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The Not-Too-Ambitious Edition Monday, January 8, 2024

It Took Me 4 Months To Understand How To Use The iPhone 15 Pro's Action Button — Here's Why I Had It Wrong For So Long, by Richard Priday, Tom's Guide

If there's a lesson to take from all this, I think it's that you are often better off setting up your phone for how you actually use it, not how you want to use it.

[...]

I still think the Action button is a good and versatile addition to the iPhone. There are over two dozen possible uses that we found for the Action button, but a user may not find each use equally as handy or necessary to have quick access to. Get too ambitious for your particular needs, and you may find that the feature hinders more than it helps, as it did for me.

After Three Years Without A Case, This Is My iPhone Now, by Chris Matyszczyk, ZDNet

Yes, I've dropped it more than once. No, it's never smashed, but wear and tear have appeared -- though in interesting, perhaps incomprehensible places.

Here, then, is what it looks like after three perfectly functional years.

Apple’s Biggest Challenges In 2024 Have Little To Do With The iPhone, by Mark Gurman, Bloomberg

[Vision Pro] is already shipping in small quantities to warehouses across the US before distribution to Apple retail stores, with the company believing it’ll have enough supply stateside by the end of January for a launch by February. I expect Apple to make an announcement related to the Vision Pro in the next week or so to take some of the spotlight away from CES, which begins Tuesday in Las Vegas.

[...]

[W]hile Apple said the Vision Pro won’t launch until “later” in 2024 in other countries, I wouldn’t anticipate that to actually be that much later. The company is considering China, Canada and the UK as some of the first markets to receive the headset.

Stuff

I Did An Apple Fitness+ Walking Workout And Was Surprised By How Much I Enjoyed It—here's How You Can Try It For Free, by Harry Bullmore, Fit&Well

The concept is simple: Famous folks go for a walk while recording a chat about their lives and playing a few of their favorite songs. You get to listen along at a later date while getting in some steps of your own.

As someone who loves high-intensity exercise, I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy this walking workout, but I actually got a lot out of my 39-minute stroll with Marvel star Simu Liu. Here's everything I noticed during my mini-hike.

The Castro Podcast App And Its Website Is Gone, by Wes Davis, The Verge

Longtime iOS podcasts app Castro has been down since Friday and its website no longer exists a month after the team behind Castro denied rumors that the app was shutting down. Users started reporting on Friday that they’re unable to download new episodes or access Castro’s website. When The Verge reached out to the contacts that were listed on Castro’s site, all of our emails were returned as undeliverable because the domain could not be found.

Notes

Spotify’s Editorial Playlists Are Losing Influence Amid AI Expansion, by Ashley Carman, Bloomberg

These days, the same music industry sources who in the late 2010s learned to obsess over what was included and excluded from key Spotify playlists have started noticing something else — it no longer seems to matter as much.

Bottom of the Page

I don't have an Action button on any of my devices. currently. If I do, however, I am tempted to program it to be my Play/Pause button, just like the similar button on the many iPods I've used previously.

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Thanks for reading.