Tick tock goes the clock as the countdown begins for TikTok to either sell to a buyer in the U.S. or shut down the service in this country, and that’s the first topic that Brett and I discuss on this week’s episode of the In the News podcast. We also talk about what Apple might be planning for its upcoming announcement on May 7, more information about what Apple plans to do next with AI, HomeKit devices that you can use outside your house, small indoor chargers, a huge outdoor charger that top of your iPhone while also chilling your cocktail, using an Apple Vision Pro to conduct surgery, and more.
In our Where Y’At? segment, we discuss using an AirTag to chase down a car thief.
In our In the Know segment, Brett shares a fantastic tip about how you can use Keynote to work with images. I talk about how you can use your iPhone with a red tint at night so that it doesn’t destroy your night vision.
Yesterday, I took a vacation from work, and my wife and I attended the first day of Jazz Fest in New Orleans. This is a two-weekend festival that is at the end of April and beginning of May every year. If you haven’t been before, it gets my highest recommendation. There are over a dozen stages, so at any one time, there is always lots of good music to hear. Yesterday, I listened to some great Blues music and a little bit of Gospel, some swamp rock and roll, a great brass band, the legendary Dixie Chicks who celebrated 60 years of singing “Chapel of Love,” Zydeco music from Rockin’ Dopsie, and then a little band you may have heard of called the Beach Boys. It was an eclectic mix of music and I loved it all. Upcoming artists this year include The Rolling Stones, Foo Fighters, Jon Batiste, Vampire Weekend, Chris Stapleton, and many more. If you cannot be here in person, you can also stream some of the music live or after the fact on WWOZ. (For example, use this link and then jump to the 50:10 point to hear John Boutte playing yesterday his toe-tapping crowd favorite: At the Foot of Canal Street.) We also had some amazing food throughout the day including beignets (both sweet with powdered sugar and savory with crawfish), a turduckin po-boy, cochon de lait, soft shell crab, catfish, meat pies, crawfish enchiladas, the always refreshing Mango Freeze, and more. If you hear “festival food” and think corn dogs, this is the opposite of that, some of the best dishes that New Orleans has to offer. If you enjoy music, food, art, and having fun, this is my annual PSA that you owe it to yourself to attend Jazz Fest in New Orleans one of these years. And now, the news of note from the past week:
A podcast update: Brett Burney and I cannot record this week’s edition of the In the News podcast on Friday morning because of Brett’s travel schedule, so we will instead record on Saturday morning. Absent any hiccups, you should see the episode in your podcast player and the video on YouTube on Saturday afternoon.
The ultimate App Store rejection is the one that occurs when Congress passes a law, signed by the President, that essentially bans your app, and that is what happened to TikTok this week, as reported by Cristiano Lima-Strong of the Washington Post.
Some, such as John Gruber of Daring Fireball, have been arguing in favor of a ban for a long time. Others think that the new law is xenophobic, unconstitutional, and/or wrong. I’m not sure where I come out. It’s quite complicated, and there are interesting arguments on both sides.
After May 7, the next big set of announcements from Apple will come during the Keynote presentation at its WWDC developer conference on June 10. It seems certain that AI will be a part of that presentation. In the meantime, some of the AI researchers at Apple have been publishing academic papers on these topics. For example, Malcolm Owen of AppleInsider reports on new ways that Apple researchers have come up with to improve the accuracy and reliability of AI using large language models. The details of these advancements are way over my head, but it is good to see folks at Apple making progress.
Jason Snell of Six Colors thinks that when Apple announces new AI features, it will be a reason to upgrade your iPhone and other devices because you will need to have even more RAM to run the AI on-device.
Here is another story about a person recovering their stolen vehicle thanks to an AirTag. But this one is a little more dramatic because dashcam videos allow you to see much of the story, not just read about it. Mekahlo Medina of the NBC affiliate in Las Angeles has the story, and I recommend that you watch the video.
The crew at MacStories is back to make HomeKit recommendations, this time for devices that are outside of your home. It’s a great set of recommendations.
There are portable batteries, and then there are portable power stations. Eric Slivka of MacRumors reports on products in development by Bluetti including a portable cooler that looks like a regular ice chest but which works as a refrigerator for up to three days. It even works as a portable ice maker. And oh yeah, you can also use it to charge your iPhone.
Filipe Espósito of 9to5Mac reports that a doctor in Brazil used his Apple Vision Pro to assist during a shoulder arthroscopy surgery. I guess if you are doing a surgery that uses a tiny camera, you might as well display it on a Vision Pro screen. There is also a YouTube video that lets you see what the doctor saw during surgery.
Before I used the iPhone, I was a big fan of Palm OS devices for a decade. My first was the Palm III in 1998 and my last one was the Palm Treo 650, which I used until I purchased an iPhone in 2008. Cameron Kaiser of Ars Technica wrote a great retrospective on all of the devices that ran Palm OS. I enjoyed the walk down memory lane.
And finally, I’ve embedded below the trailer for Season 4 of the Apple TV+ show called Trying. I’m mentioning it today because this is one of those shows that hasn’t gotten a lot of buzz but it is really good: both heartwarming and funny. The show is about a couple in England who are trying to adopt, and since the show is now about to start its fourth season, you can probably guess that the adoption story has a happy ending. But the series also explores the grief that typically goes along with the adoption process. The series especially hit home for me since my wife and I went through this process, and we also know so many others who have gone through the adoption process. But anyone who is a parent will find lots of humor in this series that hits close to home. If you haven’t started this one yet, go back to Season 1 and see what you think. I think you’ll like it. And if you have been watching, Season 4 starts on May 22:
Yesterday, Apple revealed that new iPads will be released on May 7, 2024. No, if you want to be technical about it, Apple did not actually use the word “iPad” when it said that it would have an announcement in two weeks on May 7. But it is clear that is what is coming.
First, Apple did not release any new iPads at all in 2023, so we are certainly due for a new iPad. The iPad Pro was last updated on October 18, 2022, and it was a minor update: a speed bump by going from the M1 to the M2 processor and a new hover feature for the Apple Pencil. There was a more substantial update to the entry-level iPad that same day. The iPad Air was last updated on March 8, 2022, a substantial update that brought many of the best features of the iPad Pro to the iPad Air.
Second, the main graphic associated with the event shows what is clearly a hand holding an Apple Pencil—a stylus that only works with iPads.
(If you were a high school debater like I was, you will especially appreciate the animated version of this graphic with the hand spinning the stylus.)
Those are not enough tea leaves for you? OK, how about this third one. On the service formerly known as Twitter, Tim Cook said yesterday: “Pencil us in for May 7! ✏️”
So new iPads are coming in two weeks. What will we see? The rumor is that we will see a new iPad Pro and iPad Air, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see the entire iPad line updated. It will be interesting to see whether the iPad mini also sees an update; it hasn’t been updated since 2021, and some folks believe that Apple may be done with that size of the iPad.
It also seems like it is time for a new version of the Apple Pencil. The original Apple Pencil was released in 2015 (replaced by a USB-C version in 2023) and the second generation came out in 2018. With the Pencil right there in the graphic, it makes you think that we could soon see a third generation.
One thing that surprised me about this announcement is the time: 7am Pacific. Apple usually does these at 10am Pacific. It makes me wonder if there will be some sort of live event in New York, where the event starts at 10am. We’ll see.
If you have been thinking about getting a new iPad, now is the time to wait to see what Apple announces in two weeks. If you are very happy with your current iPad—which describes me, because I still love the iPad Pro 12.9” (fifth generation) that I purchased three years ago in 2021—the question will be whether Apple has enough new features that even happy iPad users feel compelled to upgrade.
If you had “Apple allows emulator apps in the App Store” on your Bingo card for this month, then you have a better Bingo card supplier than I do. That announcement caught both me and Brett by surprise, so we start this week’s episode of the podcast by discussing what you can do with these apps and what this new announcement means for Apple and the App Store in general. We then talk about larger companies (such as big law firms) using Apple devices, an early precursor to Google Maps and Apple Maps, some great shows that are now on Apple TV+ or coming soon, and much more.
In our Where Y’at? segment, we discuss two recent stories in which Apple’s crash detection technology was used to alert authorities to accidents: one tragic, the other with a happier ending.
In our In the Know segment, we recommend some oldies but goodies as Brett discusses the Compass app and I discuss the Level function in the Measure app.
Well this was unexpected. As John Gruber of Daring Fireball reports, Apple changed the App Store rules to allow apps that can emulate classic gaming devices. As a result, a free app by Riley Testut called Delta that emulates an NES, SNES, N64, Nintendo DS, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance and that has been in development for years but used to require work-arounds to get it on an iPhone, is now on the App Store and in the #1 spot. Not the #1 games spot; the #1 overall spot. There are a lot of legal questions surrounding these emulators because people typically use them with ROM files that they find on the Internet without paying for them, but of course, sometimes the developer has been gone for decades. And although using an emulator is at least at the edge of legality, Dan Moren of Six Colors notes, ironically, that Apple is probably allowing these apps because of the fear of more government regulation. If you still own your old game cartridge, there are sometimes ways to create a backup of the cartridge and then load that in Delta, and John Voorhees of MacStories explains how to do that for Game Boy games. Federicco Viticci of MacStories noted on Mastodon that he just continued playing on his iPhone a saved game from 21 years ago. That’s a long snack break before returning to your game. I’ve tried out some of these emulators in the past, and it can be fun to relive an experience from decades ago even though the sophistication of the old games pale in comparison to modern games. I have fond memories of playing Atari 2600 games late into the night with my friends in the early 1980s, and almost 13 years ago, I had great fun playing a few of them again in a device called the iCade, which turned an iPad into an arcade game. It’s nice to know that we will be seeing more like this on the iPhone and iPad in the future. And now, the other news of note from the past week:
How is Apple doing in large businesses and other large organizations? Jason Snell of Six Colors takes the pulse every year, and the 2024 version of Apple in the Enterprise is now out. In addition to overall scores, he also shares brief comments from lots of different folks, including a few from me.
