512 Pixels

My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring the site this week. Their app SoundSource adds powerful audio controls to your Mac that you’ll be glad to have. Save 20% with code 512SOUND.

This link — which you gotta manually open in your browser — is the best thing I’ve seen on the Internet in a long time.

Jason Snell:

In researching the Designed in California series, I was struck by just how quickly the iPod’s importance was overshadowed by the iPhone. There are barely more than five years between the launch of the iPod and the launch of the iPhone. While both products took time to grow into their markets, I think it’s still the case that the true “iPod era” was only a handful of years long, and it’s been entirely overshadowed by the product that came after it.

That’s a shame, in a way, because I think people who didn’t live through this era don’t understand just what a hit the iPod was. It completely changed Apple’s fortunes, rehabbed its brand identity, gave people reasons to go into Apple’s relatively new retail stores for the first time, and taught Apple lessons that it needed to learn before it could build a smartphone. (The iPhone’s hardware was largely built by the iPod team, even if the software came from the Mac.)

Don’t miss his article for Tom’s Guide, either.

After a decade-long hiatus, David Smith’s Check the Weather app is back. Here’s Underscore on Mastodon:

While I was learning to build for the Duo, I wanted to make an app that made sense in ALL the different poses. So of course I made a weather app! After a 10-year hiatus, Check the Weather is back, with a delightful new design that’s as flexible as the weather is changeable.

I’m a big weather radar nerd and wanted an app that put radar front and center, while still giving quick access to all essential info.

Matthew Skiles’ new icon is awesome, and Rafa Conde absolutely killed it on the design side. It looks great on boring old slab iPhones and really great on the Duo:

Getting this app together has been a blast, as we got to rethink and rebuild it from the ground up. It’s wild that I reviewed the first version nearly 14 years ago and got to work on its new iteration. I would encourage you to go check it out in the App Store. It’s got a free 7-day trial, then it’s $1.99/mo or $19.99/yr.

Other than the lack of color in the app icon, I like a lot about this. IT IS LITERALLY LIQUID AND GLASS.

Looks like Apple isn’t done with new products this month. Tyler Stalman shared this over on Threads:

I think the MacBook Pro is about to enter its touchscreen era.

The audio experts at Rogue Amoeba are back to sponsor 512 Pixels. Their app SoundSource adds powerful audio controls to your Mac that you’ll be glad to have.

It starts with volume controls for each and every app on your Mac, all in one place: your menu bar. Turn down noisy websites without affecting your music, or boost a quiet video call past the usual maximum.

SoundSource does much more than just volume, though. Use it to send any app’s audio to a different device, so your music plays through your desk speakers while your calls stay in your headphones. Built-in effects like Magic Boost and Headphone EQ bring better sound to the tiniest speakers and your favorite headphones, and experts can even use it to apply powerful Audio Unit plugins to any app.

Once you’ve used SoundSource, it’s hard to imagine your Mac without it. Try it free before you buy. And, as a 512 Pixels reader, you can save 20% on SoundSource with discount code 512SOUND in Rogue Amoeba’s online store through the end of the month.

My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring 512 Pixels, and for more than two decades of great Mac audio software.

Hartley Charlton at MacRumors with some bad news for me:

Apple Store employees told MacRumors that they have been advised that there will likely be no ‌iPhone Duo‌ stock available for walk-in purchases on launch day. Staff have been instructed to discourage customers without pre-orders from coming in expecting to buy the device, warning that they will be disappointed.

Apple’s online store tells customers to check back on Saturday, October 24 for pickup availability. Pickup reservations were briefly available when pre-orders opened before the option was disabled.

The October 24 message does not guarantee stock will be available that day, and it remains unclear how firm the warning shared with employees is and whether it applies worldwide.

My thanks to Mojave Paint for sponsoring 512 Pixels. Development is moving quickly on Mojave Paint; during this week’s sponsorship they added true Clipping Masks.

I am currently traveling, but dutifully set my alarm to order an iPhone Duo. Having multiple devices is the way to go in these situations, so I was at my laptop and had my iPhone.

The Apple Store app on my phone loaded first, and that’s when I learned a terrible truth:

I could only choose Apple Stores near me for pickup, and uhhh, I am not flying across the country again next week to pick this thing up.

I just tried again, out from under the pressure of doing this in the first few minutes of availability, and for the life of me, I cannot find a way to tell the app you want to pick up a phone someplace other than your current immediate region.

By the time the website came up over six minutes later — where you can search for other Apple Stores¹ — my ship date had already slipped to the end of November or early December.

It seems that my work² on Widgetsmith and our other apps will be constrained to the simulator a little longer. It is also nice to have the new thing when it’s new, so I can write and talk about it when it’s new.

I guess the upside is that, now that shipping dates have slipped into 2027, the iPhone Duo will be new for a long time.

Best I can tell, there is not a way to change a delivery into a pickup, but currently the Apple Store support chat just won’t connect. Maybe they can change it, or I’ll get lucky with a walk-in, but this is a really dumb limitation of the Apple Store app.

Update: I haven’t been able to talk to Apple Support, but I’ve got a Best Buy order for November 3. Wish me luck.

iPhone Duo preorders open tomorrow. AppleCare seems like a very good idea for this product:

Repair	Price
Cover layer damage	$49
Back glass damage	$199
Battery service	$229
Rear camera damage	$229
Outer display damage	$379
Outer display and back glass damage	$509
Inner display damage	$999
Other damage	$1,499

I’ve been using AppleCare One for a while now, and recently moved to the AppleCare One Family. For my family, it was a good bit cheaper than all five of us having our own AppleCare One accounts.

Years ago, Marco Arment said something that I think about all the time:

Don’t bet against the smartphone.

It’s amazing how many products have run straight into this idea, like a sprinting outfielder who hasn’t slowed down in time to avoid the wall.

There are some obvious examples, especially in our AI-crazed day. The Humane AI Pin never stood a chance. The Rabbit R1 is beautiful, but is at best a novelty. The friend is never going to escape the gravity of its own domain name.

I think there are some less obvious examples as well. Think back to 2014, when Tim Cook announced the Apple Watch, and Kevin Lynch’s wide-ranging demo that showed the Watch as capable of almost everything the iPhone was. Apple has since learned that the Watch is a peripheral to the iPhone for folks who want health and fitness tracking, as well as easy access to notifications.

I mean, how many times do you glance at your watch, see a message, and pull out your iPhone to respond?

The HomeView may be on a similar trajectory.

When I showed my wife Apple’s video featuring the new product, she turned to me and asked:

Why wouldn’t I just use my phone for that stuff?

I’ve been turning that over in my head for the last day or so, and then heard very similar thoughts from Ben Thompson and John Gruber on Dithering.

It is way too early to know how this will shake out. Some folks will undoubtedly find the HomeView useful, and I do think there are real use cases where it will shine.

I highly doubt that any family will use their HomeView the way the family in that video did. Of course the iPhone will continue to be the most important product in Apple’s lineup, but that doesn’t mean the HomeView isn’t worth doing.

For some folks, it will really click, and it puts Apple in the home category in a new and fun way. I like that the HomeView is a little weird, and we should encourage Apple to experiment with products that are a little weird. For years, it’s felt like the company has been too conservative with new products, and I suspect John Ternus has more things like this on the way.

While it is doing some very clever things, it is an ancillary device, and one that not everyone with an iPhone will want or need. At Apple’s scale, even ancillary devices are big businesses. Even if most iPhone users look at this thing and shrug, it was still worth doing.