Apple reportedly backed out of it’s bid to get NFL Sunday Ticket for Apple TV+
After months of hearing that Apple was a top contender for the service last week things began to get dicey
The two major sticking points seemed to be Apple wanting more of a partnership with the league on content and not to just be a place to stream games. Also, Apple supposedly wanted to bundle NFL Sunday Ticket with their service for no additional cost. At just USD $6.99/mo the NFL believed it was too inexpensive and would hurt it’s deals with it’s broadcast partners
The story form the “league” perspective according to a report by “The Athletic”
Apple didn’t want to pay enough (I find this a bit hard to believe)
Apple’s technology and subscriber base was not up to par with competitors. The piece cites some of the early issues Apple had streaming MLB Friday Night Baseball games
Apple wanted "unknown rights" to broadcast games on future platforms not yet developed. i.e. their AR/VR headset.
Regardless… looks like YouTube got the deal at $2 Billion per year and the service will be a yet to be priced “add-on” to their existing USD $64.99 per month YouTube TV
Twitter account ShrimpApplePro sent out a details claiming Apple TV app for Android is in internal beta testing and will be released soon
Makes a lot of sense.
Apple TV app is already available on Android TV
Apple has a promo to allow anyone with an Apple ID and the Apple TV app to stream the entire first season of "Bad Sisters," "Ted Lasso," "Prehistoric Planet," "Trying," and "The Morning Show" until January 3.
There is a prompt that asks if you want to sign-up for a free trail or buy a subscription but you can dismiss / ignore that.
New AirTag features
Historically we have been left guessing what is in AirTag updates
We’ve had three updates, but all with little to no deatails
AirTag Firmware Update 2.0.24 turns out had some nice enhancements for detecting Air Tags that are not yours but moving with you
Enables Precision Finding to help locate an unknown AirTag detected moving with you.
If your iPhone is awake, a notification alerts you when an AirTag that's separated from its owner is traveling with you and emitting a sound to indicate it has been moved.
Apple appears to have temporarily removed the option to update the Home app in iOS 16.2 to the “new architecture” (matter and thread)
Supposedly some users have experienced issue with the update. HomeKit devices stuck in an 'updating' or 'configuring' status, devices going missing entirely, invitations to share the Home with other users failing, HomeKit Secure Video recording not working, and other issues
Not clear how widespread the issues are.
Apple is investigating and will restore the feature once the issues are resolved.
Some iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max owners are reportedly seeing green or yellow lines on their displays
Reports came in from Twitter and Reddit
Apple support is aware of the issue and it sounds, luckily, that it seems to be software related, so hopefully will be patched soon
Seems to pop-up on wake from sleep or on startup
Unfortunately rebooting the device does not seem to help according to the reports
Desktop Macs added to self repair
You can now get parts and tools for repairing the M1 iMac, M1 Mac mini, and Mac Studio along with the M1 MacBooks and the latest iPhones
Unfortunately, for now, it seems Mac Desktop repairs are limited to the US. This is despite Apple expanding the self repair program to Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK earlier in December
According to DigiTimes TSMC has begun mass production of 3nm chips which could mean Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max chips and machines might be around the corner
We’re expecting updated 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros and also maybe a new Mac mini Pro
The new machines will likely be announced and available sometime in the first quarter of 2023
iPhone 14 Pro lost “next-gen” GPU
Apple works their teams hard and as you might imagine their chip design team is no exception.
As such the site “The Information” has details from an Apple lawsuit that alleges chip start-ups Nuvia and Rivos poached dozens of engineers from Apple and proprietary information
As part of that it was disclosed that Apple had hoped for a big leap in the GPU design for the A15 chip, but designers were “too ambitious with adding new features” and the system had flaws
There were hopes the improved GPUs could power features like hardware-accelerated ray tracing
But the designs caused too much power draw and too much heat and had to be scraped during late stage development
Ming-Chi Kuo thinks Apple could postpone shipping or maybe cancel plans for a 4th generation iPhone SE
Kuo rolled out his predictions in a series of tweets
The gist is that Apple devices in the mid-tier and lower end have struggled to meet sales expectations and often underperform compared to Apple’s flagship devices
These products for sure have their “niche”, but it is a niche
One thing for the iPhone SE 4 was rumored to be a redesign to finally get an edge-to-edge display and to lose the home button. But that means more production cost and lower margins (or higher prices)
The looming / continuing recession may also be factoring into Apple’s decision.
Sponsor: Rocket Money
Rocket Money
Are you WASTING MONEY on subscriptions? 80% of people have subscriptions they forgot about. Maybe for you it’s an unused Amazon Prime account, or a Hulu account that never gets streamed.
There’s this great app you can use that helps track all of your expenses – and with it, you’ll no longer waste money on subscriptions you don’t even use.
You might have heard of it: it’s called Rocket Money, formerly known as Truebill.
The app shows all your subscriptions in one place and then cancels for you whatever you don’t still want.
Rocket Money can even find subscriptions you didn’t know you were paying for. You may even find out you’ve been double-charged for a subscription.
To cancel a subscription, all you have to do is press CANCEL, and Rocket Money takes care of the rest.
Get rid of useless subscriptions with Rocket Money now. Go to ROCKETMONEY DOT COM
SLASH MACCAST
Seriously, it could save you HUNDREDS per year. That’s ROCKETMONEY DOT COM SLASH MACCAST
Cancel your unnecessary subscriptions right now at ROCKETMONEY DOT COM SLASH MACCAST
Feedback, commentary, opinions
Apple Music Sing vocal removal
We were discussing last time how this new feature might work on a technical level.
I had mentioned that it’s not “easy” to remove vocals from a track
Miles, a retired musician, says he doesn’t know how Apple is doing it, but points out that Izotope’s RX Advanced plug-in has an algorithm called Music Rebalance.
You can isolate and lower the vocal, preview it, and the apply to remove the vocal.
Miles says it works, but is processor intensive. Took about 5 minutes to remove vocals from a 4 minute song and that’s on a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra
So yes, there are ways inside professional music apps with pro tools to do this, but I think this only further shows that it’s not easy.
Izotope RX Advanced is a USD $799 professional plug-in
Apple does this in real-time on an iPhone!
Securing your Mac
We discussed how to check background apps and processes on a recent show
It’s a “free” app that will scan your background apps and processes and provide a lot of detail about what they are
A lock icon shows if it’s and Apple process (green locked), a signed developer app (black locked), or unsigned (red unlocked)
VirusTotal is also integrated so it can alert you to known malware if it’s on your system
They have another great tool called LuLu that will watch for unknown outgoing network connections and give you the option to block them. You can setup rules for know apps and services. (You can also use [Little Snitch](https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch)
“Duplicate” Photos in iOS 16
The Photo app added this feature in the recent update
Ronald wrote in because he was not seeing the option anywhere in the App
The “Duplicates” should be in the “Albums” section. You can scroll to the bottom and it should be under “Utilities”. It’s in the same area as Imports, Hidden, and Deleted Items.
If you do not have any duplicates, the album will not appear. It will also take a little while after you upgrade for the AI to scan and detect the duplicates. Depending on the size of your library it might take a while.
What’s cool about the feature
Shows a side by side of the images with image sizes
“Merges” the photos so any metadata is combined and the larger, better resolution, image is maintained
You can “Select All” and when you choose merge get the option to merge only “exact” matches or “all”
