Originally published at: http://appletalk.com.au/2017/01/tuesday-morning-news170117/
Apple Music exec Jimmy Iovine says that Apple wants to do more than just music. Following an article from the Wall Street Journal speculating Apple was also investigating its own line of original TV programming, Iovine claims that Apple needs to go beyond just music, but include video content as well, and not necessarily focused on the music industry. It’s not a bad strategy, given that Spotify and Pandora’s users are mostly free — if Apple wants paying Apple Music subscribers, offering more than just music would be an ideal way to do it.
The Apple.com homepage this morning is dedicated to Martin Luther King, with a quote from him about committing yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. It’s to celebrate Martin Luther King day in the US, with Apple CEO Tim Cook also tweeting that Apple is working to help achieve justice and equality.
The latest macOS beta warns that display brightness is using significant energy. Display brightness would have always been a significant energy user, so I’m not sure why Apple is only introducing this feature right now, but it could be to do with perceived battery life issues on the new MacBook Pros.
With iPhones expected to hit the 1.2 billion units sold mark sometime early this year, making it the most successful product in history, Horace Deidu claims Apple is on track to generate $1 trillion dollars in revenue from the iPhone, possibly even by the end of the year. And despite every “iPhone killer” that comes along, Deidu writes that specific Apple qualities such as Apple’s lock-in ecosystem that allow the iPhone to stay at the top.
9to5Mac goes hands on with Apple’s AirPods and compares them to the Beats’ PowerBeats3. Both wireless headphones have Apple’s new W1 chip in them, and at the moment the PowerBeats3 are the only earbud-style headphones — at least until Apple release the BeatsX, currently delayed for at least another few weeks.
SteelSeries has released a special white edition of the Nimbus wireless controller. You can exclusively buy it in Apple stores or online, and it’s compatible with Macs, iOS devices, and the Apple TV.
New videos uploaded to YouTube in 4K resolution can’t be played by Safari, with the most likely reason being Google’s switch from the H.264 to VP9 codec. While this change only affects videos loaded from YouTube directly, embeds and previously-uploaded videos still work in Apple’s default browser.
Today I learned that the Android versions of WhatsApp and Telegram use Apple’s own emoji images on Android. Not because they’re the superior versions of the emojis or anything, but because it’s possible there’s a large portion of Android users that don’t have the latest emojis due to the outdated version of Android they’re using. Emojipedia describes this as the Android emoji problem.
Over at MacStories, Stephen Hackett explains the Mac mini family tree. The idea of the Mac mini started off as an easy computer for switchers that worked with all of their existing peripherals, but that was back in 2005 and the overall idea of the Mac mini hasn’t changed at all since then. Maybe it’s time for something new?
Jeff Geerling returned his MacBook Pro with Touch Bar for a touchless model. While he’s happy with many of the improvements offered by the faster SSD, USB-C ports, and the trackpad that remains best-in-class, the Touch Bar is mostly useless, made worse by the fact that Touch ID requires it. And there’s also some strange differences between the Touch and touchless models.