faces intense criticism of its decision to move all its 2021 film releases to HBO Max, Apple faces criticism for killing a show based on Gawker, and Disney fires off its Death Star, unveiling a slate of originals that are likely to take Disney+ to the next level. Oh, and Apple announced a $550 pair of headphones!
My friend John Siracusa is disappointed in me because I didn’t put the Macintosh 128K—the original Macintosh—at number one in this list of the 20 most notable Macs of all time.
I certainly considered it. The original Macintosh changed the computer world forever. Without its presence, this series couldn’t exist. It is a seminal product in the history of technology.
Putting it at number one felt a bit obvious, though. And there’s this: While it came first, it had a lot of drawbacks—so many, in fact, that it was revised within a year. It was a remarkable first attempt, but for my money the Mac didn’t really settle down as a platform until the Mac SE arrived in 1987.
But still, it was first. And that counts for a lot.
When it comes to Apple differentiating itself from its Big Tech rivals, there’s one area in which the company has spent a lot of time touting its record: security and privacy. From the App Store to HomeKit, Apple talks a lot about making sure that your data stays yours.
This might seem like a no-brainer. After all, we trust our devices with the most intimate details of our lives and we live those lives increasingly online. But while we might think about very obvious places that security is important (like making strong passwords or using two-factor authentication), there are plenty of other ways that our private data can leak out.
Sometimes that means making smaller changes, ones that may not be as understandable or as easily explainable to the average user, but can have just as many significant benefits in the long run. Even just in the past year, Apple has made a few of these moves to help improve security in ways that you may not be thinking about—as well as one or two that haven’t quite managed to help in the way intended.
SwiftBar lets you disable plugins without dragging files around.
One of my favorite features of iOS 14 is its support for home-screen widgets. They’re supported on macOS Big Sur, too, but I don’t bother with widgets there. That’s because there’s already a great place to display information, and it’s visible at all times: the menu bar.
In the past, I’ve used Mat Ryer’s BitBar to put all sorts of information in my menu bar, including the current temperature, air quality, and even live listeners to podcast streams. Unfortunately, it came to my attention a few months ago that Ryer had largely moved on from BitBar development, just as Big Sur arrived and caused a bunch of cosmetic issues. (A BitBar user contributed a quick fix.)
It’s a drag to see a utility you rely on fade away, but I’m happy to report that there’s a spiritual successor to BitBar, SwiftBar, in active development led by Alex Mazanov.
Now Playing, indoor and outdoor air quality, and temperature status.
SwiftBar is written in Swift—it’s in the name!—and aims to compatible with any BitBar plugins. (It worked with all the plug-ins for BitBar that I’d built.) And there are some nice additional features under development, including support for Apple’s SFSymbols icon library. SwiftBar also lets you activate and deactivate plugins from within its preferences window, rather than using the filesystem, which I appreciate.
There are lots of BitBar plugins out there, and if you know any scripting language (literally anything that can execute on macOS — mine use AppleScript, JavaScript, and PHP) you can write plugins yourself in no time.
I have come to rely on having little blobs of information available to me whenever I glance up to my Mac’s menu bar. Thanks to SwiftBar, I don’t need to even consider the prospect that I might have to give that up.
Apple’s first attempt at the ultimate thin and light laptop was overpriced and underpowered. The second attempt resulted in the definitive Mac of the 2010s.
Microsoft Gaming chief vice president Jerret West in a blog post:
In Spring 2021, we will take the next step in our journey to reach more players around the world by making cloud gaming as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate available on Windows PCs through the Xbox app and browser, and iOS devices through mobile web browser.
Of course, Microsoft also offers a game streaming option from a local console on your network, which you can do via the Xbox app on iOS. (The difference there primarily being it doesn’t necessarily require a monthly subscription fee of which Apple wants its cut.) So that’s not annoying at all.
Personally, I think this is an aberration that will in time end up with fully native iOS apps for game streaming services. Those services aren’t going away and, frankly, they’re only going to get more prominent in the next several years—the same way that streaming video and music has become a dominant form of consumption. Apple certainly doesn’t want its platform to be a second-class citizen in that regard.
The big question, though, will be how well these services perform in Safari, and whether they’re good enough.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that selling a pair of headphones for $549 does seem a bit much. Will it succeed? That remains to be seen—and Apple sometimes does misjudge its prices, as happened with the original HomePod.
But in general, you should not be surprised about Apple selling a product for a high price. Apple’s pricing strategy shifts from product to product and from year to year, but it’s worth keeping in mind some basic rules of Apple pricing.
The world is full of web services for all manner of tasks, but sometimes what you want to do is connect two (or more) services in order to complete a single task. What do you need for that? Another service, of course!
There’s no shortage of sites that offer this kind of ability: the first I recall was Yahoo! Pipes, though I’m sure there were other similar options even at the time. More recently, I’ve used sites like IFTTT and Zapier, but in the past few weeks, I’ve been playing with a new-to-me option that I find very impressive: Integromat.
Integromat’s UI is easy to understand and navigate.
There are a few things that drew me to Integromat. For one, it seems to offer some integration capabilities that aren’t available on other platforms. For example, the project I was working on required me to interact with channels on a Discord server—a feature not offered by Zapier’s Discord integration. Integromat offered the options I was looking for, and a whole lot more—way more, in fact, than Zapier.
But the main thing that I really appreciate about Integromat is its interface. The layout is highly graphical, presenting each integration as a little bubble-like module. Click on any icon and you’ll get easy to read and understand parameters that you can quickly fill out. To connect that bubble to another task, just drag one of the handles on the side to the other module you’ve added and voilà!
Filtering makes your scenarios even more powerful.
Integromat also offers powerful features for flow control. So, for example, if your workflow has a branch that only needs to be completed in certain cases, it’s easy to set up a filter that checks for specific criteria and only executes if those are met.
There are also a ton of useful built-in programming-like features. I spent a while looking for a module that would convert a string to uppercase characters only to discover that I could put a conversion function right in the field that I wanted.
Built-in functions make Integromat’s modules even more powerful.
So far, I’ve only experimented with Integromat’s free plan, as I ramp up my workflow for actual use. I imagine I’ll need to sign up for at least a month’s worth of the paid plan, however, as I’m already approaching the limit on number of operations in a month. Which is one of the few downsides I’ve discovered so far with the service: depending on how complex your workflow is, it’s easy to end up using a lot of your quota—probably a testament to how simple it is to keep adding on to a workflow. That said, the service offers a very reasonable $9/month plan that should appease most casual users, as well as more expensive plans that are probably aimed more at business users.
I also ran into some problems with the Google Drive module Integromat offers: a new security process on Google’s side meant that I needed to jump through some hoops to access the API, something which took a little bit of know-how, although Integromat does walk you through the steps. (For some reason unknown to me, it seems as though Zapier’s integration with Google Drive doesn’t require this workaround at present; I’m not sure why.)
Overall, though, I’ve been very pleased with Integromat’s interface and performance. It seems pretty zippy, and I’ve rarely had anything fail to work (except, in the case of mistakes I mad myself); plus, I’ve barely scratched the surface of all that it has to offer. So if you’ve found yourself a little frustrated by IFTTT’s lack of power or Zapier’s cumbersome interface, maybe give Integromat a try.
[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.]
First unveiled at Apple’s September event, Fitness+ provides a variety of workout videos with various trainers, and integrates with the both the Apple Watch—highlighting health data onscreen during relevant moments in the workout—and Apple Music. New content will be added every week, with a variety of session lengths, difficulty levels, and types of exercise.
Apple Fitness+ runs $9.99 per month or $79.99 per year in the U.S. and can be shared with up to six family members for that same price. (It’s also available in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the UK.)
Existing Apple Watch users will get a free month, and customers who purchase a Series 3 or later will get three free months. It’s also available as part of the Apple One Premier bundle.
December surprise! As rumored, Apple had one more trick up its sleeve for the “year” that has been 2020. This morning the company announced its new AirPods Max headphones, a long-expected over-the-ear model that bring many of the features of its AirPods line.
Apple says that the new AirPods Max—which come in five colors1, including space gray, silver, sky blue, green, and pink—have a custom acoustic design and use the same H1 chips found in other AirPods models; each ear cup has one chip, and they both have 10 audio cores to power audio processing. Like the AirPods Pro, the Max have both Active Noise Cancelation and Transparency modes, as well as the new spatial audio introduced in iOS 14.
The ear cups are designed with memory foam to help seal in sound, and feature a mechanism to distribute ear cup pressure to fit one’s head. Inside each ear cup is a 40mm dynamic driver, with a “unique dual neodymium ring magnet” that Apple says helps maintain a distortion-free listening experience, even at high volumes. (Though no doubt audiophiles will make their own judgments when they arrive.)
Ah, but how will you control such a device? Well, look no further than the Apple Watch. The AirPods Max feature, yes, a Digital Crown, which you can use to control volume, as well as play/pause audio, skip tracks, answer and end phone calls, or, of course, activate Siri. There’s also a noise control button that can toggle between the ANC and Transparency modes.
Like the AirPods Pro, the setup of AirPods Max is done on your Apple device, and automatically pairs with all devices associated with your Apple ID. Optical and position sensors mean that playback automatically pauses if you lift one ear cup.
Apple also says that battery time is no slouch: the AirPods Max will provide 20 hours of audio playback, talk time, or movie playback with both ANC and spatial audio turned on.
The headphones also include a fascinating “soft” Smart Case, which puts AirPods Max into a low-power state when not in use. For charging, Apple uses a Lightning port (sorry USB-C fans) includes a Lightning-to-USB-C cable in the box, though, of course, no power brick.
All of this comes at a premium price, though. AirPods Max will cost $549, and are available to order today in the U.S. and more than 25 other countries and regions. They’ll start shipping on December 15.
Yay, non-boring colors! These are almost the same as the new iPad Air, with the exception of pink instead of rose gold. ↩
[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.]
Warner Media is moving all its 2021 releases to HBO Max, but what will that mean for the future of the movie industry? Will streaming reign supreme, or is there a future for movie theaters? Meanwhile, a new Bloomberg report gives some shape to the future of Apple’s M-series processors—it turns out the M stands for “more cores.”
