By Jason Snell

March 26, 2019 9:14 AM PT

Initial thoughts about Apple’s services event

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

It was an unusual Apple event on Monday. No hardware, not much in the way of software, and a whole lot of services. Plus, a bunch of famous Hollywood types standing on a stage in Cupertino talking about their TV shows. Here are some quick-hit reactions…

Apple News+

Demoing Apple News+ on an iPhone rather than an iPad seems to be a careful choice to make it clear that this isn’t a digital replica like so many “magazine on iPad” efforts have been. The problem is, it seems like only about half of the magazines are in Apple News format rather than available as PDFs.

Apple News format articles are better in so many ways, including accessibility and readability on smaller devices. The PDF replicas are… less inspiring. Presumably Apple won’t bother recommending articles out of PDF replicas elsewhere in the News app, which suggests that Apple is very much trying to make it worth all the partners’ whiles to switch to the more flexible Apple News format.

Apple’s deals with newspapers also interest me. There aren’t too many, but as a Californian I like the idea of getting access to Los Angeles Times content that currently lives behind a firewall, as well as at least a select portion of Wall Street Journal content. The News app is a bit confused about the whole thing, however. I thought I favorited the L.A. Times in Apple News, but the page I went to was entirely paywalled—it was only when I used the Apple News+ tab and found a Times article, and then tapped on the Times logo, that I was able to favorite a version of the L.A. Times that gave me access to full articles.

In short, the News+ content in the News app itself seems to be a bit of a work in progress. It’s nice that the content is there, but it’s a mess. The entire Apple News app is still weird and awkward and could use with a complete overhaul; adding News+ into the mix just underscores that point.

Apple Card

Is the Apple Card going to be the best deal for people who are searching for cash-back bonuses from their credit card? Certainly not, just as Apple hardware is never going to be the cheapest in any category. If you want to do the work to find the best deal and redeem the right points in the right places, you have better options.

Apple is, however, hoping that a lot of its customers will not be interested in redeeming points and using gift cards and otherwise chasing that deal. Instead, Apple offers simplicity (sign up for the card right on your phone), privacy (private transactions and no resale of your data to third parties), and convenience (cash-back rewards appear the same day in Apple Pay Cash). That combination is pretty on-brand for Apple.

As for the physical Apple credit card, which joins a recent trend of fancy metal credit cards? It’s exactly what you’d expect from Apple, whether you think of Apple as cool, pretentious, or a bit of both.

Apple Arcade

The new Apple Arcade service seems to be Apple’s final acceptance that the economic structure of the App Store has led to the dominance of free-to-play games with in-app purchases. Apple makes a lot of money from that system, so rather than replace it, it’s adding a new service designed to provide a revenue stream to developers making a different sort of game, and to appeal to people who love those games. Our house is full of fans of your Monument Valleys and your Alto’s Odysseys, so we’re the perfect audience for Apple Arcade. There is something freeing about knowing that anyone in my family will be able to finish a game (or get bored with it) and then just flip through the Arcade tab in the App Store, looking for something else to play.

Will Apple charge more than we actually spend on games in the App Store every month? Almost certainly. But Apple Arcade will be convenient and curated and, undoubtedly, populated with a lot of desirable games that won’t be available anywhere else. Depending on the quality of the games in the service, it could be really great.

I do wonder how game developers view this service—and how well it will serve them once the service launches. Even if this service is great for consumers, it won’t work if developers just can’t make the economics work. I really do believe Apple is trying to create a place where games like these can be successful, and I hope it succeeds.

I’m also intrigued by Apple’s announcement that the Mac as a part of the service. I have to believe that this is linked, somehow, with its more general move to let iOS apps run on the Mac, beginning this fall. With a service like this spinning up, presumably Apple has made an effort to make it relatively easy for iOS game developers to get their games running on the Mac starting this fall. We’ll see.

Apple TV+

It really had to happen. Apple’s not spending billions on a worldwide TV service in order to make some money selling more Apple TV boxes. When Apple announced its first deal to get Apple video content onto Samsung TVs in January, it was clear that it would be attempting to get its new video service everywhere. With its announcement that the Apple TV app will be on Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices, the deed is done. You can spend $29 and get Apple’s video service on your HDTV, via a cheap Roku box. You can spend $49 and get it in 4K. If you’d prefer an all-Apple experience, the Apple TV box is there for you, but it’s not required to watch Apple’s TV shows.

As for Apple TV+ itself, what can be said? We got a vague launch time—this fall—and no hint of a price. We also didn’t get any show trailers, just a single quick-hit “sizzle reel.” Instead, Apple relied on star power, with directors and actors presenting their shows in segments that felt a lot like the introduction to categories at the Oscars. Some were better than others (trained comedy professionals Steve Carell and Kumail Nanjiani showed off their skills), but it was otherwise kind of lifeless.

As my podcast partner (and chief TV critic at The Hollywood Reporter) Tim Goodman likes to say, in the end we need to see the shows—no sizzle reel, no trailer can really let us judge the work. Steven Spielberg’s story of opening up a copy of Amazing Stories as a kid is great, but I remember when he told that story in 1985… and then I saw “Ghost Train,” the first episode of the original NBC series. It was a lifeless drag. All the talent and on-stage storytelling can’t help you if the shows are no good. It’ll be fall before we have any idea on that front.

What I do love about Apple TV+ is that it’s going to roll out everywhere. This is what happens when you make your own stuff—Apple, like Netflix and Amazon, is basically insisting on the worldwide rights for all of the shows they make themselves, and the result is that these new-generation companies don’t get stuck with different rights in different countries like more traditional broadcast networks do. In the background, Apple has been hiring development executives all over the world, including several prominent hires from the BBC.

Of course, the shows they put on stage Monday are all made in North America. But they’re the ones that are the furthest along. Apple’s long-term goal is to supplement its high-budget Hollywood content with material made in other parts of the world, very much along the line of what Netflix is doing (but at a much smaller scale).

Anyway, I was excited to be in the same room as Jennifer Aniston and JJ Abrams, but it’s going to be the shows that make or break the service. All Apple needs is a couple of certifiable must-watch shows and people will pay.

By Dan Moren

March 26, 2019 9:04 AM PT

Last updated May 18, 2022

Rogue Amoeba updates SoundSource

Note: This story has not been updated since 2022.

The audio mavens over at Rogue Amoeba have updated their SoundSource utility for macOS to version 4, bringing a ton of new features and a brand new interface.

Think of SoundSource like a supercharged version of the system audio widget that lives in your menu bar. But instead of only controlling volume, output, and (if you remember to hold down the Option key) input, it adds a ton of more powerful options, like the ability to control volumes and audio outputs on a per-app basis, apply Audio Units and EQ settings, and tweak input levels. There are also level meters for each app, so you can get an idea of where audio is coming from at a glance, and a Magic Boost feature that helps improve quiet audio without blowing out your eardrums by making loud sounds too loud.

It’s especially handy that you can now not only choose which apps you want to control, but also “pin” SoundSource to be visible, so you can easily refer to it while you’re checking levels in other apps.

I’ve long been a user of the earlier versions of SoundSource, and I’ve been testing betas of SoundSource 4 for a few months. It’s one of those apps that you don’t know you need until you use it for a while–then you wonder why it’s not installed on every single Mac you use.¹

As with most of Rogue Amoeba’s apps, you can download a free, fully-featured trial version to check it out. A license runs $29, but if you’ve got SoundSource 3, you can snag a $19 upgrade.

[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

March 25, 2019 9:42 AM PT

Apple Event: “Show Time” at Steve Jobs Theater

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

I’ll be posting live from the Steve Jobs Theater on Twitter at @sixcolorsevent, which is embedded below.

Tweets by sixcolorsevent

By Jason Snell

March 22, 2019 4:27 PM PT

Find video files that won’t survive the 32-bit Mac apocalypse

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

In future years we’re going to cling to macOS Mojave. Not because of any particular love for desert desktop images, but because it’s the last version of macOS to run 32-bit applications. If you rely on old software and old files, keep a Mac capable of running Mojave around, or make a Mojave virtual machine in an emulator, or both.

Among the stuff that will break this fall when Mojave’s replacement arrives is QuickTime, not just the app but the QuickTime 7 framework that is essentially the final version of Apple’s versatile, groundbreaking multimedia plug-in technology. A QuickTime Player app may go on into the future, and the concept of a file that’s a “QuickTime Movie” will probably continue, but the old QuickTime—all 32 bits of it—is being swept away.

I’ve lamented the loss of versatility of the old QuickTime 7 player app numerous times now, but yesterday Apple posted a tech note that’s worth pointing out. The deprecation of the 32-bit version of QuickTime means that the next version of macOS will lose the ability to play or convert a bunch of old video codecs. If you’ve got old project archive that use DivX or Flash or JPEG 2000 or Perian or Sorenson 3 or dozens of other old video formats, apps that rely on QuickTime to read and convert them—apps like QuickTime Player and Final Cut Pro—will lose that ability.

It would sure be nice if someone came up with a utility that knew all these old formats and could scan your drives for them, and maybe even offer to convert them to a modern, compatible format. But one little-known feature of Spotlight might help. If you start a new Finder search by typing Command-F, you’ll see that you can constrain your search by all sorts of variables, as chosen via pop-up items. So for example, you can set “Kind” to “PDF” and constrain searches to PDFs. Or set “Last opened date” to within the last x days.

That first pop-up contains a pretty amazing option, “Other…”, that when selected will take you to an enormous list of metadata that Spotlight catalogs based on the contents of the files on your Mac. Among the attributes that’s available is one called Codecs, and when I selected that I was able to find a few ancient video files encoded with Cinepak, one of the formats that will be deprecated in this fall’s release.

That might be one way to quickly determine if you have any files in these ancient formats. It might be worth a look before you upgrade any Macs beyond macOS 10.14. And again, the most prudent among us may keep a Mac around that’s capable of running Mojave, just in case a few years from now we find ourselves needing to run a 32-bit app or open a video file encoded with an obscure codec.

[Thanks to James Thomson and Joe Rosensteel for inspiring this piece.]

By Jason Snell

March 22, 2019 3:09 PM PT

Yes, Logitech’s Crayon works with iPad Pro

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Over at 9to5 Mac, Zac Hall noticed that a few of us—at least myself and Nilay Patel from the Verge, and possibly others—have been passing along an interesting new iPad tidbit after meeting with Apple about the new iPad models this week. I realize that people may have missed the brief parenthetical in my Macworld story this week, so it’s worth restating here…

Logitech’s $70 Crayon, an interesting stylus that originally was available for education only and worked only with the sixth-generation iPad, will now be supported by all of Apple’s current iPad models. So not only do the new iPad Air and iPad mini work with the Crayon, but so does my 2018 12.9-inch iPad Pro running a beta version of iOS 12.2, which should be released next week.

(Update: I tested the Crayon with an earlier iPad Pro model, the 10.5-inch iPad Pro that was just discontinued to make way for the iPad Air, and it doesn’t work—even when running the 12.2 beta. So Crayon support seems to be limited to the currently shipping set of iPads.)

The Crayon charges via Lightning, but it’s got a female Lightning port so you can plug it in to pretty much any cord you use to charge an iPhone. It’s got an on/off switch and has a wider side and a narrower side, in the style of a carpenter pencil (so it doesn’t roll). It’s shorter than the Apple Pencil, made of anodized aluminum, and of course, is cheaper than either Apple Pencil model. It’s also versatile: if you bought one Crayon you could use it on both an iPad mini and an iPad Pro—when you’d need two different versions of Apple Pencil otherwise. And unlike Apple Pencil, Crayon works via proximity and not Bluetooth pairing, so if you are frequently in a multiple-iPad environment where styluses are shared, the Crayon will simply work on whatever device it’s touching—no pairing required.

The Crayon’s also much more limited than the Apple Pencil in that it doesn’t support pressure sensitivity. If you only use a stylus for notetaking or driving an app interface, that might be good enough. If you like to draw, it probably isn’t. (It also doesn’t support double-tapping to switch tools, a very nice feature of the second-generation Apple Pencil.)

By Jason Snell

March 21, 2019 4:00 AM PT

Review: iPad mini 2019 is a modern version of a small classic

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

When three and a half years go by without Apple updating your favorite product, you start to get a little antsy. In the case of the iPad mini, Apple has spent those years completely reconfiguring the iPad line, introducing multiple models of iPad Pro and creating a new low-price sixth-generation iPad—thereby making redundant the iPad mini’s role as the most affordable iPad around.

But at least in this case, the despair wasn’t warranted. It took a while, but here’s the fifth-generation iPad mini—instantly recognizable since it’s got the same shape and size as its predecessor, but now powered by the same A12 Bionic processor found in the iPhone XS. It’s amazing what a difference three and a half years can make.

Say hello to my little friend, again

The sixth-generation iPad has effectively usurped the iPad mini’s role as The Cheap iPad, meaning that as of now, the only reason to buy an iPad mini is because you want a small iPad. And there are plenty of people who do—from extreme mobile workers to people who want to slip an iPad into a purse or coat pocket to businesses who want simple point-of-sale terminals to children with small hands and keen eyes.

For several years, the iPad mini was my primary iPad. Then I switched to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, which was a radical size change. It was quite a feeling to hold an iPad mini in my hands again after all this time. Coming from the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, the iPad mini is staggeringly small. If you’ve forgotten, it’s 8 inches (203mm) high and 5.3 inches (135mm) wide, weighs two-thirds of a pound (300g), and has a 7.9-inch diagonal display.

And yet despite its small size, that display packs in all the pixels of the 9.7-inch iPad—2048 by 1536 resolution—meaning it’s got a pixel density of 326ppi. This is a better screen than the low-cost iPad, though—it’s laminated, so it’s closer to the surface of the glass, and it’s got support for the P3 wide color gamut and True Tone. All it’s really lacking when compared to the iPad Pro display is ProMotion—this display refreshes at 60Hz, not 120.

Reporter’s notebook

For a while now I’ve been advocating for the idea that the iPhone should support the Apple Pencil, so it could be used as a sketchbook or notepad. The big problem with that theory is that it would really require a smaller Apple Pencil, and when Apple redesigned the Pencil last year, it didn’t go this route.

The iPad mini isn’t an iPhone, exactly, but it’s less than twice the volume and half again the weight of the iPhone XS Max. (It’s also got fewer pixels, owing to the XS Max’s higher-density display.) So if you imagine the iPad mini as a sort of reporter’s notebook or artist’s portable sketchbook, it starts to make more sense as the most portable device yet to support the Apple Pencil.

Today every new iPad being made supports the Pencil, but it’s important to note that all the Lightning-based iPads—the iPad, iPad mini, and iPad Air—all use the Lightning-based original Apple Pencil model. The new Apple Pencil, supported only by the 2018 iPad Pro models, is superior in a whole lot of ways—but if you buy one of these non-pro iPads, you’ll be left with the older model. Not that the old Pencil is bad, it’s actually quite good, but it’s a bit painful to go back to a Pencil without a flat edge, matte finish, and magnetic-induction charging. (You can also use the Logitech Crayon on any of them.)

Drawing on the iPad mini (or these other low-end iPads) will also not be able to take advantage of the faster digitizer rate, which combined with the ProMotion display dramatically reduces lag—the space between where the stroke you just drew is visible and where the tip of the pencil is right now. It’s not a bad experience, it’s just not as good as the experience on the iPad Pro—but you’re also using a much smaller and cheaper device. It’s all a matter of trade-offs.

Paperback reader

I’ve always preferred using a Kindle to read books, but I have to admit that the iPad mini is a pretty great size if you’re primarily planning on using it to read books, newspaper apps, and websites. The screen may feel a bit cramped when using productivity apps, but switching to the iPad mini from the 12.9-inch iPad Pro was like going from a coffee-table book to a trade paperback. Reading from apps while holding the iPad mini in vertical orientation in one hand was easy and pleasant.

However, the increased screen density of this device means you’ll probably need to crank up the default text size in your apps and in the Text Size setting in the Display & Brightness section of the Settings app. As on previous iPad minis, everything’s just a bit smaller, and unless your eyes are particularly keen (and young) you’ll need to slide that text size up a notch or two in order to get it back into comfortable territory.

I wrote a large chunk of this article on the iPad mini, and while it’s capable of all the same stuff as just about any other iPad, writing is probably not its forte. Several companies do make add-on keyboards for the iPad mini 4 (all of which will work with this model, since they’re identical on the outside), its eight-inch width in horizontal orientation is not really wide enough to fit a keyboard with normal size keys. I ended up using an Apple Magic Keyboard in a Studio Neat Canvas case, which worked fine. If you don’t mind tiny keyboards with ultra-compact keys, cases like the ones from Zagg or Logitech or even Brydge might work for you. It certainly would make this a remarkably compact and portable writing device. You just have to deal with a nonstandard, compact keyboard layout.

I should mention one of the best features of the design of this iPad mini, which is that it’s entirely identical to the iPad mini 4. That might bore people who were hoping for a complete re-think of the device, but it’s pretty obvious that wasn’t going to happen. And because Apple didn’t tweak the exterior even a little bit, every accessory made for the iPad mini 4 will work on the fifth-generation iPad mini. And at least for right now, many of them are quite cheap, because the iPad mini was considered a dead product. Old iPad mini cases and covers and keyboards should work fine with this device, provided they were designed for the iPad mini 4. (Apple made changes in design between the iPad mini 3 and 4 that broke compatibility; accessories build for other models are not likely to be compatible.)

Multi-iPad lifestyle?

As the iPad line expands—it’s a family of five now—the different models are better suited for different tasks. The iPad mini is all about that small size, and with Apple Pencil support it can serve as a sketchbook or basic notebook. It’s also an ideal size for reading books, newspapers, and other web content. At $399 it’s worth asking if we’ve gotten to the point where people will consider pairing an iPad mini with a larger iPad and using them for different tasks. The truth is, the iPad mini’s processor means it’s capable of doing almost anything its larger siblings can do—it just does them all on a smaller screen.

The new iPad mini doesn’t need to be all things to all people. It doesn’t even need to be the cheapest iPad in the product line. It just needs to be small and light while still providing the power of a modern iPad, and it does that quite well.