Cue thinks that people will pay for Apple Music once they experience its features beyond that. As it turned out, despite rumours that it would undercut Spotify – $4.99 a month was being mooted in October 2014 then $7.99 in February 2015 – the service will cost $9.99 a month after a three-month trial.
Wouldn’t Apple have liked to go cheaper? “No. We always thought ‘$9.99 is the price of an album’, so on a monthly basis that’s great. Where we put all our energy behind was the family plan,” says Cue, referring to the $14.99 option that covers up to six people in a family.
The cost of the family plan sounds great. My daughter will now probably never leave our family plan, and will forever spend my money.
Gruber and Schiller talked about Apple’s desire for creating ultra-thin devices and the criticism it gets for perhaps focusing too much on thinness and not enough on battery life and performance. Schiller claimed that Apple has struck the perfect balance between battery life and thinness, noting that if you want a larger battery in a device, its “heavier, more costly, and takes longer to charge. We model every thickness, every size, every weight and try to figure out what the tradeoffs are. I think we’ve made great choices there.”
So far, I am on Apple's side. Yes, to conserve battery life, I sometimes do not use the devices when I am out and about. But, I also think of it this way -- if the devices are heavy, I will often not bring them out and about either.
(Disclosure: I use public transport, and don't drive. As they say: YMMV.)
As to whether Apple Music is really good, we’ll have to wait and see, but the signs aren’t pointing in that direction. The elevator pitch is that Apple Music is three things, an attempt to tie it to the 2007 introduction to the iPhone. But while the advantages of a multifunction device are obvious, the advantages of a multifunction app aren’t. The App Store’s success is largely based on tightly focused apps, not sprawling suites.
Imagine an alternate reality where the Watch had the exact same Watch face functionality (including complications), the exact same notifications and communications capabilities, the exact same performant Apple apps, the exact same unexpectedly strong battery life, but no apps beyond a promise they were “coming soon.” Surely reviewers would gripe, but with a “It’s already great, and it’s going to get better” sort of vibe. Yet Apple couldn’t bring themselves to say “no”.
The fake email in the iPad’s video picture-in-picture image reads like a one-act tragedy. http://t.co/etQs31Hlj3
— Dan Moren (@dmoren) June 10, 2015The new iPhone app does basically everything its existing online dashboard does, but brings it to an interface more suited for a mobile device. Businesses can also set up notifications for whenever a payment or purchase is made or set up a daily summary.
The latest version of Google Maps, now in the App Store, lets you send any place you search for with Google Maps on your desktop browser right to an iPhone or iPad. Your phone receives it as a notifcation, and once you tap on it, the mobile app will automatically take you to that spot.
The version of Safari that ships with OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan’ allows web developers to build custom experiences that work with Force Touch input, similar to how native app developers have had access to that new hardware before now. That means that you can set custom actions for how content on your web page responds to deeper clicks on the trackpads that ship in Apple’s newest notebooks, including the MacBook and MacBook Pro with Retina Display.
App Transport Security allows developers to declare what domains they need secure connections to in a file in their apps, and encourages everyone to use HTTPS exclusively instead of the traditional, non-encrypted protocol HTTP. This is not a requirement yet, but rather a strong encouragement. It shows, however, what Apple wants developers to do in the near future.
If you are reading mail on your iPhone and iPad and a popup appears asking you to re-login to iCloud (or anything else), beware. Security researcher Jan Soucek discovered a bug in the iOS Mail app that allowed an attacker to run remote HTML code when an email is opened.
The attorneys general wanted to know whether Apple pressured the music labels — or whether the labels conspired with Apple and one another — to withdraw support for popular “freemium” services offered by companies like Spotify in favor of Apple’s paid music subscriptions.
Metal for OS X is huge — and it's going to be a much bigger deal on the Mac than it is on your iPhone or iPad. If you use a Mac to produce professional content, chances are, Metal is about to drastically speed up the professional apps you use like Adobe Illustrator and Autodesk Maya.
San Francisco may not be a daring choice for a design-led company, but when creating a font for small screens, variation takes a backseat to clarity. After all, typography isn’t just an element of user interface; on some type-heavy mobile apps, it is the user interface. As the renowned typographer Tobias Frere-Jones explains, type pervades so many user interactions, from the mundane choices like OK/Cancel, to sensitive content like personal data.
Apple is unbundling search, and we have lived for so long with centralised search engines, and Google in particular, that it’s hard to get the full extent of the implications.
The chief operating officer has long been the day-to-day operator, the heir apparent and the right-hand details whiz to the visionary CEO (think Tim Cook to Steve Jobs, back in the day). But, while not yet an endangered species, this breed of corporate executive is definitely seeings its numbers dwindle.
Will there be more radio stations from Apple? Beats 2, 3, etc for different musical genres?
And what will the Chinese radio station(s) be named?
(I am not sure if Apple Music will lanuch in China at the end of the month, but I am surprised that there aren't any Chinese radio stations announced.)
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iTunes started with music. Then almost everything else -- TV shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks, apps -- were placed under the same brand. (The [curious] exception is iBooks.)
If (when?) Apple moves into buffet of movies and TV shows, or podcasts, or audiobooks, or e-books, will we see the same Apple Music app takes on addition media types too?
The universal symbol for a city’s Metro system is a big “M.” If you see one, wherever you are, you know what to do. It’s like the world got together and agreed on a Bat Signal for mass transportation.
But transit agencies also go to some great lengths to render the letter in a way that’s uniquely theirs. With the help of the Metrobits blog we’ve identified at least 77 different M logo designs that are currently (or were recently) in use—gathered here in no special order (and listed in full at the bottom of this post). Considering that an M consists of a mere four straight lines, the group is a pretty impressive feast of diversity.
I'm a lot more relaxed now that I stopped caring about things
— Jon Rosenberg™ (@jonrosenberg) June 10, 2015Thanks for reading.