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Crash Detection Saves Unconscious AppleInsider Writer

The Apple Watch and iPhone’s crash detection has saved a lot of lives, and you probably think of it as something for when you’re driving your car. However, as AppleInsider’s Daniel Eran Dilger discovered, it works with scooters, too. Dilger was in a serious accident while riding a scooter. Lying on the ground at night, unconscious, and bleeding, he could have bled to death.

Fortunately, Dilger’s Apple Watch contacted emergency services, who found him, thanks to the feature, and took him to a hospital:

Even though I wasn’t driving a conventional vehicle, Crash Detection determined that I had been involved in a serious accident and that I wasn’t responding. Within 20 seconds, it called emergency services with my location. Within thirty minutes I was loaded in an ambulance and on the way to the emergency room.

When I came to, I had to ask what was happening. That’s the first I found out that I was getting my eyebrow stitched up and had various scrapes across the half of my face that I had apparently used to a break my fall. I couldn’t remember anything.

It’s a scary story that highlights just how important Crash Detection can be in circumstances like Dilger’s, where he was unable to call emergency services himself.

Dilger also reminds readers to update their emergency contacts on their devices. His were out of date, so they didn’t get a call about the accident. Fortunately, Find My Friends alerted Dilger’s partner of his location so they could call the hospital to check on him.

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MacStories Unwind: A Trip to Flavortown

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This week on MacStories Unwind, I take Federico on a trip to Flavortown with Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, including Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burgers, Smoque BBQ, and Del Rhea’s Chicken Basket, three of my favorite Flavortown stops.

  • Kolide – It ensures that if a device isn’t secure it can’t access your apps.  It’s Device Trust for Okta. Watch the demo today!

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Apple Announces the Swift Student Challenge Will Begin in February 2024 and New Everyone Can Code Resources

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

It’s hard to believe that it has been over nine years since Apple announced the Swift programming language at WWDC. From the day it debuted, one of the pillars of Swift has been Apple’s education efforts, which have included Swift Playgrounds, materials for teachers and students, events, coding centers, and of course, the annual Swift Student Challenge at WWDC. So, with Swift’s 10th anniversary around the corner, it’s not surprising that Apple is updating its Swift Student Challenge program and releasing new resources for educators.

Today, the company announced that the next Swift Student Challenge will begin in February 2024, a break from the past WWDC schedule. The competition will name 350 winners in total, 50 of whom will be named Distinguished Winners whose projects stand out from the other submissions. Distinguished Winners will be invited to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino in the summer to meet with Apple engineers and other winners, and all winners will receive a one-year membership to the Apple Developer Program.

The Swift Student Challenge will run for three weeks in February 2024, and students can sign up to be notified of when the competition will begin here.

Apple is also expanding its Everyone Can Code program with four new projects providing additional resources for students to learn to build apps. The projects, which provide educators with resources to guide students, include the following:

  • Design a Simple App: Students can create an app prototype in Keynote to learn the fundamentals of app design, practice rapid prototyping, and collect feedback, following the same steps as professional developers. 
  • Build with Stacks and Shapes: Students can take the first steps of building an app in Swift Playgrounds and code a self-portrait or a work of art using SwiftUI to learn the fundamentals of user interface design.
  • Build Custom Shapes: Students can bring an app interface to the next level by designing a shape, learning how to plot the coordinates, and coding their custom shape using SwiftUI and the About Me sample app within Swift Playgrounds.
  • Design an App Icon: Students can learn and apply app design principles to create a unique and memorable app icon that communicates an idea; practice rapid prototyping; collect feedback; and upload the icon to Swift Playgrounds to become part of an app.

The projects can be accessed by educators from the Apple Education Community website.

The expansion of the Swift Student Challenge and other announcements today are great to see. It’s a fantastic way to get students excited about coding, as we’ve seen first-hand based on the growing number of apps we write about at MacStories that were built by former Challenge participants. I’m looking forward to seeing what students come up with this year.


Apple Updates Logic Pro for iPad and Mac

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Today, Apple announced updates to Logic Pro for the iPad and Mac. Both platforms gain support for 32-bit float recording and Mastering Assistant, which the company says “can instantly analyze the audio and make expert refinements to the sound, adjusting elements such as the dynamics, frequency balance, timbre, and loudness.” Mastering Assistant’s processing can be manually tweaked by musicians, too.

