One of the most strongly-held arguments about Apple removing the headphone jack is that Apple has historically been first to drop a legacy technology, sometimes even before the rest of the industry is ready. Apple’s vertical integration, passionate userbase, and scale (both historically small and now immensely huge) allow it to push big changes in a way that few other companies can pull off. The floppy, SCSI, optical drives, VGA — all killed by Apple years before vanishing from the rest of the industry.
But how long does it really take Apple to kill legacy tech?
Evernote’s Chris O’Neill has published a blog post explaining price increases coming to the platform. Plus and Premium are now $3.99 and $7.99 a month, respectively, with discounts for annual buyers. For those customers, Plus is now $10 more a year, while Premium has gone up $20.
Then there’s this:
Beginning today, the prices for our Plus and Premium tiers will change for new subscriptions, and access from Evernote Basic accounts will be limited to two devices. Current subscribers and Basic users who are using more than two devices will have some time to adjust before the changes take effect. If you are impacted, look for a message from us in the coming days.
In short, if you use a iPhone, iPad and a Mac, you’ll need to pay for Evernote starting soon. Or just switch to Notes.app.
You may notice that when using Windows and a USB keyboard that is connected to a Mac via the USB port on an Apple Thunderbolt Display (27-inch), the F8 key is not recognized by Windows when you attempt to accept the Terms and Conditions agreement or start up into Windows Safe Mode.
To restore the use of the F8 key, connect your USB keyboard directly to the computer’s USB port.
The Mac platform is the simple solution for complex scientific research. It lets you leverage all the power and utility of UNIX, even if you never look at a line of code.
Run anything and everything your work depends on, including scripts, open source and commercial software, and even Windows. Program in any language from C++ to Python. And publish and present your work with easy-to-use multimedia tools. The Mac is intuitive, so you’re free to focus on your research. And top-performing Intel processors let that research happen faster than ever.
Have you ever spent all day in front of your Mac, just to wonder where the heck all that time went?
Have you tried to bill a client, but couldn’t reconstruct how many hours you spent working for them?
You could use a time tracker, but to be honest, manual time tracking sucks.
You have to start and stop timers, enter what you did, and so on.
And if you forget that, you are back to square one.
Not so with Timing. Instead of making you do all the work, Timing automatically tracks how you spend your time. It logs which apps you use, which websites you visit, and which documents you edit. You can easily categorize activities into projects, all safely and securely right on your Mac.
The app is 20% off this week at $19.99 - that already pays for itself by recovering just half an hour of unproductive or unbilled time! (And we promise you will save much more time than that!)
In his keynote address, Jobs addressed the challenges in front of Apple working with the PowerPC roadmap. Apple hadn’t been able to deliver the 3.0 GHz Power Mac G5 the company had promised:
We can envision some great products we want to build for you, but we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC roadmap.
The current Mac’s display is 5k and can be extended (in lower res) to the existing Thunderbolt Display which runs at 2560×1440 but I can tell you from personal experience that the difference in resolution sucks from a usability standpoint.
“We’re discontinuing the Apple Thunderbolt Display. It will be available through Apple.com, Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers while supplies last. There are a number of great third-party options available for Mac users,” said an Apple spokesperson.
With just a single cable, users can connect a Thunderbolt-enabled Mac to the 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display and access its FaceTime camera, high quality audio, and Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, USB 2.0 and Thunderbolt ports. Designed specifically for Mac notebooks, the new display features an elegant, thin, aluminum and glass enclosure, and includes a MagSafe connector that charges your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air.
“The Apple Thunderbolt Display is the ultimate docking station for your Mac notebook,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With just one cable, users can dock with their new display and connect to high performance peripherals, network connections and audio devices.”
The display never saw a hardware update, even after MagSafe 2 replaced the old charging standard, not to mention when Thunderbolt 2 and USB 3.0 started showing up on Macs of all sizes.
I gotta say, there’s nothing so sad in the entirety of the Apple universe as using a $10 MagSafe adaptor with a $1,000 display.1
The real question here is what happens next. Clearly, the external display business is not one Apple is super excited about, but I can see Apple wanting to offer a nice 5K external display to users who want it. My guess is that more Thunderbolt Displays have sold than one might think, and those users are often the most demanding of their hardware.
I really do hope there’s a Thunderbolt 3/USB C/Magic Unicorn Tears external 5K display on its way. While it’d require a new MacBook Pro, living in an all-Retina world sounds really appealing.2
If that’s still a few months out on the horizon, why pull the plug on the non-Retina Thunderbolt Display now? Or is this a sign that Apple’s packing up their desktop display business?
