TechCrunch

Saturday, January 23

The End of Free Listening on iTunes Radio

Katie Roof, reporting for TechCrunch:

iTunes Radio will no longer be free, as of January 28. In an email to customers, Apple said that the Pandora-like service will only be available for Apple Music subscribers, which costs $9.99 per month.

Most of the Apple TV users I know own the 3rd generation Apple TV, listen to iTunes radio a lot, and do not subscribe to Apple Music. I’m not an alarmist when Apple drops outdated ports or features, but if this move is intended to increase subscriber numbers for Apple Music1, it’s misguided. Hopefully this means that an update is coming for the older Apple TV that will finally add a Pandora app.

  1. I think this decision has more to do with the pending dissolution of Apple’s iAd service than anything else. As others have pointed out, Apple Music’s direct competition is Spotify, not Pandora. ↩

Wednesday, November 11

TechCrunch: The iPad Pro And The Death Of A Metaphor →

I love this reference to Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood buried in Matthew Panzarino’s iPad Pro review:

My battery typically lasts around 2 days on WiFi with some sketching, watching Daniel of House Tiger with my daughter and doing some typing and browsing in split-screen.

Monday, September 14

A New Dimension to Multitouch

App shortcuts are cool, but to me the killer feature of Apple’s new 3D Touch interface is peek & pop. Here’s a great description of the feature from TechCrunch:

The most important 3D Touch use case lets you peek into content — this way, you can preview an email, a photo, a link, an address, a message and go right back to where you were. It saves you a couple of taps and breaks the traditional tree hierarchy. In many ways, this feature is reminiscent of Quick Look on OS X.

When you are done peeking, you have three options. You can press a little deeper to actually go into this email, message or calendar view. You can remove your finger and go back to your feed, email list or camera view.

The inevitability of this feature coming to iPhone left me underwhelmed. Now that it’s here and I better understand what it can actually do, I find myself pressing hard on my iPhone 6 trying to will the feature into retroactive existence.

Wednesday, September 09