And the Mac and the iPad continue to move closer together… Source: Gurman: Apple working on touchscreen Macs – Six Colors

Jason Snell reacting to an article on Bloomberg about a possible new development for the Mac in 2025: touchscreen. I’m unfazed about this rumour at all. Touching the screen will probably represent 10%-20% of user interaction use cases, while the touchpad or the mouse will grab the rest.

There is one thing that I wonder if it would be possible: can you imagine the macOS UI reacting to the finger coming closer to the screen without actually touching it, something along the lines of the hover gesture with the latest iPad and the Apple Pencil? That could be interesting to watch. Apple will need to increase the size of UI elements, right now, many things are way too small to interact with the fingers. So yeah, the Mac is getting closer to the iPad.

One last thing: I would have thought that Apple would start with the iMac instead of a MacBook Pro, though. The bigger screen and the lack of a touchpad on the iMac would make the touchscreen a helpful option.

A pivotal year for AR/VR? Hu.ma.ne are set to announce their thing this year. Apple is reportedly set to announce their AR/VR headset this year. Other than that, it is expected to be a quiet year for Apple, helping to set the stage for a focus on the headset. BYW, the updated Mac Pro, a niche product, won’t make much noise in the grand scheme of things. What else will bring noise on the line? The iPhone 15 switching to USB-C? Then what? Nothing that I can think of.

Must watch video about the iPhone photography quality. Are the photos shot on the latest iPhone 14 Pro better than other high-end phones?? Are they the best ones? There is no universal answer for sure, but I find iPhone photos to be overly processed by Apple"s “magic sauce” called: software or, better yet, computational photography.

Has anyone noticed this weird behaviour in Apple’s Photos app when browsing images shot in RAW format? Let’s say you shoot a photo in RAW and then switch to Apple’s Photos app. Tapping on the thumbnail brings up the image, and after a few seconds, the image gets changed to a lower-quality version. Contrast is lost, and exposure is somewhat lowered. The result is a dull image. My possible explanation is that the thumbnail is a JPEG post-processed interpretation of the RAW image that is presented in the UI. When tapping on the thumbnail, the RAW version gets uncompressed and presented, which replaces the full-size JPEG preview version, hence the image quality degradation. 

Do you have a similar understanding, or do you have another explanation?

Dear @manton, please consider adding share sheet support on MB client on iOS so we can easily create link posts. What should be included: source link, options for quoting text and a comment. Thanks. 👋🏻🙏🏻

During my trip to South America, I started to experience RSS feeds sync issues in News Explorer. None of the feeds would update, even after resetting the sync status for all feeds. It lasted a few days. It was very inconvenient. I couldn’t get my news and instead had to visit websites individually, which implied getting content I didn’t care about (ad placements, other promotional stuff, etc.) After a while, the issue fixed itself. It was due to very slow network connectivity.

Long story short, RSS feeds are central to my content reading workflow. Without them, I’m lost. The convenience of having all the feeds converge in one app, without the noise, is unbeatable. Long live RSS!

Why is it so slow to read content in Apple News in general? Opening an article in News takes 2 to 3 times longer to render than its equivalent through the RSS feed in News Explorer (my RSS reader). Another case for RSS feeds.

I cannot count how often I select an image, thinking it will look nice as wallpaper. Most of the time, it sucks. Would it be cool if Apple added a smart album with selected photos based on their potential to be great as wallpaper? This could be something done using on-device AI, just like face recognition.

With the introduction of an always-on display in the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, many users have wondered how much impact the feature has on battery life. A new video takes a careful look at just how much battery drain there is with the always-on display and whether turning off the wallpaper reduces that drain.

And

it was found that by having the wallpaper enabled for the always-on display, an iPhone 14 Pro will drain around 0.8% per hour, compared to 0.6% an hour for the wallpaper disabled on the always-on display. Source: Test Shows How Much Battery Drain Your Wallpaper Causes on the iPhone 14 Pro’s Always-On Display - MacRumors

People asked for an always-on display because Android had it for a long time, and they got it. Be careful for what you wish for. This is something that Apple could improve with a more power-efficient A17 this coming fall in the iPhone 15 Pro line.