Tag: apple music

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Everything Announced at Apple’s October 2021 Infomercial

Apple just had their iPhone infomercial in September and launched new versions of their Apple Watch and iPhone. Now in October they have an infomercial for Mac updates. Here’s everything they announced including new MacBook Pros.

Apple Music Voice
Zane Lowe announced new playlists and a new cheaper $5 monthly subscription for Apple Music that seemingly only lets users play music through Siri on Apple’s devices and not the Music apps which have been on more than Apple devices for a while now. The cheaper plan also can’t use Spatial Audio or Lossless Audio. The regular Apple Music plan is still $10 and it’s $15 for a family plan. This cheap plan might crush Spotify if it were available on more devices and let you use the regular Music app, as it is, it seems weird and bad to force people to use Siri only.

New HomePod Mini Colors
New Homepod Mini colors in blue, orange, and yellow in addition to the old black and white options. Same $100 price, no other updates. Dave Wilkes Jr introduced the new devices.

Third Generation AirPods get Spatial Audio
That’s basically it, the non-Pro and non-Max AirPods are getting Spatial Audio, longer battery life, adaptive EQ, and a redesign to bring them a little closer to the AirPods Pro headphones design with a wide case but without noise cancellation. The default price goes up to $180 to get that noise cancellation and includes the wireless charging case, but you can still get the 2nd gen version without wireless charging and without the new features for $130.

New m1s

New Apple Silicon
Johny Srouji introduced the new M1 Pro chip that supposedly gets 70% faster CPU performance and 2 times the graphics performance.

Srouji also introduced the M1 Max with an even larger chip that has more cores for everything and supports up to 64 gigs of RAM. Srouji went over how the new variations on the M1 supposedly get incredible performance with low power consumption.

Craig Federighi introduced other features of the new chips, and then a montage of third-party developers talking about the new performance.

Macbook pro without ui
New MacBook Pros
John Ternus introduced new 14 and 16 inch Macbook Pros that get their first redesigned appearance since 2016. The controversial touchbar touch screen that replaced the F-row of keys on the keyboard is gone, but Touch ID remains, and Shruti Haldea introduced more of the new features like the return of the SD Card port, HDMI, and Magsafe 3 for power in addition to power through the thunderbolt ports. Kate Bergeron introduced the new displays on these laptops with thinner borders, ProMotion variable-refresh rate and the rumored notch that holds the camera along the menu bar area in macOS. Trevor McLeod introduced new features like the notch holds a better 1080p webcam, better speakers, and better microphones. There’s no Face ID.

Notch

Haldea returned to further throw Intel under the bus with comparisons to previous generations of Intel MacBook Pros in performance and battery life. The performance improvements sound sick. Prices start at $2000 for the 14 inch, and $2500 for the 16 inch versions. The 13 inch M1 MacBook Pro sticks around for a cheaper, touchbar equipped, option.

Overall
The new laptops are great for people who need the performance or have an older MacBook Pro and have been waiting for a bigger update.

Still to get the Apple Silicon treatment are the bigger iMacs and the Mac Pro. The Mac Mini is also rumored to receive another update but I doubt it’ll happen before the end of the year at this point.

The cheaper Apple Music plan seems punishing that users can’t seem to use the Music app. I’ll update this post if I’ve gotten that wrong but it’s gross.

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Musish is Better Than iTunes for Apple Music on Windows, Linux, and macOS

If you use Apple Music, the streaming music service from Apple that gives artists pennies instead of dollars, and want to listen on your computer, Musish is open source, runs in your web browser, and a much better alternative to running the full desktop iTunes instance if you don’t need to listen to a locally-stored collection of music.

Musish appears to log in to your Apple ID via an Apple-supplied authentication system. Very handy, I look forward to using this on Linux, where iTunes isn’t available at all.

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Planet of the Apps

The Outline has got this video picking apart Apple’s incredibly shitty Planet of the Apps. Like most things from The Outline, it’s not that great because it mixes useless cheap shots poking fun at Eddie Cue and the way will.i.am excitedly describes things, with legitimate issues the show has. The Outline also pokes fun at the boneheaded business ventures will.i.am and the other investors are involved in. Which, even as dumb as those are it’s good to see more people of color making money off of the notoriously racist as hell technology business. I’d almost say that monetizing tech assholes is worthy of congratulations in any other context, but we’re here to bury Planet of the Apps.

Planet of the Apps is a reality show about business people pitching their app ideas (in various stages of development) to celebrity investors similar to Shark Tank, which is a show I hate watch because practically everyone who appears on it is either the worst kind of libertarian (Kevin O’Leary) or the worst kind of libertarian disguised as a shitty neo-liberal (Mark Cuban) who epitomize this old Twitter joke:

https://twitter.com/crushingbort/status/463132110006784000

I gave Planet of the Apps a chance when it debuted and could barely get through the first episode. From the moment it starts with the Apple Music logo you’re left wondering “how does this fit into Apple Music?” and that question is never answered. Picture MTV switching to reality shows before they became popular for music videos, that’s what this feels like. Apple Music hasn’t earned the ability to go off music programming when it’s still in its infancy as a music outlet.

What is even going on with that name? It’s clearly a chuckling reference to Planet of the Apes, but the show is so self-serious it doesn’t fit at all.

That’s why this show starts off as ridiculous in pretending to have some kind of legitimacy to a viewer, and then just completely trips over its own banana peel by showing how thin the facade of these celebrity investors is. When it comes to their knowledge of business, tech, and success Gary Vaynerchuk, Jessica Alba, will.i.am, and Gwyneth Paltrow seem to be woefully inept.

Gary Vaynerchuk tries to monetize an app about personal safety and gets freaked out because Google has a half-assed attempt at competing with it. Gary’s freak-out just appears to be how that guy operates, which is pretty sad.

will.i.am takes the cake when he asks if what is obviously an e-ink display on a backpack is e-ink. E-ink has been around for over a decade now. Were the studio lights too bright for him to see what was going on?

None of the celebrity investors on this show seem to know why they are successful, which isn’t very surprising, but they sure do know how to take advantage of their unlikely success to fail in other businesses.

I don’t envy any of the app creators having to deal with the celebrities trying in futility to help them, if that is even the end goal of anyone on the show. All tech investors are there to make as much money as possible, or to fail as spectacularly as possible, instead of creating a viable product. I have been one step removed from, or involved with, a number of SV businesses that were close to some kind of success as a platform that squandered their opportunity because the investors and leaders wanted to cash out.

After the celebrity investors get bored with their lame guidance and won’t continue funding these apps, the show hurls the app creator before actual silicon valley investor groups as a secondary level of shark tanking and the show tried to present these external investors as a technically knowledgable group of  savvy businesspeople.

This show attempts to demonstrate tech savvy and business success for Apple’s App Store with Apple’s clean aesthetic but makes everyone involved look as greedy and disgusting as they truly are. For example, when monetizing safety is revealed to be rooted in creating fear of your neighbors and community. What kind of ghoulish asshole wants to be involved in that?

Reality shows are almost universally shallow and disgusting, I can’t make it through most of them, but they should at least be entertaining. Planet of the Apps isn’t entertaining beyond the curiosity of watching Apple struggle and fail at something so spectacularly.

This show succeeds in one thing: proving that success in any creative endeavor is difficult, especially when you’re attempting to make money at the same time. I still don’t know how this is supposed to fit into Apple Music, besides adding a perceived value to the subscription, and I have no hope that Apple will ever produce an entertaining television show. For a company that is so proud of all the times they say ‘no,’ they’ve created something that is remarkable for existing at all. It’s a car crash I am happy to look away from.

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apple music

Apple Music and Beats: 1

Apple’s streaming music subscription service, Apple Music, was released last week in addition to the new streaming radio station Beats: 1 and other features in the new versions of Music on iOS and iTunes on Windows and Mac OS X.

I’ll admit that although I had tried Pandora and Spotify they’d never really stuck. Why not own my music and listen to the full albums I love instead of playlists? Why listen to ads alongside my favorite music?

The three month trial of Apple Music has made me a quick convert for now, at least. As well as the low price, $15 for six of my family members isn’t that much more than what I was paying for one Spotify subscription. The killer feature is that the music matching (previously available in iTunes Match) will let you bring in any music that isn’t available for streaming. No Beatles to stream? If it was in your iTunes music library before, it’s available through Apple Music. iTunes Match was the thing that finally let me stop syncing my iPhone to my laptop.

There’s something really strange about the new streaming  Beats: 1 radio station that launched alongside Apple Music. It’s good. 

Unlike most other internet radio stations, there are hosts. A revolutionary concept, I know, but it’s how they host that is so different. They don’t sound like pre-programmed chatter bots with dumbass names like Free Beer and Hotwings from radio planet twelve in the marketing galaxy.

The only part of Beats-1 that sounds pre-programmed are the rare advertising reads that are given by what sounds like a BBC presenter who usually says about five words before a track starts. Not between every track, so far it sounds like it’s once or twice an hour you might hear a few words. Way better than any of the terrestrial radio stations you might hear.

One particular program I heard on the launch night was enough to make Beats: 1 post-worthy. St. Vincent had put together a mixtape for an 11-year old named Piper (who won a contest) and what do you know, this is really good. Even St. Vincent’s banter with Piper is good. 

Earlier in the day there was still plenty of fine music to listen to. Some of which was new to me. The day-time (Pacific time) DJ’s has a more traditional radio jockey style, but almost no ads and it didn’t sound like it was ruined by the influence of the record industry. Awesome.

The ads that were there were voiced by a tonally inappropriate genericly British accented person which was a bit hilarious to hear him talking about some hotel chain for a half second with rap going on underneath.

The only downside to Beats: 1 is that the music was edited for radio with no explicit option when the old iTunes radio stations had an explicit language option. Beats: 1 is available to everyone who has iTunes on a Mac, on Windows, or on the iOS Music app, there’s no fee to listen to it.