Yesterday during their Peek Performance keynote event, Apple unveiled the Mac Studio and Apple Studio Display. The former is an all-new computer joining the Mac lineup, with specs that are blowing away Apple’s previous offerings due to the introduction of a new top-of-the-line M-series chip: the M1 Ultra. The Apple Studio Display marks Apple’s true return to the consumer display market after a near decade-long hiatus.
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Mac Studio, M1 Ultra, and Apple Studio Display: The MacStories Overview
Apple’s New iPad Air Adds the M1 Chip, Center Stage Support, and 5G Connectivity
Today’s Peek Performance Apple event included a new iPad Air that replaces the model that was released in the fall of 2020 and features an M1 chip, 5G connectivity, and an Ultra Wide front-facing camera.
The new Air comes in five colors: Space Gray, Starlight, pink, purple, and blue. The chip has been upgraded from the A15 to the M1, bringing it in line with the chip used in the iPad Pro. Apple also upgraded the front-facing Ultra Wide 12MP camera, so it now supports Center Stage, allowing the camera to keep participants in the camera frame during FaceTime and other video calls. The Air adds 5G connectivity and a USB-C port that’s two times faster than before too.
Other than the new colors, the design of the iPad Air remains the same with a Touch ID top button, 10.9” diagonal Liquid Retina display that features 264 pixels per inch and Apple’s True Tone technology, but not ProMotion. The iPad Air comes in 64GB and 256GB storage configurations like the model it replaces too.
With the move to an M1 chip and support for Center Stage, the gap between the iPad Air and the 11” iPad Pro is smaller than ever. Perhaps the narrowing of the gap is temporary and we’ll see it widen again when the iPad Pro is next updated. However, the two iPads are so close in specs now that the new Air is probably the better choice for most users, especially if they can get by with 64GB of storage.
You can follow all of our ‘Peek Performance’ Apple event coverage through our event hub, or subscribe to the dedicated RSS feed.
Apple Unveils the Latest Iteration of iPhone SE with an A15 Bionic Chip and 5G
Today, Apple updated its budget-model iPhone SE with a new A15 Bionic chip, 5G connectivity, better battery life, and other modern iPhone features.
As with the previous model, the new SE comes in three colors: Midnight, Starlight, and (Product)RED. With the new A15 Bionic chip, Apple says the new SE’s graphics are 1.2x faster than the 2nd generation model it replaces. The addition of the A15 Bionic means iPhone SE users can enjoy advanced features like Live Text too.
A combination of the new chip, different battery chemistry, and changes to the design also allows the SE to run for up to 2 hours longer on its battery in video playback tests. With a 20W charger, the SE can fast charge from 0-50% in 30 minutes too.
The iPhone SE has a 12MP camera with a sensor that is capable of Apple’s Deep Fusion technology. The update also supports Smart HDR 4 and photographic styles, which first appeared on the iPhone 13. Although the camera’s sensor and the hardware that drives it makes this a new camera system, the lens hardware itself appears to be unchanged.
The iPhone SE’s glass has received an upgrade too. It uses the same shatter-resistant type of glass as the iPhone 13 and 13 Pro lines.
Finally, the iPhone SE carries a $429 starting price tag. That’s $30 more than the prior generation.
Other features of the iPhone SE remain the same. The model uses Touch ID embedded in its Home button and has the same 4.7” display as the model it replaces. Like the previous model, the new SE is also IP67 rated for water resistance. The new SE offers 64, 128, and 256GB storage capacities too.
With an A15 Bionic chip, which powered the previous-generation iPad Air, the new iPhone SE is an excellent choice for anyone who wants a smaller iPhone. It would have been nice to see it adopt Touch ID in the power button, as the iPad Air did, but regardless, today’s announcement is a nice refresh of Apple’s most affordable iPhone.
You can follow all of our ‘Peek Performance’ Apple event coverage through our event hub, or subscribe to the dedicated RSS feed.p
MacStories Starter Pack: Taking Apple Music Discovery into Your Own Hands
Editor’s Note: Taking Apple Music Discovery into Your Own Hands is part of the MacStories Starter Pack, a collection of ready-to-use shortcuts, apps, workflows, and more that we’ve created to help you get the most out of your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Apple Music’s tools for discovering new music could be better. A lot has been written about the problems, which I’m not going to rehash here. Instead, I’ve got a long list of tips, apps, and workflows you can use to discover new music now.
I’ve collected these apps and tips over many thousands of hours of listening and written about some of them here and for Club MacStories members before. However, this is the first time I’ve gathered and expanded those tips and workflows in one comprehensive story.
