Extra Ordinary

Sep 4, 2023 • Apple Event

I have once again conviced my cohosts on The CultCast to put down their predictions for Apple’s “Wonderlust” event. Here’s how it works:

• We have made a list of rumors, speculation and predictions for the event.
• On each item we will vote Yes or No whether we think it will happen.
• One point will be awarded for each correct guess.
• Any disputes in judgement must be ruled on by Leander Kahney (a responsibility he has not been informed of, much less agreed to).

Watch The CultCast on YouTube or listen in Apple Podcasts to hear us make our predictions.

iPhone 15

Apple Watch

Other Hardware

Miscellaneous

And the winner is…

We reviewed the results on Episode 612, which you can watch on YouTube).

Jun 1, 2023 • Apple Event

The CultCast is a weekly podcast hosted by Erfon Elijah, Lewis Wallace and myself. Watch us make our picks in Episode 597 and tune in this Thursday where we’ll review our scores.

Ahead of next week’s Apple Keynote, I thought I would challenge my cohosts to a game. We’ve talked endlessly about the rumors — but which do we think have credence? As we recorded live, I filled in our predictions. After the Keynote, our scores will be tallied and the winner will bask in glory.

iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS

Mac Hardware

Apple Headset

Miscellaneous

And the winner is…

May 9, 2023

Lately, Apple has been trying to drum up interest in a Mac gaming community. Despite touting the versatility of their Metal APIs and the power of their hardware, the industry does not seem to have responded to Apple’s latest efforts.

Apple has been here before, but it might play out different this time.

A brief heyday

Believe it or not, the Mac was once a strong platform for gaming. A standard part of the Keynote pitch for the latest Power Mac in the ’90s typically included a segment playing Quake II, Halo, a top PC game of the time.

They mostly got there by accident. Developers liked the QuickDraw 3D graphics API. Kids, ask your parents (…if your parents were massive Apple nerds back in the ’90s). While Classic Mac OS was a primitive operating system, it was well-understood and well-documented.

In switching to Mac OS X, an unreliable new platform that was too powerful to comfortably run on anything less than a top-of-the-line machine; in ditching the versatile and popular InputSprockets API for the buggy new HID Manager; it’s no wonder that soon into the Mac OS X era, Apple quietly stopped talking about gaming.

History repeating

To get a better understanding of where the market is today, I consulted several different lists and compiled the most commonly-cited titles of popular Mac games:

• Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2019)
• Civilization VI (2016)
• Stardew Valley (2016)
• Hades (2020)
• The Sims 4 (2014)
• Fortnite (2017)
• Kerbal Space Program (2015)
• Cities: Skylines (2015)
• Elder Scrolls Online (2014)
• Cuphead (2018)

You can see that the Mac actually had a quiet comeback to AAA gaming in the second half of the 2010s. I myself logged hundreds of hours in Cities: Skylines and American Truck Simulator on my 2015 MacBook Pro. Granted, if a Mac release came at all it was often late, killing much of the launch momentum, but nonetheless, these are popular well-known titles.

We got here again because Mac ports were easy to supply, not because Mac games were in overwhelming demand. The Mac and PC were synchronized on the 64-bit Intel architecture and OpenGL. Hell, even if your favorite title wasn’t on the Mac, you could just boot into Windows.

Nothing lasts forever. In dropping 32-bit app support in macOS Catalina, in refusing to provide first-party support for the fast-growing new Vulkan API and in switching to Apple silicon, Apple has once again shaken off game studio interest like water off a dog.

Mac gaming post-Apple silicon

At every Mac introduction, Apple has been touting M1- and M2-friendly games like No Man’s Sky, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and… well, that’s pretty much it.

I can’t say that either of the Mac’s two AAA titles are my style. But that’s not the end of the story — I decided to turn to Apple Arcade. Most of the selection is comprised of 2D games clearly designed first for the iPhone, and trust me, we’ll get back to that. But first, I set out to find the most impressive, stunning 3D graphics — the games that I figured would make the most of my new M2 Pro machine.

In play testing Asphalt 8 and Gear.Club-Stradale, I was reasonably impressed for several thrilling minutes until the race was over and you could bask in the blocky environments and low-resolution textures.

One of those above screenshots is actually from GRID Autosport for the Playstation 3, a console that released in 2006. They’re within spitting distance of each other in terms of shadows, reflections and lighting.

As I alluded to, these are clearly iPhone games first.

• Sometimes the game is too shy about hiding the cursor and it stays visible the entire time.
• Sometimes the game is too bold in hiding the cursor and you have to navigate a series of menus completely blind.
• Sometimes you have to scroll through a list with no scroll buttons, so you use the two-finger scroll gesture and it flies through a hundred items in one flick.
• More often than not, there’s no keyboard control for things like pause and resume.

It doesn’t instill confidence that developers care about the Mac.

What’s next?

To bring back the Mac gaming market, the games need to be easier to port and the demand must be overwhelming.

Microsoft, a company that has seemingly killed more ARM-based operating systems than they’ve shipped, is being outpaced by the Amish community in adopting the new architecture. The thought of headline-breaking PC games being compiled simulataneously for Windows on ARM and Apple silicon is a dream.

So, the supply will continue to be thin.

And the Mac community has largely given up on expecting AAA titles to come to our favorite platform. Diehard Mac users who care about gaming throw in their cards and build a gaming PC — Cult of Mac’s Setups series had three (1) (2) (3) joint Mac & PC setups in the March alone.

So, the demand will continue to be thin.

History suggests that given time, tides will turn once again. All we need to do is ask Microsoft for a public release of Windows 11 on ARM, ask Apple to bring back Boot Camp and ask major game studios to move beyond the Intel x86_64 architecture.

How long could that take?

Jan 25, 2023 • Apple Event

Last week, Apple unceremoniously dropped a few press releases and a couple video segments clearly cut out of a Keynote video. (Even moreso than before, I am very much stretching the definition of my ‘Apple Event’ tag.)

I made my podcasting debut on The CultCast to talk about these announcements with Erfon Elijah and Lewis Wallace.

Mac mini with M2

This is not just the best value for your money Apple has ever offered in a Mac — the very fastest and latest consumer desktop computer for just $599 — it might be the best value in the entire computer industry. And you can get it for just $499 through the education store, where you need only a .edu email address.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with the rumored redesign that would have evoked the PowerPC Mac mini. Apple’s processor transition playbook is that initial versions with a new chipset reuse the old chassis, but over time, we get the designs Apple wanted to make all along. Like the first MacBook Pro compared to the unibody model, or even more recently, the M1 MacBook Air compared to the M2 MacBook Air. Perhaps a new Mac mini design is coming even later with M3, or Apple thinks the aluminum block design is still sufficient for this computer. If ever there were a computer that didn’t need to change in a chip transition, it’d be the Mac mini.

The M2 is a modest improvement on M1. The cores themselves are only about 12% faster, but there are more cores in every M2 variant such that most tasks using the CPU and GPU are a solid 20% faster. Now built in to the base M2 chip is the media engine for faster video encoding and decoding. The Neural engine is a whopping 40% faster. Don’t overlook this — it powers many of the advanced features these days like visual lookup, cutting objects out of photos and any app using Core ML. I suspect it’ll only become more important over time.

Apple struggled with the Mac mini in the past. The last three Intel versions only came out in 2012, 2014 (with modest improvements at best) and 2018. Now that updating these machines to the latest and greatest is entirely within their own control, and so much of the research and development is amortized across the entire lineup, I think we can expect regular updates to the sidelined Macs.

Mac mini with M2 Pro

This is what I and many others have been waiting for: A mid-range professional desktop running M2 Pro.

Start with the Mac mini, check a few upgrade boxes and you may approach Mac Studio level prices, but you will be prioritizing what you want out of a computer. I don’t need the chip with the highest core count; I want a lot of internal storage space and unified memory first. Ordering the Mac Studio is like buying more ports and a bigger processor out the gate.

The Mac mini is the perfect machine for small video production studios, marketing departments, graphic designers, podcasters, grad students, data scientists and more. Although it isn’t internally expandable, this Mac bears the most functional resemblance to the kind of workhorse PC that gets bought in bulk in offices and schools across the country.

We now have somewhat of an answer as to why the M1 Mac mini was so empty inside: the M2 Pro model features a larger logic board, cooling system and power supply. In a thread on Mastodon with Jason Snell and John Gruber, I was initially skeptical that Apple couldn’t jam an M2 Max chip in there if they really wanted to. After all, they have more room to work with even in the Mac mini than they do in a skinny laptop. The key might be in the power supply — the Mac mini’s is internal; the MacBook Pro’s is on the power cable.

MacBook Pro

The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro are updated from M1 Pro and Max to M2 Pro and Max.

‘Spec bump’ is often used derogatorily, but in the era of Apple silicon, it represents a change in product direction. Updates to the hardware aren’t held back because engineers need to come up with a fresh new way to make the computer worse. Whereas in the dark days of the Intel era there were good and bad times to buy a Mac, you could buy a great MacBook Pro last week and an even better MacBook Pro this week.

It is still true in the M2 lineup that you spend at least $700 for the laptop form factor. You can see this for yourself if you compare an identically configured desktop and laptop; in this case, the Mac mini with M2 Pro and 14-inch MacBook Pro. Laptops are more expensive to engineer and come with a built-in display, camera, battery, keyboard and trackpad.

HomePod

The very next day, we get the surprise announcement of a new HomePod. I’m not entirely sure why.

The original HomePod sold poorly because it was over-engineered and over-priced. It was a good value as far as premium home speaker systems go, but consumers didn’t understand it and didn’t buy it. It took three years to sell through the original production run from 2018.

The new HomePod removes two speakers and two microphones from the original in exchange for a newer chip, different internal design, added temperature and humidity sensors, Thread and Matter support. It’s allegedly cheaper for Apple to manufacture but sold at the same $299 price point the previous model was at for most of its life.

Maybe Apple thinks they can market the new version better, but I don’t have confidence. Aside from its bigness, it has complete feature parity with the HomePod mini, and it costs 3× as much. For the cost of one HomePod, you can buy a stereo pair of HomePod minis in one room and an additional HomePod mini in another room. Instead of one stereo pair of HomePods, you can buy three stereo pairs of HomePod minis for your living room, kitchen and office.

Erfon is adamant that a HomePod sounds well over three times as good as a HomePod mini. He’s probably right. But how is Apple going to convince people of that in a crowded noisy Apple Store? How will they market how much better this one is without indirectly putting down their other $99 speaker?

Apple AR/VR Headset

Mission failed, we’ll get ’em next time.

Dec 30, 2022

Among tech enthusiasts, Mastodon is well and truly taking off as the new online water cooler in place of Twitter.

There are a few growing pains — any platform that takes on a huge influx of users will get that. Issues with servers being overloaded, complaints that the platform design cannot support social movements and that the network is less friendly to marginalized people.

One of the chief complaints even among the Mastodon enthusiasts (of which I am one) is the lack of a quote-tweet equivalent feature. If you are not familiar, or if you are reading this in a post-Twitter future, a quote tweet looks like this:

Wack https://t.co/EAtqV94t7d

— D. Griffin Jones (@dgriffinj0nes) October 12, 2022

People who follow me will see both the original tweet and my comment, both of which happen to be the same in this case. Compare that to a reply, which looks like this:

I may be thirteen years late, but The Weather Channel’s “The Best of Smooth Jazz” is a really fire album

— D. Griffin Jones (@dgriffinj0nes) September 17, 2020

You might be confused what the difference is if you don’t use Twitter a lot. Functionally, they are the same feature: a tweet of mine that is in response to another. The only difference to the end user is in the presentation.

This is why Mastodon doesn’t need quote tweets: Twitter doesn’t even need quote tweets. When people ask for quote tweets, what they actually want is a way to show their reply with the context of the original post on the timeline.

In a way, Mastodon has already laid the groundwork for this. Every post has a variety of visibility options: Public (visible for all), Unlisted (visible for all, but opted-out of discovery features), Followers Only (visible only to your followers) and Mentioned People Only (visible only to people mentioned in the post).

What I propose is that replies add an additional toggle: Show With Context. Enabling this will show both the original post with your reply on your timeline. I think it’s the simplest solution that solves the heart of the problem.

And you know what? If this is my biggest problem with Mastodon, we’re in a pretty good spot. Things could be ever so much worse.

Dec 20, 2022

As a sequel to a post earlier this year, I have an even more exciting announcement: I am joining Cult of Mac as a full-time writer. I will be continuing my How To articles with occasional news coverage in addition to top tips and weekly videos.

I’m proud that I’ll likely hit my goal of 24 posts this year on Extra Ordinary. Going forward, a lot of what I would otherwise post on this site will probably be written for Cult of Mac, like my rumor roundups, developer interviews and (of course) my complaints.

Add Cult of Mac to your RSS client to get the very best in Apple news, reviews, tips and deals. Follow Everything D. Griffin Jones on Twitter for all of my work.

Why? No reason. Literally.

This How To article was rejected by the Cult of Mac editors because it offers no useful or actionable advice and ends as a frustrated rant. Enjoy.

Apple single-handedly dragged the music industry into the 21st century kicking and screaming. The iTunes Music Store completely changed the way people downloaded music… legally, at least. The iPod pushed music into people’s pockets. And since then? Apple Music has fumbled along as a barely viable product that has confused people from its launch to this very day. iOS 16 brings a coveted new feature to the Music app: the ability to mark an artist as a favorite.

If you have a big music library, you might have hundreds of albums and dozens of artists or more. And if you’re anything like me, you listen to a small handful of the same albums 80% of the time. Quicker access to your top artists would be great… if it worked properly.

Read on to see how this broken feature barely works in any capacity and would hardly provide any utility in the off-chance that it did.

Star your favorite bands in Apple Music

To mark an artist as a favorite, open Music.

1. From the For You or Listen Now tabs, you can tap on any album and tap on their name under the album title.
2. Alternatively, from the Library tab, you can also tap Artists, tap on their name and tap See More by…
3. Or, just search by their name in the Search tab.

From the artist page, just tap the star in the top right. Tap the star again to unfavorite them. It’s that simple.

Now, you might wonder — what does marking an artist as a favorite do? I have no idea. As far as I can tell, this does absolutely nothing. This is simply baffling.

According to Apple’s official support documentation, marking a favorite artist adds them to a list you can see on the Listen Now tab. If this is supposed to be a convenient way to access the artists you listen to most, this is far from it because I can’t find it anywhere. I’ve quit the app, I’ve restarted my phone, I’ve scrolled top-to-bottom on that page countless times and I can’t see it.

There is a prominent tile labeled “Favorites Mix,” but this is not the same thing. This is a generated playlist that for me includes a bunch of random songs that are not by my favorite artists. And double checking to make sure is a big pain, because as I mention, there’s nowhere you can see all of your favorites listed. A significant portion of these songs I have rarely ever played.

Even if it is there, it’s evidently so much harder to find than simply going to the Library tab that I will continue to exclusively use the Library tab.

But hey, we can karaoke.

Dec 1, 2022

The all-in-one computer has been a staple of the Mac since its inception.

It was the only form factor available until the Macintosh II debuted in 1987. The Macintosh then grew into a large family of (arguably too many) different models — but at any point in time, Apple has offered an all-in-one Mac as a simple home computer for the average consumer.

Here’s the definitive continuity:

1. The Macintosh
2. The Macintosh 512K
3. The Macintosh Plus
4. The Macintosh SE and SE/30
5. The Macintosh Classic and Classic II
6. The Macintosh Color Classic and Color Classic II
7. The Macintosh LC 500
8. The Power Macintosh 5200, 5400 and 5500
9. The iMac G3
10. The iMac G4
11. The iMac G5
12. The Intel iMac
13. The Aluminum iMac
14. The Unibody iMac
15. The Slim iMac
16. The Retina iMac
17. The Apple Silicon iMac

Oct 21, 2022 • Apple Event

Don’t call it an Apple Event. It was a day of unprompted product announcements via press release! We haven’t had one of these since I started writing up summaries for Extra Ordinary. (I didn’t think about that when I made the ‘Apple Event’ tag for these articles. No ragrets.)

No Mac news today — you can read my attempt to manifest the Mac mini I want into existence at Cult of Mac.

Apple TV 4K

The headline feature here is that the prices are significantly lowered. The base model goes from $179 to $129. The upgraded model goes from $199 to $149. The old HD model goes from $149 to discontinued.

The second best feature is that the Siri Remote switches to USB-C. With the European Union inching ever closer to requiring USB-C by 2024, this to me is an indicator that Apple won’t push back. This is an inconsequential peripheral that Apple is switching to the USB-C train far ahead of time.

Storage options also doubled.

It also features HDR10+ and Dolby Atmos — great features for everyone out there who has a really expensive TV with these premium features but bad enough built-in software that someone would want to spend another $129 on an Apple TV. All twelve of them.

Even though I only rated the second generation Apple TV 4K three out of five stars, it is by far the best TV operating system and interface. This market is crowded with terrible products.

iPad

Since 2017, the bottom of the iPad line has been held down by the no-adjective iPad at $329. The formula is not unlike the iPhone SE or Apple Watch SE: piece together the cheapest parts from the bin without skimping out on the chip. It uses the original iPad Air-shaped case, a cheap rectangular display, a Home Button and a one- or two-year old A-series chip.

They were able to pull that off four years in a row without raising the price while dripping in new features: support for the first-generation Apple Pencil, the Smart Connector, True Tone and Center Stage.

This was the fleet vehicle iPad if you just want a big iOS canvas and you don’t need any fancy features. The iPad Air bridged the gap with a modern design and modern features; the iPad mini was brought in sync as a smaller size of the Air; the iPad Pro represented the top of the line with all the latest tech for people who get their daily work done on an iPad.

It was only a matter of time before the basic iPad moved on to the small-bezel design, ditching the Home Button and getting its flat-sides makeover. Apple prioritized the wrong features and jumped the gun to get it there.

Sure, it has the modern square design. But the chief benefit of that is compatibility with the second-generation Apple Pencil, which snaps on magnetically and stays permanently charged. Keep it there whenever you’re not using it and you’ll forget it even has a battery inside. With the first-generation Apple Pencil, not only do you not have a place to keep it — not only do you need to plug it into the iPad to charge it — but the iPad doesn’t have a Lightning port, so you need to first plug it into an adapter, then into the USB-C cable dangling off of your iPad.

Sure, it has virtually the same dimensions as the iPad Air, but it isn’t compatible with the same attachable keyboard and trackpad accessory. It needs a completely different one with an extremely confusing name.

These could be forgiven if they were necessary tradeoffs in order to maintain the $329 price point. But they aren’t. The previous iPad 9 is still for sale at $329; the new iPad 10 is priced at $449. If they were willing to raise the price anyways, why not support the good Apple Pencil?

Yes, those components cost money. The original Apple Pencil does not require any hardware in the device itself; the second generation requires magnets and an internal charging component. Why not raise the price a little more? They have already lost on keeping it as the cheapest $329 iPad; selling it at $459 instead of $449 will hardly lose any additional sales, and users get this instead of this.

iPad Pro

The new 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models have a drop-in upgrade to the M2. You can use that extra power by crashing Stage Manager up to 15% faster than M1.

The smaller one does not get the mini-LED display of the bigger one and neither of them get the horizontally-mounted camera of the iPad 10.

Today’s iPad announcements introduce more exceptions and asterisks to an iPad lineup that is dangerously close to boiling over.

Apple AR/VR Headset

Mission failed, we’ll get ’em next time.

That which we call an app by any other operating system…

Why do Mac users care so much about consistency? Jack Wellborn, for Worms and Viruses:

Surface area.

iOS and Android apps always run in full screen. iPadOS apps mostly run in full screen. Even many Windows apps typically run in full screen. Most Mac apps, on the other hand, are typically windowed and expected to share the desktop with other windowed apps.

When surface area is high, the role of the operating system shifts […] to providing a cohesive user experience for all apps.

‘Surface area’ is a great turn of phrase that instantly clarifies Wellborn’s theory. I can believe this as a contributing factor, but I don’t think it’s the full story.

You rarely hear Windows users complain about programs not being “Windows-like”, and there isn’t really any fervent calls for “iOS-like” or “Android-like” apps either, but “Mac-like” (or Mac-assed, if you prefer) is something that exists.

Proof by counter-example: iOS-like apps are definitely a thing.

iOS has a strong convention towards bottom tab bar navigation; each tab can have its own view stack that you can swipe backwards to navigate. Android has long pushed towards “hamburger menu” navigation and the system back button. Apps that reverse that feel very much out of place and ordinary people do notice.

Take Apollo versus Reddit, Aviary versus Twitter, Overcast versus Spotify. Three indie apps that are broadly praised for their respect of the iOS platform versus three apps that are widely panned for breaking its conventions.

Let’s go deeper

There’s an underlying question worth exploring. Why do I feel compelled to maximize everything in Windows, yet cram as many things as I can fit at once on my Mac? I think it comes down to three forces inflicted by the design of each operating system:

1. Windows has a prominent Maximize button on every window. The Mac, throughout most of its life, used the same button to fit the window to the exact size of its content.

2. Most Windows programs assign a single window to a single program. This technical limitation had already come back to bite them by Windows 3, where they introduced the window-within-a-window. This lived on for over 20 years in Microsoft Office. The Mac has always separated windows from apps; this pushed people towards the pattern of opening many files across many different windows.

3. The Windows taskbar was introduced as an omnipresent interface that organized every open window, allowing people to switch between full-screen experiences with a single click. The most comparable interface element of the Mac, the Dock (and the MultiFinder menu that preceded it), is organized by app. Mac OS didn’t have a user interface for picking a specific window amongst every open window until Mission Control in 2011. But if you can see both windows at once, they’re only a single click away.

All of these forces push people towards maximizing everything in Windows and cramming apps side-by-side in macOS.

While some of these forces are no longer present — the green button on the Mac now toggles fullscreen — momentum is slow. The design paradigm of an operating system has knock-on effects on its developers for years.

Just ask Microsoft.