apple
Will Faught
November 2016
Ars Technica Reviews The New 13-Inch MacBook Pro
Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica: But when you dig down to find the root cause of most people’s angst, it’s less about the new MacBook Pros individually and more about the way Apple has been treating the Mac lineup in general for the last two or three years. Even if you consider the MacBook and MacBook Pros to be solid computers—and they are, in most respects for most users—these refreshes by themselves don’t really right the Good Ship Macintosh.
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1 minute
July 2016
Switching To Apple’s Two-Factor Authentication
Dan Moren, writing for Six Colors: Apple has, for a while now, offered two separate additional security measures to protect your Macs, iOS devices, and iCloud account, but thanks to some inexpert nomenclature, it can be a little difficult to tell them apart. I had no idea Apple added this. It’s easy to switch.
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1 minute
March 2016
MacOS: It’s Time To Take The Next Step
Andrew Ambrosino hits the nail on the head: With the release of macOS should come innovation that positions the OS for the next decade of innovation, and it’s all about common threads that run through the ecosystem. Specifically, macOS 11 should introduce a common framework for presentation, a brand new model for content, and a common thread for people. […] When these three new developments materialize– UIKit, a new Filesystem, and a new model for people– there will be an explosion in next-generation apps across the ecosystem.
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1 minute
December 2015
Really good interview of Steve Jobs while he was at NeXT. I didn’t know he had such strong views about education; they made sense to me.
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1 minute
September 2015
A Humble Proposition: How To Fix The Apple Watch
David Pogue on the shortcomings of the Apple Watch: On the Watch’s weird software layout, as noted earlier, apps aren’t anywhere at all. No matter where you start, you can’t swipe your way to the Home screen. The only way to find them is to click the Watch’s crown. OK, we could probably learn that: Clicking the crown is like clicking the Home button. Clicking it always opens the Home screen.
1 minute
August 2015
My iPhone just killed the Voice Memos app in the middle of recording. The moment is lost forever. What the fuck, Apple?
1 minute
June 2015
May 2015
CBS Spills The Beans On The New Apple Streaming Service
At Re/Code’s “Code” conference on May 27, CBS CEO Les Moonves acknowledged CBS has held talks with Apple and that they would “probably” sign a deal to carry the network on Apple’s expected streaming service. Apple must be livid. No one has officially confirmed their rumored new service, and you can be damned sure Apple wanted it to be them. Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
1 minute
Changing The Size Or Case-Sensitivity Of A Sparse Bundle
A great resource for resizing sparse bundles in OS X.
1 minute
April 2015
Casey Liss on the Apple Watch: The Apple Watch strikes me as the next great frontier. In much the same way putting a computer with a built-in GPS in our pocket opened whole new doors, I suspect the Apple Watch will eventually do the same. I see that this is the future. I don’t doubt it. But is it worth spending, at a minimum, $400 today? I’m unconvinced. After trying a few on and using one a couple times, I find myself thinking the same thing.
2 minutes
In iOS Safari, open tabs often must be reloaded when you switch back to them, either because you were looking at another tab, or because you had switched to another app. This is mainly due to the rising memory requirements of iOS and apps, and iOS devices having only one gigabyte of memory for a long time. iOS will delete tab data to reclaim the memory for another purpose, and will simply reload the tabs later if you ever switch back to them; but if you don’t have a network connection when that happens, then the tabs can’t be reloaded.
2 minutes
June 2014
John Gruber: Apple, Google, and Microsoft each offer all three things: devices, services, and platforms. But each has a different starting point. With Apple it’s the device. With Microsoft it’s the platform. With Google it’s the services. And thus all three companies can brag about things that only they can achieve. What Cook is arguing, and which I would say last week’s WWDC exemplified more so than at any point since the original iPhone in 2007, is that there are more advantages to Apple’s approach.
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1 minute
June 2011
iTunes just charged me $6 because I presumably elected to subscribe to The New Yorker magazine. (I didn’t.) iTunes says all charges are final, and provides no obvious way to dispute charges or request refunds. So I’ll dispute the credit card charge as soon as it appears on my statement. Let’s see how iTunes wriggles its way out of that one. What does iTunes do if you abuse credit card disputes and just dispute everything you buy?
1 minute
Apple announced a lot of new things on Monday: their next Mac OS, their next iOS, and their new cloud service. I’m really excited about iOS and iCloud. The new feature I like the best is that iOS devices no longer need to synchronize with a computer. This necessitated a lot of additional functionality in the built-in apps and settings to make iOS self-sufficient. It really is the post-PC era! I can’t wait to get them all.
1 minute
Steve Jobs Presents Ring Campus
Steve Jobs humbly presents to the Cupertino City Council Apple’s plans to build a new Cupertino campus. The campus would be just a few blocks away from their current one. There would be only one large, ring-shaped building (the new infinite loop), four or five stories tall. Lots of parking would be provided underground and in a nearby parking structure. 80% of the area, including the circular area inside the loop, would be landscaped, and the number of trees would double from about 3,000 to about 6,000.
1 minute
April 2011
Samsung Clones IPhone, Apple Sues
It’s like an iPhone from an alternate, yet similar, universe. Ars nailed the image comparison.
1 minute
March 2011
A moving account of a Japanese Apple store sheltering people made homeless by the tsunami and helping them contact loved ones via their wifi network and computers.
1 minute
Only $5! Next to that, Microsoft’s prices are exorbitant. I love the Git support and the integration of Interface Builder into a single window.
1 minute
February 2011
Mac OS Lion looks promising: Choose and organize apps like iOS Full screen apps Better way to see running apps File changes are saved automatically File versions are stored and accessible like Time Machine Restarting saves the state of running apps and restores them automatically Easy file sharing with any Mac on your network Server with wiki These are substantial new features that I would love to have. This is the kind of innovation I admire.
1 minute
I just started experimenting with builds in Keynote. I’m amazed at how simple it is to make fairly complex animations. Everything is attractive and slick. $20 on the Apple App Store is a steal. PowerPoint 2010 is $139. Microsoft: Where is the app store already?
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1 minute
It’s kinda crazy how high Apple’s stock is right now (currently $339). I wish I had invested more in it when it was only $90. I only considered buying their stock at the time because I believed in what they were doing, and didn’t really care about dividends or stock price fluctuations. I recently took stock of what I spend my money on and realized that Netflix is another company that I believe in, and would consider investing in without doing any research.
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2 minutes
January 2011
I think the next home computer setup I’ll have will be a MacBook Air combined with a wireless keyboard and mouse and an Apple 27" display. I like the idea of being able to take my whole digital presence on the go with me, but be able to plug in for some extra screen space if I need it. Having a dedicated computer for the desktop seems like overkill these days.
1 minute
October 2010
The big thing touted for Windows Phone 7 as the innovation over iPhone is hubs: information aggregated into one place and viewable at a glance. It seems to me that Apple could easily add such a feature to the home screen by letting you drag downward or upward to view a Dashboard like in Mac OS X that you can put widgets on that call out whatever information you care about—upcoming calendar events, missed calls, new messages, weather, whatever.
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1 minute
September 2010
I was loathe to get a media center PC because: it would be a living room eyesore, it would use a keyboard and a mouse instead of a remote, it would cost as much as a regular computer, and TV episode rentals would cost too much. I think Apple has finally solved these problems with their newest Apple TV: It’s tiny and black and can pull any media wirelessly from my desktop, I can use my iPhone to control it, it’s $100, and TV episode rentals are $1.
2 minutes
May 2010
On one hand, my smartphone has a touch screen and fits in my pocket, and on the other, my laptop has a physical keyboard and a large screen. Apple’s iPad brings together the strengths of both, except for the superior typing provided by laptops. Somewhere between these two lies Apple’s iPad, which provides the immediacy, simplicity, and tactile interaction of a smartphone, and the size, complexity, and greater expressiveness of a laptop.
4 minutes
July 2009
Apple redeemed itself with its awesome store in Bellevue. My MacBook’s hard drive went bad, and I took it into the store to see about getting it repaired. It turns out the hard drive model was known to have problems, and was covered under a special warranty. The tech at the Genius Bar replaced it for me for free in about ten minutes, and that was that. Nice.
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1 minute
June 2009
I sent the following to sjobs@apple.com: Mr. Jobs, I am dissatisfied with my experience of activating my iPhone 3GS. Activation was delayed for four days. Then, iTunes gave me a vague error saying my phone couldn’t be activated without explaining why. Then, I received an e-mail with a phone number to call. I tried calling it numerous times without being connected to a person in a reasonable amount of time. I once waited on hold for about twenty-five minutes.
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2 minutes
April 2009
ITunes Smart Playlist For Unrated Songs
I had never tried to make a smart playlist in iTunes until I recently moved everything to my new iMac. I wanted to make a playlist of unrated songs, but it wasn’t clear how to make a condition saying the rating must be zero stars. The iTunes help was useless, and so was everything I found online. “Just make a condition saying the rating must equal zero stars. Easy.” Not so!
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1 minute