Posts Tagged → apple hardware

Pondering the iPhone 16 Capture Button

If the rumors are to be believed, with the upcoming iPhone 16 announcement Apple will introduce a new capture button that will be added to the phones across the line (both pro and non-pro models). The tea leaves also say that this new capture button will be mechanical, not capacitive, but that it may be touch-sensitive. This is so it can detect, for instance, swiping across the button as opposed to pressing it.

After a year with the Action button on the iPhone 15 Pro, I can tell you I am sold on these additional buttons. I’ve programmed my Action button to be context-sensitive to my current Focus mode. If I’m in Work Focus mode, pressing the button does different things than when I’m in Personal Focus mode or Disneyland Focus mode. (Yes. I have a Disneyland Focus.) In most modes, the Action button gives me a menu of options. In Disneyland mode, it just takes a picture. So, adding an additional button makes it that much better in my mind.

However, what we haven’t heard from the rumors is whether this physical button will be programmable. While I have no problem with Apple making the default behavior of the capture button to take a picture, I admit I would be disappointed if it wasn’t programmable. Not everybody wants to take a picture. Maybe for some people, “capture” means adding an item to their task list or recording a voice memo, or, in my case, triggering a customized shortcut that does all sorts of cool tricks. While I suspect a large percentage of people will use a capture button just to take photos (and by “large percentage” I mean over 90%), I hope Apple makes that button programmable for the rest of us.

Farewell, Apple SuperDrive

Felipe Esposito wrote on 9to5Mac that it is no longer possible to buy the Apple SuperDrive through the Apple Store in the United States. While there has been no official announcement, it appears that Apple is selling out existing stock with no intention of making any more. The SuperDrive is a USB CD and DVD player that you can connect to your Mac with a USB-A port. Back in the day, they were essential with operating system and software were issued on CD.

apple superdrive hardware device that reads and writes CDs and DVDs
Image: Evan-Amos

I have one in a drawer that I use infrequently. Just recently, I bought some Jamey Aebersold music books that came with accompanying tracks on CD. Using my SuperDrive, I installed the tracks into Apple Music and made them available for my next practice session.

While I understand that Apple feels it’s time to discontinue this 2008 product, I’m still a little sad. I bought mine around 2010, and now I’m just hoping I can get another 14 years out of it.

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.

The Vision Pro: Popularity, Availability, and Iteration

I’ll join the digital queue this Friday morning to purchase my Vision Pro. This is an interesting product as we head towards its launch because it appears that while it won’t be a big seller (on an Apple scale), it may still be hard to buy.

If the rumors are true, those fancy screens are hard to make and will limit the number of units Apple can ship. I also can’t help but wonder if Apple doesn’t particularly want to make this first iteration of the Vision Pro something that sells in the millions. I suspect they are still figuring out the product category themselves and getting feedback from a few hundred thousand users will give them a lot of good ideas.

The Vision Pro is expensive, and the story is unclear. A lot of the Apple faithful will pass, at least initially. This point landed for me in a recent MacSparky Labs meetup. Labs Members like Apple products. A lot. Yet we had a room full of Apple fans and only a few of them intend to buy one. Again, I expect that is due to the price and the fact that people aren’t sure what they would do with it.

The interesting point is that despite the fact that demand for the Vision Pro is lower than for other Apple products, the rumored limited quantities could still make it hard to get. (Strange, right?)

Regardless, the story of this product is not about its first iteration. Apple is thinking long-term, as they always do. Fourteen years ago, John Gruber wrote about how iteration is Apple’s superpower. Here we go again.

Apple Vision Pro Thoughts

It’s a big week for those contemplating buying a Vision Pro. Apple has always prided itself on only releasing products when they are “done.” While I have no doubt that the Vision Pro is done, I also think the use case for the product is far from done…This is a post for MacSparky Labs Members only. Care to join? Or perhaps do you need to sign in?

Apple and Support for Old Hardware

There are a lot of knocks against Apple that, when I hear them, I say, “Yup. That’s about right.” They charge too much for storage on new Macs. They’re secretive about new products, which is smart. But they are also often secretive about little stuff, which seems dumb. They are way too stingy with free iCloud storage. (5GB?! Really? In 2022?)

But then there is a separate category of knocks against Apple that baffle me. One of those is the idea that they cripple old devices, so you’ll buy a new one. Where do people get that idea? Until recently, my wife was running a 10-year-old MacBook. I know multiple people that are still using an iPad 2. (The iPad 2 shipped in 2011.) The same goes for the iPhone. When measured against the march of technology, Apple supports ancient iPhones.

John Gruber recently posted a story about Google dropping support for their Pixel 3, a three-year-old phone. At the same time. Apple still supports the iPhone 6S, which shipped in 2015. I honestly don’t get the argument that Apple is usint software updates to kill old hardware. In reality it is just the opposite.

If you look at the iPad in particular, I know a lot of people running old hardware quite happily. Apple keeps the software updates coming and the iPad is like the energizer bunny. It just keeps going and going. I have a theory that we’ll get similar longevity from Apple Silicon Macs, but that remains to be seen.