• It took all of ten seconds to take the AirPods out of the package and get some music going in my ears. And that included choosing the song I wanted to test first.[^1] The pairing process has that “magic” feel that so many claim Apple no longer produces.
• The AirPods sound pretty good. Better than any wireless headphone I’ve ever tried, in any case. They can’t compete with my B&O H6s, but how could they? Meanwhile, not having a cord is going to make a huge difference in my travels around the city every day. So I think the tradeoff is going to be worth it for me. I have my good wired headphones for home use whenever I really want to listen to the absolute best quality audio.
• I can’t use Apple’s included white earbuds at all. There’s simply no way to put them into my ears and get a proper seal without physically holding them constantly with my hands. I was skeptical about AirPods for this reason, as they are pretty much exactly the same shape as the earbuds. But it turns out, not having the cables pulling the buds down makes a big difference. I have no trouble getting the AirPods into a position where they produce the proper balance of bass and treble, and so far, they mostly stay put while sitting and working.[^2] I still need to test them further while walking, but so far the fit is way better than I expected. I may look into the many silicon sleeves that are out there to tighten up the fit even further. Though that could make them hard to put back into their case.
• I haven’t tried taking a phone call on AirPods yet. At the rate I usually talk on the phone, it may be months before that changes.
• I absolutely love the idea of having wireless headphones that can switch between my phone, Mac, and iPads with zero hassle. Compared to un-pairing and re-pairing constantly with my last set of wireless headphones, this is like waking up in the future. So far, I’ve had no issues getting them working on my iPads and my iPhone. Neither of my Macs as of this writing seem to be syncing the pair over iCloud. They are both running the latest version of Sierra, so I don’t know what’s going on there. The AirPods simply don’t show up in the Bluetooth menu. I know this is supposed to “just work” so I’m hopeful this is a temporary iCloud glitch. Switching over to my Mac for audio is something I do fairly often.
• I think I’m going to keep these. And that surprises me quite a bit. I fully expected AirPods to not work for me at all, given my history with Apple’s earbuds and fit. But they sound good enough for day-to-day music and podcast listening, and the lack of wires is going to be epic for me as I move around the city.
• I get why so many reviewers have described AirPods as the best thing Apple has released in a long time. You can tell a lot of attention to detail went into all aspects of the design, and the integration of the hardware with software is where Apple shines most.
• Having said that, I do hope Apple eventually licenses the W1 chip inside AirPods to other headphone manufacturers.[^3] I would absolutely love to see what B&O, or Bose, or Sennheiser could do with wireless over ear headphones that paired this seamlessly.
• As I said when the iPhone 7 and AirPods were announced, we’re going to have much better wireless headphones a year from now because Apple has done away with the headphone jack. AirPods should kick the other manufacturers into high gear. If they can’t match Apple’s pairing magic, they can at least up the ante on sound quality and offer more options beyond earbuds.

Update: I rebooted my MacBook, and the AirPods now show up in the Bluetooth menu. Not sure if the reboot was necessary, or if they would have shown up eventually. But that’s resolved, anyway. I’ll have to check on my iMac when I get back home.

“As far as I’m concerned, Apple cannot claim that it loves music ever again until it gives us the option to sort albums by date. No self-respecting music geek sorts albums by name. I don’t care if you hide the option in the Settings app, just give me the option for date, you wankers.”

Yes, that was me a few months back, railing on Apple for what was truly a terrible omission in the iOS Music app.

I honestly expected that Apple was never going to fix this, but low and behold, with the recent release of iOS 10.2, there’s the Sort button, sitting right in the artist listing top navigation bar, and it indeed lets us sort by Release Date, in ascending or descending order, to boot.

So let this be a beacon of hope for all your fantasy feature enhancements. I have no delusions that Apple reads my blog and “heard my plea” on this issue. I figure a like-minded brave developer or two on the iOS Music team pushed the powers that be until the feature was deemed worthy of the time.

To that developer or developers, I say thank you, from the bottom of my heart. It really does make a huge difference to the experience of playing music on my phone.

As far as Apple’s claims to loving music—let’s just say I’ll be at least slightly less likely to roll my eyes next time I hear that old line uttered on a stage by an Apple exec. They still have a long way to go, but the progress, however slow, is always welcome.

As long as I can remember, people have complained to me about the frailty of Apple’s various cables. Lightning cables, the cables on the power bricks. The old 30-pin cables. You name it, people say they are always having to replace them because they fray, short out, etc.

No doubt, the cables Apple makes are far from perfect in this regard. They’ve gotten thicker in recent months, probably as a long-overdue response to this complaint, but time will tell if the new thickness is any help to these unfortunate people who have had to pay to replace fraying cables.

I have to confess, though, I always have to struggle to empathize with people over their cord issues, because in the many years I’ve been using Apple products, I’ve never had a single cord fail on me. Is this extreme luck? I doubt it.

Having borrowed cords from friends over the years for a quick charge, or to plug my phone into my laptop, I’ve noticed a pattern. Many of my friend’s cords look as though they’ve been through a war, whereas just about any of mine look like they were unpacked out of their original boxes yesterday.

Guess which cable is mine?

I won’t speculate why my friends’ cables are so often yellowed, sticky, etc. But I can say with certainty that the way most developers wrap their cables has a great deal to do with the condition they end up in after a few months. I’ve seen all sorts of variations of wrapping the cord around itself, around devices, twisting them into knots, etc. Usually, the ends are completely stressed when they are done wrapping. And then they throw them into a bag that way for several days at a time.

I’m not saying that Apple’s cables shouldn’t be able to withstand a bit more torture than they get from most people, but there is something to be said for being a bit more careful.

And that’s where the “twist” comes in.

I first encountered the twist when I was a young musician. The one aspect of playing an electric instrument that I’ve always hated is dealing with the instrument cable. After a live performance, especially, the cable would be so twisted up in knots, and I’d have only a few minutes to pack up all my equipment and get off the stage for the next act. So I’d wrap the long cable into a circle using my arm, or just shove the cable into a bag any which way, which led to me needing to replace my cord about every six months or so.

Then one day, a sound engineer I was working with taught me the trick. Make sure both ends of the cable are free to move. Then, hold the end of the cable in one hand, and use your second hand to bring a loop of the cable over to the first hand, making a twisting motion as you do so. Allow the free end of the cable to spin freely. Repeat until the entire cable is in nice, even, flat loops.

This literally changed my life. I use this technique with every cord I own, and it works flawlessly. I almost never need to replace instrument cables anymore. I can pack several cables in seconds, and everything stays neat and orderly for the next show.

It works particularly well with Lightning cables and other Apple cables, too, as demonstrated in the following video.

The best part is not only does this prolong the life of your cables, it makes stowing away the cables into bags and pouches much easier. And it makes keeping the cables separated from each other much easier, too. No more knots.

Learn this trick, and I swear, unless you are pulling the plug out by the cable (which I really hope you aren’t) or you are stressing the cable in some other way during actual use, you should never have another problem with any of Apple’s white cables again.

Unless your cats get to them. I can’t do anything about your cats.

The Common Aspects list was always slated to be the key feature of version 1.1 of x2y for Mac. I decided to ship 1.0 with two major features of the iOS version not yet included, in the interest of getting the product shipped within a reasonable time frame. (The other feature is iCloud sync, coming in version 1.2.) I figured I would need at least a week or two to tackle adding a sidebar and all the new learning that would involve, given this was the first Mac app I was coding myself.

Above all, I wanted to use standard controls as much as possible, as I wanted x2y to look like a native Mac app. That meant using a Source List, with the blurred translucent background, standard controls for showing and hiding, and a look that was similar to the built-in Sierra apps. If you compare x2y to the Notes app, you'll see where I drew my inspiration (minus the paper texture, of course).

One little detail I wanted to add that I'm particularly happy about: if you have typed in custom values for your x1 and y1 fields, the app automatically fills them in for you when you click the add ratio button. Just give the new ratio a name, and save. Or replace those values if you want to save a different ratio.

Having access to the ratios you use most often with one click has always been a feature that sets x2y apart from most other aspect ratio calculators. I'm glad I took a little extra time to make sure I got it right. There were some gotchas along the way that I hadn't anticipated. (nextKeyView was interesting, for instance. And drag and drop reordering of an outline view was an eye opener.) But it was a great learning experience.

Add NSSplitViewController and NSOutlineView to the growing list of classes with which I am now familiar.

I also added the option to customize the main toolbar of the app, including using large icons, if desired. That one was easier than I thought it would be.

I continue to be surprised at the ease with which I have translated my familiarity with iOS APIs to those in macOS. Apple has really made a good effort to make macOS development easier over the years.

x2y for Mac 1.1 is available now on the Mac App Store.

Here’s an exercise for you.

Start with a basic premise: Apple has lost its way/ can’t focus/ has too many things on its plate/ doesn’t have a sense of the future like they used to/ hates pros/ etc.

Next, take everything Apple does for the next year and filter it through that premise, emphasizing anything that remotely supports it and ignoring anything that doesn’t.

There. I just saved you from reading Apple commentary for all of 2017. You can easily predict the blogosphere's reaction to anything Apple does.

I’m being facetious, of course, but it does seem that much of what passes for big thinking around Apple circles these days is basically confirmation bias.

We’ve been here before. Welcome to the late 90s.

Hey, I get it. I don’t like to admit I got it wrong. Or that I’ve been unfairly harsh about things that I later understood were actually reasonable compromises. Or that facts later came to light that made previous comments I’ve made seem silly.

It’s hard to face that we sometimes get emotionally charged when we first encounter news. But rather than changing our minds in light of new evidence, too many of us are doubling down on the emotion.

We seek out more support of our original premise, rather than reading the facts and then drawing independent conclusions.

If you let yourself fall into a confirmation bias loop in order to protect your ego, pretty soon everything you say or read has to fit into the premise, no matter the facts. That’s why dropping Airport devices is not an example of Apple tightening focus. It’s a sign that the car project has taken so much of Apple’s focus away that they no longer know what’s truly important anymore, so they are dropping products they shouldn’t. And so on.

Pretzel logic.

Never mind that even if the car had once been a big project, it doesn’t appear to be anymore. Apple actually seems to be re-evaluating what is critical to the future of the company and taking steps accordingly. Isn’t that what everyone says Apple should do?

But Apple doesn’t have focus is the premise. It has to be true. It has to remain true.

Apple can’t actually fix what you think is wrong with Apple. What would you have to write and podcast about then?

It doesn’t help, of course, that the people who read your work cheer you on every day. Of course they do. You’re telling them what they want to hear. You are confirming their bias. They naturally love you for it.

So now you feel an obligation to the greater community to find evidence of the premise every day. You are doing community service. Aren’t they lucky to have you, finding more proof of the premise? Isn’t Apple lucky that you are here to point out everything they are doing wrong, which is everything?

Here’s another recent example of the crazily overblown criticism Apple is getting lately. Power bricks for the new MacBook Pros.

OH MY GOD, THEY DROPPED MAGSAFE! THOSE BASTARDS!

That about sums up the average reaction, right?

Let’s try that again, only we’ll start not with our premise, but with the pros and cons of the changes to the new power bricks. We’ll then draw a conclusion based on what we find. We’ll keep in mind what people have previously found lacking in Apple power adapters, and rate the new ones based on how well Apple addressed those concerns.

Pros:

• If the cable frays, you can replace just the cable, not the whole brick
• Cables are available from anywhere, since they are standard, which means cheaper replacement options
• The Apple-supplied cable is thicker than the old cable, and thus less likely to fray in the first place
• The separated cable can be plugged into an external battery, rather than the wall, at least in theory. No need for an extra cable for the battery.[^1]
• The brick can be stowed separately from the cable, making it easier to put into slimmer bags
• The power cord can be plugged into either side of the MacBook Pro, since it has multiple ports that can accept power
• The USB-C connector on the brick can be used to charge other devices, such as phones, iPads, etc. You can travel with less stuff.
• USB-C is a great, solid, reversible, standard connector that makes firm contact and doesn’t get accidentally unplugged. It will soon be on just about every electronic device you buy, making the brick potentially even more useful for charging things in the years to come[^2]
• You don’t have to go to an Apple Store to buy an expensive replacement or spare, because anyone can make a compatible brick. Cheaper alternatives again, just as with the cable.
• The brick is smaller and lighter than previous bricks

Cons:

• No cute little fold-out feet to wrap the cable, though the detachability makes that less necessary
• No MagSafe, which was a very cool innovation
• No light indicating when the device is actually charging
• Apple no longer includes an extension cable, though the duckhead is the same as older models and will accept your old extension cable(s), as well as international connectors.[^3]

Honestly, of all the cons, not having the charging light bothers me way more than the others. But no MagSafe and no included extension cord (which some people use) are reasonable gripes, to be sure.

I think there’s a legitimate argument to be made that the cons outweigh the pros on this, though I would strongly disagree, having owned my MacBook with a similar charger for over a year-and-a-half now, as well as just about every other form of laptop power brick Apple has made since the Wall Street PowerBook. But I can count on one hand the number of articles I’ve read that cite any of the pros, while you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting plenty of articles slamming Apple for all of the cons over the past few weeks.

Why? Because they started with “the premise,” and ignored anything that doesn’t support it.

Apple hates Pros. MagSafe was something Pros liked. So they killed it. There can’t be a legitimate reason for it.

In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that the designers of the new power bricks gave earlier criticisms of Apple power bricks serious thought, and effectively addressed the bulk of those concerns. In the process, they had to compromise on MagSafe, which is unfortunate. But ultimately I think it’s a good tradeoff. Standard is better than proprietary. Having multiple ports that can accept power and do other things as well is better than one unique port that can only do power. You can disagree, but you can’t say it’s not a reasonable stance, based on the facts.[^4]

Take a similar level-headed approach to most recent Apple announcements, and you’ll quickly get to a similar place on just about everything Apple is doing. There are legitimate gripes, but most of the things for which people lambast Apple are actually just the natural consequence of tough design decisions. They compromise where they have to, just like they always have. Some of the tradeoffs are worse than others. But they are tradeoffs, not vendettas against pros, or signals that Tim Cook doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Writing that story will do nothing for your retweet count, though.

Confirmation bias is a powerful thing. And it’s tough to overcome. But once you are aware of it, it’s easy to spot in the things you read and write. Be on the lookout for it. It won’t take long to find plenty of examples.

I’m not saying Apple doesn’t do plenty of things that are worthy of criticism. I’ve done my fair share of pointing out those issues here and elsewhere. And I do think there are good writers out there that are providing useful, reasonable, logical commentary on Apple these days.[^5] But I get the sense that the tail has been wagging the dog an awful lot lately, and that isn’t a good thing. Some of us have lost the ability to be objective. And with it, I think, a good deal of credibility.