If your Mac has a Touch Bar, you can use familiar gestures—like tap, swipe, or slide—directly on the Touch Bar to adjust settings, use Siri, access function keys, and do tasks in different apps.
I would love to know what happened here. It really seems like Apple abandoned the Touch Bar pretty quickly after it launched, and now it’s all but gone.
Apple has an updated chart showing how the new $4.99/month plan differs from a regular Apple Music plan:
From reading the press release, it seems that the Music app will offer a stripped-down experience for these users:
Apple Music Voice Plan subscribers will get a customized in-app experience with suggestions based on the listener’s music preferences and a queue of recently played music through Siri. Within the app there will also be a dedicated section called “Just Ask Siri” where subscribers can learn tips to optimize Siri for Apple Music.
For access to Apple Music’s premium offerings, including Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio, Lyrics, Music Videos, and more, subscribers can easily switch to Apple Music’s individual plan for $9.99 per month or family plan with up to six accounts for $14.99 per month at any time.
The intro video for today’s event really spoke to me:
Apple’s official release of MacOS 12 (Monterey) won’t be arriving until next week, but our software is already compatible with the new OS. As you can see on our helpful Status page, all seven of our major Mac apps now have compatibility with Monterey. Just make sure you’ve got the latest versions of Airfoil, Audio Hijack, Farrago, Fission, Loopback, Piezo, and SoundSource, and you’ll be good to go on Monterey.
This is fantastic news for those of us who rely on these apps every day. It makes upgrading to Monterey sooner rather than later possible.
Next week is going to be busy; the next day is when the new MacBook Pros arrive. It looks like Safari 15 is going to be good again, and Universal Control is coming later this fall.
There’s a lot to unpack in today’s news, but here are some details I’ve noticed already:
I ordered a 14-inch model with these specs:
I opted for Space Gray this time around. I usually prefer silver but thought this new size deserved a different color from my soon-to-be-for-sale 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro.
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By all accounts, we’ll be seeing overhauled MacBook Pros during tomorrow’s event. These will be powered by the M1’s larger sibling. While its name is unknown, this system on a chip should propel the new MacBook Pro to new heights of performance.
After all, we’ve already seen what the M1 can do. The current MacBook Air, Mac mini and two-port MacBook Pro are amazing machines compared to their Intel predecessors. They’re fast, enjoy great battery life and are nearly (or always) silent.
But in a way, they were a bit boring. Picking between a post-2018 Intel MacBook Air and an M1-powered MacBook Air on the same table isn’t easy. The same goes for the MacBook Pro and Mac mini, as long as you don’t see its ports or notice its space gray coloring.1
The 24-inch M1 iMac was the first machine to break the mold of its predecessor, and when it was announced, Apple said it was the first Mac designed from the ground up around Apple silicon.
Chances are the MacBook Pros we’re going to see this week are the first notebooks cut from the same cloth. While they probably won’t come in a bunch of fun colors like the iMac, I would normally expect their design to be influenced by Apple silicon’s particular strengths. “Thinner and lighter” would be the rallying cry of such events normally, but this time, Apple has something to contend with — the 2016 class of MacBook Pros:
It’s sometimes hard to judge where history will come down on a product when the products are still for sale, but with this line of notebooks, I think their fate is sealed already. The butterfly keyboard was a disaster. The Touch Bar is lackluster at best, and feels like abandonware already. USB-C is great, but it came at the metaphorical cost of MagSafe and the actual cost of a pile of dongles.
Apple has been working to correct some of these problems already, of course. The Butterfly keyboard is finally gone, and if the 16-inch Intel MacBook Pro is any example, Apple is willing to rework the basic design to accommodate a more powerful computer with better cooling.
…but there’s more work to do, and if you believe the rumors, the new line of MacBook Pros may be a real return to greatness with the return of MagSafe, HDMI and an SD card slot. Ethernet could even show up via a new power brick, like on the 24-inch iMacs. There have even been reports that the displays will run at a true, native 2x by default.
This could be the MacBook Pro that settles all family business, and I couldn’t be more excited for it — especially if there’s a 14-inch model. Even if half of this comes to pass, these MacBook Pros seem like they’re going to be a great upgrade.
Of course, we live in a broken world and there’s almost always a catch.
Or in this case… a notch. There’s an awful lot of last-minute smoke here, so if there is a display notch as part of this new notebook line, I wouldn’t be shocked. I would be a little surprised, though. With the iPad Pro/Air/mini design, Apple has shown how it can pull off thin bezels with an embedded camera. Apple will need a compelling case as to why such an unusual design element is needed.
That said, we’ve all gotten used to the notches on our iPhones; I’m hard pressed to tell that the one my new iPhone 13 Pro Max is smaller than before, honestly. Assuming Apple doesn’t go all OS X Public Beta on this and macOS can handle it gracefully, it may not be a big deal at all.
Either way, I am pumped to see what’s next for the Mac.
A huge congratulations to Jaijai Lewis (aka LEGO The Office) as his The Office recreation has been selected as the next LEGO Ideas sets. This is a super interesting and entertaining television show that we feel is universally known and loved and Jaijai’s creation captures all the details of that story so well. It’s also very apparent to us how much desire there has been for a set like this after numerous submissions reaching review over the years. This time we had the opportunity and we jumped on it.
If you’d like to learn more about Jaijai then make sure to check out his 10K Club Interview.
I am very excited about getting this set when it comes out.
City traffic can get pretty congested, but hardly anyone would expect an endless stream of self-driving cars flocking to one quiet residential street. Except, that’s what’s happening to one dead-end street in San Francisco, according to a local KPIX report.
Amazing.
