John’s Blog

It’s been a wild week here in Dallas. From the Dallas Morning News:

Ferocious winds and heavy rain swept through North Texas early Tuesday, flooding roads, downing trees and power lines and knocking out power for hundreds of thousands of people.

Many in the Dallas area woke to the wail of tornado sirens when the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning.

“Take cover now!” the weather service in Fort Worth said at 6:13 a.m. on X. The storm packed nearly 80 mph winds, golf ball-sized hail and the threat of flash floods.

Dallas County Judge Clay Lewis Jenkins issued an emergency declaration and warned some residents will be without power for days. At a news conference Tuesday, Lewis Jenkins said the extent of the damage and number of people affected make this storm unusual, and he urged patience in the days ahead.

This is the worst storm I’ve been a part of since living here. No power for us still, but hopefully by end of week. Stay safe out there.

The Eruption and the Pinto - by Patrick Witty:

Then, at 8:32 am, the mountain erupted with fury. Lasher skid to a halt as the gigantic ash cloud barreled towards him, jumping out of his Pinto and taking the now-infamous photo. Normally, it’s a Cardinal sin for a photographer’s vehicle (or camera bag) to appear in the frame. But not this time.

It was too late for Lasher to turn around his car, so he jumped on his Yamaha and fled the plume of ash. “By the time he unhooked his dirt bike his Pinto was on fire,” Smith told me.

via @stop on threads

Sonos has made a lot of headlines lately.

First, the good. Chris Welch, reviews the new Sonos Ace headphones for The Verge:

These look like what you’d get if you put Sony’s WH-1000XM5 and Apple’s AirPods Max into a blender. The pleather ear cushions are magnetic and easily removable, though Sonos tosses in some thoughtful touches of its own; the insides are color-coded so you can easily tell which goes on what side. There’s a fingerprint-resistant coating on the exterior of the headphones to reduce smudges — particularly helpful for the black pair. And the memory foam headband has varying levels of padding to avoid putting too much pressure on any one section of your head.

Mercifully, the Ace are far lighter than the AirPods Max. There’s not quite as much metal throughout, but they still feel very well put together. And on my ears, they felt wonderfully comfortable. […]

Some very impressive details and considerations here.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find any obvious first-generation hardware flaws in my brief time with them. Maybe they’ll reveal themselves as I review the Ace, but on first impression, it’s clear that Sonos sweated the small details. (One more example: inside the fabric carrying case is a pouch for the USB-C and headphone cables that also attaches magnetically.) The controls are done right too, with physical buttons for everything and no tap or swipe gestures to memorize.

The Sonos hardware and design appear superior to the AirPods Max in every way. Will be curious to see if Apple revises the Max later this fall and fixes many of the issues with the first generation. Not that they’re worried about Sonos, but it sure would be nice to see them keep up.

Second, the bad. The new and “improved” Sonos app seems to be a hot mess. I disabled automatic app updates on my phone to avoid this. My iPad did update automatically so I’ve been trying to fight through the new UI there. It’s not great. And as noted in another Reddit comment the app update removed all accessibility support. Yikes.

Last week, Microsoft held a Windows event keynote prior to its Build Conference. Normally this is not the sort of thing I’d pay much attention to, or highlight here, but the entire thing was very compelling and interesting.

From the Microsoft Blog:

Today, at a special event on our new Microsoft campus, we introduced the world to a new category of Windows PCs designed for AI, Copilot+ PCs.

Copilot+ PCs are the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built. With powerful new silicon capable of an incredible 40+ TOPS (trillion operations per second), all–day battery life and access to the most advanced AI models, Copilot+ PCs will enable you to do things you can’t on any other PC. Easily find and remember what you have seen in your PC with Recall, generate and refine AI images in near real-time directly on the device using Cocreator, and bridge language barriers with Live Captions, translating audio from 40+ languages into English.

The keynote focused several times by name on the MacBook Air line, and how these new Copilot+ PCs are out performing the best-selling Apple laptops.

Tom Warren writes more at The Verge:

Microsoft is confident that it finally nailed the transition to Arm chips — so confident that, this time around, the company spent an entire day pitting its new hardware against the MacBook Air.

On a recent morning at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft representatives set out new Surface devices equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips inside and compared them directly to Apple’s category-leading laptop. I witnessed an hour of demos and benchmarks that started with Geekbench and Cinebench comparisons, then moved on to apps and compatibility.

Geekbench scores aren’t everything, for sure. And it’s not a fair comparison when one device is passively cooled without fans and the other sports an active cooling system with, at least, one fan.

The fan issue was noted by Andrew Cunningham at ArsTechnica:

One caveat that I hadn’t seen mentioned in Microsoft’s presentation or in other coverage of the announcement, though: Microsoft says that both of these devices have fans. Apple still uses fans for the MacBook Pro lineup, but the MacBook Air is totally fanless. Bear that in mind when reading Microsoft’s claims about performance.

The new Surface Pro looks very nice. To me this isn’t a MacBook Air competitor, but rather one for the iPad itself. A detachable keyboard, touch screen, pencil support, and a decent screen that runs a desktop-class operating system is a good thing. Microsoft seems to understand this. For the first time in over 20 years I’m very tempted to buy a Windows PC! Wow.

These announcements are a bold bet and are very compelling. In a time where passionate support for Apple products may be waning, this is a solid step for Microsoft to take. I am continuously impressed with Satya Nadella and his leadership.

Happy Memorial Day and official start to summer. Phew!  I’m coming up for air after an intense few working and personal life weeks to end the school year.

☀️🇺🇸⚾️

A nice breakdown of the track at Imola by Madeline Coleman for The Athletic.

Enzo Ferrari was on hand when construction began in 1950, and later described in his book how the circuit could become similar to a famed German track: “A small Nürburgring – I repeated that day looking around – a small Nürburgring, with equal technical resources, spectacular and an ideal path length. This belief has been achieved through the decades that have passed since then.”

Glad this race is back for 2024 and I’m excited for the European schedule to begin this weekend in Italy.

Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incredible piece of Apple history! Sure, it’s not Steve Jobs’ badge (despite the auction title), but there are only so many of these in the world – especially from one of the first ten employees.

At first, it looked good. The plastic was scuffed with age, the tape on the map was yellowed, the logo was (mostly) correct, and Sherry Livingston really was Employee #10.

But it also felt a little off. The scuffing looked… sandpapery. The splotches on the map felt overcooked. And I couldn’t stop looking at the “typewritten” part…

Cabel is the best. This is so cool.

Federico Viticci reviews the state of iPadOS:

If you’ve used iPadOS long enough (the iPad has been my primary computer for 12 years now), I’m sure you’ve run into these: the small bugs, annoyances, and missing features that don’t seem like much in isolation. Considered as a whole, however, they paint a not-too-rosy picture for an operating system that, 14 years into its existence, still lags behind macOS in terms of basic functionalities and problems that have never been addressed. […]

You know what’s equally the best and worst part of all this? That I still love the iPad.

The iPad is the only Apple computer that genuinely feels made for someone like me – a person who loves modularity, freedom, and the mix of touch and keyboard interactions. I share my frustrations because I care about the platform and want it to get better. But at the same time, we need to face reality: the iPad’s operating system isn’t improving at the speed the hardware deserves – that iPad owners who spent thousands of dollars on these machines deserve.

Something needs to change.

John Gruber has a slightly different take on Daring Fireball:

iPadOS has never been a workstation-style OS. The obvious truth — reiterated in recent weeks by the EU calling bullshit (or perhaps, conneries) on Apple’s claim that iPad and iPhone are separate platforms — is that iPadOS is a souped-up tablet-oriented variant of iOS.

This has never been more true than now — the M4 iPad Pros are, by some practical measures, the fastest computers Apple makes. But iPadOS is not the sort of system that the typical power user would think to run on super-powerful hardware.

But let’s invert our thinking on this. Instead of starting with the hardware and pondering what the ideal software would be like to take advantage of its power, let’s start with the software. A concept for simplicity-first console-style touchscreen tablet computing. A metaphor for computing with smartphone-style guardrails, with tablet-specific features like stylus support and laptop docking. A tablet OS that is unabashedly a souped-up version of iOS, not a stripped-down version of MacOS. What type of hardware should Apple build to instantiate such a platform?

Nicely produced website and list of the 100 Best Albums. Curated by Apple Music with “the help of artists and experts.”

The list will be complete on May 22nd, so just the bottom 20 are available now. I have many gripes on the ordering of this list so far, but will reserve my judgement until the entire thing is ready. 🤣

(Built in part with Svelte, it appears.)

It’s tech conference season. Yesterday was the main Google I/O keynote and, in case you haven’t heard, Google is working on AI.

As usual, The Verge has a nice video breakdown of the most important announcements. (I find sitting through Google keynotes tedious so this was helpful.)

Just a few overall thoughts from the presentation:

Google Lens gets video. Taking a video of a computer screen of code, and having Google explain the code is very interesting.

The Gemini features within Google Workspace look incredible. Creating sheets from a list of emails and and analyzing data across many sources will be very useful.

So many announcements, naming conventions, and code names. Astra, Veo, Gemma, Gemini, Gems, SynthID, yikes. Hard to decipher and remember what each is for, and what the difference is unless you work at Google on one of these teams.

I find it very interesting to hear the launch timing around each of the announcements. The “later this year” and “in the coming months” timelines really speak to unfinished and potentially reactionary features. The features that are shipping now are the most interesting to me and shows what Google has actually prioritized over the past year.

Nice bit at the end where they use Gemini to count the number of times the word “AI” has occurred in the keynote. (121)

In contrast to the OpenAI Spring Update from Monday, it seems like all of the demos from Google were very scripted and clearly pre-recorded. I understand why given the nature of this tech and its unpredictability, but the pre-recorded demos feel less real and more contrived.

Google has a long history of announcing unfinished work at I/O that often doesn’t even ship to users. I’ll be excited to see which of these announcements make it into shipping products for customers this year. Some very cool ideas and features here, now it’s time to deliver them.

OpenAI announced a few very nice updates during its Spring Update yesterday, most notably including GPT-4o:

GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction—it accepts as input any combination of text, audio, and image and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time(opens in a new window) in a conversation. It matches GPT-4 Turbo performance on text in English and code, with significant improvement on text in non-English languages, while also being much faster and 50% cheaper in the API. GPT-4o is especially better at vision and audio understanding compared to existing models.

The video demo was very interesting regarding the conversation style of GPT-4o. We’ve had text-to-speech capabilities for a long time, but this feels much more conversational and ‘real’. If the product is as good as this demo, it’s going to be really cool. The conversation felt very relaxed and, for lack of a better term, human.

Also announced is a desktop app for macOS, which will be available to Plus users starting today. Very interesting to see a macOS app before a Windows desktop app. Excited to give this a spin.

It’s been a few weeks since these two albums dropped and both have been in steady rotation on my Spotify since. It’s not a fair comparison, because I’ve been a Pearl Jam fan for well over 30 years so I won’t be comparing them. (I absolutely love Dark Matter.)

But what strikes me about both of these albums is some of the hate and rage towards them. Certainly Taylor Swift is going to get more scrutiny than a bunch of old guys, but in both cases I don’t agree.

To be a fan of an artist you don’t have to love every piece of music they release. But what you should want is for them to keep trying new things and releasing work that they love.

I’m so thrilled that these guys keep putting out music that makes them proud and excited to keep playing after so many years. And I love that Taylor keeps pushing herself, even when it’s not for everyone. She’s so incredibly prolific it’s remarkable.

More music from talented people is the goal. Some of it will resonate, some will not. And that’s just fine.

This Audio Academy link from 2019 (via Hacker News) about the Grateful Dead and its sound engineer Owsley “Bear” Stanley is fascinating. Live music amplification is mostly taken for granted these days, but it wasn’t alway the case.

It was a time when live sound problems plagued engineers, bands, and audiences equally. While rock concerts grew in size and scope throughout the 60s, audiences grew larger and louder, without the technical sophistication of amplification ever changing to meet this scenario. Screaming fans meant that low-wattage guitar amps could hardly be heard and without the help of monitoring systems, bands could barely hear themselves play. Things were so bad that the Beatles quit touring in 1966 because they couldn’t hear themselves over the audience. It was after this era that the band, the Grateful Dead, became obsessed with their sound, largely thanks to their eccentric and dedicated sound engineer.

Their solution was the famous “Wall of Sound”:

The mammoth structure was massive, made up of over 600 hi-fidelity speakers that sat behind the band as they played. It used six separate sound systems which were able to isolate eleven separate channels with vocals, rhythm guitar, piano each having their own channel. Another channel each for the bass drum, snare, tom-toms, and cymbals. The bass was transmitted through a quadraphonic encoder, which took a signal from each string and projected it through its own set of speakers. The result of each speaker carrying only one instrument or voice at a time was crystal clear audio, free of intermodulation distortion.

An overall nice bump to the iPad lineup today at Apple’s spring event. It’s surprising that this is the first major refresh of the iPad Pro lineup since 2018!

The new OLED “Retina XDR” screen is going to look amazing. One of the (few) shortcomings of the outgoing generation is the black levels on the LED displays just aren’t great at all. Especially compared to modern OLED TVs, the iPhone, and certainly the Vision Pro. This is a huge step forward. Oh, and the nano texture display option is interesting as well. Excited to see that in person.

The M4 is a nice bump. Although, I don’t hear anyone complaining about the previous CPU performance.

The new “Pencil Pro” with squeeze-ability and haptic feedback is a welcome upgrade. The tap-to-change tools on the current pencil trip me up constantly. I’ve been using the pencil more lately to take notes during meetings, so this one is tempting. The killer feature of this update is the ability to locate your pencil via the Find My app. (Apple, please bring this feature to the TV remote!)

I’m currently using an 11” iPad Pro from 2022 and I don’t really see any reason to upgrade here. There are a few really new hardware features but my shortcomings on iPad have nothing to do with hardware–it’s all about the
software for me.

Speaking of the software, it was very nice to see updated versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. I don’t use either of these on iPad, but I’m really glad they exist and that Apple is pushing them forward. More pro-level iPad software please!

Today gets me excited for WWDC, just around the corner in June.

It was an absolute joy watching Lando Norris win his first F1 race yesterday in Miami. We were on the edges of our seats just hoping he could pull it off and beat the field.

On the cool-down lap it was so fun to see the other drivers pull along side Lando and congratulate him. You can tell this was a big moment for him, and for the sport. What an amazing race weekend.

🏎️🏎️