Jeff Richardson

On Monday, June 10, at 10 Pacific / 1 Eastern, Apple will stream a Keynote address as a part of its developer conference, WWDC24. Every year, Apple takes this opportunity to preview the next versions of its major operating systems, so on Monday we will learn about new features in iOS 18, iPad OS 18, and other operating systems that Apple will release in a few months, probably September 2024. This year will be a little different. For prior WWDC keynotes, certain specific features were the big news, such as the StandBy feature announced at WWDC in 2023. But this year, I expect a theme to be the big news: AI. Apple has been hinting for months that AI will be the big theme of WWDC, and that doesn’t come as a big surprise because many other technology companies have been making major AI announcements lately. And that has resulted in articles such as this one: How Apple Fell Behind in the AI Arms Race by Aaron Tilley of the Wall Street Journal. Articles with that angle strike me as unfair. First, Apple has been incorporating AI for many years, even adding a special neural engine to its chips to handle the processing power. Just to pick one example, the Memories feature of Photos always surprises and delights me with the pictures it selects from my collection, and it uses AI to select pictures that I might like. Second, the companies that have been on the bleeding edge of AI have also had lots of embarrassing incidents, often because of the hallucinations in AI. One of my favorite recent examples was when Google’s AI recommended that people eat rocks every day, and the source of that advice was discovered to be this article from The Onion. (In case you don’t know, perhaps because you have been living under one of those rocks, The Onion is a news parody site, and a very good one.) Can Apple meet the challenge of coming up with a take on AI that seems substantial enough to satisfy users while also somehow avoiding the significant problems that seem inherent in so much of the cutting-edge AI nowadays? I myself have no idea how they will thread that needle, and it is the main reason that I am looking forward to Monday’s announcements. And now, as we look forward to WWDC next week, here is the news of note from the past week:

• I enjoyed the recent interview of Tara Cheever of Lit Software by Steve Embry of the FED Speaks podcast from the Federation of Defense & Corporate Counsel. Tara discusses her company’s great apps such as TrialPad and TranscriptPad and explains why the new iPad Air is a particularly good device to use with those apps because it has most of the features that used to be associated with the iPad Pro but at a more attractive price.
• Tara isn’t the only one with that thought. Juli Clover of MacRumors has been using the new iPad Air for the last few weeks and Clover similarly concludes: “The ‌M2‌ ‌iPad Air‌ is essentially an ‌M2‌ ‌iPad Pro‌ without the higher-quality display, and it’s a good middle tier option if you want solid performance for futureproofing but also don’t want to spend $1,000+ on a tablet.”
• Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of The Verge reports that Apple’s newest iPads, MacBooks, and iMacs all contain Thread radios even though Apple hasn’t announced that they are there. I continue to hold out hope that Apple will soon announce some type of major improvements in the smart home category, and perhaps these not-yet-announced Thread radios will be a part of that story.
• To get in the spirit for WWDC24 this weekend, you can listen to a special playlist on Apple Music that Apple created.
• One of the predictions for iOS 18 is that Apple will unveil a standalone Passwords app, something similar to 1Password. John Gruber of Daring Fireball points out that this wouldn’t really be a “new” item because Apple has been slowly improving the Password panel in the Settings app for a long time. Add a few more improvements and put it in a standalone app so that it is easier for users to find and you will end up with a great app. Of course, for almost every good iPhone or iPad app made by Apple, there is an even better third-party app for people who want more features. I suspect that I will stick with 1Password even if Apple releases a fantastic Passwords app simply because I will appreciate features like cross-platform support (I doubt that Apple’s product will work on Windows) and multiuser support (so that I can easily share passwords with my family). But because having strong and unique passwords is so important, and because a password manager is essential for having good password hygiene, I think it would be incredibly great news for Apple to announce a Passwords app on Monday that will have widespread appeal.
• We already know about some of the accessibility improvements coming with iOS 18 because Apple previewed them last month. Christian Zibreg of How-To Geek identifies five of those features that everyone might want to consider using.
• Tesla gets lots of attention for making electronic cars, but there are other great options available. I recently had a chance to check out a friend’s Rivian electric truck, and I was incredibly impressed with all of the features and how nice the ride was. Juli Clover of MacRumors reports that the second-generation versions of Rivian’s vehicles (it makes a pickup and an SUV) will support Apple’s Car Keys feature so that your iPhone or Apple Watch could work as your car key. Rivian vehicles don’t support CarPlay, but they do support Apple Music.
• If you love an iPhone app so much that you just want to curl up to it, Juli Clover of MacRumors reports that Thowboy has a new range of pillows that look like app icons: Notes, Messages, Apple Music, and Mail. Plus a Finder icon, so perhaps these are supposed to be Mac icons and not iPhone icons, but you can certainly think of them as iPhone icons if that helps you sleep better.
• Speaking of the Notes app, Benjamin Mayou of 9to5Mac explains how to create notes that do not have a bold heading.
• Lowe’s has an Apple Vision Pro app called Lowe’s Style Studio that you can use to customize a kitchen. Juli Clover of MacRumors reports that you will be able to try out an Apple Vision Pro with that app at select Lowe’s locations in North Carolina, California, and New Jersey this month. I suspect that if this proves popular, Lowe’s will try this at additional store locations.
• There have been lots of examples of people finding luggage that an airline claimed was lost thanks to an AirTag attached to the luggage. William Gallagher of AppleInsider shares the tale of a woman in Florida who didn’t have an AirTag but she did have a MacBook Pro in her lost luggage. The day after her flight, her Apple Watch alerted her that her computer was at a location, and when she went to that location, she found a house with suitcases littered around it. The police arrested the person who lived at the house, a man who worked at the airport, and reminded the victim that it is always best to call the police before approaching a house that you think contains stolen items.
• Paul Duggan of the Washington Post shares the story (gift link) of a carpenter who was fed up with his tools being stolen so he hid some AirTgs in his larger tools. Sure enough, one of them was stolen, and he alerted the police to the location. They got a search warrant and ultimately discovered 15,000 stolen power tools. Wow.
• John Guber of Daring Fireball comments on a new report that Apple is in talks with China Mobile to bring Apple TV+ to viewers in China, which would be the first U.S. streaming service in China. I share Gruber’s concern that if this happens, it may have an impact on the content of shows on Apple TV+ in an effort to comply with China’s strict restrictions on many types of content.
• For a few months now, Apple TV+ has been making a selection of older movies available for a limited time. I’ve enjoyed that feature quite a bit. For example, I’ve watched some good 3D movies on my Apple Vision Pro. Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac lists the movies that are available this month. (Unfortunately, I don’t think that any are available in 3D this month.)
• Christoffel also reports that Season 2 of the fantastic Apple TV+ show Silo may be coming out this year, and Seasons 3 and 4 may be filmed back-to-back. That sounds great to me; it is a wonderful show.
• Christoffel also came up with a selection of products that will let your iPhone or Apple Watch mimic classic Apple designs.
• Apple announced this week that Apple Books will be the home of audiobooks for the Reese Witherspoon book club.
• And finally, Apple released a cute video called Found that shows off how you can find a lost Mac by using Find My on an iPhone:

I see that a number of Anker products are currently on sale on Amazon for a limited time. I am writing about two of them because I reviewed them recently and I use them every day.

First, the Eufy SmartTrack Card (Eufy is an Anker company) is like a flat AirTag made to fit in a wallet. Here is my full review. In short, if you ever lose your wallet, you can use the Find My app on your iPhone to locate your wallet. This product works great, and the list price is $40, but the price sometimes dips down to about $17, which is how much I paid for mine. The price is there again ($16.98 as I type this), so this is a great product to get now, either for yourself or as a gift.

Second, the Anker 3-in-1 Cube with MagSafe is what I use at my desk every day. I reviewed it at the end of this post about the StandBy feature. In short, it charges and holds an iPhone so that you can use StandBy mode, plus it can charge your AirPods and an Apple Watch. It is also so small that I take it with me whenever I travel. I paid $150 for it, but you can get it now for $112.46.

I use affiliate codes when I link to Amazon, so by using those links to make a purchase, a tiny portion of your sale price goes to help pay the costs associated with keeping the lights on here at iPhone J.D. But more importantly, you’ll get great deals on two products that I use extensively and that I recommend to people even when they are not on sale.

Click here to get the Eufy SmartTrack Card from Amazon (currently $16.98)

Click here to get the Anker 3-in-1 Cube with MagSafe from Amazon (currently $112.46)

The first topic in this week’s episode of the In the News podcast is a deep dive into the new Apple Pencil Pro. Next, we talk about top lists from Apple: Apple’s list of the Top 100 albums of all time, and Apple’s list of finalists for the Apple Design Awards. We also talk about the new Marvel app for the Apple Vision Pro, three new ads for the Apple credit card, some potentially great programming coming to Apple TV+ this summer, and more. 

In our In the Know segment, Brett recommends an app that you can use to put a card into the Apple Wallet app even if the card/service doesn’t natively support that app. And I share a tip for getting ALL of your text messages on a new iPad or other Apple device after you upgrade.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice. You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

The team behind Apple Music and a select group of artists, songwriters, producers, and industry professionals picked the 100 best albums ever made, and Apple published the results this week. Any ranking like this is necessarily subjective and thus likely to lead to debate. For example, there are no country albums on this list, which may cause some to cry foul. But it is still a list of some fantastic albums and may give you some ideas for what to listen to next on your iPhone. Scroll down the website to see the album covers fly by. The top 10 on the list are: (1) The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), Lauryn Hill; (2) Thriller (1982), Michael Jackson; (3) Abbey Road (1969), The Beatles; (4) Purple Rain (1984), Prince & The Revolution; (5) Blonde (2016), Frank Ocean; (6) Songs in the Key of Life (1976), Stevie Wonder; (7) good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012), Kendrick Lamar; (8) Back to Black (2006), Amy Winehouse; (9) Nevermind (1991), Nirvana; and (10) Lemonade (2016), Beyoncé. You can learn more about why those ten made the list in this article from Apple. And now, the rest of the news of note from the past week:

• Speaking of winners, Apple announced the finalists for this year’s Apple’s Design Awards, and John Voorhees of MacStories shares the list. As is true every year, there are some apps on the list that make me say “oh, of course,” and others that I haven’t heard about that I now want to check out.
• Filipe Espósito of 9to5Mac reviews an interesting app called Controller for HomeKit that lets you create a 3D floor plan of your house and then put buttons to control your various HomeKit devices in the different rooms.
• Brent Dirks of App Advice reviews a new app called Kino, made by the team behind Halide Camera, which can be used to improve videos that you take with an iPhone. For example, you can use the Instant Grade feature to apply professional color presets that provide a film-like look.
• John Voorhees of MacStories includes a video with his review of Kino that shows the different filters being used.
• Malcolm Owen of AppleInsider compares the former Apple Magic Keyboard for iPad with the new model that works with the iPad Pro G4.
• Samantha Wiley of iLounge reports that the Apple Vision Pro was recognized as the recipient of the Black Pencil design award.
• Yesterday, Marvel launched a new, free app for the Apple Vision Pro called “What If…? An Immersive Story” (click here to download) which tells an interactive story in an immersive environment. Jason Snell of Six Colors liked it, noting that it is “a single app that demonstrates all the features of the Vision Pro at its best.”
• I tried the “What if…?” app last night, and I liked it. The interactive portions of it didn’t always work for me as well as it seemed they should, but the story proceeds even if you don’t make every hand gesture necessary to cast every spell. The one-hour presentation itself was beautiful, a 3D cartoon in which I seemed to be a participant, which was a new experience for me. This is yet another example of how immersive content on the Vision Pro is something special, and I love it.
• David Sparks of MacSparky discusses the new immersive content for the Vision Pro such as Apple’s new Parkour video and this new Marvel app, noting that “it is simultaneously promising and overdue.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to see this new content and would love to see more, but the Vision Pro is such an early adopter device with, I presume, a relatively small number of current users, that it doesn’t really surprise me that it takes time for everyone to ramp up. Indeed, the system is so new that it wouldn’t surprise me to see some major software updates announced at WWDC next month.
• Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac looks at all of the comedies and dramas coming to Apple TV+ this summer. There are lots of shows on that list that seem like they could be quite good.
• Someone who goes by the handle LegoTruman thinks it would be a good idea for Lego to sell an Apple Store, so he came up with a model to show what it would look like and posted it on the Lego Ideas site. He did a great job with this one!
• Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac shares three recent videos released by Apple to promote using the Apple Credit Card.
• And finally, Apple shot a video of an actress moving around against a green screen and then gave the video to three different artists who used the Procreate app on an iPad Pro M4 to create a different video. The end result is interesting as you see three completely different ideas even though they start from the same video:

The Apple Pencil, first introduced on September 9, 2015, is different from every other Apple product. There is no screen, no buttons, and no ports. The words “top” and “bottom” don’t really mean anything for this product. With the exception of the tip that I’m sure most people never change or even pay much attention to, there are no replaceable parts and no seams. It works as if it were a solid item carved out of a single material. And yet it can do many different things, especially with the new features added in the latest and greatest version, the Apple Pencil Pro. Of course, it is useful for artists, but it is also a great way to take handwritten notes, and it can be a nice tool for simply navigating the interface of the iPad, offering advantages over using your finger.

Since you are reading this review, I presume that you have already used an Apple Pencil or other stylus with an iPad. They have been available since the first iPad was released in 2010. For many years, there were so many options available that I used to routinely review styluses on iPhone J.D. There is an entire section of the Index of this website devoted to those reviews. But when the first generation Apple Pencil was introduced in 2015, it was so much better than third-party styluses that much of the third-party market disappeared. Companies like Adonit still make some interesting products, some of which have the advantage of being less expensive than the Apple Pencil and some of which have unique features, such as this model that can also act as a microphone and store up to nine hours of voice recordings. But for most folks, the best choice is the one made by Apple.

If you have used an Apple Pencil before, your first reaction to the Apple Pencil Pro may be that nothing seems to have changed. A second-generation Apple Pencil and an Apple Pencil Pro are virtually indistinguishable from each other except that one says “Pro” on the side:

But of course, there are some significant differences in what the new Pro version can do.

Haptic feedback

The addition of haptic feedback to the Apple Pencil Pro may be my favorite new feature.  I have long been a fan of double-tapping the side of an Apple Pencil to switch between two tools, such as between a pen and an eraser, and with the addition of haptic feedback, you get instant verification that the tools have changed.

With the new squeeze gesture, discussed below, the haptic feedback convincingly creates the illusion that the Pencil is physically responding to you pinching your two fingers together, even though no actual movement is taking place. Apple has used haptic feedback to create similar illusions of motion in the past, such as when pushing in on an iPhone or Apple Watch screen or when squeezing the post on an Apple AirPod Pro, so Apple has had the chance to perfect this.

The haptic feedback works in lots of other situations too, such as when interacting with certain menus. Tiny little clicks make it clear that you are moving from one item to the next one. It’s very nice.

Apple interface designer Steve Lemay told Nicolas Lellouche of the French website Numerama that fitting this haptic engine—the smallest one ever used by Apple—into the Pencil Pro was one of the most difficult parts of creating this new version of the Pencil because they had to rethink the entire architecture to maintain the same recognizable design on the outside. [For a cute story on why Steve Jobs once referred to Lemay as “Margaret,” read the last six paragraphs of this 2014 New York Times article by Brian X. Chen.]

The new haptic feedback is a wonderful new feature and makes the Pro a big step forward.

Squeeze

The most interesting new feature in the Apple Pencil Pro is Squeeze. Simply squeeze your fingers on the front of the Pencil to trigger an action.

The default action is to show the Tool Palette, and what that means depends upon what app you are in. If an app supports the iPad’s undo feature and there is something that can be undone such as text entry, then the Tool Palette will show an undo and a redo tool. This tool is particularly useful if there are multiple different steps that can be undone; instead of tapping the undo button, you can hold down for a second to see an arc appear with multiple notches.

You can slide the undo icon up and down the notches to select how many of the prior actions you want to undo, with a live preview of what will be undone as you slide up and down. It’s an incredibly useful and nicely implemented feature.

This undo/redo feature is so nice that I wish it were available in all apps. However, app developers can create their own custom Tool Palettes that work in their app, which means that they get to decide whether to include Apple’s new undo/redo feature. Overall, having developer-created custom Tool Palettes is a great idea because they can pick the tools for which it will be most helpful to have easy access in that particular app. And if a developer wants to provide access to more tools than there is space for in the Tool Palette’s arc, that is not a problem because you can use the Pencil to slide the tools on the arc to make new ones appear. For example, in the GoodNotes app that I use almost every day to take handwritten notes, all of the tools that you might frequently use are on the Tool Palette: pen, eraser, highlighter, shape tool, lasso tool, insert picture tool, etc.

For some tools, selecting the tool on the Tool Palette brings up additional choices. For example, selecting the eraser tool in GoodNotes places three different eraser sizes at the end of the Tool Palette so you can quickly change to a larger or smaller size depending upon what you are about to erase.

Of course, you can perform all of these same functions in GoodNotes by using the toolbar at the top of the screen. But the advantage of the Tool Palette is that it is right there next to the Pencil’s tip. Thus, it is much faster to change tools using the Tool Palette than by moving your hand up to the top of the screen and then back to where you were writing.

Although the Tool Palette in GoodNotes has an undo tool, all that you can do is tap it once to undo the last action. And there is no redo tool. I would prefer it if GoodNotes would replace this button when the system-wide undo/redo feature written by Apple, and hopefully this is a change that the developer of GoodNotes will implement in the future.

When I first started using the Apple Pencil Pro, I noticed that I would frequently trigger the Squeeze gesture by accident, and that would slow me down. I subsequently learned that if the Tool Palette comes up by mistake I should simply ignore it and keep writing. Now that I have learned that, I still find myself squeezing by mistake, but the Tool Palette no longer interrupts my flow.

The Tool Palette is neat, but it is not the only action that can be triggered by Squeeze. In the Settings app on the iPad, if you select Apple Pencil and then tap Squeeze under “Actions,” you can assign other actions to Squeeze. For example, you can switch back and forth between tools, the same action that I have long had assigned to the Double Tap gesture.

You can also assign the Squeeze gesture to a Shortcut, which opens up virtually unlimited possibilities. For example, if you are writing notes in one app based upon something that you are reading on a website in Safari, you could create a simple Shortcut that launches Safari and assign that to Squeeze. That way, you could write in your writing app and then squeeze the Apple Pencil to jump back to Safari.

I hope that people come up with interesting and useful Shortcuts that make sense with a Pencil and then share those on the Internet. By connecting the Squeeze gesture to the vast world of Shortcuts, there are lots of interesting possibilities.

Hover

Hover is not a new feature—it was one of the handful of new features that was added to the 2022 version of the iPad Pro—but I’ve heard many people say that their first opportunity to use the Hover feature has been with the Apple Pencil Pro and the 2024 version of the iPad Pro. That is certainly true for me.

The way that the feature works is that you hold the tip of the Pencil close to the iPad’s screen without quite touching the screen. The iPad will sense that you are hovering, and what happens next depends upon what app you are using. 

If you are about to write or sketch, an app can show you where you are about to start writing for greater precision. If you are using the Scribble feature, text fields automatically expand when the Pencil gets near the screen, and handwriting converts to text even faster. If you are in a painting app, the hover feature can show a preview on the screen of what brush you are using and how the paint will be applied so that you can get it just right before you start painting.

The hover feature is also useful even if you are just navigating your iPad because it can work the same as hovering a cursor, even if you are not using a mouse or a trackpad. This is useful on many websites. For example, here on iPhone J.D., there are words across the top of the website that jump to different parts of the website: Main, Index to Prior Posts, Monthly Archives, Podcast, and About Me. If you hover a Pencil Pro above one of those words, a line will appear under the word as a visual indicator without selecting the word. It is the same thing that happens when a cursor hovers over that part of the website, and it is something that you cannot see at all on an iPad without the cursor or the Pencil. I use some websites on which useful information such as statistics appear as I hover over a part of the screen, and since I don’t use a mouse or trackpad with my iPad very often, I was typically unable to use that function of the website. But with my Apple Pencil Pro always right there attached to the top of my iPad Pro, I can now get that information quickly and easily.

Find My

When Apple introduced the second generation of the Apple Pencil in 2018, it added a fantastic new feature: the ability to attach the Pencil to the top of the iPad using magnets, and to charge the Pencil in that position. It provides a perfect place to put the Pencil when you are not using it, and it means that the Pencil is virtually always fully charged.

But sometimes I leave an Apple Pencil on a table, and the next thing you know it is lost under a piece of paper, and then next thing you know you are in a different location and you no longer know where the Apple Pencil is located. With Find My added to the Apple Pencil, your iPhone or iPad can now help you locate a lost Pencil.

First, the Find My App can display a map and give the last known location. If you left your Pencil in the office and don’t think about it until after you get home, this feature is helpful so you know to stop searching your briefcase.

Second, if you are in the same house as the Pencil, the Find My app can help you locate the Pencil within the house. It doesn’t display arrows pointing in the right direction the way that some Find My devices work, so instead you have to move around while your device tells you if you are getting close. As you do so, you will be alerted that you are far, nearby, or within reach.

I had some difficulty getting this feature to start working on my Apple Pencil Pro. I eventually had to go to the Find My app on my iPad, tap on the + to add a new device, and add my Apple Pencil Pro manually. I think it had something to do with the fact that I connected the Apple Pencil Pro to my new iPad Pro while it was still transferring information from my former iPad. If you get a new iPad Pro and a new Apple Pencil Pro, I recommend that you completely finish getting the new iPad Pro set up before you pair the Apple Pencil Pro by attaching it magnetically for the first time.

Find My is one of those features that you hope you will never need, but whenever you do need it, you are glad to have it. I’m glad that this support is built-in to the new Apple Pencil Pro.

Barrel Roll

The Apple Pencil Pro contains a tiny gyroscope so that it can sense as you rotate the Apple Pencil. When your Apple Pencil is simulating a pen or brush that has a shape, such as a paintbrush that is longer when oriented one way or shorter when oriented another way, you can spin the Pencil in your hand to adjust the brush.

I virtually always use just a simple pen tool with a round dot for the point, so spinning the Pencil may not have much utility to me. But if you use your Pencil for more artistic endeavors, this gives you even more power.

Also, app developers can assign the Barrel Roll to some other function. For example, in the app Procreate Dreams, you can use the Apple Pencil Pro to change an object’s orientation.

Shadow

I don’t know if this counts as a feature, an Easter Egg, or just Apple showing off, but one interesting change with the Apple Pencil Pro is that the Pencil casts a (fake) shadow on the page. It doesn’t work (yet?) in certain apps like GoodNotes, but you can try it out in the built-in Notes app.

Create a new Note and then start writing on the note using the Pencil. Squeeze the Pencil to bring up the Tool Palette. Scroll through the palette to see the different types of pen tips. Select the fountain pen. Now put the Pencil close to the screen so that Hover mode is enabled. As you spin the pen (the Barrel Roll feature) not only will you change the shape of the small line (the Hover feature previewing what you will draw) but you will also see a change in the shape shadow of the fountain pen.

Steve Lemay of Apple told French website Numerama that the new shadow can help you to remember which tool you selected. I suppose that could occur, but the shadow is fairly subtle and many pen tip shadows are similar. But even if this was primarily added for pure whimsy, it is still fun to see.

And the rest…

Other great Pencil features from the past are still there. It still has a flat side, which helps to guard against rolling around on a desk, and which allows you to magnetically attach it to the top of the iPad for charging and pairing. It still has pressure sensitivity, tilt sensitivity, palm rejection, and ultra low latency so that it mimics a real pen or pencil. It is still white. It is still weighted well so that it feels good in your hand. And as shown above, it looks the same.

Cost

The Apple Pencil Pro costs $129 on Amazon and in other stores. That price is a pleasant surprise because it is the same price as the second-generation Apple Pencil. You can instead get the Apple Pencil USB-C for only $79 (only $69 on Amazon), which is a nice stylus if you only want the basics, but you get a lot more with the Apple Pencil Pro. Still, it is nice to have the choice.

Note that the new Apple Pencil Pro only works with the new iPads released in 2024: both sizes of the iPad Pro and both sizes of the iPad Air.

Conclusion

I’ve been looking forward to the next generation of the Apple Pencil for a while now,  and this new version does not disappoint. It keeps everything that I loved about the second-generation Apple Pencil and adds new features that are useful and fun but that don’t get in the way of what was already great.

Click here to get Apple Pencil Pro from Amazon ($129).

We start this week’s episode of the In the News podcast by turning back the clock to the day when the iPhone was first named. And to really to do that, you need to turn back the clock all the way to the 1990s when the decision was made to use the word “iMac” for Apple’s first self-contained computer aimed at getting on the Internet. We then turn the clock forward to the future to analyze whether people will pay more for an ultra-premium iPhone that Apple is rumored to be working on. Perhaps it makes sense considering that the current iPad Pro is really just an ultra-premium iPad. We also discuss new immersive content for the Apple Vision Pro, updates to Shazam!, the past and future of Atari and Intellivision, and much more.

In our In the Know segment, Brett and I each pick one of the great tips in a recent Wirecutter article on top iPhone tips. Brett discusses using the Files app to remove a background from a photo, and I share a tip for taking photos in Burst mode that had been right there in the Camera app for who knows how long but I never saw it.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice. You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

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.

Apple introduced the first iPad in 2010. In 2011, when Apple introduced the iPad 2, it also introduced the Smart Cover, a way to protect the iPad’s screen without adding much thickness or weight. The Smart Cover attached to the edge of the iPad using magnets. When covering the screen, it automatically put the iPad to sleep. When open, you could fold it into a triangle to prop up the iPad either slightly for typing or more for watching videos. It was a great Apple accessory. Apple produced Smart Covers for many different iPad models for many years, and still sells a Smart Cover for older iPad models, but none of the new iPads support a Smart Cover.

In 2018, Apple introduced the iPad Pro 12.9" (third generation), which replaced the curved and tapered edge of the prior iPad Pro with a flat edge. I’m not sure if the new edge would no longer work with a Smart Cover or if Apple simply opted for a change, but starting with that model, Apple replaced the Smart Cover with the Smart Folio. Like the Smart Cover, the Smart Folio covered the front of the iPad. But the Smart Folio also covered the back, and magnets on the back of the iPad hold the Smart Folio in place. When first introduced, I considered the Smart Folio inferior to the Smart Cover it replaced; I didn’t see any need to protect the back of my iPad, and covering the back added to the overall thickness and weight. Nevertheless, I grew accustomed to the Smart Folio over time, even if I never loved it quite as much as the original Smart Cover.

This year, with the new iPad Pro M4, Apple is changing this product once again. Apple did not consider the change significant enough to change the product name, so it is still called the Smart Folio. However, the new version folds up in to a triangle that is a different shape. And while the triangle on the original Smart Folio attached to the iPad in only one way, the new triangle attaches in two primary positions plus an infinite number of positions between those two primary positions. 

The reason for the new triangle shape is that the panel closest to the open edge is now much thinner. In the following picture, the Smart Folio for the iPad Pro 12.9" 5th generation (introduced in 2021) is on the left and the new Smart Folio for the iPad Pro 13" (M3) is on the right:

When folded into a triangle, the prior Smart Folio only attached magnetically to the back of the iPad one way: with the triangle tucked near the bottom. The new Smart Foil works in this position too, but in this position with the iPad propped up, the iPad is in almost a 90º position. In the following picture, the prior Smart Folio is on the left and the new Smart Folio is on the right:

The new triangle shape also means that when your iPad screen is facing straight up (the position that many people use to draw on the screen using an Apple Pencil), the angle is smaller than ever before, resulting in an iPad that is at only a slight angle, closer to flat on a table.

Both of these new positions are interesting. When I am sitting at a table, having the iPad screen almost fully perpendicular makes the screen harder to see than if it is tilted back a little more, but I can imagine that there are other situations in which that almost 90º tilt makes the iPad even easier to see, perhaps if you are lying down and watching a movie.

With the iPad facing up as I draw on it with an Apple Pencil, I have quickly gotten used to the new angle and I may even prefer it. Others seem to disagree. For example, Jason Snell noted on Six Colors that “the iPad now sits much lower and flatter in this configuration. This change will probably make more people happy than sad, but I’m in the sad camp on this one.”

This new Smart Folio’s triangle also supports a second primary position. Instead of tucking the end of the Smart Folio near the bottom of the back of the iPad so that the triangle is snug with the bottom of the iPad, you connect it using magnets a little further up.

This is a nice position for the iPad when the screen is upright, and it is fairly similar to the position of the former Smart Folio with just a little more back tilt. In the following picture, the prior Smart Folio is on the left and the new Smart Folio is on the right:

If you are just looking at the iPad in this new position, it works great. Right now, for example, I am typing on a Bluetooth keyboard while I look at my iPad in this position, and it is a nice, comfortable position.

The problem comes when I go to touch the screen. In this position, if I touch or tap anything that is in the middle to the top of the screen, such as buttons in a toolbar at the top of the screen, the iPad rocks back and forth. The triangle held magnetically in this position simply isn’t very steady. And the rocking is annoying.

Even worse, if the triangle attached in this position isn’t on a flat table and instead is on something more uneven like my lap or in my hands, the triangle can come undone, causing the iPad to fall back. I’ve had multiple times where I thought that I was going to drop the iPad completely and have it fall on the ground, although fortunately, I have been able to grab the iPad before that happened. 

Between the two positions—one where the triangle is snug and secure at the bottom of the iPad and the other where the triangle is attached somewhat securely by magnets on the back of the iPad—there are additional positions between the two extremes. I suppose there are infinite additional positions. There are apparently two rails of magnets on the back of the iPad so that you can slide the triangle up or down between the two extremes to adjust the angle to fit your preference. If you want, you can even make the new Smart Folio have the exact same angle as the prior Smart Folio:

This is the big selling point of the new design. It is a Smart Folio that can be adjusted to countless different angles. And if you are just looking at the screen, I suppose this is a nice advantage.

These in-between positions are also good because the iPad is more steady in these positions than the extreme position where the iPad is leaning back the most. In these in-between positions, the iPad doesn’t easily rock back-and-forth. You can touch and tap buttons near the top of the iPad’s screen and the iPad stays somewhat steady.

However, when the Smart Folio is in these in-between positions and you pick up the iPad (perhaps because you want to lean back in a chair with the iPad) even a slight touch on the Smart Folio triangle connected using one of these in-between positions can cause the triangle to unfold. And if you are not careful, this could cause the iPad to slip out of your hands.

So if the triangle is snugly behind the iPad, the 90º position isn’t a good viewing angle. The position at the other extreme looks good, but if I touch the iPad, it rocks back-and-forth. At an in-between position, the screen looks good, but if I pick up the iPad, the triangle easily comes apart. Every position has compromises, and all of these compromises can make it seem that the new Smart Folio is more frustrating than the model that it replaces. Yes, I get many more viewing angles, but none of them really add very much for me. I was perfectly happy with the single triangle position on the former Smart Folio. Most of the time, I just keep my Smart Folio in an in-between position that is almost exactly the same angle as the former Smart Folio. But unlike the former product, I need to worry about the triangle falling apart and the iPad potentially slipping out of my hand every time I pick up the iPad. Thus, the advantage of additional viewing angles is minor, and it comes with a downside.

To be fair, I should note that my frustration with the new Smart Folio has lessened over time. The new Smart Folio doesn’t annoy me right now as much as it did when I first started using it last week. I suppose that I’m getting used to treating the product with kid gloves to avoid having the folded triangle collapse. Maybe in a few weeks or a few months, I’ll learn to work around the problems. But I’m not there yet. When I asked Jason Snell about this issue on Mastodon, he responded: “I find it usable but not ideal, my problem is more with the laying-down orientation, which is much worse now.”

The new Apple Folio comes in three colors: black, white, and denim. The denim color is a bit of a misnomer; as you can see if you look at it, it is more of a slate blue. I have the black model, which looks good on the Space Black iPad Pro 13" M4.

Conclusion

Having spent the money to purchase this $100 product, I’m not yet ready to give up on it completely. Perhaps it will grow on me over time. But if you have been using a Smart Folio, or even a Smart Cover, for a long time, be warned that this product is different. If you like the idea of multiple viewing angles, you may be a fan of the changes. If you mainly use the triangle of a Smart Folio to put your iPad almost flat on a table with a slight angle so that you can write on it using an Apple Pencil, this new version works fine, and you may even consider the new angle to be an improvement. But if your main priority is to have your iPad in a safe and stable position while it is propped up and leaning at a slight angle, then be warned that you may consider this new design to be one step forward but two steps backwards.

Click here to get the Apple Smart Folio for iPad Pro 13" from Amazon ($99)

The new iPad Pro M4 is now available for purchase, and I’m now using one every day. Thus, Brett and I begin this week’s episode of the In the News podcast by discussing all of the new features of the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil Pro. We also discuss some of my initial concerns about the new Apple Smart Folio case. Then we discuss the new iPad Air, upcoming accessibility features, the new iOS 17.5, and more.

In our In the Know segment, I recommend a new word puzzle game from Apple available in the News+ app called Quartiles.

Click here to listen to the audio podcast, or just listen using your podcast player of choice. You can also watch the episode on YouTube:

What a week it has been! We now have brand new iPad Pros and iPad Airs, the first ever Apple Pencil Pro, improvements to the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro, updates to iOS 17, a first look at new features coming in iOS 18 (specifically, accessibility improvements), and a massive iMessage outage for about an hour right at the end of the workday for many folks yesterday. And while I posted my review of the iPad Pro 13" M4 yesterday, there are lots of additional things to say about the new iPad Pro that I didn’t address in my review but which others have addressed in posts across the Internet. So without further ado, here is the news of note from the past week:

• Last night, as I tried to text my wife to let her know when I would be leaving the office, my message wouldn’t go through. After a while, some of my messages were delivered as green bubble SMS texts, but others were not. I thought it was just me, but it turns out that there was a worldwide iMessage outage for certain users on Thursday from around 5:40 Eastern to 6:40 Eastern, as reported by Wesley Hilliard of AppleInsider. As I’m typing this, everything seems to be back to normal. Whatever happened, hopefully it is fixed for good now.
• I liked the title of Samuel Axion’s review of the iPad Pro M4 for Ars Technica: Well, now you’re just showing off.
• I noted in my review that the new iPad Pro 13" M4 is incredibly thin and light. Does that mean that it is less durable and can bend? Fortunately, that is not a problem. First, in an interview with Arun Maini, John Ternusof of Apple explains that the iPad Pro M4 has a central rib that is used not only for heat dissipation but that also improves stiffness. Second, Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac reports that some folks posted bend tests on YouTube and the conclusion is that “the new iPad Pro holds up well to extreme force and seems pretty resistant to bending during normal use.”
• Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac reports that the iPad Pro M4 comes with a color-matched USB-C cable. If you get the space black version, like I did, it comes with a black braided USB-C cable that looks nice and which I find is easily distinguishable from the other cables that I carry around.
• Christoffel also says that the new Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro is so nice that you might want to splurge on getting the iPad Pro just to use this accessory.
• You can purchase the new iPad Pro from Amazon and save a little bit of money.
• Mike Wuerthele of AppleInsider provides an early review of the new iPad Air M2 and concludes that it “really shines in the 13-inch size.”
• Nathan Ingraham of Engadget calls the iPad Air M2"the iPad to get.”
• Harry McCracken of Fast Company interviewed two top Apple executives—Greg Joswiak and John Ternus—to discuss the new iPads. Ternus reiterated that Apple’s goal with the iPad is to be “this magical sheet of glass that allows you to interact directly with your content.” They also point out that Apple designs new processors, like the new M4, not just to be faster overall but also to enable specific technologies that were not previously possible, such as the tandem OLED display in the iPad Pro M4.
• It is pretty clear that the iPads have amazing hardware right now. But there is still more that power users wish that the software would do. Federico Viticci wrote a good article identifying all of the key items that Apple ought to add to the iPad software, such as background processes and system-wide utilities. We can always hope that some of these items will be announced next month at WWDC as a part of iPad OS 18.
• For the last few years, Apple has taken many of its upcoming accessibility improvements and has announced them on Global Accessibility Awareness Day in May instead of saving them for WWDC in June. Shelly Brisbin, who is an expert on Apple accessibility options, runs down what is coming in this post for Six Colors. For folks with speech that is difficult to understand, one new feature is the ability to record any word or phrase and have it trigger a command (without having to use the “Hey, Siri” before it). A new CarPlay feature will flash an alert when the iPhone hears certain traffic sounds, like emergency vehicles or car horns. And improvements to the Magnifier make it even easier for folks with limited vision to read signs.
• William Gallagher of AppleInsider reports that AT&T plans to bring satellite voice calls and data to all smartphones. Currently, the iPhone offers only emergency use of satellites.
• Apple released iOS 17.5 this week and similar updates for most of its other products. Justin Meyers of Gadget Hacks counted 32 features that are new, but there are not any major ones in here. One new change is the implementation of Cross-Platform Tracking Detection, a joint effort between Apple and Google designed to alert people when a compatible Bluetooth tracker has been moving with the person for a while. The idea is to reduce the risk of stalking. Unfortunately, a dedicated criminal could simply use a tracker that isn’t compatible with Find My or this new standard.
• Felipe Espósito of 9to5Mac explains how the new Cross-Platform Tracking Detection works in iOS 17.5.
• Another addition in iOS 17.5 is a new word game in Apple News+ called Quartiles. D. Griffin Jones of Cult of Mac explains how it works.
• And finally, this video showing the Procreate app on a new iPad Pro M4 does a good job of showing off some of the cool new features of the Apple Pencil Pro: