A new collection of workouts has arrived on Apple Fitness+. Instead of a traditional theme, the new workouts are all inspired by the Apple TV+ hit Ted Lasso. Here are all the fun new workouts that make it easy to “believe.”
There’s new cycling, strength, HIIT, and treadmill workouts all with soccer-themed moves. Plus, there are two Time to Walk workouts hosted/narrated by two starring cast members: Hannah Waddingham and Brendan Hunt.
The synergy possible within a multi-media, multi-faceted super company like Apple is a little breathtaking. Especially when they know they’ve got something good to capitalize on. I hope the cast and crew of Ted Lasso are making bank on all these extras that Apple’s got them creating.
On Tuesday, Apple launched its latest foray into the financial sector: a Savings account tied to the Apple Card (which I will refer to as ‘Apple Card Savings’). From the Apple Newsroom press release:
Starting today, Apple Card users can choose to grow their Daily Cash rewards with a Savings account from Goldman Sachs, which offers a high-yield APY of 4.15 percent — a rate that’s more than 10 times the national average. With no fees, no minimum deposits, and no minimum balance requirements, users can easily set up and manage their Savings account directly from Apple Card in Wallet.
[…]
Once a Savings account is set up, all future Daily Cash earned by the user will be automatically deposited into the account. The Daily Cash destination can also be changed at any time, and there’s no limit on how much Daily Cash users can earn. To build on their savings even further, users can deposit additional funds into their Savings account through a linked bank account, or from their Apple Cash balance.
Boy, I wish those were my savings! (Image: Apple) ⌘
We knew that Apple was aiming to be competitive — they cited the Savings account was going to be a “high-yield” account before it was officially released — but the internet at large seemed surprised at just how good of an interest rate Apple secured for its customers out of the gate at 4.15%. That’s much, much higher than most savings accounts, and among the best that any day-to-day consumer can get today. Add in the slick dashboard and easy sign-up process — just a few taps through the ‘More’ menu of your Apple Card in the Wallet app, plus entering your Social Security Number1 — and I’d say it’s a big winner for customers.
Where Apple Card Shortchanges Us
That being said, I don’t foresee myself moving a bunch of money over to my Apple Card Savings, even though that’s something I could very easily do using Apple’s tools in the Wallet app. That’s because I already have a high-yield cash account through Betterment’s Cash Reserve that I like. And it’s currently sporting an interest rate of 4.20%. (Interest rates through both Betterment and Apple Card Savings are subject to change at any time.) But more importantly, it’s shared with my wife, who can access the account the same as I can. From what I can tell, Apple Card Savings allows each co-owner of an Apple Card Family account to create their own Savings, but not a common pool:
If you have Apple Card Family, only account owners and co-owners can set up Savings accounts.* Each Savings account holder will only be able to see their own account balance and details in Wallet.
*At this time, Participants aren’t eligible to set up Savings.
Everyone does money differently, but at least for my partnership with my spouse, we shared everything. The notable exception is the Apple Card, for reasons I’ll get to below. But the result is that it doesn’t make sense for me to transfer money out of one of our shared pool into another that only I have access to — especially since it wouldn’t come with any interest-earning benefit.
As for why we don’t share access to the Apple Card. Well, that’s another case of Apple getting really, tantalizingly close to an ideal product, but not quite getting it over the finish line. You see, the big draw of the Apple Card is the Daily Cash — of which I’m a big fan. Every day you’re reminded the benefits, the free money (provided you pay off the balance before it accrues owed interest) that it earns for you. 3% back for anything bought at Apple, 2% for anything purchased using NFC tap-to-pay, and 1% anytime the physical titanium card is swiped or its card number is used (i.e. online not through Apple Pay, or over the phone). The thing is, there are still a lot of places, both online and in-person, that Apple Pay isn’t accepted. Which means a lot of our transactions would earn just 1% cash back. Instead, we’ve used and loved the Citi DoubleCash card for years. Its shtick is that you earn 2% back on everything. Every purchase, no matter how it’s made.2
So why would I use the Apple Card for anything other than Apple purchases that earn that sweet, sweet 3% daily cash? The answer is, I wouldn’t and I don’t. Apple Card pays for my apps, subscriptions, and Apple devices, and that’s about it.3 The DoubleCash card rewards are simpler to understand, and earn us more money back.4 So, instead of cluttering my wife’s wallet with another card that she wouldn’t want to use anyway, we have an understanding that it’s attached to my Apple ID and pays for just those purchases (which are ultimately shared with her through Family Sharing anyway).
Another strike against using Apple Card day-to-day is that getting its transactions out of Apple Wallet and into something that has a broader view of my finances, like Copilot or Mint, is a pain the ass. You literally have to export a CSV file of the transactions each month, like an animal! Instead, I’ve got Copilot hooked up directly to my Citi account through Plaid, so every transaction is automatically loaded into my budgeting app of choice.
Okay, Getting to the Gold
I’ve prattled on about Apple Card and its Savings account’s shortcomings enough. There is at least one thing that I’m glad for, and it’s why I’ve turned on the Savings account in the first place: it finally separates my Daily Cash earnings from the peer-to-peer payments I do through Apple Cash.
For the uninitiated, Apple Cash (the artist formally known as Apple Pay Cash), is like Venmo or Cash App in that you can send money back and forth to other Apple Cash users. And it’s primarily done through the Messages app, which is pretty convenient since that’s where my friends and family discuss those friendly transactions anyone. It keeps the conversation and payment in context. It’s super easy and free, and you can even spend that money out of your Apple Cash account anywhere you can use Apple Pay.
But why is diverting the Daily Cash earnings out of Apple Cash and into Apple Card Savings5 better? Mainly because I think of the meager Daily Cash as “extra fun money” that I can choose to save up or spend frivolously. And if I need to send money to a friend to cover something that would otherwise come out of my budget, like for a meal or to cover part of a bill, it’s instead spending money out of that “fun fund”. I’ve deliberately chosen to use Cash App instead of Apple Cash because I can more accurately budget transactions there as they flow through our regular checking account.
Now, with Daily Cash safely tucked away (and earning interest!) in Apple Card Savings, I can go back to using Apple Cash as a intermediary for the checking account when doing to those peer-to-peer payments.
High(-Yield) Hopes
I used to be nervous about Apple tip-toeing into the financial world. I thought it would be a distraction from their core products, and it just seemed kind of, well, icky to do any sort of banking with my favorite tech company. But Apple, these days, is far more than just a technology juggernaut. They’ve proven that they can walk and chew gum. And while we feared that Apple Card would tarnish their brand since they’d ostensibly have to go “shake down” folks who didn’t pay back their loans, I’ve yet to hear any story of an unpleasant interaction in that regard. It could be that Goldman Sachs is bearing that grunt work and I’m just not hearing about it, but I’m pleased that it seems to be working well for both customers and Apple.
However, if Apple wanted to make it a no-brainer for even more its customers like me to default to using the Apple Card for everything, I think they need to take their, admittedly already-pretty–simple-compared-to-other-credit-card-labyrinth-point-systems, rewards program and take it a step further. I suggest making it a plain and simple 3% daily cash back for everything, but would accept a 2% minimum and higher percentages earned with special partnerships.
I truly do believe Apple when they say that one of their goals with Apple Card, their monthly installments program, and the also-new Apple Pay Later loans, is to “build tools that help users lead healthier financial lives.” Their “no fees” approach, easy-to-understand financial dashboards, and encouragement to pay off loans before they accrue interest are all very customer-first. With a few additional steps toward being more sharing-friendly and better integrated with the rest of the finance software world, they could earn more credibility, and, ultimately, more business.
I’ll note for the record that when I first tried to apply for Apple Card Savings, my application was denied by Goldman Sachs, and I was told I could contact contact them for more information. I didn’t contact Goldman Sachs, and instead just tried to apply again a minute or so later. I wasn’t prevented from trying again, and my second application was approved lickity-split. Perhaps the application process was just overloaded on day one, I don’t know.↩︎
Technically, you earn 1% at the time of purchase, and the other 1% when it’s paid off. But for all intents and purposes — again, especially if you pay off the full balance every month — you’re getting 2% back on everything.↩︎
Oh, and any transactions we make on trips out of the country. Because there are no foreign transaction fees with the Apple Card, unlike the Citi DoubleCash card. Which is pretty ironic, considering that Apple Card is not yet available outside of the U.S. four years on from its introduction.↩︎
Enough that it’s consistently covered all our Christmas gift purchases the last few years! There’s a benefit to letting it build up all year, untouched and unchecked, and then reveling in all that “free money”.↩︎
Alright, this is becoming a mouthful approaching the scale of “watching Apple TV+ in the Apple TV app on the Apple TV”.↩︎
But I’m not writing this article because the dead-tree versions of Maximum PC and MacLife are no more. I’m writing it because they were the last two extant U.S. computer magazines that had managed to cling to life until now. With their abandonment of print, the computer magazine era has officially ended.
As a budding technology enthusiast in late middle school or early high school, I was thrilled to receive a yearlong MacLife magazine subscription as a gift. It was a recognition and celebration of my nerdery. I kept each of the issues for years, marveling how it felt to geek out “alongside” the writers about something that few other people in my life cared about. I’d idly flip through them, admiring the superior graphical user interface and application library of the Mac while I still suffered through with a PC.
It was before I could get away with surfing the internet for hours and hours, and, as I see now, reading MacLife was the precursor to my tech-centered RSS and podcast devouring habits.
This news makes me a bit sad, if only for nostalgia’s sake. Honestly, if you had asked me yesterday, I probably would have guessed that MacLife was already out of print.
There’s no such thing as being lost, you’re just on a different route than the one you intended. And “should have.” Can we talk about that concept? To say you should have done something implies that there was some kind of obligation, some kind of right or wrong. It’s a thing we say to shame ourselves, to express our regret for not having done something different. It’s the mournful cry of hindsight. I feel that “could have” is a much better way of framing things.
I should have stayed in bed today becomes I could have gotten more sleep. I never should have come here becomes I could have saved myself some heartache had I made a different decision. I should have left well enough alone becomes I could have walked away. See, by reframing should have to could have you release yourself from the guilt of having picked the wrong way. Could have implies several options. Should have implies either or. And from that perspective all choices are learning experiences.
As someone who’s wracked by guilt on a daily basis for the actions I did and did not take, this hit hard. I’m not sure reframing “should have” to “could have” alleviates all that guilt, but it does make it feel like there were and are more doors to choose to go through. And we can all choose to make different decisions next time.
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
1️⃣ A follow-up to last week’s setup “thing”, Jose Munoz has got a sweet setup going to keep track of his progress in the video games he’s playing using Things and Sofa as cornerstones. He scores bonus points for 1) his uber-clean website design, and 2) the ingenious AirPods Max tie-in to his gaming setup, which he accomplishes with a good ol’ fashion cable connected to his PS5 controller. I hadn’t remembered that noise cancelation and transparency modes work over the cable, but of course it does! [🔗 Jose Munoz // josemunozmatos.com]
3️⃣ This headline is as scary as it is fascinating: ‘A strange streak of young stars is evidence of a runaway supermassive black hole, study finds’ [🔗 W. M. Keck Observatory // phys.org]
7️⃣ If you, like me, departed Twitter and found refuge on Micro.blog, you might be interested in the newest feature that Manton and team introduced: A import tool to get all your tweets onto a dedicated blog at your own domain. It integrates well within your existing blog, and puts the control back into your hands (including edits! 😉), which you can see here in Manton’s screencast. It’s going to be my project for tomorrow. [▶️ Micro.blog // youtube.com]
But between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ carcameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees. […]
Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee. The child flew in one direction, the bike in another. The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, “like wildfire,” the ex-employee said.
Still, the videos and images were certainly anonymous, so how bad is it, really?
Tesla states in its online “Customer Privacy Notice” that its “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.” But seven former employees told Reuters the computer program they used at work could show the location of recordings — which potentially could reveal where a Tesla owner lived.
Oh.
But, wait, there’s more.
According to several ex-employees, some labelers shared screenshots, sometimes marked up using Adobe Photoshop, in private group chats on Mattermost, Tesla’s internal messaging system. There they would attract responses from other workers and managers. Participants would also add their own marked-up images, jokes or emojis to keep the conversation going. Some of the emojis were custom-created to reference office inside jokes, several ex-employees said.
Maybe allowing Tesla unfettered access to the myriad of cameras on your computer car isn’t such a great idea.
(To be clear, even if it was all completely anonymized, the memeifying and blatant misuse of customer data would still be appalling.)
These folks had agreed to share their data and recordings with Tesla, but I can’t imagine any of them had this kind of access and sharing in mind when they checked that box. Not to mention the other people in and around the vehicle who made no such agreement, but were still had their recordings accessed by Tesla.
Here’s the kicker:
One of the perks of working for Tesla as a data labeler in San Mateo was the chance to win a prize — use of a company car for a day or two, according to two former employees.
But some of the lucky winners became paranoid when driving the electric cars.
“Knowing how much data those vehicles are capable of collecting definitely made folks nervous,” one ex-employee said.
I used to covet the idea of owning a Tesla. Not so much these days.
If you want to get even more angry about this whole situation, be sure to read the rest of the bombshell report by Steve Stecklow, Waylon Cunningham, and Hyunjoo Jin.
Tonight, I noticed something curious about Apple’s latest post to their official Newsroom, a blog of sorts where the company makes public statements and press releases. The post regarding the opening dates for their two newest retail stores is categorized as a ‘Quick Read’, complete with a lightening bolt icon and pop-up interaction from the main Newsroom feed. Items there have traditionally been categorized as ‘Press Pelease’, Update’, ‘Photos’, or ’Feature’1 - the differences between which have always been hazy to me. As of tonight, they’ve added ‘Quick Read’ into the mix, which further muddies the meanings.
Now, I’m not one to typically throw shade at ambiguous categorization; I’ve certainly gone back and forth in my brief time as an internet publisher on the merits of tags vs. categories, and which buckets even make sense to have ongoing. But I’ll just leave these word count comparisons here as anecdata:
Still, it’s nice to see Apple join in on the return of personal blogging with something new, however minor it may be, on their blog.
And occasional letters from the CEO, like Tim Cook’s apology for the unstable iOS 6 Maps debut. That article, I learned during the writing of this article, was taken down from Apple’s site after less than three years. Here’s the Internet Archive’s final snapshot of that page on March 31, 2015. Shame on Apple for contributing to link rot with such a highly linked post.↩︎
Dark Noise, the best-in-class white noise app, is out with version 3.0 and introduces — among other things — a subscription plan: Dark Noise Pro ($2.99/month, $19.99/year, $49.99/lifetime). I don’t fault developers who go down this route. I think they should earn additional income for developing new features, supporting new OSes, and generally keeping the app updated. But sometimes it doesn’t feel like they successfully balance the transition from a paid-up-front model to an ongoing subscription. Sometimes, it feels like you’re repaying for the same features that were already included in the initial transaction. Nobody likes it when the terms of an agreement are changed without their input or consent, so these bumpy transitions bring out the grumpiness in folks.
But Charlie Chapman, Dark Noise’s developer (and host of the excellent Launched podcast, on which he has agonized over this decision for literal years), did it right. For one, the free tier is very (too?) generous. I imagine the vast majority of users will feel no pressure to upgrade to the paid plan because of the wide selection of sounds available for free. Better yet, people who previously paid for the app before the introduction of Dark Noise Pro will have every existing feature, like sound mixing and the full current sound catalog, unlocked for them forever. They haven’t lost out on anything; the terms of the transaction haven’t changed.
This note, front-and-center in the app’s settings, makes me feel appreciated for being an original supporter, and clearly lays out the benefits. ⌘
Chapman will undoubtedly develop new features down the road, and will rightfully put that shiny new stuff behind the subscription plan. The additional income, I hope, will allow him to spend more time making his already great app even better. And if those new features seem worthwhile at those prices, I’ll happily enter into a new agreement.1 But for now, I’m very appreciative that I can continue to use the app as I always have, without needing to pay any more. It’s been a smooth transition that other developers would do well to follow.
As an aside, I always prefer annual subscription options for apps over monthly ones. I don’t want the mental overhead of reconsidering an app every month. Sure, maybe I’ll pay for one month up front to try it out, but if it sticks I’ll typically start an annual subscription. It usually saves me a few bucks overall, and it feels more fair to look back after a full year’s worth of use and then answer the question, “Would I pay for this app again?”↩︎
A weekly list of interesting things I found on the internet, posted on Sundays. Sometimes themed, often not.
Happy Easter! 🐰
1️⃣ Lex Friedman (delightful podcaster), tired of getting confused with Lex Fridman (another podcaster), created a song to explain the situation to the swaths of folks who mix them up. [🔗 lexfriedman.com/friedman]
3️⃣ The excellent Pixel Envy, written by Nick Heer, got a new coat of paint, and it looks great! I lost a good half hour just poking around the site. Very clean and attractive design. [🔗 Nick Heer // pxlnv.com]
4️⃣ Speaking of website updates, Jeff Perry has (re)created his internet home at JeffPerry.me. I love what he’s doing with the link colors and Font Awesome icons. And I’m excited that he’s a fellow Blottian! [🔗 jeffperry.me]
7️⃣ I’m always down for a good workflow write-up. This one is by John Voorhees of MacStories, detailing how he saves and manages links (and is part of the Automation April series). His takeaway: be thoughtful about how you actually work before optimizing a process. I’ve done a bit of that for my own link management lately, so it hit the right chords. [🔗 John Voorhees // macstories.net]
I think of likes on social media kind of like non-verbal responses in the real world. When I say something clever and someone around me smiles, they don’t have to think of something thoughtful to say as a response, I know they liked what I said, and that makes me happy.
I started out opposed to what Matt was saying here. Ever since moving to Micro.blog for my social media needs — another place where comments are the only form of interaction possible — I’ve felt my desire for likes and other quick reactions ebb.
But this last paragraph gave me pause. Is there a void left without a “non-verbal response” option on the internet?
