Great video by Jason Snell, revisiting Steve Jobs’ old metaphor of cars and trucks in a modern context. (A transcript is available here.)
Posts tagged with "mac"
Trucks and Cars and Mac SUVs→
Our Favorite Mac Apps of 2016
What becomes a favorite app is personal, complicated, and evolves over time. Favorites can be brand-new apps that debuted this year, old standbys that you go back to over and over, or newly-discovered apps that have been around for a while. With the end of the year in sight Alex, Jake, and I got together and each picked a handful of our favorite Mac apps that we used in 2016 to share with you.
The Story Behind “I’m a Mac,” “I’m a PC”→
Douglas Queneua of Campaign US has put together an extensive oral history of Apple’s famous “Get a Mac” ad campaign. Written in two parts, the history is told by actors Justin Long (Mac) and John Hodgman (PC), as well as many of the creative minds that birthed the campaign.
In September 2005, Steve Jobs gave his advertising agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day, an assignment: Come up with a campaign that clearly demonstrates the Mac’s superiority to the PC. There was no deadline.
Seven months, dozens of tense meetings and countless discarded ideas later, the agency produced “Get a Mac.” It would go on to become one of the most succesful and admired ad campaigns in Apple’s history, no small feat when “1984,” “Think Different” and “Silhouette” are the competition. Among those legendary ads, “Get a Mac” stands out as the most overtly comedic and one of the most expansive: The team shot 323 spots over three years just to get the 66 that made it on air.
To mark the 10-year anniversary, Campaign US asked members of the creative team, the crew and the actors to share the untold stories of how the campaign came to life. What follows is their recollections—inconsistencies, errors, biases and all—lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
There are plenty of great stories shared here from a memorable campaign.
One of my favorite tidbits from the article is that Justin Long initially assumed he would be playing the PC role, because up until then he had been playing primarily nerdy parts. “Nerdy parts,” he says, “suited my natural personality.”
Setapp From MacPaw Enters Beta Testing
MacPaw, makers of popular Mac utilities CleanMyMac, Gemini II, and other apps, wants to become the Netflix of the Mac app world. MacPaw’s new subscription service called Setapp, which entered public beta today, gives users access to a wide variety of macOS productivity apps for $9.99 per month. Developers who participate in Setapp are paid based on a formula that accounts for the price of the app outside the service and the number users after MacPaw takes a 30% cut.
I’ve spent time with a preview version of Setapp, and it couldn’t be easier for users to set up. After signing up and installing Setapp, it appears as a folder in Finder with icons for each of the apps that are part of the service, but the apps aren’t installed until you are ready to use them. When you’re ready, double-clicking an app’s icon opens a preview with an app description and screenshots so you can take a closer look at what the app does before installing it.
Double clicking an app in Setapp opens a summary of the app so you can check it out before installation.
For developers, Setapp is an opportunity to stand out in a much smaller store than the Mac App Store, albeit one with competition from very well-known, quality apps like Ulysses, iThoughtsX, iStats Menu, Marked, TaskPaper, and MacPaw’s own apps, CleanMyMac and Gemini II, to name a few of the nearly 50 available as of the beta launch. By teaming up, the service should also help developers avoid subscription fatigue among customers who can pay one monthly fee for the apps they want instead of a number of small fees to several developers.
Setapp is an interesting option for consumers and, based on the lineup of apps already in place, appears to be an attractive one for developers too. We will continue to use Setapp during the beta period and take a closer look at the service when the final version launches.
Note: We will be giving away immediate access to the Setapp beta to 50 Club MacStories members in this week’s issue of MacStories Weekly, which will bypass the usual period between signing up for the beta and receiving access to the app.
Sal Soghoian Leaves Apple→
Sad news for the Mac automation community: Sal Soghoian, Product Manager of Automation Technologies since 1997, has left Apple. Details from Soghoian himself:
Q. I hear you no longer work for Apple; is that true?
A. Correct. I joined Apple in January of 1997, almost twenty years ago, because of my profound belief that “the power of the computer should reside in the hands of the one using it.” That credo remains my truth to this day. Recently, I was informed that my position as Product Manager of Automation Technologies was eliminated for business reasons. Consequently, I am no longer employed by Apple Inc. But, I still believe my credo to be as true today as ever.
Soghoian’s work on AppleScript and other macOS automation, scripting, and accessibility technologies has always been inspiring – we wouldn’t have apps like Workflow today hadn’t Soghoian pushed the boundaries of user automation at Apple.
I don’t know what this means for automation on macOS going forward, but it doesn’t feel like a good sign to me. I love his determination, though:
Q. Are you still upbeat about the future of user automation?
A. Absolutely. The need for user automation is a constant. I’ve seen the benefits and power of individuals being able to automate critical and repetitive tasks. Solution apps are great, emojis are fun, but there’s nothing like really great automation tools. I have faith in this community, and that makes me optimistic about what we can do together.
More than ever before, I’m going to keep an eye on Soghoian’s website and future projects.
See also: the transcript of Soghoian’s WWDC 2016 session on using macOS dictation to perform specific actions (unfortunately, Apple’s session video URL doesn’t seem to be working anymore).
The In-Between Macs
The current MacBook Pro line is a little bit of a mess. Even after brushing aside the last-generation machines that are still for sale, the current offerings are confusing. Both 15-inch models come with the Touch Bar, but only two of the three 13-inch models offered do.
That $1,499 non-Touch-Bar-but-still-in-the-new-skinny-case 13-inch MacBook Pro is what I’m typing on right now. It’s a great little laptop. The screen is gorgeous, battery life is great and it’s more than fast enough for what I need when I’m not in front of my 5K iMac.
It’s a weird machine, though. I’m sure Apple left the Touch Bar — and two Thunderbolt 3 ports — out solely to hit the price point, which is already higher than the model it replaces.
My guess is that this MacBook Pro will either drop in price or be replaced in the future as the Touch Bar trickles down.
Until then, it’s in the ranks of some other modern-era Macs that were caught between other products or different eras of hardware design. Let’s look at some other examples.
Craig Federighi on Why There Is No Touchscreen Mac→
CNET spoke with Craig Federighi after last week’s keynote, and one of the questions they ask him is whether there will be a touchscreen Mac (around 2:30 in the video):
Craig Federighi: At Apple we build prototypes around all sorts of ideas. So we certainly explored the topic deeply many years ago and had working models, but we decided it really was a compromise. For a device you hold in your hand like a phone or tablet it is very natural to rest your hand on the tablet and work that way. We think touch is at its best and we wanted to build, and have built, a really deep experience around a multi-touch first user interface. Grafting touch onto something that was fundamentally designed around a precise pointer really compromises the experience.
Those were carefully chosen words by Federighi. He does not say that there won’t be a touchscreen Mac, instead he notes that the simple addition or “grafting” on of a touchscreen to the Mac would be a compromise. Importantly, the compromise that he refers to is not one related to ergonomics, but rather the fact that macOS is currently designed around an interaction model driven by a precise pointer.
I agree with Federighi. I certainly wouldn’t want to see a Mac with a touchscreen bolted on, with no adjustments to the UI of macOS. But as someone who regularly uses the iPad Pro in a laptop-esque configuration with the Smart Keyboard, I see the value in having a touchscreen on a Mac, provided that there are also UI changes to macOS. I don’t expect this any time soon, but I do think it will happen.
Apple’s Willingness to Embrace Its Past→
Jonathan Zufi, author of ICONIC, a coffee table book that celebrates the history of Apple products through beautiful photography, uses the October 27th Apple event to challenge a comment by Phil Schiller in 2012 that Apple is ‘focused on inventing the future, not celebrating the past.’
Although Steve Jobs shut down Apple’s internal Apple museum in 1997 and transferred its collection to Stanford, Zufi points out that Apple has begun honoring past products more often in recent years, especially where doing so highlights the innovations of current products. As Zufi observes:
People love reminiscing about the past, and there are still many Apple fans who love to celebrate the company’s rich product history — its successes and its failures. I’ve heard from readers who simply loved the fact that they sat down with [ICONIC and] a glass of wine and lost themselves for hours reliving these old machines, where they were in their lives when they first came across them, and how much has changed.
That’s why Phil Schiller’s comment about not celebrating the past always bothered me and I’m going to disagree with Phil on this — I’m certain Apple will continue celebrating their past as they blaze the future.
Selling the past short isn’t a prerequisite to embracing the future. Apple’s newfound willingness to look back feels like the mark of a mature company that’s as confident with where it’s been as it is with where it’s going.
The End of the Mac Startup Chime→
The MacBook Pros introduced by Apple last Thursday no longer chime on startup or when NVRAM is reset. First discovered by Pingie.com, Stephen Hackett dives into the details on 512 Pixels, including a new Apple kbase article on resetting NVRAM.
The end of the startup chime is a small thing, but as Hackett observes:
…the startup chime is ingrained into the experience of having a Mac, I’m sad to see it go. A Mac without the chime feels broken, even if I know it isn’t. I don’t power down my machines often, but I liked hearing the chime when I power them back up.
It’s tradition.
It’s like losing the Happy Mac all over again.
It makes me a little sad and nostalgic to lose the Mac’s familiar chime too. It’s not a big deal, but it’s one more link to the Mac’s origins that is gone, which feels like a loss.
512 Pixels has some great links to the history of the startup chime that are a good read while you’re pouring one out for the Mac’s familiar sound.