512 Pixels

This week on Ungeniused:

Prison escapes via helicopter may seem cool, but they rarely end well.

Thanks to our sponsor this week:

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Matt Birchler has put together a great blog post exploring what watchOS 5 could bring:

watchOS is far from perfect and there are tons of things that could be done to make it not only a better experience for those who already own one, but to draw in more people to the platform. The Apple Watch is one of the largest reasons I’m loyal to iOS for my smartphone, and since Apple is pretty darn invested in people buying more iPhones, they probably want to get people to love their Apple Watches even more so these customers never change sides.

Without further ado, here are some of my suggestions to Apple that I think would make the Apple Watch a better, more appealing product.

His suggestions are well thought out, and the design work is exactly what the direction I’d love to see Apple go. Count me in for this vision of the future.

Jason Snell has published a video showing how to attach Apple’s VESA Mount Kit for the iMac Pro. It’s a very clever bit of hardware design:

This week on Liftoff, Jason Snell and I recount the Apollo 1 fire that claimed the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee.

My thanks to our sponsors:

• Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code LIFTOFF at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
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I’m not one for publishing links to Apple ads, but this made me chuckle.

This week on Connected:

What does the death of Transmit mean for pro apps on the iPad? Should Apple make a laptop that runs iOS? Does Myke understand how hypothetical questions work?

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I found the map to Dongletown:

Learn about the adapters and cables that you can use to connect an external display or projector to your Mac.

I disagree with the company’s use of “Vintage,” but they didn’t ask me.

Jason Snell, after outlining a bunch of problems with the original MacBook Air:

And yet my affection for the MacBook Air was legitimate! It was so much thinner and lighter than any laptop I’d used before. It felt like the future. And the truth is, this is the biggest legacy of the MacBook Air: It predicted the future of laptops and then brought that future into being. It created an entire category for PC laptops, Ultrabooks, which was loosely defined as “PC laptops kind of like the MacBook Air.”

Every new Apple notebook — and many products from other companies — owe a lot to the original MacBook Air, as I write this month over on MacStories:

Today, all of our notebooks are thin and light. We’ve traded our optical drives in for a series of dongles and our spinning hard drives for fast, silent SSDs.

It wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, notebooks had optical drives and a full array of ports, complemented by features like removable batteries.

A decade ago, we entered the current era of notebook design when Steve Jobs pulled the future out of an envelope.

I took a look at mine over on YouTube:

Over on the TenFourFox blog, Spectre’s impact on the G3, G4 and G5 families of processors has been documented.

Spoiler alert: The G3 and early G4s are resistant to the exploit.

Jason Snell had one heck of a holiday project.

Your Apple Watch measures your heart rate every 4 minutes during the day. With CardioBot, you can easily understand the data captured by the Apple Watch so you can improve your lifestyle and discover notable patterns.

My thanks to CardioBot for sponsoring 512 Pixels this week. Go check it out in the App Store; I’m a big fan.