I love to use the Glif and its hand grip to keep my iPhone steady in my hand when I record video. Unfortunately, the Glif has been back-ordered for months. Malcolm Ower of AppleInsider reports that Rode released two hardware accessories to improve smartphone photography, and if you want to step it up a notch, they look great.
If you enjoy having maps on a screen in your car via CarPlay, you might be interested in this great story about the first company to offer a similar product: the Etak device that was available in the 1980s. It’s a fascinating article.
There is a tragic story by David Willimas of The New Zealand Herald about two teenage girls who were killed while off-roading when their vehicle went down a steep bank. But the article reports that the crash detection feature on the iPhone was the reason that police could locate the crash site.
In happier news, Ben Crust of the New York Post shares the tale of a man who was riding home on his bike when he hit a water-filled pothole and took a horrible fall. When he came to, his watch had already called 911, so an emergency worker was already talking to him to send help. He credits his Apple Watch with saving his life.
One of my all-time favorite Apple TV+ shows is For All Mankind, so I’m so excited to see the report by Joe Otterson in Variety that it has been renewed for a fifth season. In addition, the article reports that there will be a spin-off series focusing on the Soviet space program called Star City. I can’t wait!
And finally, my wife and I have been enjoying watching Palm Royale on Apple TV+. Here is a short behind-the-scenes featurette that doesn’t contain much in the way of spoilers but shows off how the show captures the glamour of Pam Beach in 1969.
If you work for a law firm or other corporate environment that uses Microsoft software for Mobile Device Management, then I suspect that you use the Microsoft Authenticator app for two-factor authentication and Microsoft Intune MDM on your iPhone to provide a secure connection to your firm resources. The current lack of this support for the Apple Vision Pro limits how much real work you can do with an Apple Vision Pro: you don’t have full support for email, you can receive text messages but you see phone numbers instead of sender names (because that is a part of the Contacts app, which you likely sync with Microsoft Exchange), etc. Thus, I look forward to Microsoft updating this software to support the Apple Vision Pro.
Yesterday, I was reading an announcement from Microsoft that OneNote is now available for the Apple Vision Pro. That’s great news because I know a lot of attorneys who love that product. For now, however, Microsoft says that the app “only supports personal accounts and work accounts that are not managed by your organization.” That makes sense because you need the software I just mentioned to use a work account managed by an organization. But it also limits the usefulness of OneNote because so many people use it for work.
Fortunately, Microsoft also says in the same announcement that it is working on bringing Microsoft Authenticator to the Apple Vision Pro for two-factor authentication. The full statement is: “Microsoft Authenticator is not currently available for the Apple Vision Pro. We’re working on it, though, so check back for updates soon.” That’s good to hear.
I still have yet to see an official Microsoft announcement about Intune support for the Apple Vision Pro, but surely Microsoft is working on this. Hopefully, Microsoft will say something about this soon.
[UPDATE: On November 20, 2024, Microsoft announced: “Microsoft plans to introduce mobile device management (MDM) for visionOS and tvOS early next year. This will mark an important step in ensuring that devices that run these systems can be seamlessly managed within Intune. By extending this approach to Apple’s specialty devices, Intune helps ensure your workers—wherever they are—have the tools they need to stay productive and secure, all from a single, unified platform.”]
I loved recording this week’s episode of the In the News podcast, and I highly encourage you to check it out. In fact, you should consider watching at least the first few minutes on YouTube so that you can see the fantastic pictures and video of the eclipse that we discuss in our first segment. We also talk about the Apple Vision Pro and the brutal reviews of the Humane AI pin along with the fact that there are some interesting ideas in there. We then discuss security threats for the iPhone: the incentive for hackers to come up with ways to make you unsafe, and Apple’s recent alert telling some specific users that they had been the target of a sophisticated hacker campaign. Yikes.
In light of those last few stories, our tips of the week are focused on security. I explain Lockdown Mode and who should use it, Brett discusses locking down your iPhone screen, and as a bonus tip we discuss Apple’s safety check feature.
