I, for one, would like to see a larger iMac make it out into the world, complete with a Pro-level SoC, like the Mac mini has received. The RAM and storage caps on the base-level SoCs feel too limited for a larger iMac. Yes, it would add yet another SKU to an already-crowded desktop line, but for twenty years, iMac users have been able to choose a larger, more powerful machine if it fits their needs and preferences, and the M1 model just can’t live up to that legacy.
I’m not entirely convinced a larger iMac is necessary, but I am completely convinced that at least one iMac needs to run a chip more powerful than the base-model M series. The Mac mini finally got an M2 Pro chip this year—it’s time for the iMac to offer such a chip in a high-end configuration. If that’s on the existing 24-inch frame, so be it. If it’s on a larger model, that’s just fine too. I used a 27-inch iMac as my main Mac for years and while I’m pretty happy with a Mac Studio and an external display, I get the appeal of a big, powerful all-in-one.
Apple’s iconic all-in-one computer recently hit a milestone: 25 years. Over that time it’s morphed from a Bondi blue gumdrop to a pastel slab, in between entertaining brief flirtations with white plastic and articulated arms. It’s also the oldest continuously updated Mac model, having survived multiple processor architecture changes since the days of the PowerPC.
But even though Apple seemingly recommitted to the iMac when it released the M1-powered version in 2021, it’s now been a year and a half since that update—which also eliminated the 21.5-inch and 27-inch models in favor of a single 24-inch option. The company seems to have elected to have the iMac to sit out the M2 processor generation entirely, which raises the question of the venerable model’s future.
Still, with a quarter-century under its belt, counting the iMac out isn’t always the smart move.
Interesting feature on the Apple Developer site(!) talking to developers who have been through Apple’s developer labs for the Vision Pro. Developers interviewed include Michael Simmons of Flexibits, Ben Guerrette of Pixite, and friend of the site “Underscore” David Smith:
Smith began working on a version of his app Widgetsmith for spatial computing almost immediately after the release of the visionOS SDK. Though the visionOS simulator provides a solid foundation to help developers test an experience, the labs offer a unique opportunity for a full day of hands-on time with Apple Vision Pro before its public release. “I’d been staring at this thing in the simulator for weeks and getting a general sense of how it works, but that was in a box,” Smith says. “The first time you see your own app running for real, that’s when you get the audible gasp.”
The quotes from the developers are obviously unformly positive (this is a piece on Apple’s own developer site), and the existence of the piece also serves as evangelism to get other developers enthusiastic about going to Apple’s VisionOS labs, but it’s still interesting to read the reactions.
People are reminiscing about 25 years of the iMac, which is fine and all, but I’m doing to do something a little different. I’m reminiscing about 21 years of Apple’s Shake.
What’s that? You have no idea what I’m talking about? You just want candy-colored computers? Too bad. You’re going to learn something you’ll never need to know, whether you like it or not.
In February of 2002 Apple acquired Nothing Real, a software company based in Venice, California that made the industry-leading Shake compositing software. It was in that weird period where Apple was picking up steam, and trying to convert PC users to Mac users. There was no Shake version for the Mac, but there was for Linux, Windows, and Irix (RIP).
Just a few months after that acquisition, Apple released Shake 2.5 for the Mac (along with the existing supported platforms). Shake 2.5 would be the final version for Windows.…
Up to now, I’ve been using Ferrite’s Strip Silence feature to pre-process my audio and suppress background noise. But a while back, Adobe added a version of the feature to Audition. I’ve been trying to decide if Audition’s implementation might be worth making a change, since I prefer to edit and produce my shows on the Mac, in Audition.
Diagnosing silence
In Audition, the option to remove silence is buried way down in the Diagnostics panel, where you can also deal with clipping or clicking in individual audio files. To remove a silent portion, you first need to decide what constitutes one—the high-end or level of audio you want to filter out, expressed in decibels, and how long a quiet passage should last before the removal kicks in, expressed in milliseconds. Or you can use the Find Levels command to scan your project’s tracks as a whole and suggest values, which you can accept or adjust before clicking on Strip All.
In Audition’s Diagnostics panel, choose settings for “remove silence”, or use the defaults.
When I loaded up a show we recorded awhile back, I tried all the presets and also tested out Find Levels. They all quieted audio I actually wanted to keep, like a short laugh, or the dropped end of a word. In the most extreme case, Delete Silence identified silences between individual sentences in my show intro. After some experimentation, I came up with values that work for a typical panel show, and saved them as a preset. If a new guest sends me audio with an air conditioner running in the background, or a mic technique that includes breathing or tapping on a desk when they aren’t speaking, I might try different silence settings on their individual track, possibly after applying some noise reduction.
When I’m done scanning for silences across my multitrack session, I can choose to select silent parts or delete all silent clips, as Jason does. But there’s a better way.
Preview and label your cuts
After “remove silence” has done its thing for me, the silent portions of each track are selected. If I trust Audition, I can delete them all now. Of course, I don’t, so before I click away to work on my edit, I’ll mark the silent bits for later removal. From the Essential Sound panel, I’ll choose to label all the selected clips as Ambience. (It doesn’t matter which of the four labels you use. I’m essentially just tagging these clips so I can work with them as a group.) Next, I right-click on the selection and mute them all. This way, what I hear when I’m editing the show will be the same as if I had deleted the silent bits. But I can still bring one back if I need to.
Using Strip Silence, rather than Delete Silence, the bits Audition thinks are not audio are selected. From here, you can delete them all, or tag them so you can do it later, when you’re sure you haven’t accidentally marked audio you want, for removal.
Now, I just edit the content as normal. If a clip sounds cut off, I use the handle on the right edge of the clip to expose the part that’s been silenced, bringing it back into my show. I keep listening and editing until I’ve been through the whole episode, and am satisfied that I’ve brought back any good audio that the silence-removal tool took out.
It’s important to do things in the right order when using this technique. First, I place each panelists’ raw track in the Audition multitrack session, syncing them up. Next, I select and drag all of those tracks to the Match Loudness panel. Here, I’m establishing an audio level that’s consistent across all tracks—I’ve chosen -19 LUFs.
With everything leveled out, I’m ready to strip silence on all tracks based on the preset I’ve made. If a track has some other issues, though, I’ll deal with those first. For an echoey track, I’ll apply Audition’s Dereverb effect first.
I found a set of levels I liked and turned them into a preset for my LTS podcast.
Observations
Lions, Towers and Shields is a conversation, not a scripted narrative, like so much of what I do in public radio. That means that laughter, an occasional off-mic comment, or speech that rises and falls unpredictably are all allowed to happen. That’s why my silence-removal settings are more forgiving (lower threshold, longer timing) than they might be for a radio interview.
On the other hand, recording setups and skills vary among guests, so the chances of extra noise I need to dial down on a particular podcast track are pretty high. Part of editing these shows is making a thorough enough pass in the multitrack that I can catch anomalies that the processing misses. That, and always working on a copy of the audio—with originals safely tucked into the cloud.
I don’t know if I’ll be abandoning my Ferrite workflow. When I found a settings sweet spot, and once importing large audio files from Dropbox became more reliable sometime in the past few months, Ferrite met all my needs. And on a workflow level, I like unwinding after the pod by importing and stripping silences while I watch some mindless TV show, checking to see that everyone’s files are in and sound OK. I’ll lose that vibe if I move to an all-Audition process.
Then again, now that I know what Audition can do, I have options.
The iMac turns 25, Relay turns 10 (next year in London), print magazines apparently still exist, and listeners have questions about why Apple would ever want to buy Disney.
Change is coming and you will like it whether you like it or not. The iMac has a big anniversary and Apple dons a big rubber suit and crushes Tokyo.
Unband me, sir!
Are you burdened by too many Apple Watch bands? What if I told you you will soon be able to throw out all those bands?
And buy new ones.
