Apple announced in a press release this week that the last remaining model of the iPod—the iPod Touch, which was essentially an iPhone without a phone—was finished. Within days, just about all of the remaining models sold out, according to a report by Karen Haslam of Macworld. It's the end of the iPod era. When the iPod launched in 2001 (shortly after 9/11), it was a breakthrough device: 1,000 songs in a tiny and easy-to-use device that could fit in a pocket. Nowadays, I suspect that it has been quite a while since most of us used an iPod, but its impact can still be felt. without the iPod, there might never have been an iPhone, not only because of the influence that the design of the former had on the latter, but also because the iPod was such a huge financial success for Apple that it gave the company the confidence and incentive to try to develop something like the iPhone. As former Apple executive Tony Fadell, the father of the iPod, told Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal this week: "If we didn’t do the iPod, the iPhone wouldn’t have come out. ... The iPod brought us confidence. It brought Steve confidence that we could do something outside of the map and that we could actually continue to innovate in new areas." The iPod also revolutionized the music industry. In the age of Napster, Apple showed the world that if you make it easy to pay for music—99¢ for a song with no need to buy the whole album—people will pay instead of downloading pirated music for "free." The iPod also made Apple cool again; the iPod "halo effect" convinced people to switch from Windows to a Mac. As Apple says in its press release, the spirit of the iPod lives on today because we listen to music on our iPhones using an app that is now called Music but was originally called iPod. Even the name lives on to an extent in the AirPod and HomePod family of products. So when you pour your drink of choice this weekend, I say that we all give a toast to the iPod. Gone, but certainly not forgotten. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- I'm always interested to learn about some of the cool things that folks do with the Shortcuts app. Even those of us without programming skills can use Shortcuts to put some actions together and create a useful automation. In April, the MacStories website held a contest for people to submit their best automations. Yesterday, Illinois attorney John Voorhees revealed the winners, and there are some great ones in there. Check them out, and if any of them appeal to you, you can download each one with a single click.
- Voorhees also described some big updates to Adobe's iPad apps. For example, Photoshop on the iPad can now use AI to do content-aware fill (allowing you to make unwanted people or objects in a photo disappear), and using similar AI, you can remove and replace a background.
- I'm a big fan of the eero Pro routers in my home. The model that I use gives me almost 500Mbps of Wi-Fi download speed, and up to a Gigabit for devices connected to the eero Pro's Ethernet port, which seems incredibly fast. But apparently, much higher speeds are on the horizon. Scharon Harding of Ars Technica discusses Wi-Fi version 7, which will allow new versions of mesh routers to go to over 33Gbps, which is over 60x the incredibly fast Wi-Fi speeds that I'm seeing now. I'm not even sure what I would possibly do with all of that speed ... but I'm certainly willing to do my best to try to use it.
- Leander Kahney of Cult of Mac wrote a great illustrated history of the iPod in 2011 and has updated it twice since then. It is a great way to walk down iPod memory lane.
- Stephen Hackett of 512 Pixels discusses the different versions of the U2 iPod.
- Allison McDaniel of 9to5Mac reports that AT&T is the first U.S. carrier to use location-based routing for all of its 911 calls in the United States. In the past, AT&T would estimate your location using its cell towers. Now, AT&T uses your iPhone's GPS to provide much more accurate location information for first responders: a 50-meter radius instead of a 10-mile radius.
- In an article for Macworld, Glenn Fleishman reviews the Excitrus 100W Magnetic Wireless Power Bank and concludes that it is the best portable battery that provides both USB charging and wireless charging in a single device. It holds 20,800 mAh, and it is $99.99 on Amazon.
- My "In the Know" tip-of-the-week on a recent episode of the In the News podcast was to use the Speedtest app by Ookla. That app was recently updated to add a new map feature. As Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac explains, you can use the map feature to find out how different mobile carrier networks compare in your area, or to identify problem spots if you are traveling to a different area.
- I had two problems with my iPad/iPhone this week. First, the app that I use every day to work with PDF files—PDF Expert from Readdle—suddenly stopped syncing with Dropbox this week. It was frustrating when it happened, but I reached out to Readdle's support folks via the Readdle website, and within a few hours, they had it fixed again. When I saw that the technician who solved my problem lived in Ukraine, I'll admit that I felt guilty that she was spending time solving my problem with a war going on in her country. Kudos to Readdle for looking out for its customers during this troubling time.
- My second problem this week was with my iPhone. My son received an athletic award this week and I tried to record video using my iPhone. I recorded most of the ceremony with no problems, but a few seconds before they announced his award, my iPhone suddenly stopped recording and wouldn't let me hit the button to start recording again. And then after a few seconds, the interface rebooted. That's not a good sign. I noticed that my iPhone was getting sort of hot as it recorded 4K video, and while this should have never happened in the first place, there are two things that I will try the next time that I use my iPhone to record something important. First, restart my iPhone before I start, just to give it a fresh start. Second, turn on Airplane mode. My iPhone can get hot when it is having trouble holding a cellular (especially 5G) signal, and I suspect that was happening at the school. I'm not sure if these two steps would have prevented my problem, but if you are about to record a graduation or other important event with your iPhone, you might consider trying these steps first. It wasn't a big deal for me to not have video of my son accepting his award—I was still able to take some great photos afterward—but I would have preferred to have the video. And more importantly, it was annoying that I was distracted by my iPhone as he walked to the stage.
- A funny XKCD cartoon from this week has an Apple theme.
- And finally, now that you can repair the battery and screen on an iPhone by purchasing the parts and the tools from Apple, Quinn Nelson created a YouTube video to show you how it works. Apparently, this is the same process that Apple itself uses. Although I have zero desire to ever take my own iPhone apart, I thought it was interesting to see someone else do it:
