I’m still using (and loving) it. Yes, there’s a new version now with fancy new features, but this one’s still the best Mac purchase I have ever made. I really, legitimately have no complaints. I’m happy I opted for the 4 GHz Core i7 processor upgrade, 16 GB of RAM, a 500GB SSD, and the upgraded graphics package. And after fretting about buying the irrevocable, unchangeable, VESA mountable version rather than the standard foot-stand version, I’ve been quite happy with having my iMac on an arm rather than my desk.
For more details about my desk setup, which really hasn’t changed much in the past year (other than me velcro-taping my Thunderbolt hub and USB audio interface to the underside of my desk), check out my post from a year ago.
If you guessed “just two months after the release of the latest iPhones, so time for a rumor about the next iPhone,” somebody will be handing you your prize shortly.
The latest speculation comes courtesy of KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who predicted recently that a new iPhone with an A9 processor would appear sometime in the first half of 2016. The real kicker? It’s not a giant smartphone, but a smaller 4-inch iPhone of the iPhone 5/5s variety.
We’re well into the days of the 4.7-inch and more smartphones, which left me wondering: is there still room in our lives–and our pockets?–for a smaller iPhone.
Twitter replaces stars with hearts: http://mashable.com/2015/11/03/twitter-stars-becoming-hearts/#nEFuvc71Imqp
Dan has since confirmed that you can go forwards and backwards in a video by pressing on the trackpad on the right and left respectively.
Dan likes the Plex app on the Apple TV: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3000896/streaming-media/plex-gets-an-apple-tv-app-for-streaming-your-media-library.html
Amazon is opening a physical book store: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-opens-first-bricks-and-mortar-bookstore-at-u-village/
Buzzfeed says it was Amazon’s decision not to have an Apple TV app: http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/the-apple-tv-youve-always-wanted-is-finally-here#.ss39Vzebd
Will Moltz go to a Microsoft device night? http://www.microsoftdevicenight.com/RFG/publish/MDN15/
Probably not.
Our thanks to Canary, the complete home security system in one device. Go to meetcanary.com and use the promo code “REBOUND” to get free shipping on your Canary.
Our thanks also to Casper (https://casper.com/rebound) for sponsoring this episode. Casper makes mattresses from responsive materials to ensure great sleep for nearly everyone. You spend about a third of your life sleeping, make sure it’s on a good mattress. Go to casper.com/therebound to start your 100-day money-back trial. You’ll get $50 off by using the code “REBOUND”.
Our thanks as well to Softlayer (http://softlayer.com), the cloud built to compete. You deserve cloud resources that meet your unique needs. Softlayer is one of the only cloud providers that provisions bare metal servers and virtual servers from a single, seamless platform. Go to http://softlayer.com/podcast and get your first $500 free.
I don’t know when I first noticed emoji. I probably assumed they were just another way for software to convert text-based emoticons into actual images, a feature I first saw in iChat on the Mac. But eventually I discovered that there was an entire catalog of iconography that was being used as part of Internet communication, and not too long after that, I came to embrace it. Like ASCII smileys before them, emoji add expressiveness to text chat, and that’s a good thing.
Apple has embraced emoji, too. With the release of iOS 9.1 and OS X 10.11.1, which added 184 new emoji symbols, Apple’s devices now feature every single emoji in the Unicode standard. Not only is someone at Apple making sure that it’s on top of the emoji world, but the art direction of Apple’s emoji is superb.
It’s a little-known fact: Every operating system and website can render emoji images in entirely different ways. If you’ve ever seen an emoji on one of Google’s services and wondered why it looked really weird, that’s because Google’s emoji designs are its own, as are Microsoft’s and Twitter’s and Facebook’s. The variation can be extreme, even with relatively simple images.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Well, there goes my weekend. Fireproof Games just released The Room Three, the followup to its popular previous puzzle games, which, as you might predict, were The Room and The Room Two.
The Room is possibly my favorite series of iOS games. Gorgeous, clever, and challenging, they weave a plot of arcane mystery with diabolical puzzles. If you enjoyed Myst way back when, you’ll probably enjoy The Room. And if you generally like puzzle games, like Monument Valley or Lara Croft Go, you might well dig The Room too.
In addition to syncing between multiple devices via iCloud, The Room Three also lets you create up to three profiles, so you and your friends or family members can play through on the same device without screwing up each others’ games.1
You don’t really need to have played the first two to enjoy the newest installment, though if you like puzzle games, I absolutely recommend checking out the earlier ones. (You can get the first one for a buck, and the second for $3.) Trust me: once you get started, you won’t want to put them down.
The Room Three runs $5, and it’s pretty resource intensive, so Fireproof recommends at least an iPhone 5 or iPad 3. Now begone with you!
This can avoid causing serious friction among family members and loved ones. Believe me. ↩
[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.]
If it sounded like science fiction, that’s because it was.
Back in 1982, writer Arthur C. Clarke — famous for predicting the communications satellite, among other technologies — published a sequel to “2001”³ featuring a Chinese spacecraft that landed on one of Jupiter’s moons and encountered alien life from an ocean deep beneath the moon’s icy shell.
Then last week came news that the Cassini spacecraft had grazed within 30 miles of the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, flying through a giant plume of ice and other material that had previously resided deep inside the moon. Among other things, Cassini was searching for molecular evidence that Enceladus’s ocean has hydrothermal vents and a rocky seafloor.
The premise of Clarke’s story has become increasingly realistic over the last 30 years, as it’s become clear that the most likely places in the solar system to find life aren’t on Mars or any other planet, but beneath the surfaces of icy moons out in the far reaches of the solar system.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Good news, Apple TV owners: you can now move past looking at featured apps or slowly searching based on app names. In the past couple days, Apple’s added both Top Charts and Categories to the Apple TV’s App Store, bringing it more in line with its counterparts on iOS and the Mac.1
Which isn’t to say that the Apple TV’s App Store couldn’t use a little more work. Right now, Categories offers an almost Henry-Fordesque level of simplicity: you can have whichever category of app you want, as long as it’s “Games” or “Entertainment.” (Are all apps that aren’t games entertaining? And aren’t games themselves entertainment? Oh, the humanity!)
Granted, those are likely to be the two most popular categories of apps on the Apple TV. But it also means that a lot of potentially interesting apps are falling through the cracks. Fortunately, it’s not hard for Apple to add more categories in the future—the web-based nature of the App Store means that they can roll them out without having to issue a software update. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few more categories spring up in the near future.
Meanwhile, it would be great if Apple also expanded Siri’s capabilities to let the virtual assistant search the App Store for you. At least then we’d have one more place where you wouldn’t have to use the frustrating onscreen keyboard.
Insert pithy comment about how it may have already surpassed the Mac App Store here. ↩
[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.]
Last year I was on the beta test groups for both Marco Arment’s Overcast and Q Branch’s Vesper. Both testing groups were among the most active I’ve ever participated in, in large part because we used the private message-board app Glassboard for threaded conversations.
Unfortunately, Glassboard died. Fortunately, former Genius developer Soroush Khanlou has, along with some of the people who were heavily involved in those beta tests (most notably Dave Wiskus and John Gruber), come up with some new technology that tries to replicate or even improve on the experience. It’s called Backchannel, and it creates a conversation and community right inside the beta-test versions of apps.
I got to talk to Soroush and Dave about Backchannel when I was visiting New York earlier this year1, and I’m glad to see the project come to fruition. If you’re an iOS developer, you should definitely check it out. There’s no doubt in my mind that active testing communities lead to much better apps.
Okay, if I’m being honest we spent as much time nerding out about “The Flash” as we did talking about Backchannel. ↩
Over at Wired, my pal Erik Malinowski got paid to re-watch all 24 James Bond movies and offer his opinions on what to skip and what to savor before “SPECTRE” hits U.S. theaters later this week.
I’ve seen all the Bond movies, too—007 fandom runs deep among Apple bloggers, apparently?—and Erik’s judgments seem pretty dead on with my recollection. “Diamonds are Forever” is a disaster, a lot of Roger Moore’s run is painful, and not even Daniel Craig could save “Quantum of Solace.”
I can’t agree with him about the best film, though. His choice is “Goldfinger”, which is clearly the most influential film. Many subsequent Bond films try (and fail) to recapture the magic of “Goldfinger”, which is why there are more mediocre Bond films than there should be. (My choice is “From Russia With Love.”)
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Setting up the new Apple TV is a mix between a really clever experience and a really frustrating one. Being able to sync settings from your iPhone? That’s smart. Having to enter a ton of usernames and passwords? Not so much.
Type about-face
As a number of people have pointed out, text entry in tvOS is…not great. Unlike on the previous Apple TV, where text entry was in a two-dimensional grid, tvOS offers a single continuous line of the entire alphabet (with a separate lines for numbers and symbols). Skimming back and forth among them is imprecise at best—either you go so slow that you select one letter at a time, or so fast that you overshoot and have to back up.
Linear text entry is decidedly frustrating.
Furthermore, there is, as has been remarked upon, no support for the Remote app. Which means if you were hoping to use your iPhone or iPad to enter text, you are out of luck. (At least for now.)
But even more befuddling is the lack of support for Bluetooth keyboards. The Apple TV has Bluetooth 4, which it uses to talk to your iPhone during the aforementioned setup process, and previous generations of Apple TV supported connecting a wireless keyboard for text entry. Admittedly it’s not the most elegant solution for dealing with a set-top box, but it worked just fine. Keyboard pairing is also a pretty basic feature of Bluetooth (and there’s a Bluetooth section in Settings on the Apple TV) so it’s a bit of a head scratcher that Apple didn’t add this.
Keys to the kingdom
If the only place that you had to deal with text entry was when searching for things on the Apple TV, that wouldn’t be so bad—especially now that Siri can handle most of your searching needs.
But it’s not. Because the Apple TV is app-based, and because so many apps—especially the Apple TV’s bread-and-butter video-streaming apps—rely on logging into an account of some sort, you end up entering a lot of usernames and passwords. Which, if you’ve been vigilant about keeping your accounts secure, are often long, unique, and full of cumbersome character combinations that are all too easy to mistype.
If only there were a way that the Apple TV could vacuum up our passwords as easily as it seems to jump on our Wi-Fi networks. Some sort of service that stored all of our passwords in a single location like, I dunno, a keychain or something. Sure would be nice, right?
Oh, wait.
Hey, look, a service that syncs your passwords between your Apple devices!
Why Apple decided to forego support for iCloud Keychain on the Apple TV is a mystery, but let me tell you: it sure would be helpful after the fifth attempt to enter the right Hulu password. Given that all of my passwords are already stored in iCloud, why make me do the hard work of entering them all over again? This is the exact purpose for which that system was designed.
I’ve already logged in with my iCloud account during the Apple TV setup process (via my iPhone, no less), so it would seem a relatively simple matter to then approve access to iCloud Keychain via one of my other devices, just as I do when setting up a new iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Even entering a one-time security code would be less onerous by far.
If not iCloud Keychain, perhaps the open App Store means we’ll get third-party password managers like 1Password and LastPass on Apple TV to compensate. But I’m not optimistic, for a few reasons.
First, in order to make password storage apps useful, third-party apps would have to integrate support for them. There’s no copy-and-paste on the Apple TV either, which means there’s no lowest common denominator to fall back on. And all of that assumes that apps like 1Password are even feasible on tvOS in the first place.
Second, for some of the apps on the Apple TV, Apple already provides an alternative: you can already buy a Hulu, Netflix, or CBS All Access subscription directly through iTunes, which means skipping right over the whole “logging in” fiasco. At worst it involves restoring a purchase, a far smoother experience than the alternative.
Thirdly, as I suggested in my universal watchlist piece, Apple is likely still planning on releasing its own subscription TV service. Since such a service would certainly be linked to your existing iTunes account/Apple ID, Ã la Apple Music, you could once again be spared having to worry about entering additional login credentials. Which is a far better experience, and provides a pretty good differentiator when it comes to the competition.
So perhaps Apple is holding this back as a competitive advantage. Or maybe the feature will make the cut in time for tvOS 2, sometime next year. Or maybe Apple doesn’t think it’s worth the time for a setup procedure you don’t need to do very often. But, if nothing else, the lack of full integration into a convenient part of Apple’s ecosystem makes the Apple TV feel a bit like a second-class citizen.
[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.]
But Apple’s robot assistant can’t give you personal service. The recommendations she gives you will be the same ones she gives everyone else with the new hardware. Siri can’t treat you any differently than she treats me, because for right now, she doesn’t have a choice — she doesn’t know anything about us.
Go ahead: Ask her to find you movies with Brad Pitt. And then the “good ones” with Brad Pitt, as Apple execs tell people to do when they show off the new box. Everyone gets the same list, which Siri puts together using metadata from sources like Rotten Tomatoes.
However, as Kafka points out, that recommendation engine might someday be Siri itself, which could potentially figure out over time the kind of things you end up asking about and use that to build a profile of your likes and dislikes.1
If that ends up with Siri ordering me cupcakes when I search for sad movies, that is a future I can live with. ↩
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Having had the Apple TV for less than a week, I figured it was about time for the first of what are sure to be many thoughts about what I’d like to eventually see on the set-top box.
As I was navigating through app after app, entering my login credentials and cursing the lack of a better text input method, I found myself thinking about this app-based future Tim Cook has painted. By nature, it’s highly decentralized, and while I think that approach works well enough on a device like the iPhone or iPad, the Apple TV would seem to have a much narrower area of responsibility. Though it’s certainly capable of handling many different tasks, it seems clear that the Apple TV is mostly positioned as a way to consume streaming media.
As such, that decentralized approach is also a weakness. Apple’s tipped its hat to that problem with the addition of universal search, one of the very best features of the Apple TV, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Because it means that a lot of the apps end up reinventing the wheel, creating the same features over and over again.
Take, for example, the watchlist. Almost every video streaming app on the Apple TV has some form of this, and while implementation details differ, the premise is the same: a place where you can add videos you want to watch at some point. That’s great…but on a device that’s focused on video consumption it’s also hugely inefficient.
What I’d like to see is Apple offer a systemwide watchlist on the Apple TV. Let me add all the shows, movies, or videos that I want to watch, no matter which app I need to watch them. Break them down by those categories, so I can browse what I’m in the mood for, and let me subscribe to shows that I watch regularly, so I have a central clearing house to see what I want to watch next.1
The way I imagine it, this list would, like universal search, give you the option of watching in whichever apps are available. So if I subscribed, for example, to Arrow, I would be notified when a new episode becomes available, and given the option to buy it on iTunes, stream it on Hulu, and so on.
An app accessible from the home screen (or Siri) would just list the shows I subscribe to, along with any videos or movies that I’d added. That’d certainly be an improvement over checking six different apps to see if there are new episodes to any of my shows.
One reason I’d guess that Apple hasn’t already implemented something like this is that we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop: the much-rumored Apple TV subscription service. I’m sure Apple would like to collect content from all these disparate apps and offer a unifying interface that is more elegant and easy-to-use than the fragmented approach available now, and I also imagine the company would be all too happy to use that as a selling point.
While it would be great to see Apple build a feature like this directly into the Apple TV, perhaps a third-party developer can create a solution that gets us most of the way there.
[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.
A few months back I ran through using OS X Server on your Mac to set up a VPN, which allows you not only to access computers on your local network while you’re out and about, but also enables forwarding of all Internet traffic through the VPN connection. (Great if you want to make sure that you maintain a secure connection while on public Wi-Fi.)
My guide through that process was an excellent walkthrough hosted by Macminicolo and authored by Rusty Ross. Now the two have joined forces once again to update the guide for El Capitan.
I’d been having some minor problems with the VPN since updating to 10.11, so I walked back through these steps to see if I could isolate the problems. I found one specific issue–the /etc/pf.anchors/com.apple file had been returned to its default version–and also restarted the VPN service, and everything seems to be working well once again. If you’ve run into problems with VPNs since El Cap, I’d advise you to run a check and see if you’ve encountered the same problems.
[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.
So far a lot of the Apple TV apps I’ve installed have been underwhelming: many of them are warmed-over versions of iOS apps or suitable only for bare-bones streaming. But the app that I’ve been waiting for perhaps longer than any other may actually be the best of the bunch, and that’s Plex.
If you’re not familiar with Plex, it’s a combination of software and service that lets you stream media from a server—generally your Mac, PC, or Network Attached Storage box—to a client device, including your iPhone, iPad, another Mac or PC, or some set-top boxes like the Fire TV. On the server, Plex catalogs and organizes your content, pulling down metadata where appropriate. You can also build playlists, search, and quickly filter for certain types of content. Plus a whole lot more. Honestly, it’s more or less a wholesale replacement for the media library features of iTunes.
I’ve been using the Plex server for years now. For a long time, I watched via a Mac mini hooked up to my HDTV, but the interface was often cumbersome, requiring the use of an iOS app to navigate the front-end on the Mac.1 When I picked up an Amazon Fire TV last year, support for Plex was the number one reason my Apple TV ended up relegated to second-best.2
But the new Plex app for Apple TV has reversed that trend, possibly once and for all. Perhaps most importantly, the Apple TV version beats the Fire TV’s on interface and aesthetics hands down. Plex has done an admirable job of using the interface conventions laid out by Apple to provide an easy to navigate, very responsive application. Netflix and Hulu? You guys should be taking notes here.
In particular, I’d call out Plex’s Top Shelf option in its Settings. When you put an app on the Apple TV in the top row of the home screen, the top banner displays related media. On many of the other apps I’ve installed—like Hulu or Netflix—those titles seem to be more or less random. By default, Plex just shows a banner, but if you enable the Top Shelf option, it shows actual titles from your On Deck list (Plex’s version of a queue). This is what that space should be used for frankly, and I hope more apps follow suit.
Plex’s Top Shelf feature shows media I want to watch, not what the app maker wants me to watch.
Plex’s developers have used a mix of two different approaches in creating the app—the simpler TVML markup language that Apple provides along with some native code—and the result is an app that is fast, elegant, and powerful, without sacrificing on functionality. If you’re a longtime Plex user, you’ll want this for sure, and if you’re not, well, it still might be worth checking out.
I struggled to get my Logitech Harmony 700 universal remote to work with Plex on the Mac with intermittent success. ↩
There was a hack to use Plex with earlier Apple TVs, which involved changing DNS settings and hijacking Apple’s Trailers app, but it was always a bit janky. ↩
[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.
I was really impressed with the very beginning of the new Apple TV setup process, where I was instructed to hold my iPhone near the Apple TV and enter my Apple ID and password. The device was paired with my account and hopped on my home wi-fi network without any trouble. “How great is it,” I thought to myself, “that Apple is taking advantage of the fact that most Apple TV users will have an iPhone?”
Oh, but then things didn’t go so well.
At Apple’s big media event back in September, I asked an Apple employee at one of the Apple TV demo stands if there would be an update to the iOS Remote app to support the new Apple TV. I expected him to either hedge, because he didn’t know, or give me a fun tidbit about how since the iPhone has all the same sensors that are in the new remote, the new Remote app can emulate it, plus do fun stuff like provide a keyboard so you can type in all your passwords and stuff.
Instead, this is what he said: “No.”
And he wasn’t wrong. The Remote app doesn’t work with this new Apple TV, not even a little bit. So when the Apple TV suddenly asked me for my iCloud user name and password—which it already knew, by the way, because of that fancy pairing feature at the start—I got to laboriously peck it out, character by character, including all those special characters that require toggling to the symbols keyboard1.
I repeated this step for my Netflix user name and password. For other video services, the apps punted entirely, having me load a web page on a different device, authenticate with my cable TV provider, and then enter a code displayed on the screen to connect my device. This was actually less painful than entering my user name and password one character at a time, but sending me to another device doesn’t seem like the right approach. (And with so many apps these days requiring a cable TV user name and password, shouldn’t Apple have integrated that login information right into tvOS?)
Then I tried to download the Madefire digital comics app, and I was prompted for my iTunes user name and password again. I groaned, I might’ve said some inappropriate words (fortunately, my kids weren’t around and my dog didn’t seem to be offended by them), and I pecked out the same characters one at a time.
And that’s when the Apple TV said: To activate this device to make purchases, go to your account page in iTunes.
Now, it seems that most people haven’t seen this particular alert. I have no idea what it was about my account that required this, but I had to go to my Mac, open iTunes, and click on my account name to open the account page. At which point I spied this small line of text toward the top of the screen:
Before you can complete the purchase you started on your Apple TV, you must click Edit next to your Billing Address and verify your payment information.
Whenever I try to make a purchase on a new Apple device, I am forced to verify that it’s legit, usually by entering in the security code from the back of my credit card. I expected to need to do that on the Apple TV. But being forced to switch to my Mac, click into my account settings, click on my billing address, and re-enter the code there? That seems… a bit out of the way.
But I did it! And then I turned back around to the Apple TV, only to discover it was once again asking me to input my Apple ID and password.
Did you know the trackpad on the top of the new Apple TV remote is partially made of glass? It is. And that’s why I didn’t chuck it across the room at that moment.
Given the number of times I am asked to input my Apple ID password on my iPhone and iPad, it’s clear to me that Apple needs to do a better job of authorizing devices across all its services and then getting out of the way. But at least on my iPhone and iPad, I can type that password quickly.
On the Apple TV, there’s no recourse but to tap it out one character at a time. The device doesn’t support a Remote app to make it easier, nor does it support external Bluetooth keyboards! (Maybe the Siri Remote should have a password dictation mode so I can read my password out a character at a time.)
Once I got my Apple TV up and running, I was impressed with it. It’s fast, the new interface design is beautiful, and I’m excited about how native apps will improve the Apple TV experience. I’ll write more about all that in due time.
But as frustrated as I was in September by how many steps I needed to go through to upgrade to a new iPhone, I was even more frustrated by the Apple TV setup. When it comes to buying a new Apple product, Apple does so many things right. Apple’s packaging and out-of-box experience are second to none. The hardware design is beautiful.
Unfortunately, Apple’s hardware and packaging are being let down by its software and services. The unboxing experience doesn’t end when the device is pulled out of the box—it ends when it’s set up and running smoothly. There’s a lot more work that needs to be done.
Also unfortunately, Apple has decided that the on-screen keyboard on the new Apple TV should be a single long row, rather than stacking a series of rows, so if you need to type an a followed by a y, it’s an exciting left-to-right journey. ↩
If the App Store had a theme song, it would probably be The O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money.” (Apple itself would probably pick something by U2 or–sigh–Coldplay.) During the company’s financial results on Tuesday, Tim Cook said the App Store pulled in record revenue, which bolstered the company’s bottom line for its services division’s $5.1 billion revenue.
So yes, the App Store is still doing gangbusters business overall. But I’d also imagine that it’s the tentpole propping up the company’s services division, which also includes iCloud, Apple Pay, and AppleCare. And much as Apple is a company that focuses on developing and selling products, those services are becoming ever more critical: if iPhones, iPad, Macs, and so on are the bricks of Apple’s business, services are the mortar–the stuff that holds the ecosystem together.
As of Friday, we’re living in the fourth-generation Apple TV era. Apple’s famous “hobby” of the past eight years might finally be something more than that, thanks to a Siri-enabled remote, support for third-party apps, and more. As this moment, it’s worth considering how Apple TV got to this point—and where it might go from here.
The Verge brings the latest report from the we-all-become-the-thing-we-kill department:
Amazon got its start as an online bookseller, and now – over 20 years later – it’s decided to sell books the old-fashioned way. On Tuesday, Amazon will open a store in Seattle called Amazon Books. Not only is it one of Amazon’s first physical locations, but it’s also Amazon’s first physical bookstore. Amazon says that it won’t entirely be doing things like a traditional store, however; it’ll be relying on Amazon.com data – including customer ratings, sales totals, and Goodread’s popularity – to decide which books to stock. Curators will have some say, too.
Can’t wait for Apple to start renting DVDs at the Apple Store. Any day now.
I’m still processing today’s announcement that “Star Trek” is returning to television in January 2017. It’s big news. I have been a “Star Trek” fan as long as I can remember, and the franchise is at its best on television. It’s been a decade since the last “Star Trek” spinoff, Enterprise, went off the air. I’m glad it’s coming back.
But… the details! It’s all in the details. All we know now is that CBS will be producing the new show, under producer Alex Kurtzman’s production company, which produces several series for CBS. (Kurtzman co-wrote the two J.J. Abrams-directed “Star Trek” films.) But news reports suggest that Kurtzman is interviewing writers for the project, which suggests he’s seeking a showrunner who isn’t him. “Star Trek” could really use what “Doctor Who” got with Russell T Davies, someone who is a lifelong fan of the franchise while also being a talented, top-flight modern TV writer.
Even without a writer, though, this new “Star Trek” has a direct-to-series order for an unknown number of episodes. And in a peculiar twist, CBS has announced that the premiere episode will air on CBS, but all subsequent episodes will appear only on CBS All Access, the network’s pay-streaming service.
Streaming services are big right now. Amazon and Netflix just cleaned up at the Emmy Awards. Putting a show on streaming isn’t weird anymore. But… CBS also happens to have several linear TV networks at its disposal. So developing this show for streaming seems like an odd choice.
But hey, we can sweat the details later. New “Star Trek” is coming, and for that I’m grateful.
