This Week's Sponsor:

Copilot Money

The Apple Editor’s Choice App for Managing Your Money

Posts in Linked

Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s Record Label Pages→

Ethan Millman, writing for Rolling Stone, reports that Apple has added around 400 music label pages to Apple Music. Label pages began showing up in Music late in April with the release of iOS and iPadOS 14.5 as Federico covered in in his overview. However, with the introduction of Spatial Audio and lossless streaming, Millman had a chance to talk to Zane Lowe, Apple Music’s co-head of Artist Relations and radio host, about why the company is emphasizing record labels.

According to Lowe:

“We want to highlight labels that are really hyper-focused on building great quality. The labels we’re partnering with here are the ones where I want to search for their logo on the back of the record and would buy music unheard because I trust that,” Lowe says. “That to me is really the culture that we’re trying to represent from a label point of view here. In a way, this is an opportunity for us to reestablish the concept of a label as something more than just a bank. To look at the label system again as more than just a distribution model or an investment model, but actually as a place where music, art and culture is fostered in a really deliberate and very thoughtful way.”

Listener affinity for record labels is just one aspect of music that has largely fallen by the wayside in the streaming era. It will be interesting to see if Apple Music can rekindle interest in labels as an indicator of quality and curation. There’s more Apple could do to expand music credits, but it’s good to see the company take a step in this direction with labels.

You can follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2021 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2021 RSS feed.

Permalink

Eddy Cue On Why Spatial Audio Is a Game-Changer→

Billboard’s Micah Singleton interviewed Apple executive Eddy Cue about this week’s update to Apple Music, which added Spatial Audio, a surround sound technology based on Dolby Atmos, and lossless streaming. In the interview, Cue explains why Apple is enthusiastic about Spatial Audio and emphasizing it more than lossless streaming:

…when you listen for the first time and you see what’s possible with Dolby Atmos with music, it’s a true game-changer. And so, when we listened to it for the first time, we realized this is a big, big deal. It makes you feel like you’re onstage, standing right next to the singer, it makes you feel like you might be to the left of the drummer, to the right of the guitarist. It creates this experience that, almost in some ways, you’ve never really had, unless you’re lucky enough to be really close to somebody playing music.

Although the number of Spatial Audio tracks numbers in the thousands compared to Apple Music’s catalog of 75 million songs, Cue expects it to gain momentum over time. To that end, Cue explains that Apple is evangelizing Spatial Audio:

So we went after the labels and are going to the artists and educating them on it. There’s a lot of work to be done because we have, obviously, tens of millions of songs. This is not a simple “take-the-file that you have in stereo, processes through this software application and out comes Dolby Atmos.” This requires somebody who’s a sound engineer, and the artist to sit back and listen, and really make the right calls and what the right things to do are. It’s a process that takes time, but it’s worth it.

I’ve had the chance to try both Spatial Audio on AirPods Pro and AirPods Max and lossless streaming over my home stereo system. Lossless sounds excellent on my dedicated surround-sound system, but I think Apple is taking the right approach by emphasizing Spatial Audio over lossless. As good as lossless streaming sounds, the difference is small by comparison to Spatial Audio. Also, lossless is anchored to my living room, whereas I can enjoy Spatial Audio anywhere.

I was an early adopter of DVD-Audio and SACD, which also offer a surround-sound music experience, but neither format really caught on. I think Spatial Audio could be different, though. First of all, the format isn’t an add-on cost to an Apple Music subscription. When you couple that with the popularity of Apple’s products and the competitiveness of the music streaming industry, I think the format has a fighting chance at gaining a foothold where others have stumbled.

You can follow all of our WWDC coverage through our WWDC 2021 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated WWDC 2021 RSS feed.

Permalink

Craig Federighi Provides Deeper Insight Into iCloud Private Relay→

Fast Company’s Michael Grothaus interviewed Craig Federighi this week regarding the suite of new privacy features which Apple unveiled at WWDC. The article includes some notable technical details on how iCloud Private Relay works under the hood. One of the most interesting — and somewhat unfortunate — revelations is that iCloud Private Relay will only work from Safari. Users of other browsers are out of luck here.

The reason for this restriction has to do with Apple’s commitment to unassailable privacy, which happens by ensuring that no party can ever access both your IP address and your destination URL. From what I can gauge, this is actually a three-step process which looks something like this:

  • From Safari, you navigate to a particular URL. Safari encrypts this destination URL locally and then forwards your request to Apple’s iCloud Private Relay servers.
  • Apple’s servers anonymize your IP address so that it can’t be traced back to you, then forward the request to a trusted third-party’s servers.
  • The third-party decrypts the destination URL, then forwards the final request (decrypted URL plus anonymized IP address) to the destination.

Read more

Apple Captured in a Single Email Message→

Matthew Panzarino writing at TechCrunch breaks down an email message between Steve Jobs, Bertrand Serlet, Scott Forstall, and others that documents the moment the App Store was born. Here’s the message:

The email captures an important moment in Apple’s history, but as Panzarino explains, it’s also an important lesson in effective leadership:

All in all, this exchange is a wildly important bit of ephemera that underpins the entire app ecosystem era and an explosive growth phase for Internet technology. And it’s also an encapsulation of the kind of environment that has made Apple an effective and brutally efficient company for so many years.

It’s also fascinating to learn how soon after the iPhone’s debut the call was made to let third-party apps onto the platform:

Though there has been plenty of established documentation of Steve being reluctant about allowing third-party apps on iPhone, this email establishes an official timeline for when the decision was not only made but essentially fully formed. And it’s much earlier than the apocryphal discussion about when the call was made. This is just weeks after the first hacky third-party attempts had made their way to iPhone and just under two months since the first iPhone jailbreak toolchain appeared. 

Apple is far larger today than it was in 2007, but it was by no means small then either. The sort of ruthlessly efficient decision-making on display in Serlet and Jobs’ interaction is a lot easier for startups with a handful of employees, which makes it notable for a company of Apple’s size in 2007.

Permalink

Apple Tells CNET It’s Making Privacy Changes to AirTags and Has an Android App Coming Later This Year→

CNET reports that Apple is adjusting the time within which they sound an alert when separated from their owners and adding ways to alert people when AirTags and third-party Find My network-enabled items are nearby.

Initially, AirTags were set to play a sound three days after they were separated from their owners. Now, the device will play a warning beep somewhere between 8 and 24 hours. Apple is also creating an Android app to allow owners of Android phones and devices to know if an AirTag or Find My network device is planted on them.

AirTags launched last month with numerous privacy protections baked into the device and related software, noting at the time that they expected to make adjustments along the way. With a few weeks of real-world use by customers and investigations by The Washington Post and others, today’s changes are a positive step toward ensuring that AirTags can only be used for their intended purpose: tracking belongings, not people.

The latest changes are being rolled out now and will be applied to AirTags when they are near an iPhone. Apple told CNET that it will have more details on the planned Android app later this year.

Permalink

AppStories, Episode 221 – Our watchOS 8 and tvOS 15 Wishes→

This week on AppStories, we are joined by MacStories editor and senior developer Alex Guyot to conclude our WWDC wish list series with a look at tvOS and watchOS.

Sponsored by:

  • Inoreader – Take Back Control of Your News Feed. Use the code MACSTRY2 for 20% off your first year of Inoreader Pro.
  • Pingdom – Start monitoring your website performance and availability today, and get instant alerts when an outage occurs or a site transaction fails. Use offer code APPSTORIES to get 30% off. Offer expires on January 31, 2022, and can be used only once.
  • Linode – Cloud Hosting & Linux Servers. Get a $100 in free credit.

Permalink