Apple and Support for Old Hardware

There are a lot of knocks against Apple that, when I hear them, I say, “Yup. That’s about right.” They charge too much for storage on new Macs. They’re secretive about new products, which is smart. But they are also often secretive about little stuff, which seems dumb. They are way too stingy with free iCloud storage. (5GB?! Really? In 2022?)

But then there is a separate category of knocks against Apple that baffle me. One of those is the idea that they cripple old devices, so you’ll buy a new one. Where do people get that idea? Until recently, my wife was running a 10-year-old MacBook. I know multiple people that are still using an iPad 2. (The iPad 2 shipped in 2011.) The same goes for the iPhone. When measured against the march of technology, Apple supports ancient iPhones.

John Gruber recently posted a story about Google dropping support for their Pixel 3, a three-year-old phone. At the same time. Apple still supports the iPhone 6S, which shipped in 2015. I honestly don’t get the argument that Apple is usint software updates to kill old hardware. In reality it is just the opposite.

If you look at the iPad in particular, I know a lot of people running old hardware quite happily. Apple keeps the software updates coming and the iPad is like the energizer bunny. It just keeps going and going. I have a theory that we’ll get similar longevity from Apple Silicon Macs, but that remains to be seen.

Use TextSniper for Easy OCR on Your Mac (Sponsor)

My thanks to TextSniper for sponsoring MacSparky.com this week. I’m a fan of this app.

TextSniper is a Mac OCR app that can extract text anywhere on your Mac’s screen and automatically save it to your clipboard so that you can paste it anywhere you need it. It can even read the text to you. The whole thing works a lot like the built-in screen capture on the Mac, just way more powerful.

Also, TextSniper doesn’t collect your data. The text recognition is processed on your Mac and does not require an internet connection. 

With TextSniper, you can:

  • Quickly get a text from PDFs, Zoom calls, Presentations, and Videos. 
  • Copy text from anywhere, even images and websites that don’t let you select text.
  • Quickly grab data like email addresses, phone numbers, and links.
  • Read QR codes and barcodes.
  • Get text out of just about any image format, including JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and BMP.

I find myself using TextSniper constantly in my daily work. As an example, my wife sent me a picture of a letter she received. I needed to grab some data from the letter (account number, etc…) TextSniper came to the rescue.

TextSniper works with macOS Catalina and later and also works with Parallels Desktop

Get TextSniper now and enjoy the fastest way to copy uncopyable text, wherever it may be. Use promo code TS2022 to get an additional 25% off. 

Dashboard 2.0

I missed this post from Stephen Hackett a few days ago, but I couldn’t agree more that we need Dashboard to come back to the Mac. I actually used the Dashboard before it was removed, but in today’s world with Swift UI, a Dashboard 2.0 should give you widgets zooming into your main screen. Imagine if instead of having to give a whole space to my Comms Board, I could just make it zoom in and out as needed?

This also came up on the most recent episode of the Mac Power Users. I think the trick of making a Dashboard 2.0 that would get traction among the users would be to make it fully compatible with Swift UI widgets and let the users put them all over the screen, not just the right corner as they currently are relegated with the Notification Center.

I realize this is just wish-casting, but wouldn’t it be nice?

The Supply Chain and the Apple Silicon Release Schedule

Today 9to5 Mac put together some great sources indicating that the supply chain problems everyone else is facing are finally catching up with Apple. At the last quarterly earnings call, Tim Cook explained that for Apple, the supply chain problem wasn’t the big money parts, but the little commodity bits and pieces.

Apple made a fortune, partly because of its mastery of the supply chain. People will write books about how they did it at some point if they haven’t already. It looks, however, like that run may be hitting a few speed bumps.

There is a lot of speculation about new iMacs, MacBook Airs, and Mac Pros. I can’t help but wonder if these emerging supply chain issues may slow down that product release pace. At WWDC 2020, Tim Cook promised Apple would finish the Apple Silicon transition in two years. You can argue about whether that deadline happens at this year’s WWDC or on December 31. Time is running out either way.

If Apple is indeed going to be supply-constrained and not able to get everything out by this artificial deadline in sufficient quantities, will they announce on time and release in very limited quantities, or will they just let the date slip and wait to announce until they can deliver more units? Historically, I think the answer would assuredly be the latter. They’d wait. I know Apple is a different company than it was 20 years ago, but I hope that even with their current size, they’d still wait.

iPhone Video vs. Dedicated Camera Video

I’ve spent a lot of time shooting videos with the iPhone lately. I made this video when the iPhone 13 Pro was first released, but I’ve also been using the iPhone a lot for MacSparky Labs videos and nearly exclusively for DLR Field Guide content.

My evolving preference for the iPhone over a more dedicated camera results from competing tradeoffs.

The dedicated camera has a better sensor and can have interchangeable lenses. That produces noticeably better video than video out of the iPhone. But for shooting video on the move, as we do with the DLR Field Guide videos, that regular camera comes at a cost. First, it’s heavy to carry around and awkward to wield. Second, and more importantly to me, is stabilization. My regular camera (a Sony) cannot hold a candle to the iPhone video stabilization, even with in-body stabilization, shooting with the Sony takes a ton of post-production effort to get stable where I can use iPhone footage pretty much “as is”.

Potato Jet (one of my favorite camera guys on YouTube) made his own comparison recently and came up with a similar conclusion. I’m not saying that they should shoot the next Star Wars movie with an iPhone, but for much of the stuff I do, the iPhone is plenty enough camera. So for now you need to choose your poison, slightly worse video, or deal with bulk and stability challenges.

The bigger question is where this is heading. If mobile phones continue at their current clip, exactly how long will it be before nobody can tell the difference?

Mac Power Users 624: Apple Apps That Need Some Polishing

Apple ships a wide range of applications across its family of operating systems. However, over the years, they have received uneven amounts of support and attention from the company. This week’s episode of Mac Power Users has Stephen and I talking about some of these apps and which ones could use some love from the folks in Cupertino. 

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

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My Comms Board

I’m giving a webinar today about how I journal. (There still may be time to sign up.) One of the slides shares what I lovingly call my “Comms Board,” and I thought it worth sharing here.

This is the array of apps I keep on a separate space to the left of my working screen. It’s a collection of my communication apps. The idea of this is to keep communications separate from my working screen and require me to intentionally switch screens to go into that mode. On good days, I only visit the Comms Board a few times. You could set this up with Keyboard Maestro, Moom, or any window manager of choice.