I am a season ticket holder at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans for the Broadway shows that go on tour, and every season there are some shows that surprise me. Last weekend, I saw Mrs. Doubtfire, a show for which I had very low expectations because I didn't think that movie would translate well to a musical. To my surprise, the show was quite good, and I'm so glad I saw it. One show that I can definitely see translating well to the stage is Schmigadoon!, a fun show on Apple TV+ that had a great first season and a pretty good second season but was unfortunately canceled after that. The TV show felt very much like a Broadway musical, so I wasn't surprised when I saw the report from Greg Evans of Deadline that the musical comedy TV series is going to become a stage production in Washington, D.C. That has the potential to be a very good show. And now, the news of note from the past week:
- The name "iPhone" has now become such a part of our vocabulary that we don't think about it very much, but in early 2009, when the iPhone was still relatively new, I wrote a post called Why the "i" in iPhone? which explained that the "i" originally came from the iMac. But why the "i" in iMac? Carlton Reid of Wired asked that question to Ken Segall, the guy who convinced Steve Jobs to call the iMac the iMac, and it resulted in this great article.
- By the way, Segall is also half of the team responsible for Scoopertino, a site I wrote about in 2010 that remains funny today even though it rarely gets updated. But there was a new post this year called Apple relaunches Project Titan as Project Titanic.
- When Apple released iOS 17.5 last week, it apparently had a bug that would resurface deleted photos for some people, as noted by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, but fortunately, iOS 17.5.1 came out to fix it.
- Chance Miller of 9to5Mac provides additional details on this bug released by Apple. For folks who saw the bug, some of the resurfaced photos may have been deleted as long ago as 2010, but they got caught in a corrupt database that was passed from one device to another when restoring from a backup or performing a device-to-device transfer over the years. I don't think that this bug affected me, but I've got over 65,000 photos on my iPhone/iPad so if there are a few deleted ones that came back to life last week, it might be a while before I discover them.
- Joy of Tech has a cute cartoon based on the iOS 17.5 bug.
- Malcolm Owen of AppleInsider compares the speed of the iPad Pro to a Mac.
- Wesley Hillard of AppleInsider reviews the new iPad Pro and calls it Luxury technology in an impossibly-thin package. He also does a great job of showing off the differences between the regular display and the Nano Texture display.
- What do you do with an old iPad after you upgrade? When I purchased my iPad Pro 13" M4, I sold my prior iPad Pro back to Apple and got about $500 for it, which made a big difference on the purchase price of the new iPad. But Andrew Orr of AppleInsider reports that most iPad owners hold on to their old iPads and find a new use for them. This makes sense because even an old iPad can still do a whole lot. My kids have certainly had hand-me-down iPads over the years. My daughter still uses my old first-generation iPad Pro from 2015 for simple uses like YouTube and TikTok, and it works fine for her needs.
- Charles Martin of AppleInsider shares the tale of Sigmund Judge, who bought two new Magic Keyboards for iPad and then replaced the keys on one with the keys on the other. The result is a keyboard that looks pretty darn good and matches the aesthetic of the Apple Siri Remote for the Apple TV.
- As noted by Juli Clover of MacRumors, Apple debuted the second episode of its Adventure series on the Apple Vision Pro. The first episode, showing Faith Dickey walking across a tightrope thousands of feet in the air, is one of the most amazing things to watch on a Vision Pro. The second episode is called Parkour, and it takes place in Paris.
- Wesley Hilliard of AppleInsider notes that Apple also updated the sizzle reel video on the Apple Vision Pro, and it includes lots of sports (soccer, football, basketball, golf), which is particularly nice to watch in an immersive environment.
- I watched both of those new immersive videos on my Apple Vision Pro shortly before typing this paragraph, and my heart is still pumping fast. Apple's immersive videos apparently take a long time to create, but the end result is so incredible and lifelike. I know of no other entertainment experience that is as engaging as this. It makes my head spin to think of what it might be like five or so years in the future when there is much more immersive content. In the meantime, if you don't have an Apple Vision Pro, I encourage you to go to an Apple Store so that you can (hopefully) see the new sizzle reel for immersive video. I wish I could have you all over to my house to watch it. It's great.
- The Wirecutter shares 15 iPhone tips, and there are some pretty good ones on the list.
- Jason Snell of Six Colors discusses the rumor of an upcoming high-end iPhone Ultra.
- Kanika Modi of the Mac Observer explains how to use the Google app on the iPhone to try out Google's new Gemini AI.
- William Gallagher of AppleInsider notes that the Shazam app has added support for Live Activities. Thus, if you launch the app and then switch to a different app or the home screen, Shazam will continue running in the background—for a short time at least—and then notify you in the Dynamic Island when it recognizes the song. This is interesting, but I find that Shazam is usually so fast at recognizing songs that I don't mind waiting.
- This headline from The Verge doesn't really mean very much today, but I would have thought that it was major news if you had told it to me in the 1980s: Atari acquires longtime rival Intellivision.
- And finally, back on September 29, 2023, I posted a trailer for the movie Argylle, which came to theaters in February and then to Apple TV+ on April 12, 2024. After my initial enthusiasm for the movie, I then saw some horrible reviews such as the one that John Gruber of Daring Fireball posted on Letterboxd where he called the movie "[o]ne of the worst movies I’ve ever finished watching." But then I saw some more positive reviews, and my wife and I decided to watch it on Apple TV+. I'm glad that we gave it a chance. Nothing remarkable, but it was a cute premise and fun to watch. If you have been scared away by the bad reviews, I recommend that you check it out anyway. Gruber says: "If you insist, and give it 10 minutes, believe me, it doesn’t get better." I agree with the idea of giving it 10 minutes to see what you think, but for me, the first 10 minutes made me want even more. So here is the trailer for Argylle again. Or better yet, skip the trailer (which actually contains too many spoilers in my opinion) and just see what you think of the movie after 10 minutes.
