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The Holding-a-Charge Edition Sunday, March 6, 2022

Apple Starts Taking Donations For UNICEF Ukraine Effort, by Malcolm Owen, AppleInsider

Tapping the banner while on an iPhone or iPad will open up the iTunes Store, while clicking on a Mac will launch Apple Music. The app then displays a prompt to donate, with several suggested amounts in the user's local currency.

The message instructs users to select an amount, then to select Donate to confirm the transaction. Apple states that 100% of the user's contribution will go to UNICEF.

Stuff

I Forgot My Charger On 5-day Road Trip — But My iPhone Never Ran Out Of Power, by Philip Michaels, Tom's Guide

So yes, there were some anxious moments when I realized a few hours into our trip that we would be on road without minimal resources for keeping the iPhone charged up. I say minimal because at least my car was equipped with a built-in charger. That would take care of us when driving to and fro, but charging the phone overnight was right out. I was facing an unplanned side trip to Apple Store or a week of nervously checking my iPhone's battery in between car trips.

In the end, though, I needn't have spent much time worrying. It turns out the iPhone 11 Pro Max is excellent when it comes to holding a charge.

Notes

Apple: Design Macs For Other Types Of Professionals, by Adam Engst, TidBITS

What I am a little miffed about is the implication that if you don’t need all the power of a MacBook Pro with an M1 Max chip and 64 GB of unified memory, you’re not a pro user. And that extreme performance and massive storage are the only things that matter to professionals, such that those of us whose performance requirements are well served by non-Pro Macs could have no other wants or needs that would improve our workflows and productivity. I can’t speak for other fields, but I can think of plenty of hardware and product line enhancements that would make professionals like me more productive. And I’ll bet there are many more writers and lawyers out there than 3D artists and filmmakers.

Apple Eyes NFL Assets In Massive Billion-Dollar Deal, by Michael McCarthy, Front Office Sports

The NFL is currently fielding offers for three assets: an equity stake in NFL Media, the “NFL Sunday Ticket” package for out-of-market games, and livestreaming games on mobile devices.

Apple wants to bundle them all into one sweeping deal, said sources. That would instantly make the tech giant, which has long avoided sports, one of the NFL’s biggest business partners.

The Next Big Thing In Messaging, by David Pierce and the Source Code team, Protocol

Decentralized messaging apps could be the kind of resilient, unblockable tool that people in Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere need to stay online and in touch even in the midst of a war.

Bottom of the Page

I still do think Apple is not wise to bundle news and magazines -- two fundamentally different businesses -- into a single Apple News+. The future of news need to be in a different place than the future of magazines, if we need both of them to survive. Yes, New York Times has New York Times Magazine, and The Economist is, as they claim, a weekly newspaper. But if magazines take on the strategy of, say New York Times, they will not survive nor thrive. Magazines need to find their own future. Apple News+ is not the correct strategy, I don't think.

Similarly, the business of sports entertainment is so different from the business of 'regular' streaming movies and TV, that they shouldn't be combined into a generic Apple TV+. Doing so, I'm afraid, is going to short-change one or the other business.

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Thanks for reading.