AOL is shutting down The Unofficial Apple Weblog. It’s unclear if any of the writers and editors at the site will keep their jobs, working as a part of Engadget.
The gaming blog Joystiq is also dying as a separate entity, and will be a channel on Engadget.
A lot of great people have had their name on TUAW over the years. Here’s to them.
As a kid, I loved building LEGO sets so I could play with them; as an adult, I’ve really grown to like the process of putting them together, so it’s no surprise that I found myself coveting this newly-announced $350—the entry-level cost of an Apple Watch!—2,996-piece S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. Which I have absolutely no place for in my one-bedroom apartment, unless I move into the garage.1
Here’s a super hi-res closeup to give you an idea of scale. (According to this video, the rotors are crank-turned, but you can modify it to add power and lights, as the close-up shows you.) Also kudos for the inclusion not only of Black Widow, but also a brand new Maria Hill minifig.2
Just to tie this in to technology, I recently used the iPhone 6’s time-lapse video feature to capture myself assembling the LEGO Exo Suit set I got for Christmas. It’s a bit humbling to have an hour or so of work condensed into 30 seconds, but there you go.
January 29, 2015 7:42 AM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Enough of last week’s negativity–for the moment, anyway–and let’s turn once again towards the aspirational. Last night, five of my friends and I defeated the Atheon in Destiny’s Vault of Glass raid; it was a suitably epic undertaking, hampered only by the fact that the voice chat on the Xbox 360 still sucks after all these years. So we turned instead to a Google Hangout, which unquestionably provided both better quality and more reliability.1
But this got me thinking. In the book I recently co-authored with pal Jeff Carlson, we discuss keeping in touch with your family via video chat. While Apple’s FaceTime is great for one-on-one interactions, it doesn’t support multiparty video chats. So if you have many farflung friends or family who want to chat, you have to look elsewhere: Google Hangouts work pretty well, and Skype has begun to offer its formerly pay-only multiparty video chats to everybody (though it’s not currently available on every platform). Those are just two of the most popular options; there are plenty of others. But it’s one ring into which Apple hasn’t yet thrown its hat.
Interestingly enough, FaceTime Audio does allow for multiparty connections, though it’s a little bit hidden.2 And Mac users might remember that earlier versions of iChat (now Messages) actually had support for up to four people in a video chat; it was surprisingly high-quality and easy-to-use for the time. Still, it’d be great to see Apple bring the same simplicity and ease-of-use3 to multiparty video chats that it has to the one-on-one model.
I still prefer FaceTime for one-on-one conversations; in fact, I used it just yesterday, and this morning a friend suggested we FaceTime each other as we shovel out our respective cars. But anything more than that, whether it be a podcast, D&D session, or Destiny raid, means turning to the oft-finicky process of setting up a Hangout or Skype call. (Getting people’s contact info, inviting them, sending out URLs, and so on.)
Of course, not all of my friends and family are iOS users, so it would also help immensely if FaceTime was indeed an open standard…but that’s another kettle of fish entirely.
[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.]
January 28, 2015 2:12 PM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
This week’s episode of the Connected podcast is a real treat, a nearly three-hour analysis of the original iPad launch keynote1, which took place five years ago this week.
Listening to the podcast in the car yesterday made me think back to 2010, when the iPad was announced by Steve Jobs at a special media event in San Francisco. The name of the rumored device was one of the hottest topics of late 2009 and early 2010, with speculation running from Canvas to iTablet to iSlate2.
I remember at the time advocating for the return of a then-disused Apple brand, iBook, as the name. It’s a nifty title—revived during that very event, in fact, but as software instead of hardware—but in 2015 I’m struck by how a bad name it would’ve been for that device.
Calling Apple’s tablet the iBook would have unnecessarily defined the device as more of an e-reader, rather than the more versatile device it actually was. In fact, one of the great coups of the iPad keynote was the rollout of a trio of iWork apps. Those apps might have been a little overly ambitious, but in the best possible way—and they made clear Apple’s position on the iPad as a device capable of doing real work.