Trust me on that; I have a Thunderbolt Display on my desk. ↩︎
My brother’s non-profit Operation Broken Silence has worked in Sudan and South Sudan for many years. They just spent two weeks in Yida, a refugee camp that has swelled to hold 70,000 who have fled the genocidal acts of Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir. The purpose of the trip was to film a documentary about life in the camp, in the shadow of the unspeakable crime of genocide at the hands of the Sudanese government.
“Yida is sort of a microcosm of what’s wrong with Sudan right now,” [Mark] Hackett says. “No schools, people who don’t have jobs, people displaced by the conflict. We wanted to go to Yida to get eyewitness interviews about what’s happening. But it’s also where most of our classrooms are. In Yida alone, it’s estimated that there are 20,000 to 25,000 kids. We’ve only put 700 of those kids back into a classroom.”
The teachers Operation Broken Silence supports are all local. “Before the war started, there were about 200 schools in the Nuba Mountains. Now there are fewer than 100, and none of them are functioning anywhere close to capacity. The schools that were destroyed, almost all of the teachers escaped, alongside the kids. They’re the only ones who understand the cultural context, and they understand what these kids have been through, because they’ve been through it, too. They’re better than any teacher we could bring in.”
I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but I could not be prouder of Mark and the work he and his team are doing. In a world where people are jumping up and down about headphone jacks, it’s good to be reminded that there is some serious shit in the world, and that people are busying trying to make it right.
On the second episode of my new podcast about weird Wikipedia articles, Myke and I talk about dancing mania:
In mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries, large groups of people would dance in the streets. Were they sick? Was it just a form of escape? Did someone curse them?
The agency released on Tuesday its popular NASA app for a new platform, the fourth-generation Apple TV. This version joins the app’s other versions available for iOS in iPhone and iPad versions, Android and Fire OS. The NASA app has been downloaded more than 17 million times across all platforms.
“The NASA app has been a fantastic way for the public to experience the excitement of space exploration from their mobile devices,” said David Weaver, NASA associate administrator for Communications. “Now, users with the latest Apple TV can explore and enjoy our remarkable images, videos, mission information, NASA Television and more on the big screen with the whole family.”
The app is a little clunky in places but includes a ton of great content, including access to NASA TV, live video from the International Space Station, mission information and access to over 15,000 agency images. If you’re into space, you should go check it out.
At Macworld Tokyo 2001, Steve “Business Suit” Jobs showed off what would be the last two new iMac G3 designs: Blue Dalmatian and Flower Power.
Like Sage and Ruby before them, Blue Dalmatian and Flower Power were used for just one generation of iMac: the Early 2001 models.
According to Jobs, the new cases took 18 months to develop. They weren’t “colors,” but rather patterns molded “right into the plastic.” While some companies may have just used a decal, Apple wanted something special with these machines.
There’s no denying that the designs were a line in the sand. A lot of people liked them, but even today, people poke fun of them, too.
(I think it’s telling Apple returned to more sensible colors for the last set of iMacs, later in 2001.)
Blue Dalmatian features a pattern of white blobs on a blue and green background. It’s a little bit like a cartoon disco ball.
Flower Power is way out there. The pattern of simplistic flower shapes may have been colorful, but it soon picked up nasty nicknames comparing the design to moldy bread left in the refrigerator too long.
Both of these machines were a big departure from the previous colors used, and it feels a bit like Jobs (and Jony Ive, maybe) really wanted them to exist.
All “Early 2001” iMacs came with FireWire and iMovie, but Apple still shipped multiple lines of iMacs within this generation.
Our old friend Indigo sat at the base of the “iMac” line with a 400 MHz G3, a 10 GB hard drive and a $899 price tag.
The $1,199 mid-range Blue Dalmatian and Flower Power machines ran at 500 MHz with 20 GB of storage.
The high-end “iMac SE” (sold in Graphite, Blue Dalmatian and Flower Power) came with a new 600 MHz G3, 40 GB of storage and CD-RW optical drives for burning music. It sold for $1,499.
The Early 2001 iMacs were even featured in print and banner ads:
With the Early 2001 iMacs, Apple didn’t simplify the line up all that much, but I think people were starting to wonder how long the iMac G3 would stick around.
At this point, the PowerMac, PowerBook and Cube were all running with G4 chipsets, leaving just the lower-cost iMac and iBook with the G3. The division made the overall product line a little easier to understand, but some wanted more power out of a consumer machine.
To be fair, Apple was still updating the internals of the iMac at this point. The G3s used in these models was markedly better than before, and the inclusion of CD-RW drives was a big deal. Remember, these machines shipped months before the iPod would be announced.
The G4 was the chip of the future, but the iMac would have one more round in the ring after these extra colorful machines.
