daring-rss

Luke Bouma, reporting for Cord Cutters News:

Are you one of the Netflix customers who still pay your Netflix
bill through Apple? For years now, Netflix has not accepted new
subscribers or rejoined members who want to use Apple to pay their
bills. If you already had an active account, though, that paid
through Apple you could continue to do so. Now, though, that seems
to be coming to an end.

Today, Netflix started to inform customers that Apple will no
longer be accepting Apple Pay through iTunes Subscriptions, for
example.

Netflix stopped accepting new subscriptions from in-app purchases five years ago, but until now had allowed existing in-app subscriptions to keep going — and for many of those users, at lower prices than they currently offer.

Netflix and Apple used to be partners; now they’re rivals. Dropping support for the remaining legacy iTunes accounts isn’t nearly as big a deal as Netflix eschewing a native VisionOS app, but still, it’s a sign of how far apart the two companies are today. Apple TV didn’t have an App Store until the fourth-gen models (a.k.a. “Apple TV HD”) were introduced in 2015. But back in 2010, Apple included a Netflix “app” in the second-gen Apple TV, along with YouTube and Flickr. Those services were integrated right into the system software. That seems like forever ago.

Also, hats off to Cord Cutter News for their humility. Netflix’s stock was up 2 percent today. Surely that’s because this news came as “a relief to investors” — but Cord Cutter News took no credit for it.

 ★ 

Luke Bouma, reporting for Cord Cutters News:

Are you one of the Netflix customers who still pay your Netflix
bill through Apple? For years now, Netflix has not accepted new
subscribers or rejoined members who want to use Apple to pay their
bills. If you already had an active account, though, that paid
through Apple you could continue to do so. Now, though, that seems
to be coming to an end.

Today, Netflix started to inform customers that Apple will no
longer be accepting Apple Pay through iTunes Subscriptions, for
example.

Netflix stopped accepting new subscriptions from in-app purchases five years ago, but until now had allowed existing in-app subscriptions to keep going — and for many of those users, at lower prices than they currently offer.

Netflix and Apple used to be partners; now they’re rivals. Dropping support for the remaining legacy iTunes accounts isn’t nearly as big a deal as Netflix eschewing a native VisionOS app, but still, it’s a sign of how far apart the two companies are today. Apple TV didn’t have an App Store until the fourth-gen models (a.k.a. “Apple TV HD”) were introduced in 2015. But back in 2010, Apple included a Netflix “app” in the second-gen Apple TV, along with YouTube and Flickr. Those services were integrated right into the system software. That seems like forever ago.

Also, hats off to Cord Cutter News for their humility. Netflix’s stock was up 2 percent today. Surely that’s because this news came as “a relief to investors” — but Cord Cutter News took no credit for it.

Read More 

My thanks to Sonar for sponsoring last at DF. Sonar is music to my ears: a brand-new totally Mac-assed app for for GitHub and GitLab issues.

Sonar combines the lightweight UI of a to-do app with the power of enterprise-level issue tracking, all in a native app built by long-time Mac nerds. The interface is deceptively simple, and very intuitive. Fast and fluid too. Everything that’s great about native Mac apps is exemplified by Sonar. If you’ve ever thought, “Man, if only Apple made a native GitHub client…”, you should run, not walk, to download it.

Sonar saves all your changes directly to GitHub/GitLab using their official APIs, so your data remains secure on GitHub’s servers — not Sonar’s. Do you have team members not using Sonar? No problem. Changes you make in Sonar are 100% compatible with the web UI.

Sonar is free to try for 14 days — no subscriptions or purchases required. Sonar is my favorite new Mac app of the year. You should try it.

 ★ 

My thanks to Sonar for sponsoring last at DF. Sonar is music to my ears: a brand-new totally Mac-assed app for for GitHub and GitLab issues.

Sonar combines the lightweight UI of a to-do app with the power of enterprise-level issue tracking, all in a native app built by long-time Mac nerds. The interface is deceptively simple, and very intuitive. Fast and fluid too. Everything that’s great about native Mac apps is exemplified by Sonar. If you’ve ever thought, “Man, if only Apple made a native GitHub client…”, you should run, not walk, to download it.