MacStories Starter Pack: Reverse-Engineering the Matter API and My ‘Save to Matter’ Shortcut
Editor’s Note: Reverse-Engineering the Matter API and My ‘Save to Matter’ Shortcut is part of the MacStories Starter Pack, a collection of ready-to-use shortcuts, apps, workflows, and more that we’ve created to help you get the most out of your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
For the past few months, I’ve been enjoying and keeping an eye on the development of Matter, a new read-later service that aims to combine a powerful text parser with elegant design, social discovery features, annotations, and the ability to listen to articles as audio. I’m not one to typically care about the latest VC-backed startup that promises to revolutionize reading articles with social features, but Matter struck me for a few reasons: the app’s reader mode is gorgeous; the ability to annotate articles with highlights is great; and, more importantly, it has the best, most human-sounding text-to-audio conversion engine I’ve ever tested.
Something else happened a few months ago: Matter introduced an official plugin to sync your article highlights as Markdown notes to Obsidian. Integration with PKM-style apps is a hot trend right now in the modern crop of read-later services (John covered this very topic here), so I wasn’t shocked to see that Matter joined Readwise in supporting Obsidian with a plugin. Something about it piqued my interest though:
If Matter didn’t have a public API, how could the Obsidian plugin even sync to the Matter service?
Obviously, there had to be an API involved behind the scenes, which Matter hadn’t announced yet, but which I could potentially reverse-engineer and integrate with Shortcuts. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the past month.
My experiments with the still-unannounced Matter API have developed on three separate fronts, and I’m going to share the results in three different places:
- Today on MacStories, I’m going to share a one-click shortcut called Save to Matter that lets you save any article to your Matter queue directly from the share sheet or anywhere else on iOS, iPadOS, or macOS without having to use the Matter extension;
- Tomorrow on MacStories Weekly for Club MacStories members, I will share MatterBot, an advanced Matter shortcut that lets you take complete control over your Matter queue with support for exporting annotations as Markdown or even downloading articles as MP3 files;
- Next week for Club MacStories+ and Premier members only, I will share MatterPod, another advanced shortcut that lets you turn your Matter queue into a Matter podcast feed hosted on your own web server.
Before we dive in, I also want to confirm that I privately reached out to the folks at Matter weeks ago about my experiments, and they were cool with me writing about my findings and sharing shortcuts I’ve built for the Matter API.
With that being said, let’s take a look at how you can get started with the Matter API and the Save to Matter shortcut.
MacStories Starter Pack: Customizing Your Workflows with Deep Links
Editor’s Note: Customizing Your Workflows with Deep Links is part of the MacStories Starter Pack, a collection of ready-to-use shortcuts, apps, workflows, and more that we’ve created to help you get the most out of your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
In my story yesterday, I covered how I manage links to content I come across every day. Today’s story is also about linking, but it’s not about collecting and processing the content you stumble across. Instead, it’s about creating links between the apps you use to tie your projects and the content related to them together in a cohesive way.
Deep linking between apps isn’t new, but it has seen a resurgence of interest. Part of that seems to be a natural extension of the popularity of internal linking systems in note-taking apps, but it’s also thanks to apps like Hook, the entire purpose of which is to help users link the content inside their apps together more easily.
When you step back and think about productivity apps, most involve some sort of list. You’ve got lists of messages in your email client, events in your calendar, documents in your text editor, and so on. Those lists, which serve as inboxes for an app’s content, are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, having everything consolidated and organized into lists is valuable. That’s true of the kinds of links I wrote about yesterday, but even more so for things like upcoming appointments and tasks. Apps like calendars and task managers exist because there are better solutions than a pile of scribbled notes to yourself.
On the other hand, though, any list has the power to distract you the moment you open it. You go looking for one thing but end up browsing everything or following up on something else. Before you know it, you barely remember why you opened the app in the first place. For me, the trick to staying on task when I open any app full of distractions is to find a way to go straight to what I need, bypassing the distractions entirely with the help of a deep link.
Email is one of the best examples of this sort of setup. As I explained in my story about my email setup on Monday, getting information out of whatever email client I’m using and into Obsidian where I can integrate it with my own notes helps keep my inbox under control. When I pull text out of an email message and paste it into my notes, I do my best to get everything I need. However, when there’s a back and forth conversation about a topic, it can be valuable to go back and see the entire context of the conversation, which I can do by linking to the original message thread.
MacStories Starter Pack: Introducing Obsidian Shortcut Launcher, A Free Plugin to Trigger Shortcuts from Obsidian
Editor’s Note: Obsidian Shortcut Launcher is part of the MacStories Starter Pack, a collection of ready-to-use shortcuts, apps, workflows, and more that we’ve created to help you get the most out of your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, over the past year, Obsidian has become as essential to my workflow as Shortcuts. As I have been thoroughly documenting in the My Obsidian Setup series for Club MacStories members, Obsidian – which is the MacStories Selects 2021 App of the Year – is more than a text editor: it’s something more similar to an OS for writers that encompasses note-taking, Markdown writing, journaling, research, and more. At this point, just like I can’t imagine using Apple devices without Shortcuts, I can’t imagine taking notes or writing articles without Obsidian.
Which means that it shouldn’t surprise anyone either that I wanted to combine my two favorite apps and figure out a way to integrate Obsidian with Shortcuts.
Today, I’m thrilled to introduce Obsidian Shortcut Launcher, a free Obsidian plugin – available in the Community Plugins section of the app – that lets you trigger shortcuts as commands from Obsidian. With Obsidian Shortcut Launcher (or ‘OSL’), you’ll be able to trigger any shortcut you want from Obsidian, passing along values such as the text of the document you’re working on, its name, text selection, and more. Obsidian Shortcut Launcher is free to use and works on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.
Obsidian Shortcut Launcher is the result of weeks of planning and work from me and Finn Voorhees, and it has created an entirely new dimension in how I use Obsidian and Shortcuts on a daily basis. Because OSL is available in Obsidian’s Community Plugins list, you can find its source code here. Read on below to find out how OSL works behind the scenes, how I’ve been using it for my setup, and how you can start using it yourself with Obsidian and your favorite shortcuts.
MacStories Starter Pack: Getting a Handle on Links By Treating Them Like Email
Editor’s Note: Getting a Handle on Links By Treating Them Like Email is part of the MacStories Starter Pack, a collection of ready-to-use shortcuts, apps, workflows, and more that we’ve created to help you get the most out of your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
I’ve had a link problem for a long time. Links accumulate everywhere: in Messages, mail clients, text files, Discord, Trello, research tools, and elsewhere else imaginable. If they weren’t digital, I’m sure I’d be tripping over links on my way to the kitchen for breakfast each morning.
Part of my problem is an occupational hazard. Links to apps, articles I may want to link on MacStories, images on our CDN, podcast episodes uploaded for publication, and materials from advertisers are just a small sampling of the links I deal with every day.
But links are part of everyone’s lives. Friends and family send us links to things to read, videos to watch, itineraries for trips, and a lot more. Companies send us links to things we buy online and deals we want to check out. Most of all, though, there are the many links we collect ourselves throughout our day. The Internet touches every aspect of our lives, which means links permeate every corner of our days, yet links are collected, organized, and processed haphazardly on an ad hoc basis by most of us.
Over the holidays, I sat down to think about links and how I deal with them. It didn’t take long to realize that thinking about links in the abstract is about as useful as thinking about email messages and tasks. The trouble is that links can represent almost anything from a short video that will take two minutes to watch to an expensive purchase that you will need hours to research. They vary widely in importance, the attention required to deal with them, and relevancy. As a result, it doesn’t do you much good to treat links without also considering what they represent.
Leaving links locked inside the app where you found them isn’t much use either. I’d never considered that links could benefit from a more structured processing approach like email or tasks, but having just reorganized my approach to email, I realized that they absolutely can. The trick is to keep the system lightweight and flexible and to be willing to delete most of your links to avoid clutter.
MacStories Starter Pack: Frame Nintendo Switch Screenshots with SwitchFrame
Editor’s Note: Frame Nintendo Switch Screenshots with SwitchFrame is part of the MacStories Starter Pack, a collection of ready-to-use shortcuts, apps, workflows, and more that we’ve created to help you get the most out of your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Following the release of version 11.0 of the Nintendo Switch firmware in December 2020, I released ShortSwitch, a shortcut that simplified the process of importing screenshots and videos from a Nintendo Switch console on the same Wi-Fi network as your iPhone or iPad. ShortSwitch continues to be one of my favorite utilities I’ve built in the Shortcuts app, and it’s become my default way of transferring media from the Switch to my iPhone before tweeting it. With ShortSwitch, you don’t need to scan the second QR code displayed on the console, and you can quickly preview or save multiple files at once. It still works reliably, and you can download it here.
That said, I’ve always wondered if I could improve another aspect of screenshots captured on the Nintendo Switch: framing them with a physical device template of a Switch console, just like I can frame iPhone, iPad, and Mac screenshots with Apple Frames. So a few months ago, Silvia and I got to work. After finding a Switch template we liked, Silvia modified it, and I was able to put together SwitchFrame – a shortcut that frames Switch screenshots with a classic Nintendo Switch console featuring red and blue Joy Cons.