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MacStories Unwind: Apple’s Music and MacBook Pro Event, a Great Safari Extension, and Yoink’s Clever Clipboard System

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps
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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps


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This week on MacStories Unwind:

MacStories

Club MacStories

  • MacStories Weekly
    • Federico continues his series on his Obsidan setup with a look at how he’s using templates
    • John on favorite moments from Monday’s event
    • A Mac widget tip
    • Lots of new apps

AppStories

Unwind

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Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

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Apple Announces 100+ Tech Talks for Developers

Apple announced today that it will be conducting over 100 live sessions and 1,500 hours of one-on-one office hours over the next eight weeks for developers. According to Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations:

Every single day, developers around the world are creating incredible apps and games for our platforms, and it’s our goal to provide them with every resource we can to help make the hard work they put in that much easier and more impactful. Our team is looking forward to connecting with even more developers around the world so we can better support the important work of this incredibly valued community, and listen to and learn from them.

The live sessions are being held online around the world from Bengaluru, Cupertino, London, Mexico City, São Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo, making them accessible from a wide range of time zones. Each session, which will be led by someone from Apple and followed by a Q&A session. Topics will include many subjects, including SwiftUI, App Clips, HealthKit, machine learning, AR, and accessibility. Office hours are a chance for developers to get one-on-one assistance with their apps in 30-minutes sessions.

Tech Talks 2021 are free and available to members of the Apple Developer Program and the Apple Developer Enterprise Program. To register, visit developer.apple.com/tech-talks.

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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.

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Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

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AppStories, Episode 245 – Apple’s October Music and MacBook Pro Event

This week on AppStories, we are joined by Alex Guyot live in the Club MacStories+ Discord community for a special episode recapping and breaking down everything announced by Apple at its latest online event, including the Apple Music, HomePod, and AirPods 3 announcements and the all-new MacBook Pros.


On AppStories+, Federico considers ditching his iPad mini’s Smart Cover for a sleeve, and John provides an update on his macOS Monterey review.

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Apple’s October 2021 Event: All The Small Things

Yesterday, Apple covered a lot of ground quickly, and as usual, more details have emerged in the aftermath of the event. We’ve been combing apple.com, Twitter, and other sources to learn more about the new MacBook Pros, AirPods 3 and more, which we’ve collected below:

MacBook Pro

AirPods 3

Everything Else

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What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.

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Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

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Apple’s October 18, 2021 Keynote: By the Numbers

As usual, Apple sprinkled facts, figures, and statistics throughout the keynote today. Here are highlights of some of those metrics from the event, which was held online from Apple Park in Cupertino, California.

AirPods 3

  • Features the H1 chip
  • IPX4 water resistance
  • Up to 6 hours of listening time (30 hours with the case) or 4 hours of talk time (20 hours with the case) on 1 charge
  • 5 minutes in the case provides 1 hour of charge

M1 Pro and M1 Max

  • The M1 Pro has up to 200GB/s of memory bandwidth, while the M1 Max has 400GB/s
  • The M1 Pro supports up to 32GB of unified memory and has a 256-bit LPDDR5 interface
  • The M1 Max supports up to 64GB of unified memory and has a 512-bit LPDDR5 interface
  • The CPUs of the M1 Pro and M1 Max are built with a 5-nanometer process and have 8 high-performance cores with a 192KB instruction cache, 128KB data cache, 24MB L2 cache, and and 2 high-efficiency cores with a 128KB instruction cache, 64KB data cache, and 4MB L2 cache
  • The CPU of the M1 Pro and M1 Max is 70% faster than the M1
  • There are 33.7 billion transistors on the M1 Pro and 57 billion on the M1 Max CPUs
  • The M1 Pro’s GPU has 16 cores with 2048 execution units, up to 49,512 concurrent threads, 5.2 teraflops, 164 gigatexels/second, and 82 gigapixels/second
  • The M1 Max’s GPU is 4x faster than the M1 and has 32 cores with 4096 execution units, up to 98,304 concurrent threads, 10.4 teraflops, 327 gigatexels/second, and 164 gigapixels/second
  • There are 10,000 Universal apps available on the App Store

MacBook Pro

  • The 16” MacBook Pro has a screen that is 16.2” diagonally, weighs 4.7 pounds, and is 16.8 mm thick
  • The 14” MacBook Pro has a screen that is 14.2” diagonally, weighs 3.5 pounds, and is 15.5 mm thick
  • The MacBook Pros have 3 Thunderbolt 4 ports, 1 HDMI port, 1 SDXC card slot, and 1 3.5 mm headphone jack
  • The bezel around the MacBook Pro’s screen is 3.5 mm thin, which is 24% thinner on the sides and 60% thinner on the top
  • The 16” MacBook Pro has 7.7 million pixels and the 14” MacBook Pro has 5.9 million
  • Both screens refresh at up to 120Hz, have a sustained brightness of 1,000 nits, and a peak brightness of 1,600 nits
  • The screen of both models has a 1 million to 1 contrast ratio and can display 1 billion colors
  • The FaceTime HD camera has a 1080p resolution, 4-element lens, and ƒ/2.0 aperture that enables a 2x improvement in low-light performance
  • The new MacBook Pros have 3 microphones with a 60% lower noise floor and 6 speakers with 80% more bass
  • The MacBook Pro’s SSDs write at up to 7.4GB/s and are available in up to 8TB configurations
  • The 14” MacBook Pro gets 17 hours of video playback, which is 7 hours more than before or 11 hours of web browsing on a full battery charge, while the 16” model gets 21 hours of video playback for an improvement of 10 hours or up to 14 hours of web browsing
  • The batteries can be fast charged to 50% in 30 minutes

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

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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

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Apple Announces New Third-Generation AirPods

At this morning’s keynote event, Apple announced the third-generation of its standard AirPods. The new devices feature a smaller design that is much more akin to the AirPods Pro. True to form for the non-Pro version, the new AirPods hook inside the base of your ear rather than being in-ear headphones. As such, they continue to not support the advanced noise cancelling features of their Pro siblings.

Despite the lack of noise cancelling, the new AirPods introduce Apple’s Spatial Audio technology to the non-Pro line for the first time. Spatial Audio creates the illusion of surround-sound audio for supporting media, and can even simulate the direction of that audio’s origin so that it changes when you turn your head. To aid this advanced audio experience, the new device also includes a brand-new low-distortion driver, which Apple claims will provide more powerful bass, and cleaner high frequencies.

Read more

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.

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Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

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Apple Unveils the New 14 and 16-Inch MacBook Pros Powered by the M1 Pro and M1 Max Systems-on-a-Chip

As expected, Apple released new MacBook Pros today featuring all-new Apple silicon systems-on-a-chip (SoCs). Let’s start with the chips that drive the new 14 and 16” MacBook Pros.

Apple introduced two new SoCs, the M1 Pro and the M1 Max. Both MacBook Pro models can be configured with either SoC, which take the M1 architecture and scale it up for pro-level performance. Today’s presentation emphasized a long list of metrics in several key areas, including the speed, bandwidth, and capacity of its unified memory and both SoC’s efficiency and performance per watt.

The M1 Pro has up to 200GB/s of memory bandwidth and can drive up to 32GB of unified memory. The Max doubles that with up to 400GB/s of memory bandwidth and up to 64GB of unified memory.

Read more

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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.

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Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

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Apple Introduces New Apple Music Plan, Siri Features, and HomePod Mini Colors

At this morning’s event, Apple Music’s Zane Lowe made his keynote debut to announce the new Apple Music Voice Plan. Coming in at a mere $5/month, the Apple Music Voice Plan is now the lowest-cost way to gain access to Apple’s music streaming service 1.

The Voice Plan has a catch though. True to its name, it only grants full access to Apple Music via Siri. This includes a customized in-app experience in the Music app for Voice Plan subscribers. It’s not yet clear what exactly this experience entails, but based on Apple’s press release, these users will be able to access a limited set of the Music app’s features. Specifically, they’ll be able to access their playback history and Apple Music’s built-in playlists, but it seems unlikely that they’ll be able to create custom playlists using Apple Music songs. Whether or not full search of the Apple Music catalog will be available is unclear, but requesting specific songs from Siri should be possible.

Read more

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Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.

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Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

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Replay Apple’s October 18, 2021 Keynote and Other Videos

If you didn’t follow the live stream or announcements as they unfolded today, you can replay it on Apple’s Events site and catch the product videos on Apple’s YouTube channel.

The keynote video can be streamed here and on the Apple TV using the TV app. A high-quality version will also be available through Apple Podcasts as a video and audio podcast. There is also an American Sign Language version of the event, which is available here.

More videos after the break.

Read more

Access Extra Content and Perks

Founded in 2015, Club MacStories has delivered exclusive content every week for nearly a decade.

What started with weekly and monthly email newsletters has blossomed into a family of memberships designed for every MacStories fan.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.

Club MacStories: Weekly and monthly newsletters via email and the web that are brimming with apps, tips, automation workflows, longform writing, early access to the MacStories Unwind podcast, periodic giveaways, and more;

Club MacStories+: Everything that Club MacStories offers, plus an active Discord community, advanced search and custom RSS features for exploring the Club’s entire back catalog, bonus columns, and dozens of app discounts;

Club Premier: All of the above and AppStories+, an extended version of our flagship podcast that’s delivered early, ad-free, and in high-bitrate audio.

Learn more here and from our Club FAQs.