This week on MacStories Unwind, John is joined by Jonathan Reed and Club member David to discuss the Apple TV+ show, Silo. This week’s show was recorded live in the Club MacStories Discord community as part of the Club MacStories+ AV Club.
This episode is sponsored by:
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!
Today, Apple announced $81.8 billion in Q3 2023 revenue, a drop of 1% year-over-year that was likely driven by a soft global economy that has caused an industry-wide reduction in smartphone demand. The results mark the third consecutive quarter of revenue declines for the company. With so much of Apple’s quarterly earnings tied to the success of the iPhone, the results aren’t surprising. Going into today’s earnings call, the expectation was for a 1.6% drop in quarterly revenue.
We are happy to report that we had an all-time revenue record in Services during the June quarter, driven by over 1 billion paid subscriptions, and we saw continued strength in emerging markets thanks to robust sales of iPhone. “From education to the environment, we are continuing to advance our values, while championing innovation that enriches the lives of our customers and leaves the world better than we found it.
Despite a slightly down quarter year-over-year, Apple logged some impressive Services numbers.
Although today’s revenue decline is notable for being the third consecutive quarterly decline in several years, a better gauge of Apple’s longer-term fortunes will come later this year when it refreshes the iPhone lineup. With economies around the globe still recovering, it will be interesting to see if rumors of a hardware redesign of the iPhone are sufficient to offset what some speculate will be Apple’s most expensive smartphone ever.
This week on AppStories, we examine the latest app trends and where Apple’s system apps are heading to try to answer the question of where the world of apps is heading.
Sponsored by:
Vitally – A new era for customer success productivity. Get a free pair of AirPods Pro when you book a qualified meeting.
Not long ago, I linked to an in-depth profile of Netflix Games published by The Ringer. It seems Netflix has been busy getting the word out to more publications because not long after The Ringer’s post, Ash Parrish of The Verge published a story about Netflix Games from the perspective of its in-house studio, Night School, and Ripstone, an outside game developer that created the recently-released game, The Queen’s Gambit Chess.
Netflix’s gaming philosophy right now resembles a kind of patronage system. Netflix supplies its studios with resources, and they’re free to pursue whatever artistic avenue they want. This approach isn’t too far off from how game subscription services work, bringing Netflix in line with products like Xbox’s Game Pass and Apple Arcade.
Last week also saw the release of Return to Monkey Island on the iPhone and iPad. The game, which was released on consoles and Steam last fall, marks the comeback of the classic point-and-click adventure series and its creator, Ron Gilbert.
TouchArcade, which is one of the few sites to review the iOS and iPadOS versions of Return to Monkey Island was impressed:
Having now played Return to Monkey Island on basically everything but PS5, it shines on a portable. The iOS versions have controller support as well as touch support as I mentioned above, but so do the Steam Deck and Switch versions. Given the game looks, runs, and plays brilliantly on all portables I tried it on, I recommend getting it wherever you enjoy playing games the most. There is no definitive portable version because they are all excellent. My favorite version is definitely the iPad version on my iPad Pro.
If you’re a 90s gamer with nostalgia for the Monkey Island series, Return to Monkey Island sounds like a great way to revisit the series on modern hardware.
Spaceplan.
I’ve never been a big fan of clicker games. I find them too mindless for my tastes, but last week, I stumbled upon an update to Spaceplan, a weird and wonderful potato-planet themed clicker by Jake Hollands that debuted in 2017. With the update, Spaceplan runs on modern screens, adds haptic feedback, and refreshes other game elements.
At the start of the game, you need to press a button repeatedly to collect energy that can be traded for items that collect the energy for you. The catch is that items cost progressively more in collected watts as the game goes on.
Apparently, there’s a conclusion to the game, although I haven’t reached it yet. What’s drawn me into Spaceplan is the simple graphics, hypnotic electronic soundtrack, and dialogue that help build a story around an incredibly simple mechanic. As it turns out, sometimes a little mindless fun is just what I need to unwind, and Spaceplan delivers that perfectly.
Jelly Car Worlds.
Finally, I wanted to call out an update to Jelly Car Worlds, an Apple Arcade title. Jelly Car Worlds is an excellent reimagining of the original Jelly Car, which debuted about a decade earlier on the App Store. The unique physics of this cross between a racing game and platformer are incredibly fun. Worlds added a level editor, which was refined with last week’s release. The update also added the levels from the original Jelly Car game. According to TouchArcade, future updates are planned to add levels from Jelly Car 2 and 3, which will make this a great way to experience those classic levels and inspire the design of new ones in the level editor.
Game On is a periodic roundup highlighting the biggest news in gaming on Apple’s platforms. From the iPhone and iPad to the Mac and Vision Pro, we’ll cover the big-name games on Apple devices, along with notable industry and developer news.
Today, Apple announced that it, along with Pixar, Adobe, Autodesk, and NVIDIA, have formed the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), to “promote the standardization, development, evolution, and growth of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology.”
OpenUSD is a 3D screen description technology invented at Pixar and open-sourced in 2016. The alliance’s new project, which will be housed in the Joint Development Foundation, an affiliate of the Linux Foundation, has invited other companies and organizations to join in the effort to develop OpenUSD, “a high-performance 3D scene description technology that offers robust interoperability across tools, data, and workflows.”
Mike Rockwell, Apple’s vice president of the Vision Products Group, was quoted in the press release as saying:
OpenUSD will help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences, from artistic creation to content delivery, and produce an ever-widening array of spatial computing applications. Apple has been an active contributor to the development of USD, and it is an essential technology for the groundbreaking visionOS platform, as well as the new Reality Composer Pro developer tool. We look forward to fostering its growth into a broadly adopted standard.
With big companies coalescing around a new standard, that’s one more point of potential friction that hopefully will be removed as creators begin building 3D experiences for the Apple Vision Pro and other devices.
It seems like every company is scrambling to stake their claim in the AI goldrush–check out the CEO of Kroger promising to bring LLMs into the dairy aisle. And front line workers are following suit–experimenting with AI so they can work faster and do more.
In the few short months since ChatGPT debuted, hundreds of AI-powered tools have come on the market. But while AI-based tools have genuinely helpful applications, they also pose profound security risks. Unfortunately, most companies still haven’t come up with policies to manage those risks. In the absence of clear guidance around responsible AI use, employees are blithely handing over sensitive data to untrustworthy tools.
AI-based browser extensions offer the clearest illustration of this phenomenon. The Chrome store is overflowing with extensions that (claim to) harness ChatGPT to do all manner of tasks: punching up emails, designing graphics, transcribing meetings, and writing code. But these tools are prone to at least three types of risk.
Malware: Security researchers keep uncovering AI-based extensions that steal user data. These extensions play on users’ trust of the big tech platforms (“it can’t be dangerous if Google lets it on the Chrome store!”) and they often appear to work, by hooking up to ChatGPT et al’s APIs.
Data Governance: Companies including Apple and Verizon have banned their employees from using LLMs because these products rarely offer a guarantee that a user’s inputs won’t be used as training data.
Prompt Injection Attacks: In this little known but potentially unsolvable attack, hidden text on a webpage directs an AI tool to perform malicious actions–such as exfiltrate data and then delete the records.
Up until now, most companies have been caught flat-footed by AI, but these risks are too serious to ignore.
At Kolide, we’re taking a two-part approach to governing AI use.
Draft AI policies as a team. We don’t want to totally ban our team from using AI, we just want to use it safely. So our first step is meeting with representatives from multiple teams to figure out what they’re getting out of AI-based tools, and how we can provide them with secure options that don’t expose critical data or infrastructure.
Use Kolide to block malicious tools. Kolide lets IT and security teams write Checks that detect device compliance issues, and we’ve already started creating Checks for malicious (or dubious) AI-based tools. Now if an employee accidentally downloads malware, they’ll be prevented from logging into our cloud apps until they’ve removed it.
Every company will have to craft policies based on their unique needs and concerns, but the important thing is to start now. There’s still time to seize the reins of AI, before it gallops away with your company’s data.
This week, John has news from the animal kingdom and tries a new beverage while Federico struggles with text editors (again). Plus John has a surprise videogame hardware pick.
Sponsored By:
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!
This week on AppStories, we talk about Safari, videoconferencing, Messages, and gaming on macOS Sonoma, plus stickers and widgets on iOS and iPadOS 17.
One of the perks of a Club MacStories+ or Club Premier membership is discounts on a long list of great apps and services. Today, we’re pleased to add four new Mac apps to the growing catalog of deals available to members:
Lasso is a Mac window manager that lets you move and resize windows using only your mouse. The app uses a simple grid system and keyboard shortcuts, plus it supports custom layouts, multiple displays, layout exporting and importing, and more.
Mission Control Plus is a Mac app that puts the ‘control’ back in Mission Control by letting you manage your windows in Mission Control, adding keyboard navigation, shortcuts, and more.
Batteries for Mac allows you to track all your devices’ batteries from your Mac and will notify you when your iPhone, iPad, AirPods, Beats headphones, and Bluetooth peripherals need recharging.
Sleeve 2 is the ultimate music accessory for your Mac. Sleeve sits on the desktop, displaying and controlling the music you’re currently playing using Apple Music, Spotify, and Doppler. The app is highly customizable, supports themes, and integrates with Last.fm.
Club MacStories+ adds to Club MacStories, with bonus content, a powerful web app to read Club articles on the web with advanced search and filtering, advanced RSS features, exclusive discounts, our Discord community, and ad-free, early access to MacStories Unwind, our fun weekly podcast that explores culture, media, and more.
Club Premier is the ultimate plan that includes all of Club MacStories, Club MacStories+, and the extended, ad-free AppStories+ podcast in a single package. It is the best value and the easiest way to access everything we do. It’s the MacStories all-access pass.
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