Linked List: June 8, 2021

Tuesday, 8 June 2021

Yours Truly on CNBC’s TechCheck Today ★

I enjoy doing these quick hits on CNBC. I get on, I get a few questions, I answer as best I can, and I’m out. Two tidbits on my spot today:

It seems like a widespread misconception that iCloud+ is a new additional paid tier. It’s not: “iCloud+” is now just a name for any paid tier of iCloud, even the $1/month tier. If you pay anything at all for iCloud, you get iCloud+ features like the new Private Relay feature for Safari.
Another question was about the relative dearth of AR announcements. I pointed to Maps, which is clearly moving in a very AR direction with turn-by-turn directions. But another big AR announcement from Apple this week is RealityKit 2, with 3D Object Capture using nothing more than your iPhone or iPad camera. (Or a DSLR or drone camera.) This makes creating AR objects based on real-world objects several orders of magnitude easier, faster, and more accessible.

Billboard: ‘Eddy Cue Believes the Future of Music Isn’t Lossless — It’s Spatial Audio’ ★

Eddy Cue, in an interview with Micah Singleton for Billboard:

One of the first people that told me about Dolby Atmos was Adam Levine. I happen to know him, and we were in the same place, so he was like, “Have you listened to this?” And he sends me this song and he was really excited. He said, “I can’t believe what I can do with this.” It’s going to be really exciting to see how this evolves, and all of what artists are going to be able to do with this, and how exciting it is for fans and listeners to be able to do this.

So we went after the labels and are going to the artists and educating them on it. There’s a lot of work to be done because we have, obviously, tens of millions of songs. This is not a simple “take-the-file that you have in stereo, processes through this software application and out comes Dolby Atmos.” This requires somebody who’s a sound engineer, and the artist to sit back and listen, and really make the right calls and what the right things to do are. It’s a process that takes time, but it’s worth it. […]

To me, when I look at Dolby Atmos, I think it’s going to do for music what HD did for television. Today, where can you watch television that’s not in HD?

One of the advantages music has over television is you can’t take an old TV show and truly up-res it to HD because it was shot on low-quality cameras. But in the case of audio, all these things were recorded on multiple tracks, and so it’s possible to go back to a lot of the songs and be able to do this.

The article is behind Billboard’s “Pro” paywall on their website, but the full interview is available on Apple News — and it seems to work even if you’re not a News+ subscriber.

Apple’s WWDC Newsroom Announcements ★

Collected here for posterity:

Might as well toss in a permalink to the keynote, too.

Adobe Announces Native Apple Silicon Versions of Illustrator and InDesign ★

Jasmine Whitaker, writing for Adobe:

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Illustrator and InDesign will run natively on Apple Silicon devices. While users have been able to continue to use the tool on M1 Macs during this period, today’s development means a considerable boost in speed and performance. Overall, Illustrator users will see a 65 percent increase in performance on an M1 Mac, versus Intel builds — InDesign users will see similar gains, with a 59 percent improvement on overall performance on Apple Silicon.

Specific things like opening complex documents and scrolling are even faster than those overall numbers: Adobe claims scrolling in Illustrator is 4× faster. Just from porting to run natively on Apple Silicon.

And we’ve only seen Apple’s consumer Apple Silicon chips for Mac.

Playdate Update ★

Like a little mini keynote from Panic about their little mini gaming device. Don’t want to spoil anything but I burst with joy when I saw the first non-game app for Playdate. Perfect.