Another quarter, more records

Apple this week announced earning for their second fiscal quarter of 2022 and once again they wowed us

They had a nine percent increase in revenue year over year coming in at $97.3 billion with a profit of $25 billion

Breaking down the products by year over year growth it may or may not be surprising that Services and Macs were the big winners

Services grew 17.2 percent year over year earning $19.82 billion in the quarter

In fact Apple has added over 165 million subscribers over last year and now sits at 825 million subscribers across all their services

Macs came in at $10.43 billion, with 14.3 percent year over year growth.

Wearables, Home, and Accessories $8.82 billion, up 12.2% year over year

iPhone is still tops in terms of revenue at $50.57 billion with year over year growth at 5.5 percent

And iPad saw the smallest growth at just 2.2 percent year over year generating $7.65 billion

The overall revenue and individual revenue were record highs for Apple’s March quarter in every category except iPad

Cook noted that iPad in particular was hit by "very significant supply constraints"

Apple CFO Luca Maestri also said he expects supply constraints to continue to impact Apple product sales in the third quarter

Macs did particularly well for Apple

In the call Apple said that over half of it’s new Mac customers in quarter were new to Mac

In fact Apple has been able to keep ahead of global PC shipment declines with the success of Apple Silicon and product updates to the MacBook Pro lines and the new Mac Studios

For the first quarter of 2022 Counterpoint Research said this week that Apple was able grow shipments by eight percent despite an overall decline in PC shipments of 4.3 percent

They also did well converting customers to iPhone. With Tim Cook claiming, “(They) had a record level of upgraders during the quarter” and saying they “grew switchers, (in the) strong double digits,”

Industry growth for smartphones was a similar situation

Firms like Strategy Analytics, Canalys, and IDC all disagree on the exact figures but they all show that only Apple experienced growth in the smartphone category last quarter

Canalys thinks Apple iPhone shipments were up 8 percent and they were able to scoop up 18 percent of global smartphone marketshare

A change in iPhone 13 Tide

It’s another week so why not?

Remember how just last week there was a Loop Capital saying Apple was cutting iPhone build numbers down for 2022

DigiTimes was having none of it. They claimed there were no signs of Apple slowing down and this week they claim Apple is actually expand its iPhone 13 production for the second quarter of 2022

In fact they say production of the high-end models, iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max, could be increased by about 10 million units

Apple also has reportedly stepped up iPhone 13 production in India. A report claims India iPhone production grew by 50% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2022

Looking to this years iPhone 14 we continue to get leaks and information about the size and shape of this years models

Display leaks seem to confirm that the Pro models will be slightly taller with a tweaked aspect ratio, going from 19:5:9 to 20:9, to accommodate their new “pill+punch hole” notch-less design

They also seem to confirm that the notch will remain on the “standard” non-pro models

Beta fix for Studio Display webcam

Maybe?

Apple did release and update to customers in the beta program that is supposed to address the “poor quality” webcam issue, but the results seem to be mixed

I think, to be fair, this is still a beta patch, but there are now some concerns that the issue may not be in the software alone.

The “Apple Studio Display Firmware Update 15.5.” was released as beta and does seem to touch the webcam frameworks and Center Stage

The changes supposedly address “camera tuning, improved noise reduction, contrast, and framing.”

Cropping for Center Stage appears to be not as tight, there’s more contrast, a bit more sharpness, but seemingly not much else?

Part of it might just be the limits of the hardware.

Apple uses a 12MP “ultra-wide” lens so that Center Stage can crop in and follow you around

But zooming in digitally reduces quality and the use of an ultra-wide lens means a smaller aperture so less light.

So a higher res sensor and/or a larger aperture lens may be what it really takes to fix the issue?

Probably the best thing you could do to improve the image if you have a Studio Display would be to make sure you have good lighting.

Apple also released a new minor firmware update for AirTag

AirTag Firmware Update 1.0.301

The update contains a tweak to the unwanted tracking sound to make it easier to locate an unknown AirTag

Specifically they changed the tone sequence to use more of the loudest tones

AirTags have taken some heat lately as there have been more and more media stories of people being tracked, unwantingly, by AirTags

Don’t worry if you don’t have the update yet. It’s a slow staggered rollout and won’t be fully live until May 13th

To get the updates you’ll need to have an iPhone is running the latest version of iOS and your AirTag(s) in Bluetooth range of your phone.

There also seem to be some complaints about strange noises emanating from some Mac Studio models

Coming from the MacRumors forums some customers say machines are making a high-pitched "whining" sound possibly coming from the fan, though they claim it seems to be separate from the fan noise.

The issue seems to be limited and most complaints seem to be centered around the M1 Max models, not the Ultra versions

Apple Self Service Repair launches

Apple has finally set-up [their site](https://selfservicerepair.com) for folks who want to be able to get Apple genuine parts, tools, and manuals to do self repair on their Apple products

The parts store is operated by third-party company SPOT, not Apple

At least if those products are an model of iPhone SE, iPhone 12 and iPhone 13. Not a lot of products, but hey it’s a start and Apple promises more supported products, including Macs with Apple silicon chips in the future

The good news is the tools and parts are the same as what Apple’s own authorized repair teams would get and use

And you can rent the specialized tool kit needed for USD $49/week (or purchase them if you prefer though some tool are pricey)

Here’s the sort of “bad” news… the parts can be almost expensive or more expensive than just having Apple do the repair for you

An iPhone 13 Pro display repair bundle is USD $269, Apple will swap it for you for $279. And the battery is USD $71 bucks, but Apple charge for an iPhone 13 Pro battery replacement is USD $69

But here’s the good part again… send your old part back for recycling and Apple will give you credit $33.60 for the display in our example and $24.15 for the battery

You can also get the repair manuals, in PDF from the site. They have detailed instructions for the use of the tools, the repairs, and lots of safety info and warnings.

The program is currently US only but Apple has plans to roll it out to Europe later this year.

Most are happy that the program finally exists, but advocates for self-repair (like iFixit) are still critical (rightfully so) of the program

They for example point out that a customer must enter a device's serial number or IMEI when ordering parts on the sit and any parts need to be paired with the same device after installation

I do wonder if we’ll see sites now that reverse engineer Apple’s specialized tool and make they available cheaper to use with other “after market” parts?

New Apple Watch sensor in eight?

According to Ming-Chi Kuo

Apple was hoping to get a new body temperature measurement sensor into the Series 7 Apple Watch last year but ran into issues with the algorithm, so didn’t include it.

Good news is he thinks that means it might make it into the Series 8 this year.

Because the watch can’t monitor core body temperature via hardware the algorithm is critically important to the feature. That’s because skin temperature quickly varies based on the environment.

So because it’s so tricky the feature’s still not a guarantee for this years model either.

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Additional Photo Library cleanup

Last time we helped a listener with suggestions for cleaning and optimizing a growing Photo library stored on an external

As always I’ve received great feedback and tips as follow-up from you in the community

Keith says there’s some great feature in [Pixelmator Pro](https://www.pixelmator.com/pro/) that might help when straightening an cropping

There is a checkbox setting that says, “Delete cropped pixels” which discards the cropped pixels, so he does the straightening and cropping there first and then imports into Photos (eliminates the Photos saving unmodified versions)

He mentions if you do this for a scanning project you may also want to disable Pixelmator’s setting that converts imported photos to the “pixelmator” file format. The setting is checking “Import JPEG, PNG, and TIFF Images”. Just be aware that if you set this it

Daniel recommends also checking the “video” album for large video files that might be archived or removed and also, since the Photo Library is being stored on a external, considering upgrading to an SSD vs and HDD for better performance.

Josh asks, with all the AI that is out there now why does Photos not have a find blurred photos feature

interesting thought.

Might be difficult with photos that are intentionally blurry? Like “portrait” (bokeh) photos

Also ones with poor cropping or framing

Would just be auto identify not necessarily removing.

Chasing Thunderbolt bottlenecks

Rick this week asked a very interesting question that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole regarding SSDs

What is the point of having a cable that supports transfer speeds of 40 Gb/sec,

if the SSD can only read and write at speeds of 2.8 Gb/sec. ?

The first point to discuss is how SSD speeds are generally reported

You’ll typically see read write speeds reported as MB/s or Megabytes per second

Transfer capabilities of cable/interfaces like USB 4 and Thunderbolt are generally reported as Gbps or Gigabits per second

The thing that confuses most people here, and this is common, is Bytes vs Bits. Many people try to convert by taking the speed of the SSD at MB/s and dividing by 1000 (really 1024) and assume they have Gigabits, but they don’t it’s Gigabytes

You still have to multiply by 8 to convert your GBs to Gigabits. So the SSD speeds is not 2.8 Gbps. You have to take the MBs speed multiply by 8 and then divide by 1024. So 2800 MBs times 8 to get Mbps then divide by 1024 to get Gbps which is 21.875 or about 22Gbps

A more direct way is 1Gbps is equal to 125 MB/s, so you can take the MB/s value and divide by 125 to get the Gbps value

So using our new maths we can convert USB4 / Thunderbolt 4s interface speed of 40Gbps to MBs by doing the opposite and multiplying 40Gbps by 125 which gives us a MB/s speed of 5000 or almost double the theoretical maximum rate of the fastest SSDs

But here’s the rub… Thunderbolt 3/4 has about a max transfer rate of 2750 MB/s, not 5000 MB/s. What?!! And no my math is not wrong

TB4 does have maximum bandwidth of 40 Gbps, but not all of that bandwidth can be used for data transfer

8 Gbps can only be used for video (displays), so you have 32Gbps (PCIe 3.0: 4 lanes x 8 Gbps) for data

Then there is PCIe 8b/10b encoding, (each eight-bit data byte is converted to a 10-bit transmission character) and some overhead for Thunderbolt itself and you’re left with about 22Gbps for your data

Doing our new maths that a speed of about 2750 MB/s, which is faster than most PCIe NVMe external SSDs drives these days.

According to [Tom’s Hardware](https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-external-hard-drive-ssd,5987.html) the Samsung X5 SSD is one of the fasters TB drives you can get and Macworld’s benchmarks showed speeds of about 2200 MB/s write and 2400 MBs read.

Keep in mind you can get faster internal speeds with the right connector, interface, and controllers. One of the reasons Apple has soldered in SSDs

Storage in current M1 Macs, depending on the model will benchmark out at up to 6500 to 7000 MB/s write speeds and around 5500 MB/s read speeds

But wait, you didn’t think it’s be that easy did you?

Here’s the thing… there are many places and ways things can bottleneck

There’s the drive type and internal interface. (SATA, SATA-III, PCIe)

The storage interface (USB, Thunderbolt) and within that the interface (USB 3.1 gen 1 or gen2, Thunderbolt gen 1, 2, or 3/4)

If you have an external enclosure the type of enclosure, controller, and interface on that

And then also your cables and adapters

Quick word on cables, as we’ve discussed these in the past. They matter.

Passive TB vs Active. You want “active” cables if you need the best performance for longer cables

A passive cable transmits electrical signals over copper wire without any intervention to boost the signal. An active cable uses transceivers on either end to regulate the data transfer over the cable, allowing it to transmit over longer distances.

A passive TB3 cable can do 40Gpbs only at 0.5m for a 2m passible cable the transfer rate gets halved to 20 Gbps. A TB4 passive cable can do 40Gbps to 2m

So you need to check the specs and ratings for everything in the chain and make sure they are ALL in an acceptable range for your application. Any one of these might be your bottleneck.

Banking app recommendations

I received an email from Wayne and he’s been a Quicken user and currently uses Quicken 2016 which is no longer going to be supported by Intuit

He says he’s not interested in getting the latest version as it is only available via subscription and he’s looking for alternatives (preferably free?)

I’m going to have to turn to you in the community because I really don’t use a banking app anymore.

Last time I did I used iBank from IGGSoftware

That actually still exists but is now called [Banktivity](https://www.banktivity.com)

But it’s also a subscription app at USD $45/year

I did some research and for paid apps depending on the needs there are what look to be two good options

[Moneydance](https://infinitekind.com/moneydance)

[Moneyspire](https://www.moneyspire.com)

They seem to do most of the key features: integrate with online bacnking, reporting, reminders, mobile, investiments, etc.

I don’t have experience with these so if you do and want to send in a quick 2-3 min review that would be awesome too.

Or maybe there is another app you use and would recommend?

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