shownotes_20220123

Opening
News
  iPhone SE+ 5G
    Display analyst Ross Young claimed in a tweak that Apple will call the third-generation iPhone SE expected to be announced this year, maybe even this Spring, the iPhone SE+ 5G.
      It’s widely expected to retain the same design as the current iPhone SE with a 4.7-inch display, single lens (but improved) rear camera, and home button
      The main upgrades being an Apple A15 chip and the addition, as the name would indicate, of 5G
    Young is also making predictions for the next generation of the iPhone SE which he indicates would be released sometime in 2023 in stead of 2024.
      Most have been predicting the 4th generation iPhone SE would come with a design change and a larger 5.7-inch or 6.1-inch display, but Ross seems to be saying it’s currently favoring a 5.7-inch display
    As for the timing of the release of the next iPhone SE it seems like it could be getting close.
      The French blog “Consomac” spotted listings for unreleased iPad and iPhone models in the Eurasian Economic Commission database this past week.
      The filings are legally required for any devices that offer encryption sold in Russia and select other countries.
      The belief is these are the rumored iPhone SE and iPad Air 5 models
      We’ve talked about the next iPad Air before, but it’s expected to have the same size and design as the current model, but with an A15 Bionic chip, 12-megapixel Ultra Wide front camera with Center Stage support, and add 5G support.
    For now it’s looking like we’ll see a launch for the iPhone SE in the second half of April or early May based on predictions from Ross Young
      This is based on his belief that the iPhone SE display panels will enter production this month.
    New 4th quarter 2021 numbers from Canalys show that the iPhone was still the most shipped smartphone worldwide in the quarter
      Apple’s iPhone accounted for 22 percent of worldwide smartphone shipments
      Still that was down 1 percent from the 23 percent share they had a year ago in the same quarter
      Overall the report noted that smartphone shipments only grew one percent largely due to issues with the supply chain.
    Apple responded to the news from last week that they stopped issuing security updates for iOS 14 and are requiring customers who can to upgrade to iOS 15 to receive future updates.
      Apple gave a statement to Ars Technica that they only ever intended the option to be “temporary”
      They also pointed 9to5 Mac to their support page that stated they intended to offer “important security updates” for iOS and iPadOS 14 users for “a period of time.”
      The idea essentially being that it gave users some time to wait until any of iOS 15s early bugs to be worked out.
      Guess Apple feels iOS 15 is now stable enough that users should upgrade.
  International news
    Apple Pay will soon be coming to Argentina and Peru
      Apple updated the Latina American Apple Pay page with “coming soon” messaging for the two countries
      9to5 Mac had previously noted that Interbank had slipped the news on their website briefly, but that was removed.
    The latest release candidates of HomePod Software 15.3 look to be adding multi-user support for users in Italy and India
      Multi-user support on the Home Pod let’s up to six people have access to their own playlists, messages, calendars, and more
      The beta release should be available to all users soon.
    Apple is getting ready to stop including EarPods in French iPhones
      Apple had stopped including AirPods with iPhones back with the release of the iPhone 12, but in France a regulation required the inclusion of “an accessory making it possible to limit the exposure of the head to radio-electric emissions during communications.”
      The regulation was overridden at the end of of last year and replaced with one that favors the environment. The main reason Apple had said they were no longer including headphones. To reduce environmental waste.
      Apple had sold a unique “double box” version of the iPhone in France with a second box containing the EarPods. This will be removed from the packaging starting “from the week of January 24, 2022.”
  Apple Music still number 2
    New data from MIDiA Research shows that Apple Music is the second most popular service globally after Spotify
    Their numbers are from the second quarter of 2021 and based on their predictions and calculations since Apple doesn't officially announce subscriber numbers
    They estimate that Apple Music has a 15 percent share of the streaming market well behind Spotify which has a 31 percent share.
    Overall the total number of subscribers to streaming music services has grown by 109.5 million or about 26 percent year over year
  Apple hires new producer for Apple TV+
    According to “Deadline” Apple has recently did a deal with Kevin Walsh who was the president of Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions to become producer of Apple TV+ shows under the umbrella of his own production company, The Walsh Company
    The collaboration is a multi-year deal that will see Walsh produce film and television projects for Apple
    Walsh will continue to produce on Ridley Scott production already in progress with Apple TV+, “Napoleon” [formerly Kitbag]
      With Ridley Scott directing and starring Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby.
    Apple TV+ films and TV shows have picked up nine NAACP award nominations
      The nominations include “CODA” for Independent Motion Picture. Denzel Washington in "The Tragedy of Macbeth" and Mahershala Ali in “Swan Song" for Actor in a Motion Picture, Octavia Spencer, "Truth Be Told" for Actress in a Drama Series, Alfre Woodard, "See" Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, and Ashley Nicole Black, "Ted Lasso" for Writing in a Comedy Series.
