"The year was 1983. Never Say Never Again was the top movie in the land. Total Eclipse of the Heart was the #1 song, and the most popular show on TV was Dallas. A gallon of gas cost 1.59 cents." So begins this post on the Microsoft 365 Insider blog, a post announcing that Microsoft Word is now 40 years old. When first introduced in 1983, it was actually called "Multi-Tool Word" and an article in InfoWorld that you can still read on the Internet explained that the program worked with a mouse (which the article helpfully described for those unfamiliar with such a device). That article also notes that it would be a "'see what you get' word processor, which means text appears on the screen just as it will appear when it is printed on paper." The original versions of Word ran on Xenix and MS-DOS, but as noted by Adam Engst of TidBITS this week, it was ported to the Mac in 1985. I started using Word on my first Mac in 1988 (a year before it was ported to Windows in 1989) and I have been using Word virtually every week, if not every day, since then. The release of Microsoft Word for the iPad on March 27, 2014, was one of the most important app releases of all time for lawyers who use an iPad. Later that year, the app was updated to work with the iPhone as well. Over the last forty years, Microsoft has certainly made some decisions about the Word app that I disagreed with (yes, I'm thinking about you, Word for Mac version 6.0 released in 1993), but I cannot deny how consistently useful this software has been for me ever since the 1980s. So happy birthday to Word, and thank you to the fine folks at Microsoft for the efforts over the last forty years. And before I leave the topic of birthdays, I'm happy to note that you are reading the 700th edition of the In the News post on iPhone J.D. If you are interested, I explained the origin of In the News back in 2011 when I published the 100th edition. Okay, enough about the past. Let's turn to the present and the top news of note from the past week:
- I cannot say enough good things about this review of watchOS 10 by Alex Guyot of MacStories. Reading that review made me realize that there are tons of new features in watchOS 10 that I really wasn't taking advantage of yet. Now that I have taken the time to edit my Smart Stack and remember that I can double-click on the digital crown to see and switch to recently used apps, I'm getting much more out of my Apple Watch.
- If you are interested in a leather case for your new iPhone, John Gruber of Daring Fireball recommends models from Ryan London and Bullstrap.
- Jason Cross of Macworld identifies six hidden features of the iPhone 15 line, including the ability to find out the date that your battery was manufactured and first used.
- If you are looking to upgrade the Wi-Fi in your home or office, this article from Darrell Etherington of TechCrunch makes me think that the eero Max 7 is about as good as you can get. It is expensive, so it will be more than many folks need, but combining the ease of use of eero with the advances of Wi-Fi 7 sounds pretty nice for those who already pay for super-fast Internet and want to turn that into super-fast Wi-Fi. Having said that, if $1,149.99 for a two-pack seems like too much money for you, eero is also selling cheaper models with fewer features. The eero Pro 3-pack that I reviewed in 2020 continues to work amazingly well for my home.
- Peter Cohen of Apple Insider reports that Apple's tap to pay feature on the iPhone is coming to Ukraine for the first time now that it is being supported by PrivatBank, the country's largest bank. I'm sure that this will be useful for many folks in that country, and it sure is nice to be able to report on good news from Ukraine.
- I've been using an Eve Motion sensor since I reviewed it in 2018, and it works well for me. Mine is in my TV room, and whenever I enter the room and the lights are off, the motion sensor sees me and triggers a shortcut to turn on the lights in the room. Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac explained this week why the Eve Motion is the best HomeKit motion sensor. He is using a more advanced model than the one that I reviewed in 2018, so I'm sure that the new version ($49.95 on Amazon) works even better.
- Megan Wollerton of The Verge recommends some of the best smart plugs for your smart home.
- Two years ago, Apple introduced the Apple Music Voice Plan. It provided access to Apple Music for only $5 a month, but the catch is that you could only use Siri to access music. I guess the idea is that if you only wanted music on a HomePod, you were going to use Siri anyway. The idea never made sense to me—I use my iPhone to pick music to play on a HomePod—and as noted by Roman Loyola of Macworld, Apple cancelled that plan this week.
- Derek Wise of 9to5Mac notes that you can use the new app from NASA called Spot the Station to learn about the International Space Station and get alerted when you can see it in the sky.
- And finally, this past Monday night, Apple streamed a 30-minute presentation to announce new Macs using the new M3 chip—which is similar to the A17 Pro chip used in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. The most amazing thing to me about the presentation was not the new hardware but the quality of the video. I watched it at home on my 4K HDR television by LG, the C1 model, and I was amazed at how good everything looked. And then I was truly amazed when the very end of the video said that it was shot using an iPhone 15 Pro Max, the same iPhone that I use. Obviously, Apple used sophisticated equipment to hold the iPhone and move it around, much like anyone shooting professional video would do with any camera, but even so, I thought that it was neat that the hardware being used to take that amazing video was the same hardware that I use to create home movies. We've come a long way from the very first edition of In the News in 2009 when I said that it would be nice if Apple would introduce an iPhone "with video recording capabilities." Apple can check that one off of its to do list. Apple created a two-minute behind the scenes video to provide a peak at how the iPhone was used to create the video it streamed a few days ago:
