What’s happening at WWDC? The rumors are… confusing. Also, Jason gets excited about watching four things at once, Myke tries to bring iOS 17 into focus, and we’ve got a book review of ‘Make Something Wonderful’ from the Steve Jobs Archive.
With tvOS 16.5 beta, Apple is testing a new feature for the Apple TV app on the Apple TV 4K set-top box: the ability to watch more than one game at a time.
Multiview allows users to watch up to four simultaneous streams at once. The feature is available for live sports streamed through the TV app, like MLB Friday Night Baseball and MLS Season Pass …
The “quad box” is the killer feature on Fubo, my TV provider of choice, and it’s coming to YouTube TV just in time for its integration of the NFL Sunday Ticket package. Given Apple’s investment in MLS, it makes sense there. Sports is the perfect application for watching more than one live channel at a time.
In the long run, though, this needs to be a tvOS-wide feature. Right now if there’s a game on Fubo and another on ESPN+ and a third on MLB and a fourth on the TV app… I can watch one at a time or, if I am very lucky and it’s the right combination of apps, two at a time—one in a tiny picture-in-picture view. The OS should put it all together. Maybe this is a step in that direction… or maybe it’s just something Apple had to build for MLS. I hope it’s the first one.
Starting today, Apple Card users can choose to grow their Daily Cash rewards with a Savings account from Goldman Sachs, which offers a high-yield APY of 4.15 percent — a rate that’s more than 10 times the national average. With no fees, no minimum deposits, and no minimum balance requirements, users can easily set up and manage their Savings account directly from Apple Card in Wallet.
Essentially, Apple is turning the limbo state of Apple Pay Cash (which is where all the money earned from Apple Card rewards) into an actual savings account with a high interest rate, at least for Apple Card customers. (The account, like the card, is from Goldman Sachs.)
I am not a financial-industry analyst, so I’m curious about what the motivation for this product might be. My first thought is that by offering a good interest rate, it will encourage Apple Card users to keep their money in Apple’s accounts rather than transfer them back to their home banks. And I assume there’s a long game here involving Apple encouraging people to be comfortable leaving their money with Apple, to be extended with future financial products.
If you’re an avid follower of Apple rumors, you’d be excused for wondering exactly what the heck is going on in Cupertino these days. The last couple weeks have seen stories retracting several previously suggested features, shipping time frames, or even entire products.
But, if you’ll pardon me unlimbering my bat for a game of inside baseball, all this only illustrates the many and varied reasons that such rumors should be taken with entire chunks of salt. It’s not simply because they’re rumors, but rather because of the nature of how many of those who report such rumors acquire the details in the first place.
Rumors, like sausage and politics, are a little less magical when you see exactly how they’re made, so join me on this journey inside the rumor mill. You may never look at them the same way again.
The April issues of Maximum PC and MacLife are currently on sale at a newsstand near you—assuming there is a newsstand near you. They’re the last print issues of these two venerable computer magazines, both of which date to 1996 (and were originally known, respectively, as Boot and MacAddict). Starting with their next editions, both publications will be available in digital form only.
But I’m not writing this article because the dead-tree versions of Maximum PC and MacLife are no more. I’m writing it because they were the last two extant U.S. computer magazines that had managed to cling to life until now. With their abandonment of print, the computer magazine era has officially ended.
My personal computer magazine journey ended nearly nine years ago, but the final curtain has now fallen.
My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring Six Colors this week on behalf of its app SoundSource. SoundSource is a remarkable app that lives in your menu bar and gives you complete control over all your audio. You can change the volume of any app relative to others, set different apps to play on different audio devices, enhance audio with built-in effects, and change all those settings instantly.
And of course, SoundSource has Shortcuts support too. I’ve used SoundSource to change my music playback from my AirPlay speakers to some direct-wired headphones and back, via a single button press that runs a Shortcut. If you’ve ever wished you could automate the controls found in MacOS’s Sound System Preferences and Audio MIDI Setup app, the new Shortcuts support in SoundSource is for you.
Through the end of April, Six Colors readers can save $10 with coupon code 6CSSTEN. Visit this link to get SoundSource.
Migrations and modem sounds
Dan’s Mac mini has a case of the crufts. Most of Jason’s migrations are temporary. We also reminisce about modem sounds and ponder the mysteries of supply-chain rumors.
The Steve Jobs Archive has released a book, edited by Leslie Berlin, with a small selection of Steve Jobs’s interviews, speeches, and emails—many of them to himself. There’s a limited print run being given to Apple, Pixar, and Disney employees, but anyone can download a copy for free from Apple Books or from the Steve Jobs Archive website in ePub format, or you can read it on the web in its entirety.
I have to admit that the existence of the Steve Jobs Archive generates mixed feelings in me. It’s dedicated to curating the work of an important historical figure, but also feels a bit like it’s designed to be a hagiographic tool for influencing how Jobs is remembered by history. (Given how history tends to flatten people’s life stories and accomplishments into caricature or outright falsehood, I entirely understand the impulse.)
In any event, “Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words” is a good, short read. It’s neither a dry business-school tome nor some sort of detailed historical analysis of his email trail. Instead, it’s a carefully curated collection that ranges from the familiar to the obscure.
I found the first two sections of the book, covering his early days through his return to Apple, to be the most compelling. Once Jobs returns to Apple and Pixar is riding high, the text tends to become a bit more familiar set of keynote addresses and memos from the CEO.
The highlight of the book, however, is his Stanford commencement address from 2005. It’s a remarkable speech to begin with, one that will likely be quoted for years to come. But the book also provides Jobs’s notes to himself as he began planning what to say in the speech! (He just kept sending himself emails whenever he thought of something, and because of that quirk, we get to peek inside his thought process.)
“Make Something Wonderful” is worth your time, even if it’s just to marvel at the beautifully executed web version.
Collecting and removing mobile apps, how we begin and end every smartphone session, our new computer migration process, and how we balance our digital and physical lives.
I love speaking at user group meetings. There aren’t as many Apple user groups out there as there used to be, and these days the meetings are mostly over Zoom, but as someone who mostly speaks with developers, PR people, and media types, it’s refreshing to speak to people who are much more purely enthusiastic about Apple and its platforms.
User groups also tend to do a good job of exposing the concerns and pain points of Apple customers who aren’t doing this for a living. It’s a great perspective shift. Last month, I spoke to a group that made it pretty clear about what Apple is doing that is making them unhappy. The particular complaints that floated to the top were, I think, instructive about where Apple needs to make changes and up its game. Let’s take them in turn.
This week we’re pondering future directions for watchOS complications and iOS Control Center, reacting to extremely early reports about future iPhone displays, and digesting Apple’s slow build of alternative manufacturing capacities outside of China.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Kolide offers a more nuanced approach to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies. At most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong.
IT teams routinely struggle to enforce timely OS updates and patch management, meaning that end users are storing sensitive on devices that are vulnerable to attack. Many MDM solutions are too blunt an instrument and many DLP tools are too extreme and invasive.
Kolide’s premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access their company’s apps. Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data. And instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own. Check out Kolide today.
For some people, colorblindness is a serious liability that closes doors on career dreams. It’s hard to become a pilot, train conductor, or pathologist if you can’t differentiate colors in critical instruments, signals, or tissue samples. For others, it seriously impacts their day-to-day ability to do their jobs, like surveyors spotting flags, doctors looking at skin conditions, or electricians looking for colored wires.
But for me, it’s just a lifelong series of unnecessarily confusing interactions, demonstrating that the world wasn’t designed for people like me.
Accessibility comes in lots of forms. I have flabbergasted people by explaining that the little charging light that turns from amber to green when a device is completely charged is utterly indecipherable to me. And my colorblindness is apparently far less severe than Andy’s.
The big news this week is Tim Cook and lots of him! Also big news are things that already happened, like the Mac’s bad holiday quarter and Apple putting all its metaphorical eggs in China’s metaphorical basket.
What’s cooking with Tim
Since the dawn of time people have wanted to know more about Tim Cook. Finally, they can.
Writing for GQ, Zach Baron has a lengthy and fascinating interview with Apple’s CEO. Turns out he’s not your father’s Apple CEO! Just looking at you, I’m gonna guess that was Mike Markkula? Maybe Sculley.
You have a lot of Tim-related questions, right? Of course you do. We all do. Many of them are answered in this interview. Such as, what does Tim do first after he wakes up? What are his likes and dislikes? What personal grudges does he hold? Where is Tim? What’s Tim thinking about right now? Is he thinking about me? (He’s not.)
