Welcome back to the show, freshly-unfrozen host emeritus, Jason Snell.

⏱️⏱️⏱️

Dan Moren: As part of the final Epic vs. Apple case decision, Apple is now allowing links to payments outside the App Store; I’m curious if you see this actively changing the state of how the App Store works, if it’ll stave off scrutiny from regulators, or do you think it’s just a sop?

I think Apple is asking too much of developers for any quantity of them to go through the hassle of getting the entitlement, tracking their users’ payments, paying the commission, and reporting back to Apple. I also don’t think that it’ll stave off any upcoming regulations. If anything, I think governments will loudly proclaim that Apple’s commission fee is too high, but then waffle about what they can do about it.

Apple is playing with fire here, and I can’t help but think they’re going to get burned.

⏱️⏱️⏱️

Jeff Carlson: Do you use, or have you ever used, the blood oxygen feature of the Apple Watch? Are there other health/wellness features that you do use?

Only in passing curiosity have I used the blood oxygen sensor of my Apple Watch. I think it’s a good feature to have available, and I’m frustrated that Apple has let the situation get so far that new watches are being sold without a major health/wellness-focused feature. But it’s also not a capability that I think about very often, and I don’t think its absence will have a notable impact on sales.

I would love for there to be a resolution though, so I could stop hearing about it.

⏱️⏱️⏱️

Jason Snell: Are you buying a Vision Pro; if so, why or why not? If not, what would make you consider one in the future?

I awoke early on Friday morning so that I could man the pre-order battle station that consisted of my Mac mini, iPad Pro, and iPhone all waiting patiently at store.apple.com. But I needn’t have worried about securing a unit on Day 1. Within five minutes of pre-orders going live at 8:00 am, I ordered a 512 GB Apple Vision Pro with the travel case and AppleCare.

The checkout process went quite smoothly for me, and I couldn’t be more excited about the prospect of spatial computing.

⏱️⏱️⏱️

Shelly Brisbin: When was the last time that you purchased a piece of physical media (like a TV show, movie, or music), and when that happened, did you do that because of some unavailability in the streaming world?

I make a concerted effort not to purchase stuff that will just sit on a shelf, so I really don’t remember the last time I intentionally bought a piece of physical media. I’ve been gifted a handful of paperback and hardcover books, but those weren’t my choice to receive.

Oh. Just kidding. I looked to my right and saw Michael Flarup’s The macOS App Icon Book copy that I had purchased on Kickstarter many, many months ago. I guess that and The iOS App Icon Book that came with it were certainly the most recent examples of my recent physical media pick-me-ups.

I’m looking forward to perusing them over time.

⏱️⏱️⏱️

Bonus Topic: Snow: Yay or Nay?

A hefty, heartfelt “Yay!” from us over at Scotts Cobble Nordic Center. I love watching the snow, playing in it, and more. If the winter is going to be cold — and it is — we might as well have the snow to make it more fun.

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Overtime Topic: How do you use the iPad, if you do?

I split my time pretty regularly between a 2020 11-inch iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard and a 6th-gen iPad mini. The bigger iPad comes with me to work and is my go-to for watching videos and anything I need to type out so that I can use the Magic Keyboard.

The iPad mini is mostly a home tablet for me. It’s where I do a whole bunch of reading because the size is much more conducive to holding for any length of time. It’s also my cellular version, so it makes most trips with me.

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There are certainly some notable times coming Apple’s way this year. I hope they’re ready for scrutiny from customers about the Vision Pro as a new product line and from regulators trying to even the competitive landscape.

Crashing Clockwise Podcasts

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

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1️⃣ The Bearded Teacher made an excellent video showing off the Apple Shortcuts app. He took requests for shortcuts folks wanted made, and then walked through step-by-step how to make each one. There were some great ideas here, and I immediately set up an automation to silence unknown callers from 7pm-7am. [▶️ Stephen Robles // youtube.com]

2️⃣ Devon Dundee made an incredible shortcut that talks directly to the Trakt and The Movie Database APIs to log things you watched in your Journaling app of choice. [🔗 @devondundee // mastodon.social]

3️⃣ The unstoppable Robb Knight made a Humonize! site for listeners of Connected who don’t want to give up the humming of the Rickies. If that doesn’t make any sense to you, I can’t blame you. [🔗 Robb Knight // hum.rknight.me]

4️⃣ This new electric stovetop has a battery, works off a standard plug, can cook a meal in a power outage, and looks super sleek! [🔗 Emily Pontecorvo // heatmap.news] (Via Jason Kottke)

5️⃣ Did you know there’s a QuickLook app for Windows (press the spacebar to preview files, like on macOS)? Me neither! But I guess there is! [🔗 QuickLook // apps.microsoft.com] (Via @techalter)

6️⃣ Feedle is an RSS search engine where every search is an RSS feed. Use it to discover blogs and podcasts, or keep up with a topic over time. [🔗 feedle.world] (Via Lou Plummer)

7️⃣ This may look hype-y, and it kind of is, but it’s also a fair and compelling look back at the Steve Jobs to Tim Cook transition at Apple, and beyond. [▶️ fpt. // youtube.com]

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52 Albums Project

Lukas Graham by Lukas Graham (2015) — #3/52

I like that he’s got a distinctive voice that cuts through the noise. I like that each song has a compelling story to tell. But most of all, I love how fun this album is. I’m sure there will be more Lukas Graham shared here, but his debut album is the place to start!

Follow along on the 52 Albums Project page where I’m making some playlists for you.

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Take a Chance

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Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things 52 Albums

Overcast, the podcast app by the internet’s Marco Arment, has long reigned supreme in the podcast nerd corner of the Apple-sphere. It’s a fast and reliable app, made by someone who cares a ton about audio quality, so it also helps your shows to sound their best. Maybe a year ago or more, I discovered something new in the app, which surprised me because I thought I knew everything there was to know about Overcast.

I’ve saved hundreds of hours with the app (not even getting into the thousands I’ve spent using it), exported dozens of episode clips, and made several shortcuts that take advantage of some of Overcast’s niche features. I’m what you might call a “podcast power user”. And still, this was new. I hadn’t seen anyone talk about it but was such a smart feature that I couldn’t believe it was flying under the radar. Even in the intervening year that this blog post has sat in my drafts folder, no one else seemed to notice it.

Okay, that’s enough lede. What is this thing? It’s a game. Within Overcast. Yep, now Marco is a game designer too. But it’s not just any game — it’s a watchOS game… which might explain why it’s gone essentially undiscovered. I don’t think many folks are spelunking through watchOS apps — the few that there are — these days.

So, why is there a game within Overcast? To keep up with the likes of James Thomson’s PCalc? Nope. While PCalc’s game-with-an-about-screen-gone-independent-app served to scratch a particular experimental development itch of James’s, Overcast’s game serves a more functional purpose: to distract you from the otherwise listless time necessary to download a podcast directly to the Apple Watch for offline listening.

You see, Marco has tried for years to optimize Overcast’s watchOS app to download podcast episodes in the background so that they’re always ready for you to listen to sans phone, say when you’re out for a run. But, from what he’s said many times on ATP, watchOS app development is often fraught, and getting background activity to work is even more challenging. So, despite his best efforts, sometimes the playlist of shows you’ve set to automatically download to the watch (you can choose one in the watch app’s settings) isn’t up-to-date. Sometimes you’ve got to manually hit the download button on a particular show, which means waiting with your wrist raised, lest the screen turn off and app activity paused, until the show finishes downloading. This is where Overcast’s breakout game comes in.

Actually, I should capitalize that as Overcast’s Breakout game. Because when you manually start to download an episode, what pops up but a bespoke version of Breakout. You know Breakout, that classic Atari arcade game in which you bounce around a little ball, aiming for tiles along the top of the screen by bouncing it off a paddle that you control along the bottom. When you hit a tile, it disappears. When all the tiles have been eliminated, you win that level and move on to a harder one with a smaller paddle and faster movement. I spent many many hours playing Breakout on my iPod nano, where it was called Brick.

In Overcast’s version, though, the tiles are made of the show artwork from your library of podcasts, which is a nice touch. All the while that you’re playing the game, operating the paddle by scrolling up and down with the Digital Crown, your podcast downloads in the background. There’s a loading bar along the bottom edge so that you can keep an eye on its progress. There’s no high score screen, game saves, or any way to share achievements. It’s just a nice time-filler that serves to keep you engaged with the app so that it can finish its job uninterrupted. It’s a workaround to a problem that Marco could have solved with a simple “Podcast downloading, please wait…” message. But because he’s respectful of his users and knows that’s not a great experience, he went all-out and built a whole goddamn game into his podcast app to make a loading screen fun.

I find that kind of indie developer whimsy so delightful.

Apps Podcasts

This week’s conversation was quite lively! I loved the bonus theme effects!

⏱️⏱️⏱️

Mikah Sargent: Tell me about the screens that you regularly use to watch content.

If we’re talking TV or movies, most of it happens on our main television in the living room. It’s a reasonably large (can’t remember the size) OLED screen from LG that my wife and I picked up in 2020, I think. We’ve loved it. It’s so much better than the old hand-me-down TV that we had before and that now serves as a workout screen for TV+ mostly.

But I do just as much, if not more, watching of YouTube videos, Instagram Reels, and occasional long-form content on my phone or iPad. It’s probably pretty even between the two. I tend to save up the good stuff to watch on our big TV, but Vision Pro might change all that soon.

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Zac Hall: It seems like this year is the year of bespoke AI hardware like the Humane Ai Pin, Rewind Pendant, and Rabbit R1. Is there an app on your phone that you’d actually carry around bespoke hardware for instead of using the app?

The Rabbit R1 is the most compelling AI hardware that I’ve seen so far. I think their ‘Large Action Model’ idea is huge and could inform the next set of big AI leaps. But I’d find it infinitely more compelling if it were built into the OS of the phone I already carry and that already has all my apps and info. So, conversely, I’d rather carry around the R1 as an app, rather than more apps as hardware.

But, in the spirit of the question, I think I’d too go back to a physical manifestation of the Music app, like an iPod nano that works with my Apple Music library.

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Dan Moren: Have you seen anything announced at this year’s CES that you’re genuinely interested in?

In short, no. But that’s not because they’re all stinkers this year. I just haven’t had the time to follow the coverage, so I don’t know much about the gizmos and gadgets introduced at this year’s show. The Rabbit R1 might be the only thing that I could identify as introduced last week and that sounded at least up my alley.

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Jason Howell: What is the absolute best way to point at things on a screen, and why do you feel that way?

In the debate between trackpad and mouse, I’ve been Team Mouse for many years. Trackpads are great on laptops or for the iPad’s Magic Keyboard, but given the opportunity to use a bigger screen, I’ll always go for the mouse. And which mouse, do you ask? The Magic Mouse is the best one I’ve ever used. People say it’s unergonomic, but my recent attempts to make it more ergonomic with a bigger profile have only led, ironically, to more pain in my wrist and forearm. I love its small and light form factor and its gestures so very much.

I do still have a trackpad sitting on the other side of my keyboard, but it rarely gets used, and only then just for broad gestures.

⌚⌚⌚

Bonus Topic: When you were young and you stayed home sick from school, which show do you remember watching on TV?

I think I watched most of How I Met Your Mother during sick days at home. Or at least that’s how I remember getting into the show. Price Is Right certainly was in the mix, but HIMYM was my go-to.

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Overtime Topic: What app are you forced to use, even though you dislike it, and why do you have to use it?

I’m going to choose to include web apps in the pool because there is no app that I dislike using more than Constant Contact.

<rant>I have to use it at work to send out our local shop’s email newsletter every week or so, and I hate every minute of it. The WYSIWYG tools feel like they haven’t been updated since about 2007, it’s slow, buggy, and very difficult to create anything that looks remotely good with it.

I’d much prefer to write everything in Markdown with a very simple layout, but that’s not an option. It takes me hours, and I hate it.</rant>

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Can’t wait for next week, which, because of my delay in getting to last week’s show, is only a couple of days away!

Crashing Clockwise Podcasts

I spent some time over the last week (and a lot today) reworking the Letters project into the PenPals project. I was inspired by Kev Quirk’s organization of his emails back and forth with readers (like yours truly!) on one page. Since the project really is about the conversation, it made sense to have all the letters live together and bring some cohesion to the project, rather than have them spread across many blog posts.

As for those old blog posts, I didn’t want to remove them from the site. Instead, I employed ChatGPT to help me write summaries for each partial exchange as teasers for the full conversation and updated each post with them. Here’s an example from one set of letters with Jason Becker. I’ll probably do the same thing going forward, that way each new update can still have a blog post announcing it in the feed and archive, but the conversation will reside on that specific person’s page. A living document, if you will.

Getting this all put together was a larger hurdle than I expected. First, I experimented with the CSS, which is heavily inspired by Kev’s design on his site. Then I had to go back through each blog post, copy and paste each email into its own <div>, generate and edit the summaries, update all the links from letters → penpals, write up a little blurb about each correspondent, and then, finally, check each one. Hopefully, I didn’t make any goofs.

But now I’m all caught up and am really pleased with how they turned out. Here’s Robert Silvernail’s page. And now that I’ve got templates made, each future exchange should be much easier to manage.

Speaking of which, I’m wide open for 2024 if you’d like to be my penpal for a month. You can read the guidelines and all the previous letters right here at /penpals to get an idea of what it’s like. I’d love to talk with you!

Oh, and why “PenPals” project? I think the term describes what’s happening here a little better than “Letters” project. And because I’m a sucker for alliteration.

Hope to talk to you soon,

Jarrod

PenPals

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

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1️⃣ MrMobile (and the rest of the team at Clicks) made a physical keyboard case for the iPhone and it looks… well, it actually looks quite cool! There’s no version for my beloved Mini, and I doubt I’d enjoy having a longer, heavier phone, but I can absolutely see the benefit to smartphone power typists and content creators. The whole launch video is excellent. 🔗 clicks.tech]

2️⃣ I’m going to go ahead and say there’s a lot of AI automation that goes unreviewed before items are put on sale on Amazon. 🤦‍♂️ [🔗 Elizabeth Lopatto // theverge.com]

3️⃣ With a domain name like buttsdotlol.tumblr.com, are you really expecting anything else? 🤣 [🔗 buttsdotlol.tumblr.com] (Thanks Robb)

4️⃣ I’ve been wondering how many immersive environments will come with the Vision Pro, and how many separate apps you’d have to download if you wanted more of them. Looks like with Flowriter, you could generate an effectively infinite number of them. [🔗 flowriter.ink]

5️⃣ This Instagram redesign concept video is comprehensive while being entertaining, and I’d be hard-pressed to find one of its suggestions that I don’t agree with. [🔗 Juxtopposed // youtube.com]

6️⃣ There’s a page to see the most popular pages on Wikipedia per specified timeframe. I wasn’t surprised by 2023’s top page, but there were others on that list that I wouldn’t have guessed. [🔗 pageviews.wmcloud.org]

7️⃣ “You think you’ve seen Tiny Desk performances, but you haven’t seen this.” [🔗 NPR Music // youtube.com] (Via Matt Mullenweg)

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52 Albums Project

Welcome to the Black Parade by My Chemical Romance (2006) — #2/52

This album got me through most of middle school — it was perhaps the first “edgy” music I started listening to. Certainly, it helped me process my young teenage angst. Still, I turn to it when I need to release some inner turmoil.

Follow along on the 52 Albums Project page where I’m making some playlists for you.

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Take a Chance

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Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things 52 Albums

For any climbers out there, this is far and away the best video I’ve come across (and I’ve watched a ton of them) that shows how to safely set up an extended top rope anchor over an edge using an instructor tether. Bonus tips include how to cleanly deploy your rope without tangles or dropping it, and how to swiftly transition to a rappel to get back to the ground.

I appreciate that the instructor is cool, calm, collected, and very clear about what he’s doing and why. He neither rushes nor cuts any corners, showing the entire process from start to finish. That’s a quality which is rare in many instructional videos. Personally, I like to see how people do their thing from step zero. If I don’t need to review a section, I’ll skip through it myself. By leaving out (or speeding up) bits that seem trivial, it robs viewers of the chance to learn additional skills that might not be the main point the instructor is trying to showcase.

For example, the whole reason I revisited this video tonight is because I wanted to review how he managed the climbing rope while hanging over the edge in vertical space. Too often, I find myself fumbling or tangling the rope as I try to clip its middle to the anchor and lower the ends to the ground. That wasn’t the focus of this video — which instead was to show how to get the master point extended over an edge — but because he showed and explained the whole thing, I picked up so much more.

(I wish I could find this instructor’s name — I so like his style. But it’s not listed anywhere I could find on the Videoracles website, which, by the way, has an excellent domain name: rockclimb.video.)

P.S. Happy birthday, Ma.tt!

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Update (2024-01-14): Thanks to reader Luke Lechel, apparently the guide’s name is Roddy McCalley. Thanks Luke!

Climbing

Kevin Systrom, CEO and co-founder of Artifact, on its Medium blog:

We’ve made the decision to wind down operations of the Artifact app. We launched a year ago and since then we’ve been working tirelessly to build a great product. We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way. It’s easy for startups to ignore this reality, but often making the tough call earlier is better for everyone involved.

Darn. This was one of the best link aggregators out there, and a really slick app to use. Although I didn’t open it daily, Artifact was establishing itself as the place where I went to learn about things happening outside my typical internet bubble.

There were a lot of details to the reading view that the Artifact team — led by the Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger — got right:

• One-tap striped-down reader view
• One-tap listening mode with high-quality voices
• One-tap native share sheet
• One-tap read later button
• One-tap AI summaries

And I appreciated that by default it brought you to the website of publication, just as the Internet intended.

Even posting links was nice:

• Ability to pull in images right from the link
• You could include a description, again pulled automatically if you wanted, with the link (but you didn’t have to!)

I thought of Artifact as the spiritual successor to Nuzzle, the link aggregator built atop of old-Twitter. I think the team thought of it as a news-focused Twitter successor based around links. But I guess they couldn’t get a viable business going there. It doesn’t go unnoticed that they’re doing what appears to be the responsible thing by winding it down¹ rather than burn more cash until it utterly fails.

I do wonder if it would have had a brighter future without the ability to add comments. I never engaged with that social aspect of the service, and I expect it contributed massively to its complexity and moderation costs. Either way, another new-Twitter bites the dust.

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1. Viewing posts and links will remain functional through the end of February, even though you can no longer post new links or comments. You can, and should, download the app and check out its design. And developers of news feeds and reading apps, please take notes.↩︎

Apps

A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.

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1️⃣ This is an incredible(ly clever) blog built atop of Bear Blogs. [🔗 library.xandra.cc]

2️⃣ Robb made a live word cloud for the App Defaults blogging trend! [🔗 Robb Knight // rknight.me]

3️⃣ Ben Yafai’s home page has a color-changer fidget toy that I love. Actually, there are a bunch of little elements around his site that are super clever. [🔗 ben.yaf.ai]

4️⃣ Man, humans are so cool. A 13-year-old just scored the new world record in Tetris and his reaction is priceless. [🔗 kottke.org]

5️⃣ I missed this iPhone ad when it came out a few weeks ago. It’s so good! Very creative. I almost felt bad for the power outlet. [🔗 Apple // youtube.com]

6️⃣ You know how all those analog-to-digital writing systems you had to write on certain paper and maybe scan it into an app afterward? This Nuwa Pen promises that you can write on any paper because the smarts (camera) is built into the pen. You still have to use their app, and now you also have to charge your pen. 🙄 But it does look pretty cool. I’d definitely want to see reviews once it’s out though. [🔗 nuwapen.com]

7️⃣ RSS Parrot lets you follow a Fediverse account for any RSS feed. [🔗 rss-parrot.net] (via Robb Knight)

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52 Albums Project

And now for something new! Inspired by Matt Birchler’s 365 Albums Project, I’ll be sharing one of my favorite albums each week this year as part of 7 Things. I don’t promise to share why I like each one — although I might! — I just promise to share a great album each week that I think you should listen to. (Links will be to album.link so you can listen in your music provider of choice.)

If you have (good) things to say about any of my choices, I’d love to hear them. No bummers, please!

Here we go…

~How I’m Feeling~ by Lauv (2020) — #1/52

It’s only been out for three years, but ~How I’m Feeling~ has to be one of my most-played albums of all-time. Lauv’s crystal-clear vocals ring true and carry forth all the emotion you’d expect from an album with such a title. It’s catchy from start to finish. It’s well-produced, yet raw. It makes me feel things. I love it.

Another life, another story…

Follow along on the 52 Albums Project page where I’m making some playlists for you.

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Take a Chance

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Thanks for reading 7 Things. If you enjoyed these links or have something neat to share, please let me know. And remember that you can get more links to internet nuggets that I’m finding every day by following me @jarrod on the social web.

7 Things 52 Albums

Making predictions right before each Apple event is too easy — there’s all the rumors these days! This year, I want lay my cards out on the table early so that I can bask in the glory of ‘being right points’ as soon as they happen.

But let’s make this interesting by playing by The Rickies grading system. Correct picks in Round 1 (slots 1-8) and Round 2 (slots 9-16) will be worth 1 point each. Round 3 predictions (slots 17-24), are the riskiest picks and will be worth a whole 3 points each, but any wrong picks in this round will deduct 1 point apiece.

Total possible points: 48

Let’s do this.

Round 1 (the optimistic picks)

1. Vision Pro will be previewed in January.
2. Vision Pro will go on sale in February.
3. Vision Pro will have multiple storage tier options.
4. The next Apple Watch will be called Series X but pronounced “ten”.
5. The Music app will get a major revision.
6. The Apple TV will be revised and include the A17 Pro chip.
7. All new Apple TVs and at least some new iPads will be Carbon Neutral.
8. Apple will commemorate the Mac’s 40th anniversary with some kind of video.

Round 2 (with a few bummers)

9. Mac Pro will not get a beefier “Extreme” series chip.
10. The iPhone SE will be revised but will be larger than the iPhone mini (and I will be sad).
11. There will be no new Apple external display revisions or introductions.
12. FineWoven products will get a major revision that increases durability and premium qualities, but the brand name will remain.
13. At least one new face will join and at least one will depart Apple’s Leadership webpage.
14. An Apple Pencil Pro will replace the Apple Pencil 2.
15. Apple TV+ content will win more Emmy and Oscar awards than in 2023.
16. Apple will acquire at least one household name company (think a NeXT, Beats, Shazam, or Dark Sky).

Round 3 (Risky Picks)

17. Vision Pro will ship in March.
18. There will be a Fitness+ aspect to Vision Pro.
19. AirPods Max will get a revision that includes lossless audio and a lighter-weight design.
20. Lossless audio and other high-bandwidth device-to-device data transfer will be enabled through Ultra Wideband radio chips.
21. iPadOS will gain multi-stream audio capabilities, good for podcasting from the iPad.
22. Shortcuts Personal Automations will come to the Mac.
23. Always-on system extensions will be introduced in iOS/iPadOS to enable things like third-party clipboard managers, text expansion, or launcher apps.
24. Apple will host at least one live event with presenters and an audience in the Steve Jobs Theater.

I Challenge Thee!

Want to make this a thing? I challenge other bloggers to write up their 24 predictions and send me a link. I’ll post them below and at the end of the year we can get together to grade our results. The Winner gets, I dunno, their score in dollars to go toward their blog hosting fees for the next year — crowdfunded by The Losers? Anyone who wants to could ante up $48, and the leftover cash after rewarding The Winner could get pooled and donated to a worthy cause. Or you could just play for glory, that’s great too! Just spitballing here.

Anyway, I’d love to see what you predict Apple will do in 2024!

You could be the first challengee…

Picks not picked

• Kagi will become a built-in search engine option (although, perhaps it shouldn’t be).
• The standalone iTunes apps will go away on all platforms in favor of separate in-app storefronts, but there will still be references to “iTunes”.
• Next-generation CarPlay will not be available on any car that costs less than $100,000.