Apple has a new feature called Personal Voice. This allows you to type and have your iPhone speak your words using your own voice, or a close facsimile to it. It’s quite amazing and I recommend playing with it, even if you don’t anticipate losing your voice.
You can reach the feature through Settings – Accessibility – Personal Voice. Setup requires around a half hour for you to read 150 sentences. Once you’re done, it takes a day or two to analyze your recordings and create the voice. You can then enable it with Live Speech (Accessibility – Live Speech). Then you triple tap the power button to launch the box to enter your text to speak.
It’s fascinating to consider that you could use this if you somehow lost your voice. You could even do this for a kid who is old enough to speak the sentences so that you have their voice at a particular moment in time.
This is something that you hopefully never need, but it is free and can be quite fun.
Apple devices typically use a service called Bonjour to look for AirPrint printers. Printers can be anywhere on your network and the service typically works to find out where (what IP address the printer is using). But if this doesn’t work for you, there can be a more reliable to connect to printers.
To set a particular printer to be accessed by an IP address, first you need to make that printer have a static IP (so that the IP address doesn’t change). This can be done through the printer itself or your router.
Then you need to make a profile using Apple Configurator (available through the Mac App Store). Make a new profile and name it something like “Printers.” Then add the printer(s) to the profile and put in the IP address(es). This profile can then be loaded on any Apple device (Mac OS or iOS).
By the way, this also helps if you want to print remotely while logged in through a VPN. Many VPN’s don’t play nicely with Bonjour, while using this direct approach works.
For the crazy folks who order iPhones for Day 1 arrival, this most recent ordering process was a bit of a mess. Typically, you can pre-enter your order details in the Apple Store app and then submit it order time. This time, that system failed for 15-20 minutes for many folks, pushing back many people’s ordered by a couple of weeks. This might have been compounded by supply constraints.
So if you’re ordering at that crunch time at 8am when sales start every year, you should try to order thought the Apple Store app, but also through the Apple website. If you have an iPad, try that too at the same time.
For people who were delayed in ordering or forgot this year, you can try to get the iPhones in the Apple store. This is a site that will show you what nearby stores have availability:
There’s a saying that the best time to buy a computer is when you need one. WIth new technology always arriving, most jumps in technology are incremental. So just buy whenever. Today, in August 2020, I suggest waiting a bit longer if you can.
Apple is leading the way to end of Intel-based computers with their announcement that they will start using “Apple Silicon” in their computers. This will be a huge jump for Apple’s computers and it portends similar changes that are surely coming to the PC.
Apple CEO Tim Cook Announcing Apple Silicon (aka ARM) for Macs
42 years ago in 1978, Intel came out with the 8086 chip and the x86 architecture. Intel, along with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) later, made practically every computer’s central processing unit (CPU). (There were many exceptions such as Motorola 68000 chips and PowerPC CPUs, but these never achieved the scale or had the long run of Intel’s CPUs.)
ARM CPUs use a different RISC-based architecture than Intel’s CPUs, and became most ubiquitous in Apple’s iPhones and iPads, as well as most Android phones. Apple will start selling Macs this year with ARM CPUs, which Apple refers to as “Apple Silicon,” justifiably since Apple puts a great deal of effort into designing and optimizing the CPUs for their devices.
ARM is already becoming popular in servers. Therefore, we only await Microsoft Windows’ move to ARM for a full transition away from the Intel era. (Microsoft Windows does have an ARM version, but it is not 64-bit and was never made to be able to run the x86 applications.)
What does an ARM CPU mean for consumers? Due to efficiencies of the ARM CPU, we will see computers that are faster, smaller, and cheaper, while also having better battery life. This is partially because Intel has hit technical snags which have kept their CPUs stagnant the last few years. While AMD has made great improvements with their Zen chips on the same x86 architecture, ARM chips are clearly the power per watt leaders of the future.
So certainly buy a new computer if you need one now. But a big jump in computing is on the way.
