
Just two days after providing an Apple Watch award for doing a workout on Earth Day, Apple declared yesterday Global Close Your Rings Day and provided a limited-edition award and animated stickers for the Messages app to anyone who closed all of their rings. Apple had a reason to celebrate yesterday because, as Jason Snell of Six Colors noted, it was ten years ago yesterday that Apple started selling the Apple Watch. I closed my three circles yesterday in my absolute favorite way: walking around Jazz Fest. There are lots of great things about New Orleans—the restaurants, the architecture, the history, Mardi Gras, etc.—but one of the very best is the last weekend in April and the first weekend in May every year when the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival takes place. Whether it is local New Orleans artists or international superstars, the music is always great, the food is incredible, there are lots of arts and crafts for sale, and it is almost impossible not to have a great time. Yesterday, my wife and I saw an artist that I expected to be great, and he was amazing—the Cajun fiddler Waylon Thibodeaux—and I saw an artist I had never heard of before, and he was also amazing—the bluegrass artist and multiple Grammy award winner Sam Bush. My Apple Watch wasn’t just used to close circles yesterday. I also made a lot of purchases at Jazz Fest (mostly from food vendors), and it was a delight to use Apple Pay to make each purchase quickly. If you haven’t yet experienced Jazz Fest in New Orleans, now you have something great to put on your bucket list. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- Speaking of the Apple Watch, this week Jason Snell of Six Colors discussed sleeping with an Apple Watch. After trying it for a while, he is thinking about stopping doing so. However, I still like wearing mine every night for all of the reasons that Snell discussed as the reasons he tried it out, and I intend to keep doing so. The only real downside is the need to charge it when I wake up, but I find that putting my Apple Watch on a fast charger while I get ready in the morning is almost always enough time for it to recharge.
- If you’d like a new watch band for your Apple Watch, I’ve noted in the past the occasional sales from Woot where you could get a $50 Solo Loop for only $20. Mitchel Broussard of MacRumors notes that Woot is currently running a really interesting sale: you can get three Solo Loop bands (normally $150) for just $20. And you can get two Braided Solo Loop bands (normally $200) for only $30. The catch is that you don’t get to pick the colors. Woot selects the colors, although they promise that you won’t get the same color more than once. I took advantage of the Solo Loop band deal, and I’m interested to see what colors I’ll get. Maybe they will be colors that I would never buy—like Canary Yellow—but at these prices, I’m willing to spin the wheel and see what I get. In fact, I’m thinking of taking advantage of the Braided Loop deal too. I tried out a Braided Loop last year (I returned it when I also returned an Apple Watch model), but as I noted in my review, the Braided Loop is a very comfortable watch band, and my only complaint was the $99 price. But two for $30? Hmm.
- Leander Kahney of Cult of Mac lists numerous ways that an Apple Watch has saved someone’s life.
- We all know that Apple needs to improve Siri, and David Sparks of MacSparky created a short but compelling video that demonstrates why Apple should just buy a product called Perplexity. Check it out to see what this app can do today. David is right: Siri should be doing all of this and more.
- Speaking of AI, one of the best engines for converting audio into text is Whisper, which was created by OpenAI. Zac Hall of 9to5Mac reports that the excellent app that brings Whisper to the Mac called MacWhisper is now available for iPhone and iPad.
- I haven’t seen it yet, and since the reviews have been poor, I’m not sure if I will see it, but Netflix is airing a Dutch movie called iHostage that tells the true-life story of a 2022 event in the Amsterdam Apple Store when a gunman held dozens of people hostage. Whether or not you watch the movie, you should watch the short behind-the-scenes video shared by Hartley Charlton of MacRumors that shows how the the production team recreated an entire Apple Store on a sound stage. Very neat.
- Speaking of the Amsterdam Apple Store, Malcolm Owen of AppleInsider reports that on a day that the store was recently closed, the doors were left open—and instead of chaos ensuing, the folks who discovered it acted responsibly. That’s not interesting enough to be the plot of iHostage 2: Open Doors, but it is nice to see people doing the right thing.
- Stephen Silver of AppleInsider shares a number of interesting iPhone-related stories from police reports and elsewhere, such as a Florida UPS driver accused of stealing 171 iPhones, a thief of a STIHL concrete saw whose crime was thwarted by an AirTag, a false report of an iPhone theft, and more.
- Two weeks ago, I discussed the thorny issue of customs agents demanding to search your iPhone when you return to the United States—especially if you are an attorney with confidential information on your iPhone that you are legally bound to keep confidential. Although this article wasn’t written for attorneys, Lily Ham Newman and Matt Burgess of Wired provide tips for protecting yourself from iPhone searches at the U.S. border.
- Apple released a new Immersive Video for the Apple Vision Pro yesterday. It is an episode of the Adventure series (Apple TV+ link), and it is called “Hill Climb.” In the episode, you ride along with driver Laura Hayes as she races the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb.
- And finally, Apple released a new video yesterday called Trust Issues that emphasizes the Ceramic Shield that Apple uses on the iPhone 16, which Apple says is two times tougher than any other smartphone glass. The Ceramic Shield was first used with the iPhone 12, and it has become even more durable in subsequent iterations. It is a neat technology because Apple binds nano-ceramic crystals, which are harder than most metals, into glass while still keeping the glass clear.