The update to Logic Pro for Mac adds Sample Alchemy and Beat Breaker, two tools that debuted on Logic Pro for iPad when it was introduced earlier this year. Apple also added new sound packs to Logic Pro for Mac:

The Hybrid Textures sound pack includes a collection of 70 patches, as well as over 80 Apple Loops featuring Sample Alchemy, while the Vox Melodics sound pack contains a diverse collection of over 475 lyrical phrases, hooks, layered harmonies, FX, and one-shots.

On the iPad, Logic Pro now supports Split View and Stage Manager, allowing musicians to work in multiple apps at once and take advantage of drag and drop between them. The app also has a new Recorder mode for recording sounds with the iPad’s microphone and a Quick Sampler plugin to create instruments from sounds. Samples can be previewed with gestures in Logic Pro’s Browser, and new in-app Lessons are available to help users learn the app’s new features and more.

It’s great to see Apple continue to expand Logic Pro’s capabilities and bring the Mac and iPad’s feature set closer together. More than anything, though, I’d like to see iPadOS-level audio routing added to enable the iPad to handle multiple audio inputs and outputs so I could participate in a Zoom call and simultaneously record a separate microphone input.


MacStories Unwind: You Know I Have a Problem with Controllers

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This week, John tries to convince Federico that Things’ Inbox should be at the heart of his universal capture system, a song 50 years in the making, and in a twist that will surprise no one, John bought another controller.

  • Kolide – It ensures that if a device isn’t secure it can’t access your apps.  It’s Device Trust for Okta. Watch the demo today!

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Apple Reports Quarterly Revenue of $89.5 Billion for Q4 2023

Apple’s last quarter marked a 1% decline in revenue compared to Q3 2023. Going into today’s call, expectations were for another roughly 1% revenue decline over the prior year’s fiscal fourth quarter, with consensus expectations of about $89.28 billion in revenue.

The iPhone 15 served up the revenue gains Apple needed to meet fourth quarter estimates. Source: Apple.

The iPhone 15 served up the revenue gains Apple needed to meet fourth quarter estimates. Source: Apple.

Today, Apple reported that its fourth quarter 2023 revenue came in at $89.5 billion, which was slightly more than expected. According to Apple CEO Tim Cook:

Today Apple is pleased to report a September quarter revenue record for iPhone and an all-time revenue record in Services. We now have our strongest lineup of products ever heading into the holiday season, including the iPhone 15 lineup and our first carbon neutral Apple Watch models, a major milestone in our efforts to make all Apple products carbon neutral by 2030.

The iPhone 15 wasn't Apple's only new product this quarter, but it's the one that makes or breaks the quarter. Source: Apple.

The iPhone 15 wasn’t Apple’s only new product this quarter, but it’s the one that makes or breaks the quarter. Source: Apple.

Apple’s fiscal fourth quarter is a prelude to the the first quarter of 2024, which includes the 2023 holiday season. The iPhone helped land Apple exactly where Wall Street expected it to be this quarter, but its the holiday season that will set the tone for the coming year, which will see the debut of Vision Pro and hopefully, new iPads.

Apple's quarterly revenue for the past 13 quarters.

Apple’s quarterly revenue for the past 13 quarters.

Revenue in China was slightly off, but not the miss some analysts feared.

Revenue in China was slightly off, but not the miss some analysts feared.

Gross margins continue to rise. Thanks Services revenue.

Gross margins continue to rise. Thanks Services revenue.


Audio Hijack Gains Beta Audio Transcription Feature

I’ve been playing around a lot with OpenAI’s Whisper speech-to-text engine this year. Whisper isn’t perfect, but it does a remarkably good job, substantially lowering the effort and cost of generating transcripts.

There are dedicated apps to transcribe using Whisper like MacWhisper by Jordi Brun and Transcriptionist from the makers of Ferrite, both of which I’ve tried. However, the most promising option so far is a new Transcribe block released today as part of Audio Hijack by Rogue Amoeba.

The new block is a beta feature that Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis says the company will continue to refine. It’s using the same underlying Whisper technology as other apps, but by reducing transcription to part of your existing recording flow, it’s possible to transcribe on the fly as you record and identify speakers whose audio is coming from separate channels.

We weren’t recording any shows today, so to test the new feature, I copied our MacStories Unwind recording session and used the Zoom audio settings as a stand-in for Federico. I spoke into my microphone, which was one source, and used the piano music from Zoom’s settings as the other source. Audio Hijack recorded both and started transcribing the audio as I was still recording. Here are the results:

This was a very limited test. It remains to be seen how the app does with a longer recording session, but the ease with which I set this up has me excited. By renaming the sources fed into the Transcribe block, I was able to create a real-time transcript complete with timestamps and our names.

Still, as impressive as the results are, I don’t publish what I record in Audio Hijack. It still needs to be edited, at which point the transcript created with this session would diverge from the released audio. Nonetheless, for a newly released beta feature, I’m impressed and looking forward to seeing where Rogue Amoeba takes this.


Apple’s October 2023 Scary Fast Event: All The Small Things

Apple’s presentation moved fast this evening, and since the event concluded, more details have emerged about everything announced. We’ve been combing Apple’s product pages, social media, and other sources to learn more about everything announced, which we’ve collected below:

  • The 13” MacBook Pro with Touch Bar has been officially discontinued and is no longer available for sale, marking the end of the Touch Bar era at Apple.
  • None of the desktop accessories for the iMac – Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, and Magic Keyboard – were updated with a USB-C connector (or any other features).

  • The new ‘Space Black’ color of the 14” and 16” MacBook Pros with M3 Pro and M3 Max chips is apparently not so black, based on first impressions from people who saw it in person already.

  • Speaking of the color black, Apple now sells a 2-meter, black USB-C to MagSafe cable.

  • As it turns out, ‘Scary Fast’ was applicable not only to the new M3 series chips unveiled today but also the unusually short runtime of the event, which clocked in at 30:32, judging from the presentation’s YouTube video.

  • The event video was shot on an iPhone 15 Pro Max and edited on a Mac.

Not a very long list this time around, but at just over 30 minutes and no new accessories, there weren’t many tidbits surrounding this event I’m afraid.


You can follow all of our October 2023 Apple event coverage through our October 2023 Apple event hub or subscribe to the dedicated October 2023 Apple event RSS feed.


Apple’s October 2023 Scary Fast Event: By the Numbers

Today’s Scary Fast online Apple event was packed with facts, figures, and statistics throughout the presentation and elsewhere. We’ve pulled together the highlights.

M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max Chips

  • These are the first chips built on a 3-nanometer process.
  • This process can fit up to 2 million transistors in the cross-section of a human hair.
  • The M3 architecture grants up to 2.5x faster performance than the M1 generation.
  • The M3 CPU’s performance cores are 30% faster than M1 and 15% faster than M2; the efficiency cores are 50% faster than M1.
  • The Neural Engine is faster and more efficient in M3 as well. Specifically, it’s 60% faster than M1 and 15% faster than M2.
  • The M3 Max chip is up to 80% faster than the M1 Max.
  • The M3 has 25 billion transistors, while the M3 Pro has 37 billion, and the M3 Max has 92 billion.

MacBook Pro

  • The M3 Max MacBook Pro supports up to 128 GB of unified memory and 8 TB of storage, with a maximum 16-core CPU and 40-core GPU.
  • The M3 MacBook Pro can run for up to 22 hours on one charge, playing movies using the Apple TV app.
  • The new MacBook Pros are up to 11x faster than the last Intel-based models.

iMac

  • The M3 iMac is 2x faster than the M1 model, 2.5x faster than the 27-inch Intel model, and 4x faster than the 21.5-inch Intel-based iMac.
  • The M3 iMac has a 4.5K Retina display and features a 6-speaker sound system.
  • Apple offers up to 24 GB of unified memory and 2 TB of storage in the M3 iMac.

You can follow all of our October 2023 Apple event coverage through our October 2023 Apple event hub or subscribe to the dedicated October 2023 Apple event RSS feed.