Did you watch Apple's "Let Loose" iPad announcement on Tuesday morning (or did you watch the stream after the fact)? If so, you saw that the quality of the video that Apple streamed was amazing. Once again, it was shot using an iPhone, so a video that was ostensibly about the new iPads was indirectly about how impressive an iPhone is for recording video. Filmmaker Stu Maschwitz notes that for a few shots, Apple used Panavision lenses connected to an iPhone to achieve a beautiful shallow depth-of-field that go far beyond what Cinematic Mode can produce when you only use the iPhone's built-in lenses, but I see nothing wrong with adding an accessory to an iPhone to get a better result. Heck, I had fun using a $10 solar filter with my iPhone 15 Pro when I took pictures of the recent eclipse, and I've long been a fan of using the Studio Neat Glif + Hand Grip with my iPhone when I take video. Maschwitz also notes that this was the first Apple event that was streamed in HDR. I watched the video stream on an inexpensive and boring Dell monitor connected to my boring Dell PC in my office at work, so while I enjoyed the content of the video, the video quality that I saw was far from color-corrected HDR. However, I just re-watched a few minutes of the video on my iPhone 15 Pro, which does a beautiful job showing HDR, and many of the shots are incredibly vivid (albeit small) on my iPhone's screen. Now that Apple has streamed its first event video using HDR, I suspect that Apple will continue to do so going forward. Thus, if you purchase the new iPad Pro 13" (M4), watching future Apple events on that impressive Ultra Retina XDR display featuring a Tandem OLED screen will likely be the best way to experience the full quality of Apple's video stream. So now you have one more reason to purchase a new iPad. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Chance Miller of 9to5 Mac reports that if you purchase one of the new iPads, one thing that you won't get in the box is a sticker with the Apple logo on it. I don't know when Apple began this practice—at least the 1990s and maybe even the 1980s?—but apparently, it is now over. Miller reports that this is part of Apple's environmental goals as it seeks to make its packaging plastic-free. And that makes sense, but the opposing view from John Gruber of Daring Fireball is: "Boo hiss. The fun of those stickers outweighs their environmental impact." If you still want a sticker, fear not: you can ask for one at an Apple Store, although supplies are limited. If the Apple Stores run out, and as you can see from this photo I just took, I have what seems like thousands of them in my desk where I have stored them for decades without really doing anything with them.
- Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac compares the M4 iPad Pro with the M2 iPad Air and explains what you get for the extra $300 to $400.
- Hartley Charlton of MacRumors did something similar in a handy chart that lines up all of the differences.
- Jason Snell of Six Colors explains why Apple introduced the M4 in the new iPad Pro.
- Snell also had a chance to try the new iPads at a press briefing in New York, and here are his first impressions.
- Dan Moren of Six Colors steps back and takes a look at the current entire iPad lineup.
- John Voorhees of MacStories reports on all of the small announcements during Apple's recent event.
- One omission from the new iPads noted by Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac: support for 5G mmWave, presumably because carrier adoption has been so miserable.
- Chris Welch of The Verge bids a fond farewell to Apple's Smart Keyboard Folio, which Apple is no longer selling for the iPad Pro. It wasn't the best keyboard because it was so thin, but it weighed far less than the Apple Magic Keyboard so it made it easier to carry around both an iPad and a keyboard.
- The Smart Folio without a keyboard is still around, which is good news. I've been using either an Apple Smart Cover or an Apple Smart Folio since the very first iPad. It protects the screen and gives you a way to prop up an iPad on a table. However, as Dan Moren of Six Colors reported, the Smart Folio was updated this year to support multiple viewing angles.
- Juli Clover of MacRumors discusses all of the new features in the Apple Pencil Pro. When I wrote my initial post earlier this week on Apple's announcements, I neglected to mention that one of the new features is support for Find My. I edited my original post to add a reference to that feature and to explain that, as someone who previously lost an Apple Pencil in a hotel conference room, I wish that this feature had been available long ago.
- William Gallagher of AppleInsider reports that the Apple Pencil Pro will come in five different artistic boxes that show the word "Pro" in different ways. Collect them all!
- If you have ever walked through the French Quarter in New Orleans, you may have heard someone trying to hustle you by offering to bet you that they can tell you "where you got them shoes." (Spoiler alert: their answer will be that you got them on your feet.) But as Gallagher of AppleInsider notes, you may be wondering where Apple CEO Tim Cook got them shoes that he wore during the recent Apple announcement, and it turns out that he was wearing one-of-a-kind Nike sneakers that were made especially for the launch.
- Jovana Naumovski of Gadget Hacks shares some tips for doing things faster with an iPhone.
- The Apple Vision Pro needs to have additional fully immersive content, so it is always nice to learn that more is on the way. Marvel announced that it is releasing a "What If..." story as an immersive story coming exclusively to the Apple Vision Pro.
- If I had released last week's In the News post one day later, the video at the end definitely would have been this fun Star Wars-themed video focused on the precision finding feature called Find Your Friends.
- Dan Moren of Six Colors identifies some of the Easter Eggs in that video.
- And finally, you might want to watch the following video now because Apple may remove it soon. As a part of Apple's announcement earlier this week, it showed a video called Crush! in which a large number of musical instruments and other devices are crushed together to produce an iPad. I thought that the video was moderately funny but others disagreed. For example, as reported by Ben Lovejoy of 9to5Mac, actor Hugh Grant interpreted the ad as Apple destroying traditional tools that allowed human creativity and replacing them with silicon. The backlash caused Apple to release an apology to Ad Age, reproduced by Chance Miller for 9to5Mac, and to cancel plans to run the video as a TV commercial. John Gruber said that now that Apple is at the top of our entire society, it needs to be ready for people to go after it and ought to predict this type of critique. The whole debate raises questions about the role of technology in society—questions that are far more interesting than the video itself, which is fine but nothing special. So if the following link doesn't work because the video was pulled by Apple, I suppose you didn't miss all that much.
