Apple Inc. has scheduled a product-announcement event on Sept. 12, according to people briefed on its plans, reinforcing expectations that the technology giant will release new iPhones and a smartwatch well ahead of the holiday shopping season….
In the past two years it has used San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, but people close to the company say it is aiming to use the 1,000-seat Steve Jobs Theater on its new headquarters campus. The new headquarters, however, aren’t finished, and the construction timetable could affect the timing or location of the event, those people said.
The last two years, the iPhone launch event has been Labor Day week. This date would return it to the slot it held in 2014, when the Apple Watch and iPhone 6 were launched on Sept. 9, eight days after Labor Day.
I have no doubt that Apple wants to hold the event at the Steve Jobs Theater. I also seriously doubt that today, 15 days before this event, that Apple hasn’t decided where to hold it. If Apple’s holding the event off campus, it will need to begin building up demonstration areas and other facilities as it has at previous events at the Flint Center in Cupertino or the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. Other possible venues include Moscone West in San Francisco and McEnery Convention Center in San Jose. Presumably Apple booked a few dates at off-site venues in advance just in case the Steve Jobs Theater wasn’t ready in time to launch Apple’s slate of holiday hardware.
Special guest Jason Snell returns to the show. Topics include Daring Fireball’s 15th anniversary, fruit fly infestations, clicky keyboards, sandwich cookies, the birth of Markdown, iOS 11’s new “cop mode”, favicons in Safari, Apple’s Project Titan, last week’s total solar eclipse, and Jerry Lewis.
Apple’s Services division has been going strong for a couple of years now, and the company likes to tout its ability to combine those services with hardware and software in order to deliver unparalleled functionality to its users. But not all of Apple’s devices are created equal when it comes to its primary service, iCloud.
It might be a bit strong to say that Mac users are second-class citizens in terms of iCloud integration, so let’s just say instead that there’s some goodwill for Apple to earn among Mac users–both those who are new to the platform as well as the ones who have used it for decades–by broadening iCloud’s options for those who still prefer laptops and desktops.
In particular, with the announcement this week that CrashPlan was discontinuing its consumer-oriented online backup plans, more than a few users found themselves wondering what steps to take to make sure their data remained safely and securely backed up.
There are, of course, plenty of options for Mac users who don’t want to switch to CrashPlan’s small business backup plans: Backblaze, Arq, and so on. But it also put into stark relief the fact that Mac users miss out on at least one major feature accorded to their iOS-using counterparts: iCloud Backup.
It’s easy to get so focused on the details on the present that we miss the obvious questions about the future. When John Siracusa wrote about the dangers of Mac OS X getting old in 2005, that operating system had only been around for five years—but he wasn’t wrong that Apple would need to address major shortcomings in the operating system in the long term.
So with iOS riding high (and serving as the basis for pretty much every major Apple platform that isn’t the Mac), it’s hard to imagine what comes next. And yet some tweets by Steve Troughton-Smith made my eyes pop open. After linking to a fascinating Ars Technica story about Fuschia, Google’s next-generation operating system project, Troughton-Smith wrote: “We’re far enough into the age of mobile that the big players are designing the OSes that’ll follow it-surprised if Apple isn’t doing same. It’s not so crazy to think that Apple would want to replace both iOS and macOS with something new and more unified. Post-XNU [the Kernel that runs iOS and macOS], post-BSD [Unix, the underpinnings of iOS and macOS].”
Replace macOS? Okay, we’ve played this game before—just as the Mac has changed chip architectures every decade or so, we’re now 17 years into the macOS/OS X era—and the classic Mac OS lasted about the same amount of time. iOS is comparatively young—but it’s still 10 years old, and built on top of the Mac OS X base. Perhaps its time is coming, sooner than we think. Or perhaps not. Let’s look at Apple’s long-term OS choices:
Chief among the changes for the new iPhones: refreshed versions, including a premium model priced at around $999, according to people briefed on the product, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Apple made room for a bigger screen on that model by reducing the size of the bezel — or the forehead and the chin — on the face of the device. Other new features include facial recognition for unlocking the device, along with the ability to charge it with magnetic induction, the people said.
Analyst Michael Gartenberg and I talked about the price of the new iPhone a few weeks ago on Download. What Gartenberg said: “We’re gonna see a base model at $999, and then we’re going to see the model that everyone wants, that’s going to come in at well over a thousand dollars.”
Using the same logic I used to correctly guess the price of the HomePod, I came up with the same figure. The base iPhone 7 model costs $649. The base iPhone 7 Plus costs $769. That’s a $120 spread, so an imaginary higher-tier phone would cost $889.
But if you guess $889 or $899 as the price of the new iPhone, you’ve missed one of the fundamental rules of guessing Apple pricing: Once you’ve figured out what you think the price should be, raise it. If the math (and your heart, if we’re being honest) points to an $899 price, the price is more likely to be $949 or $999. And $999 is a powerful price because, as silly as that one-dollar difference is, it means that the new iPhone doesn’t start at $1000.
Gartenberg speculated that this iPhone might start at 128GB of storage, in part to justify the higher price, but I’m not so sure. Regardless, as Gartenberg pointed out on the podcast, the most popular model will probably be the $1099 model with a higher storage capacity.
Apple is planning to unveil a renewed focus on the living room with an upgraded Apple TV set-top box that can stream 4K video and highlight live television content such as news and sports, according to people familiar with the matter… The updated box, to be revealed alongside new iPhone and Apple Watch models at an event in September, will run a faster processor capable of streaming the higher-resolution 4K content, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t yet public.
The Apple TV is an okay device—I use it a lot and I find it functional but often frustrating—but it’s in a market with many cheaper devices that are as good or better. Apple needs to be more aggressive with Apple TV pricing, which hopefully would come alongside the introduction of a high-end model. I’m exciting about Apple embracing 4K and HDR video, though—presumably it will start offering 4K/HDR movies on iTunes as well as allowing apps such as Netflix and Amazon Video to play 4K video.
When I looked up, though, my heart raced. The intensity, the dazzling colors, the freakishness of that sight—a jet-black hole where the sun should be! I’m not a touchy-feely person by any stretch, but this was a spiritual experience; I was so moved, and I could tell that my sons were, too. I could easily see why ancient civilizations assumed that some god or mystic force was responsible for total eclipses.
Siri is a personal assistant that communicates using speech synthesis. Starting in iOS 10 and continuing with new features in iOS 11, we base Siri voices on deep learning. The resulting voices are more natural, smoother, and allow Siri’s personality to shine through. This article presents more details about the deep learning based technology behind Siri’s voice.
Just scroll down to the bottom and listen to the progression between iOS 9, 10, and 11. It’s really something.
Mark Gurman’s latest at Bloomberg has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-apple-iphone8/
See this thread: https://twitter.com/rjonesy/status/899990609079009280
Adios, CrashPlan for consumers: http://tidbits.com/article/17412
Moltz and Lex use Arq but Moltz may switch after Amazon changed their storage prices: https://www.arqbackup.com
You can temporarily disable Touch ID in iOS 11: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/08/17/ios-11-emergency-sos-disables-touch-id/
Here’s what configuring the HomePod will look like in iOS 11: https://9to5mac.com/2017/08/22/configuring-homepod-looks-like-this/
Are these pictures of an Apple OLED TV? Probably not. https://www.macrumors.com/2017/08/16/images-depict-alleged-apple-oled-tv/
Our thanks as well to Indochino (https://www.Indochino.com) where you’ll find the best made to measure shirts and suits at a great price. Use the promo code “REBOUND” and get any premium suit for just $379.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Me, staring straight into the sun, with a weird 360-degree twilight behind me.
We drove all the way to Menan, Idaho to witness the total solar eclipse on Monday, and it was spectacular. If you’re ever given the opportunity to see one—and if you’re in North America, you get another chance in 2024—you should take it. A total solar eclipse is not comparable to any other solar eclipse, whether you get 15 percent coverage or 95 percent coverage. Accept no substitutes.
For the first hour or so, the sun was gradually eaten away by the moon, and in the last 15 minutes of the run-up to totality, the sunlight was clearly attenuated—everything looked more pale and gray, as if someone had turned the brightness setting down on reality. But in the last moments, things got weird. Darkness approached from the west. The sun went out entirely, and we were surrounded by a 360-degree twilight sunset. Surrounding the eclipsed sun was the beautiful solar corona, soft and wispy, looking like nothing else I’ve ever seen in the sky.
Everybody standing on the ridge of the volcanic butte was crying and shouting and exclaiming. It was a remarkable experience. And two minutes later, it was over. It took us two days of driving to get home. But those two minutes? Totally worth it. Bring on 2024.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I just got back from our road trip, but somehow (largely thanks to the magic of pre-taping) I managed to generate a bunch of really cool podcast episodes this week that you should listen to.
On Liftoff Stephen Hackett and I recounted our solar eclipse experiences. On Free Agents I talked to David Sparks in person about his origin story, from college to law firm to being out on his own. John Siracusa and I revealed that we have no idea about how donuts work on Robot or Not.
And on this week’s super-sized Upgrade, Myke and I asked John Siracusa, Alex Cox, and Stephen Hackett to join us to draft Apple hardware from any era. Then John stuck around to talk about “Blade Runner: The Final Cut” with us.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I’m seven days into a 11-day family road trip. While this has been mostly a work-free vacation—as you might have noticed from the lack of posts on the site this week!—there were a few experiences that I’ve had this week that I thought were worth sharing.
Travel prep. I didn’t need to buy much new technology for this trip, but earlier this year I bought every member of my family a six-foot-long USB-to-Lightning cable on Amazon. At home, that extra length leads to less tugging on the end of the cables, which (theoretically) reduces the strain on the cables and should increase their lifespan. On the trip, this lets the kids in the back seat plug their devices in to the dual USB adapter that’s in the front dash. I also bought a high-capacity battery just in case we’re in a situation where our devices are running down and we don’t have power available.
Surprise! You need a cable. My son’s birthday falls during this trip, and several months ago I bought a Nintendo Switch with the intent of giving it to him on this trip, a couple of days before his birthday when we were making a very long drive. The surprise was excellent and my kids got to play Mario Kart in the back of our car while we drove across the entire state of Nevada. There was just one catch: I didn’t think about the fact that the Switch comes with a hardwired power plug, rather than the more commonly seen power block with detachable USB cable that most devices seem to come with these days. Oh, Nintendo, don’t ever change.
Since the Switch’s plug is a USB-C connector, we didn’t have any way of keeping the device charged in the car after the battery ran down. It turns out, however, that in 2017 you can stop for gas at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere and find a wall of charging cables and adapters in the adjoining convenience store. The wall was dominated by Lightning cables—wow, the iPhone is a popular product—but I was able to find a USB-A to USB-C cable and pay for it (with Apple Pay, no less). We pulled out of the truck stop and back to the road, and my kids were able to play on the Switch until they were absolutely sick of it.
Reliable internet, or not. Two of the three places we’ve stayed on this trip have been rentals, rather than hotels. (They’re mostly ski condos repurposed for the summer months.) Both of them advertised Wi-Fi as a feature, but that’s an incredibly vague concept that can encompass a lot of different experiences. The first place was connected to the Internet via DSL, which is quite slow, and the connection was unreliable on top of it. The second place offered cable internet, at pretty fast speeds, but once again the Internet seems to keep dropping and then resuming. The Wi-Fi at the hotel was fast and reliable, which isn’t a given.
In the meantime we’ve blown through a giant chunk of our cellular data allotment for the month. Oh well. Life on the road.
Family photos. On this trip we reprised our Hawaii photo decision—namely to bring along an iPhone 5 waterproof case with wrist strap—and used it for various adventures. The phone was in Airplane Mode the entire time, but once we were all done, I was able to get it on the hotel Wi-Fi and plug it in and in a few hours it had synced all of its photos with my iCloud Photo Library, at which point we could view and share those photos freely.
This vacation we’ve also spent a lot of time using AirDrop to get photos between different family devices. Given our sketchy connectivity situation, it’s refreshing to be able to do fast device-to-device transfers of photos and videos.
Tech I didn’t bring. No Mac on this trip at all. Just my iPad Pro and, in case I needed to type anything (like this story!) its accompanying Smart Cover. (Yeah, I went with the Smart Cover this time because it’s incredibly compact.) I edited all my podcasts before I left home, and don’t plan to record any new podcasts (bar one, see below) in the meantime. So it’s all iPad all the time.
Camp night, eclipse day. I’m not much of a camper1, but we’re camping one night on this trip, at a campsite within the zone of the total eclipse on Monday. That big battery should come in handy, and I bought a nifty LED camping lantern that I’ll put to use. For the day of the eclipse, assuming no clouds get in our way, I’m planning on enjoying the two minutes of totality without much in the way of technology. Afterward, we’ll get in our car for the very long drive home, and I’ll record a special episode of Liftoff with Stephen Hackett.
As the post card would say, “Having a great time—wish you were here.”
I grew up in a place where city people went to camp… which has suppressed my enthusiasm for camping ever since. ↩
A Safari mock-up featuring Pinned Tabs icons (top) and Chrome today.
John Gruber wrote about supporting favicons in Safari tabs the other day, and he makes some good points. I am not a tab-oriented person—it’s rare I have more than a handful of tabs open at once, especially on macOS. But I can see how, with large number of tabs, Chrome keeps scannability by including a site’s favicon on each tab.
If I had to guess why Safari doesn’t support favicons in tabs, I’d say that Apple’s designers probably think most favicons are ugly and contribute to visual clutter. It’s probably why Apple came up with its own SVG-based spec for the Pinned Tabs feature it added to Safari in 2015. Every site has favicons, but Apple chose not to use them—and instead had web developers generate new vector-based site logos for use with this single Safari feature.
(I like Pinned Tabs, and use them all the time, but isn’t it strange that Apple never implemented them on iOS? I have duplicates of several toolbar bookmarks because on iOS, it’s like the Pinned Tabs I have on my Mac simply don’t exist.)
Anyway. this makes me wonder why Apple hasn’t used that new vector icon anywhere but in Pinned Tabs1. Tabs adorned with vector silhouettes would seem to be much less cluttery than a tab bar full of square icons of various colors and qualities. And it would be a very Apple-like move to introduce “icons in tabs”—only to use a format it defined2 rather than the one that pretty much every site has used forever.
If you’re wondering what that might look like, look at the top of this story. It doesn’t look half bad—and fits a bit better with Apple’s design approach.
They do appear… in the Touch Bar, tied to Toolbar Favorites. Which is weird. ↩
If a site doesn’t have a Pinned Tabs icon, Safari displays a rounded rectangle containing the first letter of the site, and (when active) uses the dominant color on the site as an accent color. ↩
On a recent episode of Upgrade (https://www.relay.fm/upgrade), Jason Snell speculated that Face ID would silence notifications while you’re looking at the phone. This may have been corroborated: https://twitter.com/_inside/status/894998023373303809
Glow is a new device that can monitor your electrical usage: http://meetglow.com/share/
Sense is another such device: https://sense.com
The No-GPS road trip: http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a27372/road-trip-no-gps/
Some Millennials don’t know you can get TV over the air: http://boingboing.net/2017/08/03/millennials-have-discovered-an.html
Lex’s wife’s Mac got the Jangoram Trojan: https://malwaretips.com/blogs/remove-search-jangoram-com-macos/
Our thanks to Zip Recruiter. Are you hiring? With ZipRecruiter.com, you can get your posting on all the major sites and social media. Go to ZipRecruiter.com/Rebound (http://ziprecruiter.com/Rebound) to try it out for free!
Our thanks as well to Indochino (https://www.Indochino.com), where you’ll find the best made to measure shirts and suits at a great price. Use the promo code “REBOUND” and get any premium suit for just $379.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Editorial offers Markdown styling, foldable sections, and custom keyboard shortcuts for Workflows.
When I mention that I write a lot on the iPad these days, I’m often asked what iOS apps I’m using to write. The truth is, the story keeps shifting—I’ve never really settled on a single app, because none of them give me everything that I want.
These days I’m using Editorial most of the time. It’s got full Markdown support and syncs with Dropbox1, but those features have basically become table stakes for iOS text editors. What has put Editorial over the top for me, at least for the moment, is its powerful set of user-creatable and shareable workflows. These powerful features can be assigned to keyboard shortcuts, which is huge for me since I write articles on my iPad Pro while attached to an external keyboard.
If there’s anything that frustrates me about Editorial—and this is true to a degree with almost every iOS writing tool I’ve used—is that it all still feels a little scattershot. There’s an Editorial workflow directory with a few dozen add-ons, but some of them might be better served to be built right into the app itself. And every so often, I find myself wanting to do something that BBEdit does on the Mac, and realize that I can’t do it. (Other times, I happily discover that someone else has already written a workflow for that feature, and that’s great.)
Until recently I was using 1Writer on iOS. It’s similar to Editorial in a lot of ways, but so far as I can tell, I can’t bind keystrokes to any installed custom actions, so I have to reach up and tap the screen a couple of times in order to execute them. 1Writer, like many apps, provides a custom row at the top of the software keyboard where you can attach actions. That row still appears at the bottom of the screen even when a hardware keyboard is attached, and it’s better than nothing, but it’s not as good as a keyboard shortcut!
For longform writing I’m still using Scrivener, which is my go-to tool for novels and anything else that I want to break up into sections. Since Editorial supports collapsible sections—just tap on the disclosure triangle next to a Markdown header and it’ll hide all the text below that header—I may actually just try writing long stories in Editorial and see how it goes. On macOS, I appreciate the organizational tools that Scrivener provides, but they just don’t seem to work as well for me on iOS.
Though people have raved to me about Bear, I don’t think it’s for me. I can configure it to be a usable text editor, but it really wants me to use its internal tagging and linking system, and that’s not how I want to work. It doesn’t sync with Dropbox and makes some styling choices (like hiding the content of Markdown links2) that I don’t really appreciate. In short, Bear looks like a thoughtful notebook-style writing app, but it doesn’t really fit with how I work today.
I keep Pages and Word around just for compatibility reasons, but to be honest, I almost never write anything that requires them. I guess that’s life when you write for the web instead of writing documents destined to be printed out (or turned into a PDF).
Now, I’ve shifted tools so many times that I fully expect that iOS 11 will change the terrain again. Will the existence of the Files app affect my workflow? Will one app better support iOS 11 features like drag-and-drop? Oh, probably. But in the meantime, I’ll be spending most of my iOS writing time in Editorial.
I try to save all my work into a single Dropbox folder called Stories, and then point my various Mac and iOS apps at that folder. It’s easier that way. ↩
I’ve got the same criticism of Ulysses, for what it’s worth. ↩
Dave’s back. The Hollywood Reporter’s ace TV writer Lesley Goldberg has the details:
Two years after signing off CBS’ The Late Show, David Letterman is returning to the small screen. The longest-serving host in U.S. late-night TV history is set to topline a new talk show for Netflix. The untitled six-episode series will premiere in 2018.
“Here’s what I have learned, if you retire to spend more time with your family, check with your family first,” Letterman said.
Since Letterman retired from Late Night, I’ve suspected that—unlike his idol Johnny Carson—he would find a way to return. His recent interview with Norm MacDonald only reinforced that belief.
I kept thinking that we’d see him do something on the Internet, something like Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” that indulged his own interests and gave him the flexibility to do as much as he wanted and no more. Six one-hour episodes on Netflix certainly fits that description.
The latest developer beta of iOS 11 is out, and in an interesting twist, the Messages in iCloud feature (that syncs all of your messages on every device into a single backed-up store via iCloud) has been removed:
The “Messages in iCloud” feature has been removed in iOS 11 beta 5 and will ship in a future software update to iOS 11. Users can continue to receive and store messages on each device, and they can continue to backup and restore messages using iCloud Backup.
That wording suggests this feature won’t ship with iOS 11.0, but a subsequent update. It suggests that the feature’s not quite stable enough for Apple to migrate all iOS users to it just yet, and so it’s being removed as the company moves closer to shipping iOS 11. (Presumably we’re six or seven weeks away?) But the feature’s not gone—presumably an update in October or November will turn it on, after Apple’s had more time to perfect it.
Apple Inc. is planning to release a version of its smartwatch later this year that can connect directly to cellular networks, a move designed to reduce the device’s reliance on the iPhone, people familiar with the matter said…. Intel Corp. will supply the LTE modems for the new Watch, according to another person familiar with the situation.
It’s funny—we talked about this possibility last week on Upgrade. I have felt for a long time that cellular capability is the next big feature for the Apple Watch—watchOS apps can act on their own and the Series 2 model offers GPS, but you still need to take your phone with you in case of emergency. With a cellular connection, you could still take calls, send and receive texts, and even stream audio without bringing your phone along. I always bring my iPhone with me when I exercise for that very reason.
I’m a little surprised that it’s happening this quickly, since Series 2 only arrived last year. But if Apple can get it out the door this quickly, that’s excellent. Being data independent is the Apple Watch’s future—and the sooner it can get there, the better.
John Gruber says that he’s heard there’s an “all-new form factor… for this year’s new watches.” It would be interesting indeed if Apple refreshed the look of the Apple Watch. To be fair, it’s been three years since the original model was unveiled. Still, I’d expected the basic look of the watch to remain unchanged a little while longer.
(It’s a cool idea, but I’m not sure it’s real… can AirDrop really reach that far? Bluetooth certainly can’t. Can Wi-Fi point-to-point reach that far? What’s the radio environment like up there? Is it clearer or full of interference? Why was the photo taken “Yesterday”?)
