KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is reporting that Apple is developing a W1-powered pair of over-ear headphones. I really want them to make this product.

Before AirPods, I listened to all of my audio at work of a pair of Beats Pros. I love how they sound¹, but I can’t beat the convenience of AirPods.

For me, the perfect over-ear headphones would be a pair of the Beats Pro with an Apple W-series chip. This sounds similar to the Studio3 that they already sell, but the Pro is a much better than the Studio series.

The Pro has:
– A metal frame. The plastic frame on the Studio is known for breaking. Not cracking, but actually snapping in half.
– Better Sound. Like most Beats products, the Pro is pretty heavy on the bass, but they sound way better than the Studio.
– Noise Isolation. The Pro has really thick padding and it does a great job of keeping my music from getting out and keeping other sounds from getting in. This is great in an open office.

If they took the Beats Pro and put in a battery, a W1 chip, and slapped on an Apple logo, I would buy them on day one.

Bonus points if they put in a microphone for Hey Siri, and a way to play/pause and adjust volume from the unit. Way more bonus points if they allow you to use it with a standard headphone jack, Lightning, and UBC-C in addition to the standard Bluetooth².

When he saw me at my desk this morning, he went to grab his iPad and a chair so he could “work” too. As a bonus, he even opened up RadarScope.

I used to want to get a bunch of HomeKit devices so I could control everything in my house by saying “Hey Siri” until I realized I could already do it by saying “Hey Ollie” instead 😝

When you get your son a coloring book but you kinda want to just keep it instead (I did give it to him).

I just got an email from my son’s church daycare about an active shooter training they are holding. Tell me about how unrestricted access to guns is okay again please?

Books.

Marco Arment on WatchKit:

WatchKit needs to be discontinued and replaced.

No focus on quality or expansion of WatchKit will fix this. There are only two ways to meaningfully improve Watch apps, spur third-party innovation, and unlock the true potential of the Apple Watch.

One solution is for Apple to reimplement all of its own Watch apps with WatchKit instead of their internal frameworks, which will force them to fix WatchKit’s many bugs and dramatically expand it.

The much better solution, and the one I hope they take, is for Apple to expose its real watchOS UI and media frameworks to third-party developers, as it has done on iOS.

As someone who has been doing a ton of watchOS work the last few months, I agree with every word of this. My biggest wishes are for ways to download files without going through the Bluetooth connection to the phone and to have real access to underlying graphics technologies like OpenGL or Metal.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that I was not able to hear out of my right AirPods nearly as well as I could my left one. I was getting over a cold, so I figured that I was just congested. A couple of weeks later, is started noticing that my left AirPod doing the same thing.

My AirPods looked perfectly clean on the outside, but it turns out that ear junk can go through the grill and get side the actual device. I saw recommendations on Twitter for sucking on them to clear out whatever got in there, but that was too gross for me.

Luckily, I still had a couple weeks left on my one year warranty; so Apple swapped them out for a new pair for me¹. Hopefully the more water-resistant model that Apple is reportedly working on will fix this issue as well.

So if your AirPods don’t sound as good as they used to and you are still within your warranty, it is probably worth a trip to the Apple Store to get them swapped out for a new pair.

Swinging.

Long day.

This is the first game against Golden State that I am going in to thinking that OKC is going to win, so naturally we will probably lose. 🏀

BB-8.

Date night to see Black Panther.

One of the best benefits of working from home on a snow day is having Ollie come into my office and tell me “I went potty in the potty and now I can have gummy bears”.

Mark Gurman at Bloomberg:

The model coming as early as this year will let people summon Apple’s Siri digital assistant without physically tapping the headphones by saying “Hey Siri.” The function will work similarly to how a user activates Siri on an iPhone or a HomePod speaker hands-free.

I would live this addition. I currently have the double-tap feature on my AirPods set to play/pause because that is way more useful at out open office at work. Having Hey Siri would give me the best of both worlds.

I was considering buying the new charging case for my current set when the AirPower mat is finally released, but now I think I will just wait for the new version of AirPods.