Synology is one of the biggest names in the category, and the company has a wide portfolio of NAS units that serve different audiences. As hardware has become more affordable, the functionality that you can get out of even an entry-level NAS has increased manifold.

Features like hardware encoding and encryption that were restricted to high-end NAS units in the past, are now available across pretty much entire the Synology lineup; as are M.2 slots that will add an SSD (or two) to your Synology NAS to accelerate read/ write performance.

The hardware

The Synology unit on review today is one that has all these features and a whole lot more. The DS720+ is a NAS unit that’s targeted at small to medium-sized enterprise users, or home users looking for a relatively high-end NAS unit with a focus on expandability. Though the DS720+ packs two drive bays, you can plug in a Synology DX517 — available for purchase separately — to increase the total number of pluggable drives to seven.

The DS720+ is powered by a quad-core Intel Celeron J4125 CPU with a base clock speed of 2.0GHz, and burst speeds of up to 2.7GHz. That may not seem very fast compared to your desktop, but remember that a NAS needs to operate under more constraints — in terms of power, noise, cooling; all while running 24×7 — and this processor enables significant performance improvements compared to most other NAS units out there, including the majority of Synology’s own lineup.

It’s paired with 2GB of DD4 RAM, and you have the option to add up to 4GB additional memory, giving you a total of 6GB of RAM. This can be especially useful if you plan to use the NAS unit for virtualisation using Docker or Synology’s own Virtual Machine Manager.

As I briefly touched upon earlier, one aspect of the DS720+ that power users will appreciate is the presence of two built-in M.2 2280 NVMe SSD slots. Plug in an SSD into one of these slots and you can enable a read-only cache; while hooking up two SSDs will let you create a read-write cache.

Synology says you can reduce random I/O response time “up to 20 times” by using an SSD cache. While I definitely noticed performance gains while using an NVMe SSD as read-only cache while it was active, I noticed that after a few days of use the DS720+ would no longer detect the SSD as being present.

The only way to fix this was to shut down the NAS unit, plug in the SSD into the other slot, and reconfigure the cache from scratch. I don’t know if this was down to a faulty SSD or the fact that I am using a model that isn’t officially listed as being compatible with this particular model.

The DS720+ packs two Gigabit Ethernet ports and while some might be disappointed by the fact that there’s no 10 GigE support, I managed to look beyond that and appreciate the fact that — in addition to using the secondary port for redundancy — I could use link aggregation to enable higher transfer speeds.

The unit also packs two USB 3.0 ports — one at the front, and one at the back — as well as an eSATA port.

The software

Top-notch specifications of the DS720+ enable you to get the most out of Disk Station Manager (DSM), the software that powers every Synology unit. As I’ve said before, the strength and maturity of the DSM platform — and packages that enable various functionality — is arguably Synology’s biggest strength.

DSM is the operating system that enables operation of Synology NAS units, while the packages are the equivalent to apps that run on top. And Synology’s package manager — not dissimilar to an app store — makes extending the functionality of your NAS as easy as downloading an app on your phone.

For example, you can install the Synology Drive package to get the functionality of Google Drive as well as Google Docs rolled into one. Desktop users can use a Web-based interface to browse through files as well as save/ edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in Synology’s own proprietary formats. The company says you can import/ export these files from/ to Office formats, but I had mixed results in my testing.

Synology Drive lets multiple users collaborate on the same document, but the editor itself is limited when compared to apps like Google Docs and Microsoft Office. With that said, if all you need is basic editing and collaboration abilities, you will be more than happy with what Synology Drive offers.

Alternatively, you can download the Synology Drive app on your smartphone or tablet to get similar functionality, but you are limited to viewing — and not editing — documents, which might be a dealbreaker for some.

There’s also a Synology Drive app for the desktop that allows you to setup an automatic, background sync mechanism with a designated folder similar to how apps like Dropbox and Google Drive work.

There are other packages that let enterprise users self-host alternatives to other Google and Microsoft services like mail, calendar, contacts, chat, and even notes. You can, of course, also use your Synology unit to host your websites, and completely eliminate public cloud infrastructure from your setup.

If you aren’t ready to take that step, you can use Cloud Sync to sync one or more folders on the NAS unit with public cloud providers like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, as well as a bunch of other services. Synology also makes it really easy to run a VPN server on your NAS, giving all your users an easy and secure way to connect to the office network.

Access to all these services can be controlled via a centralised account that can be managed by the IT department or the system administrator at work using the Web-based interface. Other packages include Active Backup, which lets you backup your PCs as well as severs/ VMs to your Synology unit, as well as Hyper Backup, which enables backup of the NAS unit itself.

Synology has plenty to offer home users as well, and two of my favourite packages are Download Station and Media Server. While the former is a way to download files using torrents as well as other sources directly onto your Synology, the latter is a way to manage your downloaded media files. Combine that with the excellent DS Video app — which I have praised in the past — and you have your very own self-hosted Netflix alternative.

Of course, you can also install popular packages like Plex onto your Synology if you prefer a more consistent experience while moving across platforms/ devices.

With the shift towards SSDs, the amount of storage available on laptops has declined, which means not everyone can afford to carry their entire music library the way they used to. This has led to increased popularity of music streaming services that allow users to stream millions of songs for a flat monthly fee.

However, not everyone can afford to — or wants to — pay a fee every month to access their favourite music, which means there will always be an audience for downloaded music. This is where Audio Station and iTunes Server packages on your Synology come in, as they allow you to host (potentially huge) music libraries on the NAS, while streaming them to your devices — PCs as well as mobiles — locally as well as remotely, as and when needed.

Other Synology packages include the likes of Moments and Photo Station for photo management, which I have covered in detail in the past.

DSM 7.0

Personally, I’m also excited about the expected general availability of DSM 7.0, the next generation Synology operating system, that’s set to bring a host of improvements for both consumers as well as enterprise users.

While public information about DSM 7.0 is still limited, Synology has revealed that it is set to make backing up your Macs easier, while some much-needed improvements are coming to Synology Photos. Enterprise users will also benefit from Hybrid Cloud, which will make it easier to combine on-premises and cloud storage with Synology C2.

With an expected release date of later this year, I can’t wait to test out the promised improvements in DSM 7.0 and share my experience at a later date.

Price

With a recommended retail price of around Rs. 45,000 in India and $400 in the US, the Synology DS720+ is a powerful NAS that will be a useful addition to any small- to medium-sized enterprise’s infrastructure, especially one looking to expand their collaboration/ virtualisation infrastructure.

The DS720+ might be an overkill for the needs of most home users — except perhaps the real enthusiasts, or ones with deep pockets — and they might be better off considering the more affordable (and less powerful) Synology DS220+.

Nothing new there as we’ve become used to seeing Apple products in the hands and homes of characters across several Apple TV+ originals, though this episode takes it to the next level with integrations with multiple Apple products and services. Despite the Turner household featuring at least three HomePods, what took centerstage was FaceTime, and not just because it’s central to how the story moves forward.

On more than one occasion we see the Turners FaceTiming on an Apple TV, though it looks nothing like the experience you get with an iPhone or iPad mirrored to an Apple TV today. What Lauren, Toby, and later, Rupert, experience is a FaceTime on the Apple TV in landscape mode where they only see the other person in full-screen, minus the little window that shows your own video.

Now to be clear, they still rely on an iPhone or iPad to speak to the person at the other end, and presumably share their own video. That obviously doesn’t sound ideal but until Apple makes its own television set with a built-in camera, that’s the closest we might get to FaceTime in the living room.

At various times in 2020, I found myself wishing for a video call experience that was centre around the television, since the benefits are plenty, and obvious. Given the “hacky” nature of the setup depicted in Servant, I would be surprised if this turns out to be real, but I’d take the small win until a more elegant solution is on the horizon.

When the iPad Air launched, it was all about being “thin and light”. Apple noted it was “20 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter” than the iPad 4, with some claims about its performance thrown in for good measure. However, it was its successor — the iPad Air 2 — that became the pinnacle of the series.

At 437g, the iPad Air 2 is the lightest iPad Air to date, and it brought “40 percent improvement in CPU performance and 2.5 times the graphics performance” compared to the iPad Air, underlying its claim of being the fastest iPad at the time.

I was excited enough to pick up an iPad Air 2 at launch, and it lived up to the promise, and more. Unsurprisingly, that particular iPad is still going strong in our family — we also continue to find a use for an iPad 2 that just refuses to die — and I’d go as far as to say that it’s my favourite non-Pro iPad till date.

Sadly, that’s as good as the iPad Air line got for a while. The iPad Air 2 was unveiled in October 2014, and for the next five years, the line didn’t see any updates at all.

In part, this was down to the fact that during its later years, the iPad Air 2 was fast enough for everyday use. However, it wouldn’t be inappropriate to say that the main reason was neglect. A little over a year after the launch of iPad Air 2, Apple introduced the first iPad Pro, and the line saw constant refreshes over the next half-a-decade.

Last year, Apple took a break from releasing new iPad Pro models to unveil the iPad Air 3, which bridged the gap between the two lines by adding support for the Apple Pencil, Smart Keyboard, as well as other features that had hitherto been exclusive to the ‘Pro’ line.

2020 has been another solid year for nearly the entire iPad lineup, with the release of new iPad Pro models — as well as Magic Keyboard with a trackpad — in March, and the launch of a ‘regular’ iPad in September. However, it was the iPad Air 4, which was also announced at the September event, that caught my eye, and much like the iPad Air 2 six years ago, I was excited enough to order one at launch.

The iPad Air 4 is available in new Green and Sky Blue options, in addition to the Silver, Space Grey, and (Rose) Gold colours of its predecessors. The Sky Blue variant I ordered has a very understated finish — even more than the Midnight Green finish on the iPhone 11 Pro models — and I struggled to see the “blue” from which it derives its name.

Having said that, I didn’t spend any time using this iPad outdoors or in the sun — which makes limited appearances in this part of the world, especially at this time of the year — and I expect the blue to seem a bit more pronounced when light bounces off it. Of course, all this is moot if you plan to cover the iPad’s body with a case or a keyboard.