I know that a lot of people feel like iPad is an awkward name. At the time the name caused quite a bit of tittering, and even today it doesn’t seem to be particularly loved. But I think it’s the perfect name, because pad—like pod before it—is a word that’s utterly devoid of meaning… until Apple inserts meaning into it. And that’s what the company did on stage in January 2010.
For a long time, I thought that Apple would redefine and recycle the iPod name at some point, too. But these days Apple is moving away from products with the i prefix3, so it seems like that chance has passed us by. The Apple Watch, when it arrives in April, will do so with the meaning of the word watch embedded into our expectations.
Clockwise is a weekly podcast that covers four technology topics in less than 30 minutes.
In this week’s episode, my co-host Dan Moren and I are joined by Jacqui Cheng of The Wirecutter and Casey Liss of Accidental Tech Podcast and Analog(ue) to discuss Apple’s huge quarterly results, the psychology of Kickstarter, Microsoft’s holograms, and technology that cures life’s annoyances.
If you think tech podcasts are too long, this is the podcast for you. Give it a try!
January 27, 2015 3:51 PM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Today Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the Apple Watch will arrive in April.
“Development for Apple Watch is right on schedule, and we expect to be shipping in April,” he said during a conference call with analysts following the company’s announcement of record profits. “Developers are hard at work on apps, notifications, and information summaries that we call ‘glances,’ all designed specifically for the Watch’s user interface. The creativity and software innovation going on around Apple Watch is incredibly exciting, and we can’t wait for our customers to experience them when Apple Watch becomes available.”
Apple previously had only said that the Apple Watch would ship in “early 2015.” When asked on the conference call if the product had been delayed, Cook provided some useful clarity about how Apple defines time.
“What we had been saying is ‘early 2015,'” he said. “We sort of look at the year and think of ‘early’ as the first four months, ‘mid’ as the next four months, and ‘late’ is the final four months. And so to us, it’s within the range. It’s basically when we thought.”
January 27, 2015 3:19 PM PT
Last updated July 30, 2020
Note: This story has not been updated since 2020.
Another quarter gone, another set of records fall, and another phone call between Apple executives and financial analysts.
Presented here, via my fast typing fingers, is a transcript of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s statements on the analyst call. Now you can read all about it rather than listening.
Continue reading “Tim Cook transcript: What Apple’s CEO said to analysts”…
January 27, 2015 12:52 PM PT
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
To say that the last three months of 2014 were record setting for Apple would be an understatement. Not only did the company set records for profit ($18 billion) and revenue ($74.6 billion), but it also sold a mind-boggling 74.5 million iPhones.
“Interest in Apple products is at an all-time high,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said today on a conference call with analysts after the company released its quarterly financial results. “Demand for iPhone has been staggering… On average, we sold over 34,000 iPhones every hour, 24 hours a day, every day of the quarter.”
Mac sales were 5,519,000, only about a thousand Macs lower than the all-time-record Mac sales number the company put up the previous quarter, and up from the 4.8 million Macs sold during the holiday quarter of 2013.
Meanwhile, sluggish sales of the iPad continued. The company announced 21.4 million iPad sales, more than four million less than the company sold during the previous holiday quarter.
Cook said that he’s still “optimistic and bullish” on the iPad, though, citing high numbers of first-time buyer rates: “If you look at some of the developed markets… 50 percent of the people are buying an iPad for the first time. If you look in China it’s over 70 percent. And so when you have that kind of first-time buyer rates, you don’t have a saturated market.”
Cook also suggested that the iPad’s upgrade cycle is “probably between an iPhone and a PC,” and suggested that there’s “probably some level of cannibalization that’s going on” with the iPad stuck between the Mac and the iPhone. But in the end, the CEO said that he believes “over the long arc of time, the iPad is a great business.”
