Federico with the Z13 Acronym.

Just like the App Store Review Guidelines, our Setups page is a living document. Federico and I are always tweaking and refining the gear we use, so it should come as no surprise that today, Federico updated his sections of the Setups page with new items, including his Asus gaming tablet from this week’s episode of MacStories Unwind and the accessories he used to mod his iPad Pro. He dropped a few items too.

Federico’s iPad Pro mods.

We’ve included a handy changelog at the top of the Setups page if you want to see the latest changes and will be linking updates here on the homepage to make it easy to follow along. I’ll have some updates soon too, but I’ve been waiting for a package for over a month that got stuck in Cologne, Germany. I’d love to spill the beans today, but what fun would that be? I’ll reveal what I’ve been up to soon enough.

Until then, here are the latest changes to Federico’s setup:

• Added Z13 Acronym to Videogames section (Unwind episode)
• Removed Raikiri Pro game controller and replaced with FlyDiGi Vader 3 Pro and GuliKit KingKong 2 Pro
• Added Hall effect joysticks to ROG Ally section
• Added Edge Pro MagSafe holder and BoomCan MS from How I Modded My iPad Pro with a Screen Protector, iPhone Holder, and Magnetic Stereo Speakers
• Removed mentions of velcro and replaced with AllyMate and DeckMate in ROG Ally and Steam Deck sections
• Apps section: updated entries for media tracker, read later, podcast, weather, and team communication apps
• Added new Belkin charger

→ Source: macstories.net

This week on Magic Rays of Light, Sigmund and Devon are joined by Federico and John for a special announcement as well as recaps of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and For All Mankind season four. Also, an overview of Apple Vision Pro release details and entertainment offerings, the latest Apple Original FYC and In Production news, and Devon’s new shortcut for journaling what you watch on Apple TV.

Show Notes

• Trailers:
  • Sago Mini Friends — Season 2
  • The Dynasty: New England Patriots
• Recaps:
  • Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
  • For All Mankind
• Release:
  • Killers of the Flower Moon
• Extras:
  • ‎The Essential Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • Masters of the Air — Opening Title Sequence
  • Killers of the Flower Moon — Music by Robbie Robertson
  • Talk: Kickstart Your Healthiest Year with Apple Fitness+
  • The Argylle Experience
• Also Discussed:
  • Download Watch History Journal
  • Register for the Trakt API
• Up Next:
  • Self Reliance
  • The Marvels
  • Penith (The DAVE Soundtrack)
  • True Detective: Night Country
  • Succession
• More from MacStories:
  • Club MacStories
  • MacStories Unwind and Unwind+
• Apple TV+ and MLS Season Pass
  • Subscribe to Apple TV+
  • Subscribe to MLS Season Pass

Send us a voice message all week via iMessage or email to magic@macstories.net.

Sigmund Judge | Follow Sigmund on X, Mastodon, or Threads

Devon Dundee | Follow Devon on Mastodon or Threads

Federico Viticci | Follow Federico on Mastodon or Threads

John Voorhees | Follow John on Mastodon or Threads

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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 and Magic Rays of Light that collectively, cover a broad range of the modern media world from Apple’s streaming service and videogames to apps for a growing audience that appreciates our thoughtful, in-depth approach to media.

If you’re interested in advertising on our shows, you can learn more here or by contacting our Managing Editor, John Voorhees.

→ Source: itunes.apple.com

Coates described Threads’ roadmap as follows:

• December 2023 – A user will be able to opt in via the Threads app to have their posts visible to Mastodon clients. People would be able to reply and like those posts using their Mastodon clients, but those replies and likes would not be visible within the Threads application. Threads users would not be able to follow or see posts published across Mastodon servers, or reply to them or like then.

• Early 2024 (Part One) – the Like counts on the Threads app would combine likes from Mastodon and Threads users

• Early 2024 (Part Two) – replies posted on Mastodon servers would be visible in the Threads application

• Late 2024 – A “mixed” Fediverse and Threads experience where you will be able to follow Mastodon users within Threads, and reply to them and like them

• TBD – Full blended interoperability between Threads and Mastodon

The schedule struck Coates as both optimistic given the complexities involved and likely to be controversial because the early stages are lopsided in favor of integrating Threads into Mastodon and not the other way around. As Coates explains, there are technical, legal, and regulatory reasons for that, but that won’t make it any less contentious.

Scale is quite literally another huge problem for Meta that could easily lead to unintended consequences that cause problems for Mastodon users no matter what Meta’s intentions are. As Coates explains:

The community that Threads is planning to participate in is that of Mastodon servers federating with one another via Activity Pub. The estimates of this community are that there are about 9,500 separate mastodon instances participating in this ecology, with roughly 1.5 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs). This is a fairly substantial number but of course it pales in comparison to Meta more generally, which has closer to three billion active users. Or to put it another way, Mastodon users represent about 1/2000th of the number of people using Facebook/Instagram/Threads/WhatsApp etc. worldwide.

Threads itself has only been around for a few months now and it still towers over the rest of the Mastodon community in terms of users. It’s based on the Instagram user base, and Instagram users can opt in to use Threads with a single tap. Because of that—as of a recent earnings report—Meta can currently claim around 160 million total users and about 100 million MAUs for Threads alone. So, again, maybe we shouldn’t be thinking about Threads ‘integrating’ with the fediverse and instead think about Threads attempting to engage with the Fediverse without entirely crushing it in the process.

The entire post is worth reading because it explores interesting ways to deal with distributed content moderation, identity, public education about federation, and all the other large-scale problems that Threads will bring with it into the fediverse by virtue of its size and commercial goals as an ad-funded company. None of these issues will be easy to solve, and the meeting happened before an upturn in objectionable content served by the Threads algorithm to many users. However, I’m still encouraged by Coates’ overall reaction to the meeting and the teams at Meta who are working on integrating Threads with the Fediverse:

But I can report that in my opinion the teams building it and the integration seem to be decent people, trying to build something they’re excited by, wanting to be part of something new and truly federated, and wanting to be respectful and careful about how they do it. And whether or not you think their arrival in the space is a good thing, that apparent good faith and care has mitigated at least some of my concerns.

→ Source: plasticbag.org

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The good news is that Jennifer Pattison Touhy reports for The Verge that the Thread Group has a solution:

Thread Group’s plan to fix the multi-network problem is to standardize how border routers share credentials with border routers from different manufacturers. In a blog post released at CES this week, the group says these changes should make it easier to add a new Thread border router or Thread device to an existing network. The result will be “a single, larger ranging Thread mesh network, including multiple Border Routers, which in turn can increase the reliability of all the devices in it.”

That sounds great, but like any standard, it’s likely to take a while to filter through to the devices you use in your home. Still, it’s progress and a reason to be optimistic that eventually, your smart home devices may play nice with each other no matter who makes them.

→ Source: theverge.com

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Here’s the thing about the iPad line: it’s always being worked on, and that work is never complete. You know, like roadwork. As a kid, I recall thinking Atlanta was only under construction for a few weeks. Oh, the naïveté.

[…]

The awkward thing about this never ending construction project is when a lower-end model get a “new” feature before a premium model. That’s what happened with the iPad 10 and the iPad Pro in 2022. The awkwardness was compounded by the fact that Apple released no new iPads in 2023. Instead, Apple introduced a third (but not third-gen) Apple Pencil. More roadwork.

I think this is a perfect encapsulation of the state of the iPad. For better or worse, it’s always being worked on. Not like how the Mac and iPhone are always “being worked on” (of course they are), but more in the sense that there’s always something that obviously needs to get fixed and we’re waiting for it.

And the funny thing is, I’ve been using the iPad as my primary computer for long enough now, I find its “current” state kind of charming at this point. It’s definitely an acquired taste, but why would you get a reliable computer that does the same reliable things for a good number of reliable years when you can experience the thrill of a platform that still feels like it launched two years ago when it is, in fact, 14 years-old and that perennially feels like it’s waiting for the next shoe to drop? Why join the navy when you can be a pirate? I’m only half-kidding with this. Besides the fact that, for me, no other computer Apple makes is as flexible as an iPad, part of the enjoyment is (again, for me) its quirky nature, constantly on the verge of improvement. (Please don’t send me this page.)

If there’s one thing you can say about the iPad line is that it’s never boring, for better or worse. If anything, we’re still blogging about it – 14 years later.

→ Source: 9to5mac.com

Gaming was fundamentally part of the Apple silicon design. Before a chip even exists, gaming is fundamentally incorporated during those early planning stages and then throughout development. I think, big picture, when we design our chips, we really look at building balanced systems that provide great CPU, GPU, and memory performance. Of course, [games] need powerful GPUs, but they need all of those features, and our chips are designed to deliver on that goal. If you look at the chips that go in the latest consoles, they look a lot like that with integrated CPU, GPU, and memory.

That integrated, console-like approach has the added benefit of bringing the iPhone and iPad along for the ride, greatly expanding the potential size of the market for game developers. According to Leland Martin, one of Apple’s software marketing managers:

If you look at the Mac lineup just a few years ago, there was a mix of both integrated and discrete GPUs. That can add complexity when you’re developing games. Because you have multiple different hardware permutations to consider. Today, we’ve effectively eliminated that completely with Apple silicon, creating a unified gaming platform now across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Once a game is designed for one platform, it’s a straightforward process to bring it to the other two. We’re seeing this play out with games like Resident Evil Village that launched first [on Mac] followed by iPhone and iPad.

With the introduction of the M3 family of chips, Apple’s gaming story continues to evolve by adding hardware-accelerated ray tracing, mesh shaders, and Dynamic Caching, which determines on-the-fly the amount of memory to make available to the M3’s GPU for improved performance. Those chip enhancements are paired with new developer tools designed to make it easier to bring games to the Mac.

There are a lot of variables at play, and whether Apple can compete head-to-head with PC and console games is far from certain. However, what’s clear is that Apple is doing more than at any time in recent memory to make a run at the top end of the videogame market.

Some of the fruits of those efforts are beginning to appear on the App Store. Capcom’s Resident Evil Village debuted on the Mac in the fall of 2022 and more recently on the iPhone and iPad. As Wong notes, Lies of P, one of the top releases of the year was released on the Mac at the same time as other platforms, and Baldur’s Gate 3 was released on Steam for the Mac just a couple of months after its debut on other platforms. Plus, Capcom is back with Resident Evil 4 on every Apple device, and Death Stranding is slated for early next year. That’s a lot of top-notch games.

I’ve been playing many of these titles across an original M1 MacBook Air, M1 Max Mac Studio, and, most recently, on M3 Max MacBook Pro that Apple sent me, and the early results aren’t surprising. The M1 MacBook Air struggles, while the M3 Max MacBook Pro looks stunning. That may not make any Mac the best choice for gaming today, but with the M3, the technology to make it competitive with PCs and consoles is emerging and will inevitably trickle down to more affordable Macs over time.

Whether that happens fast enough and whether Apple can attract the biggest games are just two of many open questions. However, as we head into 2024, I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen so far and plan to share more of my ongoing exploration of Mac gaming in the new year.

→ Source: inverse.com

Ever since Apple’s OSes were updated in the fall, I’ve been intrigued by the Home app’s new Clean Grid Forecast feature that predicts periods when the energy you use is ‘More Clean.’ The feature immediately reminded me of Clean Energy Charging, which works with Optimized Battery Charging, to charge your iPhone during periods when the electricity generated in your area is cleanest.

However, Clean Grid Forecast also raised more questions in my mind than it answered, like ‘What does More Clean mean?’ and ‘How does Apple know if the energy is cleaner?,’ and ‘How much cleaner is it anyway?’ These are the kind of answers that GridStatus.io, a website that offers electrical grid data, set out to answer by comparing Apple’s ‘More Clean’ periods with publicly available energy generation data.

It turns out that there’s not a lot of information about Apple’s Clean Grid Forecast. As GridStatus explains, what we know is that:

• It’s a forecast - this is important because a forecast is going to have some imperfections; and possibly change over time;
• It’s location-based, perhaps down to individual towns or counties;
• The forecast goes 12 hours out and seems to be in half-hour increments.

On the iPhone support page we learn one more piece of information, that the grid forecast is available in the contiguous U.S. only.

That didn’t give GridStatus a lot with which to work, and although they tried to validate Apple’s forecasts, the results were inconclusive:

without more info it’s hard to find evidence that what Apple’s doing here is little more than a novelty. Something for them to point to as “doing their part”, while providing no actionable information to verify or additional materials for their customers to learn from.

That’s not to say that the forecasts are incorrect. It’s just that Apple hasn’t shared enough information to judge the quality of its forecasts with any degree of certainty, which is disappointing.

With Clean Grid Forecast, Apple has an opportunity to extend its impact on energy consumption well beyond its products. Integrated with home automation, accurate forecasts could make it easier to schedule energy-intensive tasks during ‘More Clean’ periods. That’s not currently possible because the feature doesn’t extend beyond the Home app and its widgets. Sure, you can watch the forecast and defer tasks until you’re in a ‘More Clean’ zone, but a little automation would go a long way toward making task scheduling a reality.

The first step, though, is convincing consumers that deferring tasks is worth the trouble. One way Apple can do that is by sharing more information about how the Clean Grid Forecast works, providing some level of confidence that deferring tasks makes a difference. Next, Apple should integrate the forecasts directly into OS features and automation tools like Shortcuts, Siri, and home automation. Finally, I’d like to see Apple open up the forecasts to third parties so they can be integrated directly into hardware and software outside of Apple’s product lineup. That may strike some as unlikely, but with the company’s goal to be carbon neutral by 2030, it’s a chance for the company to have an impact well beyond its own products.

I realize that this is all easier said than done. At least in the US, energy production is a vast patchwork of local facilities, and there are many variables that affect whether energy is ‘More Clean’ than usual. However, by being transparent about how ‘More Clean’ is determined and offering tools that give consumers better control over when they consume power, Apple has an opportunity to empower people to take proactive steps to reduce carbon emissions and promote thoughtful decisions about power consumption on a massive scale. My hope is that Clean Power Forecasts is just the tip of the iceberg of what Apple has planned for managing energy usage in 2024.

→ Source: blog.gridstatus.io

Source: Apple.

As a result of an International Trade Commission ruling banning Apple from importing Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches into the United States, the company told 9to5Mac on December 18th that it would pull the two models from its online store on December 21st and from retail stores after December 24th, which it did. The ITC’s ruling was subject to a potential veto by U.S. President Biden by December 25th, but today, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative issued a statement that it has decided against vetoing the ITC ruling, meaning that the ruling is now final.

In a statement to Reuters, an Apple representative said:

We strongly disagree with the USITC decision and resulting exclusion order, and are taking all measures to return Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 to customers in the U.S. as soon as possible.

The company also confirmed to Reuters that it had filed an appeal of the ITC’s ruling. Last week, the ITC declined to put the ban on hold pending the appeal.

Without a veto, no stay pending Apple’s appeal of the ITC’s ruling, and Apple’s quarterly earnings report roughly five weeks away, Masimo appears to be in a strong position to extract a favorable licensing deal from Apple unless the company can find a software or other solution to the dispute.

→ Source: reuters.com

In the world of ActivityPub, every post everywhere is made up of a sender, a message, and a URL. Every user has an inbox and an outbox for those messages. That’s the whole protocol in a nutshell. The simplicity is the point: since ActivityPub is not a product but a data format like PDF or JPG, what you do with those messages, those URLs, those inboxes and outboxes, is entirely up to you.

You could have a Twitter-like app that emphasizes text, or an Instagram-like one with a UI that shows photos first. Your federated YouTube could be full of everybody’s videos, or you could make TikTok by filtering only for short and vertical ones. You could use a WhatsApp-style messaging app that only cares about messages sent directly to someone’s inbox.

You could try to do all those things, or you could try to do something nobody’s ever been able to do before. You could build a news reader that only includes posts with links to news sites and automatically loads those links in a nice reading interface. You could build a content moderation tool that any fediverse app could use to filter and manage content on their platform. You could build the perfect algorithm that only up-ranks shitposts and good jokes, and license that algorithm to any app that wants a “Epic Posts Only” mode. You could build an app that’s just an endless feed of great stuff for NBA fans. You could build one that’s just for crypto true believers. You could build one that lets you swipe from one to the other depending on your mood.

As I wrote earlier this week, the more I read about ActivityPub and federation, the more excited I get about 2024. I’m fascinated by what companies like Flipboard are doing (for instance, they rolled out their federated video channel today, which you can follow on Mastodon as flipboard_videos@flipboard.video), and I’m seriously considering the different ways we could leverage various ActivityPub integrations in a future version of MacStories.

I didn’t have “get excited about social media again” on my 2023 bingo card, but here we are.

→ Source: theverge.com

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On AppStories+, Federico shares his experiment with moving to an 11-inch iPad Pro and his iPhone as a second screen setup.

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→ Source: appstories.net

Today we are beginning to open Flipboard to the Fediverse, a rapidly emerging part of the Web which includes social services like Mastodon, Threads, Pixelfed, Firefish and PeerTube all built on a revolutionary open protocol called ActivityPub.

What does this mean for you? In the next few months, everyone using Flipboard will be able to discover and follow a whole new group of writers, vloggers, artists, scientists, explorers, political leaders and millions of others who are posting content and conversing in the Fediverse. If you curate on Flipboard, not only will you have a lot more content to curate from, there will be millions more people to enjoy the Magazines and Storyboards you are curating. If you’re a publisher, creator or brand on Flipboard, you’ll start to see new visitors and engagement as people discover and share your content across the growing Fediverse.

If you’re already using the Fediverse, you’ll be able to discover more articles, videos and podcasts thoughtfully curated by Flipboard’s many publishers and curators around the world. You’ll also be able to follow and converse with them directly from Mastodon, Threads and other ActivityPub apps.

I haven’t used Flipboard in years (even though I really liked the app back in the day), but I am so fascinated by this pivot, and I want to keep an eye on what Flipboard is doing.

The way I see it, if done correctly, Flipboard could become a fast, intuitive way for a lot of people to “get on the Fediverse” without the overhead of picking a Mastodon server and other technical jargon. Just grab the Flipboard app, create an account, and start following people from, say, Threads, Mastodon, and other ActivityPub-compatible sources. Once their multi-phase rollout is complete, you’ll have a federated account on flipboard.com that will be able to (I assume) read and post content on the Fediverse. Based on what McCue is saying, it sounds like that’s exactly what the future of Flipboard will be: a well-designed client for all kinds of federated sources.

In January we will release a new version of Flipboard that will show follows, favorites and boosts from the Fediverse. It will also enable replies to and from the Fediverse as well as blocking, muting and reporting.

I’m very keen to see how Flipboard will differentiate itself here from the typical timeline experience of clients such as Ivory and Ice Cubes, or even the Threads app. I’m also curious to understand if and how the new ActivityPub-infused Flipboard will be profitable (and I hope it will be).

→ Source: flipboard.medium.com

Apple and Masimo have been locked in disputes over the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor for years, which Masimo says infringes patents it holds. The dispute is the subject of a federal court lawsuit and the complaint filed with the ITC, which ruled in Masimo’s favor in October. That decision is subject to executive review by the Biden administration and could be vetoed, but time is running out, and vetos are historically rare.

If President Biden doesn’t veto the ITC’s ruling by Christmas, the ruling will stand. Apple could appeal the ITC’s decision in federal court, but that won’t impact the ban on U.S. sales of the two Apple Watch models, according to 9to5Mac. Apple could also settle with Masimo and license its technology or try to find a way to work around Masimo’s patents.

If I had to guess what’s going on here, I’d say it’s a high-stakes game of corporate chicken. Masimo got a ruling from the ITC that gave it leverage, so they asked for a big licensing deal. The Biden administration probably doesn’t want to deal with the dispute or look like it’s bailing out a big tech company, so I bet it told the parties to work things out, assuming Apple would pay up. Whether it ultimately will, only Apple knows, but it’s decided to force the Biden administration’s hand on the veto. If the ruling is vetoed, Apple’s existing court fight with Masimo continues, and the Series 9 and Ultra 2 go back on sale on December 26th. If not, the company still has the option to settle, which I have to imagine is preferable to pulling products from shelves for a potentially extended period of time.

→ Source: 9to5mac.com

The magic moment of using a clipboard manager comes when you realize you need to access something that’s not the One True Item on the clipboard. If you’re using the standard Mac clipboard and you copy something priceless and then, a minute later, copy something useless—welp, too bad, the priceless thing is gone, and it’s never coming back. A good clipboard manager lets you use a keyboard shortcut or a menu item to view your previous clipboards, choose the item you want to fish out and bring it back.

And that’s my pitch for why macOS should have its own clipboard manager: Because it adds undo to the clipboard via a discoverable mechanism like a keyboard shortcut and an item in the Edit menu right next to Cut, Copy, and Paste. For me, it’s become part of my Mac muscle memory: command-backslash brings up a long list of clipboard history, from which I can retrieve what I want.

It gets better. Once you know that copying something to your clipboard doesn’t destroy what’s there, your use of the clipboard can become far more extensive. You lose the fear of wiping out something important, replaced with confidence that you can grab something in case you want it later and stash it away in the clipboard history.

I agree with Jason on the idea that Apple should build a native clipboard management solution: it’s odd that they never did (especially after shipping Universal Clipboard…in iOS 10) and that they’re leaving something as sensitive as clipboard data fully in the hands of third-party developers without at least a default option for most users and a modernized framework to store the clipboard’s contents.

The lack of Mac-like clipboard management is one of the things I miss most from macOS when I work on my iPad. To give you an example: as I was putting together this post on Threads tonight with some tips I discovered, I realized I had to go back and double-check something else in the Threads app, so I copied my post (Threads doesn’t support saving as draft yet) and closed the composer UI. A few minutes later, I had already forgotten that my “draft” was stored in the clipboard, so I copied something else, and with no way to get my original text back from the iPadOS clipboard, I had to rewrite the post from scratch. That wouldn’t have happened if I was using macOS (or if Threads supported post drafts, but that’s a different story).

The clipboard management situation is even gloomier on iPadOS and iOS since, unlike the Mac, third-party apps can’t run with background privileges to monitor changes to your clipboard. Again, I don’t understand why Apple doesn’t want to make a modern API for this with all the necessary privacy controls for users. Because of these limitations, over the years I’ve seen the market for third-party iOS and iPadOS clipboard managers dry up. Remember Pastebot for iOS? Copied? Clips?

To my knowledge, it seems like the two solid (and reputable) options left are Paste (which John reviewed this year) and PastePal, both of which I’m trying again. But those apps can’t do anything about the fact that clipboard managers for iOS and iPadOS can’t be as powerful as their Mac counterparts.

If Apple ever builds their own clipboard manager, I hope it’s a multi-platform feature with an API other apps can plug into.

→ Source: sixcolors.com

In one spatial video, my mom and I were having dim sum at a restaurant and I was explaining to her what the Apple Vision Pro is and what it does. It was recorded last weekend so the memory was fresh in my mind. Rewatching the video inside of the Vision Pro, it was as if we were transported back to the restaurant, sitting across from each other over a table of dishes. I kept tilting my head a lot, almost in disbelief at how surreal it was to see my mom talking, laughing, and eating in spatial video. My mom was who got me interested in technology and I don’t think I would have a career writing about new consumer tech if not for her interest in it. To me, these convos are very precious to me, so to see them replayed with a sense of presence really tugged at my heartstrings. At one point, I fought back a few tiny tears if only because there were three Apple reps sitting next to me. Self-aware of EyeSight and the possibility that they might be able to see my tears, I asked if they could see my eyes on the Vision Pro’s outside display. I was told they couldn’t. Pre-release software, you know? I obviously couldn’t confirm that myself as the person wearing Vision Pro.

At a certain distance and window size, spatial videos can look life-sized. But even when I “pushed” the video window farther away (enabled by looking at the bar at the bottom of the window and then pulling it closer toward me), seeing my mom in 3D made me emotional. I even laid back on the sofa and placed the virtual video on the ceiling.

When I tried the Vision Pro in June, I almost got emotional “being” in someone else’s memory with the stock footage Apple had prepared for us. I can’t wait to see what it’ll be like to relive your own memories with the depth and sense of presence that Vision Pro enables. I know I’ll be capturing a lot of spatial videos with friends and family during the holidays.

→ Source: inverse.com

The MagSafe charging case for second-generation AirPods Pro that comes with a USB-C connector is now available as a separate purchase. When the updated headphones were introduced in September, many users expected the charging case would be available separately, but it wasn’t. That came as a bit of a surprise because when Qi charging was first introduced in the AirPods line, the case was offered as a separate purchase immediately. But with today’s listing on Apple’s online store, if all you want to do is swap your old Lightning case for the USB-C model, you can.

The new case is available to order on the Apple Store for $99, although deliveries in my area aren’t expected until after Christmas, and there aren’t any available for pickup in my local Charlotte, NC retail store.

→ Source: apple.com

ThingsBox.

One of the perks of a Club MacStories+ and Club Premier membership are special columns that Federico and I publish periodically. In today’s Automation Academy, Federico shares ThingsBox, a shortcuts capture system that can handle multiple media types on every Apple device, sending the results to the Things inbox.

As Federico explains, ThingsBox originated from a suggestion I made on AppStories recently, which he took and ran with to add functionality tailored to each type of media he saves, creating:

a versatile system for quickly capturing text, Safari webpages, URLs, App Store apps, and even images and save them as new items in the Things inbox. ThingsBox runs on every Apple platform and can be used from a widget, the share sheet, or manually inside the Shortcuts app; it is optimized for the Apple Watch, where it defaults to dictation input; on the Mac, ThingsBox integrates with AppleScript to see what the frontmost window is and capture its data accordingly.

Sharing different types of input with ThingsBox…

…and the resulting tasks in the inbox.

Automation Academy is one of the many perks of a Club MacStories+ and Club Premier membership and an excellent way to learn advanced Shortcuts techniques that are explained in the context of solutions to everyday problems.

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→ Source: club.macstories.net

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On AppStories+, Federico and I go behind-the-scenes to discuss the logistics of picking the annual MacStories Selects Award winners and shipping awards worldwide.

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We definitely seem to like being able to more quickly write business emails, and we like being able to ask Excel to “make this into a bar graph” instead of hunting through menus. We like being able to code just by telling ChatGPT what we want our app to do. But do we want SEO-optimized, AI-generated news stories to take over publications we used to love? Do we want AI bots that act like real-life characters and become anthropomorphized companions in our lives? Should we think of AI more as a tool or a collaborator? If an AI tool can be trained to create the exact song / movie / image / story I want right now, is that art or is that dystopia? Even as we start to answer those questions, AI tech seems to always stay one step and one cultural revolution ahead.

At the same time, there have been lawsuits accusing AI companies of stealing artists’ work, to which multiple US judges have said, essentially: our existing copyright laws just don’t know what to do with AI at all. Lawmakers have wrung their hands about AI safety, and President Joe Biden signed a fairly generic executive order that instructed agencies to create safety standards and companies to do good and not evil. There’s a case to be made that the AI revolution was built on immoral and / or illegal grounds, and yet the creators of these models and companies continue to confidently go ahead with their plans, while saying it’s both impossible and anti-progress to stop them or slow them down.

This all gets really heady really fast, I know. And the truth is, nobody knows where all this will be even 12 months from now, especially not the people making the loudest predictions. All you have to do is look at recent hype cycles — the blockchain, the metaverse, and many others — for evidence that things don’t usually turn out the way we think. But there’s so much momentum behind the AI revolution, and so many companies deeply invested in its future, that it’s hard to imagine GPTs going the way of NFTs.

I recommend reading the whole piece on The Verge. I quoted these paragraphs because they get right to the heart of the conflict that I also feel whenever I think about ChatGPT and similar tools. On the one hand, they were (largely? Partially?) built with data sets stolen from artists and creators (including this very website); on the other, the practical benefits of, say, using ChatGPT to help me proof-read my articles are undeniable.

I’ve been thinking about these issues a lot, perhaps because I make a living out of, well, creating content for the Internet. Is there a way to enjoy the power of LLMs without feeling weird and conflicted about how they were made in the first place? Will it even matter years from now? I don’t know the answer, but I’m hoping Apple will have one.

→ Source: theverge.com

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On AppStories+, I try to simplify and speed up my backup setup, and Federico has an update on his default apps.

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Apple could even hide the “always allow…” option until the user had allowed an app to see the clipboard like 5 times in a row. That would avoid giving full access to apps that you don’t want to give it to, and it even helps keep the number of apps with this always access down. After saying “allow paste” in Parcel 100+ times in the past few years and never hitting no, it might be safe to let me just say “always allow” at this point, but maybe an app where I paste once in a blue moon doesn’t need it.

They could go the other way as well: if you deny an app a few times in a row, there could be a new option the next time that asks if you want to block this app from the clipboard forever.

And as they’ve done recently with location, photos, and calendar access, it could make sense to occasionally show an alert that tells the user that this app has access to your clipboard and how often it’s used that access in the last X days.

I strongly disliked the redesigned clipboard prompts in the first version of iOS 16 (a perfect example of user experience dictated by security engineers rather than designers at Apple), and I was relieved when the company improved the system with per-app clipboard settings in 16.1. Still, these clipboard prompts feel antiquated, user-hostile, and not intelligent at all. For starters, they should be consistent – like Matt suggests – with Apple’s other privacy prompts. Second, they should learn from user habits in terms of granting access or reminding people to review their apps with clipboard access.

Third, I can’t believe it’s still not possible for third-party developers to make a proper clipboard manager for iOS and iPadOS – a software category that continues to thrive on macOS. I was writing about this stuff 13 (!) years ago, and it’s wild that nothing has changed.

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In their first interview since leaving Apple to start something new, the trio tells me that their focus is on bringing generative AI to the desktop in a way that “pushes operating systems forward.” While they don’t have a product to show off yet, they are prototyping with a variety of large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT and Meta’s Llama 2. The ultimate goal, according to Weinstein, is to recreate “the magic that you felt when you used computers in the ’80s and ’90s.”

“If you turned on an Apple II or an Atari, you’d get this basic console where you could type in basic code as a user and program the computer to do whatever you wanted,” he explains. “Nowadays, it’s sort of the exact opposite. Everybody spends time in very optimized operating systems with pieces of software that are designed to be extremely easy to use but are not flexible.”

An example he gives: “Sometimes you’ve got a browser window open with a schedule on it, and you just want to say, ‘add this to my calendar,’ and somehow, there’s no way to do that… We think that language models and AI give us the ingredients to make a new kind of software that can unlock this fundamental power of computing and make everyday people able to use computers to actually solve their problems.”

They don’t have a product to show yet, but I’ll say this: if there’s anyone out there who can figure out how to turn generative AI into something more than a text prompt or writing assistant for Word and Notion – something that can be truly integrated with your computer, your data, and, well, your workflow, it’s this trio. I absolutely can’t wait to learn more about what they’re working on.

Also worth noting: the company’s website (great domain, too) is a delightfully retro, emulated browser version of Mac OS 8.

→ Source: theverge.com

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On AppStories+, Federico and I address follow up from the first part of Nerding out for the Holidays.

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On AppStories+, Federico and I revisit artificial intelligence and discuss the sorts of tools we’ve been testing.

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Later next year, we will be adding support for RCS Universal Profile, the standard as currently published by the GSM Association. We believe RCS Universal Profile will offer a better interoperability experience when compared to SMS or MMS. This will work alongside iMessage, which will continue to be the best and most secure messaging experience for Apple users.

RCS won’t replace iMessage, SMS, or MMS. Instead, RCS will run in parallel with iMessage on a user’s device for those situations where iMessage isn’t an option, and SMS and MMS will continue to serve as fallbacks in case iMessage and RCS aren’t available.

I don’t think many people saw this coming. I certainly didn’t. SMS and MMS are creaky, old technologies that don’t work over Wi-Fi, so it’s good to see them demoted to the options of last resort. RCS isn’t perfect, but it’s an improvement over those older technologies, and perhaps Apple’s support of the standard, along with the other companies that have already adopted it, will help it continue to improve.

→ Source: 9to5mac.com

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On AppStories+, The Chamberlain Group’s decision to cut off API support to its garage door controllers is an example of what happens when a company shifts from selling to customers to selling access to those customers.

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Source: The Chamberlain Group.

When you install a garage door in your home, you expect to have full access to how it works – at least, that’s how it worked historically. As Jennifer Pattison Touhy explains for The Verge, that’s not at all the case with The Chamberlain Group, which has built its myQ smart garage door controller technology into many of the doors it sells and has systematically removed ways for consumers to use the tech:

The move breaks the smart home integrations of thousands of users who relied on platforms such as Homebridge and Home Assistant to do things like shut the garage door when they lock their front door or flash a light if they leave their door open for 10 minutes, or whatever other control or automation they wanted to do with the device they bought and paid for.

The move comes a year after Chamberlain discontinued its official Apple HomeKit integration and a few months after it finally killed support for Google Assistant. It’s sadly another example of how the company continues to be hostile to the interoperable smart home.

The result is that many people who purchased garage doors with myQ’s smart controller technology built in now have a less capable door. The only way to restore smart home interoperability is to buy a new door controller or one of the devices covered in The Verge’s story.

What I find most galling about this story is that The Chamberlain Group is removing these features from its doors while simultaneously expanding its partnerships with auto manufacturers and security companies. Think of it as GaaaS: Garage Access as a Service. Instead of offering consumers control directly, The Chamberlain Group ironically has set itself up as the gatekeeper of your garage. Rather than allowing consumers convenient access to their garage doors, The Chamberlain Group is steering them through paid services, which stinks.

A giant button and ads. That’s it. That’s the myQ app review.

I have a Chamberlain garage door at home and haven’t decided yet what to do in light of this news. The myQ app is garbage – it’s literally just a big button to open and close the door without access via a widget, the Home app, or Shortcuts. Oh, and it has ads too. I had been planning to go the Home Assistant route after The Chamberlain Group removed HomeKit access last fall, but instead, I expect I’ll buy the Meross Smart Wi-Fi Garage Door Opener that Stephen Hackett has used for a while.

→ Source: theverge.com

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On AppStories+, I explore screen maximalism while Federico heads the other direction into screen minimalism.

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There’s also a big new feature Apple is calling Dynamic Caching. Put very simply, Apple’s chip engineers were extremely motivated to eke out even more performance from their graphics subsystem—and found that the way memory was traditionally allocated was inefficient. Memory is usually allocated to different threads at compile time, meaning that some threads allocate a larger amount of memory in order to handle peak need, while other threads might choose a smaller amount of memory but risk a bottleneck.

The M3’s graphics system dynamically allocates the memory per thread in a way that’s completely transparent to software developers. Apps don’t need to be rewritten to take advantage of the new system, which Apple says makes some huge gains by wringing a lot of memory efficiency out of the system. Memory that was previously reserved for a specific thread can be given to a different thread instead. A thread that’s in a bottleneck can be given more space. It’s all to the goal of increasing overall throughput.

The fact that these improvements come ‘for free,’ meaning developers don’t have to change their apps or games to take advantage of Dynamic Caching, is at least as important as the efficiency gains enabled by the technology. Especially when it comes to things like videogames, the more Apple can do to make it easy for developers to take advantage of Apple silicon Macs, the better.

Jason also got some hands-on time with the new MacBook Pros, including the new Space Black model:

I got my greasy monkey paws on a Space Black laptop and can report that Apple’s as good as its word in the sense that it seems generally more resistant to fingerprints and other smudges.

But I don’t want to exaggerate this feature: you can still see fingerprints. They just aren’t as prominent. This is a progressive improvement over something like the Midnight M2 MacBook Air, but it’s not a cure-all.

Despite its name, Jason reports that Space Black is more gray than black, but it’s still a noticeable shift from Space Gray.

With the details of the new Macs dissected, it’s going to be interesting to see how the M3 MacBook Pro’s latest CPU and GPU configurations perform relative to the M2 models that were released at the beginning of the year. As Jason also points out, the benchmarks we see from the new laptops and the M3 iMac should give us a good idea of how M3 MacBook Airs, Mac minis, and Mac Studios will perform when it’s their turn to be updated.

→ Source: sixcolors.com