I got it set up per Joe Rossignol’s screenshots, and once Apple Music is set as the default music source, it works really well. I could play music from my library, but the Echo could not find any of my personal playlists. Likewise, it could not play music that I had uploaded to iTunes Match.
I don’t know if these features will be available after the service’s official launch date, but as of right now, Apple Music on the Echo feels half-baked.
Apple today announced a major expansion of its operations in Austin, including an investment of $1 billion to build a new campus in North Austin. The company also announced plans to establish new sites in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City and expand in cities across the United States including Pittsburgh, New York and Boulder, Colorado over the next three years, with the potential for additional expansion elsewhere in the US over time.
Great release number; even better features.
If you want to use an iPad Pro as your main computer, start here.
It costs $39 and looks pretty good, but why wasn’t it available at launch?
Update: John Gruber has one and has reviewed it:
Feel-wise it’s sort of half plastic-y, half rubbery. Plastic-y enough that it doesn’t stretch from the edges of the phone. Rubbery enough that it feels nice and grippy without being too grippy — it slides in and out of a jeans pocket easier than an Apple silicone case. Unlike any of Apple’s other iPhone cases, there is a very slight lip around the camera cutout on this case. I don’t know why, but it means the phone doesn’t quite sit flush back-down on a flat surface. My best guess is that the case is so thin it needs the lip lest the camera bump jut out.
Big news today in the smart home assistant world: Apple Music will soon become a source for the Amazon Echo devices. Here’s a bit from Amazon’s blog post about the move:
“Music is one of the most popular features on Alexa—since we launched Alexa four years ago, customers are listening to more music in their homes than ever before,” said Dave Limp, senior vice president, Amazon Devices. “We are committed to offering great music providers to our customers and since launching the Music Skill API to developers just last month, we’ve expanded the music selection on Alexa to include even more top tier services. We’re thrilled to bring Apple Music – one of the most popular music services in the US – to Echo customers this holiday.”
Apple’s iPhone XR has been outselling the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max every day since the cheaper, colorful phone hit the market last month.
Greg Joswiak, Apple vice president of product marketing, told CNET in an interview Wednesday that the device has “been our most popular iPhone each and every day since the day it became available.”
Daniel Knight at LowEndMac has taken on quite the project:
A couple weeks ago I picked up 12 used Power Mac G5s for free, and I already had five at home, including one dual-core machine. One of these has no power supply (I bought a single CPU model for less than a used power supply for my dual processor G5 would have cost me). Some of the newly acquired ones have no RAM, no video cards, and/or no hard drives. But except for the three 1.6 GHz machines and the dual-core model, they all take the same memory. Further, I can readily swap drives and video cards, giving the fastest machines better configurations.
There are a few surprises in his excellent post, and it’s made me feel good about making the 2018 MacBook Air my default recommendation for someone looking to buy a notebook.
Jason Snell, writing at Macworld:
Looking a bit further into the future, if Apple starts building Macs with ARM processors, is it going to want to offer different classes of processors within those models? On iOS, Apple has steadfastly refused to do this. Every model-year of a given model is generally powered by the same processor across the board.
It’s conceivable that Apple might roll out a new ARM processor across several Macs and have each one have a different clock speed or number of cores—but even then, I have a hard time imagining that Apple will let customers configure what processor goes in what Mac when they order them. It seems more likely that Apple will offer what it feels is the right processor configuration for a model—and if you want a more powerful processor, your option will be to buy the next model up.
I am technically on vacation this week, but I felt like I had to talk about this:
The more I use iPad Pro the more I believe iPads need their own OS. Software on iPad greatly lags hardware. Gestures feel kluged from the phone experience. Split screen/slide over are non intuitive and frankly counterintuitive.
— Michael Gartenberg (@Gartenberg) November 14, 2018
Since the new iPads were announced a couple of weeks ago, there has been a lot of talk about the device and its place in the world.
Paul Kafasis on the Rogue Amoeba blog, on a neat trick provided by Apple’s T2 chip:
On older Macs, the headphone jack and the internal speakers are essentially separate ports on a single output device, and only one of these ports is allowed to be active at a time. Because of this, audio can be sent to either the built-in speakers, or the headphone jack, but not to both. As well, if anything is connected to the headphone jack, the OS shuts off the built-in speaker completely.