512 Pixels

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This week on Mac Power Users, everyone’s favorite nerdy pastor TJ Luoma rejoins the show to update us on his tech, how he’s learned to take time away from work and some of his new favorite apps and services.

Over at The Verge, Wes Davis and Richard Lawler are reporting on the new paywall that has been erected around Twitter:

Elon Musk continues to blame Twitter’s new limitations on AI companies scraping “vast amounts of data” as he announced new “temporary” limits on how many posts people can read.

Now unverified accounts will only be able to see 600 posts per day, and for “new” unverified accounts, just 300 in a day. The limits for verified accounts (presumably whether they’re bought as a part of the Twitter Blue subscription, granted through an organization, or verification Elon forced on people like Stephen King, LeBron James, and anyone else with more than a million followers) still allow reading only a maximum of 6,000 posts per day.

Shortly after that, Musk tweeted that the rate limits would “soon” increase to 8,000 tweets for verified users, 800 for unverified, and 400 for new unverified accounts.

Ah yes, the classic “AI is digesting our data so we should punish our best users” move.

This comes on the heels of Twitter cutting off all access to people who are not logged into the site, but there is probably even more to this 4D chess move by Musk. A few weeks ago, it came out that Twitter had stopped paying it Google Cloud bills. As today is the first of the month, it’s not hard to assume that the paywall changes — in addition to the outages being reported by users — are at least in part because of Google pulling the plug¹ on something important.

Or maybe the DDOS is coming from inside the house. It’s hard to tell.

As of today, we’re halfway through the Kickstarter campaign for the 2024 Apple History Calendar; the campaign will close at little after 10 AM Eastern on Friday, July 14. If you haven’t backed it yet, and want a very nice wall calendar chock full of Apple retail and services history to adorn your home or workplace next year, now is a great time to do so!

David Pierce:

Humane, the buzzy company started by former Apple employees that has been making big promises about an AI-first and post-smartphone future, announced today that its first gadget will be called the Humane Ai Pin. It’ll be powered by “an advanced Snapdragon platform” in partnership with Qualcomm, and it’s coming later this year.

That’s really all we know so far. Humane continues to be mysterious about how the Ai Pin works, what exactly it will do, and even what it looks like. (Most mysterious of all: why in the world is “AI” not capitalized? What is “Ai?” Am I supposed to pronounce it like “eye?” I am confident this will infuriate The Verge’s copy desk and me in equal measure for years to come.)

For a company whose only product so far has been hype, announcing this on a news-filled Friday ahead of a holiday weekend strikes me as very odd.

Or maybe they just want me to think it is very odd and the Humane Hype Train is still firmly on the tracks. Who can even tell anymore?

David Pierce, writing at The Verge:

There was a sign in the Google Reader team’s workspace at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. “Days Since Cancellation,” it read, with a number below: zero. It was always zero.

This was in 2006 or so, back when Google Reader was still growing. Back when it still existed at all. Google’s feed-reading tool offered a powerful way to curate and read the internet and was beloved by its users. Reader launched in 2005, right as the blogging era went mainstream; it made a suddenly huge and sprawling web feel small and accessible and helped a generation of news obsessives and super-commenters feel like they weren’t missing anything. It wasn’t Google’s most popular app, not by a long shot, but it was one of its most beloved.

Within the company, though, Reader’s future always felt precarious. “It felt so incongruent,” says Dolapo Falola, a former engineer on the Reader team. “Literally, it felt like the entire time I was on the project, various people were trying to kill it.”

I’m starting to think I should buy a Vision Pro next year just to keep it sealed and stashed away for an auction in 2039 or so.

This week on the show, Federico, Myke and I are joined by James Thomson to talk about the visionOS SDK and what apps may be like when the platform launches early next year. Other topics include laundry symbols, the return of Ridiculous Fishing and more.

Monica Chin, writing at The Verge:

Apple’s latest Mac Pro was finally revealed at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference as a machine for the most power user of power users. The video discussed audio engineering, color grading, and video transcoding. Apple’s product page mentions code compiling, animation, compositing 8K scenes, 3D rendering, and “analyzing enormous datasets.” This isn’t just for pros, Apple seems to claim; it’s for capital-P Pros.

I wanted to know whether Apple’s purported target demographic — people who spend their days animating, making visual effects, and doing various other tasks generally associated with big, powerful computers — were actually interested in purchasing this machine. So I asked a bunch of them, and the answer, basically across the board, was no. Not because the Mac Pro is bad but because Apple’s other computers, namely its laptops, have just gotten too good.

Josh Withers:

Tim Cook once said that “we are high on AR for the long run” and it’s true, for 28 years Apple - and the rest of the tech industry - has been noodling around on augmented reality and virtual reality.

Out of a purely personal interest, I started flipping through rumours about Apple and its “glasses” to see where the leakers got it right and wrong, and the next minute I’m back in 1995, so I thought a curated list of all the leaks, rumours, and related dates might be a nice record to make in the year of our headset, AVP 0.

I enjoyed this trip down memory lane, and I suspect you will, too.

I’ve got just a handful of open blog sponsorship spots for the back half of the year. If you are interested, get in touch!

• July 17
• July 31
• September 4
• September 25
• October 30
• November 27

This week, another Q&A support document:

I have the Apple Internet Connection Kit (AICK) and I’m trying to set it up with my existing Internet service provider (ISP). When I launch the Apple Internet Dialer, it wants me to set up an account with a new service provider. How do I tell it to use my existing ISP?

When you first run the Apple Internet Dialer, it assumes you do not have internet access and guides you through setting up an account with a new ISP. If you already have dial-up access with an ISP, you can set it up by following these steps:

Step 1: Launch the Apple Internet Dialer application

Step 2: Choose Define Provider Information from the Provider menu.

Step 3: Enter the appropriate information for your ISP. if you do not know this information, call your ISP for the necessary information.

Sometimes, there was a step 3.