posts

Mark Gurman, writing at Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. will get an observer role on OpenAI’s board as part of a landmark agreement announced last month, further tightening ties between the once-unlikely partners.

Phil Schiller, the head of Apple’s App Store and its former marketing chief, was chosen for the position, according to people familiar with the situation. As a board observer, he won’t be serving as a full-fledged director, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter isn’t public.

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This week on Connected:

Federico and Myke discuss MacStories’ open letter on AI, explore their feelings on how AI could impact the future of creativity, and delve into the idea of “Context, Consent, and Control.”

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As spotted by Hartley Charlton, Apple has updated its Vintage & Obsolete Products document to include 2017’s iPhone X and 2018’s HomePod.

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This week on Mac Power Users:

David and Stephen discuss Apple’s youngest platform and where it stands a few months after launch. They share some of their favorite apps and how spatial computing fits into their personal and professional lives.

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I’m happy to announce that 512 Pixels now has a permanent merch store over on Cotton Bureau. At launch, I’ve got five shirts for sale. Three of the designs are back from the vault, updated for 2024, with a new 512 Pixels logo shirt and a design celebrating the original iPod¹ joining the collection:

These designs are all available on-demand, and ship within a few days. Cotton Bureau is offering free shipping on orders placed before July 11 with the discount code HBDCB11.

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Last year, NASA announced plans to deorbit the International Space Station at the end of the decade. We now know much more about the agency’s plans, according to Jeff Foust:

NASA selected SpaceX to develop a spacecraft that will be used to perform the final phases of the deorbiting of the International Space Station around the end of the decade.

NASA announced June 26 it awarded SpaceX a contract valued at up to $843 million to build the United States Deorbit Vehicle (USDV). That contract covers the development of the spacecraft, with NASA to conduct a later procurement for launching the USDV.

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Dr. Drang, bouncing off my recent post on Reminders:

If you have the Move tool in your Mail toolbar, you can select all the messages you want to move, click on the Move tool, and select the appropriate folder from the drop-down menu. Because the menu is long, this may seem no easier than dragging and dropping, but it is. The key is that once the drop-down menu is active, you can start typing the name of the folder and it will be selected. Boom.

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This week on the podcast:

After follow-up topics ranging from iPhone cases to apps for some very specific use cases, Stephen, Myke, and Federico discuss some of the changes in this week’s beta OSes, recent DMA news, Apple’s Beats strategy, and more.

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Every summer, I take some time with Apple’s updated stock apps. Many of them are quite good, and meet the needs for the vast majority of users.

I fully understand that sometimes you and I are not the vast majority of users, and that third-party apps can often better fit our needs.

Every year, I feel the call of Reminders. It looks nice, is integrated with the system in a bunch of fun ways, and unlike my normal app Todoist, is easy to use with Siri.

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Back in 2021, Ernie Smith wrote about the curious world of CD caddies:

The first time I ever saw a CD-ROM, I had never seen a regular CD before, and I thought that it came in a giant plastic case. To be fair to me, I was in middle school, and I had little experience with them. It was in a library, and the screen did not display anything related to multimedia, but general reference information—stuff like databases, for example. A couple of years later, I got a home computer, along with an audio CD player, and soon enough, a CD-ROM. But I always thought about that caddy, which I never saw on any of the computer equipment I owned. Why did it exist? And why, when CD-ROMs trickled down to my home, wasn’t there one?

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I recently finished Harry McCracken’s excellent article about the CD-ROM’s rise in the mid-1990s, and it made me realize that I had never really explored Apple’s early CD hardware.

Depending on how you count things, Apple sold six SCSI CD-ROM drives, from the “AppleCD SC” in March 1988 to the 600e, which was on sale from 1995 to sometime in 1997. Ahem.

The AppleCD SC utilized a CD caddy and could read CD-ROMs at 1x speed. It could handle discs up to 650 MB in size across five formats:

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Dr. Drang:

Yesterday morning, I got obsessed with the 10-day forecast section of the Apple Weather iOS app—specifically, how it presents each day’s temperature range. I still don’t understand the logic behind it.

The blog post is impressive, but the footnote contains a straight-up murder:

Several readers on Mastodon told me the alignment was fine on their phones and suggested Larger Text/Dynamic Type as the reason the charts on my phone are messed up. They were absolutely right. I bumped up my text size so long ago I’d forgotten all about it, but I should’ve known to look into that before posting. Interestingly, moving my text size down just one tick got all the bar ends to match up. The colors still seem a little off to me, but I’ll need to zoom in and look more carefully.

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