Last night I went to the Apple Store to get a new battery for my iPhone 12 mini. Normally that process would take about an hour. Because I had the iOS 17 beta installed, however, they had to wipe my phone and downgrade it to iOS 16-something before they would swap the battery. The process took so long that I had to leave my phone with them overnight to get the repair, and will be getting it today at lunchtime.

I will watch the Apple iPhone announcement/informercial today, but I am not overly excited about it. I will be buying an iPhone 15 as soon as possible, however, to replace my wife’s frequently overheating and storage-starved iPhone XR.

The Music app on the most recent iPadOS 16 developer’s beta crashes a lot. I regret installing the beta for this reason, but it was on a device I could live without, and I did need to test one of my apps.

I watched Apple’s WWDC keynote this afternoon. I am most excited about the new MacBooks because I have been hoping for that kind design since 2020. I really want one, but the closest I will ever get is buying one for my daughter next year to use for middle school.

I am wondering if a wireless CarPlay adapter would be worth it. It seems intriguing, but maybe dealing with BlueTooth is more trouble than it’s worth.

I got a chance to try Universal Control tonight. It is pretty cool! I think it will come in handy sometimes, when I want to type on my iPad without having to get my BlueTooth keyboard.

Since watching the Apple announcement today and learning about the Mac Studio, I have never been happier that I did not wait for a more powerful Mac mini before I bought mine. The Mac Studio is more computer than I need and is out of my price range (for a desktop at least). I am thrilled that it exists for other people to use, and will happily listen to the pundits talk about for the rest of the month. For myself, though, the M1 Mac mini is more than enough, and the one I bought cost about $800 less than the least expensive Mac Studio.

The M1-based iPad Air is more relevant to me. I would love to hand off my current generation 4 iPad Air to my daughter and buy the new one for myself. I don’t need the performance for much, but for photo editing it will be a leap forward. I don’t think my daughter would ever go for this plan, though; my iPad Air is blue, not pink. I should have bought a neutral color.

I am excited to see what new Macs Apple announces tomorrow. I would love for there to be a new MacBook that follows the design language of the iPad Air, with flat sides, rounded corners, and anodized aluminum shells in several different colors. Ever since I got the generation 4 iPad Air I have wanted a MacBook that looks a little like two of them sandwiched together. For a little while longer I can dream that one will be unveiled tomorrow or later this year.

I never imagined she would use it as a camera and fill it with photos and videos. iCloud Photo Library has been enabled from the start, and we have plenty of cloud storage space. Unfortunately, Photos will not free up space no matter what I do. If you delete a photo or video from Photos, it is deleted everywhere, so that is not an option.

Tonight, as I update iOS via tethering the iPad to my Mac, I am weighing my next move. Do I wipe the iPad and set it up as new, which would at least forestall the problem? Or do I simply turn off iCloud sync, wait a while for the photos on the device to be deleted, and then turn it back on? I can’t remember if I have tried the latter before. I think I may wipe the device because my daughter’s notes app has 39 notes and is taking up over a gigabyte of space, too. Strange things are afoot.

Last night I misplaced my AirPods. I didn’t realize it until this morning, when I always take them off of my dresser and put them in my pocket. At 7:15 AM, they were gone.

I didn’t mind at first. I knew they were at home, because I wore them while I was unpacking the groceries, but I had no idea what became of them. I looked for them at breakfast time, and couldn’t find them. After I finished a project at work this morning I looked again, more thoroughly. They weren’t in any of the usual places I put them. They weren’t in my clothes. They weren’t in the couch cushions.

I started to get worried that something weird had happened to them. Perhaps someone threw them out. Perhaps they had fallen somewhere I could never retrieve them. I started to wonder if I would them years from now when we move out.

By lunchtime, which is when I use my AirPods most often, I started to get desperate. Instead of going for my daily walk, I turned over the entire house looking for them. I started looking for my AirPods in crazy places throughout my house where they never could be: inside the refrigerator, inside various drawers and cabinets, and on the floor between my desk and the wall.

I almost ordered new ones from Amazon, just to make the problem go away. The generation 2 AirPods were at an all-time low price today, but they wouldn’t be delivered until sometime in January, so it didn’t seem worth it. But, I saw that the new generation 3 AirPods could be delivered tomorrow. They just cost about $100 more. I almost bought them, but stopped short because I had to go back to work.

At long last, in the middle of the afternoon, when I decided to prepare a load of towels for the wash, I found them hiding at the bottom of the towel hamper. I have no idea how they fell in there, but I was enormously relieved to get them back.

It’s so silly, isn’t it?

It puzzles me why the optimal settings for HDR and framerate are not selected by default. I always have to go to the audio/video settings and set the frame rate to “match content”. If I don’t, I get audio drift (lip sync problems). I also learned tonight that I have to set the default video output to non-HDR because the Apple TV menus look terrible in HDR, but then set the HDR setting to “match content.” That’s the sweet spot for me.

The top of the new Apple TV 4K remote looks just like the iPod click wheel. Unfortunately, it does not work anything like one; you can’t slide your thumb around the perimeter to scrub. I don’t get it. It seems like a big missed opportunity to me.

Now that my media- and backup server appears to be running stably, I’m turning my attention to setting up my new Apple TV 4K. Somehow it has remained in its box since I received it on Wednesday. I…don’t watch much TV these days. 😀

Today’s new MacBook Pro models are the first in a very long time that seem too “pro” for me. Their processor specs make my M1 Mac mini—which is fantastic—seem pretty pathetic by comparison. I’m not in the market for a new machine, but I look forward to reading the reviews.

After a long time it feels great to be a Mac user again, because there are really good products up and down the line.

I think all the products Apple announced this week are great. I am tired of hearing that some people are disappointed that they are only incremental improvements on the previous models, or that Apple isn’t exciting anymore. That’s true of every product that isn’t a new invention. And how exciting could the umpteenth smartphone be?

The steady ratchet of incremental improvement is one of humankind’s greatest achievements. The entire modern world is built on it. It’s how you get from good to great. Complaining about it is nonsensical.

I keep eyeing the AirPods Max listing on Amazon. The price is dropping below $500 now. They don’t seem perfect and I only tried them for a second but the noise cancellation puts the NC in my Beoplay H9 to shame.

I just had to reboot my iPad due to some wonkiness. I wonder when iOS/iPadOS 15 developer beta 2 will drop. I think we just passed over the historical median age of an iOS beta 1.

I picked up a Product (RED) Apple Watch 6 at Best Buy for my wife for a great price. Her Apple Watch 3 broke a couple weeks ago, and I ordered her an Apple Watch SE with a red band from Apple. It wasn’t supposed to be delivered until late July, which meant I was able to cancel it and pick up the Apple Watch 6 for her, tonight, for the same price as the Apple Watch SE, thanks to the insane Prime Days sale that other companies glom onto, too.

The red case on her new watch looks really good and matches her phone. The only weird thing is that its battery was completely dead when we opened the box. I bet the red ones did not sell well, which is why there was a fire sale today.

I’m installing the Xcode 13 beta on my new Mac mini and I’m installing iOS 15 developer beta 1 on my old iPad Pro. I will probably install iOS 15 on my old iPhone 7 Plus later this weekend. Because I upgraded hardware this year, I actually have old devices kicking around for pretty much the first time ever. All it took was spending a ton of money!

This is turning out to be a terrible year for Apple device spending for my family. I had to buy my wife a replacement Apple Watch yesterday because the screen stopped working on her Series 3 and it is out of warranty. It is the fifth Apple device I have purchased this year. 💸

I had forgotten that Apple said Siri will operate on-device starting in iOS 15. Tom’s Guide says it is a killer feature. My biggest problem with Siri is the “Siri is not available” messages I get a lot of the time. Maybe that problem will go away for me.

Oh, cool: Apple Music’s lossless audio quality tier is now live. Check out iOS Settings > Music to turn it on.

Huh. No new hardware was announced at WWDC. I can’t wait to hear hot takes about that all this week and next on my nerd podcasts.

I’m looking forward to watching WWDC while thinking about the last virtual conference I attended, last week.

Apple support came through for me again this evening. I brought in my iPad Air 4, which appeared to have a faulty region in the screen (it was really minor, but I thought it would get worse over time), and came home with a brand new iPad.