By Dan Moren

January 15, 2015 8:04 AM PT

Wish List: Siri for OS X

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

I know, right? We’ve had a voice-controlled intelligent assistant on our iPhones since 2011 and on our iPads since 2012, but on the Mac, nothing. Yes, the speech-to-text dictation feature arrived in Mountain Lion and in Mavericks we got enhanced (read: offline) dictation.

But still no Siri.

Siri has its detractors, but as folks like John Gruber have noted, it does seem to be improving, at least in terms of performance. There are certain features that I use it for frequently: checking the temperature, adding reminders to a list, sending texts while in the car, and so on.

Here’s the thing: too many people call Siri a failure because it’s not better at everything. But it doesn’t need to replace conventional inputs like keyboards, pointing devices, and remotes; it can live along side them. Really, it just needs to be better at some things—and there’s no question that it is.

So, would it be useful on the Mac?

I maintain yes—with a couple of caveats. Only one major improvement came to Siri in iOS 8: the “Hey Siri” feature. I’d say that’s critical to the best possible use case scenario for Siri on OS X. Right now, the Hey Siri feature on iOS is limited to use when the device is plugged in.¹ Given that your desktop Macs are always plugged in (and your laptops have a much higher capacity battery), they could presumably listen for Hey Siri all the time. And the higher processing power of Macs combined with their much more permissive architecture could be harnessed to let Siri do more than it can do now. Combining Siri with Automator and Apple Script, for example, could allow for much more powerful and user-created capabilities.

This isn’t anything new, by the way. Old school Mac users may remember all too well the voice control options that date back to the classic OS. A vestige of them still remains in OS X, as it happens, squirreled away under the Accessibility preference pane; there you can associate a phrase with some sort of action. But it lacks the innate intelligence of Siri: you can’t ask it questions, it can’t really look information up, etc. More than anything, it’s simply a set of voice-activated macros.

I don’t know if most Mac users would take advantage of Siri, but it could open up some pretty interesting possibilities. Imagine if your iPhone, iPad, and Macs were all front ends to a single instance of Siri that’s optimized for you, learning what tools you use, what information you want, and so on. All of it available simply by saying “Hey Siri”—or, hopefully, some name of your choice: “Computer,” “Jarvis,” etc.

Perhaps that triggers worry of some sort of HAL- or Ultron-like malevolent AI, I don’t know. To the Star Trek nerd in me, the idea of a computer available to answer questions addressed seems awesome. Amazon’s after something very similar with the Echo, but there’s certainly an element of suspicion that accompanies it—Amazon’s core business, after all, is retail, so where’s the catch?²

Adding Siri to the Mac probably isn’t a high priority for Apple, honestly, and after seeing three major versions of the OS come and go without bringing the virtual assistant to the Mac, I wouldn’t be shocked if this year’s upgrade (Big Sur? Redwood? Alcatraz?) left it on the wayside once again. But if Apple’s serious about improving Siri, and if Amazon’s Echo gains any traction, I think the company really should consider adding the Mac to the fold.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

January 14, 2015 1:16 PM PT

Last updated May 18, 2023

How I podcast: Recording

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

I do a lot of podcasting. And I am often asked about what tools I use and how I produce my podcasts. So in a series of articles on this site, I hope to detail my approach to making podcasts. What I don’t intend is to suggest that this is the only way to make podcasts—it’s just the way that I make them. If I can provide some sort of inspiration—or even a cautionary example of what not to do—I’m glad to do so.

While I think it’s true that many people underestimate how much work goes into making a podcast, I also get the sense that other people overestimate the time I spend. And depending on what kind of a podcast you’re creating, the amount of time required to put it together can vary widely. The average episode of The Incomparable takes several hours to edit; the average Vulcan Hello I can turn around in 10 minutes.

Continue reading “How I podcast: Recording”…

By Jason Snell

January 10, 2015 1:14 PM PT

Battery life: Apple’s solving for x

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Over the years I’ve said numerous times that when it comes to battery life on iOS devices, Apple appears to have a target battery life in mind and builds its hardware—a balance of power-saving software, hardware efficiency, and battery capacity—to hit that number.

It’s an observation born out of reading spec sheet after spec sheet over the years while writing reviews of new iPhones and iPads. Every year, people who are frustrated with their iPhones running out of juice before the end of the day hold out hope that the next iPhone will ameliorate the issue. In general, those people have not been satisfied.

This morning the good Stephen Hackett of the Connected podcast and 512 Pixels sent me a message, asking me if I could point him to a specific story where I had made this observation. I couldn’t oblige him—I’ve made the observation endlessly in stories and on podcasts, but I can’t recall actually writing a story about the trend.

At which point Stephen went away, did the research into Apple’s battery life claims for iPhones and iPads, and came back with numbers which prove my point—to a point.

In fact, when you survey the history of Apple’s battery-life claims—and let’s keep in mind, this isn’t using actual independent test data, but the claims made by Apple based on its own internal testing—you discover that those claims have stayed remarkably consistent over time. It’s only with the iPhone 6 that the base-model iPhone has made a major tick upward in terms of battery life.

But the real gains have been, unsurprisingly, with the iPhone 6 Plus. That’s the device that has truly broken Apple out of its “solve for x” battery-life approach after eight years.

Meanwhile, if you take a look at the quoted battery life for the iPad, you’ll find that Apple’s definitely solving for 10 hours of battery life. That was the quoted number for the very first iPad, and with some slight variation (for a while, for cellular models, it was nine!), it’s been so ever since. Apple keeps making the iPad thinner and lighter, with just enough battery to claim 10 hours of life, no more.

So when you’re anticipating the next model of iPhone or iPad, and wondering if it’ll show markedly improved battery life, keep this in mind: So far Apple has behaved as if the battery life of the iPad and the iPhone are perfectly fine as is, and that it would prefer to create a thinner and lighter model to one that puts the makers of external battery packs out of business.

Except for that iPhone 6 Plus. That thing’s a monster.

By Jason Snell

January 9, 2015 7:41 AM PT

Eight years of the iPhone

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Eight years ago today Steve Jobs got up on stage and introduced a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device: The iPhone.

That day I was feeding details back to Peter Cohen via instant message, for what we called our “live news story.” (Macworld switched to a straight liveblog and eliminated the intermediate step maybe a year later.) Some guy named Mat Honan wrote our news story.

Reaction to the announcement was mixed. Ever the curmudgeon, Rob Griffiths wrote that he was “iDisappointed” — Rob wanted more iLife with his iPhone—and Computerworld’s Mike Elgan said that “Jobs blew it.”

A few days later I managed to get my hands on one for a few minutes and was amazed by it.

If you’d like to hear some fantastic analysis of the event, I highly recommend episode 30 of The Prompt, in which Federico, Myke, and Stephen break down the entire event, complete with clips.

By Jason Snell

January 8, 2015 1:24 PM PT

The 12″ MacBook Air: Back to basics?

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

[Editor’s note, March 11, 2015: Surprise! It’s the 12-inch MacBook!]

When I first read Mark Gurman’s report about a forthcoming 12-inch MacBook Air, I considered it as the owner of an 11-inch MacBook Air. From that perspective, the rumored device’s slim feature set—most notably a single USB-C port—seems like a strange step back. I had a visceral reaction: I don’t want to replace my MacBook Air with that thing.

But that response makes the (very human) mistake of placing myself at the center of Apple’s MacBook Air strategy, and misses the fact that over the past few years the MacBook Pro has been creeping ever closer to the MacBook Air in terms of features and price. The Retina MacBook Pro line is thinner and lighter than the previous MacBook Pro line, and “thinner and lighter” is really the MacBook Air’s raison d’être_¹. The 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro aren’t _that different—$300 gets you an extra half a pound, a Retina display, and a processor that’s an awful lot faster.

Meanwhile, consider the trajectory of the MacBook Air. When it was released in 2008, it was a crazy design. It threw away a huge number of what we considered to be standard laptop features in order to be insanely thin and light. In my review of the original Air for Macworld, I used the word “compromise” ten times.

No optical drive. An incredibly slow processor, compared to all other Macs². A teeny-tiny 80GB hard drive (or an even tinier 64GB SSD for $999 more!). A single USB port. And, to top it all off, a price that started at $1799.

These days the base 11-inch MacBook Air is the cheapest laptop in Apple’s line, but it’s powered by a perfectly decent Core i5 processor. It’s got two USB ports plus a Thunderbolt port. The onboard storage is fine, albeit on the cozy side.

The MacBook Air is now a comfortable, mainstream product that even power users can adopt as their primary system. (Until I bought my iMac, it was my primary machine at home and work for a couple of years.) That’s great, but it’s also a sign that feature creep has been a-creepin’.

Does Apple feel the current MacBook Airs are truly representative of the MacBook Air name? Has the MacBook Pro’s role as the go-to laptop for portable professionals been usurped by the Air?

If Gurman’s reports are accurate, this new model pulls the MacBook Air line away from the MacBook Pro. In fact, it returns the MacBook Air to its roots—as a product full of choices that we consider crazy at first, because they’re out of step with conventional computer design, but that will appeal to a target audience that doesn’t actually care about those de rigueur features.

In other words, would Apple release a laptop with no dedicated power cable, ditch a bunch of traditional ports, and funnel every bit of power and wired connectivity through a connector that it has never before used, all in the name of creating a thinner and lighter laptop? Are you kidding? Of course it would.

