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I would hate to be someone with a repaired product locked up inside one of these stores.

After nearly three weeks and 15,000 votes, you have chosen your favorite Mac:

Coming in with 51.3% of the votes placed in the final round, the Power Mac G4 Cube has won, narrowly defeating the 2012-2015 Retina MacBook Pro.

Here is what the final, full bracket looks like:

click image to enlarge

There is a lot to process here, and I’ll be talking about the results and how I would have voted on next week’s Connected, so keep an eye out for episode 289.

In the meantime, thank you all for taking part of this. Mac Madness went from idea to reality very quickly, and I could not be happier about the responses it got, even the cranky ones. I hope this has been as much fun for you as it has been for me.

Long live the Cube!

Go get your last vote in!

Cory Hixson was kind enough to have me on his podcast, Talking to the Internet. We discussed the founding of 512 Pixels, Relay FM and a whole lot more.

This week on Connected:

Mac Madness is down to the final two machines, and Myke explains why it is all Stephen’s fault. Then, Federico takes everyone on a tour of high-resolution audio apps for the iPhone and iPad … which are all wild. Lastly, we check the temperature of the room on Apple’s Dark Sky acquisition.

I hope you enjoy this episode. It’s one for the books, I think. My thanks to our sponsors for making it possible:

• PDFpen, from Smile: The ultimate tool for editing PDFs on the Mac.
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…and John Legere has left the building.

We should get right to it. After nearly 12,000 total votes, we have arrived at the finals of Mac Madness, and it’s the G4 Cube against the 2012-2015 Retina MacBook Pro:

I really thought the black MacBook was going to edge out the Cube, but as you can tell, it fell a little shy in the Semifinals:

2012-2015 Retina MBP — 63.2%

Clamshell iBook G3 — 36.8%

G4 Cube — 53.3%

Black MacBook — 46.7%

Go vote in the Finals now! Voting will close the evening of Thursday, April 2.

I’ll be announcing the winners on Friday, April 3. May the favorite Mac win!

Adam Grossman:

Today we have some important and exciting news to share: Dark Sky has joined Apple.

Our goal has always been to provide the world with the best weather information possible, to help as many people as we can stay dry and safe, and to do so in a way that respects your privacy.

There is no better place to accomplish these goals than at Apple. We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to reach far more people, with far more impact, than we ever could alone.

Dark Sky will remain in the iOS App Store, but the Android version has been pulled from sale, but it will continue to function until July 1, 2020. That is also the cutoff date for the Dark Sky website.

The Dark Sky API will cease to function at the end of 2021, meaning other weather apps that use Dark Sky data will need to look at other services to populate their apps.

I’d love for Apple to provide this data via its own API moving forward to support apps like Carrot Weather, Hello Weather and others, but that seems unlikely to me.

Apple:

This software enables playback of ProRes RAW and ProRes RAW HQ video files in compatible applications on Windows systems.

It works with beta versions of the following software:

• Adobe After Effects
• Adobe Media Encoder
• Adobe Premiere
• Adobe Premiere Rush

Apple working to get its codec better supported across the industry is a smart move. Now we have to see how it performs. I suspect we’ll see real-world demos of this sooner rather than later.

via Mark Gurman

Apple Support:

When you print, your printer icon appears in the Dock. The icon may have a colored badge that indicates its status.

• Red badge: The printer is printing. The badge shows the number of print jobs in the printer queue.

• Green badge with a pause symbol: The printer is paused. If you print to it, you’re asked whether to resume printing or queue the print job to print later. If you queue the print job, your document waits in the queue until you resume printing. You might want to do this if you aren’t currently connected to the printer.

• Yellow badge: The printer has a problem you need to fix. For example, it could have a paper jam or need ink, toner, or paper. You may need to resume printing after you fix the problem.

If you print a lot, this is a genuinely useful feature.

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