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.]
The worst games, for the most part, have one thing in common: luck. They’re driven by it, often exclusively. Candy Land, Snakes and Ladders (also called Chutes and Ladders) and War are driven purely by chance. The Game of Life is close. It’s heavily chance-based, but one can make some decisions.4 Overreliance on luck makes a game boring or frustrating or both. Good games are driven by skill, or, like Twilight Struggle, a healthy mix of skill and luck.
I played Candy Land a couple years ago with my cousin’s kids and they either cheated or disregarded the rules, which I can’t help but feel like is encouraged by a game that requires no skill. Really, why bother when there are so many better games?
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.
Windows lets you designate a type of network so you can control security more granularly.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
Ben Thompson of Stratechery is, in some ways, our sphere’s very own Foreign Correspondent. He lives in Taipei and has a perspective on tech coming out of Asia that is often quite different from what U.S. and European analysts deliver. Today he writes about what China’s Xiaomi is all about.
Xiaomi’s ambitions are, I think, far more audacious than most realize. The company doesn’t just want to be a dominant player in smartphones, one of the largest and most lucrative product categories ever. They want the entire house, and I wouldn’t be surprised if even that is too limiting a description of Lei Jun’s ambition. There are significant challenges though, and many of them come back to product design.
The problem with Xiaomi’s originality – or lack thereof – becomes more pronounced when you consider the company’s international prospects… If Xiaomi wants to create the same sort of fans they have in China – the sort of fans that will make their house a Xiaomi house – they need to rely on their products. And copycat isn’t going to cut it.
Definitely worth a read—as is always the case with Thompson.
Most people don’t buy a small laptop for it to be a powerhouse. They just want a small laptop. And increasingly, Apple’s Air-series has inched closer and closer power-wise to the MacBook Pros, while the Pros have dramatically reduced their weight and thickness… I love my power-stuffed 11-inch. I wouldn’t want anything else. But I’m also willing to accept that I’m in the minority, and I’m breaking Apple’s product lines.
I’ve got a couple of large plastic bins in my office that are full of DVDs and Blu-rays. Many of these are TV shows and movies that now stream in HD on one of the streaming services I subscribe to, making me question my purchase decisions, but intellectual property appears and disappears from streaming services so often that I like to have my own streaming service of sorts, one full of movies and shows that I can watch on my large home TV or load onto my iPad for a flight without worrying.
When I mention converting DVDs and Blu-rays, people ask me about the method I use. For some people, getting video off of a disc and playable in iTunes or on an iOS device is old news. For other people, though, it’s still a bit of a mystery. Back in the Macworld days, one of our most popular stories was about how to convert DVDs into files, so clearly there’s interest in this subject.
I’ll detail my methods below, but as at Macworld I want to start with a disclaimer: I don’t use these tools for piracy, and neither should you. I use these tools on discs that I own, in order to create files that I keep within my household. Is it legal? Your mileage may vary. Distributing files that subvert copy protection is arguably illegal in the United States; using that software is more arguably legal. I don’t have any qualms about place-shifting my personal viewing of content I’ve purchased and still own. Still, if the idea of any of this makes you uncomfortable, look away.
What you’ll need
An external optical drive. I upgraded my disc-ripping hardware with a $200 4K UHD-compatible drive flashed with LibreDrive firmware, which means it’ll read data from discs of any region and any format. Rather than flash the firmware in Windows myself, I just bought a pre-flashed drive from one of the drive resellers on the previously linked Reddit thread.
MakeMKV. This is the essential disk-extracting software for Mac. It costs $50, and I trust the developer, who has been updating it diligently for years. It’s got a free 30-day trial, so you can see if it works for you. MakeMKV lets you extract DVDs and Blu-ray discs into MKV files, playable using many different playback apps, including my favorite, IINA. (If you don’t want to pay $50 and only want to rip DVDs, I recommend using Handbrake — see below — and installing decss via Homebrew, as described in the previous version of this article, located below this version.)
Transcoding scripts. I use Plex as my home media server, and it’ll accept MKV files and transcode them into any format your playback devices need. But the files that come straight off an optical disc are generally a lot larger than they need to be, and storage space is at a premium if you’re hoarding movies and TV shows. So I transcode those files and convert them to MP4 format with Lisa Melton’s video transcoding and other video transcoding scripts. You need to have a little bit of familiarity with the Terminal app to install these scripts, but once you get the hang of it they’re pretty easy.
Lisa has spent dozens (if not hundreds) of hours tweaking her scripts to choose the right settings for video encodes. Files tend to be a bit larger than some other methods you could use, but that’s because Lisa is trying to balance file size with quality.
HandBrake. If the Terminal is too much for you, then use the old standby — HandBrake. It will also convert those files out of MakeMKV. (I used to use HandBrake to directly convert files off of DVDs, but the software to do that has become untenable in recent versions of MacOS, so I now only use HandBrake as a transcoder, not as a disc-extractor.) HandBrake is free and it works. It’s worth having around.
Once my files are done, I transfer them to a very large hard drive (in my case, it’s a RAID attached to my Mac mini server) and Plex catalogs them and adds them to my Plex library. I use the Plex app for Apple TV to stream them to my TV, and the Plex app on my iPad to watch them—or load them up for travel.
Cabel Sasser of longtime Mac and iOS software developer Panic recaps 2014 and reports some good news:
Panic is a multi-million dollar business that has turned a profit for 17 years straight. It just hit me, typing those words, that that’s a pretty insane thing to be able to say. (And, sure, we barely qualify). Believe me, I know it won’t last forever — but wow, what a kind of crazy deal.
This is a great look into the business of software, from revenue challenges to technology decisions to problematic issues regarding Apple’s App Store policies.
I took long, moody walks on the dirt roads near my Vermont house. I passed my neighbor’s farm. One of his beef cattle stepped up to the fence and gazed at me. My eyes traced his well-marbled flanks and meaty chest. ”¨I stared into those bottomless brown eyes. “I can’t quit you,” I whispered to him. But I did. Not because my willpower suddenly rose beyond its default Lebowski setting, but because a box arrived at my door and made it easy.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
My God, it’s full of stars! (Photo by Tech Cocktail.)
[Philip Michaels is the former editor of TechHive, has been to many editions of CES, and is currently available for your freelance writing and editing needs.]
This week, the eyes of the tech world will focus in on Las Vegas, as companies, journalists, and every PR person living or dead descends upon the annual CES show. CES (which stands for C’Mon, Everybody—Stuff!) is the largest gathering of the tech industry outside of a 4chan chatroom, with companies both large and small hoping to grab headlines with their latest gear and gadgets.
How important is CES? It’s the launching pad for such innovative, disruptive products as the MySpace TV, Lady Gaga’s Polaroid sunglasses camera, a transparent washing machine from Haier, and GlassUp smartglasses. That none of these products ever actually came to market is beside the point. Tech journalists got to see demos of them, and if you ever caught a glimpse of a unicorn, wouldn’t you want to tell people about it?
And now it’s time for a new slate of products to join the ranks of memorable CES hits like that thing that did stuff and the device that made those noises and the car that was able to… I don’t know… park itself or something?
The cream of the tech reporting crop is in Las Vegas to tell you about every last product announcement as well as how far they’ve walked and how crowded it is. After all, CES is a massive affair—it takes place in a convention hall that’s the size of 3600 football fields with only one working restroom and no potable water. Attendees are encouraged to maintain a brisk pace as they walk the show floor, with smiling ushers swinging truncheons at any stragglers and saying “Move along, more to see” in a pleasant sing-songy voice. Anyone who doesn’t make it to one of the marked exits by the time the show floor closes is locked in for the night, for a first-hand look at the near-mythic CES show floor wolverines that roam the aisles from dusk til dawn.
Frankly, you don’t need to bother with any of that, not when you have a definitive guide on what to expect at CES 2015. We’ve scoured our sources—Google searches, basically—and rigorously fact-checked each claim with an “Eh… seems plausible” to produce this list of what treasures and surprises lay in store for you this week. It’s almost like being at CES, without all the hustle and bustle and nagging sense of futility gnawing at your soul.
Meet the Press
When you’ve got the world’s tech press all in the same place with no visible means of escape—doors lock from the outside at the Las Vegas Convention Center, and you’ll find the moat surrounding the facility quite impassable once the drawbridges are raised—you take advantage of the situation. No, not by releasing the gas and finishing off the publishing industry once and for all; instead, you hold a press conference. Here’s what you can expect some of the major tech players to announce.
Samsung: It will be hard to top last year’s presentation when movie director Michael Bay perfectly articulated Samsung’s vision for its products.
And yet, rumors abound that Samsung will look to build on that momentum with a parade of directors and auteurs to unveil the company’s plans for 2015. J.J. Abrams will reveal the latest Samsung TV sets through a series of ever more elaborate lens flares. Oliver Stone will talk about the vast conspiracy trying to hide the truth about Samsung’s new smartphone lineup. (“These are the selfie features the government doesn’t want you to know about,” he’ll hiss.) David Chase will discuss home appliances in great detail until the lighting goes black right as he’s about to reveal pricing and availability. And Woody Allen will mill about in the background uncomfortably until attendees, sensing the awkwardness of the situation, get up and leave.
Sony: President and CEO Kazuo Hirai will look to get 2015 started on the right foot for his company by proclaiming his great admiration for North Korea. Yup, North Korea’s got it going on, Hirai will insist. And that Kim Jong-un? Not the kind of guy to hold a grudge. “Yes,” Hirai will conclude, “it will be a great year for Sony and for Sony products that will please the peace-loving and virile people of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea if only someone, and I’m not making accusations here, stops hacking our email.”
Intel: Intel CEO Brian Krzanich will detail his company’s elaborate roadmap for how to properly spell his name. “The z comes after the r,” he will insist. “Seriously, a child could grasp this.”
Apple: You may think that Apple avoids CES altogether, but that is because you are a know-nothing dummy. We can report, thanks to EXCLUSIVE SOURCES, that Apple will in fact be making a major announcement at CES 2015. It will take place at 2 a.m. outside the parking lot of the Crazy Horse Too Gentlemen’s Cabaret on Industrial Road. Tim Cook will be wearing a disguise, so reporters are encouraged to walk up to any patron entering the building and demand to be given a closer look at their wristwatches. Your persistence will be rewarded!
Wearables
Wearable devices didn’t take off in 2014 the way manufacturers had hoped, with consumers failing to see the value of wristbands, monitors, and other gadgets that logged data about their every activity. Look for wearable makers to get more agressive this year: Anyone entering the CES show floor will be fitted with an electronic wristband—the process will go much more smoothly if your body goes limp and you don’t resist. Then, all you have to do is remark every hour that “2015 is going to be the year that people start buying wearables in my opinion” to avoid a sharp, sudden shock administered by ever watchful observers. You’ll be able to remove the wristband once wearable sales improve.
The Internet of Things
We’ve been hearing for years about the Internet of Things—a vision that involves smart appliances, mobile controls, and interconnectivity. Well, 2015 is the year that space-age vision becomes a reality. And who better to usher in this new era than actor Michael Chiklis, who played Ben Grimm in a series of increasingly entertaining Fantastic Four movies? “The Thing may tell you that it’s Clobberin’ Time,” Chiklis will tell CES attendees. “But the Internet of Things will tell you it’s Connectivity Time.”
“Get it?” he will add, after pausing awkwardly for several minutes to make sure that the joke sinks in.
Chiklis will then invite numerous tech executives on stage to share their thoughts on a world where appliances, mobile devices, and computers will talk to each other, learning your behaviors, sharing your data, plotting against you as you marvel at the convenience of programming your thermostat from your smartphone completely unaware of the diabolic trap your refrigerator and washing machine have set up for you. “Run,” Chiklis will conclude the session as he’s dragged backstage by uniformed CES personnel. “Warn the others! Fight the future!”
Drones
Stroll outside the Las Vegas Convention Center at past CESes, and you could usually spot drone makers demonstrating their wares by putting their flying machines through a series of death-defying stunts. This year, the drone demos move indoors, as we embrace our new drone-centric future. From high above the CES show floor, drones will swoop down on the attendees below, giving people a bird’s-eye view of the sights and sounds of CES while also capturing the up-close reactions of surprised onlookers and unaware passersby.
There will be no survivors.
[Philip Michaels has been writing about technology since 1999, most notably for Macworld and Tom’s Guide. He currently finds himself between jobs, so if you need someone who can string a few sentences together (or make your sentences read a lot better), drop him a line.]
For a couple of months one of the items in my future-story list for Six Colors has been more about apple and software quality. This topic—that Apple’s software quality isn’t up to snuff and keeps getting worse—has been floating in the ether for a while now, but last night Marco Arment made it fresh again.
This is a complicated issue, and one difficult to assess without knowing the facts about what’s happening inside of Apple. An avalanche of bug complaints and misty water-colored memories about the stability of Snow Leopard aside, I do think that there’s a problem here.
But what’s the cause? What are the possible solutions? Do the powers-that-be at Apple believe this is an issue? Do they think it’s one that will ultimately affect their business as a whole, or is this stuff that most people just don’t notice or care about?
This one’s still on my to-do list. In the meantime, I encourage you to read Marco’s piece.
This week on my pop-culture podcast The Incomparable, we take a look back at our favorite things from the past year, and then talk about favorite moments from the podcast itself. My guests this week are my six most frequent panelists from 2014: John Siracusa, Dan Moren, Steve Lutz, Erika Ensign, David J. Loehr, and Monty Ashley.
This week’s Incomparable is sponsored by:
Squarespace – Make beautiful websites easily, with new Getty Images integration, 24/7 tech support, and much more! Use code SNELL at checkout for 10% off.
Loot Crate – A monthly box of delight for geeks and gamers like us. Use offer code SNELL to get 10% off of a new subscription. January’s box, featuring Star Wars & Voltron and more, must be ordered by January 19 at 9pm PT.
This week’s feed sponsor is the Black Eyed and Blues Music Show with Brian Lee & Brian Parker. Host Brian “T-Bone” Lee showcases music from blues, roots and funk in a 90-minute weekly podcast. If you’re a lover of the blues, or just blues-curious, check it out.
And thanks to Brian Parker of On The Horn for asking me to include the phrase “we love @jsnell” in his sponsorship. I appreciate his support of me going indie. Here’s to a great 2015.
I want to make the case Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) is important and worth your time in 2015, and I want to suggest about 40 hours of Star Trek viewing that will cover all of the great episodes.
This is a great piece, written with love. When you’re done reading it, might I suggest dipping into the back-episode archive of Scott McNulty’s Random Trek podcast?
While traveling over the holidays, I was still working—especially on a bunch of end-of-year podcasts. For The Incomparable, I was putting together a little five-minute teaser for next year’s series of radio plays that we’re doing. While we were in Southern California, I realized that I needed an outtake from one of our previous sessions. The problem was, that clip was stored on my iMac, which was powered down in my office back home.
I’ve written a bit about how I use Dropbox to move my files around, but I’ve only been using an iMac as my main system for a few weeks, and I’m out of the habit of making sure all my files are accessible from my laptop as well.
Digging up year-old podcast files in the CrashPlan mobile app.
So there I was in Orange County, without a specific audio file I needed. And that’s when it hit me: I back up my iMac (and all my other computers) using an online backup service. Which means all of the files on my iMac are also backed up in the cloud. So even though my Mac at home is shut down, the files on it should be accessible to me.
Sure enough, I was able to log in to my backup service and restore the files. If you use CrashPlan, you can restore directly within the CrashPlan app, and files are saved right to your desktop. If you use Backblaze, you log in to the Backblaze site to specify files, and the company emails you a link with a zip archive containing the files you selected. (I prefer CrashPlan’s approach here.)
Both Backblaze and CrashPlan offer iOS apps, as well, letting you access all your backed-up files from your mobile devices. So if you forgot an important presentation or document on your computer, and you couldn’t connect to that device remotely, you could still open a copy from your backups.
When you think about this approach, it seems obvious—but the trick is, you need to think about it. It’s easy to write off your online backup as a mysterious blob of data that’s only there in case you have a disaster, but it’s there all the time, and the tools to access it are getting more convenient all the time.
Marriott is fighting for its right to block personal or mobile Wi-Fi hotspots—and claims that it’s for our own good.
The hotel chain and some others have a petition before the FCC to amend or clarify the rules that cover interference for unlicensed spectrum bands. They hope to gain the right to use network-management tools to quash Wi-Fi networks on their premises that they don’t approve of. In its view, this is necessary to ensure customer security and to protect children.
Of course what hotel chains really want is to eliminate your choice and protect their expensive in-hotel Internet access by usurping a band of radio spectrum that’s intentionally been left for public use. It’s despicable, but unsurprising.
