My HomePod arrived this morning, so I thought I'd give my first impressions of it. I've had an original HomePod for quite some time, and I love it, but I did always think I'd like a smaller one in my office. That's why I ordered a Mini as soon as it was available.

Turns out, it was a pretty good decision too. Because for £99, I think the HomePod Mini is much more value for money than the £279 HomePod. I'm not saying the HomePod isn't worth that amount of money, but instead, I think the Mini is so cheap for what it is.

Obviously, the main part of the HomePod is what it sounds like. The original HomePod has an incredible set of speakers and can be pretty loud. With that in mind, I was expecting a speaker the size of the Mini would sound drastically different. I mean, still Apple quality, but noticeably worse than the bigger variant. However, they're a lot closer than I imagined.

The HomePod has an expected much higher level of bass, but the Mini still has a decent amount. I've complained in the past that the HomePod has too much bass, so I wasn't going to complain if there was a little less. It can also be pretty loud. I have it around 50% right now and it's certainly enough. I had them working together at one point, and it was amazing, so I'll probably end up getting another Mini at some point.

I tried sending music between the Mini and my iPhone 12 a few times, and it's definitely faster than before. But I have to be honest and say that it wasn't as fast as I've seen in reviews, so maybe I need to find the sweet spot?

One side-note I have about the Mini is that the cable it comes with is what all future Apple cables should be made out of. It's a braided cable, similar to the bigger HomePod, but the thickness of a typical cable.

While the HomePod will always have the size advantage over the Mini, the difference in sound quality doesn't seem to match the difference in size. The Mini is a great speaker. I think that this is the product that will Apple to compete with other devices from Amazon and Google. I don't think that they will ever match the price points or ubiquity of either two, but I can imagine a lot more people are going to be thinking about a HomePod now.

John Voorhees, writing at MacStories:

Today, Apple announced a reduction in App Store commissions that will substantially benefit a large part of the developer community. Starting January 1, 2021, developers who earn up to $1 million per year from their apps will have the commission paid to Apple cut in half, reducing it from 30% to 15%. Apple CEO Tim Cook said of the new App Store Small Business Program in an Apple press release:

Small businesses are the backbone of our global economy and the beating heart of innovation and opportunity in communities around the world. We’re launching this program to help small business owners write the next chapter of creativity and prosperity on the App Store, and to build the kind of quality apps our customers love.

Cook continued:

The App Store has been an engine of economic growth like none other, creating millions of new jobs and a pathway to entrepreneurship accessible to anyone with a great idea. Our new program carries that progress forward — helping developers fund their small businesses, take risks on new ideas, expand their teams, and continue to make apps that enrich people’s lives.

Such a great decision, and one that a lot of people have been wanting for quite some time. The $1m a year limit is certainly going to disappoint some people, since it will cut out a lot of developers/companies. But I don't think Apple are wrong to at least focus on the small businesses first. I'm sure a lot smarter people will argue the case for or against the cap, but right now I'm just looking forward to applying for this myself.

The M1 Mac reviews are dropping, and I've just watched a review of the M1 Mac Mini by one of my favourite YouTubers, The Everyday Dad. His question was "can you use this machine as your only video-editing computer?", and it turns out not only can you, there's every reason to use this machine for video-editing.

Benchmarks are one thing, but seeing the cheapest Mac operate like this is incredible.

As with all World of Warcraft expansions, Blizzard ramp up an excitement with a "pre-patch" weeks before the launch, to get everyone ready for the changes, and have a sneak peek at the direction the game is going through. This time, the event is a "scourge invasion", which if you don't know basically means zombies, everywhere.

There are zombies that appear randomly in the world, and they can infect you, which turns you into a zombie. And in turn you can infect other players and some NPCs. It's turning out to be pretty enjoyable. I mean, it's like being asked to troll people, which can be very fun. And as you would expect, there's a lot of coronavirus related comments being made in the chat.

It's the not the first time they've done an event like this, with a similar (but more brutal) scourge event that happened in 2008 before the lauch of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

While there are quite a few players in game spending hours moaning about the event, most of us are having a lot of fun. It's really cool that a game the size of World of Warcraft can have these types of events. It breaks up the sometimes monotonous grinding through the game, and allows people to interact and actually just relax and have some fun (Not everyone in-game seems to be a fan of that though).

If you've ever thought about trying World of Warcraft, or even just want to enjoy this event, I'd recommend it. There's a free trial always available, and it gets you pretty much the full experience.

As usual, I've come across another great Instagram account via Reddit. This time it's @the.itinerarium, and it's full of maps that have been rendered in 3D. I can't quite find the person/people behind the account, but nevertheless they are some cool maps.

Here are a few that I'm a fan of:

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Speaking of youtube-dl being available again, here is Abby Vollmer over on the GitHub blog on the matter:

Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.At GitHub, our priority is supporting open source and the developer community. And so we share developers’ frustration with this takedown—especially since this project has many legitimate purposes. Our actions were driven by processes required to comply with laws like the DMCA that put platforms like GitHub and developers in a difficult spot. And our reinstatement, based on new information that showed the project was not circumventing a technical protection measure (TPM), was inline with our values of putting developers first. We know developers want to understand what happened here, and want to know how GitHub will stand up for developers and refine our processes on these issues.In this post, we provide answers to common questions about the DMCA and why GitHub handled this case the way we did, describe why circumvention claims deserve special treatment, and share how we’re updating our policies and fighting to improve the law.

With all the attention being on the youtube-dl situation, it certainly is good to see GitHub be transparent about their processes regarding DMCA claims, and also anouncing some changes to their claim review process.

Good news! The youtube-dl repository is now back up on GitHub. If you weren't aware, it was removed due to the RIAA issued a DMCA takedown notice.

As much as I agreed that the use of youtube-dl spanned much further than simply downloading videos from YouTube, I don't think the name exactly helps.

If you're wondering what they had to change to bring youtube-dl back, then you'll be surprised. They simply removed any uses of RIAA member videos from the tests. The fact that this fixed the issue, makes the whole ordeal seem a little childish to me.

But who cares, it's back.

Romain Dillet, writing for TechCrunch:

Apple has updated a documentation page detailing the company’s next steps to prevent last week’s Gatekeeper bug from happening again, as Rene Ritchie spotted. The company plans to implement the fixes over the next year.Apple had a difficult launch day last week. The company released macOS Big Sur, a major update for macOS. Apple then suffered from server-side issues.Third-party apps failed to launch as your Mac couldn't check the developer certificate of the app. That feature, called Gatekeeper, makes sure that you didn't download a malware app that disguises itself as a legit app. If the certificate doesn’t match, macOS prevents the app launch.

A pretty embarrassing bug for such a big day.

The new iPhones are out, and therefore Matt D'Avella has decided to buy a flip phone. Not a fancy super-expensive flip phone that's still a smartphone, an actual original flip phone. To be honest, that screams "extra" to me. It sounds like a fun hipster idea that won't really last.

He points out that smartphones are designed to be with us on the go, giving us a mobile computer when we are out of the house. And with most people not leaving their houses for anything other than a walk or to go to a supermarket, there's not much use to them. Although, weirdly, I'm pretty sure people are just sat inside their houses on their phones anyway.In his video, he went over the reasons why he's decided to downgrade from his iPhone, and the potential upsides to having a less-smart phone. As usual, it's one of his 30 day challenges, so it will be interesting to see how he gets on.

I wrote a post a while ago about how I was trying to automate saving money by writing more, and the goal of that saving was to purchase an iPad Pro 12.9”. But I don’t think I actually need an iPad Pro. My mind was only set on the Pro because I want the bigger size.

In fact, this relates to what I said in my post about the M1 chip. Since I talked about how Apple designs products to fit a use case, and instead of just working out what the best device is, I need to work out what my use case is first. And the thing is, although I play some games on my iPad, what I’ll mostly use it for is writing, reading, browsing Reddit, etc. Nothing particularly taxing.

Sure, I want a machine to be powerful enough so that nothing felt slow, I don’t want to be constantly pushing the machine. But I’m pretty sure the new iPad Air is capable of everything I’d throw at it and more. The only problem being the screen size. I think my perfect iPad would be an iPad Air 12.9” (or similar). Maybe two USB C ports would be nice, so I could plug in a charger and monitor without using a cable, and even have space for more accessories. But the monitor I have can power an iPad with the same USB C cable, and I don’t actually use any accessories apart from a Bluetook Keychron K2 keyboard, and a cheap USB mouse. Although that’s going to be upgraded eventually.

To be honest, I can’t see Apple bringing out a bigger iPad Air. I think it would start to add just a bit more confusion between the Air and the Pro models. And also, if you look to the iPhone and MacBook, the larger size for both of those models are only available to the Pro. I’ll probably have to end up getting whatever 12.9” iPad comes out next, and I assume that will be a Pro model next year.