OK, it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a solution.
Yes, (all together now) according to Mark Gurman (not bad, could have used a little more volume from the people in the back), Apple is prepping a big Watch redesign to mark the tenth version of the muchflopped device. So, conceivably, a year after changing the port on our iPhones, Apple could make us buy all new Watch bands.
What was PowerPoint before PowerPoint? Slide presentations. Big, fancy, multi-projector, multi-media slide presentations. As Claire L. Evans of the MIT Technology Review reports:
Before PowerPoint, and long before digital projectors, 35-millimeter film slides were king. Bigger, clearer, and less expensive to produce than 16-millimeter film, and more colorful and higher-resolution than video, slides were the only medium for the kinds of high-impact presentations given by CEOs and top brass at annual meetings for stockholders, employees, and salespeople. Known in the business as “multi-image” shows, these presentations required a small army of producers, photographers, and live production staff to pull off.
Want an example of a slide-based presentation? I’m pretty sure that’s how the, uh, “Flashdance”-inspired “We Are Apple (Leading the Way)” was created for Apple in 1984.
One of the great things about having a Mac with built-in biometric authentication is not having to constantly type in your password. It’s particularly nice for those of us that work in Terminal, where you can set up Touch ID to authenticate the sudo command that bestows administrative powers.
However there’s been one drawback to enabling that feature: because it means altering a system file, the change wouldn’t generally survive a system update—the file would get overwritten by the stock file every time macOS released a new version, meaning you’d have to go in and make the change again. I’m probably not alone in having given up on having Touch ID enabled, rather than playing the constant cat-and-mouse game.
But wait, there’s good news: in macOS Sonoma, Apple appears to have provided a new framework to work around this problem. As Mastodon user Rachel pointed out, Sonoma allows for an additional file that will persist through updates. So you can make the change once and it should stick.
From what I can tell, this system was put in place precisely for this feature. Apple provides a sudo_local.template file as an example, which not only contains a comment explaining that sudo_local will survive updates, but also even includes the code necessary to enable Touch ID.
So, without further adieu, here are the steps for enabling this feature in macOS Sonoma, once and for all:1
Open the Terminal app. Navigate to the directory that stores the authentication files by typing the following:
cd /etc/pam.d
Next, copy Apple’s provided template to the actual file that the system will read. You’ll need to use sudo and enter your administrator password to get permission:
sudo cp sudo_local.template sudo_local
Finally, open up the file you just made using your text editor of choice; I prefer pico.2 You’ll need to use sudo again here.
sudo pico sudo_local
In that file, navigate to the line that contains with pam_tid.so and delete the hashtag (#) at the beginning. Save the file out by pressing Control-X, typing ‘Y’ to save your changes, and hitting Return.
That’s it; you’re done! We’ll have to wait and see if this truly works as described, but fingers crossed you should be able to keep Touch ID access for sudo for ever and ever.
With the caveat that Sonoma is, of course, still in beta, and this could change upon the official release, as unlikely as that seems. ↩
Miss me with your command-line text editor wars. ↩
[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.]
Whether we speed up audio and video media, how we’d want Apple to change Disney Parks, our thoughts on new Apple Watch bands, and what we’re hoping to see from Apple’s Shortcuts.
The close corporate ties between Disney and Apple have created all sorts of speculation over the years that the two companies might end up being one company. Steve Jobs sat on the Disney board, and Disney CEO Bob Iger sat on Apple’s. In his memoir, Iger even suggested that had Jobs lived, the two companies might have combined.
I always considered that speculation ridiculous. But these are different times, and Disney and Apple are very different companies than they were a couple of decades ago. Which is why, when The Hollywood Reporter took the possibility of an Apple purchase of Disney seriously, I realized that the speculation I used to roll my eyes at when I was the editor of Macworld now seems… not that implausible, actually.
The original iMac entered a computing world that was in desperate need of a shake-up.
After the wild early days of the personal computer revolution, things had become stagnant by the mid-1990s. Apple had spent a decade frittering away the Mac’s advantages until most of them were gone, blown out of the water by the enormous splash of Windows 95. It was the era of beige desktop computers chained to big CRT displays and other peripherals.
In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to an Apple that was at death’s door, and in true Princess Bride style, he rapidly ran down a list of the company’s assets and liabilities. Apple didn’t have a wheelbarrow or a holocaust cloak, but it did have a young industrial designer who had been experimenting with colors and translucent plastic in Apple’s otherwise boring hardware designs.
With Jobs’ brains, Jony Ive’s designs, and the new PowerPC G3 chip supplied by Motorola, the company began to form a plan. Essentially, Jobs went back to his playbook for the original “computer for the rest of us,” the Mac, to sell simplicity. The Mac’s mouse-driven graphical interface may have changed the course of the PC world, but its all-in-one design just hadn’t clicked. Jobs decided it was time to try again.
For years, rumors about Apple and Disney combining seemed ridiculous—but in light of Apple’s transformation and Disney’s difficulties, suddenly it seems a lot more possible. Myke and Jason examine Disney’s business and try to imagine what portions of it Apple would actually want. Also: What would be in an Apple Watch X?
Libraries have traditionally been sanctuaries for culture that could not afford to pay its own way, or that was lost or buried or didn’t fit current tastes. But that is at risk now.
“The permanence of library collections may become a thing of the past,” said Jason Schultz, director of New York University’s Technology Law & Policy Clinic. “If the platforms decide not to offer the e-books or publishers decide to pull them off the shelves, the reader loses out. This is similar to when songs you look for on Spotify are blanked out because the record company ended the license or when movies or television shows cycle off Netflix or Amazon.”
The National Emergency Library, in which the Internet Archive made the titles it had scanned into electronic form essentially without limits, was highly contentious. Publishers, obviously, viewed it as piracy that cut into their bottom line. Authors were heavily divided.
Part of what makes it tricky, as this piece does a great job explaining, is that there’s a disparity between how the rules are and how people think they should be.
The law, as it stands now, is largely against the Internet Archive. That’s just the way it is. Whether that law should be changed is a different matter—one that’s not going to be solved in the courts, as my good friend and colleague Glenn Fleishman wrote:
I am an absolute fan of the Internet Archive and all the work they’ve done to preserve cultural and technical history. But as this article makes clear, they are fighting a legal battle they cannot win, because the law is clear. They need to be fighting a structural battle, all about the law, because they will not win these cases. A judge would have to come up with novel interpretations that would surely be overturned at appellate or Supreme Court level.
As an author, I think there’s yet a third level to this discussion. At the end of the day, the writers are usually the ones who get squeezed.
Most authors don’t make a living from their work, but I think the vast majority of them (if not all) support libraries and the free access to information. Most of us have used libraries a lot during our lives1, some have even depended on them. I don’t think most writers view people borrowing their books from the libraries as lost sales—we view them as possible lifelong fans of our future work.2
The solution, perhaps, is to find other ways to recompense authors for their work being borrowed. Right now, ebooks are usually sold to libraries under licensing procedures that regulate how many times a title can be loaned out before a new license has to be purchased. It’s an uncomfortable compromise, but the power remains in the hands of the publisher (as it usually does).
Other countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom, actually pay authors who live in those countries based on how many times their books are loaned out. Not huge amounts, to be sure, but when you’re a writer eking out a living, every little bit helps.
Sadly, I’m not sure such a program would fly here—especially in the current political environment, where getting funding for the arts is difficult enough as it is—but maybe there are better ways for publishers to recompense authors for these kinds of things as well. But unlike the writers of Hollywood, authors’ ability for collective bargaining is currently limited, and the publishers have deep pockets, so change isn’t likely to be fast or soon.
As many readers of this site might know, both of my parents were professional librarians, so don’t come at me about libraries! ↩
In some ways, this is reminiscent of the fight over DRM-free music in the mid-2000s, a victory that was eventually trodden over by the rise of streaming. ↩
