By Dan Moren

July 5, 2017 1:23 PM PT

Meet the new iMac, definitely not the same as the old iMac

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

After six years I decided it was time to upgrade the ol’ iMac. My previous workhorse was a mid-2011 21.5-inch model, albeit with some special modifications: a 256GB SSD (as well as a 1TB hard drive), a built-to-order 2.8 GHz Core i7 processor, and 24GB of RAM. All of those improvements meant that it was still a plenty capable machine in 2017, but it had started to become a bit sluggish when doing heavy-lifting tasks, and there was the matter of an annoying persistent line of dead pixels on the display.

Over the years I’ve gotten so used to the blue line of pixels on my iMac that I don’t even see it. Today it decided to start turning red. pic.twitter.com/avcspFVfpa

— Dan Moren (@dmoren) June 14, 2017

So, with the announcement last month of the latest iMac revisions, my upgrade plans fell into place. I have no doubt I could have eked out another year or two from the old iMac, but the new models were enough of a revision to merit upgrading (Retina displays, Thunderbolt 3, much better discrete graphics, and so on) and happened to fall right into a perfect timing window for me.

I opted for a built-to-order 27-inch 5K Retina iMac, with a 4.2GHz Core i7, 512GB solid-state drive, and Magic Trackpad 2. If you’re keeping track at home, that’s the top of the line-model with the best processor currently available in a desktop Mac. (At least until the iMac Pro shows up later this year.) I chose to stick with the standard 8GB of RAM…but only so I could save some money by getting 16GB of additional RAM from OWC, bringing me to the same quantity I had in my previous machine—albeit with much better quality memory.¹

Now that I’ve spent several days with the new iMac, I’ve begun collecting my thoughts. Most importantly that I’m super glad I made this leap, since it’s already starting to pay dividends. But there are definitely a few things that have stood out to me in the past several days.

Retina display

This is, hard as it might be to believe, my first Retina Mac. I’m a MacBook Air user and have been since 2011, so the new MacBook and the Retina MacBook Pro have never really been on my radar. I also have a Mac mini, but it’s hooked up to my HDTV, so it’s hardly a true Retina experience.

Between the high-resolution and the improved colors, the 27-inch’s 5K screen is absolutely gorgeous. This is, of course, old news for everybody who’s been using a Retina Mac for the last five years, but it is difficult to overstate just how sharp and crisp text looks on this screen. I’m sure not getting any younger, and I’d started to feel on my old iMac that my eyes were perhaps going a bit—so far, the 5K iMac has made the reading experience vastly more pleasant—and as someone who deals with text a lot, it’s a welcome improvement. (It’s still a bit of an adjustment, especially when I open up what I’m used to being a huge image, like an iPhone screenshot, that actually looks…just kind of reasonably sized on this display.)

As far as the size goes, I was a little worried that jumping from the 21.5-inch to the 27-inch might simply feel too large. Less than a week in and I haven’t felt that once. Part of it is because that curved backing on more recent iMacs actually does make it feel surprisingly small. I’ve also long had a 27-inch Cinema Display that I’ve hooked my MacBook Air up to, so this isn’t my first time on a larger screen. Mostly it just feels “not cramped” to me, and I have a pretty hard time imagining going back.

Performance

Writing certainly isn’t the most performance-intensive task, but these days my job also involves producing a lot of podcasts, and shuttling around big audio files definitely requires a bit more horsepower. So far I’ve only edited one podcast on the new iMac, but the result was still striking: I had this week’s episode of Clockwise published less than 40 minutes after it wrapped up.² Tasks that often took a lot of time: transcoding, syncing audio files, even just copying files into GarageBand, took noticeably less time. I may have audibly gasped when I saved a large AIFF in Fission, an action that I often avoided on my old iMac because it involved sitting around and watching a progress bar. The dialog with the progress bar didn’t even appear.

At the end of the day, performance improvements for me aren’t so much about making what I’m actively doing faster as making me spend less time waiting for the computer to finish what it’s doing. This new iMac has already made me more productive by speeding up tasks where I used to end up walking away from my desk to go get a drink while it did its thing.

Sundries

There are a few other small things here and there that I’m liking or getting used to on this new machine. As I mentioned ahead of getting the new iMac, one of the features I was most looking forward to was having AirDrop. I take a lot of screenshots and often send them to my Macs for uploading or sending along with pieces I wrote. On my old iMac, which didn’t have the right hardware for AirDrop, I ended up using the excellent Printopia to “print” those images into Acorn for editing, but the workflow had begun to feel a bit more cumbersome since I’d gotten spoiled by using AirDrop on my MacBook Air.³

Perhaps the most difficult thing to get used to so far has been the Magic Keyboard. I liked the old Apple Wireless Keyboard; it had a nice key feel, could be surprisingly quiet, and was easy to navigate without looking. All of those things have changed on the Magic Keyboard. The keys have less travel, which has changed the feel of typing.⁴ It’s also louder and clickier than the old keyboard, which makes it a little harder to type discreetly when one is, say, recording a podcast. Finally, the rearranged key layouts—full-size keys on the F-keys and left/right cursors—has taken some acclimation for my touch-typing. I used to orient my right hand by finding those half-height cursors and I used to be able to more routinely hit the top two rows on the keyboard because I could locate the smaller F-keys. No doubt I will adjust eventually, but for now, I feel just a bit slower. I do appreciate that both it and the Magic Trackpad 2 are rechargeable via a Lightning cable, though their initial charges are still holding out.

As for the Magic Trackpad 2, I appreciate the increase in real estate and it’s a very attractive device, but I’m still getting used to the faux-clicking. I’ve turned off Force Click for the moment, because I still haven’t heard any really great reasons for leaving it on, and because I found the second-level of clicking kind of distracting. I may eventually switch to Silent Clicking[^silentrunning], since the haptics still provide the illusion of a click sound. Also, I use tap-to-click a lot, so I’m used to the whole not-clicking thing. [^eaitsuckers]

Conclusion

Granted, I’ve used this computer for less than a week, and much of that time was a long weekend, so I really haven’t had a chance to put it through its paces yet. I’m looking forward to seeing how it handles longer podcasts and somewhat more challenging tasks like an upcoming session for Total Party Kill. Heck, maybe I’ll finally try out some Mac games that I’ve been putting off. All in all, though, I expect this iMac to take me through the next six years—or more—no problem.⁵

[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

July 5, 2017 10:53 AM PT

Spam in my kitchen: The Amazon Echo Show arrives

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

So I got an Amazon Echo Show last week—this is the Amazon Echo model with the screen on the front. If you’ve seen the pictures, it looks like a weird ’80s TV set, but a lot of that has to do with a lack of scale in many photos—it’s quite small, though definitely boxy and strange.

I am going to need to live with the Echo Show for a while to really get a sense of how having a screen affects the Echo experience. It’s clear that what’s in the product today is simply not good enough, but Amazon has shown with the previous Echo that it could constantly add new features and improve the service and software, so I’m at least somewhat optimistic.

I can see the promise of having that screen in my kitchen, because like kitchen TV sets of yore, it can provide video right where you’re working. The Echo Show can stream some live video and play back YouTube clips. I’m not really interested in playing an episode of “The Americans” from Amazon Prime Video while I’m cooking, but given all the apps Amazon has available for its Fire TV platform, I have to wonder if there will be a way for me to get access to other features (like Netflix, or MLB.TV) over time.

For years now I’ve had some repurposed music players that I’ve used as dumb screens around my house to display the current time and the temperature in my backyard, courtesy of my home weather station. They’re getting old and outmoded and I like the idea of using the Echo Show as a place to display similar information so it’s available at a glance.

Unfortunately, right now the Echo Show’s main screen isn’t particularly customizable beyond the background wallpaper image. At its best, it shows me the current time and weather for my town. At its worst, it’s a billboard for garbage news headlines and videos I don’t care about.

Update: In a previous version of this story, I said there was “nothing I could do to stop the flow of stuff I don’t want onto that screen.” This isn’t entirely true, but the state of affairs is maddening. Despite Amazon requiring you to set almost every setting for any Echo device from the Alexa mobile app, the Echo Show does contain a hidden Settings screen that you can bring up either by swiping down from the top of the screen (turns out there’s a menu hidden up there—don’t swipe over the camera lens, though, or you’ll smudge it) or by asking Alexa to show you the settings. On this screen, some of the settings from the Alexa app are available, while others aren’t, and other settings are available only on the device. What a mess.

Among the settings options is a Home Card Preferences sub-menu, that lets you change whether the data cards on the home screen rotate a single time or continuously, and let you turn off Notifications (alerts from skills and other Alexa services), Upcoming Events (from your calendar), Drop In (displaying who’s available for a slightly creepy video peek right now among your Drop In contacts), and Trending Topics (wacky stories and videos!).

Unfortunately, that’s it – and if you turn everything off, you’ll still see a rotating collection of hints about ways you can use the Echo by uttering various phrases. So you can turn off the viral news and video spam, and your own calendar, but the level of control is extremely limited—if you can find it at all.

Otherwise, your best option is to put the device in Do Not Disturb mode, where only a clock shows. But I don’t really want that—there’s information I do want to display on this device, it’s just not what Amazon wants to offer me. If I could configure the Echo Show to just show the time and my current temperature and weather forecast, I’d be much happier. It would be even better if I could choose widgets to put into the rotation and provide actual information of value. Maybe that will come in time?

What I don’t want in my kitchen is spam. And right now, that’s what the Echo Show is doing—it’s spamming my eyes when I’m in the kitchen. I’m willing to give it a little bit of time for Amazon to get its act together, but it’s embarrassing that this product shipped with this feature as the default. It’s like buying a TV set or car stereo that can’t be taken out of showroom demo mode.

If you’re an Echo fan who is considering an Echo Show, steer clear for now. The fact that there is a setting (albeit hidden on the device) is reason for hope that things will get better. But the customizability of the home screen needs a lot of work.

By Dan Moren

June 29, 2017 2:33 PM PT

A couple weeks with the iOS 11 beta

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.

Continue reading “A couple weeks with the iOS 11 beta”…

By Jason Snell

June 29, 2017 1:00 PM PT

What’s new in Photos for macOS High Sierra

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.

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.

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.

By Jason Snell

June 29, 2017 10:06 AM PT

The iPhone at 10: Into the woods

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?

must… finish… podcast…

— Jason Snell (@jsnell) June 30, 2007

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.

iPhoning from the car… And a little bit queasy'

— Jason Snell (@jsnell) June 30, 2007

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.