Post Category → not-labs

Mac Power Users 737: Scoring a Movie, with David Metzger

David Metzger is a composer, arranger, and orchestrator with a celebrated career that has earned him Academy, Grammy, and Tony Awards. He joins Stephen and me on this episode of Mac Power Users to talk about how the music for some of the most beloved films and shows of our time is made.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

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DOJ v. Apple 

As a no-longer-practicing attorney and someone who generally digs Apple, I reviewed the DOJ complaint filed today and have a few takeaways.

  • A taxpayer-funded lawsuit against a trillion-dollar company is not going away anytime soon. It will take on a life of its own. Trust me on this one.
  • In my eyes, the monopoly case here is much more complicated than it was against Microsoft back in the day. The iPhone has a lot of viable competition.
  • To follow up on that point, Apple considers the benefits arising from its control over the iPhone a competitive advantage. Can the government force Apple to make the iPhone more (for lack of a better term) hackable and diminish its market advantage? I suspect many Apple customers don’t even want that.
  • Regardless of merits, this will be a distraction for Apple. The only question is: How big?

The Problem with Vision Pro App Store

Lately, I’ve been challenged when using App Store for Vision Pro. Specifically, there’s no easy way to find the most recently released visionOS applications. While Apple does have a “new” category, a lot of apps in it were available on launch day. As somebody interested in finding new and interesting ways to use this fancy gizmo, I want to see the most recent applications being launched.

For now, I’m willing to sort through all the noise to find a little signal. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to do it.

I know this is temporary, and that over time it’ll get easier to find the notable applications, and the firehose of new ones will not interest me. But for the time being, I wish Apple had a simple way to see everything that’s new from the last several days.

On Apple Getting AI Help

Bloomberg reports that Apple is in talks with Google (and possibly OpenAI) about a deal to run iPhone AI features through these third-party providers. It’s all sketchy at this point but it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility.

Capacity is one of Apple’s big problems in terms of AI. There are just so many iPhones out in the wild that if you add an AI feature requiring any cloud processing, they would have to have massive server capacity to keep up with it.

That’s just one more reason why the on-device model makes sense. However, if there was something they did want to do on the server or make available to their users to be done on a server, they’re going to need help. So the real question would be whether Apple makes that deal or just does AI processing on device.

M3 MacBook Air has Faster SSD Speeds

A bit of good news from iFixit on the teardown of the new M3 MacBook Air: they have now switched to two 128 GB storage modules. You may know that in the first two iterations of the Apple silicon MacBook Air, the base storage models were significantly slower in read-write speeds than the other models in the line because they only used one socket for storage, significantly cutting down the bandwidth. With the M3 model, the device gets SSD write speeds approximately 33% faster and read speeds approximately 82% faster.

There was a lot of hand-wringing when the M2 model didn’t make any changes to the SSD problem. It could just be that the manufacturing timeline didn’t give them enough time to fix it. I would argue that they should have caught this problem before releasing the first one. Regardless, I’m happy that Apple did respond, and now customers of the lower-end MacBook Air will get better SSD read and write speeds.

Focused 199: Repotting and Retirement, with Jim Eagar

Jim Eagar joins Mike and me on this episode of Focused to talk about how to navigate the four phases of retirement with meaning and purpose.

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

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Who’s Responsible For Age Verification?

There seems to be a lot of finger-pointing going on about age verification between software and hardware developers. Facebook (and now Tinder) argue that it’s up to the hardware seller to verify a user’s age. (Ben Lovejoy covers this over at 9to5Mac.) In a lot of ways, that makes sense. When you register your iPhone, it should know how old you are. That could give Apple the ability to prevent underage children from downloading dangerous social media apps. Of course, it’s not illegal to have these apps for underage children in every jurisdiction.

Likewise, the seller of these dangerous apps that can harm children should take more responsibility than just finger-pointing at the device manufacturer. There are plenty of ways for Tinder and Facebook to know when they have an underage user. And they, too, should be taking steps to protect these children.

And of course, don’t forget the parents. Some parents will want to grant their children access, and others will want to lock the devices down. In my opinion, the only way we’re going to really solve this problem is if the parents, the hardware and the software people all get together on this. I absolutely would like to see Apple take a more active role in this, but I don’t think it’s solely responsible for the solution.

The New M3 MacBook Air

Recently, Apple released new M3-based MacBook Air computers in 13- and 15-inch sizes. In addition to the faster processors, the new machines can run two monitors simultaneously. Specifically, they can run one 6k and one 5k monitor, provided the lid on the MacBook Air is closed. These new computers are very similar to the configurations on the M3 iMac released late last year, and this is a nice upgrade to the MacBook Air line.

Apple’s M3 MacBook Air is here.

If you’ve been waiting for a new MacBook Air, now is the time. I’ve frequently stated that the MacBook Air really is the laptop standard at this point. I don’t recommend getting a MacBook Pro unless you have good reason for one since the MacBook Air is such a capable computer, and now with the additional 15-inch size, it is even more so.

It’s interesting that these got released via a press release. Normally there is an event around this time of year where Apple releases several new products and it would seem like a new MacBook Air would fit within such an event. This makes me wonder if the other rumored devices like an M3 Mac mini and new iPads will also be released the same way, and Apple will skip a Spring event.

We’ll see.