My son and I traveled from New Orleans to Dallas to see the eclipse earlier this week, and I’m so glad that we made the trip. The time leading up to (and after) the eclipse was fascinating, with the sun forming a crescent that you normally associate with the moon, the temperature dropping noticeably and quickly, and the light dimming in a bizarre way that is very different from dawn or dusk. And then the total eclipse was just crazy. Seeing a black hole in the sky made me feel like I was in the middle of some science fiction movie with big-budget special effects. I took a few pictures and videos with my iPhone that I liked, but my son took some truly incredible pictures with his telescope connected to an SLR camera. (I posted a few to my Mastodon account that are worth checking out.) It was a special way to start the week and something that I will never forget. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Mark your calendar: the next eclipse that will cross much of the United States will be Saturday, August 12, 2045. It starts in northern California and ends up in Florida, with most of Florida in the path of totality (I cannot even imagine how many people will be packed into Disney World since Orlando is right in the middle of the path). I hope to be there.
The Humane AI Pin, developed by former Apple engineers, is being marketed as a device to replace your iPhone. But David Pierce of The Verge used it for two weeks and was not impressed, finding a few impressive moments in a sea of lots of frustration. But the video that he created as a part of his review is interesting to watch. My main takeaway is that the Apple Watch solves the same problem and does it much better (an observation that David also makes in this video).
The Apple Vision Pro also has lots of room for improvement, but it can do many things incredibly well. Jason Snell of Six Colors calls it an ongoing experiment.
John Voorhees of MacStories reviews Seasons, a weather app for the Apple Vision Pro that takes advantage of spatial computing.
If you want to watch Netflix programming on an Apple Vision Pro, Zac Hall of 9to5Mac recommends the Supercut app, which costs $5 and includes 4K video and Doby Atmos multichannel audio.
Lumafield took some X-ray CT images of the Apple Vision Pro that show just how sophisticated the hardware is.
If you are looking for a hub for your iPad Pro (or MacBook), I see that the Anker 555 USB-C Hub is on sale on Amazon for only $39.95. It includes Ethernet, HDMI, USB-C PD (input), USB-C 3.1 10Gbps (output), two USB-A 3.1 Gen 2 ports, and an SD card (or microSD).
If you use your iPhone and other Apple devices to get work done, it is critical that you do what you can to keep the device secure, such as installing software updates from Apple. As one data point showing what we are up against, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai of TechCrunch reports that companies are now paying $5 to $7 million for zero-day iPhone hacks. That’s a lot of incentive for hackers to look for the next way to break into your device.
Of course, the one thing scarier than hackers trying to hack the type of phone that you use is hackers trying to hack your specific iPhone. Manish Singh of TechCrunch reports that Apple spent alerts to specific people in 92 countries on Wednesday that said: “Apple detected that you are being targeted by a mercenary spyware attack that is trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID [specific ID]. This attack is likely targeting you specifically because of who you are or what you do. Although it’s never possible to achieve absolute certainty when detecting such attacks, Apple has high confidence in this warning — please take it seriously.”
If you ever get a warning like that from Apple, or you are afraid that you might be the sort of target who could get such a warning in the future, you should consider turning on Lockdown mode on your iPhone. That special mode is made for people like you.
A new series called Dark Matter is coming to Apple TV+ on May 8, and Oliver Haslam of iMore says that this is good news because it was one of the best sci-fi books of the last decade.
And finally, Apple TV+ released the first trailer for the movie Fly Me to the Moon starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum. It is a comedy-drama that takes place around the Apollo 11 mission, and it looks like a lot of fun. It releases in theaters this July and then I’m sure on Apple TV+ a little after that. Here is the trailer:
The Apple Vision Pro is mostly just a prototype for what future headsets will do—headsets that I expect to be cheaper, lighter, thinner, etc. Nevertheless, it is fun to get a preview of the future. Since Day 1, it has been clear that immersive videos on an Apple Vision Pro were something special and unlike any other medium. You can look up, down, and side-to-side and you really feel like you are there. In this week’s episode of the In the News podcast, Brett Burney and I discuss a second example of something truly new with the Apple Vision Pro, a new feature just activated this week called immersive Persona. In this mode, you see floating heads and hands from your friends in the same room that you are in (or, in a shared virtual world). It is the next step forward in videoconferencing, but at the same time, it is unlike any prior videoconference experience, far less like Zoom or Teams or FaceTime and more like something futuristic that you would see in a Star Wars movie. We also discuss a new arcade basketball game for the Vision Pro, a new charger that looks great for Standby mode, and more.
Brett’s tip of the week concerns notifications on the Apple Watch. I also share an Apple Watch tip: the best watch face for when you are outside in the bright sunlight.
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.
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:
