Subscriber Rob writes, “What do we have to look forward to in the next few years as tech savvy baseball fans?”
There’s no doubt that the entertainment business in general, and sports in particular, will be dramatically altered by technological progress. I’m not a sports analyst by any means, but I’m a lifelong sports fan who also spends a lot of time thinking about tech stuff. So let me take a stab at it. Keep in mind, these are just a few broad ideas. I reserve the right to change my mind later.
The problem with the in-stadium experience is that sports are almost always going to be better experienced on television, where you get the very best angles, close up, with instant super-slow-motion replay. I attend a half-dozen baseball and college football games every year, and it’s clear that attending a game in person is still an entertainment experience—but it’s not the same experience as watching on TV, and so stadium experiences will need to continue to grow and change and innovate in order to provide something that’s worth your time. Ordering food and drinks from your seats via app is a start, as is providing free access to video replays on your mobile device when in the stadium. I wonder if augmented-reality tech could make watching a game live a bit more like watching it on TV, if you could call up stats and see replays in your field of vision while also watching the sport live. But at some point, doesn’t that just become watching TV? Why pay for a luxury box so you can watch the game on the TV set in the box, when you can just do that at home?
Sometimes, though, I wonder if the future of live sport is going to be a dramatic split between the people willing to pay huge amounts of money for an ultimate luxury experience, and the people who pay relatively little in exchange for providing a studio audience for the televised experience. My college football team, the California Golden Bears, make more money from their conference’s television deal than they can possibly make from selling tickets to people like me who want to see the game live. As a result, the games are increasingly scheduled in TV-friendly—and spectator-unfriendly—time slots. If that trend continues, they’re going to need to scramble to ensure that their lucrative television product isn’t being contested in front of an empty stadium. It’s a tough one.
Recently Major League Baseball has experimented with an all-you-can-eat monthly or season pass at various venues; for a flat price you and a guest can come to as many games as you want during the season. I think innovation like this, built on the back of the premise that everyone has a smartphone, will continue. Buy a subscription to the home team, come to a certain number of games a year, and maybe even watch as you’re dynamically assigned a seat in the stadium based on what’s available. Maybe you get a better seat if you pre-order dinner?
But of course, the in-home experience is where things could really change. High frame rates, higher definition pictures, and virtual-reality broadcasts can all make the sport more immersive. I’m hoping that viewers might one day be able to select what sort of stats and annotations they want to see on screen, or even pick their audio source of choice. I’ll crank up the sabermetrics, thank you very much.
But the truth is, the biggest way technology may impact sports is in how it’s played. We are just now discovering facts about sports we have been playing for more than a century, all due to computer tech that allows every movement of player and ball on a field to be recognized, logged, and analyzed. From baseball to soccer to basketball, our conception of what makes a good player is changing. And the players themselves are using video and statistical analysis to improve themselves, advanced medical techniques and appliances to train more intelligently or heal faster… we’re truly in the middle of a revolution in how sports are played and how athletes train.
Despite all this, though, the fact remains: sport remains an entertainment business only so long as it remains entertaining. The moment it isn’t fun anymore, the jig is up. It’s up to the sports leagues to figure out how to navigate our changing entertainment landscape and remain part of our entertainment budgets. The more that technology can connect me to my teams and make me care, the more likely they are to succeed.
Outside of recording and editing podcasts, my next-biggest chunk of time at work is spent on administration. Generally, this involves a lot of email, PDFs and spreadsheets. These tasks can be done on an iPad, but I’ve always found myself more comfortable completing them on a Mac.
Perhaps I’ve never taken the time to adjust my workflows to better fit the limitations present on iOS, but I find myself feeling constrained in ways that I don’t on macOS.
Take the task of creating a PDF from an email and uploading it to Freshbooks, the web-based accounting tool we use at Relay FM. On the Mac, I can select Export as PDF… from the file menu, save the PDF to my Desktop, tab over to Safari and upload it.
(As macOS supports creating your own custom keyboard shortcuts, I don’t even have to manually pull down the File menu to start the task, which is an added bonus.)
On iOS, this task is more clumsy. While some clients like Airmail make it easier to create PDFs from emails, the built-in app takes several steps:
Tap the Reply button, because Mail.app hates the Share Sheet.
Select Print.
On the Printer Options screen pinch and expand the Preview or press on it with 3D touch. A PDF preview window is then spawned.
Tap the Share button at the bottom of that window. to save the PDF someplace like Dropbox or iCloud.
After all of that, I can switch to Safari and upload the file from the Document Picker to the web. Most document providers require Internet access, which is another thing to consider.
This example is simple, but it’s something I do numerous times a week. I’d love to be able to use Mail.app and have an easier way to create PDFs from messages, but so far, iOS 11 doesn’t make turning an email message into a PDF any easier.
However, once a PDF has been made, iOS 11 promises to make this sort of task faster and easier with Files.app. It allows for local file storage, so my files don’t have to make a round trip to a Dropbox server and back.
This particular workflow should be a little better in iOS 11, but not remarkably different. However, the new multitasking, drag and drop and the aforementioned Files app should make this sort of cross-app work faster and easier.
Currently, so much work is reliant on Document Providers, a corner of iOS 10 that demotes non-iCloud services in what is already a pretty painful bit of UI. With Files, dragging documents to an email draft or a Note will be complete in mere seconds. Uploading a bunch of photos to a CMS will be much faster, as will importing resources into something like iWork. The new iPad Pros will allow three apps at once, allowing me to have a spreadsheet, Safari and a checklist all just within reach.
The days of hunting through Split View for the app I need are coming to a close, but I’m not sure that will be enough.
I don’t know if iOS 11 will change enough about the iPad to let me move a lot of my non-audio work to it, but I’m excited about trying it again. I’m ready to be impressed.
[Stephen Hackett is the author of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay FM.]
Since you last heard from us, we went to San Jose for Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. It was a good time. Almost everyone I know professionally was there, making it feel a bit like a high-school reunion. The weather was warm (in contrast to San Francisco), and while I had to get a hotel room for a couple of nights because San Jose is so much farther away from my home than San Francisco is, that meant I spent even more time in town, which meant it was a better event. I hope Apple keeps WWDC in San Jose for years to come.
It really is a strange feeling to wander around several square blocks and constantly hear voices you usually only hear on podcasts, or see faces you’ve come to know from Twitter avatars. And as a writer and podcaster, I’m high profile enough that people recognize me, which is just bananas. A guy got out of a car while I was walking down a street and shouted my name and got a selfie with me, which has never happened before in my life and will never happen again. Dan Moren and David Sparks were with me, which made me mortified but also gave me witnesses. Later on the same walk, someone approached David to talk about how much he loved Mac Power Users, and at least one other time I saw Dan get approached, too. It’s that kind of place. Turn around and you will bump into someone you worked with, know, or hear on a podcast.
What I’m saying is, if you haven’t ever gone to a WWDC—and why would you, if you’re not a developer?—you might actually want to put it on your “I’d like to do this sometime” list. WWDC week has transformed into what Macworld Expo was many years ago—the single event where everyone who is involved with Apple stuff—Apple employees, media, you name it—is in one place for an extended period of time. It’s the Apple equivalent of San Diego Comic-Con… but you don’t need a ticket to the big show to experience it. Other conferences—AltConf and Layers—run alongside WWDC, and I would be shocked if others don’t spring up in the years to come. As a social occasion for our community, it really can’t be beat.
If you can’t go, at least there’s good news on that front: Increasingly, the must-see events of WWDC week are available, sometimes live, sometimes on demand within hours of them happening. Some WWDC sessions are livestreamed and they’re almost all available for playback after the fact. John Gruber’s The Talk Show interview with Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi is up in both audio and video form, and the audio of the event streamed live. Accidental Tech Podcast streamed live. My podcast with Myke Hurley, Upgrade, streamed live. And of course, a zillion podcasts were posted in the ensuing hours and days of the event. Apple even set up a podcast booth for developers to record podcasts on site.
Coming out of the week, there were really two big stories. First, the new hardware—most immediately, the new iPad Pros, which were released the following week. I’m writing this story in my backyard on the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro. This thing is great… and it will be even greater once iOS 11 arrives, since it offers dramatically improved multitasking features for iPads. The iOS 11 story, as well as the macOS High Sierra story, are the other big thing. New operating systems take all summer to coalesce, as we learn new tidbits about how they work and work on extended projects to cover all the new features. That work started last week, and continues through September.
It’s how I spend my kids’ summer vacation every year, more or less. I’ve been writing about Apple operating systems from under the same redwood tree I’m sitting under right now since my review of OS X 10.1 for Macworld. The big difference is, this year I’m writing on an iPad Pro, not a Mac.
Ten years ago this week, the public first got its hands on the iPhone and began a revolution that has forever changed the way we use technology. We’ve gone from a society where a computer was something you had to sit down at a desk to use to one where it’s in your pocket all the time. We’ve ushered in an era of apps, selfies, emoji, and the answer to every question at our fingertips.
So, with all that under its belt, where the heck does the iPhone go next?
The iOS 11 public beta has started: https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/
MacRumors says Apple has acquired German firm SensoMotoric Instruments: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/06/26/apple-acquires-sensomotoric-instruments/
On the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, John Markoff interviews those who worked on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xDRdWFdsoQ
Echo Show might be a little creepy: https://www.buzzfeed.com/mathonan/meet-amazons-new-echo-show-alexa-is-watching
The Super Nintendo Classic arrives in September: https://sixcolors.com/post/2017/06/super-nintendo-classic-arrives-in-september/
Our thanks to Shutterstock (http://shutterstock.com/rebound) for sponsoring this episode. Whether you’re making ads or brochures, you need high quality images to attract and keep customers. Go to Shutterstock.com/Rebound and get started today with a 20% discount.
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.
And our thanks to Couchbase (https://www.couchbase.com/therebound). Get exceptional customer experience at any scale on the Couchbase engagement database. Always on, always fast. To find out more, go to Couchbase.com/TheRebound.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Every year we do the dance: Apple releases betas of the new versions of its operating systems and we go ahead and install them. Why, when we tell all the rest of you to be careful? Well, in part because we’re the kind of people who live to be on the bleeding edge, but also so we can write about the new versions of macOS and iOS and tell you what to expect. We do it for you, readers.
So I’ve been using the beta of iOS 11 for a couple weeks now on my 10.5-inch iPad. (I was going to wait until the public beta, I really was, but this machine simply cries out for iOS 11’s powerful features.) In that time, I’ve tried to spend a lot more time using my iPad than I used to, even if it’s still not my main computing device.
For me, iOS 11 makes that a lot more plausible than it used to be. Continuing in the tradition of iOS 9, which finally opened up the ability to have more than one app onscreen at the same time, iOS 11 has refined that into a system that is far more powerful, even if it’s not without its idiosyncrasies.
So, with the understanding that this is still a beta, and, of course, betas are subject not only to bugginess, but also to change and refinement, here are a few observations from my time using iOS 11.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
One of the major areas of improvement in macOS High Sierra is to the Photos app, which is only a couple of years old and has plenty of room to grow. I literally wrote the book on Photos, so it’s been interesting to watch Apple’s replacement for iPhoto as it has grown and changed. Here’s a look at the changes and new features in Photos for Mac on macOS High Sierra.
New image formats. Beginning with iOS 11, the iPhone 7 and later and the latest generation of iPad Pro models no longer capture photos and video in the JPEG and H.264 formats they’ve previously used—at least by default. Instead, they use the new High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) for video and HEIF (pronounced “heef”) for photos. Photos for High Sierra supports these formats natively, as you’d expect. If you share your photos (or drag them into the Finder), Photos will transcode them to JPEG and H.264, because Apple realizes that many devices can’t yet understand the formats.
(Because these formats are not supported on Sierra, Macs that are still back on Sierra will be able to view low-resolution derivative files synced via iCloud Photo Library, but not edit them.)
Portrait mode support. Photos for High Sierra supports the same portrait effects supported in iOS 11. This means that if you edit a photo taken in portrait mode on an iPhone 7 Plus, 8 Plus, or X running iOS 11, you can edit the portrait effects. (This is all aided by the fact that unlike JPEG, the HEIF format allows Apple to embed multiple images and depth-sensing data inside the HEIF file, so all that data carries along with the file up to iCloud Photo Library and back down to the Mac.)
Photo editing upgrade. Perhaps the biggest changes in Photos are in the editing pane. Previously, when you decided to edit a photo, you’d be presented with a sidebar containing seven icons: Enhance, Rotate, Crop, Filters, Adjust, Retouch, and Extensions. You could click through to any of them to reveal a subset of editing tools—or in the case of Enhance, do a one-click global enhancement to your photo.
There are nine new filter presets, replacing the older ones.
With Photos on High Sierra, when you edit a photo you’re taken to an interface with a sidebar as well as a toolbar. Tabs at the top let you toggle between three different editing views: Adjust, Filters, and Crop. (One-click Enhance is now an icon at the top right of the screen, next to the Done button.) Clicking the Crop tab will bring up the Crop functions of Photos, largely unchanged; clicking Filters will bring up a revamped set of nine pre-built image filter presets, three variations each on three different styles (Vivid, Dramatic, and black and white).
<
figcaption>Every advanced editing tool now lives under the Adjust tab, including the new Curves and Selective Color tools.
Everything else—all the more advanced editing tools—now live under the Adjust tab. Instead of having to hunt for them, they’re all there in the sidebar together. You can click disclosure triangles to show additional editing options, or hide them away entirely. It’s certainly more cluttered than the old approach, but you no longer have to remember if a particular effect is in the Filters, Adjust, or Retouch section.
There are also two new editing tools, though they’ll be familiar to users of other editing tools, including Apple’s discontinued Aperture: Curves and Selective Color.
Support for third-party edits. In the transition from iPhoto to Photos, the ability to edit a photo in an outside app and then save it back into your photo library was lost.1 It’s back now, and it’s better than it ever was in iPhoto.
In Photos on High Sierra, you can open any photo in an external image editor via the Edit With command under the Image menu. Under the Edit With menu will be a list of all the apps on your Mac that have been updated to take advantage of this feature of Photos, meaning you don’t need to pick a single external editor—you can choose different apps as you see fit.
Once an image has been opened in an external editor, you can do pretty much anything you want to it. Once you save in the app, the adjustments you’ve made come back to Photos right where you left it. You can make further edits on that photo if you want, and as with any photo in Photos, the original image is stored so you can revert back at any time.
One caveat: If an image is shot in the Raw file format, the Raw file is not sent to the external editor; instead, a JPEG version is transferred. (The Raw original is always saved and can be reverted to later, of course.)
Browsing adjustments. In previous versions of photos, the interface focused on tabs at the top of the screen—which you could optionally swap for a more iPhoto-like sidebar pane. On High Sierra, Photos has fully embraced that sidebar—it’s always visible when you’re browsing photos. (As someone who always ran Photos with the sidebar on, I applaud this move.)
<
figcaption>The selection counter (top) and a quick-filter pop-up (bottom) are additions to the Photos interface.
The contents of the sidebar have been reorganized into sections. The Library section contains different views of your library—auto-generated Memories, all of your Favorites, the People who appear in your images, the Places you took your pictures. And, in a new feature, all the photos you imported—organized by when you imported them. (This is the new import-history feature, so if you remember you imported a bunch of photos a few weeks ago, you can scroll back and see everything that came into your library from that batch.)
The Albums section of the sidebar now contains two two-level items, Media Types and My Albums. Media Types contains automatically-generated views of your library filtered by media type—Selfies, Live Photos, Panoramas, and so on. My Albums contains every album and Smart Album you create manually.
Another new feature in the image-browsing interface is the selection counter in the upper right. As you select images, the selection counter keeps count. Select 18 images and it will helpfully tell you, “18 photos selected.” The image counter is also a draggable proxy for your images—drag the image counter to your desktop or into an album, and the selected images will go there, too.
Just below the selection counter is a new quick filtering option that lets you quickly narrow the view to show only favorites, edited items, photos, or videos.
Speaking of albums, in macOS Sierra you can now import photos directly into an album—either an existing one or a new one. If you’re someone who always organizes photos by album, this will save you a step or two, since you will no longer need to import photos, make a new album, and then drag the imported items into the album.
Improvements to Memories and People. Memories, introduce to Photos last year, is a feature that looks for commonalities in the photos in your library and gathers them together into collections. Think of them as computer-generated albums that are meant to surprise and delight you with images from the past.
In High Sierra and iOS 11, Photos has increased the number of ways it parses your library looking for commonalities. According to Apple, among the new types of Memories are ones for pets, kids, hiking, diving, winter sports, nights out, and meals with friends.
In High Sierra and iOS 11, Memories is also better at picking photos from particular events, using image analysis to try to pick the best image out of many—the best smile or one where nobody’s blinking.
The People interface, which uses facial recognition software to lets you view all the images of a particular person, has been updated in High Sierra. It’s a more attractive design, and the face-recognition engine has been upgraded (Apple says it’s as much as twice as accurate) with the ability to make educated guesses about who is in a photo based on a face’s relationship to the other faces in a photo. For example, if a child is frequently in pictures with another child, the algorithm can use that to improve its confidence in its ability to assign a face to a particular person. And when you identify a photo as containing a particular person, that data is synced along with the photo, which aids your other devices in identifying that person themselves.
Transform Live Photos with the Long Exposure effect.
Live Photos improvements. Apple’s Live Photos format was introduced two years ago, and in this version of Photos, there are finally much better controls for editing Live Photos. You can manually change the Live Photo’s representative image to a different segment of the video, trim Live Photos video, and set one of three effects: a traditional live photo, a back-and-forth bouncing effect, or a Long Exposure image that processes the stack of images to create the equivalent of a photo with the shutter left open for a long time. Think about streams and waterfalls going from freeze-framed reality to a luminous, fuzzy fantasy.
Third-party projects. For years, Apple’s photography apps have made it easy to design and order printed versions of your photos—books, calendars, prints, and more. Those still exist, but in High Sierra, Photos allows third-party developers to integrate directly with Photos to create new projects. There’s a new third-party app interface that lets companies build Mac apps—there’s a special category in the Mac App Store for them, linked to from within the Photos app—that connect to Photos and allow you to order products or integrate with outside services from directly within Photos.
Apple’s announced several partners who will support this feature, including photo printers Shutterfly, Whitewall, Mimeo, iFolor, Mpix, slideshow builder Animoto, and web-hosting service Wix.
What’s not here. With every new version of any app, there are inevitably the wish-list items that didn’t get crossed off. I’m disappointed that Apple hasn’t made machine-learning-generated metadata syncing available across devices, so that every device you own doesn’t have to re-scan every photo in your library. Photos on iOS has the ability to auto-generate a movie for every Memory, but the Mac still lacks this feature. Smart Albums don’t have access to the categories generated by machine-learning scans, making it impossible to automatically combine two categories together.
And, of course, the big one: There’s still no way for members of a family to opt in to automatically sharing some or all of their photo libraries with one another, something my wife and I have been wanting for quite a while now—and a feature that Google is adding to Google Photos. Still, there’s no denying that this update to Photos is a big stride forward on several fronts.
Updated September 2017 for the final version of macOS High Sierra.
Apps could previously provide Extensions that ran inside a Photos window, which some apps used as a gateway to then open the image themselves. This new approach is direct, requiring no intermediate extension window. ↩
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Happy second 10th birthday to the iPhone, which was released a decade ago today. (No, you’re not forgetting things—everyone celebrated the 10th anniversary of the iPhone back in January, but that was the anniversary of the announcement, not the release of the product. The media loves an anniversary story, so why not do it twice in the same year?)
The iPhone was released on a Friday. Phones went on sale at 6 p.m. local time, and there were enormous lines around Apple and AT&T/Cingular stores leading up to the event. (This means Dan got his phone three hours before I did!) I got the iPhone late in the evening, and if my Twitter feed at the time is any indication, recorded a Macworld podcast about it?
The next morning my family and I had to be up bright and early to go to a previously scheduled weeklong family camp in the high sierras (no, not that High Sierra). That’s right, I would be writing my review of the original iPhone from a tent cabin in the mountains. This one, in fact:
That camp is remote enough that there was no AT&T service there. Kind of hard to review a phone when it can’t actually connect to the network! The drive up to camp was basically my best chance to test out the iPhone’s connectivity, so I sat in the passenger seat as my wife drove and checked and sent email and texts, browsed the web, and used a Twitter web interface to tweet my journey.
The first photos I took on the iPhone are from that passenger seat in the car, of my family during the drive. Once we arrived at camp, I managed to snap a few pictures of my kids playing in a flowery meadow, showing off the original iPhone’s mighty 1.9 megapixel camera.
I remember sitting in a camp chair inside that canvas-topped tent, writing diligently. It felt strange to be using and evaluating a piece of advanced technology while out in the middle of a forest, but in hindsight, it doesn’t seem as weird. The thing about the iPhone is that it’s a device that integrates itself into our lives, wherever we roam. I could hardly have lugged a new iMac with me to review at camp, but the iPhone came along easily. That’s what it does, and one of the reasons it’s great.
And it is a truly great piece of hardware. I wrote about it in a lot more detail at Macworld today, but I could make an argument that the original iPhone has the best design of all of them. Yeah, its screen is laughably small by today’s standards and it’s way too thick, but there is beauty in the glass front and the brushed aluminum back. Future iPhone designs (with the exception of the 3G/3GS, which feels like a regression for the sake of mass production) seem to be following the same track as the original iPhone design, refining it as technology and manufacturing methods improve.
Here’s what I wrote in that tent cabin ten years ago to conclude my review of the iPhone:
…The iPhone’s positives vastly outweigh its negatives. It’s a beautiful piece of hardware with a gorgeous high-resolution screen and a carefully designed, beautiful interface inside. The iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard will end up pleasing all but the most resistant Blackberry thumb-typers, making it an excellent device for email. Its Safari browser cleverly condenses full-blown Web pages into a format that’s readable on a small screen. Its iPod features make it a versatile audio player and a drop-dead gorgeous video player. And, yes, it does pretty well at making phone calls, too.
To put it more simply: The iPhone is the real deal. It’s a product that has already changed the way people look at the devices they carry in their pockets and purses. After only a few days with mine, the prospect of carrying a cellphone with me wherever I go no longer fills me with begrudging acceptance, but actual excitement.
It’s true—before the iPhone, I only carried a cell phone with me when I felt it was necessary. Being connected was optional, and not being connected was the default. When the iPhone arrived, I put it in my pocket and never looked back. On June 29, 2007, the world changed for me—I now had an Internet-connected computer with me wherever I went, even if it was up into the mountains—and in the ensuing years it would change for billions of other people around the world.
The iPhone’s influence will continue to reverberate for years to come. One decade in, that much is certain.
Ten years ago, after six months of hype and after waiting in very long lines around Apple and AT&T retail stores, people first got their hands on the iPhone. Time has a way of flattening our memories of events: Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone and the world changed.
But that simple sentence misses the initial fierce debate about whether the iPhone was going to be a usable product, the fact that the iPhone software wasn’t close to being done when it was announced in January, and the building of increasing excitement for a product that in some quarters was already being hailed as a game-changer. It was also the first time that I can remember where being in line at an Apple Store was an event.
Today, for billions of people in the world, it’s impossible to imagine not having a smartphone. But even more than that, it’s impossible to imagine working without a smartphone. When I think about how I worked 10 years ago—in the days before the original iPhone was released—it seems like a century ago.
It’s not that there weren’t “smartphones” in the days before the iPhone; I had a Palm Treo and a whole lot of people had BlackBerries. They connected to pricey, slow cellular data networks and let you read and reply to email, no matter where you were. It was the cutting edge at the time. I do recall, however, that I only carried my big, bulky Treo with me when I was traveling out and about for business. It wasn’t on my person at all times, but if I needed to be in touch I would bring it along.
Star Fox 2, which has been widely available as a ROM, never actually made it out onto the Super Nintendo. It was canceled before its official release.
That game won’t be available to play from the start, however. Players will have to unlock it through playing the original Star Fox game, also included with the SNES Classic Edition system.
Costing $80, the Super NES is more expensive than its predecessor, but it does also bundle in a second controller. (And those controllers get longer cables too, hurrah!)
The real question on everybody’s mind is exactly how hard will these be to get? And, moreover, how long will Nintendo sell them. The company’s previous foray, the NES Classic, was the hot item of last year, but Nintendo up and stopped selling them once the initial run was gone. Nintendo says that there will be more of the SNES Classic, though the company also has shied away from committing to producing them after the end of the year. In other words, the operative strategy is probably still to get ’em while they’re hot.
My real question is whether or not the trend will continue next year–because I really want an N64 Classic.
[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.]
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
It’s a pretty good state of affairs when the biggest frustration with a product is its name. I don’t entirely understand why the nomenclature of this accessory is quite so…fraught, so I’m simply going to call it the Apple Pencil Magnetic Sleeve and leave it at that.
A couple weeks back, when I first wrote about the Apple Pencil, one of my big complaints was that there’s no built-in way to store it on the iPad—something that still seems like an oversight to me. So I ponied up the $13 for the aforementioned Magnetic Sleeve and have been using it for the last week and a half or so.
It’s not a complicated device: as the name suggests, it’s a soft silicone sleeve that slides onto the Pencil. One side is flattened because it contains a magnet, which can be used to stick to any metal or magnetic surface.1 It’s available in four colors—Ice Sea Blue, Lavender, Red, and Midnight Blue; I opted for the last because it more or less matches my new Smart Cover. The package also comes with a few adhesive metal plates that you can attach to something that’s not magnetic. That’s it.
I find the feel of the sleeve to be pretty comfortable—it reminds me of the silicone grips on many pens, or those rubber things you slid onto your pencils in grade school to make gripping them easier and more comfortable. It doesn’t particularly affect my use of the Pencil and, in fact, probably makes it more comfortable to hold over time.
As for the magnetic aspect, it’s pretty solid. I can attach the Pencil to either my iPad’s Smart Cover or even to the iPad itself. The latter is not as secure: if you start shaking your iPad around, the Pencil’s going to fall off. Attaching it to the Smart Cover (specifically to the edges where the magnets are) is far more robust. Even then, it’s not a crazy strong magnet. If you’re looking for something that you can, say, throw into a bag and have the Pencil stay in place, you might want to look for something that attaches more firmly to the iPad and provides a pocket for the Pencil.
All in all, I think it’s worth the price I paid for it, and the Amazon reviews largely seem to agree. It doesn’t completely solve my storage problems: if I’m putting the iPad in my backpack or another bag, I’m still more likely to put my Pencil in a separate pocket just so it doesn’t get lost or banged around. But for just carrying around the iPad in your hand, the Apple Pencil Magnetic Sleeve at least lets you keep it all together.
Added benefit: that also means the Pencil can’t roll off your desk anymore. ↩
[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.]
Apple talked about many things at its Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month, but one that got relatively short shrift was the Apple Watch. Now more than two years in, the Watch has undergone a major transition from the product that was first announced, focusing in on specific uses like notifications, health, and fitness.
But some, myself included, had expected to see a bigger push on the health front in watchOS 4. A new marquee feature like sleep tracking, perhaps. Or a glucose monitor. (Apple mentioned that watchOS 4 will now work with external glucose monitors, but if it’s working on such tech itself, it’s not ready for prime time yet.)
While these types of health tracking features are all well and good, it would be far more interesting to see Apple leveraging its technological innovation to push health tech forward into an even more critical category: prevention. Or, to paraphrase the old saying, “Everybody talks about their health, but nobody ever does anything about it.”
Leaked information about Apple’s leaked information: https://theoutline.com/post/1766/leaked-recording-inside-apple-s-global-war-on-leakers
Tech leaders super happy to visit the White House: https://twitter.com/lachlan/status/877158391419994112
Apple does sell something that holds both your iPad and your Pencil and it’s only $149: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MQ0U2ZM/A/leather-sleeve-for-129‑inch-ipad-pro-black
MyScript Stylus, a handwriting keyboard on the App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/myscript-stylus-handwriting-keyboard/id931394264?mt=8
What the heck is the TextBlade? https://waytools.com
The TouchType iPad case is getting updated: https://touchtypecase.com
Amazon has removed its unlimited storage plan for Cloud Drive: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/08/amazon-ends-its-unlimited-cloud-storage-plan/
Our thanks to Blue Apron (http://blueapron.com/rebound) for sponsoring this episode of The Rebound. Blue Apron ships you ingredients and amazing recipes. Learn while you cook and cook meals you’ll love. Go to BlueApron.com/REBOUND and get three meals FREE with free shipping.
Our thanks also to Mack Weldon (https://www.mackweldon.com/rebound). Mack Weldon makes glorious underwear to hold your bits in the way they deserve, anti-microbially. It is truly awesome stuff. So go to MackWeldon.com/REBOUND and use the promo code “REBOUND” to get 20 percent off your order.
And our thanks to Couchbase (https://www.couchbase.com/therebound). Get exceptional customer experience at any scale on the Couchbase engagement database. Always on, always fast. To find out more, go to Couchbase.com/TheRebound.
I suggest that the problem at Uber goes beyond a culture created by toxic leadership. The company’s cultural dysfunction, it seems to me, stems from the very nature of the company’s competitive advantage: Uber’s business model is predicated on lawbreaking. And having grown through intentional illegality, Uber can’t easily pivot toward following the rules.
If there’s a defining quality to the iPad Pro, it’s that the device seeks to go beyond the traditional touch interface of iOS to seek out additional ways of getting work done. For people who are comfortable with pencil, pen, and paper, the Apple Pencil brings a new dimension to using an iPad. And for those of us who are most comfortable with a keyboard beneath our fingers, the iPad Pro—with its Smart Keyboard, the first Apple keyboard designed for iOS—was a sign that Apple realizes that sometimes, even an iPad needs to behave a bit more like a laptop.
There are probably innumerable reasons why Apple decided to expand the size of the second-generation iPad Pro, replacing the old 9.7-inch model with a new 10.5 one. But one benefit of the slight expansion—the 10.5-inch iPad Pro is 10.6 millimeters wider than the old model—is more room for typing, whether it’s physical keys on the Smart Keyboard or the virtual keys of the built-in software keyboard.
