Hartley Charlton, macrumors.com:

Microsoft has confirmed to _Windows Central_ that it has ended production of the Surface Studio 2+, a premium all-in-one desktop designed for creative professionals. With remaining stock now limited to retailers and partners, there is likely no successor to the Studio 2+ planned. This effectively ends Microsoft’s efforts to compete in the high-end all-in-one market dominated by Apple’s iMac‌, a fixture of creative workspaces for decades.

​Stephen Hackett, 512pixels.net:

For years, Apple fans have looked at the Surface Studio longingly, wondering what a version of a tilting Mac desktop could look like. Many wondered if Apple would ever do anything like this machine, adding Apple Pencil and touch support to macOS, or doing some wild Mac/iPad hybrid.

It me!¹ 👋 I’m sad to see this computer go. Its ability to transform into a giant drafting-table-like touchscreen workpad brought something new and exciting to the desktop paradigm. (I still remember the “Pure Imagination” introduction video.) Maybe we’ll eventually see something like this from Apple as macOS and iPadOS grow ever closer, but I think it’s less likely now without a rival on the market.

Oh, and remember that wild Surface Dial accessory that Microsoft shipped? I completely forgot that it was introduced alongside the original Surface Studio; I thought it came out after. You can still buy it! That was cool too and I’m surprised you don’t hear more about it given how much tactical controls are coming back.

Microsoft has historically taken big swings with the Surface line, but that era appears to be coming to a close. Was Surface lead Panos Panay’s exit a cause or an effect?

Each December, I look forward to the annual “Best of Music” episode on MacStories Unwind because John Voorhees and Federico Viticci both have really good taste in music. It mostly matches up with my taste, but I always find something new to expand my musical horizons by listening to their recommendations.

I put together a collection of platform-agnostic album.link bookmarks for all the albums the guys shared this year so that it’s easy to jump to them on your music platform of choice. I also made an Apple Music playlist, and it’s saved to the collection as well.

(If anyone else were to put together a similar playlist with all the full albums for other platforms, I’d be happy to add the link to this collection! Just let me know.)

It’s from previous “Best of Music” Unwind episodes that I discovered Mitski, Maggie Rogers, and boygenius, all of whom are excellent. I’m looking forward to playing through 2024’s list today and finding some new favorites.

Music

Spatial Personas in Apple Vision Pro. They look awesome, and everyone who tries them says they’re transformational. But I don’t know anyone personally who has a Vision Pro to try it with. If you’ve got one and are interested in do a FaceTime call with an internet stranger, let me know!

Genmoji. Really cool idea, and I like that it’s a focused use case for generative AI. But people say it’s not as good as they expected, which kind of took the wind out of my sails. And I haven’t felt motivated to send one because I don’t know many other people with a phone capable of generating one on their end, and I don’t feel like doing the whole beta/Apple Intelligence explanation song and dance.

Creating a movie memory from a prompt. Again, I think it’s an ideal case for using natural language and image recognition to create little custom movie memories — which I tend to enjoy. But an opportunity hasn’t arisen for a real-world use yet.

Action mode for shooting videos. This is a bit of a stretch. I wasn’t terribly excited by this ultrastabilization feature, although I do think it’s a good one. It’s supposed to vastly improve action shots where the camera is hard to keep stable, like when running or skiing. The issue is that there are so many modes in Camera app now, that I forget to swipe around to try out new ones. I think I’d want it to just turn on — or suggest that I turn it on — when my phone recognizes it’s in a shaky, unstabilized shooting situation.

Bonus: Travel ETAs. I actually do send live ETAs with Apple Maps very often when I’m driving to meet someone, or to let my wife know when I’ll be home after an adventure. But I hardly ever get them from other people. I can only think of once or twice that I got a notification that someone was sharing their ETA with me. It’s such a great feature that I wish more people would use it!

The holidays really arrived in my household today. Not only did my wife and I harvest and decorate our Christmas tree…

…but I also decorated my macOS desktop! Developer Simon Støvring (of Runestone, Scriptable, Jayson, and Data Jar fame) has launched what’s sure to be the hit app of the holidays: Festivitas.

The one-liner description:

Festivitas brings the holiday spirit to your Mac with festive lights for the dock and menu bar 🎄

I loved watching the development of this delightful little app as Simon added the animated lights, menu bar option, the ability to grow and shrink with the Dock, and more. It’s amazing how quickly it came together — about a week! — while being a polished Mac app. Here’s its settings window, which allows fine-tuned adjustments for all sorts of things, including the colors of the lights.

I set mine to match the wonderful nano-chromatic wallpaper by BasicAppleGuy! Or you could follow Jason Snell’s lead with Apple’s traditional six colors.

But perhaps my favorite little-yet-over-the-top touch that Støvring added is the animated app icon in the Dock:

All the joy it’s already brought me in just a few hours is absolutely worth Støvring’s €4 asking price on Gumroad.

The real question is, how far into the new year am I going to keep these Festivitas lights up? If my trend with our Christmas tree is anything to go by, it will be far longer than is socially acceptable. You’ll never stop me! 🎄

Apps

David Frum, writing ‘The Sound of Fear on Air’ for The Atlantic (I recommend reading the whole piece, but these excerpts will give you the gist):

I was invited onto MSNBC’s Morning Joe to talk from a studio in Washington, D.C., about an article I’d written on Trump’s approach to foreign policy. Before getting to the article, I was asked about the nomination of Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense–specifically about an NBC News report that his heavy drinking worried colleagues at Fox News and at the veterans organizations he’d headed. […]

I answered by reminding viewers of some history:

In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated John Tower, senator from Texas, for secretary of defense. Tower was a very considerable person, a real defense intellectual, someone who deeply understood defense, unlike the current nominee. It emerged that Tower had a drinking problem, and when he was drinking too much he would make himself a nuisance or worse to women around him. And for that reason, his nomination collapsed in 1989. You don’t want to think that our moral standards have declined so much that you can say: Let’s take all the drinking, all the sex-pesting, subtract any knowledge of defense, subtract any leadership, and there is your next secretary of defense for the 21st century.

At the next ad break, a producer spoke into my ear. He objected to my comments about Fox and warned me not to repeat them. I said something noncommittal and got another round of warning. After the break, I was asked a follow-up question on a different topic, about President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son. I did not revert to the earlier discussion, not because I had been warned, but because I had said my piece. I was then told that I was excused from the studio chair. Shortly afterward, co-host Mika Brzezinski read an apology for my remarks. […]

I do not write to scold anyone; I write because fear is infectious. Let it spread, and it will paralyze us all.

The only antidote is courage. And that’s infectious, too.

For as long as I can remember, we have known Russian and Chinese media to be unreliable due to the stranglehold that the government has on it. Through bribe, threat, or law, the media does the government’s bidding in those places.

It is an ominous sign that Morning Joe felt it had to apologize for something I said.

In the United States, we’re supposed to hold our right to free speech to be self-evident, guaranteed by our Constitution. But what I’m seeing is evidence that with Trump’s continuous threats against media, there’s no need for a constitutional amendment to negate that right. They’ve already started to police themselves.

How does Democracy fall? Slowly, then all at once. The only antidote is courage, indeed. And what is “constitution” but the courage and strength to stand behind what you believe in.

If you’re paying $20/month for ChatGPT Plus just to use the API, you’re vastly overpaying.

In November 2024, I used OpenAI’s GPT 4o model via their API 218 times — over seven times per day! — and it cost me exactly $0.62. Now, before your eyes glaze over, using their API isn’t hard. I built a shortcut that does it, and it’s my primary way of interfacing with ChatGPT or AI of any kind.

What do I use the API for? I use their model to generate a description for every image that I post online. For each image that I post to social media and my blog, they all get sent first through to OpenAI to look at, and it returns a short description that I can edit if necessary (it’s rarely necessary). I even built a Make.com automation that takes all the photos I post to Instagram and routes them through OpenAI for a description before automatically crossposting them to my blog.

I used it to generate a description for the screenshot of the chart above in this very blog post. Here’s what OpenAI came up with:

Bar graph displays daily spending in November, with green bars indicating varied amounts. Taller bars appear mid and late month. Total spending is $0.62, text indicates “Monthly Spend.”

I know ChatGPT Plus gets you access to a bunch of other features like more advanced voice usage, more image generation, building personal GPTs, and more. But at $20/month, ChatGPT would be one of my most expensive subscriptions, and honestly, I never feel like I’m lacking by using the free version.

Setting up API usage

I did this a long time ago, so I just had to reacquaint myself with how this works. After logging into your account at platform.openai.com, go to Billing. There, you can set up a Pay As You Go plan. They want you to keep at least $5 on your account, so mine is set to top up to $10 any time it drops below $5. I added $10 back in March and haven’t been charged since. I doubt I’ll make another payment before February of next year. That’ll be a whole year of usage for about $5.

And you never have to worry about something going awry and racking up a huge bill. You can set budget limits. Mine will alert me if I use more than $5 worth in a month, and I’ve set a hard stop at $10.

Once you’ve got a Pay As You Go account, go to the API Keys pane in Settings to create a new secret API key that you’ll use in your projects. You can even create multiple keys if you want to track usage across different projects.

Then get started creating! You can use my shortcut or learn how to do something new on YouTube. OpenAI’s documentation is pretty good, too. And I certainly recommend the meta approach of conversing with ChatGPT to work out your API requests.

Just know it’s cheap to use, and getting cheaper.

Update: I meant to mention that some other apps will let you plug in your personal API key to enable OpenAI-dependent features. Drafts is one example. Some apps will offer that as an alternative to paying extra for AI features since you’re removing them from needing to process your requests through their API at their expense. It can save you from needing to pay each developer directly for AI features, and I’d like to see more apps offered that option.

Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief at The Verge, announcing their new subscription option:

Today we’re launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content.

It’s a move that I’ve expected for a long time, years really, and follows behind so many other smaller publications and podcasts that launched memberships when the ad industry tanked during the COVID pandemic. Here’s what they’re restricting for non-paying visitors, and providing for subscribers at $7/month or $50/year¹:

Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay. Subscribers will also get full access to both Command Line and Notepad, our two premium newsletters from Alex Heath and Tom Warren, which are packed full of scoops every week.

I’m also delighted to say that subscribing to The Verge delivers a vastly improved ad experience — we’ll get rid of all the chumboxes and third-party programmatic ads, cut down the overall number of ad units, and only fill what’s left with high-quality ads directly sold by Vox Media. It will make the site faster, lighter, and more beautiful — more like the site we envisioned from the start, and something so many of you have asked us to deliver.

I’d prefer no ads, but I’ll reserve judgement until I see some screenshots of this “more beautiful” version. For all that The Verge writers complain about the web becoming unreadable due to the onslaught of ads, their own site has been complicit for years.

It sounds like the vast majority of the stuff I like to read there — well, the vast majority of all their stories — is going to be in the metered group. Plus, I rely heavily on RSS, and it sounds like their feed is going to be truncated going forward.

I question whether putting (nearly) everything behind a paywall will be good in the long run. I’m sure they want their work to be read far and wide. Will turning off the story spigot frustrate their loyal readers enough that they’ll go elsewhere? Or will they be invested enough to cough up the dough? It’s a big bet!

But if the meter is fair (please no “you’ve reached your one story per month” limits), it could work. It could let infrequent visitors read the (ad-overfilled) site as usual, and when a reader turns into a True Fan, they’re charged and given a better experience. And I expect the meter can be fine-tuned if it’s not working.

I’m not opposed to paying for good journalism or content in general. I get enough value from The Verge (it’s the primary place I get my non-Apple, wider tech industry and policy news) that the price seems pretty fair. But I’ll probably start with a month trial to see if it’s that much better.

Oh, and I sure would love for the reduction in ads to apply to The Verge’s podcasts, too. Their ever-lower rank in my queue is a direct correlation to how annoying their ads are alongside their lack of chapters to skip them.

Benjamin Mayo, writing at 9to5Mac on Apple’s latest rendition of the wildly popular personal music trends feature that Spotify debuted in 2016 with Wrapped (but also kind of 2015 with Year in Music):

The Apple Music year-in-review montage for 2024 is now available. View yours now at replay.music.apple.com for Apple Music subscribers. New for this year, in the Apple Music app on iOS 18.1 or later, users can also tap through to watch their Replay without leaving the Music app.

An unreserved finally is due here. For a company that touts the advantage of native apps, it sure took them a long time — they only got their offering together in 2019 — to break Replay out of the web. We all know Apple’s famously strapped for cash and developer talent, though, so who can blame them? 🙃

(But has it really broken out? As far as I can tell, the Music app is just opening a web view of the same stuff available at replay.music.apple.com. It doesn’t really offer anything new or different in the native app. Whatever, I’m calling it a win.)

Here are my top artists for 2024:

Maybe next year Apple will do something more inspired, but for now I’m just happy I don’t need to log into a web app with a decidedly long subdomain just to see some cool graphics. 🤷‍♂️

Someone should probably tell MacRumors though:

For easy access to your most-played tracks, you can add your Apple Music Replay 2024 playlist directly to the Music app. However, unlike Spotify’s Wrapped feature, Apple Music Replay remains a web-based experience, with the Music app only able to play the curated playlist of top songs once added through the website.

😬

Music

I haven’t written a whole lot about politics since the U.S. election in which we, as a nation¹, elected the convicted felon and treasonous Donald Trump back into the presidency.

Suffice it to say that I’m profoundly disappointed in, ashamed of, and embarrassed by the lack of moral character in this country that has led us back here.

But I’ve been hearing a lot of quips from liberals lately that have me worried.

“I guess I need to focus on taking care of me and mine for the next four years; I simply can’t be up in arms about every disaster.”

Isn’t that the behavior that has gotten us here? People neglecting to care for the rest of humanity and instead paying attention only to what affects themselves?

“Democrats need to take a page out of the Republican playbook and say whatever is necessary to get elected, and then just do what they think is right.”

Aren’t Republicans convinced that what they’re doing “is right”? “Whatever is necessary” sure leaves a lot up to interpretation. And when their actions are motivated by hate and fear, we have seen firsthand that the results are disastrous.

I recognize that these things are said out of a sense of defeat. What we’ve tried obviously isn’t working, so we need a new approach.

Right on cue, here’s Manton Reece, writing today after President Biden pardoned his son, with a subtly different sentiment:

Democrats need to rethink the old rules. Democrats need to say and do what’s right without giving a fuck what anyone else thinks. This pardon might be the first step.

My initial reaction is to pump my fist and give an enthusiastic “Hell yeah!” to what Manton proposes. To jump aboard the idea that we need to stop overthinking, gnashing our teeth, and fretting over every decision. Good on Biden for taking executive action where he sees fit. It’s what we elected him to do.

“Just do what’s right” seems like a simple and solid approach. Who could argue with it?

But I fear this “throw caution to the wind” attitude can lead us down a dark path. A slippery slope. The same one that MAGA/Republicans/Conservative/right-wing folks travel. One where we, like them, act out of self-interest rather than public interest. That we let fear and hatred of those across the aisle motivate us rather than love, kindness, and compassion for our fellow citizens of Earth.

We already call each other “monsters”. Villify each other. Refuse to see the humanity in each other. Do we really want to add another similarity to that list? That we, too, would say whatever it takes to get elected and then abandon any campaign promises to act solely on our gut?

I want to believe that if we all just do what’s right, we’ll make our way out of this mess to a better future. But without some consensus on “what’s right”, I fear we all start acting out of self-interest. And I just don’t believe more people acting in self-interest is going to do more good for the world.²

It’s late, and this turned more philosophical than I intended. I don’t feel like I’ve come to a strong conclusion, either here or within myself. More thought is necessary.

I doubt I’ll switch to The Browser Company’s new AI-infused-and-focused Dia browser when it debuts next year. But I can’t say I’m not impressed with their latest video. The meta angle of explaining the structure of this recruiting video within the recruiting video was a creative move. Their whole company is quite creative, really. Their Arc browser is nothing if not a bunch of creative new ideas about the interface for a web browser. One that didn’t click with me, but I can see why it clicks with so many other people.

I also think they’re dead-on when they say that AI isn’t going to be a bunch of different apps or buttons within every app. It’s going to evolve into a layer on top of everything we do with our devices. But I think that layer is going to be most useful at the operating system level, not contained to the web browser.

Still, if you don’t have an operating system to play with — and there are only a few in the world that matter — the web browser is the next best environment. While it doesn’t have access to all the other apps and data on your device (which is why plugging into the OS’s AI system is going to be most effective), a whole bunch of what people do on their computers is done in websites and web apps in the browser. And that percentage is growing, not shrinking.

Putting generative text features behind the text cursor is a genius move. I hope more products jump onto that UI. It now seems so obvious that the cursor (caret) is exactly where those capabilities should live.

The browse-for-me/take-action-for-me approach is a familiar idea. It’s what the Rabbit R1 is supposed to do. On one hand, I like the approach because it means interfaces can continue to be built and optimized for human use, and the computer just needs to learn how to work its way around the human interface. On the other hand, it seems pretty inefficient when the alternative is for sites to provide APIs for the computer to tap directly into, rather than fake its way around an interface.

I don’t know which is going to win out there, but building the ability to “click around” a human interface will always be a good backup for sites and services that don’t provide APIs.

The Browser Company is certainly one to watch in our next phase of computing. They’ve already earned a loyal fan base with Arc. That’s the toe in the door to becoming a more pervasive influence in the tech world.

Those fans — and others like me — will try out Dia just because of their reputation. If it’s great, we’ll tell our friends. Enough people switch from the big browsers, and there’s some real disruption to the current computing landscape.

Especially now, in this tumultuous time when Google has been directed by the Department of Justice to sell off its Chrome browser, The Browser Company seems poised to be a bigger player in the next chapter of the web.