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The All-About-Headwinds Edition Saturday, February 4, 2023

Down Is Up: iPhone Slumps, iPad Soars, And A Massive Quarter Isn't Massive Enough, by Jason Snell, Macworld

If you were bored of all those stories every three months about Apple’s quarterly financial results setting records and posting one banner quarter after another, I’ve got great news! Apple’s first fiscal quarter of 2023–covering the holiday quarter of the calendar year 2022–was merely the company’s second-largest quarter ever, unable to match up with the same quarter a year ago.

The world of Wall Street doesn’t care so much about Apple’s tidy $30 billion profit during the quarter. It’s more worried about that 5 percent year-over-year decline–the company’s first such decline in almost four years. Fortunately, Apple executives were well prepared on Thursday to explain what happened. You see, it’s all about headwinds.

We Spoke With Apple To Unpack The New HomePod, by Men's Journal

In my testing so far, this does remain the case to ensure that the bass doesn’t overpower a track based on the location of the speaker. It’s these kinds of optimizations, specifically with low and mids of a track, that give the HomePod an edge in the audio space. Of course, the woofer is paired with five horn-loaded tweeters that are arranged at the bottom of the device. It’s technically a minus two from the original HomePod, but that didn’t result in any lesser sound quality from our testing.

Why at the bottom of HomePod for speakers that primarily create higher frequencies? Well, it’s what Apple calls a Zero Height Array and it first premiered on the original HomePod. Costello shared that the audio source is positioned near the surface to ensure that it fires across the device evenly for a proper mix. This is specifically engineered for higher-frequencies as well.

Stuff

Timing 2023.1.3, by Agen Schmitz, TidBITS

Daniel Alm has released Timing 2023.1, adding support for importing your iPhone and iPad usage from Screen Time. You’ll be able to see exactly when you used each device, review any desired time range (not just Screen Time’s day/week views), archive Screen Time data, categorize mobile activities into projects, and more.

MacWhisper Is A macOS App That Uses OpenAI To Transcribe Audio Files Into Text, by Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac

We’ve seen the use of AI tools for a lot of things recently, like generating text and images from simple sentences. But now there ‘s a new macOS app called MacWhisper that uses OpenAI technology to locally transcribe audio files into text.

We Review Capture One For iPad, by Kaisa Leinonen, Fstoppers

It is best for someone who wants to capture on the go, do quick edits and continue editing on the full desktop version. I can also see it as a good option for a photographer who is regularly shooting out and about and only occasionally requires tethering and therefore is only using the iPad version of Capture One.

Notes

Lisa’s Family Photos, by t.c. Sottek, The Verge

In this collection, you’ll see a rare look inside the development of one of the most important computers ever made – from experiments with 3D graphics to cutting-edge UI designs. We take all of these things for granted now, but at the time these photos were taken, the camera was capturing things few human beings had ever seen. It’s hard to imagine this scene at the finely-orchestrated Apple campus of today, but at the time of the Lisa, Atkinson worked on the project at home and drove his Polaroids over on a motorcycle to share progress with the rest of the team.

Bottom of the Page

I miss the days when I know when I drag my cursor on a Window's title bar, the window will move.

Nowadays, sometimes the window will move. Some other times, if I am lucky, the window will not move and nothing happens. And some other other times, something will pop up or something else will happen that is not the window moving.

Sigh.

~

Thanks for reading.