These days far fewer people, I suspect, would describe themselves as total beginners when it comes to technology. My parents’ generation all have smartphones and most of them seem to own a tablet too; they’re comfortable with the gestures used to operate a touchscreen device. And some guy who used to be terrified of owning a mobile phone now writes about them for a living. We’re ready to manage without the crutch of a Home button, and a lot of the credit for that goes to Apple.
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is “gearing up” to launch a new version of the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air with the M4 chip. The company is preparing for a debut in March.
Apple today announced that its clinical-grade, over-the-counter Hearing Aid feature for AirPods Pro 2 is now available in the United Kingdom.
Serif has updated Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher to version 2.6 with page management improvements for Affinity Publisher, Affinity’s first machine-learning features for Affinity Photo, and minor enhancements to Affinity Designer.
Mimestream released version 1.6 of its Gmail-specific email app with a new “In Inbox” option in the message list filter and better first name extraction for participant lists.
Last July, citizens of South Korea started a petition asking Apple to enable Find My support in the region. It was assumed that Find My was unavailable due to government restrictions, but that wasn’t actually the case according to the petition.
Apple later agreed to launch Find My support for the region in spring 2025, and that integration is finally starting to roll out.
Apple today announced its largest-ever spend commitment, with plans to spend and invest more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. This new pledge builds on Apple’s long history of investing in American innovation and advanced high-skilled manufacturing, and will support a wide range of initiatives that focus on artificial intelligence, silicon engineering, and skills development for students and workers across the country.
The fundamentals from 1984's Macintosh is still present today: windows, icons, menus, pointers. There will be a learning curve definitely, but if you can time-travel an iMac back to someone in 1984-ish who has just mastered this new-fangled computer called a Macintosh, I'm sure that someone will quickly able to start using this new iMac too.
But the home button -- one of the fundamentals of iPhone OS -- is already gone.
I'm sure there is something to be said about how newer things can change faster, or how older stuff are more difficult to be drastically different, but I am not that smart to say anything.
:-)
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Thanks for reading.