Sonar saves all your changes directly to GitHub/GitLab using their official APIs, so your data remains secure on GitHub’s servers — not Sonar’s. Do you have team members not using Sonar? No problem. Changes you make in Sonar are 100% compatible with the web UI.

Sonar is free to try for 14 days — no subscriptions or purchases required. Sonar is my favorite new Mac app of the year. You should try it.

Read More 

Apple:

Historically, messaging platforms have used classical public key
cryptography, such as RSA, Elliptic Curve signatures, and
Diffie-Hellman key exchange, to establish secure end-to-end
encrypted connections between devices. All these algorithms are
based on difficult mathematical problems that have long been
considered too computationally intensive for computers to solve,
even when accounting for Moore’s law. However, the rise of quantum
computing threatens to change the equation. A sufficiently
powerful quantum computer could solve these classical mathematical
problems in fundamentally different ways, and therefore — in
theory — do so fast enough to threaten the security of end-to-end
encrypted communications.

Although quantum computers with this capability don’t exist yet,
extremely well-resourced attackers can already prepare for their
possible arrival by taking advantage of the steep decrease in
modern data storage costs. The premise is simple: such attackers
can collect large amounts of today’s encrypted data and file it
all away for future reference. Even though they can’t decrypt any
of this data today, they can retain it until they acquire a
quantum computer that can decrypt it in the future, an attack
scenario known as Harvest Now, Decrypt Later.

To mitigate risks from future quantum computers, the cryptographic
community has been working on post-quantum cryptography (PQC): new
public key algorithms that provide the building blocks for
quantum-secure protocols but don’t require a quantum computer to
run — that is, protocols that can run on the classical,
non-quantum computers we’re all using today, but that will remain
secure from known threats posed by future quantum computers.

A remarkably cogent layman’s overview of some remarkably advanced cryptography. Slots right in with two recent themes here at DF:

iMessage is inarguably an advanced, wholly independent messaging platform. It speaks only to the ease-of-use of Apple’s Messages app — the only iMessage client — that so many people mistakenly think iMessage is merely SMS with different-colored text bubbles and higher-quality image and video attachments.
Apple has good reasons not to allow unauthorized third-party clients like Beeper.

Neatest of all is that Apple is rolling out this upgrade to iMessage encryption in the next round of OS updates (iOS/iPadOS 17.4, MacOS 14.4, and WatchOS 10.4 — VisionOS isn’t mentioned in the post) automatically. iMessage users don’t need to do anything other than update their software, and their communications will use the new PQ3 encryption.

One hole in iMessage’s security story is old devices — those that can’t be upgraded to the latest OS. It’s great that Apple devices tend to be useful for years after they’re no longer capable of running the current OS, but that means that iMessage communication is only as secure as the oldest device in the chat. I’m pretty sure the only reason Beeper was able to work at all was exploiting loopholes that existed for supporting older devices.

Another hole remains iCloud backups, which, by default, continue to include iMessage message history using keys that Apple controls — which in turn means keys that Apple can, and does, use to turn over data to law enforcement when issued a warrant. Only using Advanced Data Protection are Messages backups encrypted using only keys stored only on your personal devices. But even amongst Daring Fireball readers — which I think is fair to describe as a savvy audience — only a minority have Advanced Data Protection enabled.

And even if you have Advanced Data Protection enabled, there’s no way for you to know whether the people you communicate with using iMessage have it enabled.

 ★ 

Apple:

Historically, messaging platforms have used classical public key
cryptography, such as RSA, Elliptic Curve signatures, and
Diffie-Hellman key exchange, to establish secure end-to-end
encrypted connections between devices. All these algorithms are
based on difficult mathematical problems that have long been
considered too computationally intensive for computers to solve,
even when accounting for Moore’s law. However, the rise of quantum
computing threatens to change the equation. A sufficiently
powerful quantum computer could solve these classical mathematical
problems in fundamentally different ways, and therefore — in
theory — do so fast enough to threaten the security of end-to-end
encrypted communications.

Although quantum computers with this capability don’t exist yet,
extremely well-resourced attackers can already prepare for their
possible arrival by taking advantage of the steep decrease in
modern data storage costs. The premise is simple: such attackers
can collect large amounts of today’s encrypted data and file it
all away for future reference. Even though they can’t decrypt any
of this data today, they can retain it until they acquire a
quantum computer that can decrypt it in the future, an attack
scenario known as Harvest Now, Decrypt Later.

To mitigate risks from future quantum computers, the cryptographic
community has been working on post-quantum cryptography (PQC): new
public key algorithms that provide the building blocks for
quantum-secure protocols but don’t require a quantum computer to
run — that is, protocols that can run on the classical,
non-quantum computers we’re all using today, but that will remain
secure from known threats posed by future quantum computers.

A remarkably cogent layman’s overview of some remarkably advanced cryptography. Slots right in with two recent themes here at DF:

iMessage is inarguably an advanced, wholly independent messaging platform. It speaks only to the ease-of-use of Apple’s Messages app — the only iMessage client — that so many people mistakenly think iMessage is merely SMS with different-colored text bubbles and higher-quality image and video attachments.

Apple has good reasons not to allow unauthorized third-party clients like Beeper.

Neatest of all is that Apple is rolling out this upgrade to iMessage encryption in the next round of OS updates (iOS/iPadOS 17.4, MacOS 14.4, and WatchOS 10.4 — VisionOS isn’t mentioned in the post) automatically. iMessage users don’t need to do anything other than update their software, and their communications will use the new PQ3 encryption.

One hole in iMessage’s security story is old devices — those that can’t be upgraded to the latest OS. It’s great that Apple devices tend to be useful for years after they’re no longer capable of running the current OS, but that means that iMessage communication is only as secure as the oldest device in the chat. I’m pretty sure the only reason Beeper was able to work at all was exploiting loopholes that existed for supporting older devices.

Another hole remains iCloud backups, which, by default, continue to include iMessage message history using keys that Apple controls — which in turn means keys that Apple can, and does, use to turn over data to law enforcement when issued a warrant. Only using Advanced Data Protection are Messages backups encrypted using only keys stored only on your personal devices. But even amongst Daring Fireball readers — which I think is fair to describe as a savvy audience — only a minority have Advanced Data Protection enabled.

And even if you have Advanced Data Protection enabled, there’s no way for you to know whether the people you communicate with using iMessage have it enabled.

Read More 

Asa Fitch, reporting for the WSJ:

Chief Executive Jensen Huang described AI as hitting “the tipping
point” and indicated demand for the computing power that underlies
AI remained astronomical. “Demand is surging worldwide across
companies, industries and nations,” he said.

That demand showed up in the company’s results Wednesday. Sales
more than tripled in the company’s fiscal fourth quarter from a
year earlier and are projected to do so again in the current
period. Earnings surged more than eightfold. The results exceeded
analyst expectations.

Shares in the company rose 9% in off-hours trading.

That’s a big move for a company with a roughly $2 trillion cap.

In addition to ChatGPT, a number of other popular AI products have
started to hit the market in recent months, including digital
assistants for coding and business from Microsoft. Nvidia has
transformed itself in the space of three years from a company
focused on chips that help videogames run faster to the red-hot
center of the AI boom.

Sometimes a company is in the right place at right time for a pivot/industry shift. Apple was doing great in the 2000s, with the iPod and the Mac (especially after the switch from PowerPC to Intel) — and then the iPhone happened. Nvidia was (and remains) undeniably the leader in high-end gaming video cards, but now, truly suddenly, their gaming business is dwarfed by their data center AI hardware business.

Do great work and great things tend to happen. Or in the words of Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.”

 ★ 

Asa Fitch, reporting for the WSJ:

Chief Executive Jensen Huang described AI as hitting “the tipping
point” and indicated demand for the computing power that underlies
AI remained astronomical. “Demand is surging worldwide across
companies, industries and nations,” he said.

That demand showed up in the company’s results Wednesday. Sales
more than tripled in the company’s fiscal fourth quarter from a
year earlier and are projected to do so again in the current
period. Earnings surged more than eightfold. The results exceeded
analyst expectations.

Shares in the company rose 9% in off-hours trading.

That’s a big move for a company with a roughly $2 trillion cap.

In addition to ChatGPT, a number of other popular AI products have
started to hit the market in recent months, including digital
assistants for coding and business from Microsoft. Nvidia has
transformed itself in the space of three years from a company
focused on chips that help videogames run faster to the red-hot
center of the AI boom.

Sometimes a company is in the right place at right time for a pivot/industry shift. Apple was doing great in the 2000s, with the iPod and the Mac (especially after the switch from PowerPC to Intel) — and then the iPhone happened. Nvidia was (and remains) undeniably the leader in high-end gaming video cards, but now, truly suddenly, their gaming business is dwarfed by their data center AI hardware business.

Do great work and great things tend to happen. Or in the words of Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.”

Read More 

Joanna Stern, in her weekly newsletter:

There it is, everyone. My iPhone 15 Pro Max’s FineWoven case after
five months of use. The edges are peeling, the fabric is scratched
up like an old CD and it’s browning like a rotten banana. I’ve
been waiting for the CDC to show up at my house to declare it a
biomedical concern.

Some of you will say: “JOANNA! How gross are you?” Others — those
who bought this case for $59 when it came out in September — will
likely say: “Yep. Same issues here.”

Apple made a big eco-friendly deal about the FineWoven case when
it was announced alongside the iPhone 15 models in the fall.
Replacing the company’s leather cases, Apple said this FineWoven
material was “an elegant and durable new textile” and that it was
made from 68% “post-consumer recycled content.” Admirable. Except
nothing has been fine about the FineWoven case.

The accompanying photo is, in a word, gross. Personally, I like the feel of a new FineWoven case, and used one happily while on a trip to Orlando back in the fall (I like the additional grip of a case — any case — when I’m (a) sweaty and (b) using the camera a lot) but I’ve gone caseless almost the entire time I’ve owned my iPhone 15 Pro. I’ve generally gone caseless with all my iPhones, but even more so with the iPhone 15 Pro because I find the titanium so pleasantly grippy compared to the polished stainless steel of the iPhones X through 14.

But it really does seem, five months in, that FineWoven is a failure, durability-wise, compared to Apple’s previous leather cases. And I am repulsed by Apple’s FineWoven Apple Watch straps — I wish I’d bought a spare leather Magnetic Link strap while they sold them. Setting aside durability, I just find the FineWoven Magnetic Link straps to be cheap-feeling, but they cost $100.

If you own and have regularly used a FineWoven case, I’m running a poll regarding durability/satisfaction on Mastodon, Threads, and Twitter/X.

 ★ 

Joanna Stern, in her weekly newsletter:

There it is, everyone. My iPhone 15 Pro Max’s FineWoven case after
five months of use. The edges are peeling, the fabric is scratched
up like an old CD and it’s browning like a rotten banana. I’ve
been waiting for the CDC to show up at my house to declare it a
biomedical concern.

Some of you will say: “JOANNA! How gross are you?” Others — those
who bought this case for $59 when it came out in September — will
likely say: “Yep. Same issues here.”

Apple made a big eco-friendly deal about the FineWoven case when
it was announced alongside the iPhone 15 models in the fall.
Replacing the company’s leather cases, Apple said this FineWoven
material was “an elegant and durable new textile” and that it was
made from 68% “post-consumer recycled content.” Admirable. Except
nothing has been fine about the FineWoven case.

The accompanying photo is, in a word, gross. Personally, I like the feel of a new FineWoven case, and used one happily while on a trip to Orlando back in the fall (I like the additional grip of a case — any case — when I’m (a) sweaty and (b) using the camera a lot) but I’ve gone caseless almost the entire time I’ve owned my iPhone 15 Pro. I’ve generally gone caseless with all my iPhones, but even more so with the iPhone 15 Pro because I find the titanium so pleasantly grippy compared to the polished stainless steel of the iPhones X through 14.

But it really does seem, five months in, that FineWoven is a failure, durability-wise, compared to Apple’s previous leather cases. And I am repulsed by Apple’s FineWoven Apple Watch straps — I wish I’d bought a spare leather Magnetic Link strap while they sold them. Setting aside durability, I just find the FineWoven Magnetic Link straps to be cheap-feeling, but they cost $100.

If you own and have regularly used a FineWoven case, I’m running a poll regarding durability/satisfaction on Mastodon, Threads, and Twitter/X.

Read More 

Joe Rossignol, with a fun little post at MacRumors:

In the months leading up to Apple announcing the AirPods Pro in
October 2019, the company considered changing the name of the
wireless headphones to AirPods Extreme, according to internal
information obtained by MacRumors.

The name AirPods Extreme was floated by at least one member of
Apple’s leadership team, but the company ultimately decided to
move forward with AirPods Pro branding after many employees
objected to the change, we have learned.

Apple’s matrix of product-name suffix adjectives — Pro, Max, Ultra, Extreme — usually makes sense, but occasionally doesn’t. “AirPods Pro” is clearly the right name for this product, though. Calling these small earbuds “Extreme” would make no sense side-by-side with AirPods Max. To me, at least, “AirPods Extreme” would be the name for over-the-ear headphones even better than AirPods Max.

 ★ 

Joe Rossignol, with a fun little post at MacRumors:

In the months leading up to Apple announcing the AirPods Pro in
October 2019, the company considered changing the name of the
wireless headphones to AirPods Extreme, according to internal
information obtained by MacRumors.

The name AirPods Extreme was floated by at least one member of
Apple’s leadership team, but the company ultimately decided to
move forward with AirPods Pro branding after many employees
objected to the change, we have learned.

Apple’s matrix of product-name suffix adjectives — Pro, Max, Ultra, Extreme — usually makes sense, but occasionally doesn’t. “AirPods Pro” is clearly the right name for this product, though. Calling these small earbuds “Extreme” would make no sense side-by-side with AirPods Max. To me, at least, “AirPods Extreme” would be the name for over-the-ear headphones even better than AirPods Max.

Read More 

Mia Sato, reporting for The Verge:

Engadget, which is operated by Yahoo, will lay off 10 employees, according to people with knowledge of the situation who say staff were “blindsided” by the decision. In addition to cutting staff, the editorial team will split into two sections: “news and features” and “reviews and buying advice.” The news teams will focus on traffic growth, while the reviews teams will report to commerce leaders.

As part of the layoffs, editor-in-chief Dana Wollman is out, according to posts on X, as is managing editor Terrence O’Brien. People with knowledge of the situation say that there are no plans to replace Wollman.

“[The changes] will allow us to streamline our work, increase our velocity, and ultimately deliver the best content to our readers,” Sarah Priestley, who is listed as Engadget’s general manager on its masthead, wrote in a memo shared by Max Tani at Semafor.

That memo contains this gem of a sentence (boldface emphasis from original):

I am reaching out today to share that we’re making changes to our organization, which will allow us to streamline our work, increase our velocity and ultimately deliver the best content to our readers.

The sort of executive who calls what their own publication creates “content” is exactly the sort of asshole who thinks talented editors and writers can be laid off while increasing “velocity” and the quality of the work. I predict the next time Engadget is in the news will be when they’re caught in a Sports-Illustrated-esque AI-generated content (there, content is apt) fiasco.

A great brand and publication laid to waste. That’s the Yahoo way.

 ★ 

Mia Sato, reporting for The Verge:

Engadget, which is operated by Yahoo, will lay off 10 employees, according to people with knowledge of the situation who say staff were “blindsided” by the decision. In addition to cutting staff, the editorial team will split into two sections: “news and features” and “reviews and buying advice.” The news teams will focus on traffic growth, while the reviews teams will report to commerce leaders.

As part of the layoffs, editor-in-chief Dana Wollman is out, according to posts on X, as is managing editor Terrence O’Brien. People with knowledge of the situation say that there are no plans to replace Wollman.

“[The changes] will allow us to streamline our work, increase our velocity, and ultimately deliver the best content to our readers,” Sarah Priestley, who is listed as Engadget’s general manager on its masthead, wrote in a memo shared by Max Tani at Semafor.

That memo contains this gem of a sentence (boldface emphasis from original):

I am reaching out today to share that we’re making changes to our organization, which will allow us to streamline our work, increase our velocity and ultimately deliver the best content to our readers.

The sort of executive who calls what their own publication creates “content” is exactly the sort of asshole who thinks talented editors and writers can be laid off while increasing “velocity” and the quality of the work. I predict the next time Engadget is in the news will be when they’re caught in a Sports-Illustrated-esque AI-generated content (there, content is apt) fiasco.

A great brand and publication laid to waste. That’s the Yahoo way.

Read More 

Yesterday, in my piece on the new Apple Sports app, I wrote:

Live activities for your lock screen are available, but Sports
doesn’t — yet — offer any Home Screen widgets.

A bunch of readers emailed to ask how to get Live Activities from Sports. Turns out, it’s not the new Sports app that provides them, it’s the existing TV app (which has offered them since last year in iOS 16). So if you want to follow a particular game from your lock screen, from the card in Sports for that game, you tap “Open in Apple TV”, and there you can tap “Follow Live”.

That’s a bit convoluted, really. But it wasn’t clear to me at all yesterday that you couldn’t initiate a Live Activity directly in Sports, because at the time I was writing, there weren’t any live sporting events.

(Also: I wondered yesterday why Journal is built-into iOS 17 but Sports is only available from the App Store. The obvious answer is that for the time being, Sports is only available in the US, Canada, and the UK.)

 ★ 

Yesterday, in my piece on the new Apple Sports app, I wrote:

Live activities for your lock screen are available, but Sports
doesn’t — yet — offer any Home Screen widgets.

A bunch of readers emailed to ask how to get Live Activities from Sports. Turns out, it’s not the new Sports app that provides them, it’s the existing TV app (which has offered them since last year in iOS 16). So if you want to follow a particular game from your lock screen, from the card in Sports for that game, you tap “Open in Apple TV”, and there you can tap “Follow Live”.

That’s a bit convoluted, really. But it wasn’t clear to me at all yesterday that you couldn’t initiate a Live Activity directly in Sports, because at the time I was writing, there weren’t any live sporting events.

(Also: I wondered yesterday why Journal is built-into iOS 17 but Sports is only available from the App Store. The obvious answer is that for the time being, Sports is only available in the US, Canada, and the UK.)

Read More 

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

It turns out that those scores, fed from Apple to the TV app and
the Apple TV and a few select other places, are from a data
source that Eddy Cue also cares about a lot. He’s been pushing it
to be as close to real time as is technologically possible, right
down to watching his phone and comparing it to the scoreboard at
a Warriors game. And now that data source is driving Apple’s
latest app, a free iPhone app called Apple Sports, which is
debuting today.

“I just want to get the damn score of the game,” Cue says. “And
it’s really hard to do, because it seems like it’s nobody’s core
[feature].” In a sports data world increasingly driven by
fantasy and betting, Apple’s not trying to build an adjunct to
some other app business model. […]

“We said, ‘We’re going to make the best scores app that you could
possibly make,’” Cue said.

I love the idea of Cue personally field-testing the app while in development courtside at Warriors games. “I just want to get the damn score of the game” and “We’re going to make the best scores app that you could possibly make” are downright Jobsian in their clarity, and in the fact that they’re driven simply by the notion of making a good, fun, simple, fast app that is highly focused in scope.

Remember the story about Jobs and iDVD? I feel like Apple Sports is a lot like that:

Likewise, when Jobs was shown a cluttered set of proposed
navigation screens for iDVD, which allowed users to burn video
onto a disk, he jumped up and drew a simple rectangle on a
whiteboard. “Here’s the new application,” he said. “It’s got
one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click
the button that says ‘Burn.’ That’s it. That’s what we’re going
to make.”

 ★ 

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

It turns out that those scores, fed from Apple to the TV app and
the Apple TV and a few select other places, are from a data
source that Eddy Cue also cares about a lot. He’s been pushing it
to be as close to real time as is technologically possible, right
down to watching his phone and comparing it to the scoreboard at
a Warriors game. And now that data source is driving Apple’s
latest app, a free iPhone app called Apple Sports, which is
debuting today.

“I just want to get the damn score of the game,” Cue says. “And
it’s really hard to do, because it seems like it’s nobody’s core
[feature].” In a sports data world increasingly driven by
fantasy and betting, Apple’s not trying to build an adjunct to
some other app business model. […]

“We said, ‘We’re going to make the best scores app that you could
possibly make,’” Cue said.

I love the idea of Cue personally field-testing the app while in development courtside at Warriors games. “I just want to get the damn score of the game” and “We’re going to make the best scores app that you could possibly make” are downright Jobsian in their clarity, and in the fact that they’re driven simply by the notion of making a good, fun, simple, fast app that is highly focused in scope.

Remember the story about Jobs and iDVD? I feel like Apple Sports is a lot like that:

Likewise, when Jobs was shown a cluttered set of proposed
navigation screens for iDVD, which allowed users to burn video
onto a disk, he jumped up and drew a simple rectangle on a
whiteboard. “Here’s the new application,” he said. “It’s got
one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click
the button that says ‘Burn.’ That’s it. That’s what we’re going
to make.”

Read More 

Apple Newsroom, in a post announcing the kickoff of the MLS 2024 season:

Coming soon, all Apple Vision Pro users can experience the best of
the 2023 MLS Cup Playoffs with the first-ever sports film captured
in Apple Immersive Video. Viewers will feel every heart-pounding
moment in 8K 3D with a 180-degree field of view and Spatial Audio
that transports them to each match.

I speculated on the most recent episode of Dithering — which you should subscribe to! — that Apple’s immersive video sports coverage might not be for live events any time soon, but rather will be something akin to NFL Films and the heyday of HBO’s Inside the NFL. Which is to say, highlights presented in far better quality than what you see live. Sounds like that’s exactly what’s coming soon, at least.

Also, if you have a Vision Pro, go to the TV app and check out the “Experience Immersive” preview video. (Screenshot.) It’s a trailer with a slew of Apple Immersive Video clips that, mostly, aren’t yet available in full-length form. Swimming with sharks, flying over a city, all sorts of stuff. But most interesting to me are the two sports clips: a goal scored (sorry for the spoiler) in an MLS match, as seen from right behind and above the goal; and an error-scoring run in a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, as seen from the ground-level dugout behind first base. (Missing in action is the NBA clip Apple previewed for us in the media at WWDC last June.)

These aren’t simulating “good seats” at the live events — they’re simulating impossible seats. You can’t actually sit in the dugout at Fenway. You can’t sit right behind the goal, 15 feet up in the air, at an MLS match. I’m just vibrating in anticipation of Apple making sports footage like this available regularly. Even if we’re years away from being able to watch live sports in Apple Immersive Video, even just highlights after the fact should be mind-blowing. Back in the day, Inside the NFL was reason enough to subscribe to HBO if you were an NFL fan.

 ★ 

Apple Newsroom, in a post announcing the kickoff of the MLS 2024 season:

Coming soon, all Apple Vision Pro users can experience the best of
the 2023 MLS Cup Playoffs with the first-ever sports film captured
in Apple Immersive Video. Viewers will feel every heart-pounding
moment in 8K 3D with a 180-degree field of view and Spatial Audio
that transports them to each match.

I speculated on the most recent episode of Dithering — which you should subscribe to! — that Apple’s immersive video sports coverage might not be for live events any time soon, but rather will be something akin to NFL Films and the heyday of HBO’s Inside the NFL. Which is to say, highlights presented in far better quality than what you see live. Sounds like that’s exactly what’s coming soon, at least.

Also, if you have a Vision Pro, go to the TV app and check out the “Experience Immersive” preview video. (Screenshot.) It’s a trailer with a slew of Apple Immersive Video clips that, mostly, aren’t yet available in full-length form. Swimming with sharks, flying over a city, all sorts of stuff. But most interesting to me are the two sports clips: a goal scored (sorry for the spoiler) in an MLS match, as seen from right behind and above the goal; and an error-scoring run in a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, as seen from the ground-level dugout behind first base. (Missing in action is the NBA clip Apple previewed for us in the media at WWDC last June.)

These aren’t simulating “good seats” at the live events — they’re simulating impossible seats. You can’t actually sit in the dugout at Fenway. You can’t sit right behind the goal, 15 feet up in the air, at an MLS match. I’m just vibrating in anticipation of Apple making sports footage like this available regularly. Even if we’re years away from being able to watch live sports in Apple Immersive Video, even just highlights after the fact should be mind-blowing. Back in the day, Inside the NFL was reason enough to subscribe to HBO if you were an NFL fan.

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