Our friend and colleague Joe Rosensteel has perhaps one of the best perspectives on the “Amazon Prime is adding ads” story:
Then investors wanted profit, not growth — The Netflix Correction — now it’s about generating money. So Prime Video, which was run as some “do whatever” business that basically amounted to brand advertising, and did weird stuff like buy MGM for way more than The Rings of Power and Citadel cost, now has to turn a profit.
Ads, ads as far as the eye can see.
More to the point, as Joe says, Prime is largely about the shipping benefit, with everything else as ancillary point. I know that when my wife and I were auditing our streaming subscriptions the other week, Prime was one of the ones that will basically never get cut, because free two-day delivery saves us money in the long run.1
Apple One is also currently in that department, because of Apple Music and iCloud predominantly, but I can see a path to going à la carte there—not an option with Prime really. ↩
The fate of Paramount Global hangs in the balance, and our favorites of the year. [Downstream+ subscribers get an extra half hour, including RSN collapses and potential streaming solutions, and our predictions for 2024.]
Every so often, people express an interest in my tech set-up. I suppose it’s a natural interest among tech fans to compare gear? Whatever the reason, here’s an update in what stuff I’m using to get my work done as 2023 comes to an end.
In the garage
My primary office is in my garage, as it’s been for… oh, nearly a decade now! Good grief. The garage is attached to the house and there’s a door so that I don’t have to go outside to get to the rest of it. There’s no heating out here so I have an oil heater that I use in the winter, though these days I control it via an infrared blaster tied into HomeKit via HomeBridge. It’s nice out here. There’s carpet on the floor and a bunch of curtains to separate me from the storage shelves. It’s cozy.
My desk is a 60×30 Uplift V2 with a reclaimed fir desktop. An Apple Studio Display floats above the desk, attached to a RightAngle 2 VESA arm. The Studio Display is attached to an M1 Max Mac Studio (32GB RAM, 10 CPU cores, 24 GPU cores, 2TB SSD).
An Opal C1 webcam; I’ve had a lot of problems with this product and the company recently sent me a replacement. It’s more convenient than setting up Continuity Camera every time I do a video podcast (which is weekly these days).
A 2TB Samsung T5 USB drive, which serves as a regular Carbon Copy Cloner target.
Enter… Studio B
Earlier this year I decided that now that my oldest has graduated from college and not returned home, I could set up a second office space in her room. Even with that oil heater, after a cold winter morning working in the garage I often found myself shivering and having to stand under the shower for a long time to heat back up. We have forced-air heating in the house and an entirely unused room… so maybe I could solve this problem with a second workspace?
Cobbling together older office equipment that was still kicking around and a bunch of stuff I use when I travel, I’ve managed to assemble a pretty nice heated redoubt in the back bedroom. It starts with the very desk I started out with in 2013, a VertDesk that has since been used by my wife as a COVID work-from-home desk, as a book holder at our local library, and as a gaming monitor perch for my son when he was home last summer.
After a search for something better, I ended up biting the bullet and buying a refurbished Apple Studio Display—my second!—for Studio B. I don’t love how much I paid for it, but I have no complaints about the display itself. It’s great, and since I have one in both workspaces, it makes me feel at home in either space.
I have an M2 MacBook Air that I use when I travel, so it has now also become my designated Studio B computer—attached by a single Thunderbolt cable. I bought a TwelveSouth Curve Riser to bring the Studio Display to a more comfortable elevation, and that riser includes a shelf that’s the perfect place to slide a closed and docked laptop.
Attached to the Studio Display (and by extension, to any laptop that chooses to dock there, so my wife now has a desk workspace if she’s working at home) are:
A Magic Keyboard
My former go-to keyboard, the Vortex Race 3 with blue-and-white Drop MT3 Camilo keycaps and Cherry Brown switches.
I used to write for a few hours every week at a local Starbucks, though the pandemic basically ended that practice. Still, I do work around the house throughout the day and also travel from time to time.
My faithful computing companion is my M1 12.9-inch iPad Pro, which is the first device I check in the morning, the last one I check before going to sleep, and generally with me whenever I’m sitting on the couch. In the summer months, I’ll snap a Magic Keyboard on it and write in my backyard, and in the winter when I’m needing that go-to-the-café break, I’ll put it in a stand and write at the bar in my kitchen. (Current stand of choice: the TwelveSouth Duo. Keyboard of choice: the Keychron K6.)
When I travel, it’s the iPad Pro, the MacBook Air, and that Stream Deck and MV7 microphone from Studio B. (Sorry, Studio B, I need that stuff!)
We’ll see what 2024 brings in terms of my working life. I doubt I will convert my daughter’s room to an office and abandon the garage, but it’s not impossible. In the meantime, it’s been educational to switch frequently between two computers again. And has prompted me to turn iCloud Desktop and Document syncing on! But that’s a story for another year.
So it’s come to this: Another lap around the sun, another year over. Before the calendars flip over to 2024—a year so hilarious that I can’t believe it’s not a typo—I thought I’d share some of the stuff I really enjoyed in the year gone by.
Favorite apps
I got to travel quite a bit more this year, and Flighty was my companion on those trips. Flighty provides up-to-the-minute information about upcoming and in-progress flights. It lets you add in the flights of friends and family, so you can get updates on their status, too. I used it to track everyone who was flying in for a family Thanksgiving from all over the West Coast, to plan my attack for airport pick-ups, and to know how much time I would need to move between gates for a plane change. It even kept me up to date while I was in the air via invisible push notifications over iMessage-only airplane Wi-Fi. This year brought a Flighty Apple Watch app and complication, which I’ve used a lot, too. At $48 a year, it’s not priced for casual travelers—but I hear from a lot of people who just pay $4 for a week of Flighty whenever they’re about to take a trip. For the last few years, it’s been my constant travel companion.
Cheers to Mimestream, the native Mac client for Gmail, which exited beta this year. I’ve never been a fan of Apple Mail, and as a Gmail user, I’d been using Google’s web view (filtered through the excellent MailPlane app) for ages. When MailPlane was discontinued, I despaired, but Mimestream arrived just in time. It’s a real, proper Mac app that does email right. I didn’t want to go back to Apple Mail, and I’m glad I don’t have to.
A thumbs up to Final Cut Pro for iPad, which arrived (along with Logic Pro for iPad) this year. I can’t say I’ve edited a lot of videos in FCP for iPad, but after years of complaining about Apple not supporting the iPad with its pro-level tools, it finally happened… and I was able to transfer my Final Cut Pro skills relatively quickly from Mac to iPad. Yes, there are a lot of rough edges, but it feels like Final Cut Pro is a legitimate app that’s got room to become something great on iPad.
Early this year, Twitter silently murdered third-party Twitter clients. Since my primary method of using social media was via Twitterrific, I basically saw my social media usage cut to a fraction at that moment. However—is this a good thing?—I’ve had a little bit of a rebound due to Ivory from Tapbots. It’s an iOS, iPadOS, and macOS client for Mastodon, and it’s now my primary window to social media. I see a lot of people talking about how social media sites don’t need anything except web pages and maybe an iPhone app. I guess we speak a different language: without dedicated Mac and iPad apps, my usage of any social media drops to almost nothing. Ivory is where I spend most of my social media time now, and it’s very good.
Hooray for Bartender, a venerable Mac menu bar organizational utility that reached a new milestone this year. Bartender 5 added design flourishes and automation features, but for me, it’s a must-have utility primarily because it lets me dramatically reduce the amount of clutter in my menu bar.
I come to praise OpenAI’s Whisper, which I used a lot this year to transcribe podcasts. I’ve primarily used Georgi Gerganov‘s C++ implementation, but Apple recently came out with its own accelerated example, and several Mac apps—most notably MacWhisper and Aiko—seek to provide a pretty Mac interface atop the basic power of Whisper. Whisper has its limitations, to be sure—most notably a lack of speaker detection—but it’s a staggeringly accurate technology. It’s entirely possible it will be utterly supplanted by some other AI model between now and next year, but 2023 was the year of Whisper for me.
After prodding from Myke Hurley, I got into the Marvel Snap strategy card game this year. I spent… uh, way too much time playing Marvel Snap. Like, 95 percent of all my recreational game time this year was probably flinging Carnage onto Wolverine and Nova and Deadpool and watching things explode. Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m about to reach the end of the road with Snap. But it’s been a fun ride, and they can’t take that away from me.
The excellent iOS album-focused music app Longplay came out with a big update this year. I have been trying to listen to more albums (rather than playlist shuffles) this year, and I admire Longplay’s focus on creating an attractive space to search through albums and then play them in their entirety. My only real complaint is that I do most of my music playing on my Mac, and I’d love a Mac version. Maybe next year?
Favorite movies and TV
My favorite movie of the year was “Oppenheimer.” (I’m not a Christopher Nolan die-hard, and in fact have disliked a lot of his films, but this was the perfect story for his style and talent.) Other favorites: “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” (which had a very tough act to follow and did not disappoint!), Kenneth Branagh’s gorgeous memoir “Belfast” and “Air“, an amazingly entertaining movie about (believe it or not) basketball shoe sponsorships.
This was a great year for television, so let’s go to the hail of bullets:
“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” (Paramount+) managed to one-up its amazing first season with a new clutch of standalone episodes that explore different tones and genres while being undeniably “Star Trek.”
“The Bear” (Hulu/Disney+) also one-upped its first season, including three very different episodes that could all be strongly argued were the best single episode of TV all year. I know it’s got a weird name (It’s not about a bear; it’s about a bunch of broken people who are trying to work at a restaurant!), and on its face, it might not seem like your cup of tea, but if you like great television, you need to give it a chance. (For the record, my favorite episode of the season was “Honeydew,” which featured baker Marcus going to Copenhagen.)
“Slow Horses” (Apple TV+) provided another stellar season with Gary Oldman as a spymaster who’s more than he appears while also being exactly who he appears, and his ragtag group of failed MI-5 agents who don’t have the common sense to accept that their careers are over. British spy drama at its finest.
“Foundation” (Apple TV+) is the closest thing I’ve ever seen on TV to a wide-screen space opera novel. (Not Asimov’s books, on which the show is very loosely based—the really wild modern space opera stuff I read these days.) Season one started out a bit slow, but season two is just bananas sci-fi from start to finish. Yes, you will need to pay attention—the canvas is large, and the show doesn’t really hold your hand—but this is one of the most daring and visually interesting sci-fi series ever. Apple’s money is being well spent.
“For All Mankind” (Apple TV+) returned this year with another strong season of alternate-universe space exploration, as NASA and the Soviet Union jointly operate a Mars base and consider mining a valuable asteroid. There are colossal accidents and a whole lot of dramatic situations, as you might expect. I love every minute of it, and you can hear me (and Dan) talk about it weekly on our NASA Vending Machine podcast.
“The Last of Us” (HBO/Max) managed to take the classic video game with the familiar zombie apocalypse premise and make it absolutely worthy of a prestige HBO adaptation. I’m not sure what season two will bring, but season one was about as good as it gets, most notably episode 3, “Long, Long Time,” a digression from the main storyline featuring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett.
“Reservation Dogs” (Hulu/Disney+) wrapped up its final season this year. It’s a bittersweet comedy-drama about a bunch of kids coming of age on a reservation in Oklahoma, and as with “The Bear,” I’d recommend you try it without any preconceptions because it is almost certainly not the show you think it is. It is hilarious and will make you cry. It’s sweet and ridiculous. It’s one of the best shows of this century.
“Mrs. Davis” (Peacock) — Look, I don’t know what to tell you about “Mrs. Davis.” It’s an eight-episode miniseries by Damon Lindelof (“Lost,” “Watchmen,” “The Leftovers”) and Tara Hernandez (“The Big Bang Theory”)—and if those credits seem a little wacky, you haven’t seen anything yet. “Mrs. Davis” is about a nun who is hired by a rogue Artificial Intelligence to find the holy grail. And it just gets weirder from there. I loved it. Try an episode, and you’ll know immediately if you’re in or out.
Favorite books
Every year, I read all the award nominees for the best science fiction and fantasy novels of the year for The Incomparable Book Club. The best of the bunch this year was The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. It’s a book about the nature of sentience, the threats of artificial intelligence, ecological disasters, and first contact with intelligent octopuses. Especially that last one.
The best book that I read this year that was published in 2023 was probably My Murder by Katie Williams, which is a credible sci-fi mystery in which a woman is resurrected by modern technology and begins to doubt if the neat solution to who killed her is really accurate. Along the way, there are questions about identity, a discussion of how technology is applied to favor some people over others, a fascinating depiction of the future of virtual reality, and one of the weirder support groups you’ll ever see.
My nonfiction pick is Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski. He’s maybe our greatest sportswriter, and if you love baseball, you should read this book.
I also read two older books that I loved: The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1974 novel about two very different worlds and one person who travels between them. I always loved LeGuin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness” but had never read the other famous novel in the loosely connected Hainish series. I finally changed that this year, and I’m glad I did. Uh, yeah, that book that everyone says is a masterpiece? It pretty much is. I just got there a little late.
The other book isn’t quite so old: 2012’s The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. Fans of Sir Terry seem to dislike this book (and its sequels) because, well, they don’t feel much like Terry Pratchett novels. I get it. I really do. But I loved these books, and yes, I read all five books in the series in a matter of weeks. They are a real vibe. The premise is that people learn to travel across parallel Earths, all of which are lined up in an infinite sequence along a chain. Near ones are very much like our Earth; far ones are very different. Some have life, but very few have intelligent life. It is fair to describe The Long Earth as a book in which two guys float in a blimp, traveling slowly across parallel earths. I loved the sense of exploration and, very slowly, the picking up of intelligence that things may be much more complicated than anyone imagined.
Twitter was dead, to begin with. Five years later, we look at the Ghost Of Apple Future from a different perspective. There’s also some Holiday Ask Upgrade. And who let that history podcast in here?
Hope you already got an Apple Watch 9 if you were in the market. Laughing at GM seems like it’s going to be a sport for a long time but the Beeper Mini saga seems to be ending. Or is it?
Number 9? Number 9?
The big news this week is that an Apple product is now banned in the U.S…. For being too real? Can the U.S. just not handle the realness of the Apple Watch 9?
No, actually, it’s for patent violations.
This long-brewing case against the fancy flop-maker has had its midseason twist, with the import ban forcing Apple to take Watches off the virtual shelves and, after Christmas, the real ones.
We will have to wait for January to see how the rest of this season of Apple Legal is going to play out. The company hopes to be able to issue a software update to get around the patent, but the CEO of Masimo, the company suing Apple, says good luck with that.
“I don’t think that could work — it shouldn’t — because our patents are not about the software,” Kiani said. “They are about the hardware with the software.”
Hmm. Software that’s integral to the hardware. What other company does that sound like? Maybe Apple didn’t steal the technology so much as it just assumed it was its own.
Hey, just trying to be helpful.
CarPlayin’ around
GM’s decision to eschew CarPlay in favor of its own system is the decision that keeps paying hilarious dividends.
According to [GM head of product infotainment Tim] Babbitt, CarPlay and Android Auto have stability issues …. And when CarPlay and Android Auto have issues, drivers pick up their phones again, taking their eyes off the road and totally defeating the purpose of these phone-mirroring programs.
Interesting. Interesting. Let’s just see what InsideEV’s Kevin Williams had to resort to during his test of GM’s new “infotainment” system, which he called “one of the most catastrophic road trips I’ve had in recent memory”:
I hastily plugged the address into my phone, and perched the phone near the vents, navigating to the DC fast charging stations via the tiny screen of my old iPhone.
Nailed it, GM.
Sisyphus is getting tired
The ongoing game of large cat and small mouse between Apple and Beeper seems to be drawing to a close. Beeper seems to transitioning from denial to acceptance with a dash of bargaining thrown in.
If users don’t have access to an old iPhone for jailbreaking in order to complete the registration process, that’s okay – Beeper will rent them one for a small monthly fee.
That is not likely to gain widespread interest.
In a blog post on the company’s website, CEO Eric Migicovsky said, “With our latest software release, we believe we’ve created something that Apple can tolerate existing.”
This seems a little to me like expecting Coke to sell Pepsi in its vending machines, but I am not an antitrust expert nor do I play one on TV.
On TV, I play a good cop on the edge. On the edge of retirement. Also the edge of an examining room table. And bankruptcy.
It’s not a very popular show.
[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.]
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy, but of course it isn’t. Forcing restarts without user approval will lead to data loss (and angry users), but most users don’t install updates themselves!
OS updates are the single most common issue Kolide’s customers want them to
solve. Kolide reaches out to users directly with instructions on how to get their devices into compliance. The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta.
Your author, looking a bit like he’s trapped in a Wes Anderson movie.
Ever since the announcement earlier this year of Continuity Camera for tvOS, I’ve been looking forward to giving Zoom a try on the Apple TV. The app dropped with little fanfare earlier this month, and I finally got to give it a whirl, but the result was underwhelming, to say the least.
First, some background on my particular (and perhaps unique) situation. I play a few regular Dungeons & Dragons games with my wife and several friends via Zoom. Since my wife and I are both in the same room, it’s convenient to be able to display both the video call and our map (using Roll 20) on the big screen of our living room TV, rather than peering at a small laptop display. So I use my M1 MacBook Air, extend the desktop to my Apple TV, and then run the Zoom call and Chrome in split screen on the Apple TV.1
This approach has its downsides; for one thing, we’re looking at the TV, but since we still need to reach the trackpad and keyboard, the MacBook (and its camera) is usually on an ottoman in front of us. For another, neither the MacBook microphone nor camera are great, and it requires some awkward positioning to get everything framed up (and audible).
Offloading the call onto the Zoom app on the Apple TV while using my iPhone as the camera and mic seemed like it might simplify matters, but as so often happens with new technology, this is where things started to get sticky.
Not a joiner
The initial version of Zoom’s app on tvOS is bare-bones to say the least. Once you launch it and get your camera connected, you only have a few options: there are buttons for New Meeting and Join Meeting, and a tab that lets you view your contacts.
Here’s the thing: the way 90 percent of my Zoom calls work is by being sent a link, usually via email or Slack. Those links generally include the meeting ID and password, which are each strings of random numbers and letters.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to open those links on the Apple TV. So, instead, I have to enter the codes manually. The easiest way to do that is to use the TV Remote feature of Control Center on iOS to bring up a software keyboard, rather than laboriously entering those random characters via the Apple TV’s hardware remote. But of course, I’ve already got my phone acting as a camera and mounted atop the TV, so I have to use my iPad instead.2 When I tried this, I ran into a bug where the contextual pop-up menu with the Paste command would appear off the screen.
I eventually gave up and entered the eleven-digit meeting code via the hardware remote. And then finally, after a lot of wrangling, I eventually got the password to paste in as well.
(As a note, it seems as though once you’ve joined a meeting, it does show up in your Meeting History in the Zoom app for tvOS, so that may simplify matters in the future, but for those of us who rely on Zoom links, it’s still a definite annoyance.)
Meet not-so-cute
Once I was able to join the meeting, the UI of the Zoom app is at least familiar, with little squares of video and a toolbar at the bottom. But even there, the tvOS is certainly far simpler than its counterpart on the Mac (and probably even than iOS).
Unfortunately, my problems hadn’t ended yet. The first issue I ran into was having the people on the other end of the call note that our audio was very quiet and muffled. Unfortunately—and this may be down to Apple—there was no way that I could find to boost the gain of the iPhone microphone. It may be that Continuity Microphone simply isn’t designed when people are sitting several feet away from the TV, though one would think that would be an issue on FaceTime on tvOS as well. In a subsequent test call with Jason, the audio quality was definitely lacking, and we were both able to hear our own audio coming through the other person’s speakers until we switched to AirPods. It definitely seems like Zoom’s vaunted noise cancellation doesn’t work nearly as well (if at all!) on tvOS, though it’s unclear whether that’s a limitation of the hardware or the software.
Your intrepid authors Zooming from their living rooms, with mixed results.
In one attempt to deal with the muffled audio, I disabled the Noise Cancellation features via the app’s Settings menu, and that seemed to help make things louder at least. I also thought that perhaps changing Apple’s Continuity Microphone settings to one of the other options it now offers might help matters, but it turned out that Zoom on tvOS either doesn’t offer those options, or there’s a bug in tvOS’s Continuity Microphone system: I couldn’t change the mic mode off Standard, even though FaceTime on tvOS does offer both Wide Spectrum and Voice Isolation modes.
Similarly, when my wife asked me to turn off Center Stage because the constant motion was bugging her, I was pleased to discover that I could use the camera controls on tvOS to reframe the shot, centering us both…only those settings would not stick when I returned to Zoom. Instead, we were both cropped out of the image, with just the tops of our heads visible. On my subsequent call with Jason, this did seem to work, and in my test the option works just fine in FaceTime on tvOS, so it may have been a transient bug.3
Bigger picture
There are some other issues that make this setup less than ideal, though they aren’t really Zoom’s fault. For one, the Belkin display mount I used, intended for external displays, doesn’t quite play nice with my TV—either that, or the TV itself isn’t totally steady, because I get a very minute (but still distracting) vibration of my camera image. Could I move the phone closer? Sure! But that would return us the issue of having the camera in one place while we’re looking another. Doable, but not as much of an improvement over my current situation.
Don’t adjust your computer monitor, I’m not moving.
Secondly, though having Zoom on the TV and using Chrome on my laptop is a fine workaround, I would really love it if there were still some sort of split-screen support on tvOS for running multiple apps at a time (or, at least, for AirPlaying a screen to the Apple TV while also making a video call). I realize that may be kind of a niche usage, and possibly very intensive, but a man can dream.
Overall, though, what this experience really makes me long for is a holistic Apple device that is designed for video conferencing on a big screen. Even though such a device was reportedly in testing at some point, I think there’s even less of a chance of it coming to fruition now that Continuity Camera is supported on Apple TV. Even the idea of having an external mic or camera that you could connect somehow would be nice, but again, I think unlikely—the current Apple TV models have removed the USB port found on earlier versions.
So, in terms of improvements that could be made in the here and now, I’m hopeful that a future version of the Zoom app for tvOS will take better advantage of the platform features, bringing it on par with the FaceTime app. But until then, I’m going back to my functional—if sadly janky—MacBook setup.
For those who, like me, came up with the brilliant solution of using my iPhone for Continuity Camera on the Mac while AirPlaying the Mac display to the Apple TV…sadly, Apple doesn’t support this. I suspect AirPlay and Continuity Camera are using some of the same underlying mechanisms, and thus this setup—currently anyway—runs into conflicts. ↩
As far as I can tell, there’s no way to control an Apple TV from a Mac which, though I understand it’s probably a less frequent use case, still strikes me as a little odd. ↩
Taking a screenshot of Zoom on tvOS is surprisingly hard: you have to use your Mac with QuickTime Player to capture a movie, then pull a frame from that. However, I couldn’t get it to work at all when a Zoom call was active—QuickTime Player just showed a black screen, even though the Apple TV displayed red bars around the sides to let you know the picture was being recorded. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Our joyful tech moments in 2023, the most significant non-AI tech advancement or launch in 2023, tech anticipation for 2024, and a self-indulgent gift we’ve chosen for the holidays.
Another trip around the sun, and for Apple, this felt like the calm before the storm. Next year, the Vision Pro will arrive, Apple will reportedly unleash new operating systems powered by next-generation AI, and the entire iPad product line will probably get updated.
Every year in this space, I try to predict what will happen during the next year. And just to be fair, every year in this space, I also grade my past predictions. (Be honest: how many pundits call attention to their prior year’s punditry?)
Last year I “predicted” the future in not one but two different articles. I’m going to say that I got more right than I got wrong, but I had hoped that 2023 would be a bit more earth-shaking than it turned out to be.
Apple and The Athletic today announced that Apple News+ subscribers now have access to The Athletic’s unrivaled sports journalism. The Athletic provides best-in-class team coverage, as well as coverage of the biggest and most compelling stories in sports daily, across the major sports leagues. Additionally, Wirecutter will be available for free to all Apple News users beginning early next year.
Well, this just got interesting. I’ve long thought News+ to be the least compelling of Apple’s services, but adding both The Athletic and The Wirecutter—both top-tier brands owned by The New York Times—definitely makes it more of an appeal to me. Those are both sites that I frequently run into paywall issues (despite my wife having a subscription to the Times that, apparently, does not include either of those sub-sites).
Frankly, adding the Times itself would be even more of a draw, but it’s certainly a possibility that these two brands are being used as a test case to see what how well this works out for the paper. (Presumably Apple is paying well.)
I do think the Apple News app still needs some attention, though. Right now, I still find it a big overwhelming firehose that I have little idea how to tune to my needs, despite the claims that the algorithm selects stories just for me. These days I still use Google News for my basic newsreading, but I’d be happy to dump it for Apple if the experience were to improve a bit.
The Mac Community generally loathes web views and Electron apps. We all want perfect, native Mac apps—even when an interface could be entirely native, and still not be very good. Pragmatically, we ought to recognize that we just aren’t going to get bespoke SwiftUI versions of every little thing we use in our lives. There certainly isn’t a financial incentive to do it on the Mac App Store, and the scary OMG SECURITY warnings deter a lot of non-App-Store use of smaller apps.
This is where Safari’s new Add to Dock command comes in.
You may remember Steve Jobs suggesting we add web pages to our iPhone home screens as a “sweet solution” to not having an App Store, but back then we didn’t have the rich mix of web technologies we have today—they were really just glorified bookmarks. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) aren’t new either, and in a lot of cases they might be overkill. Making a little container for a site is more than enough, in some cases.
There have been utilities that make apps out of a site, including Fluid, Coherence X, and Unite. Chrome has had the feature for years. But in Sonoma, Apple finally introduced Add to Dock in Safari, building into macOS the ability to package up any site. Here’s how a web app differs from a web page:
When you use a webpage as a web app, it looks and behaves just like it does in Safari. Yet the experience of using a web app differs in several ways.
A web app functions independently of Safari. It shares no browsing history, cookies, website data, or settings with Safari. In this way, it keeps your browsing separate, similar to using a Safari profile. What you do in a web app stays in the web app.
A web app has a streamlined toolbar, with only a back button, forward button, and Share button. If you need Safari features such as bookmarks, tabs, or extensions, you can easily switch to Safari: Click the Share button, then choose Open in Safari. Or choose File > Open in Safari.
A web app can have any name or icon that you want.
For websites that send notifications, the web app’s icon in the Dock can show the number of unread notifications.
While the feature is called Add to Dock, that’s not quite what’s happening. The ‘app’ lives in /Users/your-user-name/Applications, or if you prefer, ~/Applications. If you remove the app’s icon from your Dock, macOS still leaves the ‘app’ in your user folder’s Applications folder.
Break out of tabs
I love tabs as much as everyone else, but sometimes you have a specific site you visit often, and it can get lost in the shifting tabs, bookmarks, etc. You might have a specific window size you want to use for that web site, but not all of your other sites.
This isn’t for every site, just some, and what people find useful will vary, but that’s the beauty of it. Like you wouldn’t want to have an ‘app’ for Six Colors. That would be goofy.
Personally, I wouldn’t try to do this for Discord or Slack, which can be accessed in Safari, but have a lot of AV infrastructure inside of their bloated Electron apps that might not work well in a little Safari container.
Here are some examples I’ve been using:
Fastmail. The first ‘Add to Dock’ for me was Fastmail, which hosts one of my many email accounts. I like to keep all my emails siloed by app, not a unified inbox with work and personal stuff intermingled. Different strokes for different folks. I don’t like Mail on the Mac, even though I use the iOS client, and I’m not going to hop on the latest email client du jour. I also want access to the features Fastmail has on the website, like generating custom email addresses, that I can’t access any other way. Now it’s an app sitting right there in my dock.
Gmail. I’ve historically used Chrome to check my Gmail, and leave Safari signed out of my Google account. Because I prefer siloed email experiences, this wasn’t a huge deal, but sometimes you get those confirmation emails that you have to click on but you really want to keep doing what you were doing in Safari and it’s a whole back and forth that’s not any fun. Also there are all the settings and blah blah blah. It’s why third-party email clients that handle Gmail don’t really do it for me, either. Just like with Fastmail’s web site, the Gmail web site works with all of its own features in an expected way.
Gmail is a little less friendly to set up, if you want to have Safari logged out of your Google account, because you need to log in in Safari, add Gmail to your Dock, then log out in Safari, and then log in to the ‘app’. If you don’t care about where your profile is logged in then this doesn’t matter.
Now you have a Gmail window that can be as big or as small as you want. Any links you click on in these emails will open in your default web browser (Safari, for example). That also means any other Google services you use will open in your default web browser and if it’s not logged into your profile you will be asked to log in. If you’re going back and forth between your Gmail, Calendar, Sheets in Drive, etc. then it’s best to just leave all of this in Chrome where you won’t get the nagging pop-ups to install Chrome, and log in.
Thanks for the warning!
The icon Safari uses for Gmail is just the favicon, and it’s hideous. I’d recommend replacing it with your own image. For some reason the Safari team doesn’t let you drag and drop images into the icon field when you’re in the ‘Add to Dock’ dialog, but there is a button where you can select a file. If you want to change the icon later, you can’t do it from the Get Info dialog either. You open the ‘app’ and go to the Settings dialog under the application name, and then click on the icon to bring up a file browser. No drag and drop there, either. Any image you put in will stretch to fit, so stick with square-ish icons. It will pad it out to a squircle shape with white behind it.
Even if I stick to using Gmail in Chrome, on the occasion I need to click on a confirmation link in an email I can always get to it from here with less fuss.
Spotify. I’ve been disenchanted with Apple Music (was I ever enchanted by it? No, no I wasn’t.) People are always so jazzed about Spotify so I figured I would give it a try. I didn’t want to install their Mac app, which people complain about, so I just did it in the browser at first, but I didn’t want to always have Safari open. It’s in my Dock now and it works just fine.
Of course, that also works well because Spotify saves my playback progress of what I was doing so every time I open and close the “app” I can resume exactly where I left off. A feature that Apple, with all the native software, iCloud backends, and trillions of dollars can’t pull off in the Music app.
Mastodon. I love Ivory and use it as my Mastodon client. But sometimes there are some non-Ivory settings I want to get at. If you’re reluctant to pay for Ivory, I whole-heartedly suggest saving your Mastodon page as an app rather than keeping it in a browser tab. Despite Mastodon’s general ugliness, the site is responsive and can be resized down to a little phone-like app, or sized to fit all the columns in the advanced layout.
Single Serving Success
I’d definitely be interested in hearing more examples of sites that work well as an ‘app’, and maybe some web site developers have some ideas to polish up their app to work well in this format. No code signing, no App Store headaches, and no Electron update mechanisms.
The web, and web apps, aren’t going anywhere, so let’s find ways to make useful, less bloated, apps. Sally forth, and Add to Dock.
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
It’s time for the 10th Annual Upgradies! Myke and Jason discuss their favorites of 2023, take the input of many Upgradians, and hand out awards in numerous categories! Only the finest will walk away with the most coveted of titles: Upgradies Winner.
In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple has announced that it will soon halt sales of its flagship Apple Watch models in the United States.
The Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 will no longer be available to purchase from Apple starting later this week.
The move comes following an ITC ruling as part of a long-running patent dispute between Apple and medical technology company Masimo around the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor technology.
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Apple Watch Series 9 will no longer be available to order from Apple’s website in the U.S. after 3 p.m. ET on Thursday, December 21. In-store inventory will no longer be available from Apple retail locations after December 24.
These kinds of patent disputes aren’t uncommon, but to get to the point that products are about to be pulled from shelves is surprising—usually they get nipped in the bud before then.
That said, it’s important to note that President Biden can override this order within a 60-day window that expires on December 25; after that point, Apple can appeal the decision. As Miller notes, this ban also won’t immediately apply to third-party resellers like Amazon, who have already purchased inventory from Apple, though if it does go into effect, those stores will presumably be depleted.
Doing this right at the culmination of the shopping season is kind of fascinating—on the one hand, it feels a bit as if Apple is playing chicken with the economy; even though most holiday shopping has probably been finished before Christmas Eve rolls around, it still means that anybody who gets an Apple gift card and wants to walk into the store after Christmas to get their Apple Watch is going to be out of luck. That’s not a great look for Apple, but it also doesn’t feel like something the administration particularly wants either, especially in the run-up to an election year.
The biggest question, to me, is whether Apple will choose to try and settle this matter with Masimo. Cupertino certainly has the money to make it go away, but it also doesn’t want to have to pay out if it doesn’t have to. The fact that the company hasn’t already settled suggests that it would rather pursue other routes if possible. (Unlike a lot of these patent disputes, which are often conducted by holding companies that have acquired large patent libraries purely for the purpose of suing big companies and getting payouts, Masimo is actually a health technology company that makes products related to pulse oximetry.)
Personally, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this story for this week.
GM’s new software system better be a doozy after how it’s trash talked CarPlay. Apple beta tests a new set of security features for iPhones and you should be pre-warned that crying inside your Vision Pro may void the warranty.
Pull the other one
As you may recall, GM famously announced several month ago that it was ditching CarPlay, making the contention that it would build its own in-car entertainment and navigation system and it’d be better than CarPlay. Possibly it would have lasers and stuff. They were vague on the details.
But now GM says the reason it kicked CarPlay to the curb was as a—please make sure your mouth is devoid of liquids before continuing to read this sentence—safety feature.
That’s not how this works dot gif. That’s not how any of this works dot gif.
[ GM head of product for infotainment Tim Babbitt ] cited driver distraction caused by cell phone usage behind the wheel.
First of all, if you see a “head of product for infotainment” you know they blew it. Second, this all sounds an awful lot like putting the spin after the horse.
[headslap] “Oh, man! You know what we should have said?!”
Third, Babbitt’s contention that CarPlay and Android Auto have “stability issues” that make them distracting notwithstanding, all this is gonna do is drive people back to looking at their phones. The whole point of systems like CarPlay and Android Auto is to keep people from looking at their phones. While they may not always be perfect, they are way better than driving while looking down at your hands.
“We’re committed to keeping Apple CarPlay & Android Auto. Ford customers love the features because they help keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel,” Farley said.
The one thing that may be true about all of this is that you can be sure whatever system GM comes up with will be dull and uninspired, making no one want to look at it or admit it even is running on their car’s screen.
Security is not just a Peter Gabriel album
Apple seeded the first beta of iOS 17.3 this week, which includes a surprise security feature.
This change is designed to address the rumpus, the hullabaloo, and rending of many a garment that occurred earlier this year when The Wall Street Journal reported that someone is standing behind you right now watching you type in your passcode. The new system requires Face ID to unlock your saved passwords and adds a security delay to change settings such as your Apple ID password, unless you are at a familiar location such as your home.
I look forward to the upcoming report that the thefts are coming from inside the house.
Relive your richest memories
You know how when a rumor says that an Apple product is coming out later than other rumors said it was coming and thus said product is dubbed “delayed”? Well, what happens when it comes out earlier?
Reports just weeks ago indicated the Vision Pro would not ship until around March, but now it seems it might even arrive in time for the Lunar New Year.
After previously only demoing professionally produced 3D videos, such as the movie “Avatar: The Way of Water”, Apple recently allowed journalists to view their own spatial videos on the Vision Pro. James Cameron could not be reached for comment on why journalists would not be likewise moved when that one blue person did the thing with the—no, I actually haven’t seen “Avatar: The Way of Water”.
Come February, expect a lot more crying when people look at their emptied bank accounts through the Vision Pro. They will be just that moved.
[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.]
We got together with Backstage members live on Zoom earlier today to discuss all sorts of stuff, including Apple’s new security features, our experiments with Zoom on Apple TV, and Apple’s journey with Apple TV. We’ve embedded the video below, or you can watch it on YouTube.
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Clipboards, Journal, and Mail logs
We ponder clipboard managers and Apple’s new Journal app, which might not be for us. Also, Apple Mail excels at generating log files, sometimes.