Apple showed big growth in China, 70 percent over the previous holiday quarter. The $16 billion in revenues in Apple’s “greater China” region moved within spitting distance of the $17 billion in European revenue. (The U.S. remains Apple’s strongest geographical region, with $30.6 billion in revenues during the holiday quarter.)
“Growth was absolutely stunning in Brazil and mainland China, more than doubling year over year, which is a 3-4x what those markets were doing according to IDC,” Cook said. “I’m really proud of how we’re doing [in China]… You can tell that we’re a big believer in China, we’re looking at our investment, we’re growing the number of stores, we’ll hit 20 soon and we’re doubling that by mid 2016. We’re also growing the channel there, our online store has expanded to over 350 cities now, and in fact our online revenues in China last quarter were more than the sum of the previous five years. And so, it’s an incredible market.”
In addition to crowing about Apple’s (eminently crowable) quarter, Cook also declared that 2015 would be “the year of Apple Pay.” According to Cook, Apple Pay is responsible for two-thirds of dollars spent on contactless payment systems from the three major U.S. credit card networks. At Panera Bread, he said, Apple Pay represents nearly 80 percent of mobile payment transactions, and that Whole Foods claims that mobile payments have increased 400 percent since Apple Pay launched.
In addition, Cook promised more growth in the company’s HealthKit, HomeKit, and CarPlay initiatives to connect Apple tech to health data, home devices, and car entertainment systems, respectively.
Apple will release its earnings for the first quarter of fiscal 2015 tomorrow during the 1 p.m. PT hour, with a conference call to follow at 2 PT / 5 ET / 2200 GMT.
We will once again be live-tweeting the event through a Twitter embed here on the site, fed from our events-only Twitter account @sixcolorsevent. Plus there will be analysis, of course, and maybe even a Tim Cook Speaks transcript. See you tomorrow afternoon!
January 26, 2015 9:48 AM PT
Last updated July 8, 2025
Maybe ten years ago I embarked on a mission to convert a bunch of my old VHS videotapes into digital files. The goal was to preserve home movies and all the videos my friends and I made in high school1. I never managed to get through the entire stack, and for a decade my old VCR, camcorder, and tapes have been tucked away in a box.
Late last week I realized that all the pieces of my old project were within a few feet of my desk, and I set about reconnecting my old setup. It involves an old VCR, which I have to route through an analog-to-digital converter in the form of my old Sony Digital 8 camcorder. I needed to connect that camcorder to my iMac via an amusing cable chain: mini FireWire 400/iLink to FireWire 400 to a FireWire 400-800 adapter to a FireWire 800-to-Thunderbolt adapter.
Surprisingly, that connection actually worked, and my old camcorder—in playback mode but without a tape in it, turning it into a dumb converter box—showed up as a source in the current versions of both Final Cut Pro and iMovie. I could see what was being played on my old VCR right in the preview window. Unfortunately, that software doesn’t really seem to understand the idea of video capture from a setup like this—though I could press the capture button, it seemed to be waiting for some information from the camera that never came.
The solution, as I had feared, was to use iMovie 9.0.9, and indeed, that version was able to capture my old videos. (Standard-definition DV format files are enormous! Fortunately, I was able to convert them to very nice MPEG-4 versions using HandBrake and toss out the huge DV files.)
This turned out to be the easiest part of my project. The toughest part involved the media itself: 30-year-old videotapes. My old VCR struggled to forward and rewind cassettes, which had been sitting unplayed for at least 15 years, if not 20. Even my old trick of forwarding to the end of a tape, then rewinding to the beginning in order to loosen things up, didn’t work great. There was a lot of starting and stopping. What’s worse, this old videotape is falling apart. Tape was constantly getting tangled in the play heads of the VCR.
I ended up popping the top off of the VCR so that when a tangle occurred, I could untangle the tape with a minimum of damage. I also ended up with a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, scissors, and a sheet of blank paper, so that I could cut out little strips of paper, coat them with alcohol, and use them to clean the video play heads, which kept getting clogged.
Shockingly, this approach managed to salvage video of a 1987 high-school rock concert that wowed people on Facebook, and I even discovered a 1999 appearance of mine on Leo Laporte’s “Call for Help” show on ZDTV.
One of my motivations for dipping into my video archive was to uncover the two tapes on which I had collected some favorite moments from “Late Night With David Letterman,” which I watched faithfully throughout high school. I’m feeling nostalgic for Letterman these days, since he’s retiring in May. Every time I would uncover a portion of an episode on a videotape, I’d do a web search for the guests to see if I could find the show date, since there’s a complete list of Letterman shows on the Internet. (Of course there is.)
But as I was making those searches, I noticed something else: Almost every single show, every single favorite moment that I had refused to tape over back in the 1980s because I might want to watch it later, was on YouTube. That May 7, 1986 show featuring Cybill Shepherd in a towel? It’s on YouTube—I watched the entire episode this weekend.
The lesson learned here is, I suppose, that there’s always someone who is a bigger fan than you, a bigger packrat, a more obsessive YouTube uploader, a video archaeologist who will beat you to the prize. And if you put off your rainy-day project of digitizing those old videotapes long enough, someone else will beat you to the punch and save you the trouble. So I’ll survey my old tapes for anything that’s unique, but I’ll do so with the realization that unless it’s a home movie, it’s probably already on YouTube.
This week on my pop-culture podcast The Incomparable, we talk about a few books set after the end of the world as we know it. There’s “Station Eleven” by Emily St. John Mandel, an acclaimed book that may be a good novel, but is not good science fiction. Then there’s “The Peripheral” by William Gibson, one of my favorite writers—it’s dense and peculiar and has some amazing moments, though it feels overstuffed. And finally there’s “Slow Apocalypse” by John Varley, which I didn’t read, but apparently is very useful if you live in Los Angeles and are a doomsday prepper.
My guests this week are Scott McNulty, Lisa Schmeiser, Monty Ashley, and David J. Loehr.
This week’s Six Colors has been sponsored is Yosemite by CocoaConf, a conference for the Apple community held in Yosemite National Park April 20-23, 2015.
I grew up not too far away from Yosemite, and I’m excited to say that I’ll be headed home for the conference—I’m one of the speakers, and I’m in amazing company. The other 16 speakers include some of the best and most-loved writers, designers, philosophers, and developers working in the Apple ecosystem.
The location is perfect, at the Yosemite Lodge. My family and I stayed there last Memorial Day weekend, and it was spectacular. It’s right in the heart of the valley, surrounded by trees and huge granite structures, and right next to the beautiful Yosemite Falls. It will be a once-in-a-lifetime event, and I hope you’ll join us.
Microsoft announced freaking holograms this week (actual holograms not included) so we spend most of our time on that (http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/).
There’s a host of “ZOMG!” commentary on the web about it but there’s at least some reason to have a wait-and-see attitude (http://www.polygon.com/2015/1/21/7868351/hololens-kinect-microsoft-windows-10).
Not-really-holograms are so exciting that barely leaves us any time to discuss how badly (http://pando.com/2015/01/18/dan-lyons-career-an-obituary/) Dan Lyons’ career is going down the tubes (http://pando.com/2015/01/20/the-death-of-dan-lyons-career-your-daily-update/).
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Musician Zoë Keating on YouTube’s new contractual demands for artists:
My Google Youtube rep contacted me the other day. They were nice and took time to explain everything clearly to me, but the message was firm: I have to decide. I need to sign on to the new Youtube music services agreement or I will have my Youtube channel blocked.
YouTube’s power is immense. Many people make their living on YouTube, but because there’s very little competition its terms can be quite harsh.
The market would benefit from a serious competitor to YouTube.
— CGP Grey (@cgpgrey) January 23, 2015
There are plenty of alternatives to YouTube, but none of them come anywhere close to the power of YouTube. My children don’t watch television—they watch YouTube. YouTubers are their TV stars. It’s an amazing site, but its terms and business practices appear to be just about what you’d expect from a giant with a distinct lack of competition.
The more I think about it, the more YouTube looks like a monopoly *and* a monopsony. They’re the only game in town to buy from and sell to.
— CGP Grey (@cgpgrey) January 23, 2015
[via the afore-embedded CGP Grey.]
At last, my pal Serenity Caldwell—reviewer of so many iPad styluses!—explains why Apple supporting styluses would be a good idea:
The proposed larger screen size of the iPad Pro might be a better building ground for Apple’s stylus tech, as well. Adding new sensors and options to an already-packed Multi-Touch screen — all while keeping the device thinner than a pencil — might have been too much of a challenge on the 10-inch iPad. On a 13-inch iPad, engineers might finally have the breathing room.
John Siracusa has an iPhone! And here’s what’s on the home screen!
More importantly, he’s the guest on Mac Power Users this weekend. Insta-listen.
January 23, 2015 9:26 AM PT
Last updated March 6, 2026
RSS used to be the clock by which I watched the news. At regular intervals, a flood of headlines and other folderol would flood in, and if I had time, I would switch to NetNewsWire to scan through the several or dozens of new items, and see if any were worth previewing in the program or opening in a browser.
I haven’t checked RSS for more than a few minutes here and there in the last year, and I don’t think I’ve looked at the aggregator I use at all in a couple of months. It’s not intentional; the need seems gone. It’s been replaced by a change in my needs and a combination of other sources.
Continue reading “How I stopped using RSS and didn’t even notice”…
What happens when the DNS of millions of Chinese Internet users is pointed at your web server’s IP address? An instant, homegrown Denial of Service attack, writes The Iconfactory’s Craig Hockenberry:
The number of requests peaked out at 52 Mbps. Let’s put that number in perspective: Daring Fireball is notorious for taking down sites by sending them about 500 Kbps of traffic. What we had just experienced was roughly the equivalent of 100 fireballs.
This is the second awesome story about running servers in the past two days, following yesterday’s excellent piece about Kim Kardashian’s nude photos that features Six Colors’ own web administrator, Greg Knauss.
John Chen, head of what is still nominally a smartphone company, in a blog post adapted from a letter he sent to several members of Congress:
Unfortunately, not all content and applications providers have embraced openness and neutrality. Unlike BlackBerry, which allows iPhone users to download and use our BBM service, Apple does not allow BlackBerry or Android users to download Apple’s iMessage messaging service.
Let’s set aside the assertion that net neutrality means Apple should be forced to support iMessage on BlackBerry and Android phones. That’s a bizarre, nonsensical argument made from a company in a position of weakness: “Why won’t they share their toys?” You think RIM would have been in a hurry to share its technology with Apple back when BlackBerry was riding high?
But, that said, I’ve long wished that there were a way for iMessages to be sent and received by those on other platforms. It’s annoying to compose a group text to five contacts and have them all turn into evil green SMS messages, because one of them isn’t using an iOS device, Especially if, like me, you’re still on a limited texting plan.1
Maybe Apple considers iMessage a competitive advantage, or it simply doesn’t want to spend the time pouring glasses of ice water for people in hell, but I look at it more as an opportunity to stick it to the phone carriers, who continue to make oodles of profit off text messaging.
Between iMessage, Google’s multitude of chat systems2, BlackBerry’s Messenger, and whatever Windows Phone uses, wouldn’t it be great if we had one standardized way to send text, video, photos, and audio messages to anybody, no matter what smartphone or computing platform they’re using?
Yeah. In the words of Wayne Campbell: “And monkeys might fly out of my butt.”