Matt Birchler:
Below are 4 camera apps (stock Camera, Adoble Lightroom, Halide, and Obscurs 2) taking the same photo. It’s early morning, my living room has no lights on, and it’s bright outside.
[…]
Lightroom is my go-to RAW camera app for iOS, in part because I pay for Creative Cloud and want to get my money’s worth, bot more so because I think it gets the best photos of any app I’ve tried before.
The difference between this image and what the stock camera app produced is night and day. This is a much more satisfying shot with little noise, good color, properly exposed highlights, and zero artifacts.
The built-in Camera app made an unexpectedly poor showing. I didn’t realize that the Lightroom app had a camera, but it looks pretty good: lots of controls, a clear interface, support for both RAW and HDR (which you can lock on), a widget for quick access.
However, I don’t know how to use it with my workflow, which right now is using Image Capture to import from my Camera Roll into Lightroom Classic CC. It looks like you have to manually share photos from Lightroom to the Camera Roll, and you can’t do this in bulk; you have to select the specific photos.
The other option is to let the phone upload the photos to Creative Cloud, then wait for the Mac to download them. This is slow and wastes bandwidth and may not finish if the app goes into the background or the phone sleeps. The photos do automatically show up in Lightroom Classic CC, and you can then move them into a regular Lightroom folder. However, this does not remove them from the iPhone. You have to go back there and manually delete them (again, individually). I hope I’m missing something here.
Previously: The Best Third-party Camera App for iPhone, The Power of RAW on iPhone, New Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC.
Adobe Creative Cloud Adobe Lightroom Camera Halide High Dynamic Range (HDR) iOS iOS 11 iOS App Mac Mac App macOS 10.13 High Sierra Obscura Photography Raw Image Format Syncing
Jason Snell:
Now, iPhone unit sales are still down from the days of the iPhone 6. What’s changed is that the average selling price of an iPhone is up—way up. That’s mostly thanks to the iPhone X, which has a record-breaking price tag that hasn’t seemed to matter one whit in terms of consumer acceptance.
[…]
As someone who’s interested in products, I find the focus on Services revenue to be a bit dispiriting. I get excited at the prospect of new products and seeing how consumers are accepting or rejecting products in the market. But the discussion of Services, especially in a financial context, is essentially a conversation about how Apple can grind more money out of every single person who uses an iPhone, iPad, and Mac. (At least the Other Products line, which is also growing rapidly, contains real products like AirPods and the HomePod and the Apple Watch.)
John Gruber:
I think it’s even worse than that. I think Apple’s (Cook’s?) interest in increasing revenue from Services is keeping them from doing what’s right — increasing the base iCloud storage from 5 GB to something more reasonable.
Joe Rossignol:
Apple on Tuesday reported that it sold 3.72 million Macs in its third quarter, which spanned April 1 through June 30, the fewest in any single quarter since it sold 3.47 million in the third quarter of 2010.
Marco Arment:
Years of shameless neglect at the low end, followed by years-long design flops at the high end, have their costs.
I think, and hope, that this is as bad as it gets, and we’re on our way out of this dark period of Mac hardware.
Ben Bajarin:
Macs had an odd quarter and there are good explanations as to why. I don’t expect this as a trend signal and if what I hear they have in their sleeve is correct the Mac business will be more than fine.
Juli Clover (Hacker News):
With 54.2 million smartphones shipped in the second calendar quarter of 2018, Chinese smartphone company Huawei has surpassed Apple to become the number two worldwide smartphone vendor, according to new data shared today by IDC.
This despite not selling any phones in the US.
Update (2018-08-02): Neil Cybart:
It is estimated that Apple spent $150 million to build the first iPhone in the mid-2000s. At the time, it was a significant amount of cash for Apple. Nearly ten years later, Apple finds itself spending that much money developing one show for its upcoming video streaming service.
[…]
My theory on the dramatic rise in Apple R&D expenditures is that management is becoming more ambitious. Apple's future is found in new industries. Just as Apple moved from desktops/laptops to personal music players, smartphones, and watches, the company will need to enter new industries to remain relevant.
Ryan Reith:
Not only did iPhone volumes outpace market growth this quarter, but revenue grew 20%. That is absurd for many reasons, number one being that most of the largest iPhone markets experienced an overall decline during the same period.
Dr. Drang:
By now, I’m sure you’ve already seen the many charts at MacStories and Six Colors, but I still like to post my own. It gives me a chance to try out new ways of showing the data.
[…]
Everyone has pointed out that this quarter had the worst Mac unit sales since 2010. This is true, but as you can see, the June quarter of 2013 was about as bad—3.754 million units compared to the most recent quarter’s 3.740 million. “Worst quarter since waaay back in 2010” makes for a better story.
App Store Apple Apple Music Apple Quarterly Results Business Huawei iCloud iOS iPhone iPhone X Mac Mac App Store
Marco Arment (tweet):
Whose work does get 10 hours out of a MacBook Pro? None of the use-cases on the marketing page — Photography, Coding, Video Editing, 3D Graphics, and Gaming — are likely to achieve even half of that in practice.
[…]
Sometimes, you just need Low Power Mode: the switch added to iOS a few years ago to conserve battery life when you need it, at the expense of full performance and background tasks.
There’s no such feature on Mac laptops, but there should be.
[…]
Since then, I’ve been running Turbo Boost Switcher Pro to automatically disable Turbo Boost when I’m running on battery power, and it has been wonderful: I made it through that 8-hour flight only because Turbo Boost was off.
Previously: MacBook Pro 2018.
Battery Life Mac MacBook Pro macOS 10.13 High Sierra
