For a while now, if you wanted a good wireless charging stand for the iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods that worked with standby mode, you had two options that were both $150: the Anker 3-in-1 Cube with MagSafe and the Twelve South HiRise 3 Deluxe. I own them both, and I use them both every day. But now that the Qi2 standard can offer features similar to MagSafe without Apple's MagSafe certification, there is a cheaper option that looks quite good: the Anker MagGo 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Station, and it is only $89.99 on Amazon. Anker has a good reputation for making high-quality products, so this looks like a fantastic and less expensive alternative. And I mention all of this today because Standby Mode is perhaps my favorite feature of iOS 17, so if you don't yet have a MagSafe (or MagSafe compatible) stand yet, you are in for a real treat when you get one. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- Zac Hall of 9to5Mac discusses two games for the Apple Vision Pro that let you play arcade basketball wherever you are.
- Raymond Wong of Inverse reports that the new spatial Persona feature for the Apple Vision Pro launched this week. You can use it to take your avatar out of the traditional FaceTime rectangle so that your Persona can appear to float in a space when you are communicating with someone else using an Apple Vision Pro.
- Jason Snell of Six Colors also writes about the spatial Persona feature and explains that it makes it seem like the other person is sitting in the room with you. I had a chance to try out the feature with someone else last night, and I found the feature to be incredibly impressive. I could see the other person and their hand motions, and we could have a conversation just like we were in the same room. If I got up and moved to a different chair, the spatial audio made it sound like the other person was talking from the same spot. And like Jason shows off in that article, we tried the Game Room app (which is part of an Apple Arcade subscription) and played a game of battleship. Spatial Persona works particularly well for this sort of game because I could see the other person's face as I looked around the battleship board. Much like watching immersive video on the Apple Vision Pro is unlike anything that I've ever seen before, interacting with another person using the new spatial Persona feature is completely unlike any other video chat that I've done before. I honestly feel like the two of us hung out in the same room together, even though my brain knows that it was only virtual.
- I haven't tried spatial Persona with more than one person at the same time, but Stephen Hackett of 512 Pixels did, and he shares some photos of what it looks like. This is another one of the Apple Vision Pro features that has incredible potential.
- Dan Moren of Six Colors writes that the Apple TV hardware is being held back by shortcomings in tvOS.
- Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac reports that Apple TV+ just added a new batch of over two dozen movies to its limited-time collection including the three John Wick films, Forrest Gump, Ghostbusters, The Godfather, The Italian Job, Clueless, and more.
- And finally, Apple occasionally produces videos shot using an iPhone to show off how good the video camera is. In this short film, Japanese director Takashi Miike takes a manga called Midnight and converts it into a live-action film. It is amazing how much this film truly conveys the feeling of reading a comic book. And the bright colors and interesting camera shots really shows off what you can do with an iPhone:
