This week, there’s news about cubesats, several commercial space programs and more. Then, a look at what is going on at Blue Origin.
My thanks to our sponsors:
I just switched off this year’s St. Jude campaign. This year, the Relay FM community donated $701,220.26 to St. Jude. That puts us at $1.5 million raised in the last three years — which is an astonishing amount of money.
I owe a huge thank you to everyone who donated, as well as the Relay FM and St. Jude teams that help run the campaign every year. This is a team effort, and our team is simply the best.
St. Jude is in the business of treating and curing childhood cancer. In 2009, our oldest son was diagnosed with a brain tumor. His treatment at St. Jude saved his life, and the hospital didn’t charge our family a single cent for his care. That is thanks to donors around the world, and it’s a true honor to raise money each year for families who have had to follow in our footsteps.
Apple has a nice tribute to Steve Jobs on its homepage, complete with a video highlighting his career and a letter from his family. Hard to believe it’s already been ten years since he died.
As part of its compact size, iPod mini has a slightly smaller display than iPod. As a result, iPod mini’s Now Playing screen does not include the current song’s album name. Even so, iPod mini’s software recognizes the album field and uses it like iPod does when browsing songs by album.
Tom Strickx and Celso Martinho at CloudFlare:
Today at 1651 UTC, we opened an internal incident entitled “Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL” because we were worried that something was wrong with our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. But as we were about to post on our public status page we realized something else more serious was going on.
Social media quickly burst into flames, reporting what our engineers rapidly confirmed too. Facebook and its affiliated services WhatsApp and Instagram were, in fact, all down. Their DNS names stopped resolving, and their infrastructure IPs were unreachable. It was as if someone had “pulled the cables” from their data centers all at once and disconnected them from the Internet.
How’s that even possible?
I honestly think the world would be better off if they never came back up.
Andrei Frumusanu at AnandTech:
Overall, while the A15 isn’t the brute force iteration we’ve become used to from Apple in recent years, it very much comes with substantial generational gains that allow it to be a notably better SoC than the A14. In the end, it seems like Apple’s SoC team has executed well after all.
Steve’s last words to me were that he would miss talking together. I was sitting on the floor next to his bed, my back against the wall.
After he died, I walked out into the garden. I remember the sound of the latch on the wooden door as I gently pulled it closed.
In the garden, I sat and thought how talking often gets in the way of listening and thinking. Perhaps that is why so much of our time together was spent quietly.
I miss Steve desperately and I will always miss not talking with him.
Apple Watch Series 7, featuring the largest and most advanced Apple Watch display ever — and a reengineered Always-On Retina display with significantly more screen area and thinner borders — will be available to order beginning Friday, October 8, at 5 a.m. PDT and available in stores starting Friday, October 15.
Currently, the Series 7 isn’t in the Apple Store app at all. I hope I can save a pre-order like I did with my iPhone.
This week on Mac Power Users:
David’s newest Field Guide covers DEVONthink, and this week he and Stephen discuss the application, some example uses and the basics anyone looking at it should know. After that, they review the new iPhone and iPad mini.
My thanks to our sponsors:
Carolina Milanesi spent some time with Amazon’s new robot:
At the end of the two-week trial, I was left with mixed feelings about Astro. I was impressed with the autonomous navigation skills it displayed. I was enamored with its WALL-E like cuteness. I was convinced there could be a role for Astro to play in home monitoring and to help care for loved ones using Amazon’s new Alexa Together service. And the $1,000 price is reasonable given how much technology it packs, though Amazon might eventually sell it for less if the robot exits its current invite-only status and becomes a mainstream product.
My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring 512 Pixels this week. Their application Loopback delivers cable-free audio routing for MacOS. Get your audio where you need it, without having to crawl behind your desk.
Check out Loopback today, with a free trial. Through October 15, 512 Pixels readers can save 21% on Loopback (or any of our other fine products) with coupon code PIXELS21.
Nine years ago, I reviewed the original iPad mini and wrote:
The iPad mini doesn’t add anything to the iOS experience feature-wise, but it does make using iPad apps out in the real world far more likely. I never felt comfortable using my iPad outside the office or house, but I think I’ll be taking this smaller, lighter iPad with me more often.
In the years since, the iPad line has expanded into multiple models, all slowly filling in a continuum of sizes and prices. Somewhere along the way, the iPad mini got left behind by most of us as iPadOS grew more capable.
That was certainly the case for me. In the year since that old review, I’ve moved through a series of full-sized iPads from the first iPad Air all the way through the 11-inch iPad Pro, outfitted with the Magic Keyboard and its built-in trackpad.
There’s no argument here that iPadOS has come a long way in recent years. Features like multitasking, file management and cursor support have unlocked more and more use cases. As a result, for many people, working from an iPad has gone from a series of hoops to jump through to something that’s basically effortless.
Therein lies the conflict for me. My iPad Pro is a fantastic machine that can serve me well across large swaths of my work life, but I still prefer to do those tasks on a Mac. The iPad Pro is full of unrealized potential for me and how I like to get things done. More than once, I’ve felt silly upgrading to a new iPad just to realize that nothing changed in how I use it.
This is where the new iPad mini comes in.
Its small size — and lack of a first-party keyboard case — means that I don’t feel any tension about not using it for work. Its form factor has freed me up to use the iPad how I want, without feeling like I’ve relegated an amazing tablet to something below its station in life.
Beyond that, it’s actually better at being the iPad I want than a full-sized model. It’s great for catching up on a show while washing dishes, and portable enough that it’s fantastic as a PDF viewer while working on something in my studio or under my truck. In the week I’ve had it, I have been surprised how often I’ve reached for it over my iPhone, especially in situations where the iPad Pro would have never been a consideration.1
I’m not saying that one couldn’t work on this iPad, but I think it shines in ways that align much better with how I use an iPad. For that, the new iPad mini is a winner in my book.
It shouldn’t be surprising that this is all about the form factor. Dating back to the original, the iPad mini has always been about size first, and this new industrial design suits it very well. Getting rid of the large bezels and moving to the new Touch ID makes this iPad portable in a new way. Coupled with a good set of speakers and USB-C, it’s a modern iPad in a small form factor. ↩︎