Choose from three different collections of appearances.
On Wednesday iOS 18.2 and macOS 15.2 were released, and we wrote about it here. One of my complaints is that you can’t just make generic figures of people—you have to choose actual people in your library.
This is wrong. You can do it—I just completely missed the feature, because it wasn’t positioned or labeled in a way that made me understand what I was looking at. In the interest of correcting the record and also informing people whose brains work like mine, here’s the deal:
To create an image in Image Playground that doesn’t use the face of someone you know, click or tap the Choose… button with the word Person above it. This will bring up the person picker, full of faces from your Photos library. But in the top left corner of the picker is another option, Appearance.
The first time you click or tap Appearance, you’ll be prompted to choose a default appearance for your creations. (In subsequent creations, it’ll default to your previous choice, but you can change it by tapping Edit.)
In the Appearance view, you’ll be able to choose from five different skin tones and then from three different collections of Appearances. This is where it gets a little weird: Rather that building a person, Memoji style, you choose from three different collections of thumbnails, which are the various Appearances that might come up when you generate an image. They appear to be weighted by gender, so the leftmost is (mostly?) women, the rightmost men, the middle more of a grab bag—but there’s a lot of variation between each collection of Appearances.
That’s it. When you select a set, you’re ready to create an image. Unlike images generated from one specific person, you’ll find that different generations will be very different in this mode, because the entire appearance of the person can vary. As I swiped through a single set, I found young women, older women, young men, and people of various racial groups. It’s a grab bag. It’s meant to be generic. Go with it.
They all passed (or failed?) the Kobayashi Maru.
Once you’ve picked the Appearance, you can still add all the other prompts you want, either picked from Apple’s suggestion list or from your own terms. (I generated a bunch of starship captains with laser guns in space, enough to pack an entire star fleet.)
Choose your Genmoji base appearance.
In Genmoji, instead of picking an Appearance, you pick an “Emoji” as a starting point. You can choose between the generic female, non-gender-specific, or male emoji templates, and choose a skin tone. All the genemojis you create will be based on that template.
Our interest in current smart glasses, the smart tech we use to monitor our homes and pets, our thoughts on iOS 18.2 features like Genmoji and Image Playground, and how we organize and manage holiday gift-giving lists for ideas and tracking.
How Disney’s strategy has led to ESPN inside the Disney+ app, Disney and Netflix content strategies, Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast make a deal, the ramifications of Comcast’s “SpinCo,” crafting a theatrical hit out of a Disney+ TV show, and TV picks!
Mic Drop offers temporary floating status warnings and a persistent Menu Bar item as options.
I’ve gotten so used to having a physical mute button on my podcast recording setup that it’s quite disconcerting when I use a different setup that doesn’t offer one.
In the winter months, I work most of the time in “Studio B”, a second desk in a back bedroom that’s climate controlled in a way my drafty garage can’t be. My microphone here is a sturdy Shure MV7, but I’m connecting it via USB and its mute button is a capacitive circle that’s super awkward to reach.
As a result, I’ve been trying to find a simple way to mute that microphone using a similar gesture—push to mute, push again to unmute—that I use in my primary recording setup. After exploring a bunch of options, I’ve settled on Mic Drop, a free ($5 upgrade for pro features) Mac utility that does the job perfectly.
Mic Drop literally does everything I expected from it. It lives in your menu bar and has support for global hotkeys or AppleScript, optional audio and multiple visual notifications of mute status, the ability to choose which mics are muted and which ones aren’t, and even an optional push-to-talk toggle mode.
It’s a delight to find an app that doesn’t just do the basics, but (via its recently-released 2.0 update) offers all sorts of polish that elevate into a utility that’s truly worth recommending.
Apple Intelligence is back, and this time it’s visual. With the iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS 15.2 updates, Apple is rolling out its second round of generative AI features, including its first image-related features like Genmoji, Image Playground, and Image Wand.
These features are, on the whole, more ambitious than the initial batch released back in in October, and some of them build on those features: for example, the ability to now generate specific changes to text in Writing Tools. This also marks the first third-party integration of generative AI features into Apple’s own platforms, with the ability to connect to ChatGPT.
Apple Intelligence features are also expanding geographically with these releases, coming to more versions of English, and there are even a few non-AI related features in the mix too, such as improvements to AirPlay and a new mail categorization feature on iOS.
But does this latest round of AI features move the needle in Apple’s quest to improve its users lives? Let’s delve in and see.
2024 is fast fading behind us and thus, as is our custom, it’s time to cast our eyes back at the year that was and see how things shook out for Apple.
A lot has happened to the company over the past twelve months—and not all of it to Apple’s liking. As Apple has gotten larger and larger, it’s found itself increasingly in the crosshairs of governments, not to mention its equally weighty competitors. While the company remains wildly successful from a financial standpoint, it’s struggled somewhat when it comes to its vision of the future. In short, there are definitely cracks puncturing Cupertino’s traditionally invincible image.
So let’s take a trip down memory lane and see the stories that shaped Apple’s 2024.
I took piano lessons when I was a kid, and always hated practicing. I can blame it on the cold room we kept the piano in, but part of the reason I hated it was that most of what I played was boring. (I didn’t love having to take a long school bus ride to my piano lessons, either.)
This week I took Simply Piano for Vision Pro for a spin, and it was anything from boring. The popular iPad app for teaching piano has come to Vision Pro, and so I sat down at the very same piano I used to practice on as a kid—it’s in a somewhat warmer room now—but with a Vision Pro over my head.
Simply Piano works by listening to you playing notes and detecting if you’re playing the right or wrong ones. It’s very clever, but the Vision Pro version adds in the ability to overlay a virtual keyboard on your real one, so it can provide visual cues (in the form of glowing notes) when you’re not sure which key to play. It also annotates your fingers, so you can see which fingers are supposed to play which notes.
Even all these years later, I’ve got sight reading skills above Simply Piano’s introductory lessons, but as I went through the introductory lessons I found that the visual augmentation did feel a bit like magic. If I had any complaints, it was that sometimes Simply Piano struggled to recognize when I was playing notes, especially two of the same note in quick succession.
The Vision Pro app also comes with a virtual keyboard feature that allows you to practice on any flat surface, by overlaying a keyboard and letting you play it. I like this idea a lot, but in practice I found that it didn’t work very well. It played incorrect notes and even played notes when my fingers weren’t down. I think there’s something here—and having the ability to practice piano when you don’t have a keyboard handy is an amazing idea!—but I gave up pretty quickly and went back to my real piano.
Maybe if I had an iPad, or a Vision Pro, I would’ve practiced the piano more faithfully back in the day. Or maybe not. But this app seems to do a pretty great job of teaching the basics of piano, no teacher (or long school bus ride) required.
Tim Cook sits down for another interview (two more and he gets a free set of steak knives), Apple and Spotify take a look at your taste in music, and changes are coming to how iPhones handle memory, all for AI.
More time with Tim
If you’ve ever wanted get into it with Tim Cook about AI, this week there was an interview for you.
Writing for Wired, Steven Levy asked Cook about Apple’s awkward Apple Intelligence ads and his own comments about its features.
I’ve heard you say that Apple Intelligence could make you funnier, which seems strange.
I think it can make you friendlier, which, in many ways, can be funnier as well.
Well… no. But, OK.
Turns out if Tim doesn’t like a question, he just doesn’t answer it.
If AGI does actually happen, how would that affect Apple?
That’s a discussion that we’ll continue to have.
Tim, can you tell us your fundamental message for our times, that encapsulates the meaning of existence and holds the secrets to reinforcing the connection that holds the human race together?
My fundamental belief is, if you’re looking at your phone more than you’re looking in somebody’s eyes, that’s a problem.
Beautiful.
Questionable tastes on display
Apple released its annual Apple Music Replay this week and people were gleefully sharing their results. It used to be that no one would know what your poor choices in music were. Now people put it out there for everyone to see. What a time to be alive. Thank god these features weren’t around when the Spin Doctors were popular.
Apple Music Replay 1992: “You listened to ‘Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong’ four thousand three hun-… oh, my god, is that right? Seriously? These numbers are going to come back and haunt you, you know.”
Spotify also released its annual music review, Spotify Wrapped, leading to a bit of comparison between the two services. While Replay on iOS finally keeps you in the app (in a web view), Replay in Music on the Mac kicks you out to the web. Spotify, meanwhile, included an AI podcast instead of other features users have found fun in the past.
The result is meant to feel like you’re listening to a podcast about your Wrapped.
“Area Grown-Assed Man Listens to a Surprising Number of Superhero Movie Soundtracks.” Thanks, but no thanks.
This surely had nothing to do with the fact that Spotify cut 2,300 jobs last year.
When asked for comment on how it decided what to include in Wrapped this year, Spotify simply said, “Every year we look to bring a new and exciting experience to Wrapped for listeners. It’s part of the secret sauce of Wrapped.”
Did an AI write that response?
Dubious features
You know the old saying: “It’s not a feature it’s a… actually, I don’t know what this is.”
The shift will mark a departure from the current package-on-package (PoP) method, where the low-power double data rate (LPDDR) DRAM is stacked directly on the System-on-Chip (SoC).
Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Sure. I was gonna suggest that. LPDDR. PoPping and SoCking.
Now, there might be a downside.
It may also use more power and increase latency.
All so we can walk faster through the uncanny valley of Image Playground. OK.
All that work for AI is still not as little requested as this:
Now you can convert your real money to fake money right from your iPhone!
That’s great and all but can I buy Hawk Tuah meme coin with Apple Pay? (If you don’t know what Hawk Tuah is, do not type it into your favorite search engine. Or anything.) Probably just as well that you can’t as — gasp! — it seems to be a bit of a pyramid scheme!
What’s the world coming to when you can’t trust a person who got famous for saying [WHAT SHE GOT FAMOUS FOR SAYING REDACTED] with your money?
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
Rise of the laptops
Holiday deals and holiday Mac purchases; the rise of Mac laptops and the fadeaway of Mac desktops; Dan uses the command line to fix his lights.
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Developer Simon Støvring (Scriptable, Runestone) has just released a fun new app for the holidays called Festivitas:
Festivitas automatically adds festive lights to your menu bar and dock upon launch and you can tweak their appearance to match your preferences ✨
That’s it—that’s the app. It hangs holiday lights off your menu bar and on your Dock. (You can choose to have lights in both places or just one.) It’s a well executed app that’s got the flavor of the fun early Mac era. It reminds me of classic Mac apps like Underware and more modern takes like Notchmeister.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Festivitas is that it’s so customizable. For the Menu Bar and the Dock you can choose the size of the lights, the cable thickness, the distance between lights, the color of the lights, and the pattern the lights use to move (or not move, as the case may be). I immediately set mine in the six Apple rainbow colors, for obvious reasons.
Back in the day, I had one computer. It was a laptop bought for me by my employer, and at work, I’d attach it to an external display and use it at my desk. At the end of the day, I’d close it up, put it in my backpack, and take it home.
For the last ten years I’ve worked at a desk at home, with a desktop Mac as my primary computer. But over the last year or so, I’ve been using my MacBook Air a lot more, whether I’m traveling or spending the winter in a heated room rather than my unheated garage.
So what’s better, the single-Mac life or being a Mac vagabond? As someone who’s been there, and back, and there again, I can tell you that it’s never been easier to live the two-Mac lifestyle—but it’s also never been a better time to just give the desktop up and learn to love a Mac laptop.
The KVM switches between the Mac mini and MacBook Pro, allowing them to share the keyboard, a monitor (on the arm above) and a mouse. The Zoom Podtrac P4 audio interface is also shared between the two Macs. The cable leading from the right edge of the switch connects to a small puck that is magnetcially stuck to the VESA mount above.
I live a multi-Mac lifestyle. It’s a luxury, but mighty close to a necessity if I want to keep my work life and personal life (which includes freelance projects) separate. But how do you organize your life and desk so that both Macs can do their best for you? My solution is a modern spin on an old option: a KVM switch.
The Problem
The radio station where I work issues me a MacBook Pro, on which I edit audio, write feature stories and do all the admin things you do when you have a job. I use the MBP in the office, but most often while working from home. It’s connected to a Dell P2242H monitor (also workplace-owned) that’s mounted on a VESA arm.
Also on my desk is a computer I own. Until recently, it was an Intel iMac, shoved unceremoniously to the back of the desk, behind the monitor arm. To manage my personal stuff, I have routinely fired up Screen Sharing on the MacBook Pro to control my iMac.
My plan when I started this job several years ago was to keep work and personal computer things entirely separate. But files and apps have always been a little bit mixed between the two machines. Lately, I’ve concentrated on making the separation of job and home more explicit. It’s a privacy thing, and a backup and archiving thing.
Unfortunately, Screen Sharing’s occasional glitches—and a vast difference between M2 and Intel performance—made that harder than I liked. So I recently bought a new M4 Pro Mac mini.
Sharing Isn’t Always Caring
Screen Sharing has mostly worked well when I needed to check on personal stuff during the work day. Everything financially or personally sensitive has lived on the iMac’s local drive, and my home email accounts don’t have a place on my MacBook Pro. But there have been issues, like when I need to edit a document or fill out a form over screen sharing. Characters sometimes get dropped. Occasionally, network glitches forced me to find a keyboard I can connect directly to the iMac. And the pointer I enlarge in accessibility settings so that I can actually find it onscreen turns tiny again when I use Screen Sharing.
These are small annoyances, but ones I’m tired of fighting.
Keyboard, Video, Mouse
There’s nothing new about a box that allows you to share a keyboard, monitor and mouse between multiple computers. The idea of a KVM switch goes back so far, that I hadn’t even considered it as an option I could try. Do they still exist? How do they handle multiple port types and video resolutions?
I quickly learned that they do exist, and in an era where I/O ports are often in short supply, a modern KVM can serve effectively as a dock, too. My MacBook Pro is one of those two-port M2 numbers that made its debut at the bottom of the range in 2022. So I bought the Mac mini for performance,and a KVM switch so I could share all the things.
I picked an the Anker Docking Station KVM Switch ($160). Options with more or fewer ports are available from Anker and elsewhere, including many that are far cheaper. Some KVM/dock devices, including mine, offer support for multiple 4k monitors, but since I use a single, mid-priced display, I was more interested in ports than pixels.
Ports of Call
The switch box is a small rectangle, with ports for connecting computer and monitors on one side, and three USB-A ports, plus a USB-C port on the other side. This arrangement makes it tough to completely banish unsightly cables from your desk, but I’ve compromised by leaving the KVM behind my monitor arm, and bundling cables where I can.
On one end of the KVM switch is a 1/8″ audio jack – theoretically useful for an audio producer and podcaster who wears wired headphones a lot, but I haven’t used it much. On the other end is a hard-wired cable, leading to a puck that’s just about the size of a second-gen iPod Shuffle. The lighted button on the puck switches between your connected computers. Its cable is two feet long, but the best thing about this switch is that the puck is magnetic. It’ll stick to the back of my VESA mount, keeping it out of the way, but easy to reach. That little puck brings me so much joy. It’s my favorite feature of the switch!
So Much to Share
Once two computers are connected to the switch, you can add peripherals via the USB-A or USB-C ports. I’m rocking an old Magic Keyboard, with a Logitech mouse plugged into it, so that covers the K and M aspects of the switch. I could start using the computers together now, but I have more devices to share. My Logitech webcam is also a USB-A device. And the most modern gadget I want to share between MacBook and Mac mini is the Zoom Podtrac P4 I’ve been using as an audio interface. With a microphone plugged into the Podtrac, I can record a podcast or jump on a Zoom call from either Mac.
Since I started using the KVM switch, I’ve learned that when everything’s connected, I can use both Macs at once by switching to the Mac mini with the switch and then opening the MacBook Pro’s lid. It’s not something I do often, but you might want to. I also realized I needed to differentiate the look of each Mac’s screen, so I’d remember which machine I was using at any given moment. I’ve given each Mac its own wallpaper, and the Mac mini’s login screen says “Welcome home,” which reminds me when the workday is over.
Caveat KVM
My switch needs are relatively simple, with no 4k displays or dual monitors. If you want to share high-resolution gear, or if you have multiple displays, be sure the switch you choose supports them. A good return policy on any switch you buy could also save you headaches, if your setup doesn’t work with the first switch you bring home.
Stephen Hackett joins Jason to discuss emergency calls, reaction to Jason’s “The Mac is the Model” piece, iPhone metals, our innate troubleshooting powers, Jason’s laptop dilemma, the ChatGPT Mac app, and some very old Vision Pro news.
