Black Ink 3, the next version of Red Sweater’s app for crossword connoisseurs, is coming soon for both iOS and Mac. A preview beta is now available with one of the most anticipated features: iCloud Sync. Now you can start solving a puzzle on your Mac in the morning, put a little time in during the day on your phone, and finish up on your iPad that evening. Everything syncs seamlessly through your existing Apple account.
The beta also includes an innovative new “share solving” feature that is unique to Black Ink. As you solve, the app records the order and timing of your own personal progress, so that it can replay your solving process when you’ve finished. You can easily copy the solve as an animated GIF, with or without spoilers, to share with your friends and family. Check it out in action here!
Adding touch to that should have been treated as the biggest change to the Mac in more than half a decade. Instead, Apple presented it as more of a routine upgrade — rather than an opportunity to build something new. The updated models are significantly lighter and slightly thinner, with better heat management and a redesigned cooling system. Yet they look much like the tried-and-true 2021 versions and run the same M5 Pro and M5 Max chips introduced this past spring.
Apple has finally made a touch-screen Mac but is offering few new reasons for customers to take advantage of the feature. As expected, the software implementation is largely about tapping, swiping, pinching, zooming and scrolling. The most interesting application I saw was using the touch display to test iPhone apps in development, which is hardly a mass-market selling point. In some cases, the touch controls are even too small to be easily tapped.
Rather than enabling a new paradigm, the addition instead serves several marketing and financial purposes: It closes a gap that Windows laptop makers have highlighted for years; accommodates consumers who grew up with iPhones and iPads and find it strange that a pricier Apple laptop won’t respond to touch; and gives the company another feature to market to prospective upgraders. The change also makes interactions across Apple’s products more consistent.
He goes on from there, but his overall point is that Apple didn’t push the MacBook Pro far enough when adding touch. That’s a point I disagree with; Apple’s way of treating touch as a nice addition atop an already-beloved machine was the right call.
The last time Apple totally reworked the MacBook Pro, it did not go well, and reworking macOS for touch would invite a lot of the issues Microsoft has had with Windows when trying the same thing. Stability is the name of the game with a product like this.
The HomeView’s OS — which doesn’t really seem to have a name — was explored over the weekend by several folks. It looks like an interesting mashup of iOS and watchOS, complete with a bunch of fun wallpapers. I’m partial to this one:
My thanks to Mardo for sponsoring the site this week. It is the best Markdown viewer ever made. Press Space on a Markdown file and watch it render beautifully, live, right in Quick Look.
I’d argue that the Mac’s lack of touch is a liability at this point. Its omission has turned from a deliberate design decision that made sense for its time to a choice dictated by inertia and, perhaps, an unwillingness to challenge the status quo. Which is especially funny since the “status quo” of Apple is that of a company that sells millions of touch-enabled devices every year and considerably fewer trackpad-only ones. The lack of touch on the Mac feels like a self-inflicted problem that has no reason to exist anymore, and which John Ternus is rightfully rectifying for the modern age.
As someone who has spent the past decade working on an iPad, and is now increasingly shifting his workflow to the Mac, I think it’s great that we’re getting touch as an option on the Mac. I’ve always been in favor of hardware that can adapt to the user instead of the other way around.
The MacBook Pro getting touch support feels like another step in the long arc of Apple meeting users where they are – even if it means “contradicting” a quote from 2010. We’re moving on, and it’s about time.
Steven Levy got to speak to Apple’s CEO (and others) about the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display for Wired (Apple News):
I ask if Apple is about to break a long-imposed taboo and introduce a Macintosh with a touch screen.
Ternus beams. “Who knew?”
We are referring to the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display that Apple is releasing today at an event in Los Angeles. It’s got a mighty M5 Pro or M5 Max chip and a show-stopping tandem OLED screen. (A tandem screen has multiple light-emitting layers, producing more dramatic contrasts.) But its most conspicuous feature is one that’s been deeply woven into iPhones, iPads, and even Apple Watches for years but not Apple’s laptops: a touch display. After years of resistance, a Mac screen has finally gone digital.
As in fingers.
This turnaround is a big deal to Apple fans. Ternus shrugs off the drama. “The Mac is first and foremost an indirect input device, built around the trackpad and keyboard. But I think there’s times when it’s comfortable and handy to have touch.”
Levy goes on:
Joswiak, who holds Schiller’s old title of SVP of worldwide marketing, concedes that touch was overdue, at least for users with sophisticated needs. Its pro customers—engineers, scientists, software developers, and media creators—were impatient with Apple for its failure to let them interact directly with the screen. “Most pros own an iPad, and almost every pro owns an iPhone,” Joswiak says. “So this is something that they’re natural with. There’s a generation of young creators and young people using our MacBook Pros that expect to touch.”
The most important thing about this laptop is that the Apple logo lights up on the lid. I will never forgive Jony Ive and Tim Cook for taking that away ten years ago. I understood it on the 12-inch MacBook in 2015, but taking it off the MacBook Pros was in poor taste.
In terms of specs, the two classes of MacBook Pros are very similar. Both use the M5 Pro or M5 Max,2 and both top out at 128 GB of unified memory. The OLED model can be had with a 16 TB SSD for a cool $7,000. Here are the main areas in which the specs differ:
The big story here is the display. Here’s a bit from that press release:
The new MacBook Pro debuts the PROLED XDR display, which uses tandem OLED technology and advances it with breakthrough innovations in every layer, advanced algorithms in the display engine, and a state-of-the-art factory calibration process to deliver Extreme Dynamic Range (XDR) and stunning visual fidelity. With exceptional brightness, striking contrast, and vivid true-to-life colors, PROLED XDR offers the ultimate front-of-screen performance, enabling a new level of visual acuity and precision for content creators, photographers, colorists, and designers who need a reference-caliber display on the go.
PROLED XDR is the world’s best laptop display, delivering true-to-life color and unparalleled brightness and contrast. The PROLED XDR display offers tandem OLED technology unlike any other, with deep innovations in its layers that keep brightness and grayscale uniform across the entire display, while minimizing internal reflections common in traditional OLED designs. It’s all backed by advanced algorithms in the display engine that precisely control each pixel in real time, plus a meticulous manufacturing process and precise calibration of every panel for consistency from display to display.
PROLED XDR offers up to 2000 nits peak HDR and SDR brightness, allowing specular highlights to shine with stunning intensity. And through optimizations in the tandem OLED panel and custom compensation techniques, combined with precise control of light across the display, the PROLED XDR display achieves an industry-leading 10,000,000:1 contrast ratio, so even the deepest shadows reveal incredible detail, bringing HDR content remarkably close to reality.
The tandem panel is built for professionals, and I think it shows. Its wide color gamut will be appreciated by some, as will the 2000 nits peak SDR brightness.
…but this display won’t be remembered for any of that stuff. It will be remembered for this:
Back to Apple:
Thoughtfully designed for Mac, Touch introduces a whole new way to interact with your work. The Touch sensor is built directly into the display panel — not layered on top of it — reducing latency so you feel like you’re touching the content itself. Everyday experiences like scrolling and pinching to zoom feel natural and responsive. And new, intuitive interactions let you do even more, like manipulating 3D objects or playing virtual instruments.
macOS hasn’t followed Windows in overhauling its design for touch. There are some minor tweaks like increased menu spacing, pop-out window controls, and small animations to assist when touching the UI, but this version of Golden Gate is very, very similar to the one we’re all running today.
I think this was exactly the right way to add touch to the Mac. As someone sticking with his M4 Max MacBook Pro, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on the future of the Mac. I’m sure this will be cool when I eventually upgrade from this notebook.
Jason Snell compares this strategy to one where Apple makes some convertible machine that’s more like an iPad when folded around:
If Apple wants to make that laptop in the future, it can—and it can add a more complex touch mode then. Instead, this interface strikes me as Apple doing right by its own MacBook Pro users by making the touch interface nice, but also acknowledging that for most people, touch will be an additive part of interfacing with their Mac, on top of keyboard and trackpad.
That said, one portion of Apple’s intro video showed a developer using Xcode to test an iOS app, and they were touching the app in the iOS simulator. That… is a really cool use case. For the first time, developers will be able to touch their apps right on their laptop screen during development.
The chassis is both thinner and lighter on this machine, but not to the detriment of usability. Mercifully, all of the ports have survived, and Apple is boasting about an even better sound system than before.
All in all, this is exactly what most people expected, and I think that’s great. In the past, big swings with the MacBook Pro have led to some serious misses. Playing it safe — while still moving things forward — is the right call for such an important product.
These new machines are more expensive than the regular MacBook Pro, but not by as much as I feared. The PROLED models start at $2,899 for the 14-inch and $3,399 for the 16-inch, both with the M5 Max. The existing MacBook Pro starts at $2,499 and $2,999, respectively. Pre-orders are up now.
Mark Gurman has reported that the M6 Pro and M6 Max have been tossed overboard to move more quickly to the M7 generation of Apple silicon. Time will tell if he’s right, but it sure seems like he may be. ↩︎
Thanks to Cameron Kaiser’s excellent blog Old Vintage Computing Research, I have a growing interest in the Apple Network Server line of computers. One of Kaiser’s posts mentions the ANS 300, a model I wasn’t familiar with at the time.
Turns out, it is wild. Tom Owad wrote about it back in 2004:
The Apple Network Servers are high end servers built by Apple that run IBM’s AIX variant of UNIX. Pictured above is the Apple Network Server 700, Apple’s top-of-the-line server with a 180 MHz PPC 604e processor, two power supplies, 7 removable drive bays and 2 fixed drives. The ANS 500 had a slightly lesser configuration, with a 132 MHz 604e, only one power supply, and 7 removable drive bays. Both have locking wheels on the bottom (handy since the unit weighs about 80 pounds!) and a locking/sliding 3-position translucent door to cover the drive bays. The power supplies are removable via a handle behind the purple removable “grille” in the bottom. These units were specifically designed to be highly serviceable yet very secure.
The ANS 300 had the same architecture as the 500 & 700, but was an easily rack-mounted unit intended for Internet/FTP/Mail/Web serving, departmental and small database servers, etc, and consequently had less expansion. It has two removable drive bays and one fixed drive (behind the LCD). Much of the serviceability & security was abandoned for the sake of size. For instance, there is no obvious way to secure the drive bays, or the motherboard tray from being removed. The power supply is fixed and would be slow to field repair. The fixed hard drive mounted behind the LCD is very hard to reach, etc. The key lock on the front controls only the “on, lock, service” options, unlike the multiple key lock controlling those functions plus doors and security on the full size 500/700 units. These issues ceased to be important, however, as the ANS 300 never shipped.
Here are some images of the machine in all of its glory:
Owad continues:
Code named Deep Dish, the ANS 300 is essentially an Apple Network Server without the large drive array. As a consequence, the computer is only four rack-units high. The logic board is in the bottom of the unit on a slide-out tray. There are two standard ANS removable trays on the right side of the unit’s front. The Deep Dish also has one fixed internal drive, and the floppy drive is fixed, as well. Apple also had plans to produce an external drive array for the machine, which is why there is an ultrawide SCSI port above the PCI slots.
I joined Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, and Shelly Brisbin on this week’s show to talk about our iPhone Duo impressions, reports of cracking phones, and Apple’s busy week of releases.
If you are looking for a Duo, you may get lucky at your local Apple Store. I was at mine half an hour before opening, was the first person in line, and one of just three folks who were able to buy one.
I have like 90 minutes of time with it, but uhhhh this phone is weird.