The iPad Air 4 takes its design cues from the iPad Pro, getting rid of the home button, which allows for thinner bezels at the top and bottom. That change, coupled with a slightly wider body (7-inches, compared to 6.8-inches on the iPad Air 3), means Apple was able to ship a larger 10.9-inch display on the iPad Air 4, compared to 10.5-inches on its predecessor.

Visually, the iPad Air 4 looks identical to the 2018 iPad Pro that has been a near-constant companion of mine for the last couple of years. Apart from the smaller display — I use a 12.9-inch Pro — and as a result, the slightly cramped keyboard (more on that later), the main thing that took some time getting used to was the lack of Face ID.

Face ID is great on the iPhone, and despite my initial reservations, it’s safe to say that the best implementation of Face ID is on the iPad, not least because it works in both portrait and landscape orientations, something the iPhone lacks to date. However, it’s not until you go back to using a fingerprint scanner that makes you appreciate the speed and convenience you take for granted on a device with Face ID.

The first couple of days were a bit rough, but pretty soon I got used to putting my index finger down on the power button while sitting down to work on the iPad. What I continue to find annoying to this day is that Touch ID on the iPad Air 4 is a tad slower than the last time I used it on an iPhone.

Of course, it would be unfair to compare Touch ID on the iPhone — where it’s embedded in front-facing home buttons where your entire finger can be scanned — to the one on iPad Air 4 where only part of your finger can be scanned at any given time. This means you need to rest your finger on the button a little bit longer for it to get a good-enough scan.

That’s hardly a surprise given this is effectively a first-generation Touch ID sensor and Apple has done a good job with the software, with little touches like the “Rest to Open” message that pops up on the screen to remind you to take it a bit slow when trying to unlock the device.

There are some tweaks to the Touch ID setup process as well, with a reminder to rotate the iPad and register another finger to account for the different orientations in which you’ll end picking up the iPad.

I’d be curious to hear from someone making the move from an iPad Air 3 to this one on what they make of the placement and performance of the new Touch ID sensor. In the absence of that information, I have a feeling that at least some of the things that I’ve mentioned might be limited to those moving from an iPad with Face ID to this one.

Apart from the increase in size (and the additional pixels that it brings), the display is virtually identical to one of the iPad Air 3. This means you get True Tone and support for the P3 colour gamut, but no ProMotion and a slightly lower peak brightness compared to the iPad Pro models (500 nits, as opposed to 600 nits). I like having ProMotion on the iPad Pro, but I didn’t particularly miss it on the iPad Air 4, and I imagine that’d be the experience of most (but definitely not all) users.

What I did notice is that just like the iPad Pro models, the additional pixels on the iPad Air 4 mean you get small black bands on either side when using certain (read unoptimised) apps in landscape mode.

The iPad Air 4 brings support for the second-generation Apple Pencil — its predecessor supported the original Pencil — and there are a bunch of software enhancements to make the Pencil a bit more useful in certain contexts.

With that said, I’m frustrated that you still can’t use the Pencil as a replacement for simple finger-based gestures to, say, swipe up to go back to the home screen, which I find a bit baffling. Overall, as I’ve said before, the Pencil is a nice add-on for artists as well as those who prefer taking handwritten notes but — strictly in my opinion — it isn’t a “must-have” to go with your iPad Air/ Pro, unlike a keyboard which I can’t recommend enough.

Which brings us to the Magic Keyboard with its “floating design” and built-in trackpad. Apple introduced this accessory in March with new iPad Pro models, but I hadn’t used one for an extended amount of time until I got my hands on the one I ordered to go with the iPad Air 4.

The keyboard is the same model that works with the 11-inch iPad Pro — I imagine maintaining this compatibility was a big part of the reason Apple increased the size of the iPad Air 4’s display — and the first thing I noticed was how heavy it is. I remember reading reviews of the Magic Keyboard earlier this year and all of them made references to the weight (and the magnets that are almost entirely the reason behind it) but I was still surprised when I first held it in my hands.

I received the iPad Air 4 and the Magic Keyboard as two different shipments on different days, and the second I held the box containing the keyboard, I realised how heavy it was compared even to the iPad box I received a day earlier.

By itself, the iPad Air 4 weighs 464 grams, while the keyboard weighs 608 grams. Combined, the two weigh a bit more than the combination of 12.9-inch iPad Pro and Smart Keyboard Folio that’s been my daily driver for a while. The difference isn’t much, but it was definitely noticeable.

Of course, the design of the Magic Keyboard is meant to alleviate this a bit by making it easier to quickly detach the iPad when you don’t need the keyboard, which means you are carrying around less weight in certain situations. In practice, though, that action didn’t come naturally to me at all, possibly because I’m set in my ways as a Smart Keyboard Folio user.

The Magic Keyboard is backlit, and since it draws power from the iPad, Apple is pretty aggressive in terms of managing when the lights comes on, and how quickly they are turned off. Without a dedicated row of function keys, there are no hardware controls to quickly increase/ decrease the brightness manually, though it can be controlled via Settings.

In terms of the actual typing experience, the Magic Keyboard reminded me of third-party keyboards from the likes of Logitech that I’ve used in the past. By that, I mean that the keys feel plasticky (without feeling cheap) and the scissor mechanism has more travel (1mm to be precise) than what you get with the fabric-finished Smart Keyboard Folio.

The new keyboard hasn’t significantly improved my typing experience, though I’m willing to concede this could well be down to years of living with the Smart Folio Keyboard as well as other keyboards with low travel (my work laptop is still a 2019 MacBook Air with the old Butterfly keyboard) and having accepted them at this point (Also see: death and taxes).

Apple introduced native mouse and trackpad support in iPadOS 13.4, complete with snapping the pointer to nearby controls to help you find your way around. The idea is to minimise — if not completely eliminate — the number of times you have to reach out and touch the screen.

Additionally, the trackpad can also be used for gesture-based navigation. For example, you can swipe up with three fingers in any app to go back to the home screen, or use the three-finger swipe left/ right to move between apps. Of course, these gestures are also available if you have an external trackpad like the Magic Trackpad 2.

The trackpad is especially helpful if you are using the iPad with a monitor, something I do quite often at work. With the Smart Folio Keyboard alone — or even if you throw a mouse into the mix — you still need to keep tapping the screen to accomplish certain tasks.

This means you need to switch between the monitor and the iPad regularly, and ever so often I find myself focusing on just the iPad and forget that I have a bigger display attached, just because it’s simpler. The Magic Keyboard for iPad managed to change that.

Once I trained myself to use gestures and the on-screen pointer instead of reaching out to touch the iPad for every little thing — which admittedly took a couple of days of conscious effort — I found myself being a lot more productive when working with an external screen. In that sense — and I know I’m a few months late on to this — the iPad and Magic Keyboard offer a “true laptop experience” that wasn’t possible earlier.

The trackpad — or more specifically the pointer — also came in handy when finding my way around data points on graphs, and when using apps like Remoter Pro to VNC into a Mac Mini, something I find myself doing very often.

However, when I balance these conveniences with the extra weight that the Magic Keyboard adds to the package — and its eye-watering $299 (Rs. 27,900/ SEK 3,695) price tag — I don’t consider it to be an essential upgrade for my needs, and I’m quite happy sticking with the Smart Keyboard Folio instead.

Though I haven’t used the iPad Air 4 with a Smart Keyboard Folio yet, the experience wouldn’t be any different than using it with an iPad Pro, and that’s something I have covered in-depth earlier. One thing you need to keep in mind regardless of the type of keyboard you choose is that due to their smaller size, the keyboards that get paired with an iPad Air 4 (or the 11-inch iPad Pro) will always feel a bit cramped.

This is something most people get used to pretty quickly if the iPad is the only device they use, but if your workflow involves juggling between an 11-inch table and a 15-inch laptop, for example, it gets harder to transfer your muscle memory between the two devices.

The Magic Keyboard, of course, also includes a USB Type-C port. While it can only be used for charging, at least that leaves the one on the iPad free for other tasks. That’s right, the iPad Air 4 is the first non-Pro iPad to pack a Type-C port. I connected a 27-inch Dell 4K monitor with the iPad — both via the Type-C port, and with an HDMI port connected via a Type-C dongle — and it had no trouble driving the display at full resolution.

The iPad Air 4 is powered by the A14 Bionic, which also appears in the iPhone 12 line. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t notice any performance issues with the iPad Air 4, but in day-to-day tasks, I didn’t spot any significant gains compared to my 2018 iPad Pro, though that’s more to do with the latter’s competence than a slight on the newest chips.

When it came to benchmarks, the iPad Air 4 comfortably outscored the two-year-old iPad Pro in single-core tests, which was hardly a surprise given the year-on-year improvements Apple’s amazing silicon team continues to deliver. In multi-core benchmarks though, the iPad Pro more than held its own thanks to the four high-performance cores inside the A12X, as opposed to two on the A14 Bionic.

Though the iPad Air 3 had stereo speakers, both the drivers were near the home button, while with its successor Apple has positioned them on opposite sides, giving you clearer left-right separation when you hold the iPad in landscape mode. The resultant sound isn’t quite as room-filling as you get with an iPad Pro, but it’s an upgrade nonetheless.

As far as battery life is concerned, well, it’s an iPad, which is to say you won’t have any complaints. The iPad Air comes with a 1m Type-C to Type-C cable and a 20W Type-C charger in the box, which should make for a faster charging experience.

Apple has made a bunch of improvements in the rear camera — including a 12-megapixel ƒ/1.8 wide camera and 4K 60 fps recording, both significant improvements — but I have no interest in being the guy who takes pictures and shoots videos with his iPad so I haven’t tested the cameras at all. Improvements in the front camera department — which would’ve surely had broader appeal — are minimal, with the iPad Air 4 adding support for 60fps recording and Smart HDR.

iPadOS 14 brings a host of features, big and small, most significant of which seem to be the Pencil-related improvements mentioned earlier.

I did run into a few minor bugs though — one time the trackpad pointer disappeared, and in the other instance the iPad stopped responding to Apple Pencil’s input. On both occasions, I had to restart the iPad for things to go back to normal.

By themselves they don’t seem like issues worth bringing up here, but I don’t recall facing anything similar with the iPad Pro at any time during the last couple of years, so these instances stuck out more than they probably should have. On the face of it, they definitely sound like early bugs that future software updates should fix.

Another change I would like to see is the evolution of multitasking on the iPad. What I miss, for example, is the ability to keep an app pinned on the right fourth of the screen, while using Command-Tab to cycle through other apps on the left. Apple offers Slide Over to achieve a similar effect, but it isn’t quite the same since it ends up covering parts of the “main” app.

Even as we wait for the software to evolve, it’s clear that the iPad Air 4 blurs the line between the iPad Air and iPad Pro. With the inclusion of a bigger display, a Type-C port, as well as the A14 Bionic — which puts the iPad Air 4 ahead of the iPad Pro line in terms of single-core and GPU performance, at least until the Pro line is updated — the iPad Air 4 has the 11-inch iPad Pro within its sights.

With a $200 (Rs. 17,000 in India, and nearly 3,000 SEK in Sweden) price difference between their starting prices, you would think the iPad Air 4 would be a no brainer. So let’s recap everything you’d miss out on if you picked up the more affordable offering — you’d lose Face ID, ProMotion display, LiDAR scanner, and will have to settle for worse cameras and speakers, as well as 64GB of storage.

That’s right, while the iPad Pro base model packs 128GB of storage, the iPad Air 4 starts at a meagre 64GB. While some believe that’s too little for any meaningful work — and I agree that it isn’t ideal — I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker either, especially if you don’t typically use more than a handful of apps.

If, however, you are a gamer, or you like keeping a ton of media available on your device for offline use, you might want to consider spending a little extra to get the 256GB variant of the iPad Air 4. At that price point though, you’re nearly in the iPad Pro territory and save for the A14 Bionic, the iPad Air 4 doesn’t look as appealing in comparison.

If you are okay with the base model, you can pick up an iPad Air 4 and a Smart Folio Keyboard for roughly the price of a 10.9-inch iPad Pro. The only other thing you need to keep in mind — especially if you are looking at this as a “laptop replacement” — is if you’d be okay with the size.

Most people use laptops that are bigger than 11-inches, so switching to a 10.9-inch tablet might feel like a downgrade. Personally, while I appreciate the extra portability of a smaller device in certain situations, I prefer the additional real estate that my 12.9-inch iPad Pro offers, and I wouldn’t be happy using anything smaller on a daily basis.

If you already have an iPad Pro with Face ID, you are better off waiting for future updates to the Pro lineup, but you don’t need to hear that from me. If you have a 10.9-inch iPad Pro, though, you will have an interesting decision to make when it’s time for your next purchase, and I have a feeling that many would opt for an iPad Air instead.

The “new reality” has been here for between six to eight months now, so I hope you have the basics figured out. That’s to say I hope there’s a dedicated corner of the house that you call your “home office”, though I realise not everyone has the financial means or physical space (often both) to setup a workstation consisting of a(n ergonomic, hopefully) desk and chair at the very least.

Many employers have stepped up to fund or facilitate purchase of different types of equipment to make working from home a more comfortable experience. But the one part of the setup that often gets neglected is one that quite literally enables the work-from-home economy: the humble Wi-Fi router.

Most people continue to use the Wi-Fi router provided by their Internet Service Provider (ISP), which might be good enough for some users, but if you are the guy on Zoom calls whose video is always freezing, or if there are certain parts of your house that are dead zones in terms of Wi-Fi coverage, it might be worthwhile in investing in a better Wi-Fi router.

Yes, I know the last thing you want to do is deal with yet another gadget, and you actually like the fact that your router is hidden away in some corner and it’s something you literally haven’t thought about in months, if not years. But in a world where it’s increasingly common for multiple people to be working and/ or studying from home at the same time — not to mention we are streaming more video than ever before — the router is now (if it wasn’t already) arguably the most important piece of tech in your home, so it’s worth giving your choice a second thought.

Over the years, I have tested and reviewed my fair share of routers, and in a new series of a posts on this blog, I will talk about the things you need to keep in mind while buying a new router; how to know if you even need a new router; as well as share recommendations of my favourite networking gear.

The latest to fall by the wayside are the EarPods and humble power adapter that, until recently, came bundled with every new iPhone. While many smartphones — especially those on the budget end of the spectrum — have shipped without any kind of earphones, the iPhone 12 lineup could potentially be the first mainstream phones to ship without a power adapter (aka charger) in the retail box.

For years, I — and countless others — have complained about Apple shipping its most expensive phones with puny 5W chargers, possibly the only “specification” that’s remain unchanged since the original iPhone. This in a world where even the most affordable smartphones — that cost a fraction of an iPhone — ship with a charger that’s at least twice as fast, while manufacturers of more expensive Android phones have been engaged in a “fast charging” race whose heady mix of marketing and actual technological innovation is reminiscent of the “megapixel wars” from a few years ago.

Apple partially addressed this complaint by shipping an 18W charger in the box of last year’s iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max, while the $699 (9,195 SEK/ Rs. 64,900) iPhone 11 continued the 5W charger tradition. That, as we now know, was just a temporary relief, as Apple’s long term solution to those complaints has been to drop the charger from the box completely.

Apple wants you to believe that the move is all about the environment. Here’s what Apple’s press release announcing the iPhone 12 range says on the subject:

Apple is also removing the power adapter and EarPods from iPhone packaging, further reducing carbon emissions and avoiding the mining and use of precious materials, which enables smaller and lighter packaging, and allows for 70 percent more boxes to be shipped on a pallet. Taken altogether, these changes will cut over 2 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually, equivalent to removing nearly 450,000 cars from the road per year.

And here’s what Lisa Jackson, Vice President, Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives at Apple said during her rooftop appearance at this month’s special event:

“And just like we did with Apple Watch, we looked for ways to cut waste and use less material. Customers already have over 700 million Lightning headphones and many customers have moved to a wireless experience with AirPods, Beats, or other wireless headphones. And there are also over 2 billion Apple power adapters out in the world, and that’s not counting the billions of third-party adapters.

So we are removing these items from the iPhone box, which reduces carbon emissions, and avoids the mining and use of precious materials. Removing these items also means a smaller, lighter iPhone box. We can fit up to 70 percent more products on a shipping pallet, reducing carbon emissions in our global logistics chain.”

The message Apple wants you to take home is that the move’s good for the environment (and any financial gains are purely coincidental). But what does Apple gain apart from securing the future of the planet, good PR, and the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from doing the “right thing”?

As many have pointed out, Apple saves on the cost of manufacturing accessories that would’ve otherwise been bundled in each box, but none of these savings have been passed on to consumers. In fact, on average the iPhone 12 range is more expensive than the previous generation, especially in markets like India, though at least part of that is down to higher local taxes and weak INR (the same way that lower Sweden pricing is thanks to a much stronger SEK).

Apple will also point to the fact that all models now come with OLED panels, which more than offsets the “next to nothing” (quotes mine) it costs to manufacturer the charger and earphones you no longer get in the box. This is perhaps the only time you’ll (unofficially, of course) get anyone at Apple to admit that the pair actually cost mere cents to manufacture, so there wasn’t much to pass on in the name of savings, all while continuing to sell them for $29 each until recently.

But my main gripe isn’t that Apple hasn’t reduced the price of the new iPhones. It’s that Apple’s move — when seen in its entirety, as explained below — will actually encourage purchase of more chargers, going against Apple’s public claim of doing good for the environment. Sure, not every iPhone buyer will end up purchasing a charger, but my guess is that a substantial percentage will, and Apple is well positioned to profit from that trend.

Apple is bundling a Type-C to Lightning cable in the box, rendering most chargers that majority of the people would have lying around useless. That, of course, means you’ll be in the market for a new, Type-C charger, one that Apple will gladly sell you for $29 $19.

Even if you do that, the charging speeds you get won’t match what chargers bundled with most Android flagships could provide, but that’s probably better for the long-term health of your phone’s battery and is a topic for another day.

Unless you plan to resell it, or hand it over to someone else in the family, you could decide to continue using the charger and cable from an iPhone you currently own. Well, the joke’s on me, because most people can’t keep their iPhone charging cable from getting destroyed within six months, forget about a year or few, so that’s not really an option either.

So, as it turns out, if Apple dropping a charger from the iPhone retail box wasn’t bad enough, bundling a Type-C cable actually makes the move worse, as the said cable will (by lying unused) only add to environmental waste Apple says it wants to avoid. The company points out there are “2 billion Apple power adapters out in the world, and that’s not counting the billions of third-party adapters” but the real question is how many of them are Type-C? My guess is not many. So what will most people need to do to use the cable that came with their shiny new iPhone? Buy another charger of course.

What about the decision to drop EarPods from the box? Annoying as many will find it to be, that’s a move I can understand, not least because it’s one with precedence within the industry (though perhaps not with phones anywhere near the same price point). Regardless, it’s a decision that will add further fuel to the rocket ship that is AirPods sales.

Setapp launched on iOS (and iPadOS, argh, I hate doing this) in August with eight apps, with two more seemingly added since. Arguably the most high profile of these apps is Ulysses, the text editor that’s gained its fair share of fans — with @prawnway being the most dedicated user I know — since its launch a few years ago.

I too have spent a fair amount of time using Ulysses — in fact I’m typing this in Ulysses, before I post this via MarsEdit, another longtime favourite Mac app available via Setapp — thanks at least in part to the fact that it was included as part of Setapp, a service I was already using. I have never completely embraced it thanks to its few quirks, not least of which is the way it handles links in Markdown.

Before this becomes a post about Ulysses, let’s switch back to talking about Setapp. The new iOS offering also includes apps like 2Do, Paste, and SQLPro Studio, but what’s more interesting than the selection of apps is how Setapp is getting around Apple’s restrictions to effectively “unlock” in-app purchases on iOS and iPadOS.

The Setapp app on macOS has a new section called Available on iOS, which lists apps available as part of the new offering. Open the listing page of any of these apps and you will see an ‘iOS app’ button. Tap on this button and you’ll see two options — one to download the iOS app, if you don’t have it already, and the other to unlock all features of the app.

Both these things are done via QR codes. The idea is to first install the app via the App Store and then, in the second step, to scan a QR code that unlocks all features of the said app. The app then behaves exactly how it would have if you completed an in-app purchase via the App Store.

Setapp has a webpage explaining how this setup doesn’t violate Apple’s policies, but one can’t help but wonder if Apple will one day wake up and decide this kind of behaviour is no longer allowed. That fear aside, the most disappointing fact about Setapp for iOS (and iPadOS, sigh) is probably the limited number of apps on offer right now.

As mentioned earlier, there are only ten iOS apps on offer, and all of them are “companions” to Mac apps that are already available via Setapp. That’s a disappointingly low number, but it’s worth remembering that Setapp’s entry to Mac was similar in terms of the relatively small set of apps on offer, and now the platform has grown to 198 apps (at the time of publishing this post).

Given App Store’s terms of service, it’s unlikely that Setapp will be able to offer access to “standalone” iOS/ iPadOS apps (i.e. ones without a corresponding app on other platforms) anytime soon, but one hopes that at least some other high profile Setapp partners like Screens will include their iPhone and iPad apps as part of the service.

This is especially important given some of the service’s changes around policy and pricing. Even before the launch of Setapp on iOS, the likes of Ulysses were already offering Setapp users unrestricted access to their iPad and iOS apps. But with the introduction of Setapp for iOS, each iPhone or iPad added to a Setapp account counts towards your device quota.

Those on the Setapp personal plan ($9.99 per month) are limited to using their apps on a single Mac, while if you have a Family plan ($19.99 per month) you can enjoy the same access across four different devices. Setapp now lets you add an iPad or iPhone to your account for $2.49 per month, which means if you are using, say, Ulysses across a Mac, iPhone, and iPad, you will end up paying more for that privilege.

With that said, the advantage of using a service like Setapp is unlimited access to 198 fully-unlocked premium Mac apps, including the likes of iStat Menus, Screens, BetterZip, CleanShot X, and many, many more. If you are interested in just one or two specific premium apps, you’ll undoubtedly be better served by signing up for those services directly.

What I like about Setapp is the fact I have discovered a handful of apps that otherwise may not have become part of my workflow. Every time I have a new requirement, the Setapp store is usually my first port of call, and invariably I end up finding something I can use (and at least tolerate, if not like).

Late last year, Setapp also extended its standard offering to business customers, in addition to offering custom plans that provide access to a subset of apps at an agreed per-user price. With a handful of popular developer tools and eduction apps in its portfolio, the company certainly has the potential to target a wide variety of companies. And if my work email inbox is any indication, Setapp certainly knows this too. PS – Sorry Tanya, I promise I will answer your email soon!

You can try Setapp free for 7 days.

The obvious place for me to start was to try and replicate the departure boards you see at Stockholm’s bus stops, since I had (very recently) also tried to write a macOS screensaver that would do just that, before life got in the way. Continuing that abandoned project in what seemed — and, as my experiments showed, definitely is — a “friendlier” environment seemed like the logical thing to do.

Getting started with Scriptable was pretty simple, thanks largely to the sample scripts within the app, specifically the View JSON and News in Widget scripts which do exactly what their names suggest. Taking the relevant bits from the two scripts and pointing them to SL’s awesome real-time API was as easy as I thought developing the screensaver would be.

I’ve released the script as a Gist (and embedded it below), and here are some thoughts on Scriptable and writing widgets on iOS 14, as well as the script itself:

1. This is very much a quick-and-dirty script put together in a couple of hours, and is specific to my use case as someone who lives close to a bus stop (and no train line nearby) but hates waiting there. The idea is to monitor upcoming departures at a specific bus stop in one direction so I can time my own departure from the house to minimise waiting. It should be trivial to customise the script for a more generic requirement.
2. I use a pure black background as my iPhone wallpaper, hence the motivation to use a pure black background colour for the widget. With that said, though the screenshot shows the widget being used on the home screen, I don’t foresee continuing to use it like this on a daily basis largely to the fact that there’s no way (that I’ve come across) to force the widget to update periodically (every minute would be ideal). Which is why I was forced to add the “Updated:” bit in the footer, so I know how dated the information that I’m looking at is, and to manually run the script again (which shows the updated widget as a popup), if necessary.

3. Scriptable offers plenty of options that let you customise the look and feel of the widget but I didn’t bother experimenting with most of those. Ideally, I would love for the widget to look exactly like the boards you see at bus stops — the “stacks” added in the current TestFlight build should make it easier to do stuff like that — giving this very much “functional” widget some much-needed “whimsy”.
4. As you can see I went the good-old fashioned “tabs and fixed-width fonts” route for formatting. For some reason using “regularMonospacedSystemFont” wouldn’t return a fixed-width font (as I understood it should), so I ended up hardcoding the font name itself, though Menlo wouldn’t have been my first pick otherwise. If you know why the regularMonospacedSystemFont approach didn’t work, please let me know via Twitter or the comments.
5. I did all the development on the iPad (Scriptable of course is available for both iPhone and iPad) and while the development process itself was pretty straightforward, figuring out how to add a Scriptable widget to the ‘Today View’ when I was done took a lot more time than I’m willing to publicly admit. I kept looking for Scriptable under (what I now know is the old) list of widgets you see when you go to Edit > Customize from the bottom of the Today view. Maybe it’s just me, but that “+” sign to add iOS 14-only widgets is really easy to miss, especially when you are in landscape mode (which is how I use the iPad 99 percent of the time).

While it’s convenient to have this information on the iPhone and iPad, the need to build that screensaver still remains — the idea is to have the Macs in the house act as giant departure boards you can glance at while getting ready. I hope to return to development soon and add to my screensaver collection of one.

I’ve been using a HomePod — in both India and Sweden — since March 2018 and my experience is pretty much in line with what you might have read elsewhere. In a nutshell, it’s by far and away the best-sounding smart speaker available in India right now. While the newest high-end Echo devices feature much-improved sound quality, nothing comes close to the richness, clarity, and sheer loudness that the HomePod can offer.

However, Siri’s well-documented shortcomings mean that it, sadly, falls short as far as the “smarts” are concerned. While adding support for English (India) means that the HomePod is now as good as Siri on iOS in understanding Indian accents and ‘Indianisms’ (like Bollywood song names), its ability to offer useful answers and information is just as limited as that of the iPhone.

The difference HomePod’s support for English (India) makes, an illustration pic.twitter.com/szHb3zwZQG

— Kunal Dua (@duak) January 29, 2020

At home, we use our HomePod regularly to set timers and to look up weather, something we’ve been doing a lot more frequently since we moved to Stockholm, as the weather plays a much bigger part in day-to-day lives in this part of the world. Other HomePod features like personal requests, Siri Shortcuts, and HomeKit-support haven’t gained any traction in our household.

The boy will ask Siri to play the occasional tune, but I’ve noticed he now turns to Alexa more often, probably having been scared by the “Sorry, I’m having trouble…” response that the HomePod used to give every once-in-a-while until I figured out how to solve the problem for good (more on that in a later post). Of course the real reason he turns to the Echo Spot for his music requests is that he likes seeing lyrics as he’s listening to a song, and that he doesn’t mind the tinny sound.

But the most use we get out of our HomePod every day is by using it as a speaker for our Apple TV over AirPlay. We’ve been cord-cutters for the best part of a couple of years now, which means we do 100 percent of our TV viewing via the Apple TV, and the HomePod is our audio output device of choice.

Minor annoyances aside, this works really well, and at various points I’ve considered adding another HomePod to the setup, what with $199 sales extremely common in the US, and enjoying a true stereo pair. The only thing that’s stopped me from doing that is long-term — and I mean really long-term — question marks over the utility of the product.

I’ve already invested nearly $400 in a HomePod (yes, I am one of the “suckers” who bought it at full retail prices when it first launched in the US) knowing fully well that this device will one day become a very expensive (albeit beautiful) paperweight.

One day, in the mid- to long-term future, Apple will stop shipping HomePod firmware updates. And some day, Siri will no longer work on the device because Apple has moved on to a new voice-based assistant. And finally, WiFi and AirPlay standards on the HomePod will go out of date and will no longer be compatible with the digital infrastructure of the time.

Once all that happens — and that day will surely come — the HomePod, like many other smart devices that rely entirely on modern interfaces like wireless audio, will be completely useless.

Which brings me to the biggest thing I wish the HomePod did differently — it should have shipped with an aux-in port. I know that makes me sound like the one dude who still complains about the iPhone’s missing headphone jack (hi, @reckless) but it’s the inclusion of this “legacy” port that would’ve made the HomePod a truly “future-proof” product. Let me explain.

Before I cut the cord and switched entirely to the current Apple TV + HomePod setup, I had a whole host of devices connected to an A/V receiver. And the device I was using for my audio needs was a Cambridge SoundWorks Radiio CD 740 unit that I love for the same reasons I love the HomePod — it’s relatively compact (for what you get), and the sound quality is top-notch.

I paid top dollars for both products at purchase (and didn’t mind doing that for the most part), but I can’t imagine I will have my HomePod hooked on to my TV in 2038, the same way the 740 I bought nearly twenty years ago is still connected to my TV back home in India — all thanks to the good-old aux-in port.

As Google grows, its willingness to float bad products is starting to seem a little bit similar to Microsoft, ten years ago. You know what’s also similar? Its dependence on a single cash cow that keeps them from caring whether any single side venture lives or dies.

Which leads us to:

The direct contrast of course is America’s best design-driven company, Apple. Steve Jobs would rather die than release any new product that wasn’t a step-wise improvement over everything that existed before. That’s the mentality of someone that cares about whether people use a product. It’s the mentality of a designer. Google’s mentality is that of an engineer, content to labor over one cool feature at the expense of creating any overarching value.

And finally:

As the example of Microsoft vs. Apple showed us, the engineer’s mentality can win early in a product cycle, when new features can create great advantages over competitors. But over time, as the tech gets commoditized, it’s companies like Apple, which are focused on integrating all the features, that create world-changing products.