I think the MacBook Pro is about to enter its touchscreen era.

It starts with volume controls for each and every app on your Mac, all in one place: your menu bar. Turn down noisy websites without affecting your music, or boost a quiet video call past the usual maximum.

SoundSource does much more than just volume, though. Use it to send any app’s audio to a different device, so your music plays through your desk speakers while your calls stay in your headphones. Built-in effects like Magic Boost and Headphone EQ bring better sound to the tiniest speakers and your favorite headphones, and experts can even use it to apply powerful Audio Unit plugins to any app.

Once you’ve used SoundSource, it’s hard to imagine your Mac without it. Try it free before you buy. And, as a 512 Pixels reader, you can save 20% on SoundSource with discount code 512SOUND in Rogue Amoeba’s online store through the end of the month.

My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring 512 Pixels, and for more than two decades of great Mac audio software.

Apple Store employees told MacRumors that they have been advised that there will likely be no ‌iPhone Duo‌ stock available for walk-in purchases on launch day. Staff have been instructed to discourage customers without pre-orders from coming in expecting to buy the device, warning that they will be disappointed.

Apple’s online store tells customers to check back on Saturday, October 24 for pickup availability. Pickup reservations were briefly available when pre-orders opened before the option was disabled.

The October 24 message does not guarantee stock will be available that day, and it remains unclear how firm the warning shared with employees is and whether it applies worldwide.

The Apple Store app on my phone loaded first, and that’s when I learned a terrible truth:

I could only choose Apple Stores near me for pickup, and uhhh, I am not flying across the country again next week to pick this thing up.

I just tried again, out from under the pressure of doing this in the first few minutes of availability, and for the life of me, I cannot find a way to tell the app you want to pick up a phone someplace other than your current immediate region.

By the time the website came up over six minutes later — where you can search for other Apple Stores¹ — my ship date had already slipped to the end of November or early December.

It seems that my work² on Widgetsmith and our other apps will be constrained to the simulator a little longer. It is also nice to have the new thing when it’s new, so I can write and talk about it when it’s new.

I guess the upside is that, now that shipping dates have slipped into 2027, the iPhone Duo will be new for a long time.

Best I can tell, there is not a way to change a delivery into a pickup, but currently the Apple Store support chat just won’t connect. Maybe they can change it, or I’ll get lucky with a walk-in, but this is a really dumb limitation of the Apple Store app.

Update: I haven’t been able to talk to Apple Support, but I’ve got a Best Buy order for November 3. Wish me luck.

I’ve been using AppleCare One for a while now, and recently moved to the AppleCare One Family. For my family, it was a good bit cheaper than all five of us having our own AppleCare One accounts.

Don’t bet against the smartphone.

It’s amazing how many products have run straight into this idea, like a sprinting outfielder who hasn’t slowed down in time to avoid the wall.

There are some obvious examples, especially in our AI-crazed day. The Humane AI Pin never stood a chance. The Rabbit R1 is beautiful, but is at best a novelty. The friend is never going to escape the gravity of its own domain name.

I think there are some less obvious examples as well. Think back to 2014, when Tim Cook announced the Apple Watch, and Kevin Lynch’s wide-ranging demo that showed the Watch as capable of almost everything the iPhone was. Apple has since learned that the Watch is a peripheral to the iPhone for folks who want health and fitness tracking, as well as easy access to notifications.

I mean, how many times do you glance at your watch, see a message, and pull out your iPhone to respond?

The HomeView may be on a similar trajectory.

When I showed my wife Apple’s video featuring the new product, she turned to me and asked:

Why wouldn’t I just use my phone for that stuff?

I’ve been turning that over in my head for the last day or so, and then heard very similar thoughts from Ben Thompson and John Gruber on Dithering.

It is way too early to know how this will shake out. Some folks will undoubtedly find the HomeView useful, and I do think there are real use cases where it will shine.

I highly doubt that any family will use their HomeView the way the family in that video did. Of course the iPhone will continue to be the most important product in Apple’s lineup, but that doesn’t mean the HomeView isn’t worth doing.

For some folks, it will really click, and it puts Apple in the home category in a new and fun way. I like that the HomeView is a little weird, and we should encourage Apple to experiment with products that are a little weird. For years, it’s felt like the company has been too conservative with new products, and I suspect John Ternus has more things like this on the way.

While it is doing some very clever things, it is an ancillary device, and one that not everyone with an iPhone will want or need. At Apple’s scale, even ancillary devices are big businesses. Even if most iPhone users look at this thing and shrug, it was still worth doing.

I think Apple’s just-announced HomeView may be the latest entry in the list of things that prove Ferguson’s point.

To put it in another set of terms: the HomeView is “new but somehow familiar,” to borrow a Jony Ive phrase. I think it applies to just about every aspect of this product.

The HomeView’s existence is not a surprise, as it was rumored for ages. With it, Apple has moved into a space previously occupied mostly by products from Google (Nest?) and Amazon, albeit at a higher price point. What does that $299 price get you?

Hardware

Right off the bat, we have to address something — a bunch of people have compared it to the iMac G4:

I mean, come on. Sure, the HomeView’s 7-inch square display doesn’t move in all the ways the iMac’s display did, but I’ll take a hit of that sweet nostalgia. If the next version includes a larger display with more flexibility, I may pass out.

From the front, the HomeView strongly resembles an Apple Watch sized for a giant. The aluminum base looks right at home in Apple’s lineup, and should wear much better than the fabric-covered HomePods, especially in a kitchen.

I am very curious as to how it sounds. The base and its included woofer aren’t that big, and Apple has put some of the speakers in the display to compensate. I assume Apple has done a good job here, but I’m looking forward to hearing one myself.

Apps & Services

Here are the biggest remixes. The clock face looks a lot like Apple Watch faces¹ and iOS’ StandBy had a baby:

I love the customization here; I think finding a setup that matches your space will be totally doable.

Apple’s own apps follow this same trajectory. Reminders, Home, Music, Podcasts, and more look like themselves, just tweaked for the form factor. If your life is in these apps, the HomeView will be much more useful.

A lot of that comes down to the third-party app story, which is … weird. Unlike basically every other part of Apple’s ecosystem, the HomeView does not have an App Store. Instead, it has Apple’s built-in apps and “compatible third-party audio and video apps.”

Under the hood, it seems that some of these apps will be projected from the user’s iPhone, not unlike CarPlay apps. Here is a bit from Julian Chokkattu’s article at Wired:

It doesn’t have an App Store. Instead, Apple has a curated selection of apps, including FaceTime, Messages, and Safari. A handful of third-party media apps like Spotify are available, and developers can bring over existing CarPlay apps. If your iPhone already has one of these CarPlay apps installed, it can automatically appear on the HomeView after setup. (There are no video streaming apps like YouTube, Netflix, or Disney+, but if those companies choose to make their apps available on the CarPlay framework, they will show up on the HomeView; for now, you’ll have to consume videos by using the Safari browser.)

Will the HomeView become a carrot for developers to support CarPlay? I doubt it, but time will tell.

This may seem like it goes against my premise that the HomeView is a remix, but I don’t think it does. Instead of an App Store, HomeView relies on Apple’s first-party apps and the user’s iPhone — and the apps that are already on that device. The glue holding most of that together? A mix of iCloud and Continuity.

Whatever apps are available, they are all accessible on a scrolling screen intermixed with widgets. Apple hasn’t shared a lot of information about this — the HomeView isn’t even on the developer website as of this writing — but Apple has a couple of ways that widgets can show up across devices.

Back in macOS Sonoma, Apple added the ability to show iPhone widgets on the Mac. In iOS 26, CarPlay gained support for iPhone widgets as well. I fully expect that all third-party iOS widgets will be able to run on the HomeView, just as they do on the Mac.²

Then there’s Siri AI, which is at the heart of the product, and supposedly why it didn’t ship a year ago. The HomeView taps into your personal context, just like your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. That means it should be able to extract details from your messages, emails, notes, calendar, and more in response to a query. Siri AI can also pull from its world knowledge and will sync conversations back to the Siri app on your iPhone.

Smart Home Controls

In addition to Apple’s first-party apps making it more useful, the HomeView’s value also comes from Apple’s smart home platform, which has seen both ups and downs over the years, but this product is a clear message from Apple that it believes in HomeKit.

The HomeView can easily become a smart home controller, with controls for your favorites. In most of Apple’s press photos, these controls are front and center, like this one of the wall-mounted version.

I run Home Assistant behind the scenes, but my family interacts with things like smart plugs and the garage door³ using HomeKit, usually via one of the HomePod minis⁴ I have placed around the house.

This has led to some frustration over the years when a HomePod doesn’t hear them correctly. Tapping a button would certainly clear that up.

Multiple Users

We now have a mix of hardware and software and services, but the HomeView goes one step further than some of Apple’s other products with its support of up to six users. Here’s a bit from Apple’s press release:

HomeView recognizes up to six people and delivers a personalized experience for each one. Each user gets their own personalized Home Screen with apps and widgets. Personal content stays private from others, while shared photo albums and music can be easily enjoyed by everyone in a household, including guests.

This recognition can be via sight (with the HomeView’s built-in Center Stage camera) or by voice, as shown in Apple’s promo video:

The video shows this working in a lightning-fast way, and I hope that is true. Out of everything about this product, this is the feature I am most curious about. I have had very mixed results with personal requests on my HomePod minis.

The Apple Way

The HomeView doesn’t bring that much new to the table in terms of raw innovation. Instead, it’s like some product folks walked around Apple Park, picked some of the best parts of the company’s ecosystem, and baked them into one device.

That is by no means a complaint on my part. As someone steeped in Apple’s ecosystem, I love that my notes and tasks and bookmarks and messages and events are on all of my devices, all of the time. The HomeView is a new surface for that content and information, and a showcase of what Apple can do when its various teams work together on something new.

With familiar layer-based rendering and powerful typography tools, Mojave Paint works equally well for design or photography. Use masks on any filter or adjustment to get the right look on a photo, or make the best-looking flyer for a lost cat your neighborhood telephone pole has ever seen.

Sprinkled throughout, you’ll find nice touches you won’t find in competing products from the world’s billion-dollar companies. Keep an eye on the Mojave Paint blog for updates.

Mojave Paint is available on the Mac App Store with a 14-day free trial. After that, it’s normally $9.99, but this week it’s on sale for $4.99.

The centerpiece is a new smart home hub called the HomeView. Equipped with a display and an A18 chip, the product essentially serves as the Siri command center for an Apple-powered household…

The HomeView comes in two versions: a countertop model with a metal speaker base and a wall-mounted version with a flat, square base that sits against the wall beneath the display. The countertop offering will come in four colors: space gray, silver, starlight and pink, while the wall-mounted version will be limited to space gray and silver.

I certainly like this name more than “HomePad.” This product is designed to give users a look into their personal information and smart home. HomeView totally works.

Next week should be fun.

Federico talks about pixels, Myke talks about Steve Jobs, and Stephen talks about scratches.

We just closed our annual St. Jude campaign and raised an amazing amount of money. Together, the Relay community donated $756,200.97 to assist St. Jude in understanding, treating, and defeating childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases.

That means that since 2019, the community has given just shy of $5.6 million for this noble cause. That number truly leaves me speechless.

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. Your donations mean that more families will have more tomorrows with their children, just like we have enjoyed with our son.

Here is the hotel in satellite view, and then in Apple’s 3D rendered view:

It seems that Apple does have the technology to make smooth pyramids!

One evening a hand took it out, plugged it in and installed NAS Reborn. It heard the Mac in the study — which had never once spoken to — ask for a folder, and the iPhone appeared in the Finder as if it had always belonged there.

Then the Mac wanted to hand over its Time Machine backups. “I have only sixteen gigabytes,” the iPhone whispered. So the hand brought a hard drive, a broad, quiet fellow who hummed to himself, and joined the two with Apple’s Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter, which took the charger as well.

Soon it served a website over HTTPS, answered anyone who spoke S3 and took in Git repositories from Working Copy, all on a few watts. The things in the drawer did not believe a word, and the key still tells everyone that the iPhone is only resting.

NAS Reborn turns an iPhone 6s, iPad Air 2 or anything newer into a network drive for the Finder, the Files app and Windows Explorer. Join the TestFlight beta for iPhone, iPad and Mac at nasreborn.com.

I expect we will hit our campaign goal while on the air, which is going to be magical. Tune in!

At the center of the strategy is a smart-home hub code-named J490, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple also plans to announce the first update to the HomePod mini since that device’s 2020 debut and its first new TV set-top box since 2022.

…

The hub’s defining feature will be its ability to serve multiple members of a household. It is designed to recognize who is speaking to it or approaching it, and then display personalized content and provide answers based on that person’s data and accounts.

When a user walks up, for example, the device will show that person’s contacts, messages, calendar appointments, notes and preferred app layout. The interface can then change automatically when another recognized household member approaches. It will also have a mode for visitors that hides personal information.

The device identifies users by their voices or through a facial-recognition system, though the latter is less reliable than Face ID on the iPhone. Users can require secondary authentication through an iPhone if they don’t want to rely solely on voice or facial recognition. The iPhone also serves as a fallback when the hub cannot identify someone correctly.

I really hope this works well, but that’s on Apple to prove. A lot of the company’s devices are shockingly single-user.¹

The HomePod can support multiple users, but my experience with that has been pretty rough. That’s not a big deal for a lot of people, but something with a screen is going to need to support families in a much deeper way.

Gurman’s reporting makes me optimistic about this being better, but I also have questions. Let me re-quote part of his article:

When a user walks up, for example, the device will show that person’s contacts, messages, calendar appointments, notes and preferred app layout. The interface can then change automatically when another recognized household member approaches. It will also have a mode for visitors that hides personal information.

We have a HomePod mini in our kitchen near the sink. The countertop in front of it is often used for food prep, and when things are busy, my wife, at least one of our kids, and I are all using that space. Is the HomePad just going to endlessly cycle between sets of information? What controls will I have to manage that from being a rotating billboard?

I can’t wait to see the details, because in a device like this, they really matter.

I present to you downtown Memphis, looking east from the Mississippi River:

Yes, we have a Bass Pro inside a pyramid. No, it doesn’t look like Apple’s rendering of it:

Ramesses now stands at the University of Memphis, but that’s a story for another time.

I was going to report to Apple that the sides of our pyramid are actually smooth and not stepped, but the “Report an Issue” feature inside of Apple Maps doesn’t have a category for 3D rendering issues.

Instead, I opted to submit feedback. If you or someone you know can help with this very important issue of civic pride, you’ll find it filed as FB24988556.

Federico has an M5 Ultra Mac Studio review unit and shares what local AI looks like on macOS today — and in the future. Myke has advice for buying iPhones in countries other than your own, and Stephen is old.

We will be off next week for the Podcastathon, but will be back on October 8.

I have launched and withdrawn more than 50 apps from the App Store over the years, but never have I had a withdrawal sustain the consistent attention that Geneva Moon (and its astronomically accurate complications) has. I pulled it 6 years ago and yet I still get people asking about it on a regular basis.

It broke in watchOS 27. Over the weekend I got it working again. Here it is. I hope this makes a small but highly dedicated group of people happy. Also, I made it free.

St. Jude cares for some of the world’s sickest children regardless of their race, ethnicity, beliefs, or ability to pay. Its patients receive the customized care they need to treat childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases, no matter what barriers they face.

Donations from normal folks like you and me make that possible.

If you haven’t donated or signed up to host your own fundraiser, today is a great day to change that!

We’ll be hosting the 8th-annual Podcastathon on Friday, October 2, from noon to midnight Eastern. We have been working on this for months, and I believe it will be the best one we have ever done.

Like in previous years, the stream will be on Relay’s YouTube channel:

The Podcastathon is my favorite workday of the entire year. I hope you will join us!

This Performa 410 was a store demo unit! This is the kiosk software that would have been running on a demo Mac inside a store like Sears or Circuit City. The machine was never wiped back to factory state before being sold, and the original owner kept the demo software the entire time they had the machine. Such a cool find!

It includes a comparison between the Performa 410 and the Performa 466, so clearly those two models must have been sold side-by-side at the same retailer.

Aside from that, there is a tutorial about how to use a mouse, info about a few Apple accessories, and a ton of software demonstrations about several included software and devices such as ClarisWorks, Quicken, the Global Village fax modem, AOL, American Heritage Dictionary, and SuperMunchers. There are also several demos of other software you could buy including Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Yearn2Learn, and Battle Chess.

He’s shared the whole thing on YouTube:

In the world of technology, trade-offs change nature over time. The first iPhone was amazing, but it was expensive and only ran on AT&T. The original MacBook Air was an incredible piece of engineering, but it ran hot and slow.

After a product matures, those trade-offs begin to shift, especially when it becomes a family of products.

When there was just one iPod, it was easy to know which one to get. Once the iPod mini came along, it changed the equation for many people. For the last several years, iPhone customers have faced similar questions when looking at the Pro and non-Pro models.

The trade-offs between those two devices have always been pretty clear. The Pro has a better camera system and other nice-to-haves, but you have to be willing to pay for them. I think most iPhone buyers knew what camp they fell into and were mostly okay with it.

Last year, the iPhone Air upset the apple cart, adding a new third option that was both better and worse than its more established siblings.

I’ve been using one for the better part of a year, and the trade-offs aren’t as bad as you may think.

What You Know

Right off the bat, I should note that the iPhone Air has not sold well. Compared to its more mainstream siblings, its numbers are downright embarrassing. There are several reasons for that.

First, Apple hasn’t advertised the Air; last cycle’s marketing focused on the cosmic orange 17 Pro. Given how people have reacted to seeing my iPhone Air, I feel like most consumers don’t even know Apple sells it. I’ve had more “Is that an Android?” than “Oh, is that the iPhone Air?” over the last 12 months.

Then there’s the Curse of the Fourth iPhone. Apple has sold two sizes of Pro phones successfully, but finding that same success with non-Pro phones has proven elusive. The Mini and Plus were both on sale for just two years, then Apple took them off the market.

The iPhone Air is very different from those older devices. They were the regular iPhone in a different size; the Air is wholly different from the iPhone 17, yet the curse remains.

Third, Apple made some big trade-offs to make the iPhone Air a mere 5.64 mm thick. The battery life isn’t up to par with other modern iPhones, and the single camera can leave you without the reach of the iPhone Pro. The thin Titanium chassis can become quite warm under load. The single loudspeaker is … not great.

How I Feel

Here’s the thing — I’ve found I can live with all those limitations to have such a thin phone in my hand and in my pocket.

That’s not to say the last year has been perfect.

On days I am at my desk, I can top up the battery, but on weekends or travel days, I’ve had to rely on the Air’s external battery. This isn’t a big deal, but it does require some thinking ahead.

The camera has been my biggest pain point. The 1× lens isn’t bad, but the lack of flexibility is pretty limiting. This is true on both ends of things — the lack of a true macro mode and the limited zoom limit what the Air can capture.

The Air is not a bad phone today, just an imperfect one. It’s not the best phone Apple sells, but it’s the next best thing.

Parts of it are magical.

Remember how light the iPhone 5 felt back when it was new? The Air feels that impossible at first, and it hasn’t really worn off in the months since. I never got into the whole Marie Kondo thing, but this iPhone does spark joy for me.

It’s also affected every other iPhone in my house, at least in my mind. They all feel clunky.

What Comes Next

Every once in a while, a product comes along that shows us a glimpse of the future.

There is a phrase that is often used to describe a failed product that ends up being right in the end:

It was ahead of its time.

Think about the Newton, Apple’s PDA from the 1990s. It foretold much of what we have today in the smartphone age, but it couldn’t reach far enough into the future to grasp it.

Of course, the iPhone Air isn’t really like the Newton, but the point stands—the iPhone Air is a little part of the future we can enjoy now.

One day we’ll look back on it and realize it was the start of a new era. This Air may not be a winner, but one of its successors will surely take the crown.