If you love the story about Cook asking an executive responsible for an operations problem in China “Why are you still here?” and don’t mind hearingitfor thetwentieth time, then you won’t be disappointed in this interview. To be fair, it is a good story that does get to Cook’s understated, all-business style. And the one about him checking his bag at McDonald’s and deadpanning to the clerk “Where are my fries?” doesn’t have the same impact.
Overall, it’s a fascinating look at Cook, even if the man himself predictably toes the party line. The App Store is described as “a trusted place where developers and users could come together in a two-sided transaction” as if Apple weren’t in the middle taking its cut, and you won’t learn anything about Apple’s unannounced headset that you didn’t know, unless you didn’t know that Cook has a keen interest in AR technology. If so, I’d like to welcome any and all subscribers to Living Under A Rock Quarterly.
Apple doom update
This week Apple announced that it would release its second quarter 2023 results on May 4th, but some people are still talking about the previous quarter. We already knew that Mac revenue was down 29 percent year-over-year in the holiday quarter, but now analysts’ estimates are out to provide more color to the Mac’s very bad quarter.
As bad as it was, it seems it was one of those fights where you should see the other guy.
All is not lost for Apple, however! (Look at you, thinking all was lost for Apple. You’re adorable.) According to Counterpoint Research, the iPhone 13 was the best-selling smartphone in China last year. Not only that, but Apple did pretty well overall…
…as three different iPhone models took the top three slots in the sales ranking…
While there are some things to be concerned about, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that Apple’s gonna be OK after all. Just a hunch. Could be wrong. Might delete later.
You gotta dance with who brung ya
Apple’s complicated relationship with China continues to be complicated and relationship-y.
As someone who very distinctly remembers when Apple was about to go out of business, it’s very weird to be living in a world where Apple has to be careful about how quickly it changes the country where it manufactures devices in order to not create an international incident.
Go grab your dictionary. I’ll wait. Now, if you open it up to “thorny situation”, well, you probably won’t see a picture of this situation because there’s no entry for “thorny situation” in the dictionary in the first place. But if there were an entry for it… well, there probably still wouldn’t be a picture of this situation. How do you even photograph it? Also, what adult has a dictionary with pictures in it? Is this a Portland thing?
The point is, for years Apple has taken advantage of China’s ability to provide a sometimes literally captive workforce in an industrial center built specifically for making exactly the kinds of computing devices the company sells. And it worked great! Until it didn’t.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
As I write this, Apple has just debuted its Friday Night Baseball broadcasts for this season—in the afternoon, thanks to coverage of a Cubs day game. And I’m happy to report that the local radio overlay feature works well. Accessible from the More (three dots) button on iPhone and iPad and the sound icon on Mac and Apple TV, I was able to switch from Apple’s announcers to sound from the Cubs’ home radio broadcast. (Alas, audio from Rangers road games are strangely not available this season.)
The integration is flawless. Radio announcer audio is synced up perfectly with the video. When the radio broadcast isn’t providing audio, the broadcast plays stadium background audio. (In fact, it sounds to me like perhaps Apple is grabbing an announcer-only feed from the radio broadcast and then mixing in its own background audio—either that or it’s perfectly synced.)
Also I’m happy to report that Apple’s advanced probability forecasts are rounded to the nearest percentage, so a player is listed as having a 14% hit probability instead of 14.2% or 14.18%—a level of precision that’s unnecessary and probably unreal.
Three outs in an inning, three dots in the scorebug.
Finally, Apple’s scorebox still features three dots to represent the number of outs in an inning, which is as it should be, since there are three outs in an inning. (Many broadcasters make the mistake of only displaying two dots, which is criminal.)
Jason still can’t even with General Motors. We waste some cycles drawing trendy 3D junk while pondering (timely!) Easter eggs we have known. And is the forthcoming Apple VR headset like the Lisa, or like the Apple Watch?
As first reported by Reuters, General Motors has decided that the company’s future electric cars will drop support for CarPlay and Android Auto, preferring the company’s own infotainment system based on the lower-level Android Automotive operating system. Essentially, all of GM’s EVs will run Android and offer access to certain Android apps, but any hope of connecting your phone to the cars via any means beyond Bluetooth will be gone.
Ultimately, however, this is about control. Whether drivers want it or not — and I suspect a great many do not — this next generation of cars will be about consumer data and subscription features as much as they’ll be about instant electric torque and eliminating carbon emissions. The auto industry is banking on data and subscriptions being massively lucrative revenue streams. GM alone hopes to grow its subscription revenue more than tenfold to $25 billion per year by 2030. Why would any automaker want to cut Apple in on that or be forced to play ball with its software? And neither Apple nor Google charges car companies to use these features; owners don’t have to subscribe to them monthly, either.
“From a business perspective, having more control over what happens within your vehicles is extremely valuable for both vehicle development as well as the opportunities presented by capturing and repackaging data for analysis and marketing,” Ivan Drury, Edmunds’ director of insights, told The Verge.
I have a lot of strong feelings about this, because it’s a clear case of a corporation prioritizing its own business and technical interests over the needs of its users. While GM’s statements on the matter constantly emphasize that this is an improvement or evolution of the in-car experience, it’s all spin and lies.
The truth is, instead of allowing your smartphone—the single most important information appliance we all have—to be a key part of the driving experience, GM has decided that it will place itself at the center of that experience. This fundamentally means that it will be a second-class experience, because almost nobody will consider their car computer as their primary device.
Relying on a secondary device has huge drawbacks. First, consider compatibility: If users rely on apps and services that aren’t available on GM’s platform, they will be forced to change, fall back to Bluetooth, or go without. The arrogance in believing that GM should force people to bend their digital lives in order to fit into their cars is breathtaking. Are users going to be forced to change their podcast app of choice, or streaming music service of choice, or audiobook player of choice, all because General Motors wants to enhance its revenue?
But it’s worse than that. Even if you happen to use a supported service or app, you have to rely on syncing between devices. Now you’ve got to hope that whatever connectivity the car offers will be able to keep your music playlists and the current playing location of your podcast or audiobooks synced and up to date. Cloud syncing is tricky—do I really trust General Motors to keep all my stuff in line?
And of course, there’s the Android app experience itself. It has never been the platform’s strength. If the app you want to use is available on the Play Store, and has been flagged for Automotive use, and presumably has been approved by some invisible GM gatekeeper… will it be any good? Or will it be a mediocre-at-best-but-at-least-it-works experience?
GM wants your data. It wants to control your in-car experience. Yes, I have sympathy for a company that is trying to integrate a lot of advanced in-car navigation and safety features with its own hardware stack—in fact, I think it’s not at all unreasonable for GM to declare that if you want to use those features, you must use GM’s built-in navigation apps. But, of course, that’s not what they are actually doing. They’re trying to hide their power grab behind their need to tie auto-drive features to their own navigation system.
This move is infuriating enough simply by dint of it being a giant corporation deciding that its customers were too satisfied with making their own choices. But let’s be honest, the software track record of auto companies is poor.
Even when they do a good job—let’s give them the benefit of the doubt—their priorities are never aligned with the users. If you buy a new iPhone, or upgrade to the new version of iOS, you get new features and better hardware. The computer on a GM car will never get a hardware upgrade, and I would wager that the software will remain fairly static—with key new features and updates only arriving on newer model cars. Even if GM begins this process in a competitive position versus CarPlay and Android Auto, that advantage will begin to depreciate the second you drive the car off the lot.
Tangentially, two EV companies have already gone down this path: Tesla and Rivian. And yes, both of them are just as arrogant as GM in preferring their own stock software to the smartphones in everyone’s pockets. At least GM will have access to Android apps—Tesla finally added support for Apple Music earlier this year! (It took just eight years!) A guy in Poland has spent countless hours trying to hack CarPlay into the Tesla web browser.
I get the impulse to want to control everything that happens in your car, if you’re an automaker. But given the fact that the smartphone is everyone’s real ride-or-die, the best choice is to integrate tightly with the supercomputer we all keep in our pockets, not to say “let them eat Bluetooth” and be happy degrading the customer experience in the interest of control and incremental revenue.
The real question is, what happens next? Of course, the smart move would be for GM to backtrack and offer basic CarPlay support on future models, but I don’t think anyone is actually expecting that. What is worth watching is what other automakers do next. According to some numbers revealed by Apple last year, 79 percent of new car buyers in the U.S. say that CarPlay is a must-have feature. (Obviously, GM doesn’t believe those stated preferences are particularly strong.)
Will GM’s competitors follow its lead, relieved that the world is finally starting to trend away from bring-your-own-device support in cars? Or will they consider CarPlay a competitive advantage that will allow them to market their own vehicles against GM’s? I sure hope it’s the latter, because we’re never going to give up our smartphones—and if our cars don’t talk to them properly, our in-car experiences will always be second-rate.
