By Jason Snell

October 10, 2024 4:11 PM PT

Putting my solar (power) system in my menu bar

It was a busy summer at the Snell house. Our roof predated our purchase of our house, and we’ve been in this house 25 years, so… yeah. We needed a new roof. Getting a new roof was an opportunity to add a rooftop solar power system and update our HVAC system, so we went all in, and all summer I coordinated with three different companies, all of whom wanted to spend time on my roof, or attaching things to the side of my house, or rewiring things on the inside.

Anyway, it’s all done now. We survived, and our house got a big upgrade! But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I wasn’t also excited to figure out how to integrate my new home tech into my life in a custom way.

The new HVAC system was easy—there’s a Homebridge plug-in, and boom, it’s now integrated with HomeKit. On the solar side, things were trickier. I found a few Homebridge plug-ins, but looking in the Home app to see my solar status didn’t really make sense? I wanted it in my Mac’s menu bar. Just because. Why did we pay for three big solar batteries on the side of our house if I can’t see a battery icon that represents my house? C’mon.

Anyway, what I ended up doing was digging through loads of documentation—most of which involved querying the solar system manufacturer’s API, which is delayed and limited to about one query per hour unless you pay a subscription fee. But I did finally discover, by looking at the code for one of those Homebridge plug-ins, that there’s a local API for my solar system. Yep, it’s true—my solar system, the one inside my house, has its own web server and will respond to properly formatted queries with blobs of JSON.

After a lot of wrangling, I got it to work. So if you’ve got an Enphase Energy solar system of recent vintage (hello, Google searchers!), feel free to check out my Python SwiftBar script, which shows me how much power my house is using, the status of the battery, how much power the solar panels are generating, and what (if ever) we’re taking from or sending to the grid.

And so there it is. My house has a battery, and that battery icon is in my Mac menu bar. It feels… right? Yes, that’s it. It feels right.

By Jason Snell

October 10, 2024 3:04 PM PT

“Submerged” brings immersive narrative to Vision Pro

I just watched “Submerged,” the new immersive short film directed by “All Quiet on the Western Front” director Edward Berger, on the Apple Vision Pro. It’s the first scripted, narrative-driven piece of immersive video on the platform, and after the failure of Apple’s MLS video highlights, I was curious to see what choices Berger would make in using a medium with a very different grammar than traditional filmmaking.

By the time I was done with “Submerged,” I was convinced that Berger is a very talented director who knows how to adapt his skills to a different format. There are no quick takes in “Submerged”—I’d wager the average length of a shot is multiple times longer than your regular 2024 blockbuster—because quick takes are disorienting in the immersive format. Instead, Berger allows shots to linger, occasionally toggling between one shot and its reverse angle, which allows a perspective shift without a complete loss of the understanding of the scene’s geography.

In a format that can’t really use century-old tricks for focusing a viewer’s attention—like focus shifts and zooms and pans and close-up cuts—Berger tries a few different approaches to focus our attention. I was struck by his use of extreme close-ups, which get us very close to the actors a few times—and make it impossible to look at anything else. There’s also a lot of short depth of field, allowing the out-of-focus background to drop away from our attention—or even to entice us without distracting us.

I wondered if “Submerged” would be a series of static shots or if the director would find a way to be a little more dynamic, and Berger seems to have figured out that pushing in or pulling back (on a smooth track) is not as likely to trigger motion sickness as a completely handheld shakycam would. (I will admit to feeling a little bit of vertigo during one shot, which was a very fast-paced pull-back down a corridor.)

Still, most of the shots are more static, and seeing actors performing in those shots reminded me much more of a live theater performance than a film. This is not a bad thing, but it sure felt different. It was all on the performer, in those moments, and on me as the viewer to observe their performance. Similarly, the sets in “Submerged” are intricate and beautiful—and because of the immersive nature of the project, I think that was a necessity. It felt like looking at an amusement park experience, with detail in every corner you look.

The film also makes excellent use of Spatial Audio to further immerse you in the scene of a submarine during World War II. It’s got a score, which I didn’t expect but which didn’t feel unwelcome, even though I was watching immersive scenes—mentally, I knew I was watching a movie, just one playing by some very different rules.

Obviously, the film was short—there’s really just a prologue for us to meet some key characters, one long action set piece, and a brief denouement—but it worked for me. It also left me wanting more. I’m not sure the world is ready for an immersive feature film, but I could absolutely imagine what a feature-length version of a taut submarine thriller would look like, and it would be extremely fun.

Apple’s got a making-of video on YouTube, and in a press release it touts some forthcoming Immersive content, including highlights from the 2024 NBA All-Star weekend (which took place eight months ago!), an intimate concert with English singer Raye that is destined to make me just as uncomfortable as Alicia Keyes did, an immersive story about a free diver who is swimming under ice (just in case “Submerged” wasn’t enough underwater for you), a spotlight on a free solo climber, and a travelogue soaring over Maine.

I’ll watch it all. But “Submerged” has made me really interested in the next immersive narrative film, whatever it might appear.

By Jason Snell

October 10, 2024 9:39 AM PT

iPhone 16 Pro review: Control before Intelligence

We’re getting closer to the end, presumably, of the most static design era in the iPhone’s history. While Apple continues to iterate on the specs of its most important product, the iPhone 16 product line is visually part of a generation that dates back four years to the iPhone 12.

On the one hand, it’s a fact that reveals just how the pace of smartphone design innovation has slowed. This is the longest time Apple has been stuck on a design generation in the history of the iPhone. On the other hand, Apple largely stopped redesigning its laptops in 2010, and nobody seems to mind too much. There’s something there about a device slowly iterating toward its ideal form, and I do wonder if Apple thinks that the iPhone 5-esque stylings of the iPhone 12/13/14/15/16 are the equivalent of the classic MacBook Air/MacBook Pro design.

The problem is this: History suggests that every time Apple does a physical redesign of the iPhone, there’s a surge in iPhone sales. That’s quite a motivator, given the iPhone’s place as the generator of more than half of Apple’s corporate revenue.

So what do you do if you’re Apple? You (again, presumably) try to work on new technological breakthroughs that will let you change things up more dramatically—the introduction of Face ID in the iPhone X let the home button go away, for instance—while you keep pushing forward with the specs and internals in the meantime. It’s not exciting, but neither is it a moral failing.

I’d sure rather be using an iPhone 16 Pro than an iPhone 12 Pro, because the newer model is better in almost every way. That’s what years of iteration will do. Since most iPhone buyers do not upgrade once a year, those individual iterations only really matter in the cumulative sense. So before I dig into this year’s collections of choices and iterations, it’s worth considering the grand sweep of time (iPhone Pro edition):

• iPhone 13 Pro: ProMotion, 3x telephoto lens, chip improvements
• iPhone 14 Pro: Dynamic Island, Crash Detection, SOS via satellite, 48MP camera, always-on display, brighter display, Action Mode, chip improvements
• iPhone 15 Pro: Action Button, USB-C port, 24MP fusion image, chip improvements, titanium exterior, and (in hindsight) Apple Intelligence support

This year, that list grows to include larger displays, a new 48MP camera, 4K120 video support, 48MP ultrawide camera, new Photographic Styles workflow, surround audio, 5× telephoto lens (which arrived last year on the Pro Max model only), and (of course) chip improvements courtesy of the new A18 Pro chip.

Would it be fun if Apple unveiled an entirely new, never-before-seen iPhone design? Yes, it would. Maybe next year. But the company needs to sell phones in the meantime, and as ever, it has taken the last year to add a bunch of improvements that will provide a solid set of upgraded features that, when added to those from previous years, make for a solid update.

Continue reading “iPhone 16 Pro review: Control before Intelligence”…

By Joe Rosensteel

October 4, 2024 11:57 AM PT

Lost In Space

Sometimes there are bugs that happen and hit wide swaths of devices causing serious problems for users, and other times a teeny tiny thing breaks and it only affects a handful of people. It doesn’t really matter, though. Bugs are still frustrating.

On October 1st my friend Ry went on a hike. He completed his hike, and I sent him the usual, terrible, canned fitness response that we send one another ironically. “Way to take a hike. 🌳” He said thanks, and then the Messages app in iOS said Ry was only available via satellite. I thought he was being a fancy lad on a hike using satellite messaging, but he was no longer on a hike, and was on 5G cellular.

He tried force-quitting Messages, and restarting his iPhone, and reseting his network settings, but no matter what he did, my iPhone insisted Ry was only reachable via satellite. So then I restarted my iPhone, and I tried turning off and on all the various connection methods at my disposal.

That’s when I found out that everyone else having a one-on-one conversation with Ry from an iOS 18 device was also experiencing what I was experiencing. Anyone on 17.4, or using macOS Sonoma¹ just had messages pop through with the usual iMessage tag.

What gives? How could only conversations with him be stuck in satellite mode and only on iOS 18 devices? This is a very annoying problem, because every time you send a message “via satellite” it bugs you about it, and you can’t do things like send images or media. Naturally, if he was really on satellite, you wouldn’t want to do that.

I did what everyone else does in this scenario and went to bed with the expectation that the passage of time would reset something.

October 2nd was the same deal. Ry was still stranded over Earth like a modern-day balloon boy.

I opened his contact info and messaged the email address tied to his Apple ID, instead of the phone number. It went through as a regular iMessage. I tried switching back to the phone number and it went back to satellite. Another friend tried the same trick, but stayed on the email address only to have it switch to satellite a few seconds after he messaged.

I was on to something, though, right? Maybe the problem was on the receiving end (our iOS 18 iPhones) instead of the sending end (Ry’s iOS 18 iPhone).

Drastic times call for drastic measures, and so I turned iMessage off and on again. Hold onto your butts.

Fortunately, no raptors were released, but the conversation thread with Ry split into two. One thread had some messages and was stuck in satellite mode. The other thread had some other messages and was in normal iMessage mode. I force-quit Messages for the zillionth time in two days, and when I relaunched it, the conversations had merged back together and the satellite mode was gone.

It was all iMessage, baby.

I relayed this information to the other friends, and they did the same thing. Messaging Ry returned to normal… but I hadn’t noticed one side effect, reported by another friend.

On the lock screen of the iPhone, and only the lock screen of the iPhone, notifications from Ry were now labeled “Maybe: Ry Amidon To You & Ry Amidon”. As if Ry and I were in a group text with Ry.

For crying out loud. The Watch notifications, Mac notifications, and even the display name in iOS were all singular Ry. That’s when I remembered the email address tied to the Apple ID that I had messaged earlier.

I blew away the email address and then the “Maybe” went away. Everything was normal.

I typically don’t open Feedbacks when I can’t reproduce something (and I absolutely can’t reproduce whatever this is) but I put together one with system logs and screenshots and fired it into the void².

If I had to guess (and it’s probably better if I don’t) it seems like Ry’s phone pushed some status to Apple’s iMessage servers which was pushed to our iOS 18 devices… and stuck. I can’t think of another reason why the satellite messaging state was preserved until we each toggled off iMessage support on our individual devices. There’s no toggle to disable sending and receiving satellite messages in Settings. In fact, if you search Settings for “satellite” it doesn’t return any results at all.

Having satellite messaging is definitely a boon to people that have experienced real emergencies and have been otherwise disconnected from the world. Ry, however, wasn’t experiencing any such issues—so we all just got some puzzling inconvenience.

I can’t even say for certain that I fixed anything, because in the grand tradition of internet problem-solving, all I can report is that it “works for me!”

If anyone does eventually run across this weirdness (hello, Google searchers!), I hope you can at least learn from what I tried. If you’ve got an easier fix, or you happen to work at Apple and can just toggle this stuff from the heavens, then drop me a line.

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1. I’m not upgrading to a .0 OS release. I have real work to do. This policy has never lead me astray. ↩
2. Feedback ID FB15362065 ↩

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]