    Apple also picked up a number of nominations in the Visual Effects Society (VES) Awards
      Apple received nods for TV Series and movies like See, Finch, and Foundation in categories like Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Episode, Outstanding Animated Character in a Photoreal Feature, and Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Episode
      The winners will be announced on March 8, 2022.
    Apple announced they will be releasing a live action Godzilla and the Titans TV series that's based on Legendary's Monsterverse franchise
      What is the Legendary Monsterverse franchise? The series of films from Legendary pictures that includes films like "Godzilla," "Kong: Skull Island," and "Godzilla vs. Kong."
      The series will be set “Following the thunderous battle between Godzilla and the Titans that leveled San Francisco” and will “explore(s) one family's journey to uncover its buried secrets and a legacy linking them to the secret organization known as Monarch.”
      The series will be produced by Legendary Television and have Chris Black, known for "Star Trek: Enterprise" and "Outcast”, serving as executive producer and showrunner and Matt Fraction (Hawkeye) serving as a co-producer.
      The series will premiere globally when the series is ready, but Apple has not revealed a release date.
    Apple has reportedly signed a second multi-year deal with Skydance Media.
      Apple already has a deal in place with Skydance Animation and they are the production company behind Foundation
      The new deal will see Skydance “develop and produce an annual slate of live-action global-minded movies that will be released through Apple Original Films”
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Feedback, commentary, opinions
  Troubleshooting memory leaks
    Not long ago we were having a discussion of some owners of new M1 and M1 Pro and M1 Max systems running into “out of memory” errors.
    At the time it seemed like only a few owners were being impacted and some of it might have just been chalked up to “growing pains” as developers work on transitioning their apps to universal binaries to support the M1
    Antony this week emailed me to that he had a low memory warning for the first time on his new M1 Max
    When he checked, using [iStat Menus](https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/) what he found was his ad blocker AdBlock One was using 60GB of RAM
    Force quitting the app freed the memory, but this brings up a good category of apps that you might forget to check when troubleshooting issue. “Extensions”, specifically browser extensions.
    “Memory leaks” are a thing that can impact any app and you machine regardless of if it’s running Intel or and Apple Silicon
    An easy way to check and view memory usage of your apps is to use the Activity Monitor:
      Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor
      Click on the Memory tab
      Click the Memory column to sort by usage.
        There you’ll see which app are using the most memory and how much each is using
        If there is something using an excessive amount you can quit that app and hopefully free up the ram
        If you launch it again and it continues to chew through RAM, it might possibly have a memory leak.
        Different actions or behaviors might be the trigger for the memory leak so it’s possible you might not see it right away.
      Unfortunately if an app does have a memory leak there is likely not much you can do besides hope that they developer knows about the issue and patches the app
        If you can reliably repeat the issue you might be able to help the developer by contacting their support and providing the specific steps that trigger the leak.
      Some other things to note when you’re reviewing the Memory tab in Activity Monitor
        At the bottom you can see the “Memory Pressure” graph. This will show if your machine is using memory efficiently over time.
          Ideally it’s green.
          If it’s yellow or red there might be an app that is consuming excessive memory or you have too many apps using memory and you might try quitting apps your not using.
        Swap used is another stat to check.
          If this is really high it can be an indication that your apps are consistently exceeding the physical RAM and using your hard drive as “swap” to move items in and out of memory.
          If you have a spinning drive using a lot of swap will have a big impact on performance. With SSDs it’s far less of an issue, but less ideal than using your RAM.
          If you’re consistently seeing a lot of swap the you might consider reducing the number of apps you have open at ay one time or monitor your apps more closely to see if there is one that might be using excessive RAM.
      Some other tools that might be helpful in monitoring RAM are iStat Menus and [CleanMyMac X](https://macpaw.com/cleanmymac)
  Cleaning up “other” files
    From memory, let’s move to storage
    Something that comes up from time to time is the what the heck is “Other” question. And that’s exactly what JC asked me about this week.
    If you look at the storage on your Mac, Apple Menu > About this Mac > Storage you’ll see a bar chart representing the storage on your Mac (this is also on iOS) divided into categories. Things like Documents, Photos, iCloud Drive, Music, Books, and Other…
    Often “Other” is the largest or at least in the top 2 or 3 of the largest amount of used storage on your Mac
    But Other is so vague, so what is it and how do you clean it?
    Other files includes:
      System temporary files
      Archives and disk images
      Personal user data
      Files from in your user Library (Application Support, iCloud files, screensavers, etc.)
      Cache files
      Fonts, plugins, extensions
      Hidden files
      Any other files that are not recognized by a Spotlight search
    Now that you know what they are, where are they and what can you do about possibly cleaning them up?
    System and Temporary files:
      In the Finder use the Go menu and choose > Go To Folder.
        Or hold down the option key, click the “Go” menu and choose “Library”
      Type in `~/Users/[your username]/Library/Application Support/` or navigate to the Application Support folder
      There are a lot of apps and files in here, so be careful
      But if you see maybe references to old apps you long deletes, these might be ripe for removal.
    Caches
      Hold down the option key, click the “Go” menu and choose “Library”
      Select all the files in the Caches folder.
      Drag them to the Trash.
      Empty Trash.
      Typically it is safe to delete cache files since they will be recreated by the system or apps that need them
        If you’re concerned click-hold Option and drag the Caches folder to your desktop to make a copy of the folder before you delete all the cache files. Once you’re sure you no longer need the backups you can delete the Caches folder on your desktop.
    Safari Plugins
      Open Safari
      Select Safari > Preferences and click the Extensions tab
      Review and remove any extensions you don’t need by selecting the from the list and and clicking the “uninstall” button
      If you want you can also “disable” them temporarily by unchecking the checkbox next to the extensions name
    Archive files
      Old application installers or large archive files
      Open the Finder
      In the Search type kind:archive and hit return.
      Make sure the “size” column is visible (if not right click the columns and enable it) and sort by size
      You should be able to see and review any large DMG or ZIP files and can remove any you no longer need.
    Other “Library” locations to check
      Hold down the option key and click the Go menu in the finder.
      Choose Library
      Look at the Logs folder for any old application log files
      Look at the Containers folder for any items that might be for apps you no longer use or have deleted
      Look at the Screen Savers folder to see if you have any 3rd party screen savers you don’t need.
    If all this feels a bit daunting to do manually I would recommend checking out [CleanMyMac X](https://macpaw.com/cleanmymac)
      It has a bunch of tools and utilities to help you find and safely remove a lot of these files
        Their “Large & Old” files tool and find stuff you may have forgotten about and can probably archive someplace off your Mac main hard drive
        The System Junk scan can identify and help you clean up a lot of the items we’ve just discussed form the “Other” category
        The Uninstaller offers a better way to remove old apps that finds all the “extras” that could get left behind in the “Other” locations like the Application Support or Caches folders.
  What happened to KVMs?
    Back in the day when you had multiple computers and wanted to use a single wired monitor, mouse, and keyboard to control both you would buy a KVM switch.
    Now we mostly have wireless (Bluetooth) mice and keyboard and the concept of a physical KVM switch has gone away.
    Still with many of us working remote now we might have an office machine and our personal machine occupying the same space and having a monitor, mouse, and keyboard setup for both is cumbersome.
    I have had a lot of you, like Dan, asking about modern solutions to this issue.
    It one of the reasons why I think Apple is bringing us Universal Control in macOS Monterey, but that feature still has not rolled out and will only support newer (2016-2018 and later) model Macs that support Continuity and Handoff.
    So Dan was asking my about solutions and honestly I don’t know about much.
    I know that there are at least some mice and keyboard offerings that support “multiple” bluetooth set-ups with a button or switch that will toggle the connection between different machines.
    Dan asked about [Logitech Flow](https://www.logitech.com/en-us/software/options.html) which promises a functionality similar to Apple’s Universal control but looks like it would work cross-platform
      I have no idea how well this would work or not.
    Still neither of these solutions integrate monitor switching
      There are monitor switching products out there so I assume you could add that to the setup, but that doesn’t feel quite as clean as the good old KVM?
    So I ask the community. Are any of you out there using a single monitor, mouse, and keyboard setup with multiple Macs or PCs and how are managing it seamlessly?
  Thing of the Moment: Pestle
    A new cooking app from indie developer Will Bishop called [Pestle](https://pestlechef.app)
    Let’s you import recipes from anywhere on the internet
      Adds a ShareSheet item and using the share button from a page with the recipe it will “slurp” everything in
      Can also add via URL or manually
      If you add manually you can use the camera to scan and OCR the ingredients list.
    Then it lets you view the recipe with step by step instructions
      You can tap an ingredient in the instructions to see it’s measurement
      You can also turn on “Hands free” paging, by saying “Next” or “Back”
    Ability to adjust the serving size and it will auto scale the ingredients. Also has unit conversions
    Can create grocery lists in Reminders for ingredients
    If you purchase the app you get Meal Plans and Recipe Discovery (feeds)
      And right now they are offering a USD $4.99 “Lifetime” price.
      Normal pricing is $0.99/mo. or $9.99/yr.
    Support for FaceTime SharePlay so you can cook together
Closing
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