CleanMyMac X: Your Mac, as Good as New [Sponsor]

CleanMyMac X by MacPaw is your complete Mac maintenance solution. Redesigned with a beautiful, intuitive interface that makes it a pleasure to use, CleanMyMac X frees up wasted storage space, protects against malware, optimizes your Mac’s performance, and more.

It all starts with Smart Scan, the all-in-one center for analyzing, optimizing, and protecting your Mac. Here you’ll find sections to clean up unwanted and unnecessary files that are cluttering up your Mac’s drive. CleanMyMac also scans for malware, protecting your Mac against malicious third-party code and vulnerabilities like cryptocurrency miners, browser hijackers, and adware. There’s an optimization section that can free up RAM and manage login items, launch agents, and memory-hungry apps too.

At each step of the process, you’ll have CleanMyMac Assistant at your side. It’s an intelligent advisor providing explanations of everything CleanMyMac does and recommending courses of action.

CleanMyMac X has an app update module that scans your installed apps for available updates too. It’s a fantastic, centralized way to see all the apps on your Mac that have updates whether or not you bought them on the Mac App Store. When you want to uninstall an app, CleanMyMac X is there to help, deleting hidden files and any other cruft that an app would otherwise leave behind when you delete it.

You owe it to yourself to make sure your Mac is running smoothly and safely with enough storage to get your work done, so don’t wait. Go check out CleanMyMac X today. There’s a free trial waiting to help you get make your Mac as good as new.

Our thanks to CleanMyMac X for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Zane Lowe on Why Apple Music Is in the Storytelling Business→

Speaking of Apple Music and Billie Eilish, Tim Ingham, writing at Music Business Worldwide, has an interview with Zane Lowe. It’s a good interview that covers a range of topics from how Lowe builds relationships with artists to what differentiates Apple Music and what they see in Billie Eilish.

An artist like Billie Eilish thinks in sounds, she thinks in colors, she thinks in visuals, she thinks in collaborations, she thinks in all kinds of different forms of creativity. When you’re dealing with an artist like that, it opens all these other areas that you can help build things around.

With Billie, there’s color everywhere, this attitude and it’s like, ‘Wow, this is really interesting.’ At Apple, because of where we’ve all come from, we understand streaming, but [we’re thinking], ‘How can we make a streaming service that is deeper and more layered and speaks to the aspects of music we grew up loving?’

I don’t ever want to look back on my time in the streaming era and think, ‘Yeah man, great job at just building a utility.’

Functionality is so important; [a service] needs to work and it needs to be intuitive. But there should 100% be room for creative discovery and it should be 100% driven by the artists, or at least in collaboration with artists.

See also: this interview with Billie Eilish and her brother/co-writer Finneas and Zane Lowe from last month. It was originally posted on Beats 1 but you can also watch the YouTube video below.

Permalink

Apple Music, Exclusive Extras, and Merch

Apple and Billie Eilish, whose highly anticipated album WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? (out March 29) has set a new record for pre-adds on Apple Music, have launched an interesting new kind of partnership on the company’s streaming service. At this link (which is not the same as the standard artist page for Billie Eilish on Apple Music), you’ll find a custom page featuring an exclusive music video for you should see me in a crown, the upcoming album that you can pre-add to your library, an Essentials playlist for Billie Eilish’s previous hits, two Beats 1 interviews, and, for the first time on Apple Music (that I can recall), a link to buy a limited edition merch collection.

The merch drop is available at this page, which is a Shopify store with Apple Music branding that offers a t-shirt and hoodie designed by streetwear artist Don C, featuring Takashi Murakami’s artwork from the aforementioned music video. The purchase flow features Apple Pay support; both the website and email receipts contain links to watch the video, pre-add the album, and listen to the Essentials playlist on Apple Music.

For a while now, I’ve been arguing that Apple Music should offer the ability to buy exclusive merch and concert tickets to support your favorite artists without leaving the app. The move would fit nicely with Apple’s growing focus on services (you have to assume the company would take a cut from every transaction), it would increase the lock-in aspect of Apple Music (because you can only get those exclusive extras on Apple’s service), and it would provide artists with an integrated, more effective solution to connect with fans directly than yet another attempt at social networking.

This collaboration with Billie Eilish feels like a first step in that direction, with Apple actively promoting the limited edition sale and embedding different types of exclusive content (video, merch, Beats 1 interviews) in a single custom page. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple continues to test this approach with a handful of other artists who have major releases coming up in 2019.

2018 iPad Pro to Add Support for the Logitech Crayon in iOS 12.2→

In addition to the new iPad Air and iPad mini, it looks like Logitech’s Crayon stylus, first introduced with the 6th generation iPad last year, will be compatible with the 2018 iPad Pro line too thanks to the upcoming iOS 12.2 software update. Jason Snell writes:

Over at 9to5 Mac, Zac Hall noticed that a few of us—at least myself and Nilay Patel from the Verge, and possibly others—have been passing along an interesting new iPad tidbit after meeting with Apple about the new iPad models this week. I realize that people may have missed the brief parenthetical in my Macworld story this week, so it’s worth restating here…

Logitech’s $70 Crayon, an interesting stylus that originally was available for education only and worked only with the sixth-generation iPad, will now be supported by all of Apple’s current iPad models. So not only do the new iPad Air and iPad mini work with the Crayon, but so does my 12.9-inch iPad Pro running a beta version of iOS 12.2, which should be released next week.

(I haven’t been able to test if earlier iPad Pro models will also add compatibility via this update, or if compatibility is limited to the 2018 and 2019 models.)

If you don’t like the design of the new Apple Pencil and would rather use a thicker stylus based on the same drawing tech but that charges via Lightning, the Crayon is a very good alternative to Apple’s device. Just keep in mind the differences between them.

Permalink

The Case of the Late-2012 iMacs

The recent iMac updates brought additional power and flexibility to Apple’s all-in-one desktop, but didn’t redesign or modernize the iMac as we’ve known it for many years.

As the 21.5- and 27-inch machines are here to stay for at least a while longer, I thought it would be a good time to look back at the first of their kind, introduced at a press event in October 2012. You probably can’t tell if the press image above is from 2012 or 2019.

Read more