Spotify and Hulu are teaming up to bundle their music- and video-streaming services together for $12.99 per month. The deal is available now for Spotify Premium subscribers and will be broadly available in a month or two.
Want to listen to a podcast while exercising or doing yardwork, without having your iPhone along? Couple an Apple Watch with one of these five podcast apps and you’ll be able to leave your iPhone behind. But prepare for a few glitches and rough edges.
watchOS 4.3 lets you control your HomePod from your Apple Watch, allows the Apple Watch’s Nightstand mode work in any orientation, and shows more information on the Siri watch face. tvOS 11.3 merely lets fourth-generation Apple TV owners play videos in their original frame rate, and HomePod 11.3 fixes bugs.
Not every HomePod owner is a music addict, and even those who are will likely want their speakers to do other stuff. Julio Ojeda-Zapata has explored ways to tap the HomePod and Siri for information consumption, personal management, and other uses. For context, he compares the HomePod’s capabilities and Siri performance to equivalent features in competing Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers.
Plug an Apple TV 4K into a compatible TV and experience ultra-high definition HDR video, right? Unfortunately, as “Take Control of Apple TV” author Josh Centers has found, it’s far from that simple.
It looks like Apple will be getting into digital magazine subscriptions with the acquisition of Texture, which provides its subscribers with access to several hundred magazines for a flat monthly fee. Apple was silent on its plans for the service.
Apple tapped Oscar-winning director Spike Jonze to produce a four-minute short film — it’s an ad, but so far from the usual dreck that passes for advertising that the term barely applies — to promote the HomePod. Adweek provides some additional background on the piece, which features the English musician and dancer FKA twigs and is a tour de force of choreography, set design, and digital effects. Go watch it.
“Take Control of Apple TV” author Josh Centers has extensive experience with cord cutting — trading traditional cable or satellite TV for an Internet-based service — so The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple invited him onto The Dalrymple Report podcast to talk about the available options. They discuss the complications of getting rid of traditional TV service, Josh’s favorite alternative services, and rural TV technology of yesteryear.
If you’re still using a first-generation Apple TV, be aware that Apple will cut off its access to the iTunes Store on 25 May 2018 due to security changes. These security changes will also prevent PCs running Windows XP and Windows Vista from accessing the iTunes Store. The hard-drive equipped first-generation Apple TV shipped in January 2007 and was available through September 2010. The second-generation Apple TV and later will continue being able to get content from the iTunes Store.
Apple has updated all of its operating systems — macOS 10.13 High Sierra, iOS 11, watchOS 4, and tvOS 11 — to fix yet another text-crashing bug. Here’s how to get the updates, and our advice on when you should install them.
Interested in ditching cable or satellite in favor of an Internet TV service? We’ve looked at DirecTV Now, Sling TV, and PlayStation Vue in the past, and Josh Centers now dives into Google’s YouTube TV service, which recently released a native Apple TV app, and comes away impressed.
We’ve had the HomePod for a weekend, and for the most part, it has been a success when it comes to music, thanks to excellent audio quality and Siri spinning Apple Music tracks with aplomb. Siri on the HomePod has been less useful as a fount of general knowledge, or perhaps we just don’t have the right questions.
The Olympics are upon us once again, so here’s how you can watch them on your Apple devices.
Apple quietly slipped some new remote control capabilities into iOS 11.2.5 and iTunes 12.7.3. Josh Centers explains how to take advantage of them.
It will be a while before we see in-depth analyses of the HomePod’s audio capabilities, but iMore’s Serenity Caldwell was impressed by its sound quality in her first impressions of Apple’s new smart speaker. She compared it to the Amazon Echo, Google Home Max, and the Sonos One, and “came away from that test both impressed and shocked by the engineering Apple has put into making this tiny 7-inch speaker a musical powerhouse in your living room.” On the downside, she notes that the HomePod currently lacks stereo pairing, multi-room audio, multi-user support, and native support for services other than Apple Music.