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Switch sales figures, and updates to the accessories and game lineups. Also why did they kill the NES Classic?
On this week’s Remaster, Myke and I discuss some recent Switch news and upcoming games. You can listen here.
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Nike has news out today concerning the latest fruits of its partnership with Apple. A new model of Apple Watch called ‘Apple Watch NikeLab’ is coming soon:
The limited edition, neutral-toned Apple Watch NikeLab maintains the beloved features of its predecessor: deep integration with the Nike+ Run Club app, exclusive Siri commands, GPS, a two-times-brighter display and water resistance to 50 meters, all made possible by a powerful dual-core processor and watchOS 3.
I don’t understand why Nike felt the need to give this Watch a new name rather than releasing it as an extension of the Nike+ line. Perhaps it’s simply a marketing angle, as they are presenting the NikeLab as a limited edition model.
If you’d like to get your hands on the Apple Watch NikeLab, it goes on sale April 27th on nike.com, at NikeLab stores, and at an Apple Tokyo pop-up in Isetan. Assuming this is a comprehensive list of sellers, it means you won’t be able to get the Watch from the Apple Store. It also appears unlikely that the band will be available for separate purchase, though that remains unclear.
Apple’s developer site details a new API that makes it possible to embed Live Photos on the web:
This new JavaScript-based API makes it easy to embed Live Photos on your websites. In addition to enabling Live Photos on iOS and macOS, you can now let users display their Live Photos on the web.
Live Photos were first introduced in September 2015 alongside the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. Since then, their adoption across major social media platforms and other parts of the web has been slow.
Today’s news is welcome, as it will hopefully help expand the reach of Live Photos beyond the sandbox of photo apps on iOS.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross writes for VICE News about an ambitious new goal for Apple:
Apple has one of the most aggressive sustainability and recycling programs in tech, but it still pulls plenty of metals and toxic rare-earth materials out of the ground to make iPhones, iPads, Macbooks and other products.
That’s about to change. The company is set to announce a new, unprecedented goal for the tech industry, “to stop mining the earth altogether.”
The announcement, part of Apple’s 2017 Environment Responsibility Report released Wednesday, will commit the company to making devices entirely from recycled materials such as aluminum, copper, tin, and tungsten. But there’s one hiccup: Apple doesn’t know exactly how it’s going to make that happen.
Setting ambitious goals seems to be part of Apple’s culture, but speaking about such goals publicly before the team has reached them – or before they even know how to reach them – is very different from the company’s norm.
Aside from this announcement, the piece also features interesting details about some of Apple’s other environmental efforts. One of the stranger tidbits is that Apple soaks certain products in synthetic human sweat to test their durability over time – a fact also highlighted in the company’s new environmental videos.
Four new videos were released by Apple this morning, each focusing on a different aspect of the company’s environmental efforts. The videos feature different Apple employees who have roles focused on the environment, and they all share a similar artistic style and comedic tone.
One video shares how Apple creates artificial sweat to test the durability of its Apple Watch bands, another discusses how Apple Park was designed with a high level of “breathability,” a third covers Apple’s ambitions to produce zero waste company-wide, and the final video is about how solar farms can co-exist with traditional farming.
Video embeds after the break.
This morning Apple notified Apple Watch users that the company’s third activity challenge was coming up soon. Following challenges for Thanksgiving (U.S. only) and the start of the new year, the latest challenge is in celebration of Earth Day on Saturday, April 22nd.
This new challenge encourages Apple Watch owners to complete a 30-minute or longer walk, run, cycle, wheelchair, or swim workout on Earth Day. Doing so will earn a special Achievement in the Activity app, as well as unlock a few new iMessage stickers.
My wife and I are two-for-two on prior activity challenges, so I’m sure we’ll aim for the trifecta and complete the Earth Day challenge as well. If Apple pushed these challenges more frequently, they might be less motivating, but so far I think the company has struck a healthy level of frequency by centering challenges around special occasions.
In February 2010, nearly a year after I started MacStories, I registered a domain for a project I knew I wanted to launch in the future: AppStories.net.
Seven years later, AppStories finally joins the MacStories family. AppStories is the first MacStories podcast, hosted by yours truly and John Voorhees, and it’s all about the world of apps. Every week, John and I will cover our favorite apps, the human stories behind the apps we love, as well as the impact of apps on our economy, culture, and personal lives. And we’ll always do so in about 30 minutes.
You can check out AppStories’ website here, or, even better, subscribe on Apple Podcasts.
You can also find AppStories on:
Alternatively, you can just hit Play on our embedded episode card below to start listening to the first episode of AppStories.
AppStories is an important milestone for the MacStories team, as well as an idea I’ve been pondering for several years. Just like MacStories, we’re committed to AppStories and we’ll keep doing this for a long time. Despite its long gestation, this is just the beginning for AppStories, which will become an essential complement to MacStories going forward. I am extremely excited about AppStories and the plans we’ve outlined so far.
If you’re not interested in the backstory, I’d love for you to check out the first episode and subscribe. But if you want to learn more and understand what our goals for AppStories are, allow me to start from the beginning.
Nate Lanxon reports for Bloomberg on some welcome updates to Apple Maps in Europe:
Apple Inc. is expanding the capabilities of its Maps app in Europe to help users charge their electric vehicles or find bike rental hubs.
The company has added the locations of the U.K.’s electric vehicle charging stations by incorporating data from Munich-based Cirrantic’s Moovility service, which lists re-juicing points for cars made by Tesla and Nissan, among others.
It has also added public bicycle rental and drop-off points to maps of London, New York and Paris in a catch-up to long-time mobile navigation leader Google, which has listed such stations in multiple countries for some time.
Last December Apple added ChargePoint integration to Maps to help users in the U.S. find electric vehicle chargers, so it’s nice to see something similar come to Europe.
The bicycle rental information is also welcome as Apple Maps continues branching out from simply providing directions to now being a central hub for various modes of transportation, such as ride sharing and now bicycling.
Microsoft To-Do is the official successor to Wunderlist, the popular task management app acquired by Microsoft in mid-2015. Microsoft unveiled To-Do today in Preview, which is essentially a public beta. The service is built on Office 365 technologies, but according to ZDNet it is available to anyone with a Microsoft account; Office 365 is not required.
To-Do launches today on several major platforms, including iPhone, Android, Windows, and the web. Unfortunately iPad and Mac versions are not available at this time, but Microsoft says those apps will be available in the coming months.
After spending some time with To-Do on iPhone, my initial impressions are that it’s a beautiful, simple task management tool that very much feels like a worthy successor to Wunderlist.
