Unauthoritative Pronouncements

Matt Birchler wrote a nice blog post, and made a YouTube video, about his favorite Mac tips. Honestly it feels like, “I know the Mac” and then you check out something like this and realize that there’s some overlap, but there’s also stuff you did not know.

In the case of Matt’s tips it was for Command+Option+I which opens a Get Info window that changes based on your selection, including your selection of multiple items. This is like the info pane in the finder window I usually use, but so much of that window is taken up by image previews I usually have to scroll down to see other file info.

A couple of weeks ago, Merlin Mann posted on Mastodon (and talked on RecDiffs) about the long list of keyboard shortcuts that are available to Mac users. What particularly piqued my interest was the keyboard shortcut to get to the Help menu’s Search field, Command+Shift+?.

I periodically use that Search field under the menu to find functions in an application when I can’t remember where they are, or if the app can even do that thing. I think most people assume it searches help documents. I absolutely didn’t know about the keyboard shortcut though because there’s no shortcut listed next to that Search box. It makes it into a kind of Spotlight/Launchbar/Alfred thing where you can, without leaving the keyboard, just hit the shortcut and type whatever command you want to do in the app and hit enter.

We’ve all got these things that we each accumulate into our mushy, little monkey-brains, or even habits that we don’t perceive to be “tricks” or “hacks”. There’s huge overlap in that knowledge too, where we might think someone is just cynically posting about “lifehacks” to score some clicks, but more often than not, even a cynical post might have something in it. We just don’t know what other people don’t know. A bubbling froth of Venn diagrams.

There’s also knowledge that gets lost over time, and new ways of doing things that veteran Mac users don’t know. Jason Snell recently wrote a very good post about Mac defaults being enough for most people. It’s great to rethink how much stuff we’ve accumulated might not be entirely necessary.

Robb Knight brought Hemispheric Views’ Duel of the Defaults to my attention, and the attention of a lot of other people. He’s compiled a running list of peoples’ default apps for things. They’re not tips, exactly, but what apps to use is kind of a tip.

Joe’s Mac Tips

Finder

I have no fancy Finder tips. I just have strong preferences for how I use it. Command+J:

• Always open in column view.
• Browse in column view.
• Group by Date Modified
• Sort by Date Modified.
• Text Size 12.
• Show icons.
• Show icon previews.
• Show preview column.

I’ve used Macs since my mom’s Mac Plus running 6.0.8 so I know all about the classic way to view things in a Finder window, but I frequently find that I need to do something with the hierarchy. That means I also ‘Show Pathbar’ at the bottom, and ‘Show Sidebar’ to get at locations quickly.

Another thing I occasionally need to do is get a path from the Finder into Terminal. All you have to do is drag a file or folder from the Finder window to the Terminal window and it’ll paste it right there. For the reverse, you type open . and then a Finder window will appear with the directory you were in in the terminal open so you can do things that are easier to do from the Finder, or easier to do from the Terminal.

Another thing I do is under Finder -> Settings -> Advanced. Show all filename extensions. It’s not as neat, and clean as hiding them, but too often I find that I want to just know if something is a png, or jpeg without having to select and interrogate each individual item. I wish there was a way to hide the extension for apps only, because there are plenty of context clues about what’s an app. You might have also done that thing with a text file where you typed an extension, thinking that you changed it, just to realize you now have a file called “post.markdown.txt”.

In those same settings change “When performing a search:” pulldown to “Search the Current Folder”. Usually I know I want to find something in Dropbox, or in a directory with all my blog posts, or podcasts, and I don’t want to search the entire Mac, slowly, and get a lot of noise in my results.

In Finder -> Settings -> Tags I recommend turning off any tags you don’t use (that’s all tags, for me) because they clutter up context menus and the Sidebar.

Safari

My biggest tip for Safari is to customize your toolbar by right-clicking on it and rearranging that mess. While I like the Sidebar in the Finder, I haaaaaaate the Sidebar in Safari and prefer to use the Favorites Bar. For some reason, even though the Favorites Bar is attached to the same user interface elements you can edit with Customize Toolbar, the option to enable it lives in the View menu.

An option that really helps me everywhere in the OS, but especially Safari is an Accessibility setting. Settings -> Accessibility -> Display. Then turn on “Show toolbar button shapes” so you can, you know, SEE WHAT IS AND IS NOT A BUTTON. Big help in Safari’s toolbar, no matter how you choose to customize it.

Another setting particularly useful in Safari is in Settings -> Appearance -> Show scroll bars. Set it to either ‘Automatically based on mouse or trackpad’ or ‘Always’. For some reason I find it really distracting when the scroll bar element appears and disappears, especially if I’m reading something kind of long, or going back and forth in a reference document. Maybe I’m just old.

A new feature that I’ve really been taking advantage of is Add to Dock. I wrote about it for Six Colors, but the short version is that it makes a little ‘app’ thing that runs a lightweight, sandboxed instance of Safari. The ‘app’ doesn’t even need to live in your Dock once you make it. It’s worked well for certain tasks that I don’t want to bury in tabs, work better at a different screen resolution than my main Safari window, or want to keep separate cookies and profiles in. Experiment with it — it’s fun!

I’m pretty disappointed in Apple Music (as an app, and as a service), so I wanted to try Spotify, without downloading Spotify’s app. Works great with Add to Dock.

The only keyboard shortcuts I use frequently in Safari are Command++ and Command+- to increase the ‘zoom’ of a web page. You’d be surprised how many other apps also accept those keyboard shortcuts.

Hot Corners

I love this feature of macOS and have used it for years. It’s in my muscle memory. The lower right corner brings up Mission Control and the lower left corner puts my Mac to sleep. I use these two things multiple times a day, and they never break, or throw errors. It’s utter dependability is why it’s a natural gesture.

Screen Saver - Colors

I miss After Dark’s flying toasters as much as the next person, and I do like all the fancy screen savers that we’ve had over the years, but my current bar is set at a screen saver that won’t spin up my MacBook Pro’s fans. Screen Saver -> Photos -> Options -> Colors. Then I know my Mac isn’t asleep, but also isn’t taking off into low Earth orbit.

Third Party Apps

Just like Matt Birchler did, I’ll write about some of the apps I use to spackle over stuff.

Drafts

I love this app. I use .00001% of its features, but the features I don’t use never get in my way. It’s for notes, snippets, drafts, grocery lists because of Task Paper stuff, just anything and everything. I don’t use it for writing longer form pieces, but they may start there.

Byword

This is my favorite text editor to write in because I can’t fuck around in it. It’s from the era of “distraction free” markdown text editors with iOS and Dropbox support. Kids these days may not appreciate that little sliver of development history, but I’m grateful that Byword keeps chugging along. It has neither bells, nor whistles, and it’s perfect. Occasionally, I will change the monospace font I use in the app, but I can’t waste my time on themes, or complicated outline structures. A nice feature is that it has multimarkdown YAML front matter - which means nothing to you - but it’s how I write for my blog, with Title: being the first line, and whatever I enter as the title is what it would like to save the file as. It’s just a nice feature.

BBEdit

This is my preferred code editor. I used to used TextWrangler, R.I.P., but the free version of BBEdit suffices for most of what I need to do. I’m not a developer, I just write code that breaks for free. It is probably the app where I have to use the Help -> Search function the most.

Transmit

I would be lost without Transmit. It takes care of all my FTP needs in such a beautiful, delightful way. It does way more than that, but I’m a simple man.

SoundSource

This is essential for my setup. When I dock the laptop the audio inputs and outputs could wind up with anything - or even after a restart. Using SoundSource insures my audio is where I expect it to be, and it has handy per-app overrides, which is useful when I want Zoom, Skype, Slack, and Teams to use my headphones attached to my ElgatoXLR, but I want my system audio to be my speakers attached to my laptop dock. It’s very handy.

One Thing

I wanted to put the weather, according to my Home temperature and humidity sensor, in my menu bar, and One Thing was perfect for it. You can format whatever you want to and fire a Shortcut that updates the menu bar. Shortcuts is awful, and the Home integration with Shortcuts is fragile and entirely incapable of being debugged, but that’s not One Thing’s fault because it only does … one thing.

Alfred

I was a longtime Alfred user on my previous MacBook Pro. I think it was Alfred 3? I never got around to installing it on my current MacBook Pro in 2018 because I wanted to see if I could get by with Spotlight. Spotlight’s pretty great.

Recently, mostly because of my unrelated frustrations with Shortcuts, I’ve been getting back in to Alfred because it has its own workflow automation system. It uses a nodegraph, and we all know how much I love nodegraphs. I’m currently tinkering with some stuff to improve my day-to-day Mac experience and get things out of what increasingly seems like unmaintained automation software.

Bartender

I resisted buying Bartender for years because I just didn’t really have a need. Then, as I’ve been working from home, I’ve accumulated a lot of things that I’ve had to install, for work-related connectivity that I otherwise wouldn’t use or want to look at. I finally broke down and banished all my stuff.

Lightroom

Honestly, it’s probably the best app they’ve made since introducing Creative Cloud. Lightroom Classic always felt clunky to me, but Lightroom is nimble, and is just as fully featured when I’m on the road away from my computer. I never have to worry about where a photo is saved. Big endorsement from me. It’s also way better than Photos, which is almost never in sync with anything else, and lacks decent tools.

Logitech MX Master 3S

This isn’t really software — it does come with some heinous Logitech software — but it changes the way I use my computer. The thumb-paddle-shaped part isn’t just comfortable to hold, it does the equivalent of a three-finger swipe on a touch pad to change Spaces and full screen apps (which are spaces). I use a lot of software that needs to take up one, or both, of my monitors and you really need a way to switch through them quickly. It makes a big difference, even over using Hot Corners for Mission Control, because I don’t have to hunt for anything.

Share Your Hot Tips

Like I said at the start, there are huge areas of overlap with what other people do, but there’s also stuff that people don’t mention because they think it’s either too obvious, or it doesn’t occur to them. Whether anything Matt Birchler, Jason Snell, Merlin Mann, or I said would lead to anyone changing anything about how they use their Macs is sort of besides the point. It can confirm you’re doing exactly what you should be doing, and people like me are nuts for using column view.

Don’t assume other people already know everything and keep silent because you’re missing out on some tiny thing that might be useful.

In a rush to get everything done before the holidays tvOS 17.2 was pulled out of the oven too early. I have strong opinions about tvOS, and obviously hold it to a high standard, but I don’t see how delivering something by this arbitrary deadline qualifies as progress when the thing being delivered is so incomplete, and buggy.

Everything I said about the revised TV app is still true.

The issues that I have suggested Apple should resolve:

1. Unify media and apps into one interface, with the ability to pin favorite apps.
2. Reduce the amount of Apple TV+ promotion in the interface, particularly for non-subscribers.
3. Properly personalized recommendations based on viewing habits.
4. Handle live TV through a unified programming guide, like Amazon does, instead of pretending the only live TV is live sports.

The new interface miraculously resolves none of these things.

A brief recap of that post: Instead of a horizontal row of pill-shaped buttons in the TV app, it’s a vertical sidebar that auto-hides. The experience still centers Apple TV+, and now MLS Season Pass. None of the core functions can be moved around or hidden. I hope you like those things because they live there forever, above anything else.

It sucked in the beta, and it still sucks now, because nothing was improved at all about it since its introduction in October. Except for some reason “Watch Now” has been renamed “Home” in the TV app. So now you have an Apple TV with a Home Screen that has a TV app that has a Home Screen. Deep, sharp inhale. Long, slow exhale.

There is a new Newsroom write-up about it how great the TV app improvements are!

“The redesigned Apple TV app makes it easier than ever for users to watch the shows, movies, and sports they love through an intuitive interface that brings content to the forefront,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Services. “With so much available to watch, our aim is to ensure users always have their favorites at their fingertips.”

No it isn’t. What’s at my fingertips are shows that I don’t subscribe to. Regardless of the quality or award-winning nature of those shows, I do not have an active subscription, and shoving them under my fingertips does me no favors, because what I want to do is not at the forefront as long as it’s taking up that space.

The new sidebar navigation also introduces Home, a unified guide for all the shows, movies, and sports viewers love. Within Home, the Channels & Apps section allows users to browse each of their subscribed channels or connected apps in depth. And collections — including New Shows & Movies, Top Charts, Trending, and For You — bring forward the best recommendations for viewers to enjoy across what’s new, popular, and tailored just for them.

This is absolutely not how this works in practice. I invite anyone in tvOS 17.2 to scroll down the sidebar to Amazon, Disney+, Max, or another major streamer. You’ll see a very sparse, depersonalized interface that shows you very little media at all, let alone media that’s relevant to you, specifically. This is in stark contrast to the media displayed inside of those apps. This is utterly barren in comparison.

It utterly fails at being a replacement for even the worst, buggiest, third party app I have, and I’d rather use the treacherous Prime Video app than deal with what the TV app thinks is on Prime Video, because the TV app doesn’t really know.

On living room devices, the sidebar will also feature profiles, allowing households to quickly switch between users for better personalization in Up Next and content recommendations across the app.

This still doesn’t work in practice. Third parties really haven’t bought in to Apple’s user profiles. People also don’t always watch movies and TV shows in their own profile (Apple or otherwise). Also the only thing in the interface that shows personalized recommendations is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down at the bottom of the TV app’s Home Screen. It currently takes me 16 swipes down to get to that personalized “For You” row, and 23 swipes to get to “We Think You’ll Love These Action-Adventures”.

Right under those fingertips!

Do the people working on this product not know what personalization is? It’s an interface where I can’t move anything, to even narrow down my interests, or even the Apps and Channels that matter to me more than the others. Charting, promotions, editorial content all buries personalized recommendations, and there’s no consideration for what mood I might be in. Compare this to any major streaming app at all and you’d see how weak and pallid this personalization is because it can’t match, let alone extend it, and they own this whole platform, not just a singular app.

R.I.P. iTunes Store

I don’t have a lot of love for the remnants of the iTunes Store inside of tvOS. The Movies and TV Shows apps never had good navigation, and felt entirely alien to the way other, modern media apps felt.

I’m not really won over by its replacement in the TV app, or the execution of the transition. Someone at Apple must have, wisely, figured that a lot of users probably had TV Shows and Movies somewhere in their Home Screen, and because the Home Screen is a left-aligned mess, removing two apps was sure to cause a lot of app reshuffling and confusion after upgrading (just as the sixth column did a few months ago). Those apps now just serve as splash screens with redirects to the TV app Store and Library views.

They didn’t do anything to spruce up the experience of navigating your library. It’s a sea of 16:9 tiles that can be filtered by genre, but the genres are still bad. Animation has a cute little Mike from Monsters Inc. style icon, but all my Pixar movies are in “Kids & Family” - whoopsie!

Also a lot of my Library is incompletely categorized. “TV Shows” contains only Battlestar Galactica episodes that I’ve purchased. Tapping on it reveals all the seasons as rows, with each row having all the episodes horizontally tiled across, instead of something sane or practical like a season navigation element and an episode list. Also if you bought a few episodes here or there, and not the complete season, the interface doesn’t show you the missing episodes or how to get to them in the store. The episode consists of a thumbnail that will play the episode, and a truncated text description under it that can be expanded into the exact same amount of text.

Also BSG is my only “TV Shows” show, all the other TV shows I’ve purchased are strewn about in the genres. “Comedy” has shows like 30 Rock and “Drama” has shows like Mad Men.

The Store fares a bit better, but only because it has rows based on ratings, popularity, sales, and genres, and they all have much more information when you drill down into them because it’s showing you the information you see when you ask Siri for a show (more on that later).

Unfortunately, there’s no cute iconography here, and the genres are these over-sized 16:9 icons that are just a color gradient overlayed with something from a stock photo library. Not really a step backwards for the iTunes Store at all, but not really moving anything forward.

While the TV app’s Home Screen (grumble) has two rows of lightly personalized media recommendations, there’s no personalization in the Store view at all. Nothing based on your purchase history, library, or streaming habits. Everything displayed here is the same as it is for everyone else in your region. An editorial, TV-Guide-magazine-like approach that isn’t modern and doesn’t meet user expectations from the other streaming apps they use.

Do You Want to Search or Search?

A huge change that I didn’t write up (well, I started to last week, but then the OS needed to ship so here we are!) is the change to the Siri button in tvOS 17.2 because that was shoved in to the last two release candidate betas.

Like you pulled the underbaked cake out of the oven and sprinkled sugar over the top because you forgot to add it earlier.

Tapping the Siri button in compatible apps will bring up a search box element at the top of the screen where you then need to hold down the Siri button to dictate a search. It will then whisk you away to the Search app, which will conduct the search and display the results there. OR, if you’re in the TV app it will do the search inside of the Search view of the TV app, which will show the same results as the Search app, but doesn’t have the same filtering. Tap and hold inside of the Music app gets you a Search inside of that app (except on my 4th gen Apple TV).

Holding down the Siri button will still, eventually, bring up that spinning orb and you can do all the same Siri stuff you’re used to with the orb. It will display it’s search results in the same ephemeral overlay as before.

So why did I say “compatible” earlier? Well, right now you can only tap to dictate a search in the Home Screen, the TV app, or the Music app.

The wording in the “What’s New” splash screen — “Press [Siri button] to dictate a search from the home screen, or anywhere in supported apps like TV and Music” — hints at future third-party integration, but do you know what I don’t want to have to ever guess at? Which third party apps will and won’t work when I tap-and-hold. I also have no idea how Apple expects to entice third parties to adopt it since they have been unable to get any of them to adopt the default player to support timeline scrubbing, or unified menus.

Apple also only shipped support for TV and Music, not Apple’s other first-party apps like the App Store, or Podcasts.

If you’re in the Amazon app and you want to use the new tap-then-hold dictation search then you need to navigate out of the application you’re in to the Home Screen, or TV app (or really the Search app, but that’s even more taps!) You can still hold to ask Siri to search for something though while you’re in an app that’s not compatible without needing to navigate anywhere.

If Amazon adopts the tap-and-hold to bring up their own Search view inside of the Prime Video app and only search Prime Video then that’s even more confusing.

It’s good that instead of an ephemeral search overlay you can drill down and refine your search results in the Search app, but the execution of this is obviously incomplete.

That’s not quite all there is to it though, because tap-and-hold searches aren’t just different implementations, they also show different results. Tap-and-hold is taking the words you speak and putting them in the Search app’s search box for you. Hold-down for the Siri orb searches some other, unknowable way. If you’re searching for a movie title you’ll mostly get expected results because both are being very literal with the title. If you use any of those genre searches with Siri they don’t work in the search app.

For instance, “Show me Christmas movies” will yield wildly different results because the Search app tries to search for every word of that like you’re using a search engine in 1998. The first result is a movie called Show Me Your Glory because the first part of my search was “show me”. Deep exhale.

Siri hold-for-orb will show you a vertical overlay with very common Christmas movies. Utterly, and perfectly, unoriginal Christmas classics. Exactly what’s expected.

To recap:

1. Tap, then hold Siri button on the Home Screen, in the TV app, or in the Music app and get your dictated search term piped to the Search app which can be navigated in, and out of. It can’t understand expected natural language requests that Siri understands, or any command that you would give to Siri. It won’t fall back to Siri, or even understand that you tried to ask it to do a command. It’s just a very literal search box.
2. Hold the Siri button everywhere and get ephemeral search results that will not be in the Search app, and will disappear when you navigate away, just like it’s always done. This is the only way to do natural language searches or issue commands.

So now this one button does two things, and does them differently, and you need to decide what kind of thing you want to do.

This is like taking two half-baked things and putting them together to make one whole-baked thing. That’s not how that works.

Ideally, you would not have tap-and-hold at all. Just hold. You would ask Siri something that was recognized as a search, as it does now, and the search would be displayed in the Search app, using all the same natural language searching that Siri already does, but the functional filtering and navigation that the Search app has and the ephemeral overlays don’t.

Unless You Have a Bug

My test Apple TV hardware for tvOS betas is an Apple TV 4th generation, renamed to the Apple TV HD, and introduced in 2015. Apple sold these until 2022. They’re not going anywhere, and they get tvOS 17.2 just like every other Apple TV. My living room Apple TV is a 2nd generation 4K introduced in 2021. It doesn’t go on the betas because that’s the one my boyfriend uses and I don’t want to hear about it if the beta breaks something.

The beta broke something. When tap-and-hold Siri buttons shenanigans happened the other week my Siri orb search overlays stopped working correctly. I filed a Feedback (FB13456609) last week when the release second candidate appeared, and it was still broken, but I heard from other people that it worked fine for them.

I recorded a video today, with the Apple TV running the official tvOS 17.2 release if you really want to see it. Now that it’s official, I installed it on the Apple TV 4K in the living room and that one does not have the bug. Near as I can tell the only thing different between the two is the model. Same user account, same network, same everything.

But it can’t be some widespread issue affecting the 4th generation Apple TV because that would be silly — beyond ridiculous. Maybe it’s some bit of cruft left from a beta install that’ll just disappear in a January point release, but it doesn’t fill me with confidence that I participate in the Apple TV beta process, file a feedback, and the thing still ships anyway. Why waste my time writing up bugs? The Feedback site even stripped all the new lines out of what I wrote.

Do I bother writing up the Music search bug and generating a sysdiagnose again on my 4th gen Apple TV, or should I just cross my fingers?

Bake It Again

I hope that 2024 gives Apple employees more time to refine what they shipped here in 2023, but I don’t feel like it’s helpful to ship tvOS 17.2 in this state. Breaking the Siri button into two functions definitely didn’t need to be published before everyone went to this year’s holiday party. I don’t understand the motivations at play unless it’s about looking good in a demo to person higher-up the ladder.

As I’ve repeatedly said, there’s plenty of work to do in tvOS, and the TV app. It’s not like I object to people working on it, like it’s some perfect thing, but I don’t want to have to explain to my boyfriend that he’s using the Siri button wrong.

I really do want a unified, pragmatic approach to home media. Searching, browsing, live TV guides, unified profiles — everything. Not just a selection of Apple’s interests shoved in front of what I want to do, and certainly not in a haphazard, impersonal way.

People often reply to my critiques of tvOS to say that at least it’s not Fire TV, or Roku. That Apple cares about the user experience. While Apple is nowhere near as bad as Amazon at monetizing those eyeballs, that doesn’t mean Apple is shipping a product that’s beyond reproach. Even if Apple TV+ shows and movies are critical darlings, that’s no justification for degrading the user experience, and it has nothing to do with how Siri and Search work.

Whether the next bake is 17.3, or 18.0, I hope the people at Apple get the resources and time they need, and they’re not just pulling it out of the oven because they’re out of time.

My pal — Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Todd Vaziri — posted on his blog about something that really bothers him, and also bothers me.

Folks who follow me on Twitter (currently known as X) are probably aware of my years-old, depressing, frequently updated and repetitive thread pointing out studios and filmmakers downplaying or outright lying about the use of digital visual effects on their projects. “We did it all for real!” is the message given in interviews, production notes and featurettes. The truth is these movies frequently contain hundreds or even thousands of digital visual effects shots, and sometimes the sequences they’re directly referencing are made entirely out of digital effects.

It’s a trend in movie marketing that’s gone on entirely too long. As Todd points out filmmakers frequently boast about the VFX in their films even when the people compiling these marketing features try to hide it.

Todd’s most egregious example is Gran Turismo and he goes into detail about it.

Another big one for me though, was Top Gun: Maverick. Todd graciously invited me to attend the Academy bake-off (where a small group of VFX supervisors for the current years’ films pitch the visual effects branch of the academy on their films to try and earn a spot on The Academy Awards’ voting ballot) and I got to see excellent work on a wide variety of films, one of them was Top Gun: Maverick.

There was a dazzling reel of all the work that went in to making that movie, and an interview process with the VFX supervisors and leads after it was finished. It was fantastic and it pained me that the forces responsible for marketing that movie chose to suppress this and spin a narrative about real planes.

There were absolutely real planes, and they did amazing work, but creating fully realistic VFX to integrate seamlessly with them is also work worthy of praise. Everyone should get the chance to be proud, instead of enduring public shame for their craft because someone thinks it sells more tickets.

My boyfriend is very fond of travel, and I definitely skew towards being less adventurous. Something I’ve been thinking about on our trips over this past year is how the tech that I take for granted in my everyday life has to be adapted for life on the road. Things are very different from when I took my first international trip to Paris in 2011. Why not write up a few observations about my most recent trip to Paris in 2023?

Planning Ahead

Google Sheets

The one constant in trip planning for many years is Google Sheets. My boyfriend will start a new Sheets document and put in travel dates, restaurant reservations, flight numbers, train ticket info, whatever. Sure, it would be better to put it in a calendar ahead of time, but it’s easier to think about the timing when you’re not trying to map the time zone difference in your head. You just write it out, and it’s in a grid, so it just makes a natural kind of sense.

Mercury Weather

An innovation for me this year is using Mercury Weather to keep an eye on the forecast as we get closer to our travel date, as well as while we’re traveling. Mercury isn’t my preferred domestic weather app, which is CARROT Weather, but it has such a compelling trip forecast feature that I can’t imagine traveling without it now. I first used it this summer on a trip that spanned, London, several Greek isles, Athens, and Vienna. This trip I used it to see Paris, Strasbourg, and Paris again (return flight) all plotted out.

I keep Mercury’s 8 day forecast widget in the Smart Stack on my iOS Home Screen, along with Carrot. In the week leading up to travel I’m conscious of every fluctuation and trend in the forecast while I’m just generally using my iPhone. During travel it helps keep tabs on the next destination, as well as showing the forecast at home. Carrot just shows the weather for where you are right now, which is still useful, but it doesn’t know that I will be in Strasbourg two days later, or at home four days after that. Weather conditions could be similar, or quite different, and it’s good to keep that in my peripheral vision. I’d have to open the app and query each of those things if I wanted to know.

Up In the Air

Technology on flights is weird. All the planes we were on for our trip offered some fairly expensive Wi-Fi, but the Wi-Fi actually worked for streaming media over the Atlantic Ocean, so how can you really complain about that?

Music App

The reason I needed to stream was because I perpetually forget that in the age of streaming my iPhone really doesn’t have media downloaded on it like it used to when I’d plug an iPhone into a Mac and sync with iTunes. It would be nice if Apple could proactively download things, especially when it pulls down data about flight tickets from my email. Amazon does something with proactively downloading things on Fire tablets, for example, but it’s to promote Amazon’s interests more than it is to help you.

Watch

The Apple Watch could also use some understanding of trips too. It gets locked into the time zone at the start of the flight, but at a certain point you want to know the time at your destination. You can change your watch face to show a World Clock Complication for a location, but that’s all manual. United Airlines recently added a Live Activity to show flight progress, but not all airlines (Air Canada) have Live Activities, and the Watch doesn’t show Live Activities as Complications.

Focus Mode

One thing I make use of on a flight is Do Not Disturb. There are various automated notifications that can still pop up, with or without Wi-Fi which can wake you up if you happen to finally fall asleep.

I really wish there was a Travel Focus Mode — as you may have guessed from some of my comments above — where it could better contextualize information I need or want when it knows I’m traveling great distances. I couldn’t even figure out how to make my own Focus Mode to do something like that. I can make a focus mode that I invoke to mute notifications, and such, but it’s manual, and doesn’t do anything with crossing time zones. It’s not about an app state, or geolocation trigger — I’m in an airplane, or about to land, etc.

All Roads Lead to Roam

I remember the very first time we landed in Paris, with my iPhone 3G, and Jason’s iPhone 3GS, and we desperately avoided using any cellular connectivity. We’d take screen shots of the Maps app (back when it was Google Maps) while we were on hotel Wi-Fi and then try to interpret those screenshots for directions when we were walking around Paris.

SIM card swaps always seemed daunting, but fortunately my cell provider added a fixed day rate for international roaming, and I’d much rather use that. Same phone number, same everything, but I just budget it in to my travel expenses. You do you though.

Apple Maps and Google Maps

Speaking of directions: Apple Maps gives pretty good directions in Paris these days. Not great directions, but decent enough. The killer feature is Apple Watch integration for directions, especially now that iOS 17 added the little mini-map view on the wrist to help orient yourself at crowded or confusing intersections. I traveled with iOS 16 in London this summer and I kept winding up on the wrong side of the road because the old way really didn’t provide enough context.

Google doesn’t have anything to compete with that, but Google makes up for it with richer location data than Apple. I kept bouncing back and forth between Google Maps for planning where to go, and Apple Maps for directing me to that location.

Domestically, Apple Maps location data is typically acceptable enough that I don’t worry about opening Google Maps, but internationally, at least where I’ve been in Europe, Apple Maps has a fairly shallow data set. Last November, I filed a whole slew of Maps Feedbacks about location information in Paris being in Japanese, and locations having multiple listings with some being in Japanese and others in English. It was like there was some database merging error. This November, fortunately, the only destination I came across in Japanese was a Japanese tea shop from Kyoto with a location in Paris. Way better.

Apple doesn’t have as many restaurant reviews as Google, or photos. Google also has their estimations of how busy a place is presently, and the daily trends for how busy it can be. Again, nothing like that exists for Apple.

Both could use some improvement with the Paris Metro though. There are multiple entrances and exits spread over a large area of the surface, and on several occasions both apps would say to go to a Metro entrance that was farther away, across several lanes of traffic, rather the one literally next to us.

Walking directions for both apps would frequently be in agreement with one another, but occasionally Apple Maps would want us to cross back and forth across some diagonal roads rather than stick to a side for a more logical interval.

Directions for both apps are inadequate inside of train stations and airports. This is a domestic and international issue. Apple brags about the data they have for airports, frequently throwing up a notification that it has a detailed map of the airport you’re in, like LAX, but not CDG. However, Apple has no 3D understanding of the airport, or any kind of route guidance. Once you zoom in to an airport, or train station, Google Maps will show a little level selector in the interface to let you see the floor plans for slices of a terminal, but they also don’t provide walking directions inside of the airport structure.

Directions inside of an airport can be pretty important when an airport is unfamiliar (or terminals recently changed) and it can be helpful to know where an airline lounge is relative to your departure gate. Where is border control situated?

Train station information in Paris and Strasbourg was also inadequate with businesses in real life that weren’t marked in either Apple Maps or Google Maps, but Google had the upper hand on Apple when it came to showing the train schedule while you were looking at the train station.

Lost in Translation

Apple has improved the Translate app for iOS, but it’s not as good Google Translate, in my opinion. It also has a weirdly opinionated design that doesn’t click with me. Niléane at MacStories wrote up her assessment of it a while ago.

I’ll keep trying with Apple’s Translate app, but fortunately Google Translate’s not going anywhere.

They both work for rehearsing how I should order a croissant while I’m walking to the store in the morning.

Travel Photos

What would a vacation be without photos? We take them for our own reference, to fortify our memories, or to share with others not on the trip. Also, sometimes we have to economize how much gear we’re dragging around.

Peak Design 3L sling is just the right size to hold my Sony a6400, the Sony 18-135 F3.5-5.6 OSS, and the Sigma 18-50mm F2.8. Zooms are easier when you don’t have time to fumble with changing lenses, especially fast zooms like the Sigma. Of course there’s the Lightning to SD adapter that I’ve talked about before.

Sometimes that’s even too much, or doesn’t quite fit the bill, and the iPhone 13 Pro enters the fray.

Camera app

This app really needs a sprucing up. What can I say about it other than that? It takes photos.

Obscura

I like Ben McCarthy’s app, Obscura. They put a lot of effort into it, and it shows. I use it as my “I’m trying to take a nice photo” app, and I leave it in RAW mode, where the Camera app is never used in RAW mode. Separating it like that helps me mentally keep tabs on what I’m doing. It’s most helpful in a situation where I don’t have my a6400 on me, and I don’t want the Camera app’s intense noise reduction to smudge everything to hell.

Spectre

Spectre is an old app, but it still works. I still have the same complaint I’ve always had, which is that I want to be able to pick a point for it to 2D-stabilize to because I just can not hold the damn thing still enough, and I’ll be damned if I’m setting up a tripod. It does help at sunset, if you’re trying to get info in your shadows, and the Camera app just absolutely does not want to cooperate.

Lightroom

The mobile app got a significant refresh in October that really cleaned up the interface. The focus effect stuff is garbage, and I have absolutely no idea why anyone would use it, but Lightroom remains the best way to process and handle RAW files on an iPhone. In some cases, a better way to handle iPhone photos too.

I copy over my RAWs from my a6400 to an album, and pick through them for the ones I like, and then export them to the Camera Roll. It all works just fine, even on international roaming when the hotel Wi-Fi craps out.

A lackluster feature of the fall revision is HDR support. It has it, but it can’t render it out to HEIC, just AVIF, and JPEG XL. They all have quirks so use HDR editing with caution if you’re used to a more predictable workflow.

Back Again

I’m grateful I have the opportunity to travel, even though it can be stressful, but the technology I take with me is definitely improving over time to make travel easier. It’s also possible to see a future where my iPhone and Watch might understand context, some kind of virtual assistant, if you will. It’s not about explaining every location I’m presently in, as if I’m not going to move at all, ever again. Figure out where I’m going, and when I’m going home.

If there’s one thing about Apple Music I’ll never understand it’s Apple Music Replay. It is once again time for the annual user-experience tire-fire. In the Apple Music app, you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the Listen Now screen, or you find it in your top row somewhere. I guess Apple might still be sending push notifications about it, but I turned that trash off awhile ago.

The tile implores you to “Replay and share your year in music.” In tiny text, seemingly indicating shame or remorse, it says “Go to site”.

You see, the Apple Music app - and iTunes before it - are largely glorified markup viewers, but for whatever reason, the Music app still can’t display Apple Replay in the Apple Music app. Instead the user is shunted off to the web version of the Music app.

Not a big deal, right? Except you have to log in with your Apple ID in your web browser to see the web version of the app you were just in so you can look at text and images with CSS animation. Does the Music app not pass Acid3? For all the crap Apple, and its fans, level at Electron based apps we’re left with this native app’s sweet solution.

What are we doing here, again, where I have to sign in to a second location to participate in what is essentially web marketing?

It is also incredibly fragile web marketing, because if you click, or tap, on that little hamburger menu in the Replay page it will show you “Select a year to see your listening[sic]”. The “‘22” doesn’t work. The text “This is your Replay.” strobes on an endless loop and nothing happens because no one at Apple thought that the page from last November should still work.

Highlights Magazine

Once the user is logged in, they can play a highlight reel, based off of Snapchat, and Instagram Stories vertical “video” format — which looks great on my MacBook, BTW. The thing is just a carousel of animated stuff.

It seems to be like something one could upload to a Stories, or other vertical video product to share, but there are no sharing controls in a desktop web browser at all, so you have to go to the site in Safari on iOS, to get a share icon to save a static PNG to send somewhere else. There’s something poetic about failing to do something social well and using the format pronounced “ping”.

It’s like when your parents would buy you those electronic toys that weren’t real video game consoles or computers — Tiger Electronics shit — and you were just supposed to pretend it was a GameGear.

You can’t even share this with the people in your Apple Music social graph. I guess all anyone really needs from their friends is the dreaded Friends Mix, eh, Apple? I mean why would the people I’m following, and who follow me, on Apple Music want to know anything about my Apple Music if I chose to share it? Why not just keep shoving random shit I’ve listened to at them?

Back to the content of this not-social social media reel, which is also underwhelming. This is like a form letter from an actuary. The number of minutes of music I listened to? Wow, insightful. The genre I played the most being “Pop”? No way! I bet no one else has that!

Also whoever was setting this year’s mail merge left the rank number on the “Top” slides. The slides only have one thing on them, and already say “Top” so the enormous “1” in the lower right hand corner adds nothing.

This whole thing feels like someone was very excited to animate things, move album artwork around, and transform data, but no one really gave much thought to what this whole thing is supposed to mean to someone. How it makes someone feel.

Lists Go Sideways

There is actual information once you get out of the Highlights Reel and scroll down, unfortunately it’s in sideways carousels.

That’s how we all like to read lists, right?

For Mac users you can top the “>” and waiting for an animation to slide the four items across the screen. Then tapping “>” again for the next four items. Hopefully you don’t want to go back in the list because then you need to move over to the other side of the carousel and tap “<”. Don’t worry though, you can scroll the list sideways without having to tap, but the page doesn’t load more than four-to-six pieces of album art or auto-playing artist portraits so you need to stop scrolling and wait for the list to finish loading.

On iOS, it’s a slide carousel, with five items listed vertically and you swipe horizontally. You have the share icon, which you do not get on the Mac, but it only saves a PNG of the five currently displayed items, and not the whole list of 15.

This is using the same accursed design metaphors in the Listen Now page in the Apple Music app, here in the web browser, where a list could be anything, even something readable, but it’s not.

I should mention that even though this is all designed to look like Apple Music’s Listen Now interface, you can’t listen now to anything that’s on this page. This is not interactive. (Rubs temples.)

Wrapped

Spotify Wrapped absolutely trounces Apple Music every year when it’s released. In a few days social media will be flooded with happy Spotify customers sharing their Spotify Wrapped with everyone else. It’s a great advertisement for Spotify, and the attention is well-deserved, because Spotify puts far more effort into crafting Wrapped than Apple puts into Replay.

Who knows what new ways Spotify will come up with to absolutely embarrass Apple Music subscribers this year? Even if it was just what they did two, or three years ago, it would be more than Apple’s done this year, or is likely to do in the future.

UPDATE: A day later and Spotify Unwrapped is released, and as expected, it trounces Replay. The Verge’s Emma Roth theorizes it’s too popular right now because some users are hitting server errors. That’s good bad-press to have if you can get it.

Throw money at this problem, Apple. Consider using that Apple Music price-hike to fund it.

Last week I wrote a piece for Six Colors Subsribers on Spatial Video as recorded by iPhone 15 Pro models in the iOS 17.2 beta.

It bothers me slightly that Apple has been pretty vague about how it would all work to preserve the magic of it, because I’ve seen more than a few people decide to jump on the beta and start recording all their special moments as Spatial Video. People are not fully informed of what it is they’re committing to, because they have no way to visualize it.

The brief summary is that the Spatial Video is 1920x1080 HD video and it’s stereoscopic 3D video in the old-fashioned sense that there’s a left eye, and a right eye, and there isn’t some immersive holodeck-like experience (which we knew would not be the case, but was in the marketing videos). The interaxial distance between the cameras is so small that you only get useful volume out of something 3-8 feet from camera, and even that will be pretty mild. The big bummer is that nothing is happening to match detail between the left and right eye to make up for the drastic differences between the paired cameras.

Continue to record all your precious moments as you otherwise would, and do some extra recordings on the side in Spatial Video, but don’t put all your eggs in this basket.

All the details are available if you subscribe to Six Colors for the full piece, and the very 2D video where I walk through a few example Spatial Video recordings from Jason Snell. You should be a Six Colors subscriber anyway for the member content that I don’t do.

My number one thing to do with my nervous energy used to be opening Tweetbot, and the Twitter app. Just going back and forth. Bored? Look at Tweets. Want to see news? Look at Tweets. Want to talk to friends? Look at Tweets. Want to see when D-list Apple pundits are talking about? Look at Tweets. Uncomfortable silence in a waiting room? Look at Twitter.

It was a habit for any and all occasions. When I stopped using Twitter, a little over a year ago, I knew there wasn’t a Twitter replacement. I needed to unlearn my habits, and it’s an ongoing process.

Mastodon isn’t Twitter, for better and for worse. I decided early on that it was a place for a specific type of social interaction. I wasn’t going to evangelize the Fediverse like someone with Tux desktop wallpaper talking about FOSS. I was just going to use it for fun, and also not for anything too personal.

Instagram had been converted to a private account long ago. It’s a good way to interact with certain people, but it has its own darkness, obviously. When Threads started up I joined to see what was going on, and it’s been pretty dismal. Optimizing for brands and influencers. It has its whole gross thing about boosting interaction by spamming people to see Casey Newton’s posts all the time. It doesn’t bring me any joy, so it’s relegated to another iOS screen. If it turns into the place where one must be, then I’d probably create another account unlinked from my private Instagram, but I’m in no rush to entertain that.

Slack and Discord are not microblogging platforms, but they fulfill a role in having a place to pop in and be social about certain topics. I’m not a completionist about it, and I don’t want to get invested in arguing with people. It helps that it’s controlled access, through various membership programs, and not a general audience.

As for news, real news, not Kyle Griffin paraphrasing headlines in quote tweets, I’ve tried a few things. I have a Los Angeles Times digital subscription, and their app is shockingly good. They cover all the major global news, and local news. The Food section is pretty good too.

I tried Apple News, and Apple News+, and both suck. Mostly the app is trash. It’s weird to think that LAT, a struggling newspaper, has a better app than one of the most profitable companies to ever exist. Things like forcing you to see stories from publishers you’ve blocked, because of some weird editorial desire to appear objective and fair. Completely irrelevant listicles from third-rate content farms. Also a lot of breaking news from CNN, which is the same as just going to CNN or the CNN lite site. I’m not always in the mood for breaking news.

I also have a couple newsletters through a subscription to Puck, and Lowpass. I wish they just gave me an RSS feed instead of emails, but I’m surviving. It’s lower volume news than the rapid-but-vapid stuff churned out about entertainment, and entertainment-related tech.

RSS

I’ve also rediscovered RSS. I was never a Google Reader person, or someone that maintained a curated list of RSS feeds. I tried but it always ended up feeling like another inbox. The trick, it turns out, is subscribing to sites that only post a few times a week, and to have a RSS reader that syncs across all my devices.

Enter NetNewsWire, with all my feeds in iCloud. A handful of bespoke sources, particularly ones that don’t post to Mastodon, and I’m good to go. This also helps with sites that have been junked up, like DPReview, but it’s not a place where I would want the bulk of posts from The Verge.

Nobody Reads Any More

When all else fails, I read books now. It’s true! I’ve read four novels in the past month, and I’m almost done with a fifth. I’m not going to win any reading-speed contents, but that’s not the point.

I noticed that I keep jumping between the apps and news sources when I was lying awake in bed at night, unable to sleep. I was feeling stressed out, and just compulsively opening and closing apps like suddenly there would be a slew of new stuff at 3 AM Pacific. The Kindle app solved that.

I could just be in the app, with it’s dark background and gently glowing white text. Twitter, even in the best of times, wasn’t something for winding-down.

Introspect Yourself

I’m going to keep screwing around to try and get the right balance of social activity, and media. As I’ve said before, I don’t want a Twitter replacement. I don’t want to be disconnected from the world, or the people in it, but I’m not craving a new stress machine. I’ve got enough shit to deal with.

I will not bury the lede: I’m going to whine about modularity in Apple’s computers.

I greatly appreciate how Apple’s devices are tightly integrated and pack enormous power into very thin enclosures. The downside, as Apple has pushed their hardware in this direction, is that it went from “difficult” to “impossible” to do anything with hardware inside of Apple’s cases. I’m not cynical enough to suggest that Apple has only done this to charge exorbitant prices for their RAM and SSD’s at the time Macs are purchased, though I’m sure that certainly is a perk. It seems to be a very genuine desire to package peak performance.

However, the speed and power trade-off is that Macs are more disposable than ever. Not immediately disposable, heaven’s no, but that shipping configuration will be the same from the time it’s boxed for shipment to the time it’s e-waste. Apple highlights recycling programs, and trade-in programs to mitigate it, but recycling a computer isn’t zero-waste alchemy, and certainly nothing like the impact of upgrading an existing computer. When Apple refers to “longevity” of devices in their environmental reports they’re only talking about the the hardware being durable.

Memory Over Time

Look, I get it, soldering the RAM together with the M-chip gives Apple an incredible performance advantage over moving the RAM to chips that are seated in slots on the motherboard. It’s also not elegant. Savvy nerds would upgrade their RAM with inexpensive (relative to Apple’s prices) DIMMS and sometimes run into problems with the quality of those chips which was a support headache. However, the key thing is that when there were memory problems, that chip could be yoinked right out of there.

The soldered RAM problem also extends to perceptions around how much RAM to buy at the outset, knowing that it can never be changed. If you guess wrong, or had guessed based on conditions that were true at time of purchase, then the only recourse is to trade-in the machine and buy a new one, even if that new one is the same except for the RAM size.

AppleInsider found an interview where Bob Borchers, Apple vice president of worldwide product marketing, said that 8 GB of RAM is really more like having 16 GB on other systems because of how efficiently the Mac uses the RAM. Sure, ~Jan~ Bob. I won’t litigate exactly how much magic RAM certain kinds of customers need, or what the floor is on RAM in Macs, but that Bob is talking about this at all highlights a genuine concern buyers have.

Will the RAM be enough at first, and will it continue to be enough?

I, obviously, don’t have a solution that doesn’t sacrifice performance, but there’s gotta be something greener than this. Do you have socketed M chips with their RAM that can be popped out whole?

I don’t take as much of an issue with storage. It’s easier to figure out your needs based on current usage than it is to guess at RAM usage over a period of time. The prices Apple charges are highway robbery, but it’s the price of doing business. It’s just that sometimes “drives” fail —chips fail. A lot needs to be replaced when that happens on these systems where the NAND is soldered on.

All-For-One

We’re all charmed by all-in-one computers. Well, except for the hideous Molar Mac. They are, however, supremely wasteful when you consider the longevity all-in-one displays, and their enclosures, vs. their computer components.

Jason Snell, in his iMac review, and on his Upgrade podcast with Myke Hurley, lamented that Target Display Mode went away many years ago with the introduction of the Retina iMac. The bandwidth just wasn’t there to drive the panels in the iMac. Now, we absolutely have that bandwidth with Thunderbolt 3 and 4, but no Target Display Mode to turn an old iMac into an excellent monitor. Apple’s preferred solution is that you return the iMac to Apple for a pittance of what you paid for it to apply to the purchase of a new Apple Product.

That’s not that weird until you consider how long Apple uses some of its parts for. The panel Apple uses in its Studio Display is the same one that’s in Jason’s 5K iMac Pro. It’s been the same panel for years and years. The trade-in for that iMac Pro is a maximum of $550, and a Studio Display, with that same panel, is $1599. Why not just use the old display instead of creating a wasteful cycle?

It’s a pretty niche, pretty nerdy concern, I’ll absolutely grant you that. A lot of people would sooner trade in the computer and have a cleaner desk setup, but’s less discuss trading-in in the context of the M1 iMac.

The M1 iMac was introduced in 2020, and three years later there’s the M3 iMac. It is identical in every way to the previous model except for the M3, and the wireless connectivity. It was a refreshing design when it was introduced (some quibbles aside) so there’s no great urgency for it to be overhauled. However, because everything that changed is localized to the logic board, that tiny board could be swapped to make it the latest and greatest iMac. Even with everything soldered to the board.

Instead, if someone had an M1 iMac and wanted an M3 iMac they must trade-in for “up to $460” in credit towards buying a whole new computer.

Look, I’m not saying everyone wants to replace their logic boards, especially not with the unfriendly-to-service design of the iMac, but if the goal is to reduce waste, and emissions, why are we reprocessing and remanufacturing entire machines that are identical except for one thing? Where’s the logic in that? Oh right, it’s on a teeny-tiny PCB!

Why design a computer that has modular manufacturing, like reusing the same display panels, the same cases, the same speakers, the same anodized colors, the same cameras — for years and years — if the end product has none of that modularity?

Trade-in seems like it absolves everyone, but the iMac, as newly designed in 2020, and still manufactured today, contains only 14% recycled or renewable content. The logic board is less than 14% of the iMac’s content. That’s worse than any laptop Apple sells, which a lot of people would assume are pretty wasteful.

If the answer is that people concerned with the environment shouldn’t buy all-in-one computers than why does Apple sell them?

Battery Blues

The other week John Siracusa wrote that he thought Apple should go back to removable batteries. I honestly just furrowed my brow when I started reading it. It didn’t make a lot of sense, or seem all that likely in the context of swapping batteries, like road warriors used to do. We have high performance charging these days. However, in the context of waste, John is right on the money.

Finally, related to that last point, worn-out batteries are an extremely common reason that old tech products are traded in, recycled, or replaced. Removable batteries are an easy way to extend the useful life of a product. This leads to less e-waste, which is perfectly aligned with Apple’s environmental goals as 2030 approaches.

Of course, longer product lifetimes means fewer product sales per unit time, which seems to run counter to Apple’s financial goals. But this is a problem that can be solved using one of Apple’s favorite financial tools: higher product margins. If Apple can actually make products that have a longer useful life, it can charge more money for the extra value they provide.

Back in the day, I could bring my MacBook Pro in to the Apple Store, turn it over, and slide the spring-loaded release to pop out the battery. Then simply pay for the new battery, pop it in, and be on my merry way. Nothing approaching that experience is possible with an Apple product today.

Signifying Nothing

Ultimately, I don’t think any of thins whining means a lot, and how much of my kvetching is rooted in my reluctance to spend large sums of money in shorter spans of time? Probably most of it. Green-wash-concern-trolling, or whatever. That’s me, I suppose.

I don’t foresee a future where Apple optimizes around people upgrading Macs again. Hell, the Mac Pro completely comes apart like a Mr. Potato Head, but for absolutely no real reason at all since anything worth upgrading is soldered on. We’re not going back to daughter cards, or Processor Direct Slots. Nor will we have Apple Stores performing logic board swaps for any reason other than hardware failures.

I wasn’t going to say anything about the “Shot on iPhone” tag at the end of the Apple event yesterday on this blog. There’s nothing to really write about that isn’t covered by Apple’s own words. I made my snarky Apple Event jokes, like they should have shot it on a MacBook’s 1080p FaceTime camera, but that isn’t a complaint about using iPhones to shoot things, and I didn’t think there was anything to say.

Was I ever wrong!

The most popular post on The Verge, two days after the event, is a post insinuating that that Apple isn’t being genuine when it shared their behind the scenes images and videos of the event. The writer seemed to think they caught Apple:

It’s a neat way to promote the recording quality of iPhone cameras, but it’s not like everyday folks can recreate these kinds of results at home unless they happen to own a shedload of ludicrously expensive equipment. The gear shown in the “Scary Fast” behind-the-scenes footage is fairly standard for big studio productions, but Apple’s implication with these so-called “shot on iPhone” promotions is that anyone can do it if only they buy the newest iPhone.

If Apple said that the video was shot on an Alexa Mini at the end of the video, or a Sony FX-3, would the writer’s criticism be the same? I’d hazard to say no, it wouldn’t be. That the iPhone can be inserted into the same production workflow Apple would otherwise use for this event is absolutely a normal thing to laud.

Sure, there’s more to post production that I would love to find out about from Apple, but it’s the same as any of their other polished Apple Event videos. They didn’t deepfake Tim Cook and say the iPhone 15 Pro shot that.

People think lights and crews are cheating? Because there’s VFX in places, editing, color-timing? Of course there is? This is a commercial video. It’s not a benchmark of what you, a total novice, can shoot in your backyard. It’s a camera in lieu of another camera. It is not replacing the entire production pipeline of shooting video.

As my friend Todd Vaziri said:

Some people see “Shot on iPhone” and people think it’s just some bumblefuck named Frank standing there all by himself holding the iPhone with his hand and shouting “action!”

In a way this seems so bizarrely evident, that it needs no explanation.

For the sake of well-meaning people, that may have missed the iPhone 15 Pro’s log support, and external video recording, check out what Stu Maschwitz had to say about it after the iPhone 15 Pro was released:

His video completely explains log, and what it’s used for. I assume people check out his stuff? I don’t know why I need to repeat it, which is why I don’t write about it. You follow Stu, right?

The ability to record to external media is why they can shoot for a significant amount of time, because media is huge. You don’t shoot your home movies that way. That’s not for the bad videos of concerts you upload to Instagram. It is, however, not a trick Apple has pulled on you.

Just to be extremely clear: The iPhone footage is still going to have the sensor and lens properties of an iPhone, so if someone wants a certain look, they might want to consider other options that have a flexible array of lenses. Again, not a trick, it’s literally all right there in your hands. That if you needed to “run and gun” in low light without the ability to set up lights, you’d want something with better low light sensitivity. If you wanted dreamy out of focus backgrounds, you’d want a big sensor and big glass. The iPhone won’t replace IMAX, etc.

That’s not up to Apple to make the iPhone 15 Pro serve every situation and every need. Confusing Apple shooting this event on the iPhone with theoretical scenarios not depicted in the video is unhelpful.

This whole kerfuffle is similar to something from only a couple months ago, where people got all worked up about The Creator being shot on the Sony FX-3. The camera, in and of itself, didn’t shoot that movie. The workflows enabled by having a smaller camera, were complemented by the nimble, resourceful team shooting the project. If someone ran out and bought a FX-3 they wouldn’t have The Creator any more than running out and buying an iPhone 15 Pro means you’re going to make an Apple video presentation by yourself.

It should, however, encourage people to think resourcefully about tools at their disposal, and the iPhone 15 Pro is another tool to consider, and potentially reject, based on your specific production needs, along with all other cameras. This is why people do camera tests, for crying out loud.

If you’re not someone creatively inclined to care about any of this, then I invite you to stop arguing on the internet about it like it’s an abstract, unknowable concept, or root for various sides like sports teams.

Apple silicon is fantastic. Performance per watt is off the charts (actually it’s very much on Johny Srouji’s charts.) However, I keep putting off upgrading from Intel to an M chip because the cost is eye-watering, and the Apple laptop line-up didn’t seem particularly predictable in its release cadence or feature set.

The MacBook Pro has been refreshed three times so far, twice this year alone. The MacBook Pro 13” finally kicked the bucket, but prices didn’t really come down on any of the models with Pro chips, they still start at $1999, and $2499 for a 16” screen. We finally got the MacBook Air 15” this spring, but it’s only a low-end config. There’s no way to spec a MacBook Air with a M2 Pro or M3 Pro chip.

Why do I care about the “Pro” chip so much? Despite the name the Pro is really the middle chip, but there’s no middle laptop for it. The base M2 and M3 can be configured with more RAM (to a point) but they can’t be configured with extra ports, or even drive more than one external display. They’re not like pokey Centrino chips — they do have the ability to perform — but they are inflexible for certain workflows that require additional connectivity, like dual displays.

It’s pretty easy to argue that dual displays is a high-end feature, and thus demands a $1999 or more computer, but that wasn’t true of Apple’s Intel-based laptops. It has always felt like a regression to me since the introduction of the first M1 chips, and it’s not something apple wanted to correct in the M2 or M3.

I freely admit how important dual external displays are is colored by my need to use them, but then again, this is my blog, so deal with it or close the tab.

I need those displays for my work, and no my employer doesn’t pay for my machine or subsidize it in anyway. I connect to a workstation with remote desktop software and I do the actual performance crunching on that computer. My machine just needs to display things. If the base M chips could work with dual displays in clamshell mode it would be a no-brainer and I would get the 15” MacBook Air.

Intel Pro to M3 Pro

I have a 2018 15” MacBook Pro with 2.6 GHz 6-core Intel Core i7, crap Intel UHD Graphics 630, 16 GB of 2400 MHz DDR4 memory, and a 512 GB SSD. I bought that in 2018 for $2799. I have held on to this machine for an eternity in Apple years because I paid so much money for it. The 15” MacBook Pro I had before this was $1699 (I think, I can’t find the exact receipt) and that was similarly held for 4 years.

The battery performance on the 2018 is shot to hell, but the prospect of going into a store and spending money on the battery isn’t appealing. The revised butterfly keyboard has been mostly fine because I don’t generally use it as a laptop, but now the “o” key sometimes inserts “oo” which is also not a lot of fun.

The price equivalent model, the middle config, is the $2899 M3 Pro 12-core CPU, 18-core GPU, 36 GB of unified memory, 512 GB SSD. The one down, is $2499 and has half the RAM.

Doesn’t seem like we’ve made much headway with storage in 5 years! The build-to-order bump to 1 TB is $200 for either model, which would give me a $2699 or $3099 machine. I’m hovering at 153 GB of free space on my current drive, so despite my efforts at optimizing it does seem likely that I would cross the 512 GB barrier, or dedicate more of my time to file management, offline storage, and fighting cloud services to really please keep that file I used seven days ago.

While a lot has been written and said about how Apple’s chips are more efficient with RAM and storage than Intel, people don’t expect to buy exactly the same storage, or lower, than their current laptop. It’s not user upgradable, so it’s not the kind of thing one can try to use and just adjust later if they guessed 18 GB instead of 36 GB. You’re stuck.

Someone might be asking why I don’t consider the 14” MacBook Pro because it can be had for less than 16” models. It’s display is too small. I do really need a larger display for the times that I take my computer away from my desk. I do not, however, need it to be as beautiful and luxurious as the Liquid Retina XDR display. While that is definitely a wonderful screen to have, it is not essential.

To Air is Human

What I had been really jazzed by, before it was announced, was the 15” MacBook Air. There were rumors it would ship with the M3 chip, so maybe that one chip revision would drive two displays? Naive, of course, for multiple reasons.

The 15” MacBook Air, configured with 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD is $1899, $800 less than a 16” MacBook Pro with similar storage. Without a M2 Pro or M3 Pro chip it’s not much of a discount, because I can’t use it for my work.

Maybe Apple would sell more 15” MacBook Airs if they had a more capable one?

Let’s ignore the 13” and 14” laptop models, because they muddy the pricing, and if someone is shopping for a large screen, they are not considering those. We really only have one configuration of 15” MacBook Air. They do sell two at the Apple Store, but the only difference is 256 GB (shame!) or 512 GB of storage. There is no other M-chip configuration at all.

That means there’s a price umbrella between $1499 (15” M2 MBA 8/512 GB) and $2499 (16” M3 Pro MBA 18/512 GB). A thousand dollars where the only thing that can fill that gap is custom RAM and SSD sizes, no chip variation at all. That money gets you a larger battery, a fan for cooling, a much better display, and more connectivity with HDMI, SD cards, and additional lightning ports. It’s not like it’s $0 for those, but if those are less important to a shopper then they might gravitate towards the Air, if only it had at least one config with a more capable chip.

Honestly, I understand that the Pro chips run hotter than the base M chips, so they need a fan, and there isn’t a fan in the current 15” MacBook Air, but can we under-clock it? Throttle it? Something? Can we turn off some more cores on the Pro chip? Look, I’m not Johny Sirouji, but there has to be some way to have an additional display driver in a laptop under $2499.

Changing the design to disable the internal display in clamshell mode, and use both external display drivers for external monitors, doesn’t seem to have any appeal to Apple, so why not disable a bunch of a cores and charge a bunch of money? You guys like money?

What the 15” MacBook Air is, as it exists, is a good low-end laptop with a middle of the pack price tag. The 16” M3 Pro MacBook Pro is a very good high-end laptop with a high-end price tag, and the 16” M3 Max MacBook Pro is a ludicrous laptop. There’s no real middle, and that price gap shows it.

Some people think the gap is covered by the 14” M3 Pro MacBook Pro, but again, I assert that people are not cross shopping screen sizes like this. We are unlikely to ever get a cheaper 16” MacBook Pro, unless they put the vanilla M3 in it, and I don’t see that solving anyone’s problems at all.

Clock’s Ticking

Eventually, my machine will no longer be able to serve it’s function, either from hardware failing over time, the OS not supporting it, or some accidental damage or loss. Entropy isn’t going to wait for me because I’m cheap.

If I absolutely needed to buy a Mac right now, it would probably be the 16” MacBook Pro with 18 GB of RAM and the upgraded 1 TB storage. Then I would hold on to that for 5-6 years to try and eek out every penny. If I don’t have to upgrade though, then I won’t. As beneficial as it would be, perhaps there’s some configuration around the corner that will be more balanced to my needs, or at the very least, maybe Apple will bump their storage above 512 GB.