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by Jason Snell

April 16, 2019 12:18 PM PT

Qualcomm and Apple bury the hatchet

Apple just released a PR statement indicating the end of hostilities with Qualcomm:

Qualcomm and Apple today announced an agreement to dismiss all litigation between the two companies worldwide. The settlement includes a payment from Apple to Qualcomm. The companies also have reached a six-year license agreement, effective as of April 1, 2019, including a two-year option to extend, and a multiyear chipset supply agreement.

This is pretty big news. Apple wasn’t able to use Qualcomm’s modem chips in its devices, with Apple turning to Intel for LTE modems and getting kind of desperate about what it would do in the 5G world. The two companies have been suing each other and throwing one another under the bus in the press, but it’s apparently all over now.

The agreement comes the day a trial began in San Diego pitting the two companies against each other, with an Apple attorney creating a labored metaphor about fried chicken and patents. Apparently the trial attorneys can make a KFC run now, because it’s all over.

(Update: And with that, Intel’s now out of the 5G modem game.)

By Dan Moren

April 16, 2019 12:10 PM PT

Restoring Mojave’s “missing” VPN server with VPN Enabler

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

I recently updated my Mac mini server to macOS Mojave after a long and troublesome ordeal.1 While the update has been mostly positive, one of the features I was sad to lose was the ability to configure my own VPN server. As you may recall, the VPN server was previously available as part of macOS Server, but was removed by Apple–along with several other features–in that software package’s Mojave-compatible update.

vpnenabler

But, as it turns out, all is not lost. The underlying code for running the VPN server is still present in macOS–there’s just no UI for configuring it. I could have just dug into the command line and figured out how to restore it, but it turns out that hard work has already been done for me. Via Twitter, Andrew Flemming pointed me to Bernard Teo’s VPN Enabler for Mojave, a $15 software package that–as its name suggests–provides a simple front-end for configuring a VPN server on Mojave.

I purchased VPN Enabler, set it up, and I would argue that it’s even easier than Apple’s own tools: besides fitting everything in one compact window, VPN Enabler will even suggest appropriate IP addresses so you don’t have to worry about figuring out what portions of your LAN are available. Additionally, it will generate a mobile configuration profile that you can use to automatically set up VPN access on your iOS devices with just a couple taps.

It took me less than 10 minutes to get up and running with VPN Enabler (and a solid few minutes of that was testing to make sure it still works even when the software isn’t open on the mini, which naturally, it does), and it’s working seamlessly.2

So, if you’ve been holding off upgrading to Mojave because of the lack of a VPN server, I can report that VPN Enabler does the trick. And if you’ve ever wanted to set up a VPN for your home network but been worried it was too complicated, this app takes pretty much all of the guesswork out of it.

  1. I’ve been writing a post about this whole saga which those of you who follow me on Twitter or listen to The Rebound will have heard much of, but it’s very long. Keep an eye out. ↩
  2. I found that the macOS VPN server actually died every once in a while and needed to be restarted, but so far I haven’t had that problem with VPN Enabler. ↩

[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 Dan Moren

April 16, 2019 7:23 AM PT

The future of the PlayStation

Wired’s Peter Rubin has an exclusive chat with Mark Cerny, lead system architect on Sony’s next-generation console, in which they talk about the technology key to that platform, including solid-state storage:

On the TV, Spidey stands in a small plaza. Cerny presses a button on the controller, initiating a fast-travel interstitial screen. When Spidey reappears in a totally different spot in Manhattan, 15 seconds have elapsed. Then Cerny does the same thing on a next-gen devkit connected to a different TV. (The devkit, an early “low-speed” version, is concealed in a big silver tower, with no visible componentry.) What took 15 seconds now takes less than one: 0.8 seconds, to be exact.

We’ve been used to SSDs in our computers and our devices, but game console have lagged behind, in part because there tend to be several years between generations, but also because games are big and large capacity drives have been pricey. The impact on game experiences could be huge, and I’m curious to see just what Sony (and Microsoft) have in mind for the next generation of consoles.

By Jason Snell for Tom's Guide

April 13, 2019 8:04 AM PT

The end of iTunes: What it means for you

Well, iTunes, it was a good run. According to reports from knowledgeable developers, this fall marks the end of the viable life of an 18-year-old app that started as an MP3 jukebox and ended up as an all-purpose media player, e-commerce engine, and mobile-device synchronizer.

It may be hard to believe it now, but iTunes began as a pretty great music player. iTunes was so good, and so successful, in fact, that Apple turned it into the repository for pretty much every media and device strategy that followed, making iTunes into a hodgepodge of features that was simultaneously unbearable (for users) and unkillable (for Apple).

The end may be nigh, but while iTunes may soon leave active service, it’s not going anywhere for quite a while.

Continue reading on Tom's Guide ↦

April 12, 2019

Killing iTunes, washing clothes, and watching Star Wars with the volume down.

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By Dan Moren for Macworld

April 12, 2019 5:30 AM PT

The iTunes break up: What will happen to our favorite features?

For a company that maintains multiple major operating systems, has its own productivity suite, and even developed one of the most popular web browsers in use, there was a time that the piece of software most identified with Apple was also perhaps the one most viewed as a necessary evil.

I speak, of course, of iTunes.

Yes, the music-playing/device syncing/media-buying/podcast-listening (and so much more) app was at one time not only a brand unto itself, but also an almost universal experience, as one of the few pieces of Apple software that was ported to Windows computers.

But iTunes may not have much time left on its clock. In recent days, speculation has hinted that the upcoming version of macOS will instead feature separate apps for music, podcasts, TV, and so on, likely based on their iOS counterparts. But those apps lack a lot of iTunes’s more powerful features.

Calls for iTunes’s breakup go back years (including me), but now that it seems to be on the verge of happening, it’s worth considering the things that iTunes actually does well and which deserve to stick around.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

by Dan Moren

April 11, 2019 5:22 AM PT

The human side of voice recognition

Bloomberg’s Matt Day, Giles Turner, and Natalia Drozdiak on the humans who audit recordings from Amazon’s Alexa in order to improve speech recognition:

Amazon.com Inc. employs thousands of people around the world to help improve the Alexa digital assistant powering its line of Echo speakers. The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes and offices. The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa’s understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands.

And just in case you think Amazon’s the only one doing this:

Apple’s Siri also has human helpers, who work to gauge whether the digital assistant’s interpretation of requests lines up with what the person said. The recordings they review lack personally identifiable information and are stored for six months tied to a random identifier, according to an Apple security white paper. After that, the data is stripped of its random identification information but may be stored for longer periods to improve Siri’s voice recognition.

At Google, some reviewers can access some audio snippets from its Assistant to help train and improve the product, but it’s not associated with any personally identifiable information and the audio is distorted, the company says.

There are a couple of different takeaways here: firstly, that our technology apparently isn’t yet good enough that any of these systems can get away without human intervention.

Point two is that there really should be some sort of standard for how this data is treated by companies around the world. If human intervention is required, it shouldn’t be up to each company to decide how it’s going to protect that information, which is occasionally sensitive.

The Rebound 233: All Those Penguins

Our Scottish developer joins us.

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By Jason Snell

April 10, 2019 12:38 PM PT

2019 iMac review: The best of a bygone era

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

The 2019 iMacs are a contradiction. They are brand-new computers that somehow feel like the last members of a dying order. They are shells designed in 2012 that somehow contain 8th- and 9th-generation Intel processors. They represent Apple’s broad-appeal entry-level Mac desktop, but can also offer power to rival the performance of the base-model iMac Pro. They are part of a legacy that once represented the core of the Mac market, but now fills specific niches in a world devoured by mobile technology.

I had a chance to spend a couple of weeks with a top-of-the line 5K iMac with a 9th-generation Intel processor, and its performance was impressive. There’s no denying that the iMac is better than ever, just as there’s no denying that this is a product line that’s in need of reinvention after years of stasis.

Continue reading “2019 iMac review: The best of a bygone era”…

By Jason Snell for Macworld

April 10, 2019 11:50 AM PT

Spotlight: Don’t take your Mac’s powerful search engine for granted

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost 15 years since Apple first announced Spotlight as a banner feature of Mac OS X Tiger. In fact, Spotlight has been around so long that I suspect that most Mac users take it for granted, not entirely understanding just how broad its purview is and how powerful it can be at finding the stuff that’s on your Mac. Whole books could be (and have been) written about Spotlight, but let me take you through a few details that you may have never learned.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

By Jason Snell

April 10, 2019 9:00 AM PT

Seeing a black hole with half a ton of hard drives

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

That’s a black hole. Source: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

In a legitimately amazing achievement for humanity, the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration announced that it has directly imaged a black hole for the first time1. There is some amazing science going on here, as this really caps more than a century of the expansion of our understanding of the universe, from Einstein’s general relativity to Eddington’s measurements confirming Einstein’s theory to the first detection of a black hole collision via gravitational waves to, today, this image of a black hole four times the size of our solar system nestled at the center of a galaxy 55 million light-years away from us.

But this is Six Colors, so I want to talk about computers!

To capture this image, the EHT used seven different radio telescopes all around the world in order to use something called interferometry, which combines data from telescopes spread out over a wide distance to essentially create a virtual telescope the size of the distance between the telescopes. The result is a telescope that’s basically the size of Earth. (Among the telescopes used is one at the South Pole, which needed to be retrofitted to make these measurements.)

Then the telescopes have to capture data simultaneously, which means the weather needs to be good in Hawaii and Spain and Chile and the South Pole and other places simultaneously. And when that data is captured, it needs to be brought back to a correlation facility to process it and generate a single data set.

Here’s how Dan Marrone, Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona, described it during today’s press conference:

At the end of that, we had five petabytes of data recorded… it amounts to more than half a ton of hard drives. Five petabytes is a lot of data. It’s equivalent to 5,000 years of MP3 files, or according to one study I read, the entire selfie collection over a lifetime for 40,000 people.

The image you saw, though, isn’t five petabytes in size, it’s a few hundred kilobytes. So our data analysis has to collapse this five petabytes of data into an image that’s more than a billion times smaller. We do that in many steps. The first of those steps is to get [hard drive modules] to our correlators in western Massachusetts and Bonn, Germany. The fastest way to do that is not over the Internet, it’s to put them on planes. There’s no Internet that can compete with petabytes of data on a plane.

Let’s do some math. Hawaii is 5,000 miles away from the MIT Haystack correlation facility. Let’s assume roughly 700 terabytes of data (one-seventh the total) is flying from Hawaii to Haystack. It’s about 10 hours to fly from Hawaii to Boston (there are no commercial direct flights from Hilo to Boston so you might want to build in another two hours to fly from Hilo to Honolulu and ride the Wiki Wiki bus and wait for a flight), it takes an hour to drive down from the Mauna Kea summit to Hilo, and another hour to drive from Logan Airport to Groton, MA. Let’s generously estimate it takes 14 hours to get 150 pounds of hard drives from the summit of Mauna Kea to MIT Haystack.

That would mean they transferred 700 terabytes in 50,400 seconds, for a final data rate of about 14 gigabytes per second. As Marrone said, if you’re dealing in petabytes of data, the fastest bandwidth you can buy is not the Internet—it’s putting your hard drives on an airplane and flying them to your destination. (The project did need to wait for Antarctic summer before the data from the South Pole could be flown back—a much slower data rate, though still faster than any other transfer method from Antarctica!)

My pal John Siracusa pointed me to this excellent quote from computer scientist Andrew S. Tanenbaum: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”

Want to know more about black holes? Kip Thorne’s book Black Holes & Time Warps is great.

  1. Okay, it’s really the silhouette of a black hole. You can’t see the singularity, but you can see the area from which no light is able to escape. ↩

by Jason Snell

April 8, 2019 1:44 PM PT

HoudahSpot 5 brings makes advanced Mac searching easy

I enjoyed this in-depth review of HoudahSpot 5 by John Voorhees over at MacStories. While the Finder has more search features than you might think, HoudahSpot harnesses the power of Spotlight while providing flexibility and functionality that isn’t as readily available in Apple’s built-in tools.

HoudahSpot takes a different approach that makes it easier to access the power of Spotlight. The app surfaces Spotlight’s advanced file search functionality and couples it with its own layer of tools to extend what Spotlight can do. With version 5, the app has been reexamined from top to bottom adding new features and refining the entire experience. The result is a terrific update that maintains HoudahSpot’s position as one of the premier pro utilities on the Mac.

The update looks great and I’m planning on wiring it up to LaunchBar, the utility that’s generally at the center of my Mac navigation.

By Dan Moren for Macworld

April 5, 2019 5:19 AM PT

Three Apple products in the danger zone

Goodbye, AirPower! We hardly knew ye.

It’s only early April and it’s already been a tough year for Apple. Besides the admission that the company simply could not ship the wireless charging pad that it had been teasing for a year and a half, there was also the restatement of the company’s holiday quarter results, and an Apple event featuring TV content that showed remarkably little of that content, leaving some folks scratching their heads.

With nine months left in 2019, Apple’s surely got more challenges ahead of it. It’s got multiple subscription services to launch later this year, high expectations for the upcoming iPhone, since smartphone sales have begun slowing, and the next step in what will likely prove a significant shift for its two major software platforms.

On top of all of that, Apple has a small handful of products that are potentially trouble waiting to happen. Though none alone–or perhaps even all three together–would likely cause the company to tip into the abyss, they still could end up being things that Apple ends up spending more time discussing than it really wants to.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

April 4, 2019

We’ve slashed HomePod prices! Everything must go!

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By Jason Snell

April 4, 2019 12:29 PM PT

Last updated January 8, 2021

BBEdit is back in the Mac App Store

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

Back in 2014, Bare Bones Software’s Rich Siegel announced he was pulling his app, BBEdit, out of the Mac App Store. It was a bad sign for the viability of the store, and Bare Bones wasn’t the only major Mac developer to realize it didn’t make sense to sell their software in Apple’s store.

Last June, Apple made a big deal about forthcoming changes to the Mac App Store that would lead to Bare Bones, Panic, and other developers to make their return to the store. And today, Bare Bones announced that the app has returned after a five-year absence. (There’s even a feature story on the Mac App Store about it.)

The Mac App Store version of BBEdit differs in that it’s a subscription model: users pay $40/year or $4/month for access to all of BBEdit’s features. Bare Bones will still sell software that uses the traditional “perpetual license” model directly from its website. (The app has a 30-day trial period, and many of BBEdit’s great features work even if you never pay for it.)

In macOS Mojave Apple has modified some of the rules for Mac App Store apps and allowed apps a little more access to system functionality. As Siegel put it in his company’s press release today, “It is very important to us to provide the exact same user experience and feature set for all of our customers… Being able to provide this was a deciding factor as we considered returning BBEdit to the Mac App Store.”

Panic Software returned to the Mac App Store last November with Transmit, its FTP client. Like Bare Bones, Panic chose to built the Mac App Store offering around a subscription ($25/year) while also selling the app as a standalone $45 download directly.

by Dan Moren

April 4, 2019 6:16 AM PT

Apple cuts price on HomePod to $299

MacRumors reports that Apple has cut the price of the HomePod in the online store from $349 to $299.

We don’t have firm numbers on how many HomePods Apple is selling, but I suspect it’s not enormously high. The product has seen little in the way of improvements since its initial launch more than a year ago, and it’s been widely discounted at retailers in the last six months or so. (I bought a second one for $265 from Target over the holiday season.)

There have been some rumors that Apple might launch a cheaper model, but to me there’s still an open question of what exactly that might look like: where is Apple going to make tradeoffs to save cost?

The bigger issue to me is whether or not Apple’s going to invest in the HomePod’s future. Though I’m confident that the company is still heavily invested in Siri, it’s a matter of what Siri innovations make their way to the HomePod.1 Otherwise, it might as well be the iPod Hi-Fi 2.0.

  1. Not to mention other features, like, say stereo support on the Mac. ↩

The Rebound 232: Ray Romano

45 minutes on AirPower.

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By Jason Snell for Macworld

April 3, 2019 8:28 AM PT

Pro or no? How the high-end 2019 iMac measures up

High-end iMac or iMac Pro? Ever since the iMac Pro was released in 2017, that’s been a key question for pro-level Mac users who aren’t sure if taking the perilous leap from the summit of the iMac product line across to the $4,999 (and up) iMac Pro was worth the financial risk. With the 2019 updates to the iMac line, the gap between the two products has narrowed even more, making the question that much harder to answer.

I’ve been using a base-model iMac Pro as my primary computer since it shipped, and last week Apple sent me a high-end 2019 iMac, so as I write this I am literally sitting in that iMac Pro gap. (It’s comfy here, thanks for asking.) The 5K iMac is equipped with the 3.6GHz 8-core ninth-generation Core i9 processor, 16GB of RAM, a Radeon Pro Vega 48 GPU, and 512GB of SSD storage—a configuration you can buy today on Apple’s website for $3449—no small gap of $1550 from the price of the base-model iMac Pro.

If you’re in a market for a new, powerful desktop Mac, should you buy the top-tier iMac or leap across the gap and into the warm embrace of the iMac Pro? Reader, you will be shocked to learn that it all depends on your priorities.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

By Dan Moren

March 31, 2019 2:26 PM PT

The Back Page: Apple’s Missing Services

It was a big week for Services in Cupertino, with Tim Cook announcing Apple News+, Apple Arcade, the Apple Card, and, of course, Apple TV+. The company’s clearly making a hard push to build Services revenue, as it’s repeatedly promised to do, but part of me wonders if perhaps Apple hasn’t pushed hard enough. To my mind, it’s leaving money on the table by not offering more services for its hundreds of millions of users.

Don’t worry: I’m here to help. I’ve invested a lot of time—minutes really!—in concocting ways that Apple could further boost its Services portfolio by taking advantage of just a few opportunities that it’s missed:

Apple Podcasts+

Look, there just aren’t enough hours in the day anymore. Between work, chores, all the TV shows we are contractually obligated to watch, and, oh yeah, our friends and family, we barely have time to sleep, much less listen to all those podcasts people have been telling us we can’t miss. That’s where Apple’s new Podcasts+ service comes in. For just $4.99/month, Apple will run all those podcasts your friends have been talking about through a machine learning algorithm, then have Siri provide you with a summarized digest of the most important moments, so you don’t have to stand blankly around the water cooler while everybody is talking about the latest episodes. Creators don’t get left out either: for $14.99/month, Apple will use the same technology to produce your podcast for you, leaving you more time for binging all that peak TV.

Apple Keyboard+

We’ve all heard the anecdotes of bad keyboards—Apple’s now even apologized for the problems experienced by “a small number of users”—but clearly something more pervasive is happening here. Keyboards shouldn’t die when they get a little bit of dust in them. But that’s a problem that can be fixed with the new Keyboard+ service from Apple. For just $5.99/month you can have a genuine Apple Genius show up at your door each week with a toolkit and a can of compressed air. They will then carefully disassemble your keyboard, prying off each individual key cap and removing all foreign objects, then painstakingly reassemble it all, just as it was, except maybe without the ‘e’ key. For the special Keyboard++ $9.99/month service, they will just bring you a new laptop every month, just in time for the previous one’s keyboard to stop working.

The modular Mac Pro

Why sell a computer once when you can sell it over and over and over again? We know that the upcoming Mac Pro is supposedly “modular” but what if that really means that it’s a service! For a low, low fee of $49.99/month, you can make sure that your Mac Pro is always updated with the latest components, whether it be faster drives, more RAM, or a better graphics card.* And since new modules are sure to come out infrequently, it’s a great way for Apple to rake in subscription revenue over time! (*Installation requires you to bring your Mac Pro to an Apple Store and leave it there for 48 hours for the upgrade to be completed. Also, your entire disk will be wiped, even if it’s not the part being upgraded, so make sure to make a backup. Does not include provisions for a loaner machine.)

Apple Park+

Are you obsessed with Apple? Do you spend endless hours digging into obscure and private APIs to see what you can discover about new Apple announcements? Creating your own implementations of yet-to-be-released Apple products and then releasing them to the public? Well, then, perhaps you are a candidate for the new Apple Park+ service. For just $99/month, Apple will give you a desk in a secure room in its Apple Park headquarters, where you can do all of that digging and investigation in peace and quiet, without being distracted by the Internet or, you know, windows. (Offer valid for Steve Troughton-Smith and Guilherme Rambo only.)

[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 31, 2019 2:25 PM PT

Applications Folder: Rocket – Fast emojis on macOS

Rocket

Matthew Palmer’s Rocket is an app that lets you enter emoji into just about any app on your Mac just by typing a few characters—rather than using the Emoji picker. (Dan wrote about Rocket last year.)

As a big user of Slack, which uses the same approach as Rocket, I’ve discovered that it’s much easier to type :rocket: than open the Emoji picker and scroll around until I find the proper emoji. Likewise :flag-us: or :roll-eyes:. With Rocket, you can do that in just about any app—and as you type, it automatically guesses what you’re looking for based on what you’ve typed so far, so frequently it only takes a couple of letters to get exactly the emoji you want.

Rocket, which is free with a $5 “Pro” tier to unlock a few additional features, lives in the menu bar, but is basically invisible—until you type that trigger character, which I’ve set to the colon to match Slack’s approach. Rocket lets you set a default skin tone for emoji that support skin tones, and it can be turned off selectively inside particular apps and websites. The latest update added support for VoiceOver, making Rocket perhaps the first emoji picker that can be used by the blind.

Quite frankly, this should be a feature of macOS, but since that will probably never happen, I’m glad that Rocket exists. It makes it much easier for me to 😉 or 😥 or otherwise express myself in emoji.

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