2025-06-30 23:30:41
Source: Apple.
It’s been 10 years since Apple Music launched the summer following Apple’s acquisition of Beats. To mark the anniversary, Apple has made several announcements.
First of all, the company will soon open a 15,000 square foot multi-use campus in Culver City, California. According to Apple’s press release:
…the new studio represents a major milestone in Apple’s continued mission to support artists at every level by giving them the tools, platform, and creative freedom to tell their stories in entirely new ways. More than just a studio in the traditional sense, the new space is a creative campus that reflects a decade of Apple Music’s commitment to high-quality sound, authentic storytelling, and artist-first experiences.
Source: Apple.
The facility includes two radio studios for Apple Music Radio, with Spatial Audio playback and adaptable configurations to accommodate interviews, performances, and more. Apple has also built a 4,000 square foot soundstage for live performances, multicam recording, events, and screenings. Other spaces are dedicated to Spatial Audio mixing, social media production, and isolation booths for songwriters, podcasters, and interviewers. Apple’s new California studio is designed to anchor its other locations that include New York, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, and Nashville.
Apple is also celebrating its 10th anniversary with a series of events on Apple Music Radio. “Don’t Be Boring: The Birth of Apple Music Radio with Zane Lowe and Ebro Darden” has concluded, but you can still catch:
Apple Music Radio will also be counting down its 500 most streamed songs over the past decade, with 100 songs featured each day, culminating in the top 100 songs, which will stream on July 5th.
The Replay All Time playlist. Source: Apple.
Finally, Apple is rolling out individual Replay All Time playlists to its subscribers, which aggregates your most streamed songs from the past 10 years. The playlist hasn’t appeared for me yet, but I know Federico has it, so I expect it will show up for most subscribers soon.
I’ve been a subscriber of Apple Music since day one. While I’ve leveled my fair share of criticisms of the service over that time, it says a lot that I’ve stuck with it for a full decade. There’s always room to improve, but I’m glad I’ve had Apple Music as the soundtrack to my everyday life for so long. Ten years is a big milestone for anything, and judging from where things stand today, Apple Music has a bright future ahead of it.
The post Apple Music Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary with a New Campus, Radio Events, and a Special Playlist first appeared on MacStories.
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Join Now2025-06-28 01:35:35
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
Niléane hosts the next installment of the Our Tech Stories series, Chris has an iPad keyboard case with a kickstand, and everyone attempts to replace a cherished app with something from Apple.
This week, Federico and John dig into MacStories’ big infrastructure update, John tours Wilmington, NC, TV locations, and they both have TV, movie, and music picks, plus two movie deals.
Sigmund and Devon are joined by special guests Jonathan Reed and Benjamin Mayo to highlight the theatrical debut of F1: The Movie. Then, they discuss this Friday’s premiere of Apple Original thriller series Smoke.
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Join Now2025-06-27 05:20:30
To avoid additional fines, Apple is making several new changes to App Store rules in the EU. Today’s changes are a result of an April ruling by the European Commission that levied a €500 million fine against the company and ordered that it “…remove the technical and commercial restrictions on steering and to refrain from perpetuating the non-compliant conduct in the future….”
The changes are complex and wide-ranging, but among the highlights regarding in-app offers are changes that:
Fees have changed for developers offering external purchases, too, and include:
Note, too, that by January 1, 2026, the Core Technology Fee will be replaced by the Core Technology Commission.
Also, developers in the EU will be able to offer their apps not only through alternative app marketplaces, where were already available, but also their own websites. To sell an app via a website, you have to be an Apple Developer in good standing for two consecutive years, obtain a €1,000,000 standby letter of credit, and have an app that has more than one million First Annual Installs on iOS and/or iPadOS in the prior calendar year. As you would expect, developers selling outside the App Store are responsible for managing the purchase process, taxes, and customer service, and failing to do so could result in the revocation of API access by Apple.
All right, that’s a lot and while I’ve tried to boil it down to the core points, there are a lot of details developers should study carefully and understand before taking the plunge of selling their apps outside the EU App Store. The best place to learn more now is from Apple. Start with the developer announcement, which links to more details about the new rules and relevant legal documents. Apple is also offering 30-minute sessions for EU developers to ask questions and provide feedback.
If you’re wondering what Apple thinks of all this, well, it’s not happy. An unnamed spokesperson told CNBC:
The European Commission is requiring Apple to make a series of additional changes to the App Store. We disagree with this outcome and plan to appeal.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The fee structure and rules are complex and will need to be studied closely to evaluate the practical effect of the changes. That said, I’m cautiously optimistic that our readers in the EU will soon have more choice than ever, which I’m glad to see.
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Join Now2025-06-26 02:56:13
Earlier today, I updated my AirPods 4’s firmware to the beta version, which Apple released yesterday. I was curious to play around with the software update for two reasons:
I’ll cut to the chase: while I haven’t been able to test sleep detection yet since I don’t take naps during the day, I think Apple delivered on its promise of improved voice recordings with AirPods.
For starters, I’ll mention that the process of updating AirPods to beta software is better and less obscure than it used to be. If you’re running a Mac, iPhone, or iPad with the latest OS 26 developer release and open the AirPods menu in Settings, you’ll find the option to enable beta updates for compatible AirPods models. I enrolled my AirPods 4 and placed them in their case next to my iPhone, and after a few minutes, the beta firmware was installed. I still don’t love that there is no way to manually install a software update on AirPods, but at least the process is a little more streamlined now.
If you recall, a while back, I mentioned that I was disappointed with the recording quality of AirPods when I published a story about turning my own voice recordings into actionable items in Obsidian. At the time, AirPods 4 were essentially unusable if I wanted to record myself while doing chores around the house or driving. The earbuds would pick up a lot of external noise, and the resulting audio was heavily compressed. I resorted to using a pair of Xiaomi earbuds, combined with some LLM scripting on a Mac mini server, to process my brainstorming sessions, extract tasks from them, and save those tasks as notes.
With the new beta firmware, things are much, much better. For context, here is what a simple voice recording sounded like while wearing two AirPods before the beta firmware update:
I recorded this on my balcony, with some construction work going on at a neighbor’s apartment, using AirPods’ standard voice settings. Here is audio from the same environment, using one AirPod only:
Both are…pretty bad. Well, here’s what a recording from the same scenario with two AirPods sounds like now, after the beta firmware update, with standard settings:
And here is a single AirPod:
It’s a fairly dramatic difference, to the point that I can now actually consider rethinking my voice notes workflow around AirPods connected to my iPhone or Apple Watch. So what’s going on behind the scenes? Here’s how Apple officially described the feature in its press release:
Creating content gets even better with studio-quality audio recording. Interviewers, podcasters, singers, and other creators can record their content with greater sound quality, and even record while on the go or in noisy environments with Voice Isolation. With the H2 chip, beamforming microphones, and computational audio, users will also enjoy more natural vocal texture and clarity across iPhone calls, FaceTime, and CallKit-enabled apps. Studio-quality audio recording and improved call quality work across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, while also supporting the Camera app, Voice Memos, dictation in Messages, video conferencing apps like Webex, and compatible third-party camera apps.
That doesn’t say a lot, so I decided to take a look myself. Beyond the “computational audio” magic that Apple is working behind the scenes, the updated AirPods now save audio files with a sample rate of 48 kHz, as opposed to the 24 kHz files that were saved before the beta firmware:
The new audio file is on the right.
I’m sure that there is more going on under the hood than a mere sample rate boost, but that surely doesn’t hurt. As a result of the change, the audio files I saved this morning after the beta update are almost double the size of the old ones.
Regardless of how Apple made this possible, I’m thrilled that AirPods are now a good solution for recording long voice memos or voiceover for quick videos. Would I use AirPods instead of my microphone to record my weekly podcasts? No, but for everything else – whether it’s recording voice notes or hopping on a non-podcast Zoom call – this means I can now use AirPods without having to say, “Sorry, I’m using AirPods for this”.
Speaking of notes, I will revisit this topic later in the summer as Apple releases more beta updates, but I was also curious to see whether my convoluted workflow to record myself and use an LLM to extract actionable items from a recording could be replicated simply using Notes and Apple Intelligence. The answer is…yes, surprisingly.
After recording myself in Notes, I copied the transcript (which was generated instantly thanks to the excellent SpeechAnalyzer framework, a separate model that Apple improved this year) and ran a shortcut that passed the text in my clipboard to the Reminders share sheet extension. That extension has been infused with Apple Intelligence integration this year, and one of the things it can do is extract actionable items from the input text. The extension did exactly that, on-device, in seconds, giving me the ability to quickly turn my voice ramblings into a list of tasks in the Reminders app:
Turning transcripts from Notes into actionable tasks thanks to Apple Intelligence and Reminders in iOS 26.
Color me impressed. I’m going to keep an eye on all of this over the next few weeks.
The post Testing AirPods 4’s Beta Update and Improved Recording Quality for Voice Notes first appeared on MacStories.
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Join Now2025-06-25 02:20:59
Enjoy the latest episodes from MacStories’ family of podcasts:
This week, Federico and John reflect on where the iPad fits within their workflows after the announcement of iPadOS 26.
Then, on AppStories+, they explore the potential for an Apple automation renaissance built on the features announced at WWDC.
This week, we have RG Slide pricing and penguins, along with new AYANEO news and a cool aluminum TrimUI Brick.
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MacStories launched its first podcast in 2017 with AppStories. Since then, the lineup has expanded to include a family of weekly shows that also includes MacStories Unwind, Magic Rays of Light, Comfort Zone, and NPC: Next Portable Console that collectively, cover a broad range of the modern media world from Apple’s streaming service and videogame hardware to apps for a growing audience that appreciates our thoughtful, in-depth approach to media.
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Join Now2025-06-23 01:28:32
Good post by Parker Ortolani, analyzing the pros and cons of a potential Perplexity acquisition by Apple:
According to Mark Gurman, Apple executives are in the early stages of mulling an acquisition of Perplexity. My initial reaction was “that wouldn’t work.” But I’ve taken some time to think through what it could look like if it were to come to fruition.
He gets to the core of the issue with this acquisition:
At the end of the day, Apple needs a technology company, not another product company. Perplexity is really good at, for lack of a better word, forking models. But their true speciality is in making great products, they’re amazing at packaging this technology. The reality is though, that Apple already knows how to do that. Of course, only if they can get out of their own way. That very issue is why I’m unsure the two companies would fit together. A company like Anthropic, a foundational AI lab that develops models from scratch is what Apple could stand to benefit from. That’s something that doesn’t just put them on more equal footing with Google, it’s something that also puts them on equal footing with OpenAI which is arguably the real threat.
While I’m not the biggest fan of Perplexity’s web scraping policies and its CEO’s remarks, it’s undeniable that the company has built a series of good consumer products, they’re fast at integrating the latest models from major AI vendors, and they’ve even dipped their toes in the custom model waters (with Sonar, an in-house model based on Llama). At first sight, I would agree with Ortolani and say that Apple would need Perplexity’s search engine and LLM integration talent more than the Perplexity app itself. So far, Apple has only integrated ChatGPT into its operating systems; Perplexity supports all the major LLMs currently in existence. If Apple wants to make the best computers for AI rather than being a bleeding-edge AI provider itself…well, that’s pretty much aligned with Perplexity’s software-focused goals.
However, I wonder if Perplexity’s work on its iOS voice assistant may have also played a role in these rumors. As I wrote a few months ago, Perplexity shipped a solid demo of what a deep LLM integration with core iOS services and frameworks could look like. What could Perplexity’s tech do when integrated with Siri, Spotlight, Safari, Music, or even third-party app entities in Shortcuts?
Or, look at it this way: if you’re Apple, would you spend $14 billion to buy an app and rebrand it as “Siri That Works” next year?
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→ Source: parkerortolani.blog