2025-08-23 00:12:42
Nice update to Menial’s excellent SQLite developer tool for the Mac. Worth the wait.
2025-08-22 10:27:03
Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:
Apple today announced that the monthly price of Apple TV+ is rising in the United States and some international markets. From today, the monthly subscription will cost $12.99, up from $9.99.
Existing subscribers will see the price change 30 days after the next renewal date. The pricing for yearly TV+ subscriptions and the Apple One services bundle remains unchanged.
The annual price for a standalone TV+ subscription — unchanged, as Mayo reports — remains $99. The usual rule-of-thumb for subscriptions of any sort seems to be to charge 10× the monthly rate for an annual subscription. That’s exactly where the TV+ month/annual prices were before today. Now, the annual subscription price isn’t just a little bit cheaper than 12× the monthly price ($156), but a lot cheaper.
This seems to be a clear sign that streaming services are different than most subscriptions. People subscribe to newspapers or blog/newsletters and they stay subscribed, because they want to read regularly. Same for a music subscription, like Spotify or Apple Music — people want to listen to music all the time. Churn is just naturally higher with streaming video — people subscription hop. Subscribe, catch up on all the exclusive content you’ve missed, then unsubscribe. Subscribe again when there are a few more exclusive shows you’ve missed again. Unsubscribe again. And Apple TV+ has been reported to have higher than average churn. So I think today’s price hike, affecting only the monthly price, is about dealing with that. If you want to subscription hop, Apple TV+ is going to cost a bit more. If you want to stay subscribed to Apple TV+, you really ought to subscribe annually (or subscribe to Apple One and get Music, Arcade, and additional iCloud storage bundled together).
2025-08-22 10:10:34
Fox (capitalization verbatim):
Fox Corporation today announced the official launch of FOX One, a bold new streaming service that brings together the full portfolio of FOX’s News, Sports and Entertainment branded content — all in one place, both live and on demand.
Available today across major web, mobile and connected TV platforms, FOX One is priced at $19.99/month with a 7-day free trial or $199.99/year, with the option to add-on B1G+ or bundle FOX Nation for an even greater value. Starting October 2, customers will also have the opportunity to bundle FOX One with ESPN DTC Unlimited for $39.99/month.
I just mentioned yesterday, re: MS NOW’s idiotic backronym, that Fox often styles its name in all caps without pretending the f-o-x letters stand for anything. Anyway, $20/month seems steep, but Fox carries a lot of sports.
Apple is promoting the launch prominently in the App Store (including Fox’s preferred all-caps styling), no doubt because Fox — unlike certain well-established streaming services — offers its subscriptions via IAP.
2025-08-22 08:33:56
Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge back in February:
Two weeks ago, we exclusively reported Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks on how many pairs of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses the company had recently sold and might theoretically sell: 1 million pairs in 2024, with the possibility of reaching 2 million or even 5 million by the end of 2025.
But glasses giant EssilorLuxottica, which produces those glasses for Meta, has now publicly revealed 2 million pairs of Meta Ray-Bans have sold since their October 2023 debut, and that it’s aiming to produce 10 million Meta glasses each year by the end of 2026.
I mocked a report from Counterpoint Research this week for its Bezos Numbers on smart glasses sales growth. Here are some real numbers from the current market leader. For context, Steve Jobs’s stated goal for the iPhone, at launch in mid-2007, was 10 million iPhones sold by the end of 2008 — a goal they reached before the holiday quarter of 2008 even started.
I feel close to certain that smart glasses are going to be a big product category. But they’re not there yet. A few million units is something, but it’s not a hit. Given the current capabilities — a camera on your face, speakers on the temples, and a microphone for talking to the system — I don’t see how they currently beat a smartphone and wireless earbuds. If you already carry a phone and earbuds everywhere you go, when would you want Meta Glasses? For taking lower-quality photos and videos, and listening to lower-quality audio? I don’t think the product category is going to take off until there’s a visual HUD in the lenses, and that still seems years away, at any price.
2025-08-22 08:22:19
New video game, just out:
Herdling is a brand new adventure from Okomotive, creators of the atmospheric and acclaimed FAR games, and Panic, publishers of Firewatch.
Looks absolutely beautiful. Painterly. Darth says it’s good.
Available now for Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Epic Games Store. Not (yet?) in the Mac App Store — not because of any hassles regarding the App Store, but because there’s not (yet?) a Mac port of the game, period.
2025-08-22 03:49:04
Added this footnote just now to yesterday’s piece on MSNBC’s rebranding to “MS NOW”:
Historical pedantry: from 1975–1979, Microsoft spelled its name “Micro-Soft”, with, yes, an uppercase S. But that’s not camel-case, and that hyphenated spelling is as much a footnote to Microsoft’s brand history as the woodcut Isaac-Newton-under-a-tree logo is to Apple. Microsoft’s logo from that era was very disco-’70s and kind of cool — but while “Micro” and “Soft” were broken across two lines, there’s no hyphen in the logotype.
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