2024-11-23 03:15:51
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, writing at The Verge:
Next year, [Apple] will reportedly launch an “AI wall tablet for home control,” and it’s said to be developing more devices for the home (including cameras, a tabletop robot, and maybe even a TV). Among other features, such as video calling, this new smart display will reportedly be a hub for Apple’s home automation platform, Apple Home, providing a communal household interface for controlling smart devices like lights, locks, security systems, and cameras.
It’s about damn time Apple took the smart home seriously, having let Apple Home / HomeKit largely languish in the decade since its launch. All signs point to a renewed interest here, kick-started by the company’s involvement in Matter (a new smart home connectivity standard it helped develop) and spurred by a need to find its next big thing.
This is a piece I was planning on writing, but I guess I don’t have to, because Pattison Tuohy makes every point I was going to make. All I can add is that if you look at Apple’s annual financial trends, you’ll see that after several years of major growth, the Wearables, Home & Accessories category has stalled out.
The Apple Watch and AirPods can only do so much. Maybe Apple has finally realized that for this category to grow, the company will need more of a home strategy than “benign neglect.”
2024-11-23 03:10:40
Journalist and developer Tyler Fisher, on his personal blog:
Today I’m excited to launch the public beta of Sill, my new social media tool. Sill connects to your Bluesky and Mastodon accounts and aggregates the most popular links in your network. (Yes, a little like Nuzzel.)
Nuzzel was an all-time great service, and I still miss it. Sill is meant to be an open-source replacement of a sort, trawling your social-media feeds (it currently supports Mastodon and Bluesky) for popular links and aggregating them in a single place.
I’ve been using Sill for a few days, receiving a daily email with highlights from my social feeds at a time of my choosing (sent to my Feedbin account), and it’s extremely promising. Even better, some of the things it’s obviously missing—like support for lists, which are really popping off on my Bluesky feed these days—are in the plan for the future.
2024-11-23 01:00:25
My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
1Password wants you to understand the details about how laws like GDPR can affect your business. The EU enacted GDPR in 2018, and the days of betting that you’re too big or too small to be noticed by GDPR are over.
You need to comply, and it’s not the kind of thing you can solve by buying a tool or
scheduling a training session. You need to collect only the data you truly need to function, and secure the data you have. Starting with common breach culprits like compromised passwords might be a good idea—sensible advice from the maker of a fine password manager.
For more about GDPR compliance and other good advice, check out the 1Password blog.
2024-11-22 03:53:26
Apple’s spent a lot of time investigating alternative ways of interacting with its devices, but one of my favorite is one of the newest: head gestures with AirPods.
If you’re not familiar with this feature, introduced in iOS 18, it allows to you use a head nod (up and down) or a shake (side to side) as substitutions for OK and Cancel. For example, you can answer or decline a phone call, reply to or dismiss a notification or message.1 It works with both the AirPods Pro 2 and the AirPods 4 line.
I love this feature. Is it a little silly at times? Sure. But there are plenty of occasions where I can’t easily get to my phone or Apple Watch—say I’m carrying things in both hands, or wearing gloves—and I don’t necessarily want to talk to Siri. Nodding and shaking my head is second nature, and I like the audio feedback the AirPods provide to encourage the gesture.2 Could it be a little better? Sure; at times I feel that I have to move my head somewhat too vigorously, which probably looks a bit comical. (More so than talking to Siri? Probably not.) But I also have faith that the machine learning algorithm Apple is no doubt using to detect these movements will be refined with time.
What I wish, though, is that there were more options for gestures. For example, I’d love the ability to change volume or move back and forth through music tracks using a head gesture—say tilting my head to the right to increase, tilt my head to the left to decrease. I appreciate that the AirPods Pro 2 have the ability to slide your fingers up and down to adjust volume, but I find those controls finicky at times, especially while wearing gloves in the cold of winter. The same goes for using the Digital Crown on my Apple Watch—if it’s even on the right screen for it. More often than not, I just try to hit my phone’s volume button while it’s inside my pocket, which isn’t much better.
As an Apple Watch Series 7 user, I haven’t gotten to really try out the gestures there, but I have briefly used the hand gestures Apple added in visionOS 2 and found those to be winners. As Apple continues to develop these platforms and add more sensors to its devices, I expect these kind of alternative interactions to only increase, and I, for one, am here for it.
2024-11-21 08:38:08
My current desktop Mac, the one I work on day in and day out in my garage/office, is an M1 Mac Studio. I’ve had it for almost three years, and it’s still great.
I know it’s great because from time to time, I end up using a M2 MacBook Air to encode a video or demux a Zoom recording or transcribe a podcast and find myself wondering exactly what is taking so long. Oh, right. It’s a base M2. The M1 Max blows it away, as it should.
But with the arrival of the M4 Macs, I’m tempted like never before. There’s now a M4 Pro-based Mac mini, and the M4 is just so much faster than the M1 that I could replace my Mac Studio with a tiny Mac mini and actually see a noticeable speed boost. One of my M4 MacBook Pro review units is an M4 Pro, and I can see just how fast it is. What’s more, I can run a bunch of benchmark tests to make myself uneasy:
There it is, in black and white. The same chip in the $1599 M4 Pro Mac mini generates a single-core CPU score that’s 73% faster than my Mac Studio and a multi-core score that’s 92% faster! Less than three years on, the pace of Apple silicon has turned my Mac Studio into something that even generates lower CPU scores than the base M4 Mac mini.
So it’s settled, then?
Not quite. The 20-GPU-core M4 Pro MacBook Pro is only 8.7% faster than my 24-core M1 Max Mac Studio. One of the big benefits of the Max-class chips is that they’ve just got more GPU cores. And while I’m not much of a gamer or a 3-D graphics pro, there are several machine-learning-based tasks I frequently perform that hammer the GPU. The M4 Max in the MacBook Pro starts at 32 GPU cores and is configurable up to 40.
If I traded in my Mac Studio for a Mac mini, I’d get a big CPU boost, but only a meager 8.7% improvement on GPU. Meanwhile, if I wait until next year, I can probably get a base-model M4 Max Mac Studio that’s firmly in crossover territory with the Mac mini.
(A strange feature of the Apple silicon Mac era is that you can configure a Mac mini so that it costs more than a Mac studio. Yes, that model has more RAM and storage than the comparable Mac Studio, but it’s really close. And for a couple hundred bucks more, wouldn’t I want to hold out for a dramatic increase in GPU speed to go with those improved CPU cores?)
So it’s settled, then?
This is when I made the mistake of talking to a couple of my computer nerd friends. They suggested that since I spend a lot of time in the winter working in my house’s back bedroom (which has central heating), instead of trying to get my garage up to a workable temperature via a space heater, I might actually be better off buying an M4 Max MacBook Pro and toting it back and forth between the two spaces.
Oh, I do not want to contemplate the laptop-as-a-desktop lifestyle, mostly because I did that for years during the Intel Mac era and it wasn’t great. Using Apple silicon laptops attached to external displays and peripherals is a much, much better experience, but… do I really want to do that to myself?
Advantages: I wouldn’t have to keep making sure settings are synced properly between devices. Using the computer in the back of the house has reminded me that despite all the ways that I can now keep documents in sync across computers via cloud services, some stuff on my Mac still doesn’t sync. It wasn’t so bad when nothing at all synced because I had zero expectations. Now, I want it all to Just Work, and it doesn’t. A laptop would solve this problem—and solve it on the road, too.
But… this also means I would need to travel with a 14-inch MacBook Pro. They are great, don’t get me wrong, but I’m a refugee 11-inch MacBook Air user now accepting life with a 13-inch MacBook Air. Do I want to travel with a larger laptop? (Or, if I mostly use the iPad when I travel, does it not matter?)
I don’t have a good answer. It feels like every week for the next six or eight, I’m going to have a moment of weakness where I click around on Apple’s website, configuring stuff and looking at the final price and realizing it’s a bit high and then closing that browser window. Until the next moment of weakness.
This is what they call the tyranny of choice, right?
