The Ultra Wide works really great in normal lighting conditions and overall I’m thrilled to have it, but you will feel a difference when you move indoors or shoot into the evening. The images are softer than the Wide, and without Night mode you’ll be tempted (or forced) to switch back to Wide depending on how limited your light is.
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One thing I love about Apple’s approach to Night mode is the strategic balance of solving a technical problem while also caring deeply about artistic expression. When you look at the image above, it’s clear their team didn’t take the let’s-make-night-look-like-day approach, as some of their competitors have. Instead, it feels more like an embrace of what it actually is (night) while asking, “How do we capture the feel of this scene in a beautiful way?”
The first teardown of the iPhone 11 Pro Max is officially out, courtesy of DChannel on YouTube, and it reveals the inner workings of the newest extra-large iPhone. The most interesting part: the 11 Pro Max has a 15.04 watt-hour battery, nearly 25 percent larger than the iPhone XS Max’s 12.06 watt-hour cells — suggesting the size of the battery, and not any software optimization, is likely the main reason for the new device’s greatly improved battery life.
I stood on the sidewalk and snapped a shot across the street, to a parked car and the tree behind it. On my iPhone XS, the scene is unsalvageable, a muddy car next to a lit driveway with a black void behind it, other than the suggestion of a few branches. The Night Mode shot, on the other hand, shows the car and driveway clearly, with the tree behind it in great detail, another tree off to the side, and above it all, a night sky with dozens of visible stars. The difference between the two shots couldn’t be more dramatic. And all I had to do was hold my iPhone steady for three seconds.
With every success the company has had since Steve’s death, there’s always a moment in the midst of my excitement when I think, I wish Steve could be here for this. It’s impossible not to have the conversation with him in my head that I wish I could be having in real life. More than that, I believe that if Steve were still alive, we would have combined our companies, or at least discussed the possibility very seriously.
In the summer of 2011, Steve and Laurene came to our house in L.A. to have dinner with Willow and me. He was in the late stages of cancer by then, terribly thin and in obvious pain. He had very little energy, and his voice was a low rasp. But he wanted to spend an evening with us, in part to toast what we’d done years ago. We sat in our dining room and raised glasses of wine before dinner. “Look what we did,” he said. “We saved two companies.”
All four of us teared up. This was Steve at his warmest and most sincere. He was convinced that Pixar had flourished in ways that it never would have had it not become part of Disney, and that Disney had been reenergized by bringing on Pixar. I couldn’t help but think of those early conversations and how nervous I was to reach out to him. It was only six years before, but it seemed like another lifetime. He’d become so important to me, professionally and personally. As we toasted, I could barely look at Willow. She had known Steve much longer than I had, going way back to 1982, when he was one of the young, brash, brilliant founders of Apple. Now he was gaunt and frail and in the last months of his life, and I knew how much it pained her to see him that way.
Personally, I’ve always bounced back and forth between Apple Maps and Google Maps, but I’ve been impressed by the strides Apple has made, especially in iOS 13. This is the year in which it feels like Apple is finally getting all its fundamentals squared away and started looking at new features.
Happily, you can still upgrade to Catalina without losing access to older apps, thanks to virtualization. All you have to do is run Mojave in a virtual machine to keep your older software functioning. It makes sense to use Mojave, rather than an earlier macOS release, because Mojave will receive security updates longer than older versions of the operating system.
At this writing, Parallels Desktop 15 for Mac is the only Catalina-ready virtualization software. VMware Fusion isn’t yet Catalina-compatible. The open-source VirtualBox is an option, but it’s appropriate only for those with a strong interest in reading forum posts and staying up on the technical issues.
Dowling previously was Apple’s head of corporate public relations for 10 years. During his tenure, the tech giant has dealt with everything from Tim Cook’s first years as CEO after the death of its iconic founder to a bevy of new product rollouts to a fight with the US government over encryption.
According to a memo he sent this week to staff, Dowling wrote, “it’s time.” He added that he plans to take time off and is apparently not moving to another job at another company. Dowling will stay at Apple until the end of October.
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Marketing head Phil Schiller will take over Dowling’s role in the interim, and sources said the company will be considering both internal and external candidates to take over the position.
It seemed like “slofies” could have been a one-off joke when Apple mentioned them during its iPhone event last week, but the company is clearly pleased with the made-up term. On Friday, Apple applied for a US trademark on “Slofie,” potentially giving the company control over the word’s usage.
A few months down the line, I can confidently say that my initial assumptions about this filter were deeply flawed. To the extent that it’s helped me at all, it’s mostly done so in superficial ways that haven’t quite precipitated the sustainable lifestyle changes I’d been hoping for. Devoid of color, my phone is no less functional, but it’s now drab and joyless enough to inspire a second layer of thought every time I mindlessly pick it up and start scrolling through YouTube or Twitter. Occasionally, this flimsy firewall is obtrusive enough to break me out of my conditioned patterns of behavior, but just barely. Overwhelmingly, I still feel like the dog in Pavlov’s experiment, except there’s now an intermediary step between the ringing of the bell that once made me salivate and the arrival of my meal: the sound of fireworks (or, for the purposes of this metaphor, some other stimulus that dogs hate).
In the latest version, Apple (it seems) allowed in-app purchases of audiobooks via credits... except that I can't find my wish list of books to buy.
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Thanks for reading.