Linked List: September 27, 2016

Tuesday, 27 September 2016

Aetna to Subsidize Apple Watch for Its Health Insurance Customers 

Aetna press release:

Aetna today announced a new initiative to revolutionize members’ consumer health experience by combining the power of iOS apps and the unmatched user experience of Apple products including Apple Watch, iPhone and iPad with Aetna’s analytics-based wellness and care management programs. Beginning this fall, Aetna will make Apple Watch available to select large employers and individual customers during open enrollment season, and Aetna will be the first major health care company to subsidize a significant portion of the Apple Watch cost, offering monthly payroll deductions to make covering the remaining cost easier.

In addition to the customer program, Aetna will provide Apple Watch at no cost to its own nearly 50,000 employees, who will participate in the company’s wellness reimbursement program, to encourage them to live more productive, healthy lives.

Seems like this could be a big deal. Beth Mole, reporting for Ars Technica:

In a statement to Ars, Aetna spokesperson Ethan Slavin said that Aetna will be working directly with Apple to develop a suite of healthcare apps for Aetna customers. “Apple will have employees devoted to providing support to Aetna on this initiative,” he wrote, and “Aetna will also have a dedicated employee unit focused on this collaboration.” Slavin was mum on whether the apps would be developed using CareKit, however.

Serenity Caldwell’s Apple Watch Series 2 Review 

Speaking of Serenity Caldwell, her Apple Watch Series 2 review is incredibly detailed, and includes a good video (shot entirely with iPhone 7).

The Talk Show: ‘You’ve Got the Nubbin’ 

Serenity Caldwell returns to the show to discuss Apple’s new stuff: the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, Apple Watch Series 2 (and the semi-new Series 1), iOS 10, MacOS Sierra, and more. Or as she describes it: “In which @gruber and I grumble about Watch restores and obsess over a whole bunch of photos on an audio-only podcast.”

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Úll 2016 

Úll:

Úll is a conference for people who build and love great products. We focus on great product stories, presented through an Apple-shaped lens. We treat the conference itself as a product: with a deep emphasis on the attendee experience.

Úll 2016 will explore that very Apple-y of ideas: thinking different.

November 1-2 in Killarney, Ireland. Úll is one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended — probably the best. It’s beautiful, smart, friendly, and fun. If you can make it, go.

Rich Trouton on iCloud Desktop and Documents in MacOS Sierra 

Great piece by Rich Trouton exploring the details of how iCloud Desktop and Document syncing works. He makes a good point here:

Currently, Apple provides 5 GB of storage space for free for iCloud users. That 5 GB of storage includes storage for your iCloud email, your iCloud backups for your iOS device(s), your iCloud Photo library and iCloud Drive. If you need more than 5GBs of storage space, you have to pay for it.

Considering that most folks likely have more than 5 GB of files stored in their home folder’s Documents directory, let alone their Desktop folder, there are immediate issues with enabling iCloud Desktop and Documents syncing if you’re not paying Apple for sufficient iCloud storage space.

It’s easy for me to say that Apple should give all iCloud users a lot more free storage, and I know that the company is on a “We make money from services” kick this year. But they’re the ones who keep adding new features to iCloud that require significantly more storage space.

iCloud Photo Library vs. iCloud’s 5 GB Free Storage Tier 

Rui Carmo:

There is just no sane way to archive iCloud photos on your Mac once you’ve gone past the baseline 5 GB. None whatsoever. Zip. Nada.

Photos, like iPhoto before it, remains stubbornly autistic where it regards managing multiple photo libraries — it’s possible, but fiddly, error-prone and utterly incomprehensible to the average user.

And, more to the point, there is no way to move photos directly from one library to another. This last bit, as far as I’m concerned, is inexcusable.

Right now, the only sane way to cope seems to setup a smart folder inside Photos for items older than a given threshold and manually export (and then delete) originals from that — which renders all of your nice metadata useless. […]

Apple ought to build in to Photos an archival feature that allowed me to export items from my iCloud library to an archival one on my Mac, prompting me to do so upon reaching, say, 75% of my iCloud capacity (or another set threshold) to make things easier for the average user.

That archival process would create, say, an archive bundle per year, and copy across all the metadata and album associations you’ve painstakingly defined in Photos.

You’d then be free to move those around to backup storage at will, and clicking upon an archive would launch Photos with the archive temporarily open in the sidebar so you could move things back and forth.

Carmo makes some good points in this piece, but I think he’s conflating two different issues:

  1. 5 GB of storage is not enough, and most people are never going to budge from the free tier. 50 GB for just $1 a month is a good deal, but there are way too many people who just won’t budge from “free”, no matter how cumbersome the 5 GB limit makes their life. Surely Apple will eventually increase the storage capacity of the free tier; the sooner they do so, and the larger they make it, the better.

  2. Photos should make it easier to deal with very large libraries.

Carmo is focused on #2. I think #1 is the more pressing problem. I bet the number one reason people find they need multiple libraries in Photos is because they’re bumping up against their iCloud storage limit.