Mark Gurman, writing about new iPad Pros which could come “as early as April:”
The devices will have an updated processor that is on par with the faster M1 chip in the latest MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac mini. Apple designs these processors itself and typically has them made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Apple is also looking to include a Mini-LED screen with at least the larger model, which would be brighter and have improved contrast ratios.
Stephen is accused of flip-flopping, while Myke has updated some firmware. Federico has reviewed a new iPad desktop stand and then the three descend into a Round Robin of iPhone features that wouldn’t exist if Apple was starting over in 2021.
(We would probably ship a terrible iPhone.)
In Connected Pro, Federico shares a gaming annoyance and I give away six months of Apple Music and News+.
The Android-maker said on Tuesday that starting July 1, it is reducing the service fee for Google Play to 15% — down from 30% — for the first $1 million of revenue developers earn using Play billing system each year. The company will levy a 30% cut on every dollar developers generate through Google Play beyond the first $1 million in a year, it said.
Citing its own estimates, Google said 99% of developers that sell goods and services with Play will see a 50% reduction in fees, and that 97% of apps globally do not sell digital goods or pay any service fee.
Mail Update for Mavericks includes improvements to general stability and compatibility with Gmail, including the following:
- Fixes an issue that prevents deleting, moving, and archiving messages for users with custom Gmail settings
- Addresses an issue that may cause unread counts to be inaccurate
- Includes additional fixes that improve the compatibility and stability of Mail
Gmail being in broken in Mail was a real good time there for a little bit.
This week on Mac Power Users, we get back to the Mac in a big way:
The ecosystem of Mac apps is small compared to what’s available for iOS and iPadOS, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some real gems out there to make working on macOS more productive.
My thanks to our sponsors for supporting my Mac app habit:
Unread is an RSS reader for iOS with beautiful typography, comfortable gesture-based navigation, and a variety of color themes.
While the best websites provide RSS feeds with full article content, some have feeds that only contain summaries. Unread automatically determines which feeds have full article content and which feeds just have summaries. When displaying articles from summary-only feeds, Unread retrieves full article content from the website. You get the full article in Unread without needing to open the website.
Matthew Panzarino at TechCrunch reports that the HomePod is joining the great iPod Hi-Fi in the sky:
After 4 years on the market, Apple has discontinued its original HomePod. It says that it will continue to produce and focus on the HomePod mini, introduced last year. The larger HomePod offered a beefier sound space but the mini has been very well received and clearly accomplishes many of the duties that the larger version was tasked with. The sound is super solid (especially for the size) and it offers access to Siri, Apple’s assistant feature.
My thanks to Soulver for sponsoring the site this week. It is a smart notepad with a built-in calculator. Get instant answers to calculations… right in in text. It’s the perfect middle ground between a traditional calendar and a spreadsheet, compete with natural language support, currency conversions and more.
What’s follow-up and what’s a topic? Why has Apple chickened out with a change in iOS 14.5? Who wants a new iPad Pro? How many secrets have been kept between the co-hosts? Is this an annoying way to write a show description?
(Sorry about that.)
On Connected Pro, Ticci talks about finding the balance between being cool and confident, and debates if Steve Jobs was cool or not. Also, Myke has a security problem and I tell a story about shipping a hard drive.
This week, several Mac apps have been updated to support Apple silicon natively.
The biggest title is Adobe Photoshop. Darrell Etherington has details on TechCrunch:
Per internal testing, Adobe says that users should see improvements of up to 1.5x faster performance on a number of different features offered by Photoshop, vs. the same tasks being done on the emulated version. That’s just the start, however, since Adobe says it’s going to continue to coax additional performance improvements out of the software on Apple Silicon in collaboration with Apple over time. Some features are also still missing from the M1-friendly addition, including the ‘Invite to Edit Cloud Documents’ and ‘Preset Syncing’ options, but those will be ported over in future iterations as well.
If you had told me a decade ago that this platform would have grown to the size it is today, especially in education, I’m not sure I would have believed you.
In December 1917, two ships collided in Halifax Harbor. The resulting explosion killed over 1,600 people, injured another 9,000 and leveled everything within a 1.6 mile radius.
This story is shockingly tragic, and was so obviously avoidable.
My thanks to our sponsors: