This weekend I sat down for a 50-minute conversation with Stephen Hackett about space stuff! We covered New Horizons’ Pluto discoveries, a newly-discovered Earth-like planet, and why space is back in the news. If you like space stuff or are just space-curious, give it a listen and let us know what you think.
Recurring special guest Guy English joins us as Lex is out striking important business deals (http://www.midroll.com/pr/).
We recorded this before Apple’s results were announced (http://sixcolors.com/post/2015/07/appleq3results/) but as Apple was having some uptime issues with its online services (https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/).
People may really like their Apple Watches, if you believe surveys (https://techpinions.com/the-state-of-apple-watch-satisfaction/41126).
Does the iPhone really make up 82 percent of podcast listening? http://9to5mac.com/2015/07/20/report-82-of-mobile-podcast-listening-happens-on-iphone-mostly-using-apples-podcasts-app/
Apple has hired a quality control executive from Chrysler: http://9to5mac.com/2015/07/20/apple-hires-former-fiat-chrysler-exec-for-its-rumored-electric-car-team/
A Google self-driving car has gotten into an accident but it’s the human’s fault: http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/17/autos/google-self-driving-car-injury-accident/index.html
Dan will one day be the last man driving around with robot cars but it’ll be like that episode of the Twilight Zone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_at_Last
Which is not the same as the one with the stopwatch that stops time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Peace_and_Quiet
Who buys iPods? These people: http://www.birchtree.me/blog/who-buys-ipods
Apple Watches may not cause health problems but licking radium brushes certainly does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
Please gaze upon the Sinclair radio watch: http://www.ledwatches.net/articles/sinclair-fm-radio-watch/watch-photos1.htm
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Get excited! This week’s Six Colors sponsor is Meh. I already bought two remote-control helicopters from a Meh deal this week. It’s been a Meh kind of week.
The founders of Meh left Woot and started their own awesome deals site, which posts new deals every day at midnight Eastern.
Their site’s FAQ is hilarious. They’ve got an RSS feed at https://meh.com/deals.rss. Their domain is three letters long. You get the idea.
July 24, 2015 2:10 PM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Our family minivan came with a USB connector in the glove compartment, and so for years I’ve kept a 60GB fifth-generation iPod Classic1 in there, loaded up with as much music as I could fit. But lately it’s been showing signs of age that made me fear for the life of its internal spinning hard drive, and I haven’t been able to load our entire music library onto it for years.
But recently I got a chance to try out Other World Computing’s $49 iFlash, an upgrade that replaces the iPod’s hard drive (5th and 6th generation models only) with an SD card reader (with inserted SD card—I used a 128GB SDXC card that cost about $70). Now my old iPod has doubled in capacity, enough to fit every song I own. It’s also no longer relying on a spinning platter as a storage mechanism, which should extend its life dramatically.
Cracking open an iPod and replacing its hard drive isn’t for the timid. If you’re not comfortable poking around in the guts of electronics, you might want to find a friend to perform the installation for you. I’ve never cracked open an iPod before, and I managed to do it just fine, though the install process was a little harrowing at a few points. (It would’ve been much easier had I watched OWC’s how-to installation video, which hadn’t yet been posted when I installed the product in my iPod. I did use iFixit’s guide, which was helpful… up to the point when I needed to install the iFlash.)
I don’t carry this particular iPod around anymore—like I said, it lives in the glove box—but every time I pick it up I’m also struck by how much lighter it is. It feels more like a movie prop than a real device, because that metal drive has been replaced by a very light card reader.
In any event, even with my troubles (I installed the product upside-down and so I had to disassemble and reassemble it), it took me less than a half hour from start to finish. It helped that I had some spudgers, but otherwise the installation didn’t require any tools that I didn’t have at hand.
Look, the iPod isn’t a cool product anymore. But if you’ve got an iPod Classic around—in your pocket or car or kid’s room—and want to keep it running (or return it to relevance), this is a relatively low cost way to do the job. Not everyone needs (or wants to pay for) streaming music—and now I’ve got 14,000 songs at my fingertips whenever I’m driving.
In my Stay Foolish column at Macworld this week, I take a look at what Tim Cook’s recent comments about Apple Pay might portend for the next year of the service:
And, in fact, Apple Pay couldn’t come at a better time, thanks to the imminent transition to more secure forms of payment, such as chip-based credit cards. Starting in mid-October, the liability for fraud on magnetic swipe transitions at most retail locations shifts from the card issuer to the retailer itself. That’s a big incentive for stores to switch to terminals that accept cards with embedded chips or NFC payments–such as Apple Pay.
Wired reports on Apple’s backing of a bill before Congress to extend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to apply to sexual orientation and gender identity:
The bill has 155 co-sponsors in Congress. It’s also backed by one of the most powerful businesses in the world: Apple. In a statement to Human Rights Campaign, Apple wrote, “At Apple we believe in equal treatment for everyone, regardless of where they come from, what they look like, how they worship or who they love. We fully support the expansion of legal protections as a matter of basic human dignity.”
My favorite thing about Tim Cook’s Apple is that it takes a stand on issues without prompting from outside sources.
This week’s real More Color column at Macworld is all about El Capitan’s Split View mode, which still has a few kinks to work out:
One of the more interesting features of OS X El Capitan is the new Split View, which lets you run two apps side by side without any distractions (other than the other app, of course). It’s sort of like full-screen mode, except with two apps.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Full Screen Mode, mostly because I am frequently switching between at least two apps. But adding a second app to Full Screen Mode gives the feature an extra dimension that makes it much more intriguing to me.
File this one under the “about time” department:
T-Mobile’s new Advanced Messaging service is built on the Rich Communications Service (RCS) standard and adds near real-time chatting for one on one and group messages; typing indicators and read notifications; and the ability to send photos and videos up to 10MB in size. It doesn’t require the use of another app or for either party to sign up for another service. The carrier says that it built the service to work “across all devices, makers and operating systems, and wireless operators”, though for now, it is the only carrier in the US that supports RCS.
iMessage is not without its idiosyncrasies, but it’s definitely improved my messaging experience. It’s also, much more importantly, broken the stranglehold the carriers have on text messaging, which is pure profiteering. (The cost of sending text messages is negligible to the networks, even as you pay your $20 a month for unlimited text messages.) SMS is also, generally speaking, old and, if not broken, then at the very least out of touch with the way messaging is used these days.
T-Mobile says its approach is based on the Rich Communications Services standard, which was created by the GSM Association—the same body that develops cell standards. Adoption of the standard has been slow, especially in the U.S.—Sprint and AT&T were said to be working towards it back in 2013, and while Sprint eventually launched a Messaging Plus service based on RCS, it requires users download a separate app—precisely what T-Mobile says it’s aiming to avoid.
Because requiring a separate app just isn’t going to happen, especially if users have to go out and download it. The less tech savvy will get confused (I’ve seen this happen on Android phones, some of which have multiple messaging apps installed) and the more tech savvy will gravitate towards their preferred solutions. And therein lies the real challenge. Messaging is a heavily fragmented market, between text messaging, platform solutions like iMessage or BlackBerry Messaging1, and third-party offerings like WhatsApp, GroupMe, Facebook Messaging, and what have you. And behind all of it, SMS remains the lowest common denominator.
I have to wonder if Apple would even consider adopting this standard; I think it would have to be much more widely implemented first. It would certainly alleviate some cross-platform communications issues—we’ve all probably encountered that situation where one non-iPhone-using friend turns an entire group conversation from iMessage-blue to SMS-green—but it’s a question of whether or not Apple really cares about your Android- and Windows Phone-using friends.
Short answer: It doesn’t—but it does care about your experience. So in the best case, if this standard does get adopted by major players like AT&T and Verizon—and that’s hardly a gimme, as neither of them have the same need to differentiate themselves that Sprint and T-Mobile do—Apple could potentially implement RCS in the same way that SMS is currently used: as a fallback. Which is to say that when iMessage is available, iOS uses that; otherwise, it uses RCS.2
Regardless, I think we can all agree that the death of SMS has been a long time coming, and even if its demise is still a ways off, I imagine the mourning period will be short.
Update: Reader Richard writes in to point out that one of the major benefits of iMessage is its end-to-end encryption. SMS security varies depending on the network, though it can pretty much always be accessed by the carrier. It’s unclear from my research whether RCS, or T-Mobile’s implementation of it, will have any sort of encryption in place.
July 23, 2015 6:04 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Playing with betas is always a risky game, but earlier this week I noticed that while everybody online was talking about a new version of the OS X El Capitan beta, no such update was appearing in my version of the Mac App Store. I tried repeated quitting and relaunching of the Mac App Store app and even a few restarts to no avail, and eventually took to Twitter to see if anybody else had run into a similar issue.
Lo and behold, they had. And Twitter follower Pavan Rajam uncovered a suggestion for me on the Apple developer boards:
There may be a better solution to this problem (If it works for you then it’s certainly preferable to having to continually having to update from links):
sudo softwareupdate —set-catalog https://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-10.11seed-10.11-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.gz
The above command should set the update catalog correctly (something that doesn’t seem to be happening automatically for some).
I fired up Terminal, pasted in the command, entered my administrator password, and relaunched the Mac App Store. Sure enough, the subsequent beta was waiting for me.1
My understanding is that this simply manually points the software update mechanism to a specific “feed” of updates. If you’re concerned about what this might mean in the long run, the help page for softwareupdate says you can reset to defaults by using the command softwareupdate —clear-catalog.
As always, running beta software is purely an “at your own risk” endeavor, but hopefully this will help make sure you at least get all the updates you need.
[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.]
July 22, 2015 3:53 PM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Jim Dalrymple has had it up to here with Apple Music. In an 1100-word break-up letter on his site, The Loop, Jim details all the reasons the service has frustrated him. You should go read the whole thing, but to summarize:
This inconsistency seems to be related to mismatches between Apple’s cloud library and Jim’s existing music collection
Songs were sometimes duplicated in the Music app
The library couldn’t differentiate between tracks on source albums and greatest-hits compilations
Albums Jim owned didn’t show up in his library
He got bad music recommendations1
Turning off Apple Music removed purchased music from his library
I’ve seen some of the symptoms Jim reports, though not nearly as severely. I saw tracks get removed from source albums and added to greatest-hits compilations, making it impossible to listen to the original album without retagging. I’m sure there are dozens of examples I just haven’t noticed yet that will annoy me once I notice them.
I’ve had no problems adding music to my library, though… in fact, I praised the process earlier this month. The promise of Apple Music as a fusion of your own music and just about anything else you could want to listen to is an impressive one. But it’s a pretty tough promise to deliver on, and Apple Music seems to be falling short for a lot of people.
What’s funny is, when I saw that Jim was ripping into Apple Music, I thought it would be for a completely different reason that he didn’t even mention!
Yesterday, Apple had a pretty severe cloud-services outage. And with it went my access to Apple Music. Most of my music listening takes place on a Mac without much of an iTunes library, so I’m largely playing music stored in the cloud. Yesterday, the music stopped. My Mac wouldn’t play anything. My iPhone wouldn’t play more than a few saved tracks. I ended up spending most of the day listening to music via Home Sharing from the Mac mini in my house that’s got a copy of my entire music library.
There was also another (shorter) outage last Friday, when I repeatedly received a message informing me that “Cloud Music Library was not responding (503)” and that I should check my firewall software. When your error messages conjure Windows 95-era Microsoft, you’re doing it wrong.
What those outages did is point out that with all the great convenience of having the world’s music library at your beck and call, if the servers go down when you want to listen to music, you’re out of luck. If Apple wants people to embrace streaming their music, and embrace Apple Music as the service that provides them with that music, its services need to be reliable.
That means keeping its servers up and running. And it means fixing bugs and interface mistakes like the ones vexing Jim.
I like Apple Music. I really do. It’s already exposed me to a bunch of great new music and its curated playlists have managed to surprise and delight me. But if it can’t be reliable, and if it separates me from my favorite music by mislabeling and miscategorizing the music I’ve collected over the years, it’ll be a failure.
This week my More Color column at Macworld is a quick-reaction piece about the just-released Apple results, in which I pick out five interesting tidbits from the day’s numbers (and the analyst call):
Another quarter, another happy financial report from Apple. The company’s third financial quarter is rarely the place where you expect to see records—in Apple’s largely seasonal business, the period from April to June is generally the sleepiest quarter—but there was still a lot to be gleaned from the numbers, and from the following hour-long call with financial analysts. Here are the most interesting things to come out of Tuesday’s Apple federally mandated disclosure of financial data.
July 21, 2015 3:15 PM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Every quarter, Apple CEO Tim Cook talks to financial analysts for a little while after the company’s earnings are announced. This quarter was no different. Presented here, a transcript of everything Cook said on the call.
Continue reading “‘It’s Tim’: What Apple’s CEO told analysts”…
July 21, 2015 1:09 PM PT
Last updated July 30, 2020
Note: This story has not been updated since 2020.
Apple has released its quarterly results, reporting $49.6B in revenue, having sold 47.5 million iPhones, 10.9 million iPads, and 4.8 million Macs.
Continue reading “Apple reports $49.6B quarter on strong iPhone, China results”…
Well, this is pretty wacky. Knights of the Old Republic II, the Star Wars RPG developed by Obsidian and published by BioWare, was released way back in 2005. But it was full of bugs and glitches, many of which Obsidian didn’t bother patching, which led to plenty of dissatisfaction, despite the title’s popularity.
Fast forward a decade and, with no fanfare, Aspyr, Disney Interactive, and LucasArts have contrived to release a huge update for the game, including bringing support for Linux and–20th Century Fox fanfare–the Mac.
There’s also better support for the popular Sith Lords Restored Content Modification, which seeks to put back a lot of the game content that was removed due to the game’s rushed release schedule–including the ending.
It’s not everyday that you see a 10-year-old game lavished with this kind of affection. Mac users can grab it for 25 percent off–just $7.50–over on Steam.
July 21, 2015 9:02 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
In preparing my spreadsheet for public dissemination, I knew I’d obviously have to remove all the data in the spreadsheet. But I realized that there was also a potential loophole: Numbers documents take advantage of OS X’s Versions feature, a sort of on-disk Time Machine that lets you easily jump back to a previously saved version of the file.
That previous version contains all the information I just painstakingly wiped out of the document. Could it mean that an enterprising soul could still get access to all of my personal details? (Answer: No, it doesn’t—older versions are stored locally in an invisible database!)
That solves my problem. However, if you’re sharing a local computer and don’t want someone with access to it snooping in your drafts, you can remove old versions from documents—it’s just not immediately obvious how you do so. For instance, this is the interface you see when you choose File > Revert To > Browse All Versions.
Not exactly brimming with options.
But here’s the trick: the menu bar is still accessible in this mode. Just move the cursor to the top of the screen, and it’ll pop down. Good for a first step, but what then? I ended up using the Help menu to search for “versions,” which pointed me to the correct spot…right back to File > Revert To, which in this mode contains a Delete This Version option.
You can use Versions’s arrows on the bottom right to select the version you want to remove—it doesn’t seem as though there’s a good feature for removing all previous versions, however. (Update: Reader Mike Barron points out you actually can remove all old versions: “You can remove all previous versions by simply holding the option button when navigating to File->Revert. When doing so you should see “Delete This Version…” change to “Delete Old Versions…” You will receive a confirmation before the deletions occur.”)
[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.]
I had the pleasure to talk to Mr. John Gruber of Daring Fireball on his podcast, The Talk Show, this week. We discussed Pebble’s new Pebble Time smartwatch, the “Safari is the New IE” argument, the state of web advertising (and its adverse effects on performance and privacy) and monetization, and more.
July 21, 2015 6:43 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Update: Check out the updated version of this sheet for 2017, including expense tracking.
Who knew you folks were so interested in spreadsheets? After my post last week detailing my freelance accounting sheet, I was inundated with requests for the template. Far be it from me to deny you fine people, so here it is, in all its glory. (Click the image to download.)
I have, of course, removed all of my pertinent information from the file, but to give you a better idea of how things work, I’ve filled it in with a variety of placeholder information. All of which can, of course, be removed and filled with your own details.
You’re free to use this, tweak it to your tastes, and redistribute it, although it’d be great if you acknowledge the source. If you happen to make any changes and would like to share them, feel free to shoot me an email (or hit me up on Twitter) and let me know.
Enjoy!
[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.]
July 20, 2015 4:45 PM PT
Last updated July 30, 2020
Note: This story has not been updated since 2020.
Once every three months, Apple talks about details of its business that it otherwise doesn’t talk about—because as a public company, it has to disclose its financial results to the world.
Even for people (like me) who are not interested in Apple for its balance sheet or its investment potential, it’s a great window into how Apple’s business is shaped and how the company’s core products are doing. There’s always something to be gleaned from the post-release conference call with analysts, too, usually via tidbits dropped by Tim Cook.
Here’s what you can expect Tuesday:
Around 1:30 p.m. PT (4:30 ET), raw results will be released. The business TV channels—which for the preceding 30 minutes were expressing skepticism that Apple is actually still in business and isn’t just a money laundering front for aliens—will chime in with instant analysis of dubious value.
Between 1:30 and 2, I’ll generate a whole bunch of charts that visualize the Apple results in interesting ways and post them here as well as on our event Twitter account, @sixcolorsevent.
At 2 PT/5 ET, the conference call starts. You can listen to it yourself or read the summation on @sixcolorsevent. We’ll also post a transcript of the more interesting things Tim Cook and company say on the call, later, right here.
Brian X. Chen and Vindu Goel of the New York Times write a story about developers deciding how they might apply their products to a new category of accessory, and turns it into a FUD story about Apple watch sales in advance of Apple’s financial results tomorrow:
The lack of support from Facebook — and from other popular app makers like Snapchat and Google, which also do not have apps for Apple Watch — underscores the skepticism that remains in the technology community about the wearable device. That puts the watch, Apple’s first new product since the iPad in 2010, in something of a Catch-22: The companies whose apps would most likely prompt more people to buy the device are waiting to see who is buying it and how they use it.
Facebook’s Adam Mosseri, quoted in the story, is right on when he says (summarized by Chen and Goel) that it’s hard to imagine “how to deliver a good Facebook experience—including the news feed’s stream of posts, photos and videos—on such a small screen.” Facebook Messenger would be a good Apple Watch app, but Facebook as a whole? As Mosseri said to Chen or Goel, “You’d just want to get your phone out at that point.”
Not unreasonable. Developers are still struggling to figure out the best way to display information and interact on a device as small as the Apple Watch. Some developers have ripped up their first apps and started anew. The advent of watchOS 2 this fall will probably cause even more to follow.
This is a story about developers trying to figure out if they want to be on a new platform, and if they do, how best to accomplish that. Unfortunately, Chen and Goel’s story makes it seem like the development community is just holding its breath waiting to see if Apple’s selling watches, while users are similarly waiting to see if their favorite apps from their phones run on the watch before buying.