Month: August 2023

The other day, my teenage son, who now has a driver’s license and his own car, showed me an interesting shortcut that he created on his iPhone. With essentially one tap, he can alert me and my wife that he is in trouble and let us know exactly where he is located. He gave me permission to share his shortcut here because it might be something that you want to put on your own iPhone or the iPhone of one of your family members.

Once my son triggers this shortcut, here is what it does. First, it sends a text message to me and my wife that says “In trouble and I’m at:” Next, after determining the current location, the shortcut sends that location in a number of different ways: (1) as a street address, (2) as a very precise Latitude and Longitude, and (3) as a map picture that can be tapped to open up the precise location in the Maps app. Sure, it is a little duplicative to send all three, but in an emergency situation, we may not be using all of our wits, so why not be as clear as possible.

The shortcut has just a few, simple steps, so you can create it yourself in the Shortcuts app on your iPhone in just a few minutes or less. Here are the specific steps that he used in the Shortcuts app. (I redacted my wife’s name):

Note that for each Send command in this shortcut, you will see at the end a circle with a > in it. Tap that circle on each command and you will see “Show When Run” with an on/off switch. Turn that switch OFF for each Send command in the shortcut. That way, all of the messages will be sent without even opening up the Messages app and without waiting for you to confirm each send, which is critical to make this quick and efficient.

If you are in an emergency, you don’t want to have to open up the Shortcuts app to trigger this shortcut. Thus, my son created a small Shortcuts widget that triggers this shortcut when you press it and he placed that widget at the top right of the widgets screen that you access by swiping from left to right on the front of an iPhone. I like that location. First, the widget is in a location that you are unlikely to hit accidentally, Second, it is easily accessible, even if the iPhone is locked.

Thanks to this widget, if my son senses that he is in an emergency, he can swipe to the right and press one button. That’s it. That alerts me and my wife that something is wrong and tells us where he is located. And if someone dangerous is near my son, he won’t have to say anything.

Will my son ever need to use this shortcut? I certainly hope not. But just like I hope that I never have to use crash detection or Satellite SOS on my iPhone 14 Pro, I’m very glad that he has this shortcut, just in case. Consider whether you want to create something similar.

A few days ago, Apple released the results for its 2023 fiscal third quarter (which ran from April 2, 2023, to July 1, 2023) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results.  This is typically not a big fiscal quarter for Apple, but Apple had a very good one this time last year with record revenue of $83 billion. This year, the revenue for the quarter was $81.8 billion, down about 1% from last year, but that is still better than two years ago which was a record for the fiscal third quarter. Apple makes so much money that even when it is a little down from the prior year, it still does very, very, well. If you want to get all of the nitty-gritty details, you can listen to the audio from the announcement conference call on the Apple website, or you can read a transcript of the call prepared by Jason Snell of Six Colors.  Apple’s official press release is here.  Here are the items that stood out to me.

iPhone

• Apple’s iPhone revenue for the quarter was $39.67 billion, down 2% compared to the record $40.67 billion this time last year.
• Apple CFO Luca Maestri said that well over 50% of all iPhones are sold using some sort of a program that helps to reduce the price: trade-in, installment payments, financing, carrier promotion, etc. Maestri said: “We want to do more of that because we think it really helps reduce the affordability threshold for our products and we think it is also one of the reasons why our product mix has been has been very strong during the last couple of cycles.”

iPad

• iPad revenue was $5.79 billion, down from $7.22 billion this time last year.
• Apple CEO Tim Cook said that revenue was down compared to last year in part because this time last year Apple was seeing lots of sales from the launch of the new iPad Air.

Other

• On April 30, 2020, Apple announced that it had over 515 million paid subscriptions across all of its services. Over half a billion subscriptions seemed pretty impressive. But now, just over three years later, Apple has announced over a billion paid subscriptions. That cuts across lots of different services—not only Apple Music and Apple TV+ but also third-party apps in which people pay money to Apple for a subscription. Nevertheless, that is a lot of people paying money to Apple every single month, and I’m sure that for Apple it helps to both increase overall revenue and even out revenue that otherwise has highs and lows as new products are released.
• Maestri noted that there are over 2 billion Apple devices in active use, a number that continues to grow.
• As for Apple TV+, Cook specifically mentioned that some of the particularly popular shows right now are the new shows Hijack and Silo and the returning shows Foundation and The Afterparty. I enjoyed and can recommend all four of those shows.
• So many people are talking about AI nowadays that it comes as no surprise that one analyst asked Cook about AI. Here is how Cook responded: “If you take a step back, we view AI and machine learning as core fundamental technologies that are integral to virtually every product that we build. And so if you think about WWDC in June, we announced some features that will be coming in iOS 17 this fall, like personal voice and live voicemail. Previously, we had announced life-saving features like fall detection and crash detection and ECG. None of these features that I just mentioned and many, many more would be possible without AI and machine learning. And so it’s absolutely critical to us. And of course, we’ve been doing research across a wide range of AI technologies, including generative AI for years. We’re going to continue investing and innovating and responsibly advancing our products with these technologies with the goal of enriching people’s lives.”
• Cook said that he is using a prototype of the Apple Vision Pro “daily.”
• Cook finished up his introductory remarks with this interesting statement: “Apple remains a champion of innovation, a company fueled by boundless creativity, driven by a deep sense of mission, and guided by the unshakable belief that a great idea can change the world. Looking ahead, we’ll continue to manage for the long term, always pushing the limits of what’s possible and always putting the customer at the center of everything we do.” That sounds good to me.

It’s time for episode 108 of the In the News podcast, and what a fun show we had this week. We discuss Apple TV+, the smartphone market, how Apple is doing with iPhone sales, HomeKit and CarPlay hardware, and why spatial audio is a good idea in Microsoft Teams meetings—but unfortunately, it seems like you need use a wired headphone for now, not Bluetooth. Boo.

In this week’s Where Y’at? segment, we talk about tracking house plants.

This episode is sponsored by SaneBox, so Brett and I explained why that service makes you so much more efficient when you deal with emails. Go to sanebox.com/inthenews to sign up for a free trial and get a $25 credit toward a SaneBox subscription.

In our In the Know segment, Brett explained how to filter messages in the Mail app, and I shared a tip for having your iPhone remind you at a later time/date that you need to take care of a specific email.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice.  You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

When Apple first started producing TV shows and its first original show was Planet of the Apps, I had my doubts about what might come next. But ever since the start of Apple TV+ with just a few shows on November 1, 2019, the quality of the programming has steadily improved to the point where Apple TV+ is now perhaps my favorite streaming network. Case in point: this week, Apple aired the seventh and final episode of the show Hijack, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, just as I have every other episode of this suspenseful show. What is great is that the star of the show, played by Idris Elba (Stringer Bell in The Wire) is not an action hero but a professional negotiator, so he uses his words and psychology, not weapons, to battle the bad guys. If you haven’t watched Hijack yet, I urge you to do so. And when you do so, good luck resisting binging the whole thing at once. I’m not sure that I would have had the patience to wait very long if all episodes had been available when I started. Will there be a second season? The star of the show, Idris Elba, told K.J. Yossman of Variety back in June that he was “open to that character coming back” but he didn’t want it to be yet another hijack plot, which makes sense. And now, the news of note from the past week:

• Air Canada announced this week that you can now watch Apple TV+ shows on Air Canada flights. As much as I just raved about Hijack, that might not be the best show to watch while you are actually on an airplane.
• Why are smartphone sales down while the iPhone’s market share is increasing? David Sparks of MacSparky has some theories.
• Users of AirPods know that Spatial Audio can make a big difference when you are watching a video or listening to music. and Spatial Audio in the FaceTime app has been able to make voices sound more spread out for a while. A post by Hong Sodoma on the Microsoft Teams blog this week reports that Microsoft has now also added spatial audio to Microsoft Teams so that people on the left side of the screen appear to be talking from that direction, etc. Watch the video in that post starting around the 60-second mark to see it in action.
• Shortcuts expert Matthew Cassinelli—he was part of the team that invented the app Workflow, which Apple purchased and renamed Shortcuts—reports that there are new shortcuts in iOS 17 that let you open up the camera in a specific mode, such as selfie of video. Sometimes, I want to start taking a video or a photo right away, and hopefully this will help to make that a reality.
• Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac reviews the Philips Hue Enrave, a ceiling fan light that has a very simple design so you won’t really notice it but it works with HomeKit. It doesn’t have all the colors in the spectrum like some Hue products, but it does let you adjust the color temperature of the white light. There are different sizes and prices, but it looks like a solid product for a smart home.
• Julia Buckley of CNN reports that a man traveling from the United States to Zurich via London landed in Zurich only to discover that his bike was missing. And considering that this was a biking trip, that was a problem. But he had an AirTag on the bike, which allowed him to confirm that his bike never made it out of London, and eventually, the airline got his bike to him thanks to the AirTag—even though it was about halfway through his time in Europe.
• Using an AirTag to track a bike doesn’t seem unusual. What seems unusual is using an AirTag to track a plant. But as reported by Fox29 Philadelphia, that is what one person did after being annoyed about potted plants disappearing from the front of her house.
• Last week, I reported that a four-pack of AirTags was on sale on Amazon for under $85, a great price. This week they are a little higher at $88.99, but that is still a discount over Apple’s $99 price.
• Leander Kahiney of Cult of Mac says that if you want an inexpensive way to add wireless CarPlay to your car, you can use an Amazon Fire tablet.
• And finally, Apple has launched a new campaign called Pay the Apple Way to show how much easier and safer it is to pay for items using Apple Pay. Here is one of the new, funny videos in that campaign called Everyday Captcha: