The big iOS news of this week was actually tvOS news — lots of folks discovering tips and tricks on the Apple TV. For example, I wish I had known the trick about pressing play/pause to shift from lowercase to uppercase back when I was first setting up my own Apple TV and entering passwords. This tip and many more are included in the news items of note from this past week:
Marc Newson is a famous designer who helped Apple to design the Apple Watch. He is now an Apple employee and spends about 60% of his time working for Apple. James Chessell of the Autralian Financial Review posted an interesting interview with Newson.
We are in the first week of the new Apple TV, so it was in the news quite a bit this week. Jason Snell discusses the future of Apple TV in an article for iMore.
One of the nice features of the Apple TV is that you can connect Bluetooth headphones, so that you can watch a show or play a game without disturbing others in the same room. Brent Zaniewski of iMore recommends Bluetooth headphones to pair with an Apple TV.
Security expert Rich Mogull gets to the bottom of reports that a security broker recently paid $1 million for a browser-based iOS 9 hack, in an article for TidBITS.
As attorneys, we often make arguments that parties are bound by the terms of their contractual agreements. Thus, I won’t ask you how many times you yourself have tapped a button on your iPhone or iPad acknowledging that you have read the iTunes Terms and Conditions; you would have to plead the Fifth, because we both know that you haven’t actually done so. The current version (revised Oct. 21, 2015) is 20,624 words long. It is a running joke that virtually nobody has ever read it.
New York artist Bob Sikoryak is famous for his masterful cartoons drawn in the style of other artists, such as his Masterpiece Comics collection which combines classic literary works with modern comics (for example, The Stranger by Albert Camus as a Superman comic). This year, Sikoryak has been working on a new comic book in which each page is drawn in the style of another famous comic book artist. Sikoryak explained to Brady Dale of the New York Observer how he came up with the subject for his latest work: “So I was thinking, ‘What would be an interesting thing to adapt?’ And I made a joke to someone that: ‘I should do the iTunes agreement.’ And the more I thought about it, I realized, I had to do it.”
The end result is an illustrated version of the iTunes Terms and Conditions. All of the words that you know and love are there, and they are incorporated into wonderful illustrations that feature a cartoon version of Steve Jobs. But each page is different — and thus each Jobs is different — because each page is done in the style of a different artist.
For example, here is page 6 of the comic book, illustrating the ‘Pre-Orders” section of the agreement, done in the style of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts:
And here is page 15 of the comic book, illustrating the “Automatic Delivery and Downloading Previous Purchases” section of the agreement, done in the style of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes:
(All images posted with permission of R. Sikoryak)
Sikoryak is posting each page of his book to a Tumblr page called iTunes Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel. He started in September and he is now up to page 49. New pages are added to the top, so if you want to read in order starting at the cover and then page 1, page 2, etc., you’ll have to scroll all the way to the bottom of that page and then page up towards the top of the page.
This graphic novel is great fun. You’ll find pages done in the style of:
Rex Morgan, M.D. (Dal Curtis, Marvin Bradley, John Frank Edgington)
Dilbert (Scott Adams)
R. Crumb
Little Lulu (John Stanley and Irving Tripp)
Amazing Spiderman (Stan Lee and Steve Ditko)
The Walking Dead (Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard)
Archie (Dan DeCarlo)
Garfield (Jim Davis)
Cathy (Cathy Guisewite)
Richie Rich (Warren Kremer)
Dennis the Menace (Hank Ketcham)
The Flash (John Broome and Carmine Infantino)
Beetle Bailey (Mort Walker)
Rube Goldberg
Tintin (Hergé)
Saga (Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples)
…and many, many more.
I never thought it was possible for someone to come up with a way to make me want to make my way through every page of the iTunes Terms and Conditions, and then want to go through and look at it all again, but Sikoryak has definitely done it. Sikoryak has truly found a way to turn the iTunes Terms and Conditions into a page turner.
Bravo on a job well done, and I look forward to the upcoming additions!
The fourth generation of the Apple TV went on sale this past Friday. I bought one and have had a chance to use it over the weekend. If you have used either of the two prior models of the Apple TV (the second generation came out in 2010; the third generation in 2012), there is much that is similar. You still have a home screen with icons, and you scroll down to see more icons. Some features have barely changed at all from the prior model except for an updated interface, such as the ability to use Home Sharing to stream your music, photos and videos (purchased or home videos) from a Mac on your home network that is running iTunes. But one thing is very different, and it has the potential to make the Apple TV infinitely better than prior models: the ability to download apps.
Third Party Apps
When the iPhone App Store was introduced on July 10, 2008, there were 500 apps available. A year later, there were 65,000 apps, and today there are well over a million apps. But even on day 1, many recognized that the true value of the iPhone App Store was its potential. Developers could create apps to give the iPhone, and then the iPad, capabilities that their creators at Apple probably never dreamed of. For example, we now have a large number of fantastic legal-specific apps.
Apps on the Apple TV have the same potential. There are a limited set of TV apps available today, and some of them — like Netflix and YouTube — provide the same capabilities that that had been baked-in to previous versions of the Apple TV. But already we are seeing some pretty neat TV apps. Games were a popular app category on the iPhone, and I’m sure that the same will be true on the TV. For example, this weekend my kids and I enjoyed playing Beat Sports, which is pretty fun. And while I’m normally not a big fan of Crossy Road on the iPhone or iPad, I must admit that my kids and I had a ton of laughs when we played the two-player version on the Apple TV (using an iPhone as a controller for Player 2). There are some interesting non-game apps already available; here is a list of some from Rene Ritchie of iMore.
But again, what really interests me is not what is there today, but the idea that the App Store can grow in quantity and quality. Many attorneys use an Apple TV in trials, mediations and meetings so that they can display information on an iPad for others to see. It is probably a question of when, not if, before we will see Apple TV apps designed for lawyers.
Siri remote
Another new feature of the fourth generation Apple TV is the Siri Remote. As the name implies, you can press a button on the remote to activate Siri and ask it to play movies or TV shows, or even search for specific episodes. This is nice because the alternative way of entering input into a TV device — using a small remote to select letters, one letter at a time — is slow and maddening.
Unfortunately, right now Siri is mostly limited to videos, although there are a few other questions that it can now handle (and I’m sure that this will improve in the future). For now, you sometimes need to provide other text to the Apple TV, such as a username or password, and you have to use the old, slow and maddening method. Fortunately the Apple TV removes a little of that misery by offering to connect to your iPhone and learn some basic information from it, such as your WiFi network and password. Every little bit helps.
The Siri remote also has a touch surface at the top where you can swipe and click to navigate the Apple TV. I find this much easier to use than the old Apple TV remote.
The Siri remote can also measure movement, so you can use it to play Wii-style games on your Apple TV.
Volume buttons on the remote can control the volume on your TV or even on your receiver. There is a fantastic interface for learning your receiver without having to type in four digit codes or anything like that. Just follow the instructions and hold the volume up and down buttons on your receiver’s remote when asked.
Unlike the iPhone 6s and Apple Watch, the Siri remote does not include the ability to sense how hard you are pushing down (Force Touch / 3d Touch). That might be a useful feature for a remote, so perhaps we’ll one day see an updated version of the Siri remote.
I like the new remote because it is both easy to use and powerful. My main complaint is that sometimes it is hard to figure out which end is up, especially in the beginning, but that is no longer an issue for me now that I added Apple’s $13 Remote Loop to the bottom, making it easy to see which end is up (and preventing my kids from flinging the remote across the room while swinging a bat in Beat Sports).
Speed and Responsiveness
The new Apple TV uses a much faster processor inside. This is important because the unit is very quick to respond to your controls, which makes the experience of using the Apple TV much better.
Apple also did a nice job with the user interface, with all sorts of little touches that make it super easy to move around the screen. The nice interface makes the Apple TV seem easier to use.
Responsiveness is especially nice when you are watching a video and want to move forward or backward (scrubbing). You can tap the left or right side of the touch pad to jump forward or backward 10 seconds, and doing so is incredibly fast. Or you can slide your finger across the touch pad to move through the video timeline. On many other TV-connected devices, scrubbing is so difficult that I often just don’t do it. But on the new Apple TV, this feature works amazingly well.
Note that Apple sells both a $150 32 GB version and a $200 64 GB version. The more expensive version has the potential to be even faster because it can store more data locally without the need to stream it. Apple says that the 64 GB version is recommended if you plan to download and play a lot of games. I opted for the 64 GB version just in case it is noticeably better and because the $50 difference is not large, but at this point I have no idea whether the extra memory makes a big difference.
4th generation = 1.0
Apple calls this the fourth generation of the Apple TV, but because this is the first version to run the tvOS system, a close cousin to iOS, in many ways Apple TV has the hiccups of a new version 1.0 product — even when it comes to technology that is under Apple’s own control. For example, Apple TV doesn’t work with Apple’s own Remote app on the iPhone, which is a huge surprise and disappointment because it means that for those times when you need to enter text on the Apple TV, you cannot just use the familiar keyboard on your iPhone.
Another noticeable omission: iCloud Photo Library. My iPhone and iPad now have access to every single one of my almost 50,000 digital photographs because they are stored on iCloud. But this feature doesn’t exist yet on Apple TV. For now, there is a workaround that I noted above — make sure that your computer is on the same network and running iTunes, and use Home Sharing. But the Apple TV would work better with the same full photo access that exists on iOS devices. I’m sure that this is coming in an update, but I was surprised that it wasn’t ready on Day 1.
I’m sure that Apple was eager to get something on the market in time for the holidays and had to leave a few unfinished features for a future update. Nevertheless, it is a shame that the device has some missing pieces. Fortunately, other functions on the Apple TV work great, and I have no doubt that Apple will soon release software updates to address these and other initial limitations.
Conclusion
The 2015 version of the Apple TV has a few missing features, but it is still an amazing device today and will get even better with a few updates. It is clearly the first step towards a much better TV experience. It will be great fun to see what developers come up now that they can create apps.
Whenever there is a discussion of lawyers using iPads, a frequent topic is when is it appropriate to use an iPad instead of a computer. Thus, I thought it was interesting when I saw a post on Twitter this week about the most famous iPad-using lawyer in the country, President Obama. Pete Souza, the Chief White House Photographer, posted a picture this week of President Obama working at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Then, in response to a question about why there isn’t a computer on President Obama’s desk, Souza explained that the President just uses an iPad. Feel free to tell folks that if it is good enough for the President, then it is good enough for you, if someone asks why you are using an iPad to get your work done. And now, the news of note from this week:
Speaking of Pete Souza, most of his presidential photographs are taken with a high-end camera, but he also uses an iPhone to take and post pictures on Instagram (and Twitter). This week, I enjoyed listening to an interview of Souza on Episode 20 of the Hashtagged podcast, in which Souza discusses how he started to use an iPhone to take official White House pictures. He also discusses this famous photograph taken in the situation room on May 1, 2011 during the mission to find Osama bin Laden.
The Apple TV officially goes on sale today. I enjoyed watching a short interview on CNN Money with Apple Senior VP Eddie Cue in which he discusses the Apple TV. The easiest way to watch both parts of the interview is to start at this post by Dave Mark on The Loop.
Ben Thompson of Stratechery discusses why Apple is doing just fine, notwithstanding what some stock analysts might say.
Steven Levy, who knew Steve Jobs and frequently interviewed him, isn’t a fan of the new Steve Jobs movie. Levy posted an interesting interview this week with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin about the liberties taken in the movie.
If you want to switch from Evernote to Apple’s Notes app, you can move all of your notes using a program on a Mac. David Pogue of Yahoo Tech explains the process.
Need a costume idea for Halloween? Evan Killham of Cult of Mac points out that you can just ask Siri.
Law Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University visited New Orleans this week and posted a few fun pictures, and discussed lawyering in the Big Easy. No, this doesn’t have anything to do with the iPhone, but I’m always happy to see lawyers (and others!) have a good time down here in New Orleans.
And finally, now that I’m off the topic of the iPhone anyway, I’ll conclude today with a link to this silly video of a Jeopardy game that I think I could totally win (via The Loop):
The Apple TV has always been the best way to display content from your iPhone or iPad on a television. You can show off pictures and videos that you took on a large HDTV, and you can mirror your screen so that others can see web pages, apps, etc. that you are using on your device. Additionally, the Apple TV has provided a way to stream video from services such as Netflix and HBO. Starting this Friday, Apple will start selling the new (fourth generation) Apple TV, which can run its own apps and works with the new — and very cool — Siri Remote.
Apple gave review units of the Apple TV to select journalists, and their reviews started to go online last night. If you have been wondering whether a new Apple TV is right for you, here are the reviews that I found interesting:
John Paczkowski of BuzzFeed: “Apple says the future of TV is apps. That may or may not prove true, but after a couple days with the new Apple TV, it’s a compelling argument. Turns out custom-building a TV from a broad palette of apps that includes everything from pay TV channels and games to travel accommodation services and Periscope is a great way to get exactly the TV experience you want — or close to it, anyway. The new Apple TV isn’t just an upgraded set-top box, it’s the first ‘true’ Apple TV, one that articulates Apple’s vision of what the TV viewing experience should be. It’s an appealing vision.”
Christina Warren of Mashable: “The remote is, in a word, fantastic. It’s slightly larger than the old Apple TV remote and it includes a few more dedicated buttons for menu, home, play/pause and Siri. … It feels awesome in the hand. If you’ve ever used a trackpad on a MacBook, MacBook Air or MacBook Pro — you’ll be familiar with the experience. Swiping faster on the touchpad moves faster across the interface, slower goes slower. Movements are extremely precise and never felt out of control. The remote is Bluetooth — not IR — so you don’t need direct line of sight to navigate — which is nice. On some Bluetooth-based remotes, I’ve noticed lag between a selection and what happens on screen but the Siri remote always keeps up.”
Nilay Patel of The Verge: “I asked for ‘‘80s movies with Tom Cruise on Netflix’ and Siri found me Top Gun and Risky Business, for example. Delightful. Once you select a movie or show, Siri will open a universal landing page that deep links you right into the various services that offer the content. So if you search for Game of Thrones, you’ll see that you can buy it on iTunes and stream it on HBO Go or HBO Now, and you’re off to the races. In terms of iterative improvements to the Apple TV, this is the most important thing Apple could have done, and the execution here is among the best in the game.”
Geoffrey Fowler of the Wall Street Journal: “I think the Apple TV lays the best foundation for what I want TV to become. The Apple TV’s greatest edge is its remote control. That may sound trivial, but other efforts to make apps work on TVs have been comically complex. … The Apple TV gets the Internet TV remote right by reaching for the same touch-screen feeling that makes the iPhone intuitive to a 2-year-old. The new remote has a glass touchpad on one end that you swipe and tap around with your thumb as if it’s an iPhone. Without having to look down, you feel connected to what’s happening on the big screen.”
David Pogue of Yahoo Tech: “Apple has taught Apple TV to recognize natural voice commands in four categories: finding videos, navigating playback, opening apps, and asking questions. … It’s clear that Apple worked its fingers to the bone on this; it works unbelievably well. You have to give a lot of commands before you find a failure.”
Brian Chen of The New York Times: “Even for those more basic elements, the device is better at streaming video content than less expensive products from Amazon, Roku and Google, all of which I tested over the last month. While the new Apple box has flaws, it also has a cleaner interface for finding things to watch and a niftier remote control — not to mention more compelling apps and games.”
Walt Mossberg of The Verge: “Apple TV has become a sort of iPhone or iPad for the TV, a platform for apps usable across a room. By making the box another vessel for its giant assortment of third-party apps and home-grown services, Apple is putting itself in a position to host programming the networks and studios are increasingly streaming, as well as new kinds of TV content.”
Patrick O’Rourke of MobileSyrup: “In true Apple fashion, my initial impression of the Apple TV is that it feels exceedingly refined, similar to most Apple products. It’s clear this revamp of Apple’s set-top box has been in development for a number of years; everything from the device’s new iOS 9-based user interface (UI) – dubbed tvOS – to its sleek Siri Remote is both visually and functionally impressive. But is the Apple TV a better device than the plethora of already released Android set-top boxes, or my current favourite streaming device, the Roku 3? In most respects, yes: The new Apple TV is significantly ahead of the competition in terms of design and hardware, especially when it comes to the device’s UI and Siri Remote.”
Apple starts a new fiscal year at the end of September every year. Yesterday, Apple released the results for its 2015 fiscal fourth quarter (which ran from June 28, 2015 to September 26, 2015) and held a call with analysts to discuss the results. Apple's largest financial quarter is always the first fiscal quarter (the one that we are in now) because it includes the holiday sales during November and December. But because of a surge in iPhone sales at the very end of the last fiscal quarter — the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus went on sale on September 25, and the quarter ended the next day — this turned out to be a hugely profitable quarter for Apple. Yesterday, Apple announced quarterly revenue of $51.5 billion and quarterly net profit of $11.1 billion, making it Apple's best ever fiscal fourth quarter. And because it was the end of the fiscal year, Apple also reported revenue for the fiscal year of $234 billion, which is $58 billion (28%) more than 2014. As John Gruber of Daring Fireball remarked: "The most profitable company on the planet today, and revenue and profit are still growing at around 30 percent annually."
If you want to get all of the nitty gritty details, you can download the audio from the announcement conference call from iTunes, or you can read a rough transcript of the call prepared by Seeking Alpha, or you can read a transcript prepared by Serenity Caldwell and Jason Snell over at iMore. Apple's official press release is here. Here are the things said on the call yesterday that I think would be of interest to iPhone and iPad users:
iPhone
During the past quarter, Apple sold just over 48 million iPhones, the most that Apple has ever sold in a fiscal fourth quarter. A big chunk of those were the new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus phones sold in the last two days of the quarter; Apple CEO Tim Cook previously announced that Apple sold 13 million new iPhones in the first three days that the new models were on sale, and the first two of those days were in the last fiscal quarter. By comparison, in the 2014 fiscal fourth quarter, Apple sold just over 39 million iPhones, and the end of that quarter included the launch of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.
30% of folks who purchased an iPhone in the last quarter to replace a prior smartphone were switching from Android, the highest Android switch rate that Apple has ever seen since it started measuring switchers a few years ago.
By my count, as of September 26, 2015, Apple had sold over 821 million iPhones since they first went on sale in 2007.
iPad
Apple sold almost 10 million iPads (9.873 million). That's the fewest iPads that Apple has sold in a fiscal quarter since 2011.
By my count, as of September 26, 2015, Apple had sold almost 292 million iPads since they first went on sale in 2010.
Cook referenced that Apple will start to sell the brand new iPad Pro next month. It will be interesting to see what kid of demand there is for the iPad Pro considering that overall iPad sales have been down recently.
Here is my updated chart showing iPhone and iPad sales to date, by fiscal quarter. Looking at the trend, it seems likely that in the current quarter that includes the 2015 holiday season, Apple will sell over 100 million iOS devices for the first time ever. Indeed, Apple might even sell close to 100 million iPhones alone this quarter.
Etc.
Cook said that Apple sold more of the Apple Watch in the fiscal fourth quarter than it had in the fiscal third quarter (which was higher than the fiscal second quarter) so Apple Watch sales are on the rise.
Cook said that there over 13,000 apps on the Watch App Store, 1,300 of which are native apps designed for watchOS 2.0.
Apple's revenue in China doubled from the previous year. Tim Cook says that, at some point, he believes that China will be Apple's biggest market.
iOS 9 adoption is very strong, and the updated operating system for the iPhone and iPad was downloaded by more users than any software release in Apple's history. Today, six weeks after it was released on September 16, 61% of active iOS devices are already running iOS 9.
6.5 million people are paying for Apple Music. Another 8.5 million people are still in a free 3-month trial of Apple Music.
Apple Pay will be available to American Express customers in Australia and Canada before the end of 2015, and will expand to Spain, Singapore, and Hong Kong in 2016.
Thank you to Lit Software for sponsoring iPhone J.D. Many of you know Lit Software because of the company’s fantastic TrialPad and TranscriptPad apps. The company’s newest app is DocReviewPad, an app that you can use to review and annotate documents on your iPad. It is the only app of its kind for the iPad, and it turns an iPad into an even more useful litigation tool for attorneys. For my overview of the basic features of DocReviewPad, check out the review that I posted in July. But since then, the company has issued three updates to add new features and improvements.
The most recent major update was version 1.2, which came just a few days ago, and it adds some great new features. (And that update was tweaked today, October 27th, with Version 1.2.1.) My favorite new feature is that you can now create a tag or issue code at the page level. In the past, you could only assign issue codes tags or issue codes for an entire document — which usually makes sense, but in some circumstances is not as precise.
Screenshot
After you assign issue codes, when you create a document report, the report will now show you whether the issue code applies to the entire document (and will give you the Bates range of the document), plus the report will show you if there is a document for which the issue code applies to just one or a few pages of the document (with an indication of both the total Bates range of the document, plus the specific Bates number pages on which the issue code appears).
Another new feature is a redact tool, useful if you have a document that you need to produce which contains information that is privileged, trade secret, or otherwise not appropriate for disclosure. Note that this is not a “true” redaction in that DocReviewPad simply obscures the content with a black box, which means a PDF editor could still reveal the content below the black box. However, if you print the document with the redacted portion obscured and then re-scan the page that you printed, you will then have an electronic file that can be produced and which doesn’t contain the redacted words or information underneath the black box.
One nice interface improvement is that there is no longer a single “Annotate” tool which contains both the highlight and the pen function. Instead, there is a separate button for “Highlight” and for “Pen.” Both of those tools are so useful that it makes sense to give them dedicated buttons so that you can select them more quickly.
Screenshot
Another interface improvement is that you can now hold your finger down on a document image and a pop-up menu will appear with useful options: rename document, remove or update the appearance of the Bates number that you applied, assign a new Bates number, extract pages (with the option to select a starting and ending page, plus a file name for the extracted pages), and close the document.
Other new features include the ability to search for a specific Bates number as well as OCR data and document name, and a notification of gaps in the Bates number sequence.
DocReviewPad was a great app when it was launched in July, but it continues to get more useful thanks to frequent updates adding new features. It is amazing that you can use an iPad to store, organize and review all of the documents in your case, and even create production sets. But even if you just want a tool for applying Bates numbers to a set of documents, DocReviewPad works great for that function alone and is easier to use than any other software I’ve tried for the computer or iPad.
The Steve Jobs movie comes out today, although it has been in limited release for a few weeks now. From everything I’ve read it sounds like a great movie for folks who like Aaron Sorkin’s fast-talking style, and with its three acts the movie is more like a stage play than a motion picture. Having said that, I understand that the movie is so full of factual inaccuracies that it seems almost unfair to call it the “Steve Jobs” movie. Good articles by Walt Mossberg and John Gruber suggest that it would have been better if the movie had changed the name of the main character from Steve Jobs to something else so that it was clear that this is a work of fiction, much like Orson Welles made a movie loosely based on William Randolph Hearst but then called it Citizen Kane — not Citizen Hearst — to account for the artistic liberties. As California attorney David Sparks writes: “Aaron Sorkin writes some great dialogue and the story does pull you in. However, there is so little connection between the movie and actual events, that you have to wonder why they called it Steve Jobs at all.” I’m sure that I’ll see the movie eventually, and because I am a fan of Sorkin’s work, I suspect that I will enjoy this as a movie. But if you see it, don’t expect this to be anything close to a true biography. And now, the news of note from the past week:
If you practice law in Louisiana like I do, you’ll be pleased to learn that New Orleans attorney Matt Miller has updated his $4.99 Louisiana Civil Code app to contain the current law. It is a free upgrade for prior users of the app.
Attorney Jeremy Horwitz of 9to5Mac explains why the new Apple TV that comes out next week is worth getting.
Apple released iOS 9.1 this week. It adds new emoji characters such as a taco, rolling eyes, a middle finger, and even a fleur-de-lis (a favorite for those of us in New Orleans). Jeremy Burge of Emojipedia has a good list of the new ones. If you have an iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus, iOS 9.1 also does a better job creating live photos when you move your camera after taking a shot.
Apple also released watchOS 2.0.1 this week. The update includes those new emoji characters and also fixes a lot of bugs and improves performance and battery life.
Nate Raymond of Reuters reports that Apple told a federal court that it is impossible for Apple to access data on an iPhone running iOS 8 or iOS 9. Apple said that it is technically possible for the company to access data on the 10% of iPhones still running iOS 7 or earlier, but Apple would not do so unless ordered by a court.
Christian Zibreg of iDownloadBlog reports on some of the highlights of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s appearance this week at the Wall Street Journal Digital Live conference.
Rene Ritchie of iMore reviews Apple’s newest Magic Keyboard. I love using the prior model of Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard with my iPad. I don’t think it is worth spending the money to upgrade because that older keyboard still works great for me, but if you are looking to get a Bluetooth keyboard for your iPad, you’ll want to consider the new Magic Keyboard.
Jordon Kahn of 9to5Mac discusses a new report from AAA on how distracting it is to use the iPhone/Siri and other hands-free technology while driving.
And finally, Adam Lisagor of Sandwich Video has started to produce a hilarious new series of videos called Computer Show. It is a computer-related talk show from the early 1980s that interviews folks from the technology world today — which means that the co-hosts are mighty confused as to what is going on. It is amazing how well these are done; they walk the fine line between parody and being a spot-on duplication of shows that I used to watch when I was a kid, back when the Apple II was high technology. So far, there are two videos. The first video, embedded below, is very funny. Watch that one first. But then don’t miss the second one which answers the question of what someone from the early 1980s might think of an iPhone.
Ever since the first model of the Apple TV went on sale in 2007, it has been the best way to get content from your Apple devices on your TV. The last big update to the Apple TV was in 2012, although there was a minor update in 2013. On September 9, 2015, at the same time that Apple introduced the iPhone 6s and the iPad Pro, Apple announced the new version of the Apple TV. Yesterday, during an interview at the Wall Street Journal Digital Live conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple would start taking orders for the new Apple TV on Monday, October 26, and said that the device would start shipping by the end of the week. There will be a $149 model with 32 GB, and a $199 model with 64 GB.
The new Apple TV will have a fresh new interface, and thanks to its use of the Apple A8 chip (the same chip used in last year’s iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus) it will be substantially faster and more responsive than the prior model of the Apple TV (which used an A5, the chip that was in the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4s). It will come with a new remote that has a touch pad and buttons for common functions. Early reviews indicate that the touch pad will be very precise for scrubbing through shows, and I hope that this is true. Fast-forward and rewind on the current Apple TV always seems to me to be difficult to control, and never gets me exactly where I wanted to go.
One of the buttons on the new remote will trigger Siri. Just hold down the button and tell the TV what you are looking for, such as the name of a movie or a TV show, or a particular actor or genre. At launch, Apple TV will be able to search Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Showtime and iTunes. You can also use Siri to ask questions or give commans, such as “who directed this movie” or “fast forward two minutes.” One neat feature: you can ask Siri “what did he (or she) just say” and the show will not only rewind 15 seconds but will also temporarily turn on closed captioning so that you can read the words on the screen as well as hear the words again. Very neat.
The new Apple TV also supports third party apps. I’m sure that we will see lots of games on the Apple TV, just l like we have a huge number of games on the iPhone and iPad. I don’t currently have a game console in my house; in fact, it occurs to me that I haven’t had a game system hooked up to my own television since I had an Atari 2600 and a ColecoVision in the early 1980s. I doubt that the Apple TV will support the sophisticated games that can be played consoles like the PlayStation and Xbox, but my guess is that the games that Apple TV supports will still be plenty fun. I’m just as interested to see what non-game apps are introduced for the Apple TV. As Tim Cook said yesterday: “Apps are the future … things that you want to do on a larger screen. Games are a part of it, but there are many other genres.”
The Apple TV has always been a nice way to show off something on the iPhone or iPad on a large screen so that it can be shared with others. And if you have a Mac at your house, the Apple TV has always been a great way to show off your home movies, photographs and other media. With the new features that will be available starting next week, the Apple TV has the potential to be much, much more.
Apple will start selling the iPad Pro and its little buddy, the Apple Pencil stylus, in November. We don’t have a release date yet, but Roger Fingas of AppleInsider reports that both products were approved this week by the FCC. Rumors are that Apple will start taking pre-orders in the next week or so, with shipments starting in the first week of November. And now, the news of note from the past week:
Jared Newman of PCWorld reports that JetBlue is starting free and fast Wi-Fi service on its flights — fast enough to even stream video.
Michael Rosenwald of the Washington Post reports that Gary Allen has passed away. For many years, Allen published the definitive website on Apple retail stores, and he visited more stores and had more experiences in lines outside of Apple Stores than anyone else. He will be missed.
Federico Viticci of MacStories reports on the new versions of Pages and Numbers for iOS released by Apple this week.
Stephen Hackett of 512 Pixels reviews the new Notes app in iOS 9.
And finally, have you ever wanted to be in the middle of a music video? You can do so if you load this 3D YouTube video on your iPhone or iPad and make it full screen. Then move your device around while the video plays and you will be in the middle of the action. If you have a chair that swivels, it is fun to sit in that chair and spin around with your iPhone or iPad in your hand while the video is playing. The video is embedded below, but to make it work I think that you need to click or tap here to load the video in the YouTube app. This is a song from the Andrew Lloyd Weber upcoming Broadway show School of Rock — the Musical.
