The iFixit Teardown is up for the HomePod 2, and it contains some good news. The original HomePod was full of glue and other bits, making it difficult to repair, but the new one is much better. “The most significant change is that the HomePod 2 can be opened without destroying it.”
We all wonder why Apple pulled the original HomePod before the second-generation HomePod was ready. I can’t help but think their tendency to fail and near-impossibility to repair played a role. Apple has made significant improvements in repairability with the new one. Hopefully, they will be more reliable as well.
1Password announced on their blog that they’ll be incorporating passkeys into their app by summer. Passkey is a great technology and will help many folks be more secure on the Internet. I love that 1Password is early to the game. My question is about the app name. If you start using it, will you call it “NoPassword” instead of “1Password”?
For those of you working on quarterly planning with me, next week is the halfway point for 2023 Q1. Hard to believe, right? I’m doing a check-in call with any Early Access members that want to join in next week… … This is a post for MacSparky Labs Level 3 (Early Access) Members only. Care to join? Or perhaps do you need to sign in?
This week MacSparky is sponsored by Unite 4, the best app for turning websites into apps. These days, many of us are using web services that require us to navigate a website to interact with them. This creates all sorts of issues. When you close your browser, you are closing your tools. When you want to jump straight to the tool, there is no easy way. Some of them are Electron-based and use up your Mac’s resources. Moreover, they often don’t follow conventional macOS standards.
You can fix all of that with Unite 4. Unite 4 takes a website and turns it into an app. It’s dead simple. You type in a URL, and you get a Mac app. It even creates an attractive Mac-friendly icon.
Of course, people use Unite 4 for productivity apps like Gmail, Hey, Slack, Basecamp, and every other web-based productivity app. But you can also make entertainment apps like Netflix, YouTube, and Disney+. Unite 4 goes a step further with the ability to put these apps in your status bar (which, by the way, is an excellent place for Slack) and create floating windows. It also lets you take a “slice” of a website and put it in your Dock for quick reference.
In this month’s Deep Dive, I share my experience with and a little advice on getting started with meditation. The audio for this session is also going into the Early Access podcast feed…
There’s a Mac and mobile application, Poe, giving you an easy way to kick the tires on artificial intelligence. I’ve been playing with it for the last day, and I recommend it, particularly if you’ve never tried this kind of thing before.
The application is as simple as download, open, and start talking to it. It’ll give you a good idea about the state of conversational artificial intelligence. It is easy to make fun of this stuff; AI gets a lot wrong. But it’s constantly learning. Like it or not, this stuff is coming, and it’s time to wrap our heads around that.
While we are not at the point of robot overlords just yet, we are getting to the point of helpful robots.
Jason Snell just published his annual Six Colors Apple Report card, where he asks folks writing about Apple to score the company in different categories. Jason has been doing this long enough now that you can see some interesting trends and get a feel for how Apple is doing with its various products and services. I like how the report card is focused on the products, and not the finances. It’s always a privilege for me to participate in this, and fascinating to see how Apple appears to be doing from the outside.
Happy Monday! I hope you had an enjoyable weekend. On Friday I received shipment of my new HomePod, and I spent a lot of the weekend kicking the tires…
