Every year, one of my absolutely favorite times to be in New Orleans is for the two weekends of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which everyone calls “Jazz Fest.” It starts this Friday, April 28, 2023, and runs through Sunday. For the second weekend, it starts on Thursday, May 4, 2023 (known as “Locals Thursday” because many of the out-of-town tourists haven’t arrived yet) and runs through Sunday, May 7, 2023. Despite the name, “Jazz” is only a small part of the music. Yes, there is the WWOZ Jazz Tent, dedicated to great Jazz music. But there are 12 other music stages with every kind of music that you can imagine: rock, country, blues, gospel, cajun, R&B, and more. And Jazz Fest isn’t even just about the music: the food is equally impressive. The competition to even be able to serve food is fierce, and the food offerings are amazing. There is also a stage where famous and not-yet-famous chefs show off how to make popular dishes (and typically provide samples). Plus, there are tons of arts and crafts to browse and purchase.
If you look at the list of artists for the first weekend, you get a sense of how wonderful and diverse the music is. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Jason Marsalis, Kermit Ruffins, Wu-Tang Clan, Charmaine Neville, Galactic, Michael White, Ed Sheeran, Steve Miller Band, Rebirth Brass Band, Kenny Loggins, Los Lobos, and so many more. For more information on many of the artists, I recommend downloading a copy of this week’s issue of Gambit, a free alternative newspaper in New Orleans. (Click the download link at the top left of the viewer to get a PDF version, which is easier to read on an iPad or a computer than the web-based viewer.)
But better yet, why not listen to those artists? Many people have that one friend that you turn to for music advice, For decades, for me, that has been Bill Kelly, founder of Kelly Law Partners in Denver. Bill has an appreciation for classic artists while also somehow being keenly aware of the best new acts. And he is an even bigger Jazz Fest fan than I am.
To get in the mood for Jazz Fest this year, Bill created a playlist composed of artists playing at the first weekend of Jazz Fest, and he picks out one great song for each artist. It’s not quite everyone who is playing this weekend, but it is pretty darn close. I was surprised to see a song on the list by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, a band started by Louisiana native Joseph Nathan “King” Oliver in Chicago in 1920s. Louis Armstrong played with that band. It turns out that this year is the 100th anniversary of some of the best music released by that band. So this year, there is a tribute to that groundbreaking band at Jazz Fest, led by Don Vappie.
After Bill shared the playlist with me, he said that I could share it here on iPhone J.D. This is an Apple Music playlist, but if you instead use Spotify, I know that there are many ways to transfer a playlist from Apple Music to Spotify, so hopefully you can listen to on your music service of choice. I’ve listened to this playlist many times now, and it is fantastic.
Alas, I will not be at Jazz Fest this year. As I explained at the end of the last episode of the In the News podcast, I recently had an orthopedic surgery, so my leg is in a cast for four weeks, making it difficult to get around. No Jazz Fest for me. But at least with this playlist, and streaming music from WWOZ, I can appreciate some of the music. If you are not attending Jazz Fest this year either, with this playlist, now you can do the same.
Brett and I start this week’s episode of the In the News podcast by discussing recent iPhone security issues including protecting the confidentiality of your passcode and being careful about using public charging devices. We next discuss the new Apple savings account, choosing the best keyboard for an iPad, using your HomePod to listen out for a smoke detector alarm, opening up a $40,000 iPhone, and more.
In our In the Know segment, we focus on the Apple Watch. Brent describes how he uses his Apple Watch as a flashlight, and I describe how useful an Apple Watch can be when you are on the mend from a surgery or simply under the weather.
Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway (which owns nearly 6% of all of Apple’s stock) provided an interesting observation on what makes Apple special. When explaining to CNBC why Apple’s is its largest holding, he said: “If you’re an Apple user and somebody offers you $10,000, but the only proviso is they’ll take away your iPhone and you’ll never be able to buy another, you’re not going to take it. If they tell you if you buy another Ford car—they’ll give you $10,000 not to do that—you’ll take the $10,000 and you’ll buy a Chevy instead.” As John Gruber of Daring Fireball noted: “He’s right: Apple’s moat is customer loyalty, and that loyalty is earned through user experiences that other companies can’t match.” If someone offered you $10,000 but you had to forever give up using an iPhone, would you do it? I know my answer. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Two months ago, there was an alarming story in the Wall Street Journal about how crooks were watching people enter an iPhone passcode and then stealing the iPhone. When someone has both your iPhone and the passcode, they can make your life miserable. In a follow-up article by Nicole Nguyen and Joanna Stern, they share stories from many folks who were victims and who pleaded with Apple to restore access to their data but Apple could not do so because of the way that iPhone’s handle privacy and security. This simply underscores how critical it is that you keep your iPhone password confidential.
Note that the Wall Street Journal article emphasizes that people were trying to prove their identity to Apple, as if Apple did not trust that the person was the real original owner of the stolen iPhone. But as Adam Engst points out in TidBITS: “Once that recovery key is set, the company can do nothing to help—it no longer controls the necessary encryption keys. That’s why I say that users may be locked out of their accounts permanently. When the Wall Street Journal article talks about how victims attempt to prove ownership of their accounts with various forms of identification, it’s missing the point—identification is not in question; the data is simply inaccessible because it’s encrypted with a key that Apple doesn’t control.”
If you monitor your blood glucose, John Gruber of Daring Fireball says that the new app called Glucomate for the iPhone and Apple Watch is worth checking out.
If you use an Apple Card credit card, you earn Daily Cash for each of your purchases. It builds up over time and can be used on whatever you want. I recently purchased a new home computer (Mac mini) and it helped that had built up $700 in Apple Cash to put towards the new purchase. But as Jason Cross of Macworld explains, Apple debuted a new feature this week: instead of just earning Daily Cash, you can have that Daily Cash deposited into a free savings account that earns a very respectable 4.15% interest. I see no reason not to turn on this feature if you use an Apple Card, Why not earn interest on your Daily Cash as you save up for something special?
I should have linked to this post when it went up in January, but better late than never. In a post on Six Colors, Shelly Brisbin notes that you can change the text size on your iPhone (I knew that) but do so on an app-by-app basis (I did not know that).
In a new post on Six Colors, Jason Snell explains that this trick is especially useful if you want to adjust the font size with the new iOS app for The Athletic.
If you own a smart smoke detector, like the Google Nest Protect that I use throughout my house, your smoke detector can give you an iPhone notification when the alarm goes out. But what if you have a traditional simple smoke detector? Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac explains that there is a new HomePod feature that you can optionally enable. Once you do so, if your HomePod hears a smoke detector alarm, the HomePod will notify you.
Justin Meyers of Gadget Hacks has an interesting list of built-in iPhone features that you might not know about such as an Apple TV Remote and a Code Scanner.
When I started to become interested in technology in the 1980s, I used to love to read computer magazines, and I subscribed to many of them. As the Internet grew, starting in the late 1990s, I found myself reading and subscribing to fewer magazines, and then eventually no magazines. Harry McCracken of Technologizer writes that the last two computer magazines (Maximum PC and MacLife) have now stop publishing print magazines, marking the end of computer magazines in America. Hopefully the end of tech websites in America is nowhere near because I have no plans to give up iPhone J.D. any time soon.
And finally, do you want to know what it was like to unbox an original iPhone, the one first released in 2007? Marques Browlee paid $40,000 to purchase one at an auction run by Sotheby’s and then opened it up in a YouTube video. Along the way, he shares lots of details about the original iPhone that I have long forgot. For example, it came with a charging stand. I really enjoyed watching this video, and perhaps you will as well:
Your email Inbox is a mess. I feel confident in saying that because it is a problem that virtually all of us face. Your email Inbox is incredibly useful because it contains the important emails that we deal with every day for work, for family, etc. But that usefulness is undermined by all of the other items that are stuffed in there. There are emails from people who you don’t want to hear from. There are newsletters that you are never going to want to read. There are newsletters that you do find useful and which you will look at it, but not now. There are emails on personal matters that will at some point be important to deal with, but not during the work day when you are trying to get work done. Wouldn’t it be great if your Inbox was smart enough to sort through this mess so that when you open the Inbox you can focus on only the handful of messages that really matter at that point in your day?
That’s what SaneBox does, and I’m thrilled that the company is sponsoring iPhone J.D. again this month so that I can spread the word on what a useful product this is. I’ve been using SaneBox on my iPhone J.D. account since last year, and it has been a transformative service for me. Why? Because SaneBox works with almost any email provider to intelligently sort your incoming mail so that you can be more efficient. The emails that matter the most go right to your Inbox. But emails that matter less go to another folder, such as a folder for newsletters and a folder for items that SaneBox thinks that you can most likely deal with later–emails that are, in my months of testing, mostly junk that I never want to see at all. And it is easy to teach SaneBox that you never again want to see emails from a particular sender: just drag one such email into the folder called @SaneBlackHole and then you never have to deal with that sender again.
SaneBox is like having a virtual assistant organize your email for you so that you can focus on the important stuff. I used to dread opening up my Inbox because I know that it was going to be full of items that don’t matter right now and it would take me a while to focus on the key messages. But now, I’m happy to click on my Inbox because it only contains the good stuff.
How SaneBox works
SaneBox works with any email service that provides IMAP, EWS – OWA, or Active Sync, such as Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL, iCloud, MS Exchange, Microsoft 365, Fastmail, Amazon WorkMail, and others. Since last yaear, I’ve been using it with my iPhone J.D. email account, which is just a normal IMAP account associated with a domain that I own. You may have an email account exactly like this one. My inbox receives a lot of emails from lots of different sources: people reaching out to me with questions or suggestions, companies that offer valuable and relevant services, newsletters that I signed up for, but also a lot of unwanted and/or junk email that is not caught by my spam filter.
SaneBox works by analyzing the headers—but never the body—of your emails. That means that SaneBox sees things like the subject line, date, and who the email is from. But SaneBox does not see what the email says in the body of the email. Based on its analysis of the headers, SaneBox keeps the email on your own email server—SaneBox never transfers your emails to its own server—and simply moves some of the emails from your Inbox to another folder.
You need to give SaneBox your email address and your email password so that it can see the headers. But the security of SaneBox has been audited by numerous security firms. The service has been around since 2010, a long track record that attests to its trustworthiness. Moreover, if you want to avoid giving SaneBox your normal password, you can turn on two-factor authentication and create an app-specific password with many services so that the password you give SaneBox is specific and unique to SaneBox. Click here for more information on this process.
You can also use two-factor authentication with the SaneBox service itself. That way, you can be sure that your SaneBox dashboard is completely private and accessible only by you.
What SaneBox does
The main thing that SaneBox does is analyze the information in the headers of your emails and then filter messages based on that analysis. For any message that SaneBox thinks is likely a normal email that you would want, SaneBox leaves the email in your Inbox. For messages that SaneBox considers less useful, such as messages that may be junk, SaneBox moves those emails to a folder called @SaneLater. Messages that seem to be mailing lists are moved to a folder called @SaneNews. Messages that SaneBox knows that you don’t want to see because you already told SaneBox (more on that below) are moved to @SaneBlackHole. And so on. I have more information on these specific folders below, but the end result is something like this: instead of going to your Inbox and seeing 17 new messages when only 3 of them are actually important, you see 5 new messages, including the 3 that are most important.
Thanks to SaneBox, I am much more efficient when I check email. I check my iPhone J.D. inbox from time to time during the day. Without SaneBox, if I pause what I am working on and see that I have over a dozen or more new messages, going through those emails becomes a chore. I need to take the time to separate the important emails from the others, and the whole process wastes time. With SaneBox, I instead glance at my Inbox and just see a few emails that are important. Based upon that, I can quickly decide if I need to read or act upon any of them or if I can get back to whatever else I was working on. Later on, when I know that I have more time to devote to email, I can pay attention to the emails that were moved into another folder such as @SaneLater. This vastly improves email efficiency.
It also saves you time. If you receive an alert every time an email comes in, the time that you waste looking at a new email only to discover that it is something unimportant and then trying to get your mind back to the task you were working on before can really add up.
Here is a deeper dive on the main SaneBox folders and other features. Note that you get to determine which of these folders and features you turn on and off, and you can typically adjust settings on each feature to fine-tune it. So for example, if you want to keep all newsletters in your Inbox instead of having them automatically moved to @SaneNews, just don’t turn on the @SaneNews feature in your SaneBox dashboard.
@SaneBlackHole
My favorite SaneBox folder is @SaneBlackHole. When I get an email from someone who I don’t want to get email from—maybe it is a spam message, maybe it is a marketing company that is of no interest to me, maybe it is a political candidate who I don’t want to see literature from, etc.—I simply move it from my Inbox to the folder called @SaneBlackHole. This trains the SaneBox service. Future emails from that address will automatically move to the @SaneBlackHole folder, stay in that folder for a week, and then get deleted.
Why not just click the unsubscribe button in the unwanted email? That’s fine if you trust the company sending you the email that you don’t want. But sometimes when you click an unsubscribe button, you are confirming to the sender that your email is an active one, and they will turn around and sell your email address to other companies, which results in even more unwanted email. When you move an email to the @SaneBlackHole folder, the person or company is not alerted that you did so.
What if you make a mistake? If you put something in the @SaneBlackHole folder by accident, simply move it back into your Inbox. SaneBox will see that you did that and learn that you don’t want future emails from that sender to go into the @SaneBlackHole folder.
Is the @SaneBlackHole folder the same thing as a Spam folder or a Junk folder from your email provider? Not really. The end result is similar, but how it gets there is very different. Your own email provider provides a Spam folder feature that analyzes not only the sender and subject line but also the content of your email to determine if something is spam, phishing, a virus, etc. Spam folders are not perfect, but when they do work, they perform an important job by moving an unwanted email out of your Inbox. Even with SaneBox, you should continue to use the Spam folder feature provided by your own email provider. But as we all know, there are many messages not caught by a Spam folder even though you might want them to be. Perhaps your email service cannot determine whether it is truly junk because for some types of messages, one person might want the message and another person may not. While you can often train the Spam folder provided by your email service provider, and you should do so, Spam folders are not always as smart as you want them to be. Thus, @SaneBlackHole works in a different way, along with your normal Spam or Junk feature, to provide a more customized filter. If you never want to hear from X again, just move one email from X into the @SaneBlackHole folder. And then you are done.
SaneBox describes the difference between a Spam folder and the @SaneBlackHole folder this way: “Keep in mind that @SaneBlackHole is not for SPAM. It is meant to be used for legitimate email from people or services that you don’t want to see or hear from anymore. Spammers go out of their way to make each email be sufficiently different so trainings like these don’t work.”
For me, the @SaneBlackHole folder has worked extremely well. Every once in a while, I’ll take a look at what is in that folder and see a huge number of emails that used to be going straight to my Inbox. I’m so thrilled to see that they went there instead and didn’t waste my time.
@SaneNews
When SaneBox detects that you are receiving something that looks like a newsletter, it moves the message from your Inbox to the @SaneNews folder. This is nice because I receive many newsletters that I signed up for and want to receive, but I don’t always want them to interrupt my workflow during the day by piling up in my Inbox. Whenever I’m ready to look at newsletters, such as while I’m having lunch or at the end of the day, they are waiting for me in this folder.
Sometimes, I’ll see something show up in @SaneNews that I did not sign up for and that I don’t want to receive. I simply move that email into the @SaneBlackHole folder to train SaneBox to put similar emails there in the future.
On the other hand, sometimes I’ll see something that is a newsletter but it is important to me so I’d rather keep it in my Inbox. For example, perhaps you love reading the free iPhone J.D. email that goes out whenever there is a new post. (You are not receiving the iPhone J.D. newsletter? Just click here or scan the QR code to the right to sign up.) Simply move the email with the newsletter out of @SaneNews and into your Inbox to teach SaneBox that it should keep that particular newsletter in your Inbox so that you will notice it more quickly.
It is nice that @SaneNews, like all SaneBox folders, is simply another folder in your email. This means that the fact that SaneBox has filtered the email doesn’t mean that you don’t have easy access to it. It’s not like you need to go to the SaneBox website to view it or anything like that. Your current mail client, including the Mail app on your iPhone or iPad, just sees @SaneNews as another folder. Your iPhone, iPad, computer, etc. doesn’t need to know that it was the intelligence of SaneBox that moved the message into the @SaneNews folder or any other SaneBox folder, nor does your iPhone need to know that by moving a message from one folder to another folder, you are training the SaneBox service.
@SaneLater
The @SaneLater folder is a place where SaneBox puts emails that it considers likely to be less important, including messages that may be junk. If there is a type of email that you want to receive but typically don’t want to act upon right away, move it from your Inbox to the @SaneLater folder to train SaneBox to move similar messages there in the future. You can always manually move a message from @SaneLater to your Inbox to train SaneBox that this is an important type of email that deserves to stay in your Inbox.
A lot of the emails that show up in my @SaneLater email are emails that I would consider spam or junk emails and that were not caught by my Spam filter. So I will often select a bunch of them and move them into the @SaneBlackHole folder so that in the future they will go straight there instead of in my @SaneLater folder. That system isn’t perfect—the spammer may change up the “from” email address slightly to try to confuse SaneBox—but when I move a message into the @SaneBlackHole folder, at least I am trying to do something.
@SaneCC
If a message is sent to someone else but also sent to you as CC, you can have that message automatically go to a @SaneCC folder instead of your Inbox. I understand the idea here—since the email was not sent directly to you, it is potentially less important than other emails in your Inbox. I don’t have this SaneBox folder turned on because so many of the emails that I receive as a cc are just as important as the ones for which I am in the “to” field. Nevertheless, I can understand how this may be valuable for many folks.
@SaneNoReplies
Have you ever sent someone an email asking for a response, but then they don’t reply, and then you forget that you were waiting for a reply, and then you get annoyed at yourself for not following up sooner? The @SaneNoReplies folder is an optional folder aimed at addressing this situation.
Here’s how it works. You send an email to someone. Just like always, your sent email goes into your Sent folder. But additionally, within a few minutes, SaneBox puts a copy of your sent email into the @SaneNoReplies folder. When someone replies to your email, the email that you sent is deleted from the @SaneNoReplies folder because it is no longer an email without a reply. The idea is that you can glance at your @SaneNoReplies folder from time to time to see the message to which there was no reply, and that can remind you to follow up and request a reply. If you see something in there that doesn’t belong—perhaps you never expected a reply, or perhaps the other person replied in some other way like a phone call or a different email—just delete it from that folder and SaneBox will stop waiting for a reply.
Note that the @SaneNoReplies folder only acts upon emails where you sent the first email. If you are replying to an email chain, nothing that you send will go into this folder.
SaneReminders
What if you want to make sure that you get a reply within a specific time period, like three days? When you compose your email, add a bcc or a cc to 3days@sanebox.com. If three days have passed and you haven’t yet received a response, then SaneBox will put a reminder email at the top of your Inbox. What if you want to get that reminder in three days regardless of whether you get a reply? Simply add the word “keep” such as keep.3days@sanebox.com.
Pretty much anything that you can think of will work for those SaneBox reminder addresses. There is a big list of them on this page. Examples include sunday@sanebox.com, november21@sanebox.com, dec.21.2pm@sanebox.com, etc.
SaneReminders works when you are sending a message and you use that special email as a cc or bcc. It also works if you receive an email and you want to deal with it at a later date: simply forward the email to a SaneBox reminder address such as friday@sanebox.com. On Friday, at the top of your inbox, you will see an email reminding you to act upon that email. (You can configure in the SaneBox settings what time of day those emails show up.) This is a good way to move an email out of your Inbox so that it doesn’t bother you right now, but then have it come back when you will be ready to deal with it.
…and more
This post would get too long if I described every feature of SaneBox. There are lots of them. As I noted above, this service has been around for over a decade, so SaneBox has come up with lots of different features over those years. For example, you can schedule Do Not Disturb periods for your Inbox. You can create custom folders like @SaneReceipts or @SaneFamily and teach SaneBox how to move things into those folder for you. Just recently, SaneBox introduced an Email Deep Clean feature to help you clean up an Inbox that has gotten too big. And you can do so much more.
Price
SaneBox has lots of different pricing tiers so that you can just pay for what you need, and you can try before you buy to get the service working and find out if it makes sense for you. It only takes minutes to set it up, and if you don’t like the service, simply unsubscribe. And while you can pay month-to-month if you want, you can save substantially if you sign up for one year or two years.
If you only want to use two SaneBox features, you can choose the “Snack” tier which is $7/month or $59/year or $99 for two years. The most popular tier is the “Lunch” tier which can work with two email accounts and lets you choose six features for $12/month or $99/year or $169 for two years. (That’s the tier that I paid for.) You can also get the “Dinner” tier which works with four email accounts and includes every feature for $36/month or $299 a year or $499 for two years. There are discounts for educational, non-profit, and governmental agencies.
Click here to sign up. That link includes an affiliate code that provides a small affiliate fee to iPhone J.D. if you decide to pay for a plan.
Conclusion
SaneBox is a fantastic service that makes your email better. Even if you are not sure that the service is for you, it costs you nothing to try it out. SaneBox can also work especially well if you have an alternative email service that you use for making purchases and other purposes but that you don’t check throughout the day. With SaneBox working to keep the Inbox clean and tidy, you can be much more efficient when you check that Inbox. I recommend that you check out the free trial to see for yourself how it works and the wonders that it can do for your Inbox.
I’ve mentioned the Steve Jobs Archive in the past. It’s an organization started by close friends of Jobs, including his widow Laurene Powell Jobs, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and former Apple design chief Jony Ive. This week, the organization released an ebook called Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his Own Words. It is a collection of speeches, interviews, and correspondence by Jobs, presented with lots of great photographs. And it is quite good, with lots of interesting stories and inspiring words of wisdom. I’m not finished reading it yet, but based on what I’ve read so far, I definitely recommend it. And specifically, I recommend reading it in a web browser to appreciate the great layout, which you can do by using this link. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Brett Burney and I are not recording an episode of the In the News podcast today, but we plan to be back next week.
Lots of folks have been talking about the warning by the FBI this week that if you charge an iPhone or Android phone at a public charging station, your device might possibly be hacked. As Jason Cross of Macworld notes, you can likely bypass the risk identified by the FBI by tapping “no” if you use a public charging device and you see a prompt asking if you trust this computer. (You can still charge even after tapping “no,” but you cannot send data, which protects you.) Or, if you see an “accessory not supported” message, that could be a sign of something suspicious. The safest approach is to always use your own cord and your own charger. (There is no risk plugging your own charger into a public outlet.) That’s also probably the fastest approach for charging your device because most of the free public charging options are only 5W.
Rob Dubbin of The Verge provides some of the story behind Ivory, the excellent Mastodon app created by the team behind the former Twitter app Tweetbot, and explains why Ivory is so good. I love using Ivory.
Apple updates the firmware on AirPods models from time to time, but the process typically doesn’t involve you doing anything. At some point when your AirPods connect to your iPhone, they are updated. But what if you don’t use an iPhone or other Apple device, for example if you just use AirPods with a PC? Chance Miller of 9to5Mac notes that for these folks, one solution offered by Apple is to set up an appointment at an Apple Store or an Apple Authorized Service Provider to update your firmware. Interesting that this is the solution offered by Apple.
Lauren Leffer of Gizmodo explains why a bizarre error in Apple’s Find My service is sending many people to a single house in Texas, thinking that their missing iPhone is there.
Jason Snell of Six Colors notes that Apple TV+ is doing a good job with the Friday Night Baseball feature that allows you to select local announcers instead of the national announcers. I with there was something like this for NFL football. I vastly prefer listening to the local announcers at WWL when I watch a Saints football game, but getting the radio in sync with the TV image is sometimes difficult.
And finally, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the movie Tetris on Apple TV+. As a lawyer, I find it amusing that the central tension in this movie is not something inherently dramatic like a car chase but instead is essentially just contract negotiations, and yet the movie makes this suspenseful. It gets a little silly at times, but it was fun to watch. here is the trailer:
My daughter uses an older pair of AirPods, and she mentioned the other day that her speakers no longer seemed very loud. At first, I thought that it might be time to invest in a new pair since she uses them often, but then I remembered that Belkin recently released an AirPods Cleaning Kit. For only $15 (on Amazon), the kit is supposed to clean up the gunk that builds up on the speaker grill of a pair of AirPods, which can interfere with speaker quality. My daughter tried it on her AirPods, and she immediately noticed a substantial improvement, declaring that her AirPods were fixed.
The Belkin AirPods Cleaning Kit contains everything that you need, and it is very simple to use. I can say with confidence that even a 15-year-old can figure it out.
The box provides you with a cleaning cloth that you can use as a work surface. Put two drops of solution on the speaker grill, wait 60 seconds, then use the brush to break loose any gunk that has built up. Then, apply the Cleaning Gel to the grill; it sticks to the gunk, and when you pull off the Cleaning Gel, the gunk is removed with it.
Although I was tempted to show you before-and-after photos, nobody needs to see what my daughters’ AirPods looked like before. Suffice it to say that they looked considerably cleaner afterwards.
If the cleaning procedure is insufficient after you do it once, the instructions say that you can do it again, but one time was enough for my daughter. She did, however, repeat the procedure on the other openings of the AirPods, which I presume are part of the microphone system.
Note that this cleaning kit is designed for any generation of the AirPods, but this is not made for the AirPods Pro. Note also that this cleaning kit works for one cycle of cleaning each of your AirPods, although as noted above, you can clean more than once during the cycle if necessary. If you decide to clean your AirPods again in the future, you’ll need another $15 kit. Hopefully, the cleaning that my daughter did will last a long time.
If you want to clean up your AirPods, especially if the gunk on them is affecting the listening experience, I can recommend this cleaning kit.
Brett and I start this week’s episode of the In the News podcast by talking about Apple CEO Tim Cook in light of the recent profile of him in GQ. We next talk about GM’s decision to move away from CarPlay and whether iPhone owners will take their business elsewhere. We celebrate the iPad turning 13, discuss whether to use a case for an iPhone, explain what to do if your iPhone calls 911 by accident, and more.
In our In the Know segment, Brett shares a tip for working with different time zones in the Calendar app, and I discuss ChatGPT in general and the new S-GPT shortcut by Federico Viticci of MacStories.
If you have CarPlay in your current car, would you buy a new car if it didn’t have CarPlay? According to Joseph White of Reuters, GM hopes that the answer is yes. For GM’s future electric vehicles, GM will no longer support Apple CarPlay (or Android Auto). Instead, GM will have its own system, one that it hopes it can monetize by getting you to pay for certain features—something that GM knows how to do considering that it has been selling the OnStar service since 1996. CarPlay receives free, regular updates and occasional new features whenever Apple updates the operating system on your iPhone. Will GM deliver regular updates to its cars after someone has already paid for the car? Will people be happy if the app that they prefer to use for navigation, listening to podcasts, listening to music, etc. is not available on GM’s system? Can GM do a better job creating a software interface than Apple? Will people even consider purchasing a new car if it doesn’t have CarPlay? There are certainly other car manufacturers that don’t support CarPlay, most notably Tesla, so maybe this will work out for GM. But Patrick George of The Verge reports that GM’s announcement sparked an immediate backlash from many people, and just last year, Apple cited research finding that 79% of all new car buyers will only consider buying a new car if it has CarPlay. I suspect that GM will see fewer sales as a result of this decision, and I wonder whether GM will make up for all of the lost sales with the additional charges that it can extract from car owners who use GM’s built-in infotainment system. And now, the news of note from the past week:
The normally private Tim Cook is on the cover of GQ this month. In an article written by Zach Baron, Cook explains many aspects of his job and himself. It’s a well-written article, and Baron clearly did his research before interviewing Tim Cook.
Do you use a case for your iPhone? John Gruber of Daring Fireball has an interesting discussion on the subject. I generally do not use a case, although I do own the Apple leather case and I use it from time to time when I think I am at a higher risk of dropping my iPhone. Gruber recommends a case from Bullstrap that looks nice as well and doesn’t include a bottom lip, if that is your preference.
In the iPhone 14 and the newest Apple Watch models, Apple added crash detection as a feature. For example, if your iPhone senses that you have been in a collision, your iPhone will alert you, and if you don’t respond after 20 seconds, your iPhone will call emergency services such as 911. What if it does so by mistake? Your natural tendency may be to just hang up, but as Juli Clover of MacRumors explains, Apple has updated the Crash Detection page on its website to state: “If the call has been made, but you don’t need emergency services, don’t hang up. Wait until a responder answers, then explain that you don’t need help.” Good to keep in mind.
It is hard to make a really good app for the Apple Watch, but some developers have done it. One example is Clicker, an app that I’ve been using for a long time. The idea is simple: start the app when you need to count something. Tap the face of your watch every time that you need to increase the count. Force-press and tap the “subtract” button if you make a mistake and need to decrease the count. And that’s basically it. Tap the Settings icon at the top right to adjust a few things such as counting increments, whether you want to count up or count down, whether there is a goal, etc. The app was updated to version 2.0 earlier this year, and this post by the developer, Craig Hockenberry, explains how the app works and what you might use it for. It’s free and it works well.
The iPad is now 13 years old. William Gallagher of AppleInsider takes a look back at the early days of the iPad. For example, he notes that many people made fun of the name when the product was announced, which is something that I haven’t thought about in a long time because “iPad” is now such a common part of my vocabulary.
Ivan Mehta and Lauren Forristal of TechCrunch report that Hulu has a new interface on the Apple TV that is rolling out to customers. My wife and I started subscribing to Hulu a long time ago, expecting to cancel it after a few months. But we still find lots of good things to watch on Hulu.
This is a long holiday weekend for many folks. If you find that you have too much extra time on your hands, John-Anthony Disotto came up with 129 things that you can ask Siri that will result in an answer that is somewhat surprising and occasionally humorous.
And finally, there are lots of interesting shows coming to Apple TV+ soon, and Apple revealed trailers for some of them this week. Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie looks to be a great documentary that brings back tons of memories for folks like me who were huge fans in the 1980s and 1990s. Drops of God looks like it could be interesting if you don’t mind the subtitles. And Silo tells the futuristic tale of an entire community that lives in a slio deep underground. Here is the trailer for Silo, which has a great cast so I hope it is good:
iOS 16.4 is finally out, and Brett and I begin this week’s episode of the In the News podcast by discussing some of the many, many new features. We next talk about the new Apple Music Classical app, which is great in many ways but still has much room for improvement. We discuss some of the rumors of what we might see on June 5, 2023, when Apple has a keynote presentation at the beginning of its WWDC developer conference. We discuss the Apple Store in Grand Central Terminal, an app for scanning greeting cards, recovering an Apple Watch that is lost at sea, checking out digital books from your public library, Tetris, and … yes … kissing your iPhone.
In our In the Know segment, Brett shares a tip for optimizing storage on your iPhone, which can be critically important when you take a lot of 4K video. I share a tip for using a new feature in the GoodNote app for the iPad to more easily select different pen colors and widths.
Along with lots of operating system updates including iOS 16.4, Apple released a new app this week: Apple Music Classical. If you already subscribe to Apple Music, you can use this app for no extra charge. I suspect that most folks don’t listen to classical music very often, and that’s true for me as well. But there is a lot to like about this app. First, it does a nice job of providing the additional metadata about a song that is especially relevant to classical music, such as composers, periods, soloists, conductors, etc. Second, there is a lot of music in there that is not in the traditional Apple Music app. For example, my favorite Mezzo-Soprano is Stephanie Blythe. She appears on five albums in Apple Music but nine albums in Apple Music Classical. Apple calls Apple Music Classical “the world’s largest classical music catalog.” Third, there is lots of rich information in here, including tons of playlists for longtime fans of classical music and beginning steps for those of us who are, for the most part, novices. I’ve particularly enjoyed a nine-part series featured in the Listen Now section called The Story of Classical in which host Guy Jones explains what to listen for, provides stories behind the music, and of course provides lots of great examples of the music. It’s like a crash course in classical music. There are curious omissions—why is there no iPad or Mac app? where is CarPlay support?—but what Apple has provided seems quite good. Click here for a 30-second video from Apple with a fun introduction to the app. And click here for an excellent review of Apple Music by Kirk McElhearn for TidBITS, in which he does a great job of explaining and showing what Apple got right and what needs more work. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Apple announced this week that its developer conference, WWDC, will take place June 5 to 9, 2023. For those of us who are not developers, that means two things. First, we can expect to see the first previews of iOS 17 (and iPadOS 17, etc.) that week. Second, we can expect some Apple announcements during a keynote presentation on June 5, and all of the buzz is that Apple will preview its new AR/VR goggles. After all of the rumors for years, it is interesting to think that we will finally have some ideas of what Apple plans to do in this space in just over two months.
iOS 16.4 came out this week, and if you haven’t updated yet, you should do so soon—if for no other reason, for the security updates. But lots of new features are in there. For example, Chance Miller of 9to5Mac points out the changes in the Apple Music app.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball notes that to take advantage of the new Voice Isolation feature for cellphone calls, you need to turn it on via the Control Center during a call. That is a bizarre way to enable this feature, and I suspect it means that most folks will never discover it.
Michael Potuck of 9to5Mac reviews the new version of an app that I had never heard of before called Hello There. It is a greeting card scanner and organizer. Someone sends you a greeting card and you enjoy it, but then what do you do with it? With this app, you scan it and organize it so that you can look at it again in the future but you don’t have to keep the physical card. It’s an interesting idea for an app.
There are lots of fascinating Apple Stores around the world. One of the particularly interesting ones is the one in Grand Central Terminal in New York. If you haven’t seen it before, Nathanial Pangaro of AppleInsider provides a walk through.
Ed Hardy of Cult of Mac reports that Apple is beginning to roll out its new Apple Pay Later service, which gives you six weeks to pay-off interest-free loans for online items that you purchase.
Filipe Espósito of 9to5Mac shares the story of a man who lost his Apple Watch at sea near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. But thanks to Find My and a nice swimmer who discovered his watch, he was able to get it back.
If you use the OverDrive app to borrow digital books from the library, Sarah Perez of TechCrunch reports that the app is shutting down on May 1, to be replaced by the Libby app.
If you have been enjoying watching Season of Ted Lasso, as I have, then you’ll also enjoy this short inside-look video with some short cast interviews. If you haven’t been watching Ted Lasso … well, I certainly hope that you have some good reason for that decision. Maybe you want to binge them all at the end of the season?
Speaking of good Apple TV+ shows, my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed the first season of Shrinking, a show created by many of the people behind Ted Lasso. Funny, heart warming, and excellent.
If you want to track upcoming TV shows or movies to watch, video games to play, and books to read, attorney John Voorhees of MacStories reviews an app called Sequel that looks really nice. The review led me to download it to try it out.
Oliver Haslam of iMore reports that if you are in a long-distance relationship, you and your partner can purchase a kissing machine accessory for the iPhone so that the two of you can share a kiss. This would normally be the sentence in which I comment upon the product, but frankly, I find myself at a loss for words.
