Month: January 2021

In a speech given at a conference yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke out on why Apple places an emphasis on privacy and responsibility, and he took swipes at other technology companies that take a different approach.  Jason Snell of Six Colors prepared a transcript of Cook’s remarks, and it is a short and interesting read.  For example, in one part of the speech that was clearly aimed at Facebook, Cook said:  “Long hours spent cooped up at home, the challenge of keeping kids learning when schools are closed, the worry and uncertainty about what the future would hold, all of these things threw into sharp relief how technology can help — and how it can be used to harm.  Will the future belong to the innovations that make our lives better, more fulfilled, and more human?  Or will it belong to those tools that prize our attention to the exclusion of everything else, compounding our fears and aggregating extremism, to serve ever-more-invasively-targeted ads over all other ambitions?”  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• Yesterday, I discussed Apple’s most recent financial quarter in which the iPad seemed to do particularly well.  Jason Snell of Six Colors noticed the same thing and he discussed that and more in his take on Apple’s fiscal 2021 Q1 financial results.
• CARROT Weather, my favorite weather app, was updated yesterday to version 5.  Alex Guyot of MacStories describes what is new, including lots of options to customize the interface so that the app shows you exactly what you want to see in the way that you want to see it.
• A BBC News article describes how a cyclist in England was swept off of his bike into a swollen river and was carried a mile downstream before he was able to grab hold of a branch and then use his Apple Watch to call the fire department, which was able to save him.
• Danielle Moody of Fox 29 in San Antonio reports that a woman who was kidnapped used her Apple Watch to call for help.
• This week, Apple introduced a new part of Fitness+ for the Apple Watch called Time to Walk (or Time to Push for those in a wheelchair).  The idea is that you connect your Bluetooth headphones, such as AirPods, to your Apple Watch and then take a walk while an interesting person tells a story interspersed with music as your Apple Watch keeps track of the exercise you are doing while you walk.  For the first week, Apple featured stories from singer-songwriters Dolly Parton and Shawn Mendes, actor Uzo Aduba (Orange is the New Black), and NBA player Draymond Green.  I tried the one with Dolly Parton and I really enjoyed it.  She shared some stories from when she was young and then introduced three of her songs.  The only song I recognized was 9 to 5, and Parton shared some fun stories about making that movie and creating the song.  I’ll definitely try this one again.  Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac shares some more details on how the new feature works.
• Bradley Chambers of 9to5Mac recommends home security cameras that work with Apple’s HomeKit smart home technology.
• Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac reviews the EasyPencil Plus by SwitchEasy, a stylus that works with the iPad and looks somewhat similar to the second-generation Apple Pencil but costs only $37 on Amazon.
• I really enjoyed watching the TV series Tehran on Apple TV+, a fun spy thriller.  Nellie Andreeva of Deadline reports that the show has been renewed for a second season. 
• And finally, speaking of Apple TV+, Apple has a new show starting on February 5:  The Snoopy Show.  Snoopy was always my favorite of the Peanuts characters thanks to his vivid imagination, and it looks like this show focuses on that.  The official trailer for the show made me smile.  It also made me wish that my two teenagers were little kids again so that they would want to curl up on the couch with me and watch these cartoons.  (My wife and I did convince them to watch the classic Peanuts Thanksgiving and Christmas specials with us this past November and December, so maybe there is hope.)

Yesterday, Apple released the results for its 2021 fiscal first quarter (which ran from September 27, 2020, to December 26, 2020, and did not actually include any days from calendar year 2021) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results.  This is typically Apple’s best quarter of the year because it includes holiday sales.  This year, it was the best quarter in the history of the company, with revenue of $111.4 billion, up 21% from this time last year.  (And this time last year, Apple posted record results which were 9% higher than the year before.)  Has any other company ever reported revenue of over $100 billion in a single fiscal quarter?  I honestly don’t know, but I certainly couldn’t find any evidence of it when I did some Google searches on this.  But as impressive as this number is, the real reason that I report on Apple’s quarterly earnings is not to report on the numbers — let the folks at places like the Wall Street Journal focus on that — but to report on the financial call that Apple holds with analysts every quarter, during which Apple always seems to have something interesting to say about the iPhone and iPad.  If you want to get all of the nitty gritty details, you can download the audio from the announcement conference call from iTunes, or you can read a transcript of the call prepared by Seeking Alpha, or a transcript prepared by Jason Snell of Six Colors.  Apple’s official press release is here.  Here are the items that stood out to me:

iPhone

• iPhone revenue during the quarter was an all-time record $65.6 billion, compared to almost $56 billion this time last year, a 17% increase.
• The number of iPhones that are actively being used around the world is now over one billion.  This means that there are more people now using an iPhone than at any time in history.
• Apple CFO Luca Maestri said that there has been high interest in the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max, and that supply has been limited as a result, but supply is now starting to catch up with demand for those high-end iPhones.

iPad

• iPad revenue during the quarter was $8.4 billion, compared to almost $6 billion this time last year, a 41% increase.
• Apple did not announce the number of iPads that are actively being used right now, but Maestri did say that Apple’s installed base of active devices reached all-time records “in each of our major product categories,” and the iPad is one of those categories.  So this means that there are now more people using an iPad than ever before.
• Apple CEO Tim Cook said that about half of the people buying an iPad are buying their first iPad.
• This was not a record quarter for iPad revenue because iPad sales were higher around 2013-2015.  For example, in the 2014 fiscal first quarter (i.e. the end of 2013), Apple sold 26 million iPads (which was a record) and saw iPad revenue of $11.5 billion — which I believe was an all-time record.  But for over five years, iPad revenue has been much lower.  I’m glad to see iPad sales going up again because that should encourage Apple to focus on the iPad even more.  For those of us who consider the iPad a critical part of their work life (not to mention a much-appreciated device for entertainment), I would love to see Apple do even more with the iPad.
• Cook said that the big increase in iPad (and Mac) revenue during the past quarter reflects “the continuing role these devices have played in our users’ lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Other

• Cook said:  “Wearables, home and accessories grew by 30% year over year, driven by significant holiday demand for the latest Apple Watch, our entire AirPods lineup including the new AirPods max, as well as the new HomePod mini.”  I know that in my own home, I bought my wife a new Apple Watch for Christmas and she bought me a new HomePod mini. 
• Cook said that if Apple’s wearables business (AirPods, Apple Watch, etc.) was a stand-alone business, it would be a Fortune 120 company.
• Cook also noted:  “The winter holiday season is always a busy time for us and our products, but this year was unique.  We had a record number of device activations during the last week of the quarter.  And as COVID-19 kept us apart, we saw the highest volume of FaceTime calls ever this Christmas.”
• If you count up all of the different ways that people can pay Apple for a subscription to something (an app, a service like Apple Music, etc.), Apple now has a record 620 million paid subscriptions, which is 140 million higher than this time last year.

Apple released an update to iOS yesterday, iOS version 14.4.  Similarly, iPadOS 14.4 was released yesterday.  The update adds some very minor new features, such as the ability to scan even smaller QR codes, and fixes a few bugs.  But what caught my eye is that Apple says that this update patches two vulnerabilities in the operating system that “may have been actively exploited.”  I cannot remember Apple ever before using that phrase with an iOS update. 

Apple has not provided any details on exactly how any hackers may be “actively exploiting” this security flaw, but I’m sure that you don’t want to be the first on your block to find out.  To be safe, I encourage you to stop using your device for about 15-20 minutes to install this update as soon as you can.  (Open up the Settings app, tap General, and then tap Software Update.)  I did so last night on both my iPhone and my iPad, and I didn’t run into any problems with the updates.

On April 1, 2020, Apple released its free COVID-19 Screening Tool, a simple app with resources to help you figure out what to do next if you think that you might have COVID-19.  Less than two months later, Apple released iOS 13.5, an update to the iPhone operating system that added support for exposure notification apps, a simple form of contact tracing.  That iOS update was only half of what was required for this system to work; additionally, each country or — in the U.S. — each state had to have its own exposure notification app that worked with the notification system first released in iOS 13.5. 

I live in New Orleans, and Louisiana has just released its exposure notification app, which Louisiana calls COVID Defense.  Zac Hall of 9to5Mac has been tracking these apps, and based on his count, similar apps are now available in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia.  That makes Louisiana the 21st state (plus D.C.) to have one of these apps.  Additional states, such as Oregon, should be up-and-running soon.

I’m going to describe Louisiana’s app in this post, but all of the similar apps from other states and countries work the same way because they are all based on the same technology jointly developed by Apple and Google.  Note that some states, such as California, take advantage of a system called Exposure Notification Express that works the same way but you don’t have to download a special app; you just receive a notification asking if you want to opt-in.

The way that the app works is that it generates a unique, anonymous token associated with your iPhone but not associated with your name, location, or any other personal information.  The token changes every 10-20 minutes.  Whenever your iPhone senses (using Bluetooth) that it is somewhat close to another iPhone or Android phone running the same app, your iPhone saves the token from that other device.  And it keeps a list of all of those tokens for 14 days.

If a person tests positive for COVID-19, they will receive (or can obtain from the Louisiana Department of Health) a verification code.  That person should enter that code in the COVID Defense app on their device.  Every day, the app downloads a list of all of the tokens associated with positive COVID-19 cases and checks them against the list of tokens it has encountered in the last 14 days.  If there is a match, then your iPhone will give you a push notification alerting you of a potential exposure.  Note that, to ensure your privacy, all of the matching takes place on your individual iPhone.  The government is not notified of your possible exposure; only you are notified.

The notification will not tell you the name of the infected person or the location where you were possibly exposed because — to protect privacy — Apple and Google built the app not to store any of that information.  Thus, nobody has to worry about the app tracking their location or anything like that.  The tradeoff is that it makes the alert less useful because you don’t know much about the potential exposure, but the point is simply that it gives you a warning of a potential exposure so that, hopefully, you will get tested.  Even if you are not (yet) experiencing any symptoms, you may be an asymptomatic carrier of the virus as a result of your recent exposure.

Obviously, this app will not alert you to all exposures.  For the app to work well, you need for the people around you to be using the app.  According to an AP report from a month ago, in 16 jurisdictions in which the app was available in 2020, about one in 14 people in those jurisdictions used the app.  That same article reports that 45% of people in Finland used a similar app.  A report from Jennifer Valentino-DeVries in the New York Times last month said that 60% of the population in the District of Columbia is participating.  It would be better to see larger use everywhere, but at least there are still many millions of people taking advantage of this technology. 

Additionally, for the app to be helpful, you need for anyone who tests positive to be thoughtful enough to log their positive status into their own app.  According to that same New York Times article, a recent study in Switzerland concluded that for every 100 people who tested positive, the app correctly notified 24 contacts who had caught the virus. 

I wish that Louisiana had released their app long ago so that, by now, there might be a larger user base in my state.  Nevertheless, I guess better late than never, and by releasing an app at the end of January 2021, Louisiana is still ahead of over half of the other states in the United States.  If an app like this (or the built-in service) is available wherever you live, I encourage you to use it.  The more people who do so, the better we are all protected.

Click here to get COVID Defense (free): 

In a week with many highlights, one of the very best moments was the poetry written and performed by 22-year-old Amanda Gorman during the inauguration.  As lawyers, we write words every single day, but I have never written anything as beautiful and powerful as her poem, The Hill We Climb.  I was moved when I first saw it, and then I enjoyed it, even more, when I went back and watched it again last night.  When James Corden of The Late Late Show asked Gorman about the experience, she shared that she received so many messages afterward that — notwithstanding the cold weather — her iPhone overheated.  She also mentioned that she should ask her mother for a new iPhone.  Tim Cook, if you are reading this, please send Gorman a new iPhone 12, perhaps with a yellow case to match her coat.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• Catherine Reach, the director of the North Carolina Bar Association’s Center for Practice Management, recently reviewed the Microsoft Lists app.  And as Nicholas Terry of 9to5Mac noted earlier this week, that app is now available for the iPhone.
• California attorney David Sparks shares some tips for cleaning AirPods and AirPods Pro.
• Megan Cerullo of CBS News reports on a new study that concludes that smartwatches like the Apple Watch can help to spot COVID-19 days before people are symptomatic.
• If you like the way that an iPad seems to float above a keyboard in Apple’s Magic Keyboard for iPad but you just want a stand, Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac reviews the Satechi Aluminum Desktop Stand for iPad, and it looks like an interesting product.
• Adam Engst of TidBITS shares some tips for using Apple’s HomeKit smart home technology.
• If you want HomeKit compatibility for a smart home device that is not made to work with HomeKit, one solution is the HOOBt, which CS Starter Kihristopher Close reviewed for iMore.
• Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac reviews the Neatmo Smart Video Doorbell, which works with HomeKit.
• Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac reviews the Logitech Circle View Doorbell, which works with HomeKit secure video.
• Ron Amadeo of Ars Technica explains the new Wi-Fi 6E standard.  The iPhone works with Wi-Fi 6, but it doesn’t currently work with 6E — something that may change later this year.
• If you purchased an iPhone in late 2019,  you received a free year of Apple TV+.  Although that was going to run out a few months ago, Apple announced in October that the free trial was extended to February.  This week, Apple announced that it is extended again, to July 2021, as Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac explains.  I’m sure that Apple had planned to have a lot of new things available to watch when it was time for folks to renew, but the pandemic surely delayed those plans.  I guess Apple currently thinks that as of June-July 2021, there will be lots of compelling content to convince people to renew.
• Apple shared some truly incredible photos taken with the iPhone 12.
• And finally, to return to Amanda Gorman, do yourself a favor and watch or rewatch what she said on Wednesday, and then check out the full James Corden interview:

I was thrilled and honored to be the guest on the latest episode of the Mac Power Users podcast.  California attorney David Sparks and Stephen Hackett, an expert on all of Apple’s products, host one of the very best podcasts for anyone looking to do more with their Apple technology. 

In this episode, we discussed a broad range of topics:  some of the best apps for the iPhone, tips for getting work done with your iPad, iPad apps to touch up photographs, how to be productive when you use both a PC and a Mac, home automation products that work with Apple’s HomeKit technology, and a bunch of other useful services including Apple’s new Fitness+ service and CarPlay.  If a friend was to ask me to sit down with them and describe everything cool that I’m doing with technology, the conversation that we would have would be very close to the conversation that I had with David and Stephen on this episode.  And although this podcast is called “Mac” Power Users, and we did discuss some Mac technology, we spent far more time discussing iPad and iPhone topics — so even if your primary computer is a PC instead of a Mac, you will feel right at home listening to this episode.  I think that this episode came out really well, and I encourage you to check it out.

You can listen to the podcast in a web browser by going to this page, but my favorite way to listen to a podcast is on an iPhone.  You can do so using Apple’s own Podcasts app, Overcast (my favorite podcast app), or virtually any other podcast app using these links:

Click here to listen to Mac Power Users #571 using Overcast

Click here to listen to Mac Power Users #571 using Apple Podcasts

Click here to listen to Mac Power Users #571 using Castro

Click here to listen to Mac Power Users #571 using Pocket Casts

Click here to listen to Mac Power Users #571 using an RSS feed

I am a big fan of the Apps in Law podcast, hosted by Brett Burney.  Brett always finds interesting attorneys to interview about (typically) just one app that they use in their law practice.  In the most recent episode, Brett interviews Illinois attorney Chuck Armbruster, who recommends an app that does something I’ve been wanting for a while.  The app is called OCR Scanner with LEADTOOLS SDK, and while the name is a mouthfull, it has a great function:  it performs an OCR on a PDF file.  There are many apps that will convert an image to a PDF file, including OCR, but those apps won’t help you if your file is already in PDF format.  For example, if opposing counsel sends you a PDF file and you just want to do a quick OCR so that you can search the text and highlight using an app like PDF Expert, you can run the document through OCR Scanner with LEADTOOLS SDK and then send the document to another app like PDF Expert to read and annotate it.  The app is free, and although I’ve just started trying it out, it seems to work well.  For more details, listen to that episode.  It amazes me that there are not more apps like this in the App Store, and it also seems like a feature that should be built-in to premium PDF apps for the iPad, just like it is built-in to many PDF programs for the computer.  And now, the news of note from the past week:

• Illinois attorney John Voorhees of MacStories discusses the HomePod Mini, including its ability to work with Thread-compatible smart devices — something that I didn’t know about before reading his article.
• Jason Cipriani and Sarah Mitroff of CNet share tips for using a HomePod Mini.
• I’m a fan of Apple’s new Fitness+ service, for the reasons that I explained in my recent review.  But this is just a 1.0 product and there is definitely room for improvement.  Dan Moren of Six Colors offers suggestions for how Apple could improve the Fitness+ service, and I would love to see many of the features he describes added in a future update.
• Over on Macworld, Moren shares some thoughts about what Apple might be planning with the augmented reality technology that it has been working on for years.
• If you subscribe to Apple TV+, you can watch the shows on your Apple TV, iPad, iPhone, or in the Apple TV app on a Mac.  But you can also stream to any browser by going to tv.apple.com, and Apple updated and improved that website this week.
• Brent Dirks of AppAdvice reviews Phone Buddy, an Apple Watch app that alerts you if your iPhone is not nearby, to try prevent you from leaving it somewhere by accident.
• Nick Guy of Wirecutter recommends some cases for the iPad Pro.
• The Find My app on your iPhone can be used to locate a person or an Apple device.  But Apple is obviously looking to expand this to other items.  When you are using Safari on your iPhone, type this into the address bar (or just click this link) — findmy://items — and Safari will ask if you want to open the Find My app.  Say yes, and you will see a hidden page in the app explaining that the app can be used to track everyday items like keys, a backpack, or a bike.  There is even an option to identify an item that you found but which does not belong to you.  Given that at least part of this item tracking feature is now a part of the Find My app (albeit hidden) perhaps it won’t be long before Apple starts to ship its long-rumored AirTags devices and Apple opens up the Find My app to third-party developers.
• Juli Clover of MacRumors points out some of the interesting Apple-related accessories unveiled at the (virtual) CES convention this week.
• And finally, if you are interested in hearing how noise cancellation works on the new AirPods Max, Faruk Korkmaz of iPhonedo put together a fascinating video that you need to listen to while wearing a pair of headphones.  Using some interesting technology, he gives you a good sense of how they work.  It’s a really interesting video, and worth checking out even if you have no intention of purchasing an AirPods Max just because it does neat things with audio.

Apple added preliminary iPad mouse support in 2019, and I found it to be very useful, but also somewhat frustrating because it seemed so limited with the cursor merely mimicking your finger without working like a mouse attached to a computer.  On March 24, 2020, Apple added fantastic mouse and trackpad support to the iPad when it released iPad OS 13.4.  For the first time, the iPad had true cursor support, like a computer.  And in fact, it was even better than a computer because the cursor could change its shape and function depending upon what your cursor was over.  The only drawback was that individual apps needed to add support for these advanced features, so it still felt somewhat incomplete.  But to be honest, there was really only one app for which I really wanted to see this advanced mouse and trackpad support:  Microsoft Word. 

On October 26, 2020, Microsoft announced that full support was coming “within a couple weeks.”  Well, I guess everything took longer in 2020, but yesterday the Microsoft Word for iPad app was finally updated to add full trackpad and mouse support.  And I have good news:  it works great.

Connect a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse (or trackpad) to your iPad, and you are ready to go.  When you move your cursor around the text portion of a Microsoft Word document, the cursor changes to an I-beam, much like you would see when using Microsoft Word on a computer.

I find that using a mouse in Microsoft Word on the iPad is an easier, faster, and more precise way to select text as compared to using your finger.  It works exactly the way that you would expect it to work.

When you move your cursor over one of the tools at the top, the shape of the cursor changes to indicate what will be selected if you click when your cursor is at that spot.  For example, if you hover your cursor over a tab, it changes to the shape of the entire tab:

If you hover your cursor over a formatting tool, such as the “B” that formats text in bold, your cursor changes to the shape of that tool:

If you own Apple’s Magic Keyboard for iPad, which has a built-in trackpad, that device plus your iPad give you an incredibly powerful portable word processor for working with Word documents.  But even if you don’t want to spend $290 for that device (or $330 for the larger version for the 12.9″ iPad Pro), you can use any Bluetooth keyboard and any Bluetooth mouse with an iPad.  Or, if you have an iPad Pro, and if you have a USB-C hub that has a USB port on it — I use the HyperDrive 6-in-1 USB-C Hub (my review), but you can also use something less expensive such as this $19 adapter from Apple or this $8.50 adapter from Amazon Basics — you can even plug in any wired mouse to the iPad.  And surely you have one of those around somewhere.  I even hooked up a wired Kensington trackball to my iPad Pro and it worked great with this new version of Word.  If you have an iPad with a Lightning port, you can connect a USB device by using a Lightning-to-USB adapter such as this one.

Whether you use a trackpad or a mouse, wireless or corded, the Microsoft Word app on the iPad is now significantly better as a result of this update.  I wish that it had come sooner — I definitely would have taken advantage of this when I was working from home every day during the pandemic in 2020 — but it is here now, and it works really well.

I love that it is so easy to give an Apple Watch a new look simply by changing the band.  After using an Apple Watch for over five years — since it first went on sale — I’ve had lots of opportunities to try out lots of different bands sold by Apple.  The very first watch band I ever purchased, the Classic Buckle, is actually my least favorite of all that I own.  But thanks to a Christmas gift from my wife, I now have a new band that makes the list as one of my all-time favorites:  the Solo Loop, which Apple first introduced on September 16, 2020.

The Solo Loop is the most simple band that Apple makes.  There are no clasps.  It only comes in solid colors.  Each version of the band is just a single size.  It doesn’t have any fancy features. 

While the design is simple, this is also perhaps the most complicated Apple Watch band to purchase.  That is because you have to pick a specific size, from size 1 to 9 for the 40mm Apple Watch and from size 4 to 12 for the 44mm Apple Watch.  The Apple website lets you download a printable guide that helps you to determine the correct size, and also includes instructions for how to measure your wrist with measuring tape or a ruler.  Or you can visit an Apple Store and have a specialist help you find the correct size, but that option is obviously more limited during the pandemic.

Another option for determining the correct size — or a good way to double-check that you picked the right measurement — is to figure out what hole you use on an Apple Sport Band and then follow John Gruber’s instructions for translating that to a Solo Loop size.

Once you determine your size, you get to pick a color.  There are currently ten colors to choose from:  Northern Blue, Plum, Deep Navy, Kumquat, Ginger, Cyprus Green, Pink Citrus, White, Black, and Red.

My wife picked out Cypress Green for me, and it looks great.  It is a very dark green — almost black, depending upon the light.

Simply slide each end of the Solo Loop band into the Apple Watch, and it is ready to use.

The Solo Loop stretches, almost like a rubber band, so to put it on you just slip your wrist in, expanding the band in the process.  And then it surrounds your wrist.

The back of the Solo Loop has a slight indented well, which helps the Solo Loop to feel even thinner.

There are a number of things that I really like about the Solo Loop band.

First, it is by far the thinnest and lightest Apple Watch band that I have ever tried.  That’s a nice feature in a band.

Second, it is by far the most secure Apple Watch band I’ve ever used.  Because there is no clasp, there is zero chance that you will catch it on something and have the Apple Watch band open up and fall off of your wrist.  That almost happened to me a few times with the large size of the Sport Band, although the XL size of the Sport Band solved that for me.  But even so, I love how secure this feels on my wrist.  It is not going anywhere.  If I was going to go swimming with my Apple Watch, this is the band that I would want to use to make sure that the band doesn’t come off without me noticing it.  And if you want to do a vigorous run outside and you don’t want any chance that your Apple Watch will become disconnected and fall off, this is the band for you.

Third, this band is made of silicone, so it is super easy to clean.  I wouldn’t want to wear some of my other bands if I knew that my hands were going to get dirty, but I don’t see that ever being a problem for the Solo Loop.

Fourth, I like that this band holds your Apple Watch in place.  It is not going to slide up and down your wrist.  It makes your Apple Watch feel like it just becomes a part of you.

So let’s talk about comfort.  The most comfortable band for the Apple Watch that I’ve ever used is the Sport Loop with its double-layer nylon weave.  As I noted in my review, that one is like the yoga pants version of the Apple Watch, and it is perfect for when you are stuck at home during a pandemic — not that you would in any way feel embarrassed wearing it in public.  The Solo Loop is not soft like the Sport Loop, but it is still incredibly comfortable.  I think that this is a result of it being so thin, light, and seamless, but it also helps that it so perfectly conforms to the shape of your wrist.  I consider this one of the most comfortable watch bands I own, although the Sport Loop still holds the #1 spot for comfort.

One downside of the Solo Loop is that if you sweat while you are wearing it (for example, when you are working out), the sweat can get trapped under the band because the silicone does not breathe.  It’s the same issue that you can have with the Sport Band, but it is a little more pronounced because the Solo Loop is a little tighter against your wrist than the Sport Band.  I only notice it when I remove the Solo Loop at the end of the day, and I certainly don’t notice it every time, but it is something to consider.

Overall, I really like this band.  It is comfortable, thin, light, durable, and secure.  If those features appeal to you, I encourage you to try this band out.  At $49, it is one of the cheapest bands that Apple sells.  I’m glad to have this band, and I use it often.

After enduring what seemed like decades waiting for 2020 to end, it has been disheartening to see 2021 begin with record COVID-19 numbers and a U.S. president inciting insurrection while refusing to acknowledge the decision of American voters.  As to the latter, Apple CEO Tim Cook remarked Wednesday night:  “Today marks a sad and shameful chapter in our nation’s history. Those responsible for this insurrection should be held to account, and we must complete the transition to President-elect Biden’s administration. It’s especially when they are challenged that our ideals matter most.”  Well said.  And now, for some respite from those troubling news headlines, here is some of the other recent news of note:

• Jason Snell of Six Colors reviews and compares the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 12 Pro Max.
• Jason Cross of Macworld reviews Apple’s AirPods Max.
• In a recent press release, Apple noted that customers spent $1.8 billion in the App Store the week between Christmas and New Year’s.  That press release also includes many other interesting facts and figures from the past year.
• Chance Miller of 9to5 notes that, according to one report, nine of the top ten smartphones activated on Christmas day were different models of the iPhone.
• Michael Potuck of 9to5Msac explains how you can use a 3D printer to make your own version of Apple’s $129 MagSafe Duo charger.
• Have you ever used the service Gazelle to get some cash for an older Apple device?  Chance Miller of 9to5Mac reports that the service is about to shut down.  Fortunately, Apple itself now offers a similar service for many used Apple products.
  
• Karissa Bell of Engadget reports that the MTA system in New York now supports contactless payments at all subway stations and bus lines in all five boroughs.  So you can simply tap your iPhone or Apple Watch and then go through the turnstile, without having to worry about a MetroCard.
• Here is a smart home device that I had not seen, or even thought of, before.  Bradley Chambers of 9to5Mac reports that you can now get the VOCOlinc Flowerbud, which is an essential oil diffuser that works with Apple’s HomeKit technology.
• If you want a sensor to add to your HomeKit setup, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of The Wirecutter recommends some of the best HomeKit sensors.  One of them that she recommends is the Eve Degree.  I’ve been using an Eve Degree since I posted a review in 2018, and it still works very well for me, making it easy to get the weather conditions in my own backyard.
• John Gruber of Daring Fireball talks about the different USB-C chargers sold by Apple that may look the same but do not work the same.  It’s all very confusing.
• Adi Robertson and Mitchell Clark of The Verge report that Apple removed from the App Store an app called Vybe Together that was used to promote secret in-person parties that violated pandemic rules on social distancing.
• Ben Sandofsky does a great job of describing, in much detail, how Apple’s new ProRAW image format works on the newest iPhones and when you might want to use it.
• Jared Newman of Fast Company identifies some of the best new apps of 2020, some of which are iPhone apps.
• And finally, the iPad Air that Apple introduced just a few months ago is so close to an iPad Pro that I find it hard to recommend an iPad Pro to anyone right now — unless they really want the larger 12.9″ screen (which I love).  But Apple obviously knows this, and it makes me think that the next version of the iPad Pro must have some impressive new features that will really set it apart from the iPad Air.  Rene Ritchie does a good job in this video of discussing some of the things that Apple could add to the 2021 version of the iPad Pro to make it noticeably better than the iPad Air: