Yesterday Apple announced the iPhone 16e, and I briefly considered trading in my iPhone 13 mini for one.
Bear in mind, the name I chose for my Personal Hotspot on the phone is “You can pry my iPhone 13 mini from my cold, dead hands.”
So, is the iPhone 16e worth abandoning that bold stance? Uh… no.
There are definitely some ways it’s better that I would appreciate: faster CPU, better battery life, USB-C port.
There are ways it’s “better” that are either irrelevant to me or actually a downgrade, from my idiosyncratic perspective: a larger screen (too big to reach across with one hand, and too big for my pocket), Apple Intelligence. (I suppose as a “techie” I should care, but I am utterly disinterested in AI in general, and in “Apple Intelligence” in particular.)
There are ways it’s clearly worse, but that I don’t care about, most specifically MagSafe. I like MagSafe in concept, but I don’t have a MagSafe charger and am indifferent about getting one.
And then there are ways it’s worse, that I very much do care about. Again, the size. My eyeballs would appreciate a bigger screen but no other part of me wants my phone to grow. Even the 13 mini is slightly larger than my ideal phone size.
But above all, the real deal-breaker, is the camera situation.
I am not heavily invested in the iPhone for high-end photography. Obviously I’m not, or I wouldn’t still be using an iPhone 13 mini. But I do shoot all of my YouTube videos on my iPhone, and there are two specific features of the iPhone 13 mini camera system that I use extensively: Cinematic Mode, and the 0.5x zoom, wide-angle lens.
The iPhone 16e lacks both of these camera features. Without them, I would be giving up too much.
Of course, I actually own two iPhone 13 minis. (I inherited my dad’s when he died.) So I could trade in my 13 mini and upgrade to the 16e for my day-to-day phone, while still using the spare 13 mini for shooting video.
I considered it. But… back to the size thing. I don’t want to carry a larger phone. So until Apple makes another small phone, or until it just stops working altogether (a far more likely scenario), you can pry my iPhone 13 mini from my cold, dead hands.
Don’t get me wrong, I greatly appreciate the fact that the Mac has built-in translation features (which predate the marketing appellation “Apple Intelligence”). I just don’t get why it lacks so much context.
ICS Calendar Pro is a big (and growing, slowly) part of my business. And a big (and growing, faster than the business as a whole) chunk of it is in Europe. I’m a lame American, who really only speaks English. Sure, I studied French for three years in high school, and Russian (!) for two years in college. And I have enough of a general understanding of most common European languages that I can at least identify on sight what language something is written in, even if I have some trouble actually reading it — and I most definitely can’t respond in that language. (Well, I almost can in French, sometimes. But it definitely wouldn’t sound professional.)
Enter the Mac’s built-in system-wide translation feature. Just highlight a block of text, right-click on it, and the contextual menu offers translation as an option. It can’t translate to every known living language, of course, but I am mainly dealing with four languages other than English, in this order: German, Dutch, French and Italian.
I just don’t understand why the Mac is so stupid about what kinds of translations I want to do.
My Mac system language is set to U.S. English. So the Mac is usually pretty good, when I’ve selected a block of text that is not in English, at recognizing such, and choosing the correct “from” language in the dropdown.
The “to” language… not so much. It generally just remembers the last language I translated something into, and uses that. But shouldn’t it be smart enough to figure out that if the “from” language is not my system default, the language I want to translate it into is probably the system default?
When the “from” language is English, I get that it is harder for it to know what I want to translate into. There’s context that the system-wide translation tool is probably isolated from.
Ideally, the translation tools would have the context available, such as “this text is inside an email being sent to an address with the .de TLD.” In that context, it should be obvious that if I’m bothering to translate some text out of English, the most likely language I’d want to translate it into would be German.
Yeah, I have a lot of users in countries where it’s not so straightforward — e.g. Belgium and Switzerland — but in general, it seems like there’s a more logical starting point than, “OK, here’s a block of text written in English. Let’s try translating it from German into Spanish.” Sheesh.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I have a problem with my iCloud Photo Library. A few problems, in fact:
I only add photos/videos to the library from my iPhone. I might occasionally take photos with my iPad, but I almost never need to add those to my library.
The way Apple “manages” storage for the iCloud Photo Library is woefully inadequate. As I noted in the post linked above, there are only three options: put everything on your device, let your device decide on some arbitrary amount of free space to keep, or don’t have the photos on your device at all.
The way the options work is not adequate for me with an unwieldy library of over 50,000 photos, and neither the storage space nor the need to have my whole photo library on my iPad and Mac.
I pretty much have no interest in the new Apple Intelligence features that are rolling out as we speak. But today I did learn there’s one intriguing new ability. (At least, I think it’s new.) The Photos app can now identify duplicates in your library, and purge them, retaining only the highest-quality version and merging all of the meta data.
I immediately took advantage of that feature, and removed about a thousand duplicate images.
But I still was confronting a very convoluted situation with my new iPad, which has only a meager 64 GB of storage. (I was seduced by a “Cyber Week” promotion to upgrade from my old 8th Gen to a 10th Gen that was on sale for $259, but I overlooked the fact that in so doing, I was going from 128 GB to 64 GB.) The whole damn library got loaded onto the new iPad before I could stop it, and now I’m dealing with trying to purge it.
There should be a simple and fast way to just delete the entire thing from a device, but there isn’t. Apparently turning off iCloud Photos on the device deletes everything, but… does it? It’s not instant, and there’s no progress indicator. The photos do seem to be very slowly disappearing from the device, but the lack of clarity is maddening.
Meanwhile, I also (finally) discovered something that I think should obviate all of this nonsense. You can very easily access your entire iCloud Photo Library from iCloud on the web!
Yes, just go to icloud.com/photos and log in to your account, and you have a fairly decent set of tools for interacting with your entire iCloud Photo Library without having to store any of it on-device.
One look at the crap I keep in my library should make it clear why I don’t need this filling up all of my devices’ storage.
Why isn’t this one of the default options? In fact, it seems like it would be a no-brainer for Apple to make the Photos app present an option to interact with the library in the cloud only. I know there are bandwidth and connectivity implications, so it would probably involve a reduced set of features.
I suppose, in a way, that’s what the option to optimize storage does — or at least what it’s intended to do — but I am still astonished that it works in such a way that even the reduced/optimized images can fill up your device storage. Why doesn’t it just keep the tiny thumbnails plus the meta data (and no videos!) on-device, and only retrieve larger versions when you interact with an individual image directly?
Again… maybe it actually is doing that, and it’s just that my library is so ludicrously large that it still causes a problem.
But I know I’m not the only person with a huge library (probably others are even much larger than mine), who only ever wants to add items to the library from their iPhone, not their iPad or Mac. It seems that in those extreme cases, they could provide a “web-only” option.
Or, at least… let people know you can shit-can your whole Photos library on the iPad and just access it through the web if you really need to get to your photos.
Sure, you lose cool things like the “memories” widgets on the iPad OS home screen if you don’t have the library on-device, but it’s a trade-off that is not only acceptable, but necessary in a situation like mine.
Sometimes, in their effort to make tools easier to understand by limiting how much they explain what’s going on behind the scenes, Apple actually makes their tools harder to use.
tl;dr update: I submitted a bug report about this issue to the WordPress Trac, it was fixed in 6.7.1, and I was even credited as a contributor to that version. Now on with the post…
Look at this image:
Now look at this one:
What if I told you those were the same image? Well… I mean… they’re not. Obviously. But they’re supposed to be. They were both the same image when they were on my computer. The same exact file. But I uploaded them to this page in two slightly different ways, and that made all the difference.
The one on top — the screwed-up one — I placed by inserting an Image block in the WordPress Block Editor, and then clicking the Upload button in that block, navigating my hard drive, and locating the image. The one on the bottom, I placed by again inserting an Image block, but this time I just dragged the image from a Finder window into the Safari window. WordPress supports drag-and-drop uploads.
Looking “under the hood,” I discovered that the file on top was somehow getting converted to Apple’s “High Efficiency Image Format,” HEIC (the reason for the C instead of an F is something I’ll leave to the Apple podcasters). WordPress just added HEIC support in version 6.7, which was released this week. Since browsers (other than Safari, I assume) can’t display HEIC images, WordPress automatically converts uploaded HEIC files to JPEG. And that’s why these two images look different. JPEG doesn’t support transparency, so the areas that were transparent in the original PNG got flooded with the nearest available colors1.
But, why should the results of these two upload processes be any different?
Well, after starting in the WordPress Support Forums and then moving over to the Make WordPress Core Trac and finally searching until I stumbled upon a year-old, barely active thread on the Apple Developer Forums, I discovered that Safari has a bug — I mean it has to be a bug, right? — where, if a file upload input field says it accepts HEIC format, Safari automatically converts the uploaded file to that format, apparently with no option not to do that. (I looked around all of the settings, even the developer ones, and didn’t see anything about this “feature” at all.)
And sure enough, WordPress 6.7 is a bit haphazard with its “support” of HEIC uploads, which made it easier to confirm the cause. There are two ways, generally speaking, that WordPress handles file uploads: the browser upload, via an <input type="file"> HTML field, and a JavaScript/AJAX/React/whatever drag-and-drop option.
The <input type="file"> field in the Image block of the Block Editor has added HEIC support via the accept="image/heic" attribute. But the input field in the old school Media Library upload page has not been similarly updated. (It’s become a fact of life in the WordPress world that most of the core team’s attention is on Block Editor stuff these days, and older features get ignored.) Uploading images in the Media Library does not do the conversion. Likewise, whatever exactly is going on with the drag-and-drop method also does not involve the accept="image/heic" attribute that causes Safari to do its mischief.
Unfortunately, it looks like the only “solution” at this point would be for WordPress to do a browser sniff and remove the accept="image/heic" attribute if the browser is Safari. The only reason that was explicitly added was to get Chrome to support HEIC uploads; as I understand it, Safari would support them regardless, but explicitly declaring HEIC support is apparently what triggers Safari to make the conversion.
So, practically speaking, Safari users who want to upload PNGs to their WordPress sites just need to be sure to only upload via drag-and-drop, or the Media Library.
(I haven’t tested, but I suspect JPEG uploads are likewise getting converted to HEIC and then back to JPEG, which probably results in a reduction of image quality.)
Side note on how I discovered this in the first place: Two days ago I was writing another blog post somewhat critical of Apple, and I found when I was trying to upload a screenshot of a window from my Mac — Mac screenshots are saved as transparent PNGs — the transparency was turning black. I was so driven to distraction over the situation that I barely managed to finish writing the post.
1 Saying those areas are flooded with color is an oversimplification. It looks like the color of each pixel is being determined consistently with how PNG compression works.
I just got a new MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip, to replace my 3-year-old MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro chip. That older machine was fine, but, well… something in my gut just told me that if I was considering dropping two grand (minus some trade-in value) on a new computer manufactured in China, maybe I should do it before the end of 2024.
Anyway… I have the new MacBook Pro, and it’s pretty great. It’s essentially this year’s version of the same machine it’s replacing. The off-the-shelf model with a 14-inch display and a 512 GB SSD, at the same retail price. The upgrades are all in the Apple Silicon SoC: M4 Pro in place of the M1 Pro, with more cores and 50% more memory. A worthy upgrade to an already solid configuration.
I say “solid” because… well, I’d really like to have more disk space. I do a lot of video editing these days, and that requires a lot of storage. The problem is, Apple charges a ludicrous markup for increased disk capacity. And since external SSDs over Thunderbolt 5 are as fast as internal SSDs, I can get a 4 TB external disk for not much more than a meager 512 GB upgrade to Apple’s internal disk. The choice is obvious, even when weighing the convenience factor.
Which finally gets me (almost) to my point. Last night, after I had everything set up on the new Mac (I chose to manually install apps and copy files, so I could control what did and didn’t get moved over from the old Mac), I had over 300 GB of disk space free. This morning I sat down and was surprised to see I only had 180 GB free. What gives?
Well… what gives is the Photos app. I hadn’t even opened it — on purpose, for the exact reason I’m about to describe — but since I had logged into my iCloud account, the Mac “conveniently” automatically downloaded my entire Photos library from iCloud onto the Mac.
Do not want.
On my previous Mac, I had long since shuffled the Photos library off to an external disk. Honestly I never even really use Photos on my Mac, partly because my library is an unwieldy, 120 GB mess of close to 57,000 images1. But mostly because Apple gives users (almost) no control over how the files are managed on their Macs:
So, basically, you have three options:
Fill up all of the space on your hard drive with your photo library.
Fill up all of the space on your hard drive with your photo library, until your Mac decides you’re running out of space, then let it decide how much space to free up.
Don’t have your photos on your Mac at all.
The default is #2, but it’s a pretty crappy option. Because for your Mac to know how much disk space to keep free, it needs to know how you intend to use it. If I’m not currently working on a video project, I don’t need much space. But if I am, then I can go from needing next to nothing to suddenly needing 200 GB or more of free space. Which means I always want to keep at least 200 GB free, in case I’m about to start on a video project. Once I’m rolling, I don’t want to be distracted with figuring out how to free up space.
Now here’s a twist: since, as I mentioned, external SSDs over Thunderbolt are essentially as fast as an internal SSD, you can easily edit a Final Cut project directly on an external disk. In fact, I do that a lot. But not always. I still want that free space.
The thing that really kills me is that it would be so simple for Apple to resolve this issue. All they’d need to do is add a slider to the settings tab from the screenshot above, letting the user set a minimum amount of disk space they want to keep free. Why doesn’t Apple do this? I feel like there’s a very intentional reason. And I think I’d be exasperated if I knew it.
1 Apple is really to blame for the mushrooming library, too. Their automatic tagging by date and location, and AI-assisted tagging of subjects like individual people, pets, etc., make it so easy to find specific images that there is no incentive to put any effort into culling the junk from your library. Growing libraries lead you to pay for larger iCloud storage allocations to hold them. There’s a reason “Services” is Apple’s fastest growing revenue segment. But all of that aside — whatever, I really am not bothered by it — the one place Apple is completely shitting the bed on all of this is handling on-device storage.
