Linked List: September 8, 2016

Thursday, 8 September 2016

AirPods Hands-On: ‘They Stayed in My Ears and Sounded Awesome’ ★

Susie Ochs, Macworld:

Now, that plastic has been a deal-breaker for me for years — I hate how normal EarPods feel in my ears. They don’t seem like they’re going to stay put, and they simply fall out if I move my head too much. Even if they do stay in, after about a half hour, my ears just start to ache, although I don’t experience the same pain when using earbuds with silicone or foam tips. Since the AirPods look so similar, I expected them to feel the same too — and I’m surprised and happy to report that I was dead wrong.

Not only did I dance, I headbanged. I shook my head side to side, I tossed my hair, I jogged in place, and I looked silly doing all of it. The AirPods stayed put, and they stayed loud. The music (more Sia, naturally) sounded full and lush and I couldn’t hear a single word anyone around me was saying, as if I was completely sealed off in a bubble of rock and roll. Pretty impressive.

My experience as well. I don’t mind Apple’s wired ear buds, but the AirPods feel better and fit better.

The AirPods’ special features are pretty impressive too, even though that specialness means they only work with Apple devices. You don’t need a brand-new iPhone or Apple Watch to use them, but they only support Apple devices running the latest operating systems: iOS 10, macOS Sierra, and watchOS 3. The AirPods use Bluetooth, so you would think maybe there’d be a way to pair them to an Android phone or an iOS 8 device since those have Bluetooth too, but there’s no button on the AirPods to put them into pairing mode. We’ll test to confirm when we get review units, but it seems like the AirPods will only be “seen” by Apple devices.

It’s true that the special pairing magic only works on Apple devices running the new OSes. But the AirPods can most certainly be used as regular old Bluetooth ear buds with an Android device or a Mac running a pre-Sierra OS or whatever. The pairing button is on the case, not the AirPods.

Belkin Lightning Audio + Charge RockStar ★

$40 dongle made in cooperation with Apple:

The Lightning Audio + Charge RockStar makes it possible to listen to Lightning Audio while charging your iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. Enjoy music or talk through Lightning Audio headphones while you charge. Use the RockStar anywhere; at home, at work, in the car or on the go.

Someone should make a long (3-4 feet?) USB-to-Lightning cable that has a short 3.5mm headphone jack Y-splitter at the end.

For people who charge while listening to headphones at their desk, Apple’s years-old Lightning dock has always had a headphone jack for audio out.

How Apple Conducted Its iPhone 7 Battery Tests ★

Interesting note: Apple conducted most of its iPhone 7 battery life tests with the phones paired to “Bluetooth headphones”, presumably AirPods.

How to Reset and Enter DFU Mode on iPhone 7 ★

Volume down takes the role previously held by the home button.

Akamai: ‘Yesterday’s Apple Keynote Was the Highest Ever Peak Video Traffic Event for Akamai’ ★

Remember when Apple’s keynote feeds used to flake out? Seems like a long time ago. Would love to know the actual number of live viewers — Akamai handled the video streams for the Olympics.

Samsung Has $38 Million of Goods on Board Two Vessels of Bankrupt Hanjin Shipping Co. ★

Kyunghee Park and Edvard Pettersson, reporting for Bloomberg

Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s biggest smartphone maker, said about $38 million of its goods and parts were on board two vessels operated by the distressed Hanjin Shipping Co., which applied for bankruptcy protection last week.

Supporting Hanjin’s Chapter 15 U.S. Bankruptcy Court petition, Samsung said in a court filing Tuesday that without an order protecting the shipping line against creditors, the vessels won’t be able to dock, causing the South Korean electronics maker losses that may “continue to escalate so long as the cargo aboard these ships remains unloaded.”

$38 million is probably small potatoes compared to the cost of the Note 7 recall (not to mention any lawsuits they might face over exploded phones), but this adds to a run of bad luck for Samsung.

Om Malik on the iPhone 7 and the Camera Industry ★

Om Malik, writing for The New Yorker:

The distinct business advantage that Apple has achieved thanks to its hardware is the sheer volume of iPhone sales, which justifies the big spending on the specialized chips that make that hardware so powerful. The new image processor is a perfect example. It can spread the cost of that investment in chips over hundreds of millions of iPhones. In comparison, the falling sales of stand-alone cameras have hampered the ability of camera companies to innovate and spend on core technologies. Given that hardware and software are equally important today, Apple’s advances in both areas makes it difficult for anyone to beat the company in photography for the masses. You can see why the camera companies are doomed.

Another factor is that it now feels natural to be able to share photos across the internet as soon as you’ve snapped them. There are times when I’ll take a photo with my iPhone even when I have my Fuji X100S with me, simply because I want to post it to Instagram or Twitter, or send it to someone privately on iMessage.

Business Insider Clickbait of the Day ★

Dave Smith at Business Insider: “Here’s What Happens if Your Apple AirPods Get Lost or Stolen”:

What happens if someone steals your AirPods? What if you’re on the subway and someone snatches one or both out of your ears and runs away? Does Apple have a way of preventing this kind of theft?

The short answer, unfortunately, is no.

Apple says that if AirPods are lost or stolen, you’ll have to buy new ones, just like any other Apple product. There’s no anti-theft measures in place to protect your shiny wireless earbuds.

Google search must be broken — I’m trying to find Business Insider’s previous coverage on what happens if your $300 Bose / Beats / Sennheiser / Etymotic headphones get lost or stolen, and I’m coming up with nothing.

Apple Will Not Give First-Weekend Sales of iPhone 7 ★

Julia Love, reporting for Reuters:

Apple Inc. will not release first-weekend sales of its new iPhone 7, the company said on Thursday, making it harder for analysts to get a read on the product’s prospects amid questions over whether its popularity has peaked. […]

“As we have expanded our distribution through carriers and resellers to hundreds of thousands of locations around the world, we are now at a point where we know before taking the first customer pre-order that we will sell out of iPhone 7,” Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said. “These initial sales will be governed by supply, not demand, and we have decided that it is no longer a representative metric for our investors and customers.”

One reason this makes sense is what happened two years ago:

On Sept. 28, 2015, when Apple announced record first-weekend sales of its iPhone 6, its stock dropped 2 percent, reflecting Wall Street’s worries about cooling demand.

The iPhone 6 wound up selling in far greater numbers than anyone, including Apple, expected. The opening weekend numbers didn’t help anyone foresee actual demand.

On the other hand, here’s Steve Jobs in a 2009 interview with David Pogue:

He said that Apple doesn’t see e-books as a big market at this point, and pointed out that Amazon.com, for example, doesn’t ever say how many Kindles it sells. “Usually, if they sell a lot of something, you want to tell everybody.”

Inside iPhone 7: Why Apple Killed the Headphone Jack ★

Great feature by John Paczkowski for BuzzFeed:

I know a longtime iPhone user who’s something of an audiophile. He’s spent a fair bit of money on high-end headphones over the years. The other day he told me that if the next iPhone doesn’t have a headphone jack and there’s a marquee Android phone available that does, he’ll switch. He doesn’t want Lightning headphones or wireless buds. And he doesn’t want to carry an adapter. He just wants to use the headphones he likes. And he doesn’t think he’s alone. What would Apple’s leadership say to someone like him?

“We do understand that this might be a difficult transition for some people who love their wired headphones,” says Schiller. “But the transition is inevitable. You’ve got to do it at some point. Sooner or later the headphone jack is going away. There are just too many reasons aligned against it sticking around any longer. There’s a little bit of pain in every transition, but we can’t let that stop us from making it. If we did, we’d never make any progress at all. The question we ask ourselves when making transitions like these is, have we done all the right things to mitigate it and to explain it and to make what’s on the other side so good that everyone is happy with the change? We think we’ve done that.”