For me, the big takeaway is that Overcast appears to have reached a sustainable level. I always worry that app releases will have a big spike of initial interest, and then tail off to nothing. Overcast appears to have had the big spike, yes, but whatever momentum and visibility it gained during that period appears to have paid off with ongoing visibility. (My guess is that the app’s been so well received that its word-of-mouth promotion and appearance on numerous best-app lists have helped it maintain a decent level of revenue.)
I do still wonder about the app’s viability over time. Because Marco has phrased the app’s purchase option as “unlock everything,” I worry that he’s preventing himself from coming back to his current customers down the road to ask for more money for big new features. But there are other ways Overcast could fund itself, including cloud services. (I’d pay something for the ability to add URLs and arbitrary audio files directly to my Overcast playlists, for example.)
Still, as someone who recently left his job and now works at home all day, I can relate to Marco’s take on creating a sustainable business:
After the self-employment penalties in taxes and benefits, I’m probably coming in under what I could get at a good full-time job in the city, but I don’t have to actually work for someone else on something I don’t care about. I can work in my nice home office, drink my fussy coffee, take a nap after lunch if I want to, and be present for my family as my kid grows up. That’s my definition of success.
My son just walked out the front door to go to school, and I gave him a hug before he went. And so I raise my cup of fussy tea to Marco and Overcast.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
For the last few months, I’ve been playing around with Hanx Writer. I usually don’t hold much truck with celebrity-backed apps—they’re usually more gimmick than substances—but in this case, two things drew me to the app:
A very polished, nostalgic, and functional simulation of a classic typewriter.
Tom Hanks. I mean, who doesn’t love Tom Hanks? The man is a national treasure.1 Even when he’s nattering on to a volleyball on a desert island, there’s just something so trustworthy about him. Tom Hanks would never lead me astray!
To be fair, it was mainly the first one. The app debuted right about the same time that I’d been brainstorming on a novel idea with a noir-ish tone, and the sound and feel of a classic typewriter seemed the perfect way to bring those sensibilities to the surface.
As a writing tool, it’s a lot of fun. Far from perfect, but it’s designed with limitations in mind. I even ponied up for the additional typewriter and font styles. Hearing the tappity-taps of the keys while writing—and that great DING! SHOOOK at the end of a line—is viscerally delightful.
But as much fun as it is to write with, it gets a little tricky when it comes to editing: there’s no search feature, no way to highlight things, etc. Well, sure—you wouldn’t have had any of those things on a typewriter; they’re just sticking to the aesthetic. “That’s cool,” I thought to myself. “I’ll just export it to another app and do my editing there.”
And this is where Hanx Writer commits its unthinkable sin. Because you can tap on the Share button and send your file to Dropbox, Good Drive, iBooks, GoodReader, and any number of other apps.
But when you do, it comes through as an un-editable PDF. “Okay, I’ll just copy and paste it into Pages.” Which sort of works, except you end up with all sorts of weird mid-line (and occasionally mid-word) line breaks, missing tabs, and so on. That might not be a pain if you’ve written a couple of pages, but on 21,000 words of a novel in progress, it’s a little more of a chore.2 (Format conversion, in general, often seems to be more art than science.)
You can probably work some crazy grep madness to try and restore it to a usable format, but this is all a pain for something that should have been easy.
I’m not sure exactly what workflow the Hanx Writer folks had in mind—print it out, maybe?—but I’m pretty sure that the format in which it exports is not a standard that most publications, book publishers, or movie studios would take without a raised eyebrow and a disbelieving chuckle—well, unless you’re Tom Hanks, probably.
Long story short: don’t hold your user’s data hostage. As much as I like Hanx Writer and enjoyed typing in it, I’m a working writer—emphasis on “working”—and, at the end of the day, I’m going to land on the practical tool that helps me get my work done, not the idiosyncratic one that I have to wrestle into submission.3
Literally. I hear Nicolas Cage will go looking for him in his next movie. ↩
I also tried uploading to Google Drive and downloading as a Word doc (only a fraction of random pages came through), extracting text via an Automator workflow (pretty much same result as copy/paste), using Adobe Reader (which wanted to charge me), and PDFPen export to RTF, which had some funkiness too. ↩
One of my Twitter followers pointed out that Hanx Writer also has a $0.99 in-app purchase for a third-party keyboard that provides the typewriter keyboard in other apps, so I’ll be giving that a whirl next. ↩
[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.]
James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series is being made into a TV show for Syfy, and this is pretty much our first look at it.
Jason, I, and several others discussed the series not too long ago on The Incomparable; I feel comfortable saying that these were my favorite books of 2014. I devoured all four multi-hundred page volumes within the space of a month or so, and regret nothing.
The show looks interesting, veering from low-budget looks on some of the sets that are reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly to pretty solid CGI space scenes. I still think Thomas Jane is too young and too handsome to play the world-weary protagonist Miller, but it’ll hardly stop me from watching. Steven Strait, who plays Holden, the other main character, is not quite what I pictured either—he also seems a bit too young—but again, TV networks are gonna TV network. At least they got the fantastic Shohreh Aghdashloo to play my favorite character, political operative Chrisjen Avasarala.
All in all, I’m looking forward to another well-made space opera on TV—it’s been far too long.
The geometry-bending puzzle game Monument Valley was one of the hit games of the last year, and it was hard not to find it delightful–unsurprisingly, it made our top iOS games of the year list. But we already know that critical and even popular success doesn’t always translate into financial success.
The developers behind it, ustwogames, have created a detailed infographic, breaking down of the numbers involved in the game: from sales of it and its expansion to stats about how many people finished the game, which were the most popular chapters, and more. (Note: There is at least one spoiler for the game in the chart, so you might want to avoid if you’re in the midst of playing or plan to play.)
It’s yet another fascinating data point of the economics behind apps, though even this may not paint a full picture–ustwogames is, itself, a smaller part of ustwo, a larger studio, and it’s unclear exactly how this is reflected in aspects like development costs. And, even more to the point, hardly every app–or even one in a thousand or ten thousand–has this kind of success.
Issue 20 of the iOS development magazine objc.io features an interview with Loren Brichter, creator of Tweetie and Letterpress. Brichter has fascinating things to say about why programming just isn’t good enough, and about keeping perspective in life.
Maybe it’s the Graybeard engineer in me, but the more I learn, the more terrible I think programming is. I’d love to rip everything up and start over. But you can only swim against the tide so far, so it’s sometimes satisfying to sift through the garbage and repurpose terrible technologies to make something that is slightly less terrible.
It’s definitely worth a read, even if you’re not a programmer yourself.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Not on the list: “Hey Siri, why aren’t you on the Mac?”
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.
With one exception, as my friends Lex Friedman and John Moltz informed me: when Siri has delivered you a result, you can use “Hey Siri” at the Siri screen. It’s almost an interactive command prompt. ↩
If it were a Google product, for example, we’d all be pretty confident Google was using the info to target ads better. ↩
[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 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.
In this week’s episode, my co-host Dan Moren and I are joined by Serenity Caldwell of iMore and Stephen Hackett of 512 Pixels to discuss Apple’s endless quest for thinner and lighter devices, Faux Apple Watches at CES and the rise of Apple Watch fever, the final destination of the iPod touch, and the end of an era at the iTunes Store.
Clockwise is sponsored this week by:
Boom 2: Audio processing to make whatever sounds come out of your Mac sound great.
We still eagerly await the Apple Watch, the companion app for which was recently revealed (http://9to5mac.com/2015/01/13/apple-watch-iphone-companion-app-revealed-with-new-watch-features-monograms/).
But if you went to CES you could have gotten a fake Apple Watch for $30 (http://mashable.com/2015/01/08/fake-apple-watch-ces/).
That reminds us of a great story from Macworld | iWorld 2013 (http://www.macworld.com/article/2027044/starfish-smartwatch-saga-illustrates-entrepreneurial-stumbling-blocks.html).
Dan is getting an Amazon Echo (http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo/). For science.
But he really wants to talk about his surfeit of remotes and how he hopes the Neeo will fix all his problems including that rash (http://www.neeo.com).
The entire rest of the episode is a T-Mobile ad read conducted by Lex (http://www.t-mobile.com).
The most critical component to Apple’s current mobile dominance lies behind that sapphire crystal lens. In today’s commoditized smartphone market, even great design and spectacular thinness are becoming commonplace. Powerful processors and large batteries are expected rather than exceptional. To win over new customers (and to keep existing ones), smartphone makers will have to act like what they are selling is actually a smart camera first and everything else second.
I am constantly amazed at the quality of the iPhone 6 camera. But more than that, I see it with my teenaged daughter and her friends—their primary social-media platform is Instagram, and getting those photos is the single most important thing they do on their phones. We can joke about selfies all we want, but this is a generation that is using photography as a primary medium of communication. That’s huge.
Apple kept the number 5 position on a worldwide basis, maintaining its lead over ASUS. The company’s steady growth, along with recent price cuts and improved demand in mature markets, has helped it to consistently outgrow the market.
Apple’s fiscal 2014 also saw the most Macs sold in a fiscal year in Apple history.
Join Six Colors—and our @sixcolorsevent Twitter account—as Dan Moren and I break down Apple’s latest official financial results on Tuesday, January 27, at 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern.
This week on the tech podcast that doesn’t judge you for how many windows you have open, Myke Hurley and I discuss the rumored 12″ MacBook Air, how Apple approaches battery life on iOS devices, Apple software quality, uses of scripting and automation, Siracusa-style window management, and the first time I ever picked up an iPhone eight years ago.
This week, Upgrade is sponsored by:
lynda.com: An easy and affordable way to help individuals and organizations learn. Free 10-day trial.
Stamps.com: Postage on demand. Click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in UPGRADE, for a no-risk trial and your $110 Bonus Offer, including a digital scale and up to $55 FREE postage.
Mailroute: a secure, hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam. Go to mailroute.net/upgrade for a free trial and 10% off, for the lifetime of your account.
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.
This week on my pop-culture podcast The Incomparable, I am joined by John Siracusa, Tiffany Arment, Brianna Wu, and Tony Sindelar to talk all about the Portal series of video games. The games are classics and it was a great discussion.
There’s also a bonus track with more mischief including a song sung by Andy Ihnatko! And in a first for us, one of our listeners—superfan Clinton Phillips—did an entire commentary track to the episode. It’s only a matter of time before there’s a podcast about The Incomparable every week. Hey, it worked for Slate and Serial.
This week’s Incomparable is sponsored by:
Casper — A latex and memory foam mattress that’s comfy, shipped to your door, and you can try it out for 100 days! Get $50 off by using promo code incomparable.
Clockwise is a weekly podcast that’s 30 minutes long and hosted by me and Dan Moren. In this week’s episode, we’re joined by our former Macworld colleague Dan Frakes and Black Pixel’s Jessie Char to discuss 12-inch MacBook rumors, why tech hipsters hate on Facebook, selling you a new TV, and the relevance of CES.
Clockwise is sponsored this week by:
Loot Crate – Like getting an awesome box full of geek/gaming gifts from a friend every month. Enter code CLOCKWISE at checkout for 10% off of any new subscription.
Finally, this week on my tech podcast, Upgrade, Myke Hurley and I discuss Apple’s software quality issues and the difficulty in diagnosing problems from outside an organization, why Family Sharing is a problematic feature, and what’s good and bad about CES. Plus, Myke and I trade favorite podcasts.
This week, Upgrade is sponsored by:
Hover: Simplified Domain Management. Use code ‘ENEMY’ for 10% off your first purchase.
Mailroute: a secure, hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam. Go to mailroute.net/upgrade for a free trial and 10% off, for the lifetime of your account.
Stamps.com: Postage on demand. Click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in UPGRADE, for a no-risk trial and your $110 Bonus Offer, including a digital scale and up to $55 FREE postage.
Igloo: An intranet you’ll actually like, free for up to 10 people.
Thanks to DevMountain for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
DevMountain is an immersive bootcamp for learning how to build iOS apps. It’s a 12-week program, housing included, in the beautiful state of Utah. Participants live and breathe iOS development with full-time iOS developers as the instructors. Subjects covered include Objective C, Swift, new iOS 8 features, and even WatchKit.
Individually assigned mentors work one-on-one with students, and students finish the program with apps in the App Store. Tuition for the 12-week program is $8900, 20 to 25% less expensive than competitors. And you can save $250 by using offer code FINALLY when booking.
Bootcamp-style education immerses students in the content they want to learn, and it’s cheaper and faster than college. DevMountain doesn’t claim that participants will leave the program as one of the top iOS developers in the world or with a hit app in the store, but after spending three months without distraction learning the ins and outs of iOS, participants will have a strong foundation to help them build a new career.
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.
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.
Much of the episode is spent talking about a post by Marco Arment (http://www.marco.org/2015/01/04/apple-lost-functional-high-ground).
Daniel Jalkut has collected a list of problems over the last 10 years (http://bitsplitting.org/2015/01/05/the-functional-high-ground/), so it’s not like Apple has always had bugs. Since posting, Marco has said he regrets saying what he said because of the subsequent media buzz (http://www.marco.org/2015/01/05/popular-for-a-day).
Dr. Drang has another take (http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2015/01/apple-leverage/).
Moltz and Dan have a wait-and-see approach to Photos (http://www.imore.com/photos-os-x-yosemite-explained). Lex is going to be the experiment group.
The only interesting thing we’ve heard from CES is that Mophie has Juice Packs for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus (http://www.mophie.com/shop/battery-cases). Unless you want a DJ controller that looks like the Millenium Falcon (http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/06/casio-new-dj-controllers-trackformer/).
Lex and Moltz talk about their experience with the Kano (http://www.kano.me).
Lex is considering getting custom-made ear molds for headphones (http://earsound.com). Dan wants to look like Lobot (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lobot). But then he’s going to the Anaheim Star Wars Celebration (http://www.starwarscelebration.com).
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.
Art by Martin Hajek, based on Michael Steeber’s renderings for 9to5Mac’s report.
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.
At some point, getting thinner and lighter becomes pointless. It’s worth arguing about if we’ve reached that point or not, but for the purposes of this exercise, let’s just accept that everyone at Apple thinks it’s necessary. ↩
The first MacBook Air’s processor was slow, but even worse, its cooling system just couldn’t stand up to heavy use. When the processor got too hot, one of its cores would shut down—making the system basically unusable. It was a great laptop to use in a meat locker, a bad one to use in the afternoon with a west-facing window. ↩
The 12-inch PowerBook G4 is one of my favorite Macs of all time, but then, I love small Mac laptops. The 11-inch MacBook Air has since eclipsed it, but I have a whole lot of fondness for that 12-incher, and the 9to5Mac renderings resemble that design. ↩
Warren’s actual thesis in the article is that this model could be “cheap enough to compete with low-end Windows laptops and Chromebooks with hopefully fewer compromises,” which is a much better way of putting it. Apple doesn’t compete with those systems by cheaping out, it does so by offering a better experience at a price that’s appropriately higher. ↩
This is the point where I note that the non-Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro is still for sale for $1099. ↩
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.
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.]
