By Dan Moren

April 30, 2017 5:18 PM PT

The Back Page: Introducing Apple Music Video, Coming at Some Future Date

CUPERTINO, California — April 26, 2017 — Apple® today announced its new Apple Music™ Video™ service, which will feature a variety of original video content developed by Apple® and its partners. Headlining the new service is the company’s upcoming “Carpool Karaoke” series, which will launch later this year and be exclusively available to Apple Music™ Video™ subscribers. The company is excited to debut this new show, which was always intended to appear later this year, and which it had no plans whatsoever to release in April, no matter what Eddy Cue said.

“Carpool Karaoke has been a highlight of James Corden’s Late Late Show,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer. “It’s featured memorable performances from some of our greatest musical luminaries, from Justin Bieber to me. We are delighted to bring it to Apple Music™ Video™ at some future time which is not this time. And we’re all too happy to state that this was not simply an elaborate plan for Eddy to get a chance to bring his karaoke to the masses.”

The star-studded Carpool Karaoke will feature pairings of celebrities that you never demanded to see. The show will be joined by other ill-conceived original programming on Apple Music™ Video™, including the recently teased reality show Planet of the Apps, in which prospective developers will have a chance to get their app idea backed by a “celebrity” judge in an in-depth review process that involves 30 seconds of riding on an escalator.

“We’re truly excited about Planet of the Apps,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing. “It’s a great way to get people excited about building apps and it does not in any way include a pool of lava that contestants will be thrown into if their pitch is not selected. However, we are considering changes for the second season, including adding a pit of spikes and replacing Gary Vaynerchuk with somebody who people actually know, like maybe Mark Cuban. I mean, he was on Entourage, right?”

In addition to these, Apple Music™ Video™ will eventually be the home of a number other programs that are currently being actively developed by Apple®, as well as a number of other seemingly random properties which the company has acquired as part of a “camouflage” strategy to keep its users guessing. At launch, the service will be available in select major cities, ranging from Cupertino, California to San Francisco, California.

Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, and has been kind of scratching its head about what to do with the Mac lately. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV, though let’s be honest, only the first one really matters. Apple’s four software platforms — iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS — provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud, when they are working. Apple’s more than 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth, and to leaving the world better than we found it when the techno-elite eventually decides to abandon the planet in favor of Mars. Which should be any day now.

[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

April 30, 2017 5:16 PM PT

What I Use: Learning curves

I think my favorite thing about buying new tech products is the learning curve. When you get a new tech product, it’s got stuff you’ve never experienced before—unless you’re re-buying the model you already owned, you’ll get a new feature here and there that you get to experience for the first time.

Even more exciting, though, is the learning curve on an entirely new kind of product, one you’ve never had before. You get to experience how it feels to use it, then begin to wonder if there are features or techniques you can use to go beyond what you’ve tried in your initial usage. (Nobody reads the manual first, right?) Then you go on the web and learn about the tricks other people have discovered. You figure out if there are awesome (and possibly expensive) accessories you should buy. If you’re really enthusiastic you may discover an entire new community of people using that product, and join it.

I recently bought a DJI Osmo Mobile gimbal for my iPhone, to take better videos. You can see it in action in this vacation video and this Six Colors video. My enthusiasm for the product is not quite enough to get me to join a community, but it was the most recent purchase I’ve made that gave me that electric feeling of opening a box to reveal a gadget that was unlike anything I’d ever used before. I got to ramp up that learning curve, starting as a complete novice and gradually working myself up to “familiar with how it works.” (I in no way consider myself an expert. But I’m still learning.)

Then last month, we bought an electric car. And boy did I get those new-gadget feels.

I told a version of this story on an episode of Upgrade, but I don’t think I’ve written about it anywhere. Basically, my daughter is about to learn to drive and we didn’t want her driving in our existing, 12-year-old compact car. (We own two cars, the primary being a Honda Odyssey minivan.) We started talking about how, since we were buying a second car, we might be interested in looking at electric cars. I did some research—product research is the very beginning of the learning curve!—and discovered that many electric cars are leased, rather than bought.

It makes sense—I’ve heard Marco Arment talk about it on Accidental Tech Podcast before—because the electric car market moves so fast that in three years the cars will presumably be vasty better. And nobody knows quite how electric cars will age, and when their (large, expensive) batteries will degrade so much that the car is basically undriveable. So leasing is, apparently, a better bet. Except… my wife and I came to realize, as we talked about it, that we are not lease people. It wasn’t going to work for us. We buy our cars, drive them a long time, and then get rid of them.

However, the lease culture around electric cars has led to some interesting secondary markets. All those leased cars, once they’re returned, needed to go somewhere. And I started to find a whole lot of used Nissan Leafs listed for $7500 or $8000 on used-car websites. This, for a car that cost more than $30,000 a few years ago.

It seemed like an opportunity to buy a replacement small car that didn’t need great range, since my wife works two miles from home and I don’t commute at all. The van provides us all the capacity and range we need—but for driving around town, the electric car would do the trick. So we bought a Leaf.

And so the learning curve continued. We spent way too much time researching car range and available fast chargers and the apps that connect with the car’s onboard data systems. I signed up for EV charging networks in case I’m somewhere and need a charge. I sorted through various EV websites and learned about the quirks of my (relatively old!) electric car.

For the record, Nissan’s Leaf app is ugly but functional, but there’s a much nicer app called Eva made by an independent developer. And there are a host of charging-map apps, my favorite probably being PlugShare. I also bought a Clipper Creek 240A charger so I can charge my car much faster when it’s at home.

For what it’s worth, I love driving the thing. It’s no Tesla, but it’s still so much more fun than my old Honda Civic. And even as a 2012 model, it’s the newest car we own—the van’s a 2011.

My point here is not to suggest that you rush out and buy an electric car. But in buying one, I got to recognize one of the things I love about technology is the experience of learning something entirely new. It doesn’t happen too many times in anyone’s life, but if you’re riding the ragged edge of tech you get to experience it more—and sooner—than everyone else. I love it. I suspect a lot of you reading this do, too.

By Dan Moren

April 30, 2017 5:13 PM PT

By Request: Battery backups and obsolete tech

Reader K.E. asks “are Battery Backups needed any more, or more generally what legacy tech do we no longer need?”

Great question and, as you might suspect, one whose answer lies on a spectrum. As far as battery backups go, I personally have never bothered with an Uniterruptible Power Supply (UPS), though I always find myself tempted to pick one up when I see them on sale. The idea behind a UPS is that, should your power go out, you’ll have enough time to save your work and safely shut down your computer.

Several technological developments have meant there’s less need for this kind of device than there used to be. For one, a lot of people—perhaps the majority—use laptop computers that have their own built-in batteries, which means that a UPS is only a benefit when power goes out and your laptop is out of charge. (The same goes for iOS devices, which spend the majority of their time on battery power already.)

For another, macOS and many of the apps we use on it have gotten much better at auto-saving work as well as recovering data when they are shut down abruptly. That’s not to say that data loss is a thing of the past, but that the way we used to think about it—”Oh no, the power died and I forgot to save my work!”—is probably not the way most data is lost anymore. (You still want a good surge protector to avoid frying your hardware in case of a power spike, but a UPS isn’t a must-have outside of, say, a business that depends on its computers staying up.)

That’s not to say that a UPS doesn’t still have its benefits. If you have a desktop computer, it may still be handy to be able to shut it down safely when the power goes out. More and more, too, I hear of people hooking their cable modems and routers up to a UPS, so that they can maintain an Internet connection when the power goes out. (Unfortunately for me, my modem and router are in different rooms which makes that kind of a tricky proposition.)

As to the larger question of device obsolescene, well, there are obviously a ton of things that we don’t use anymore, as the large drawer of old cables in my office can testify to. One thing that I found myself thinking about a few weeks ago as I swapped around some AA rechargeable batteries is how most of the new tech from Apple has obviated the need for third-party batteries. If you get a new keyboard, mouse, or trackpad from Apple, they all have built-in rechargeable batteries. One of my Xbox controllers has a rechargeable battery pack; even the ersatz Super Nintendo controller I bought to use with my Mac mini game emulator has a battery in it. Sure, there are still plenty of other household gadgets that want AA batteries, but way fewer than there used to be.

One other thing that came up recently was that I traded in a multifunction printer for a straight up black-and-white laser printer. I thought the lack of a scanner would actually be a significant blow, but it turns out that scanning apps using an iOS device’s camera have actually become pretty sophisticated and handle most of what I need. More than anything, I miss the MFP’s copier capability, but only on the increasingly rare occasions that I need to duplicate a physical document.

I’m sure there are other pieces of equipment that used to be considered de rigueur but are now old hat, so chime in, readers: what have you seen falling by the wayside?

[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 Stephen Hackett

April 30, 2017 5:09 PM PT

The Hackett File: Three months of Touch Bar

When the new MacBook Pros came out, I ordered a stock $1499 model. That’s the 13-inch model without the Touch Bar.

I left my review with a bit of a meh feeling about the whole thing. I liked the new design, but Dongle Life and poor battery performance had me down.

I spent quite a bit of time in that review explaining why I didn’t pony up for a Touch Bar model, but in January, I needed a new-in-box Mac for a YouTube video. I went to my local Apple store and picked up the $1799 machine. It’s the entry-level, 13-inch with Touch Bar. I shot my video and then figured that, since I had some time before I had to return it, I should get to know the Touch Bar a little bit.

If you haven’t caught on, that’s the laptop that I am currently typing on. (Shocking, right?) Out of the box, the increased power was a welcome addition. More importantly, this MacBook come with four ports, which I’ve found to be helpful while working out in the real world, doing things like recording and editing audio or video.

In the time since my upgrade, those two things are why I’m happy I kept the nicer laptop, not the Touch Bar itself.

That’s not to say the Touch Bar is bad. It does what it advertises on the tin, but it hasn’t revolutionized the way I work on my Mac. It may be that most of the time I use an iMac, so the Touch Bar can’t fully elbow its way into my workflows. However, I think part of it is that I just don’t see the Touch Bar as critical to the Mac experience yet.

I like Control Strip, which allows fast access to things like screen brightness, volume controls and more. I’ve swapped out Siri for the “Show Desktop” feature of Mission Control, which I use constantly.

I love the emoji picker. It’s a lot of fun to blast through a bunch of faces to find just the right one. The emoji palette in macOS Sierra is clunky at best, and the Touch Bar really highlights the need for Apple to overhaul it.

(Don’t get me started on the lack of search within iOS’s emoji keyboard. Geez.)

The whole thing with the Touch Bar is that it’s context-aware, adapting itself to what is onscreen at any given moment. This enables fun things like scrubbing video in QuickTime or Safari, but the flexibility means some developers have handled things very differently than others.

Even Apple’s own apps are uneven in their approach. iWork does its best to cram in as many useful tools as possible; Mail shows a huge “Move to…” button to help file away email, even for accounts that just have an Inbox and an Archive. Of course, some apps have no Touch Bar support, in which case it doesn’t light up unless the user is typing.

This uneven experience has made it harder for me to grow accustomed to it. I find it frustrating to reach for something that’s not there when I want it. Taking my eyes off the screen to swipe around can slow me down, especially if I already know how to complete the task at hand with a keyboard shortcut or in the GUI.

Keyboard shortcuts are the obvious parallel in all of this. I wasn’t around when they first showed up, but I’m sure some complained about an uneven experience back in the day. Time works wonders, though, and today keyboard shortcuts are second nature for many users.

These days, if an application doesn’t assign a keyboard shortcut to a menu item I often use, I can simply open System Preferences and make my own. With the Touch Bar, the user is at the mercy of the developer.

All of that said, I’m fully aware that we are still in the early days of the Touch Bar. Best practices will emerge and I think Apple and others will do a more consistent job of implementing parts of applications to better work with swipes and taps.

At this point, though, I’m pretty cool on the whole thing. It’s very clever hardware, but it’s not changing the software world for this Mac user just yet.

[Stephen Hackett is the author of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay FM.]