Linked List: October 18, 2021

Monday, 18 October 2021

Apple Music’s New $5/Month ‘Voice’ Plan 

This plan struck me as weird when it was announced during the keynote, but it makes sense for the way many people use Apple Music: by just asking Siri to play whatever, where “whatever” is a particular song, a particular artist, or a particular mood. If this is your plan, when you go to the Music app on your devices, the interface will just be Siri suggestions and your listening history.

What more do you get for the regular price of $10/month? Spatial audio (potentially cool, depending upon how carefully the songs were mastered), lossless audio (borderline pointless), offline mode (downloading songs to your device), custom playlists, lyrics, and music videos. For me, it’d be really weird not to be able to browse an available index of all music (artist → album → song), but a lot of people just ask Siri for whatever.

Spotify doesn’t offer a plan like this (screenshot for posterity) — but Spotify doesn’t have its own voice-driven hardware. Amazon Music has a $4/month Echo plan that is very similar, but Amazon’s Echo plan is limited to one single Echo device or Fire TV.

Facebook ‘Ready to Engage on Substance’ 

John Pinette, VP of communications for Facebook, in a series of tweets:

Right now 30+ journalists are finishing up a coordinated series of articles based on thousands of pages of leaked documents. We hear that to get the docs, outlets had to agree to the conditions and a schedule laid down by the PR team that worked on earlier leaked docs.

A curated selection out of millions of documents at Facebook can in no way be used to draw fair conclusions about us. Internally, we share work in progress and debate options. Not every suggestion stands up to the scrutiny we must apply to decisions affecting so many people.

To those news organizations who would like to move beyond an orchestrated “gotcha” campaign, we are ready to engage on the substance.

Casey Johnston:

this tweet appears to contain words but all i hear are little baby crying sounds? can you explain

There was a time when “VP of communications for Facebook” sounded like a great job, I bet. That time is not now.

Updated MacOS 12 Monterey Page Reveals Safari 15 With Tabs That Look Like Tabs 

Didn’t make today’s event, for some reason, but the updated page for MacOS 12 Monterey (shipping next Monday) shows that Safari 15 has reverted to actual tabs instead of “tabs”. Compact mode is still an option, which is great — the way this design should have been approached all along. Safari 15 on iPadOS 15.1 comes along for the ride too.

We’re left with one single design mistake in Safari 15 across all platforms: the close buttons for tabs being on the right instead of the left on iPhone. Pretty good outcome given what was shown back at WWDC.