In terms of the details of Gurman’s report, I like that this future MacBook Air has a larger screen than the 11-inch model—but is actually narrower than the current 11-inch MacBook Air. Take a good look at a MacBook Air sometime, and you’ll see a whole lot of extra space on the sides of the keyboard and quite a large bezel around the display. In the renderings 9to5Mac commissioned based on Gurman’s information, the keyboard goes almost edge to edge, in the style of the 12-inch PowerBook G4³.

The suggestion that the new MacBook Air might have a single USB-C connector seems to be the place where people tend to roll their eyes. As someone who used that original MacBook Air for a year, yeah, it was quite inconvenient when I wanted to plug more than one USB device into it. (I invested in a powered desktop hub and a smaller one for travel.)

But just because it will be inconvenient for some users doesn’t mean that Apple won’t do it. In fact, you can almost hear the stage patter when the feature is unveiled: Most connectivity is wireless these days, we’ve made a great $49 accessory that adds all the ports you’d want, and the included power adapter—the most innovative power adapter ever—features a breakaway magnetic coupler and is itself a USB and Thunderbolt hub. I’m making the details up, but you’ve got to think there would be more to the story than, “Yeah, your power plug is also your USB plug, get used to it.”

Gurman’s report also mentions that this is a fanless design. In an interesting piece of tech speculation at The Verge, Tom Warren cites this as a reason why Apple might use Intel’s Core M processor, which runs cooler and uses less power than the i5 and i7 chips Apple uses in current MacBook Air models. If the Core M powered the MacBook Air, that would open up a gap in speed between the Air and the MacBook Pro models. That’s lousy for people who want their super light laptop to be as powerful as possible, but if being a MacBook Air is about being thin and light and everything else will be sacrificed to serve that goal, it makes sense.

There are numerous other intriguing possibilities suggested by Gurman’s report. A redesigned keyboard would keep its full-sized keycaps (hooray!) but cram them all closer together. As a really fast typist, I’m always worried that keyboard changes are going to slow me down, but until this keyboard comes into existence and I can try it, I guess I’ll reserve judgment. The 9to5Mac renderings show the power key moved to the top left corner, which seems unfortunate since it’s lived in the top right for so long. There’s a suggestion that the MacBook Air might pick up a color scheme from iOS and offer laptops in both silver and “Space Gray,” and as a fan of the old black MacBook I endorse this plan, even if Space Gray is not remotely black.

Finally, there’s the question of price. Warren’s piece at The Verge features the subhead, “Is Apple finally making a cheaper laptop?”⁴. Apple’s laptops have been creeping down in price over the years—seriously, you can buy a new MacBook Air for $899!—and Apple has never, ever wanted to be the low-price leader in any category. I just can’t look at Gurman’s report and come away thinking that Apple’s designed this thing to be cheap.

I suppose this new model could be cheaper than any current Apple laptop, but I have a hard time seeing it. Here’s my price speculation: Maybe the existing MacBook Airs will continue to kick around at their $899 and $999 starting points (or even drop to $799 and $899)⁵ and that this model will arrive with a price tag that’s above them, because of the Retina display. And yes, people will scream about how there are faster laptops available at a lower price—just as they did when the original MacBook Air came out. The old-school MacBook Air models will be faster, but they won’t be Retina and they won’t be as thin and light and crazy-new.

If Gurman’s story proves accurate, the new MacBook Air will not be a laptop that’s for everyone. But that’s okay. By returning to its roots—being designed for a very specific set of traits at the cost of ones we take for granted—the MacBook Air might end up being more true to itself.

By Dan Moren

January 8, 2015 12:20 PM PT

Troubleshooting a too-sleepy Mac

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Of the three Macs in my house, the Mac mini is the glue that holds my computing infrastructure together. It’s my central repository for my data, my entertainment center, and it also acts as a portal from the outside world. (I can ssh or sftp into it from anywhere in the world, which turns out to be quite handy on occasion.)

But lately, the mini’s been dozing off like a narcoleptic koala on Ambien. Despite Energy Saver settings instructing it to never sleep and a deactivated screen saver, it seemed to go into sleep mode any time I left it alone for more than a few hours. More to the point, it also refused to wake up when I tried to initiate a network connection, which was irritating when I tried to retrieve a file from one of my other local Macs and downright frustrating when I was trying to retrieve some files while I was in another city.

I checked out pmset -g¹ in the command line to see if anything looked out of order, but didn’t notice any glaring issues. After some further searching, I found a recommendation to trash the Energy Saver preference file at /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.PowerManagement.plist and manually restored my settings. I threw in a system restart for good measure, and all seems to be ticking along for the moment.

Obviously, this may not fix all sleep-related problems, but if you’ve got a Mac that’s sleeping too much or not at all, it might be worth a shot.

1. This gives you a rundown of the power management settings for your Mac, and can sometimes suss out something that’s incorrectly configured. But it does largely look like gibberish, even if you read the manual page.↩

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

January 8, 2015 8:59 AM PT

Wish List: Location-based security for iOS and OS X

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Location services have been a major function of iOS since its earliest days, and they’ve increasingly played a part in OS X in recent years as well. At the same time, given that we have devices that always seem to know where we are, why can’t we use that a little bit more to our advantage?

I’m thinking in particular of security. Good security is always balanced with convenience: the more convenient a feature, generally the less secure it is–but it’s also more likely that people will actually use it. As opposed to incredibly good security which is also extremely inconvenient. It’s a sliding scale, too: if you work for, say, a defense contractor that does top secret work, you’re going to have a higher threshold for inconvenience than if you simply take the occasional selfie.

Generally, I err on the side of more security. My iPad and iPhone are both protected by passcodes (the iPhone’s is more complex, as it goes more places and I usually use Touch ID), and my Macs are all password-protected as well. All will lock themselves automatically if left unattended for a short amount of time.

But that focus on security can also be frustrating. When I’m using my iPad at home, having to enter my passcode every few minutes is irritating–no, it’s not the end of the world, but gosh darn it, I’m in my own house: who’s trying to break into my iPad?

So, wouldn’t it be great if your iPad, iPhone, or Mac knew that you were in an area designated “home”–through use of a geofence that you specify, or via which Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth devices it can see–and could relax security restrictions accordingly? Windows uses a system like this for its network connections, allowing you to identify some Wi-Fi networks as “home” and some as “public,” in the latter case using tighter strictures to ensure that your connection remains as private as possible.

In the simplest example, I’d love to be able to set different lock times for home and away. So maybe my iPhone locks after a minute of inactivity when I’m out and about, but five minutes when I’m at home. Or perhaps my iPad doesn’t require a passcode when I’m in my house.

The feature would have to be opt-in, naturally, as I’m sure there are folks with no interest in loosening their security, but overall I see it much like Touch ID: a system that’s easy to use and appeals to people who otherwise would eschew security measures like a strong passcode due to perceived inconvenience.

There are indications that Apple has at least thought about this: John Gruber last year pointed out an Apple patent filed on the subject, as well as noting that Android has a similar feature.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if, as demonstrated in that Android video, the Apple Watch and iPhone eventually work together in a way that helps you secure your devices, unlocking seamlessly when both are present. But a similar feature could be used with your iPhone or Apple Watch for unlocking your Mac–and, of course, third-party developers have already rolled out apps like Knock, which lets you tap your phone to unlock your Mac, and FingerKey¹, which allows you to use Touch ID for your Mac.

As we start the slow, tedious move away from the password, it behooves Apple–and other technology companies–to be looking for clever solutions that can help replace our dependence on that antiquated system while still keeping our data and devices secure and convenient.

1. FingerKey seems to have been removed from the App Store, at least in the U.S. I’ve reached out to the developers.↩

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

January 7, 2015 2:17 PM PT

That’s not noise–those are stars

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

There’s some spectacular new space imagery floating around the Internet and my Twitter timeline these days. And that’s good, because as the owner of a Retina 5K iMac, I am constantly on the lookout for images that are of high enough resolution to be deployed as desktop pictures.

The spectacular Hubble Space Telescope picture of Andromeda—a teeny, tiny segment of it is on this post—is a 17,384-by-5558 pixel (200MB) file that shows part of the nearby Andromeda galaxy. The dots in the image don’t represent noise in a digital photograph. As Phil Plait writes on Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog:

The entire full-res image shows something like 100 million stars. A hundred million! And you can see them, pick them out as individuals, due to Hubble’s extremely sharp vision… It’s incredible. This is an entirely different galaxy, and not only can we see individual stars in it, but hundreds of millions of them.

Then there’s the updated release of one of the telescope’s most famous images—”Pillars of Creation”—showing stars being born in the Eagle Nebula. That one’s also available as a 6780-by-7071 image (33MB).

Not only is this spectacular space imagery peering deep into the universe and allowing to better understand our place in it, but it’s enabled me to create two new items for my Desktop Pictures folder.

As I was writing this, my friend Rob Griffiths was doing the exact same thing. The needs of the Retina iMac display are powerful.

The two 5K desktop images I made from the Hubble Andromeda photo; I like "right" best. https://t.co/5D4Y9afbe8 https://t.co/C4jHGvOSSD

— Rob Griffiths (@rgriff) January 7, 2015