Day: 20 April 2021

Assorted Other ‘Spring Loaded’ Announcements ⇥ tidbits.com

Michael E. Cohen, TidBits:

With Apple Card Family, a service available starting in May 2021, two people can co-own one Apple Card, sharing and merging their credit lines and benefiting equally from the shared credit history. In addition, Apple Card Family lets parents share an Apple Card with their children — including setting spending limits and controls — using an updated Family Sharing service.

This sounds like it will be helpful for, say, a couple where one person has major student loan debt or does not have a great credit history; but, now that their finances are shared, that person can benefit from the better collective credit rating.

Alex Guyot, MacStories:

During today’s keynote event, Apple announced their new Apple Podcasts Subscriptions service. Launching in May in over 170 countries, the service will allow users to subscribe to premium podcasts directly from the Apple Podcasts app. Premium shows will offer access to various perks for users, such as removing ads, releasing shows early, or providing exclusive content.

Ashley Carman, the Verge:

Initial partners include Pushkin Industries, QCODE, and NPR. It appears that content creators will have to pay Apple $19.99 per year in order to offer subscriptions, and Apple will take 30 percent of revenue for the first year of a subscriber’s lifetime and 15 percent for the years following. This means that if a subscriber only subscribes for one year, a podcaster will have given Apple 30 percent of that revenue. Podcasters are incentivized to keep subscribers around longer.

Podcasters will have to upload their subscription content through Apple’s backend, not through RSS and their hosting provider. Their regular feed, however, can still operate through RSS. Because the subscription content goes through Apple, podcasters also won’t receive specific data about their paying listeners, like their email, names, or contact information. Apple essentially owns the relationship.

The Podcaster Program Agreement appears to have a some requirements worth paying attention to if you are interested in joining. One thing I did not see in there is an exclusivity requirement. That means you can have a Patreon and a paid Apple Podcasts tier, and upload the same paid-only materials to both.

Apple’s Letter to Artists About Streaming Music Payouts ⇥ variety.com

Anne Steele, Wall Street Journal:

Apple Music told artists it pays a penny per stream, according to a letter viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

[…]

Artists aren’t paid directly by streaming services, so a single play of a song doesn’t result in a penny going into that artist’s account. Instead, streaming services pay royalties to rights holders — a group that includes labels, publishers and other distributors — which in turn pay artists based on their recording, publishing and distribution agreements. Both Apple and Spotify pay rights holders based on the share of total streams their artists garner on each service.

Yet artists cite the per-stream pay rate as an indicator of their earnings. Major labels say the average monthly streams per user is a better measure of the streaming economy, and growing numbers of streams mean more money coming in for artists. Both Spotify and Apple, they say, are at or near the 1,000-streams-per-listener monthly benchmark that is seen as a success.

Jem Aswad, Variety:

However, nuances were lost in some of the wording: The first sentence of the WSJ article reads: “Apple Music told artists it pays a penny per stream” — which does not specify who it pays a penny per stream — and while the main headline on the article reads, “Apple Music Reveals How Much It Pays When You Stream a Song,” a secondary headline reads, “Apple Music pays artists twice as much as Spotify per stream.”

It is not hard to see how the inaccuracies, which were not stated but may have been inferred from the letter and the article, could lead some artists to think that they’ll be getting a penny from Apple every time their music is streamed, or even that the company has increased its rates to pay artists a penny per stream, even though the letter specifically states that “royalties from streaming services are calculated on a stream share basis” (i.e. a song’s percentage of the service’s total number of streams, which means Apple Music does not pay royalties on a per stream basis). Ultimately, the variables make apples-to-apples comparisons (sorry) nearly impossible, but multiple sources say the two companies’ rates are actually much closer than Friday’s headlines would imply.

The penny-per-stream average is clearly an inaccurate way to measure artists’ earnings, but it does lend itself to a trivia game of estimation with your favourite songs and albums. Mike Rockwell:

My most played artist in Plex has 627 plays. Based on Apple’s average payout of $0.01 per stream, that would have resulted in $6.27. But I’ve purchased four albums for a total of about $40.

This inspired me to look in my library at some high play-count records I have to see how much they would have cost if they were streamed instead. For example, my total play count of all of the songs on “The Fragile” is 1,392. If I had streamed all of those plays, Apple apparently would have paid Trent Reznor and company about $13.92. But I added this rip of the album to my library in June 2009 — which is when I bought a CD copy for probably about $25 — and, if I had to pay $10 per month for Apple Music, it would have cost me over $1,400 to maintain my library over that time.

Of course, that’s not a per-album rate. I get millions of songs for my $10 per month. In about the same timeframe in 2009, I also added Burial’s “Untrue” to my library. I have played the thirteen songs on that album 684 times in total, leading to an estimated payout of $6.84. My CD copy of that album probably cost $15, of which William Bevan probably earned just a few pennies. Apple Music obviously has not existed since 2009 but, if it had, I cannot work out how much less artists would have made if I had streamed all of my music instead of buying physical copies.

Somehow, we are still paying just $10 per month for music in an era where streaming must be paired with live performance to have any hope of generating an income for an artist, all the while fighting the paradox of streaming music, and artists are still getting screwed in the middle of all of it. There would not be a music industry without music, but the industry gets all of the money while musicians still have to fight for scraps.

Facebook’s Media Strategy, Unwittingly Emailed to a Journalist, Seeks to Treat Large-Scale Leaks as ‘Normal’ ⇥ datanews.knack.be

Pieterjan Van Leemputten, on the Belgian DataNews website and translated by Google:

Facebook has a communication strategy ready to dismiss the data breach in which 533 million accounts, including three million Belgians , were leaked as affecting the entire sector. At the same time, the company expects this to happen and wants to use blog posts on the subject in the future to ensure that it no longer has to respond to every incident.

That is a short summary of an internal communication email that ended up in the Data News mailbox. The email itself dates from April 8 and comes from a communications officer at Facebook, and is addressed to the company’s PR staff in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).

Kind of funny how Facebook’s communications person was feeling pretty confident about the declining media attention the leak of half a billion users’ personal details was getting in an email accidentally sent to a reporter. Scraping is a fairly common practice but let’s not forget that Facebook allowed more than one to copy the records of hundreds of millions of people each without raising red flags.

The New M1-Powered iPad Pro ⇥ apple.com

Apple:

The breakthrough M1 chip takes the industry-leading performance of iPad Pro to an entirely new level. The 8-core CPU design features the world’s fastest CPU cores in low-power silicon — delivering up to 50 percent faster CPU performance than A12Z Bionic. The 8-core GPU is in a class of its own, delivering up to 40 percent faster GPU performance. This combination of CPU and graphics performance on iPad Pro widens its lead as the fastest device of its kind. Powerful custom technologies, including a next-generation 16-core Apple Neural Engine, an advanced image signal processor (ISP), a unified, high-bandwidth memory architecture with up to 16GB of memory, 2x faster storage, and up to 2TB capacity, make iPad Pro more capable than ever. The industry-leading power efficiency of M1 enables all of that amazing performance along with all-day battery life in the thin and light design of iPad Pro.1 Because M1 shares the same fundamental architecture of A-series chips, iPadOS is already optimized to take full advantage of the powerful technologies in M1 to easily handle everything from simple navigation to the most demanding workflows.

An iPad uses what is ostensibly the same processor as half of Apple’s Mac lineup. Impressive. This is the first time Apple has openly acknowledged the iPad’s memory instead of treating it as secret sauce and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it is offered in similar configurations as its Mac cousins. Unlike a Mac, you cannot customize the RAM independent of its storage; if you do not want a terabyte of disk space, you will get 8 GB of RAM.

There is a lot to love about these new iPad models, and I am excited to see the display in the 12.9-inch model, even though it increases the price considerably. But this is the part of covering new iPad hardware where I am legally obligated to express that my frustrations remain in its software. I am excited for what WWDC may bring on that front because, much as I want one of these new iPad Pro models, nearly all of the things I wish to change about my base-model years-old iPad are in its operating system.

The Redesigned iMac Comes With an M1 Chip and Is Available in Seven Colours ⇥ apple.com

Let’s start with what we can see, shall we? Not since the iMac G3 of the late 1990s has Apple used such vibrant colours on any Mac, and they look beautiful. The product photography makes the green one look like the original “Bondi Blue” iMac. If I were buying one of these iMacs, that’s the one I’d have. I wish the MacBook Air came in these same colour choices.

The new model has a slimmed-down bezel in white, which is an odd choice. I am curious about what that will look like in person, though I have not been a fan of any of the devices I have used with white bezels. There isn’t a logo anywhere on the front, but it still has a chin because that’s where the computer is.

That chin features a pastel version of the iMac’s colour that is matched in the stand; around the sides and back, it is a richer and more vibrant hue. Don’t worry — there is still a silver model available if you are boring.

I am so happy to see colourful computers again — can you tell?

It is around the back of this iMac where things take a bit of a dive. For a start, it has just two USB 4/Thunderbolt ports; on the higher-end models, there are an extra two USB 3 ports. But that and a headphone jack is all the I/O that you get. That means no USB-A ports, of course, but also not SD card reader, which I use every few days on my own iMac. At least all currently-sold iPhones ship with Lightning cables that have a USB-C connector.

This iMac also has a curious new port around back for power and connectivity. It supports WiFi, of course, but if you want to use a wired connection, the higher-end models include a power brick with a gigabit ethernet port. That means the power supply is no longer built in, which creates some floor clutter, and — most curiously — this connects to the iMac via a single braided cable that attaches magnetically. So all current Apple notebooks have cables that are firmly seated and can cause the computer to go flying if they are tripped over, but one desktop model has a magnetic cable.

Apple is pitching this 24-inch iMac as a replacement for the 21.5-inch model; it has discontinued all but the lowest-end 21.5-inch Intel models, but it has retained the 27-inch models for now. This sets up the possibility for a greater differentiation between Apple’s more consumer-oriented products — the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, and this iMac — and its higher-end products. This iMac uses ostensibly the same chip as its other own-silicon Mac models — and the new iPad Pro — and is limited to the same storage and memory options. The M1 products that have been released so far have proved to be extraordinarily powerful, but there are plenty of use cases that would benefit from more RAM and more power. That is what we can expect from the big iMac, and the 15-inch and higher-end 13-inch MacBook Pro models.

The New Apple TV 4K and New Siri Remote ⇥ apple.com

After many years, Apple has updated the Apple TV 4K and the accompanying remote control. From the newsroom (U.S. link because none of the announcements from today, aside from podcast subscriptions, have Canadian press releases yet):

Apple today announced the next generation of Apple TV 4K, delivering high frame rate HDR with Dolby Vision and connecting customers to their favorite content with the highest quality. At the heart of the new Apple TV 4K is the A12 Bionic chip that provides a significant boost in graphics performance, video decoding, and audio processing. And with an all-new design, the Siri Remote makes it even easier to watch shows and movies on Apple TV with intuitive navigation controls. Together with tvOS — the most powerful TV operating system — Apple TV 4K works seamlessly with Apple devices and services to magically transform the living room in ways that everyone in the family will love.

[…]

Through an innovative color balance process, Apple TV works with iPhone and its advanced sensors to improve a television’s picture quality. Apple TV uses the light sensor in iPhone to compare the color balance to the industry-standard specifications used by cinematographers worldwide. Using this data, Apple TV automatically tailors its video output to deliver much more accurate colors and improved contrast — without customers ever having to adjust their television settings.

This is a fairly modest spec bump. The star of the show is the new Siri remote, which looks like a hybrid of the aluminum stick from several years ago and the iPhone 12. It still has few buttons and some touch-sensitive controls, but it appears to be less fiddly than the current version and is certainly easier to tell by feel which way is upright. It is also going to be shipping with the still-available Apple TV HD — but it is only $30 less than the $179 4K.

The colour balancing feature is not exclusive to this new model. It works with any Apple TV that supports tvOS 14.5 and any iPhone with a Face ID array. I will not be able to try it until the tvOS update is released next week, but I am curious about what changes it will make to my cheap and old television.

Notably absent in this Apple TV update is spatial audio. Perhaps it is the kind of thing that will need a camera capable of tracking multiple people.