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The Make-the-Most Edition Friday, November 20, 2020

Apple’s First-gen M1 Chips Have Already Upended Our Concept Of Laptop Performance, by Chaim Gartenberg, The Verge

It’s not just that Apple’s hardware is faster (although straight benchmarks would indicate that it is); it’s that Apple’s software is designed to make the most of that hardware, in a way that even the best optimization of macOS on an x86 system wasn’t.

Apple To Push Ahead With Controversial Privacy Feature, by Andrew Griffin, Independent

Apple software chief Craig Federighi told The Independent that the feature and the company’s support for privacy is a “core value”, and that the change grew out of a longstanding, philosophical commitment against excessive data collection.

He insisted that the feature would eventually prove “better for even the people that are currently, at times protesting those moves” because they raise trust in the apps and devices that those developers and advertisers require to work.

Upgrade Updates

Apple Releases iOS 14.2.1 With Fix For Text Message Bug And iPhone 12 Mini Lock Screen Issues, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

According to Apple's release notes, iOS 14.2.1 addresses several serious bugs that were found in the new ‌iPhone 12‌ devices. It fixes a bug that caused some MMS text messages not to be received in both single person and group chats, and it fixes a bug that caused the Lock Screen of the ‌iPhone 12‌ mini to become unresponsive.

Apple Releases Revised Version Of macOS 11.0.1 Big Sur, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

Those who have already updated to ‌macOS Big Sur‌ will not see this update, but those who are coming from Catalina or an earlier version of macOS will get the new release.

Apple Offers Instructions On What To Do If macOS Big Sur Causes Installation Errors On 2013 And 2014 Machines, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

Apple has now addressed this issue in a new support document that provides instructions on what to do if ‌macOS Big Sur‌ can’t be installed on a 2013 or 2014 MacBook Pro machine. Apple suggests Mac owners experiencing these issues unplug external devices, attempt restarting, reset the SMC, and reset NVRAM or PRAM.

Stuff

Today At Apple Launches 'Make Your Holiday' Project Book And Virtual Creative Sessions, by Tim Hardwick, MacRumors

At the center of the program is a free downloadable 74-page project book that gives families and friends “easy-to-do projects and ideas for sharing gratitude, giving thoughtfully, and celebrating festively.”

Beats Launches New ‘Flex That’ Campaign Against Racial Inequality With Its Flex Headphones, by Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac

The company is today launching a new advertising campaign to promote its new headphones while also sharing messages against racial inequality.

Scriptable Supercharges iOS Widgets Like No Other App, by Alex Cranz, Gizmodo

Scriptable allows you to set up cool Siri automations in iOS using Javascript, but with the advent of widgets, it also allows you to run scripts directly on the home screen—which means I can finally have that transparent weather and calendar widget I’d prefer instead of a big box that obscures my wallpaper.

Taskheat 1.5 Adds macOS Big Sur Support, A New Look, And More, by Oliver Haslam, iMore

Alongside the new support for Apple's latest operating system, this new version also adds widgets for easy task management as well as a visual redesign to make everything feel right at home on your Mac.

Develop

The Rise And Fall Of Getting Things Done, by Cal Newport, New Yorker

The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner. But the cumulative effect of such constant, unstructured communication is cognitively harmful: on the receiving end, the deluge of information and demands makes work unmanageable. There’s little that any one individual can do to fix the problem. A worker might send fewer e-mail requests to others, and become more structured about her work, but she’ll still receive requests from everyone else; meanwhile, if she decides to decrease the amount of time that she spends engaging with this harried digital din, she slows down other people’s work, creating frustration.

In this context, the shortcomings of personal-productivity systems like G.T.D. become clear. They don’t directly address the fundamental problem: the insidiously haphazard way that work unfolds at the organizational level. They only help individuals cope with its effects. A highly optimized implementation of G.T.D. might have helped Mann organize the hundreds of tasks that arrived haphazardly in his in-box daily, but it could do nothing to reduce the quantity of these requests.

Notes

Nvidia Is Bringing Fortnite Back To iOS With New Cloud Gaming Web App, by Nick Statt, The Verge

Nvidia is joining its fellow cloud gaming providers in choosing to bypass Apple’s App Store and launching a mobile web app version of its GeForce Now service. Nvidia’s version is available today in beta form, meaning any of the service’s more than 5 million registered users can fire up GeForce Now in mobile Safari on an iPhone or iPad and get playing.

Bottom of the Page

People who were arguing whether Apple should be a hardware or a software company should have stopped arguing in the last few years when the iPhone started to be faster than many laptops. But if they are still arguing, the M1 should really have stopped all such nonsenses.

Apple has always been a computer company, not a hardware nor a software company.

Someday, when we look back at the history of computers, the era of Microsoft + Intel + Dell/Compaq/whatever, when each company builds one component of a computer, will look like the anomaly that it was.

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Thanks for reading.