Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2018/08/thursday-morning-news090818/
As part of a longer piece interviewing several key Spotify execs about the work they do and the music industry in general, Fast Company also talked to Tim Cook about his take on music streaming. Cook never mentioned Spotify by name, but said that he worried about the humanity being drained out of music by algorithms, about music curation being more about bits and bytes than it is about arts and craft, or curation from actual humans.
Reports of 2018 MacBook Pros having some kind of speaker crackling issue are coming in. The issue appears to stem from audio playback, although there’s been no clear pattern or cause of the issue besides that so far. It’s possible that there’s a lack of shielding in key areas that causes the issue, or perhaps some kind of interference from the new T2 chip, or even something as simple as audio drivers.
Apple may be powered by 100% renewable energy, but they’re not stopping there. The company announced a new partnership with tech companies Akamai, Etsy, and Swiss Re to develop two new wind and solar energy farms in Illinois and Virginia earlier this week. Both renewable energy projects are set to generate 290MW for the grid in the Eastern US, with the companies also planning on purchasing additional renewable energy from existing solar and wind farms.
The Migration Assistant is ridiculously good for moving all your data to a new Mac, and the Migration Assistant in macOS Mojave has one more trick up its sleeve. Accounts, documents, email, contacts, and calendar information can now be imported from your Windows PC, even from third-party apps like Microsoft Outlook, although you’ll still need to download and run the Windows version of the Migration Assistant.
If you’re a fan of the Siri watch face, you’ll be please to know there are some great Siri improvements in watchOS 5. Raise to speak is probably the biggest one, although if that sounds even remotely annoying you’ll be able to turn the option off in settings. The Siri watch face has also been updated, with a new colour scheme and more data sources than ever before. Siri also has new areas of knowledge across all Apple’s platforms, including knowing about famous people, some foods, and motorsports.
AppleInsider has an article about Apple’s removal of the doorbell HomeKit category, but that only seems to be an issue on the US website. On the Australian site, HomeKit-compatible doorbells are still listed, although the only product is August’s Doorbell Cam, which has only been announced and isn’t yet available. In any case, it’s no big deal, Apple probably just thinks there’s no need to show a category which doesn’t have any in-market products, not because doorbells are from the 90s or anything.
A theory from 9to5Mac claims Apple’s desire for ever-increasing revenue in the Services bucket is forcing them to do the wrong thing. Instead of giving everyone more than 5GB of iCloud storage, Apple wants us to pay for an iCloud storage upgrade subscription. Instead of keeping the App Store affiliate program around, they’re putting that money back into the pot. It’s an interesting take, but like all speculation, is likely we’re only getting a small part of the story.
The cheese grater Mac Pro turned 12 years old earlier this week, which AppleInsider calls the best Mac ever made. It all started with the transition to Intel, way back in 2005, with the Mac Pro being introduced as the successor to the PowerMac G5 of the same design. It remains to be seen whether we’ll ever see that kind of Mac from Apple ever again.
A new Apple Pay Cash ad reminds us that it’s not available outside of the US. Maybe one day, it will be.