I really should have more to say about this after many years of waiting it out to get one, but the simple truth is that the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID is just a great keyboard. I probably should have caved years ago to purchase one.

Don’t get me wrong; there were things that I quite liked about the Keychron K3 Ultra-Slim keyboard that I used to use — namely, its fun, light-up colors, slick design, and trendy mechanical keys. But no one else can make a keyboard with Touch ID, and that’s the killer feature.

The Good

• The feel. I like the key travel and that it’s now more similar in feel to my iPad’s Magic Keyboard.
• The Lightning connector. That’s right, I said it. I got a Lightning version specifically. Now, my trackpad, mouse, and keyboard all use the same connector. I keep a 3-in-1 cable connected to my Mac mini, so it’s easy to hook just about anything up to it, but I won’t need to swap the tip between USB-C and Lightning so much anymore.
• The color. I love orange. I don’t love this orange, but it’s alright. I somewhat regret not just getting classic silver since the keys are white anyway.

The Bad

• The arrow key layout. I didn’t think I would mind it, but everyone is right. The arrow keys should be in an inverted T layout rather than half-height up/down arrows and full-height left/right ones. Everything should be half-height so it’s easier to distinguish them by feel.
• No backlight. For this price, it should be backlit, right?
• The lack of multi-device pairing. With Universal Control, this isn’t as big of a deal, but it’s going to become more of a problem for me in the future. When I get a MacBook Air and use it at this desk but keep my current Mac mini hooked up as the “family computer”, it will be tricky to get all my peripherals to swap to the laptop. Multi-device pairing would have made it easier to use the keyboard with my Vision Pro, too. My fingers are crossed for some sort of AirPods-like magic device swapping in the next version.

The Great

I’ve saved the best for last.

• Touch ID! Not typing passwords to login, access my 1Password vault, and grant numerous other system permission is fantastic. Weirdly, the App Store doesn’t seem to have gotten the message and asks me to type out my Apple Account password for every purchase.
• It’s quiet. I know people love the clickity-clackity of their mechanical keyboards, but that wasn’t a huge draw for me. I do better with the quiet when I’m trying to concentrate.
• Speedy connection. It connects super quickly to my Mac. My Keychron would struggle to wake the Mac, and even when it did, it took multiple seconds of my mashing keys for it to figure out its shit to start typing in my password. The Magic Keyboard has no such issues. When I press the Touch ID button, it dutifully and promptly wakes and unlocks my Mac right to my Desktop.

Alright, I guess I had enough to say about this keyboard after all.

P.S. I have a Keychron K3 Ultra-Slim, RGB backlit, 75% (84-key) layout keyboard with optical brown switches for sale. 😆 It’s in great shape. Although I’ve moved on from it, I’d love for it to have a nice home where its mechanical switches and sick blacklight will be appreciated.

I’ll match Amazon’s used price at $70 and free shipping. (Seems like it’s out-of-stock at Keychron, but it retails at $95 new on Amazon.) Let me know.

Reviews For Sale

Apple’s App Store Awards video for this year is mesmerizing. I’ve watched it many times already.

There are some really good-looking apps on the list, and I just had to buy the Apple Watch app of the year, Lumy, because it does such a beautiful job of keeping track of the golden hour, sunset/sunrise times and more.

Lumy’s developer actually has an app bundle (those still exist!) with Lumy, Calzy (a calculator), and Currenzy (a currency converter). They’re all really pretty, but what sold me on the bundle is Calzy. It has a modern, interactive widget that can replace the old PCalc one we lost this year! I, once again, have a calculator in its rightful place in the Today View.

Maybe it’s just me, but I love being able to swipe over to a persistent calculator. ⌘

The bundle of three apps cost $10 versus the $7 of Lumy and $5 for each of the others. Congrats to all the awardees this year!

Apps

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

1️⃣ Apple’s annual holiday ad gets a big thumbs up from me this year. [▶️ youtube.com]

2️⃣ James G made his own little web reader that updates once per day so that he can read his favorite websites like a daily newspaper. I love when people build tools to meet their own specific needs. [🔗 jamesg.blog]

3️⃣ For the Apple New+ readers out there (and probably regular Apple News publications, too), Parker Ortolani has a good tip for quickly getting to your favorite news sources from the Home Screen. [🔗 mastodon.social]

4️⃣ The folks behind Trello created a 40-second audio track designed to banish earworm songs stuck in your heads. I can’t speak to its efficacy, that’s just what it says on the tin. [▶️ youtube.com]

5️⃣ If this Mufasa story has been told before, I’ve missed it. And that’s okay! It’ll be fun to go into something new without comparing it to an older film, one that’s been long-held dear. [🦁 youtube.com]

6️⃣ Jack Wellborn worked on an AppleScript to automatically mark items in NetNewsWire as read if they’re older than 36 hours. Helps keep things from piling up in the read-later queue. [🔗 mastodon.social]

7️⃣ Thanks, Kottke, now I want this $420 one-time use timer that counts up for over 2,000 years. [🔗 cwandt.com]

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

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.¹

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.