We had some tough choices to make. The new platform allowed for two very different ways to build apps, each with distinct advantages and disadvantages. The easiest was TVML, which is a custom markup language evolved from the earlier version present on previous generations of the device. TVML is a markup language for media interfaces, meaning that it’s incredibly easy to make the beautiful screens you’re accustomed to seeing in the Apple apps. On the other hand, they allowed running full native code, which was obviously essential for games, and provided the highest level of control.
We timeboxed two days of prototyping using both technologies, and quickly realized that a beautiful native-looking UI build with the native SDK would take much longer than using TVML. On the other hand, the limitations around the TVML media players led us to want to use our native code from the iOS app.
TVML uses the same behaviours and appearance characteristics as the stock Apple TV apps, which is great. The downside is that they are less customisable and slower than what a truly native app would be, as every TVML app is backed by a JavaScript application layer.
‘Native’ tvOS apps are way faster and more flexible in what features and functionality you can do, but you don’t get access to a standard TV UI library. Native developers have to reimplement all of the OS-level behaviour themselves, if they want to replicate this which is a lot of redundant work.
This may be a very developer-minded request but what I want Apple to do is add a TVUIKit library to the native app side. This would include things like the system autoscrolling labels and smart headers in collection views. They would effectively be stylised UIKit controls, which don’t really fit in the core cross-device UIKit component library, but are used across tvOS apps. Then, developers don’t have to painstakingly recreate behaviours that you get free with TVML whilst also having the speed and utility benefits of native apps.
Kuo says that the 4-inch iPhone “resembles an upgraded iPhone 5s” and features an A9 processor. The design of the device is somewhat unclear from Kuo’s report, but he hints that it will feature a metal casing as opposed to the plastic design featured on the iPhone 5c.
Regarding the next major iPhone refresh, Kuo says Apple will keep on track with its normal third-quarter unveil and subsequent release of the device. Kuo anticipates that both the 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch models of the iPhone 7 will feature Apple’s A10 chip. The two variants of the device will differ, Kuo believes, when it comes to RAM. The analyst expects the 4.7-inch iPhone 7 to feature 2GB of RAM, like the current-gen devices, while the 5.5-inch iPhone 7 Plus will feature 3GB of RAM.
An introduction of a brand-new iPhone model released early next year is really unprecedented. The Verizon iPhone 4 was launched in February but it doesn’t count as a new model of phone. I criticised Apple’s release schedule in the last two years for focusing too much on the latter half of the year, so it’s refreshing to see a major product launch scheduled for the first-half.
The language of Kuo’s description of the phone is also interesting. Rather than describing it as a smaller iPhone 6, the report speaks of an ‘upgraded’ iPhone 5s. If true, I think Apple wants to clearly separate this device from the premium 6s and 6s Plus in the lineup. Another idea is that given the pattern of the iPhone lineup, the 2016 flagship iPhone 7 is going to have a drastically-different external appearance. As such, if Apple did match 4-inch phone design-wise with the iPhone 6s, it would only really be relevant for a few months anyway.
Kuo mentions the existence of the iPhone 7 for fall 2016, no surprises there. He suggests that the RAM in the SoC will differ between the 4.7 inch and 5.5 inch variants. To date, there has been no such discrepancies with the 6 or the 6s. I think its too far away for the RAM specs to be set in stone, but it just reminded me of something semi-related. I think the iPhone 7 Plus will have a new screen resolution. Specifically, 2208 x 1242 (up from 1920x1080). This eliminates the inelegant downscaling trickery that the Plus GPU currently has to deal with, as it renders the UI at 2208 x 1242 and then scrunches it down to native screen resolution. The additional RAM might be for this purpose; to support the additional pixels.
Apple TV is a really great product, truly. I think the App Store has launched with a solid library of stuff, more than disproportionate to the number of units Apple will ship in the near term. The Siri Remote touchpad is a great idea and reminds me a lot of the iPod clickwheel: eschewing D-Pad Controls for a digital surface that can flick between a series of list items very quickly.
The touchpad is perhaps even more adaptable than the clickwheel innovation, because if you want to use it like the old remote, you can. Just tap in the corners to move in that direction one item. The tap/click discrepancy is a significant barrier but the interactions make a lot of sense once its ingrained into muscle memory. The tactile response of the remote is fantastic, allowing you to get physical confirmation of actions without having to look down.
tvOS is a great platform too. The appearance is fantastic and once again highlights the embarrassing shortcuts Apple took with the iOS ‘flat’ redesign in large part because of the legacy. The parallax iconography and movie art adds a nice cool factor to sweeten the experience. Whilst these effects are three-dimensional, it is not a flat reinterpretation of a skeuomorphic concept. I also like how tvOS offers some very direct cues to help direct people to learn the ‘new’ touchpad gestures. There are clear arrow indicators signifying where a swipe can do something special, as well as guiding text labels in many places to signpost actions that are non-obvious, like “Slide down for info” or “Press Play/Pause to delete”. There isn’t much ‘mystery meat’ here to trip up on.
There are some odd omissions including a few regressions from the third-gen box. These issues aren’t technical challenges, they just aren’t included in the 1.0 for unknown reasons. Things like no Bluetooth keyboard support, lack of a dictation option for entering text, no Remote app support, no Apple Podcasts app, gimped Siri.
These features are the lowest of low-hanging fruit. I’m sure they will get added in time, however you can only make a first impression once and the damage by not having a few of these things has already been done. Twitter was flooded with complaints about the pains of entering account logins without a Remote app or Bluetooth keyboard pairing.
The lack of a working iOS Remote app is inexcusable; Apple hasn’t even said that an update is coming soon. Whilst it isn’t a feature of the Apple TV itself per se, having a working iPhone Remote app available is a critical feature of the product. If it was a matter of prioritising resources, then the allocation of resources was bad. Shipping features of the fourth-gem Apple TV are less important than the need for a usable Remote app. Password entry is a massive painpoint that everyone who bought an Apple TV on day one has now had to endure. Fixing this a week later does not remove the sour taste of those experiences.
No Siri dictation support for text boxes in tvOS is a stinker too. It’s the most obvious use case in the world that QA and engineers working on the new software must have ran into in testing and yet it ships without it. The frustrating element is the problem is already solved: Apple TV has a mic, Apple TV has Siri, every other iOS device has dictation for text input. Join the dots, dramatically improve the usability of any Apple TV app with a search experience. It’s mind-boggling that it isn’t included in the tvOS keyboard.
The new smartphone game will be “Miitomo”. It will be free to play, with attractive add-ons that people can pay for, Mr. Kimishima says. %(emphasis-hover)Other smartphone games will be pay-to-download%, he says.
Looks like Miis go ahead and communicate with other Miis without your knowledge. This will help people who are hesitant to talk about themselves to communicate with others, and reveal a side of your friends you never knew, Mr. Kimishima says.
The anticipation was built. Nintendo has been saying its bringing its games to iOS for several months now. The timing was perfect. Apple’s mobile game press conference was set a day before the new Apple TV ships. Unfortunately, what Nintendo showed was not a flagship title at all, it’s a stretch to even call it a game. It’s more like a social messaging app with 3D avatars (the Miis).
It wasn’t what I was hoping for but I also question how well it is going to fare in the market. At least for Western audiences, many companies have tried and failed before Nintendo to galvanise people into running around as 3D avatars in their own virtual world. Perhaps Nintendo has a competitive edge in the Japanese markets to make this successful, I’m not familiar enough with the situation.
What is definitely true is that what I wanted to see did not transpire. However, I remain confident that Nintendo will ship a true honest-to-good game for iPhone eventually. There are five games planned between now until March 2017. %(emphasis-hover)Importantly, other games will not be freemium%. It makes sense that these would be the ‘AAA titles’ everyone is wanting, likely interconnected with Nintendo’s next-generation NX console that has a mobile component.
When I proposed to my management that Apple should be running its own such servers, and that our devices should use them when the local or ISP DNS servers failed, I was told that the executives would never approve the expense of provisioning and running them. This was around the same time as the company had more money in the bank than the US Government.
Giving someone DNS privileges means giving them a complete record of every website you ever visit, as the job of a DNS server is to translate domain names to web addresses. Apple’s public stance on privacy aligns well with the idea that Apple should run its own DNS, thus automatically pointing your devices’ DNS settings at a trustworthy first-party source. This is exactly what Alf Watt, a former Apple employee, apparently proposed internally to management but it was shot down and canned. Sounds like a good idea to me.
I’m interested to know what AppleCare representatives are trained to say in these kind of scenarios where the best option is to use an alternative DNS server. Do they recommend people use Google’s (8.8.8.8)? That would be pretty bad given the privacy implications at stake.
I tweeted last night that Apple’s resource investment into redesigning the battery stats screen in iOS 9 was worth it solely for the purpose of getting Facebook to improve the efficiency of its iOS app. I think some people took it as a joke, but I meant it seriously.
Changes to how the Facebook app works can effectively be treated as system-level changes because the reach of the app is almost the same as the OS itself. Unlike the Google Play Store, the App Store doesn’t disclose numbers on app installs but Facebook is always high in the top free chart. Multiple analytics companies say Facebook is the #1 downloaded iPhone app of all time.
Having that position of power is interesting scenario for the phone makers. Apple must have been aware of the problems with the Facebook app and it must have annoyed the people in charge of iPhone power-management that a big proportion of their problems are actually accountable to a third-party company they don’t control.
Foundation and UIKit already include hundreds of conditionals to keep the pool of very-popular apps working well so I don’t think its a case of Apple not paying attention, although — granted — these special-case code bits are mostly focused on stopping crashes with popular apps on new version of iOS, not battery efficiency per se. I don’t know what relationship Apple and Facebook have in regard to their iOS apps but it seems like Apple would want as good a relationship as possible for the largest app vendor on iPhone and iPad.
I guess Google has similar connections with Facebook for its Android app; I assume Facebook is the most popular third-party app on Android too. For Microsoft, the significance of Facebook is a big problem because until very recently Facebook showed no interest in making an app for Windows Phone at all. Due to the insane popularity of the social network, Windows Phone suffers a lot without a first-party client.
Microsoft’s solution here is interesting — they have come to an arrangement with Facebook to make an app on their behalf. The official Facebook app for Windows Phone is published by Microsoft. Facebook is so important to a platform that Microsoft uses its engineering resources to write a fully-featured Facebook app for Windows Phone. Its such a socially ingrained thing that the lack of Facebook is a platform deficiency, its existence is more important than most OS features are.
Now, Apple isn’t in the unfortunate position where Facebook can straight up refuse to make an app. There is some give and take, there’s no way Facebook could forgo the users of 500 million iOS devices. This ensure Apple retains power to an extent even if Facebook has a stranglehold that few other developers can exploit. Top games are replaceable. If Apple banned Clash of Clans one day, a million clones would fill the gap. The same isn’t true for Facebook because that’s where your friends are. If you couldn’t access Facebook on iPhone, people would stop using iPhones.
How far could Facebook go before Apple felt the tradeoff was worth it? My guess is that if Facebook started doing something nefarious, Apple would cut it off indirectly with a future software update rather than flat ban the Facebook app. Perhaps, there would be terse discussions in quiet rooms. This mirrors what happened with the Twitter app. Twitter was found to be tracking what apps users had installed by looking up a dictionary of URL schemes. Apple didn’t pull Twitter (despite having sufficient grounds to do so) but it indirectly resolved the problem by changing URL scheme lookup permissions in iOS 9 to prevent any app in the store from doing it going forward. I don’t really have a definitive point, I am simply intrigued by the balance of power. And its topical because of the Facebook battery drain palaver.
Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJDLive conference, Mr. Ramaswamy called for a “sustainable ad standard” that would ensure digital ads don’t use a lot of bandwidth and aren’t “rudely interruptive.”
%(emphasis-hover)“This is essential to our survival,”% he added, calling recent announcements by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry group, a good start. “We’re talking about getting this in a time frame of months rather than years. We need to get going on this.”
Google execs infamously make some far out claims about the technology industry at large but the same vacuous statements about Google TV don’t transfer across to the online ad industry. Google is the leader, it has the power to enact the changes it pronounces. It doesn’t need to convince a committee of people to form an industry standard, it is the standard.
If the company thinks it has to do something major in online ads to sustain itself, %(emphasis-hover)as Ramaswamy’s comments indicate%, it can just do it and everyone else will have to follow, as long as Google’s new solution is unequivocally superior.
How is it that in 2015 we need to decide how to communicate and then search for the person? Or try to remember what platform they are on before opening an app.
This is clearly aligned to the interest of the app makers, but not users. Clearly we need some sort of aggregation layer, where we decide who we want to speak to, then decide the how after. The Microsoft Windows phone had a People Hub to do just this, communication arranged around people with the pipes where they belong, as a background.
I don’t agree with the negative sentiment Goodwin is portraying here. Distinct apps offer uniqueness and differentiation and additional specialised features that a conglomerate generic UI can’t provide by definition. Shuffling between apps on a Home Screen could be seen as annoying but combining them doesn’t really give you any less frustration, it just moves the complexity to somewhere else in the chain.
If you ditch the app model and instead centralise everything into one view, that view (by nature) has to become cluttered and complex. Then you have to split stuff up, either with tabs or some navigation hierarchy at which point you are basically making independent apps anyway.
A lot of it comes down to how you think about interacting with a computer. If you want to send an email with an attachment, there are typically two ways of going about this. You could find the file to send and then share it via email, or you could start an email and add an attachment. One of these correlates closely to an app model, the second one to be precise. Open Mail, make a message.
With the app metaphor, there’s a clear sense of ownership. These things belong here. To start a thing, go here. Having an integrated system just jumbles that up, confuses the workflow for anyone who doesn’t follow this mental process. And here’s the crutch: everything I’ve seen has shown me that this is what more people prefer.
It sucks that messaging apps now have to take up multiple rows on the Home Screen to connect with your friends. However, that creates a simpler experience once you enter those apps. Swapping between apps is not a chore. People love it. It’s like going to a shopping centre: each clothes shop is sandboxed into its own location but each has their own personality and their own presentations.
App developers love the freedom of apps too. It’s a blank canvas that can fill the whole display. Developers get to do whatever they want in their own sandbox. They can customise and specialise their content display at will. Moreover, the boundaries are clearly defined for the user, so they can follow who controls what is being shown on the screen at any particular moment. Some geeks may feel constrained by the encapsulation of software but the mainstream public laps it up. It makes it easier to manage.
Where appropriate, you can have apps that are aggregators. These already exist and fit cleanly alongside single-purpose software. Contacts is a good example. You don’t need to check many different apps to see all of your friends, you can just add multiple accounts to Contacts. It’s not ugly or a weird edge-case, it’s just another icon to tap on.
Messaging apps could be like this too if it wasn’t for business execs stopping integration by not using standard protocols or releasing APIs. This isn’t really a con of the app design though but a fact of nature for everything. Business people would stunt this kind of integration no matter how the UI is formulated.
Goodwin derisively cites Tim Cook (‘The future of TV is apps’) highlighting the fragmented mess of video apps on his iPad. The whole point of the new Apple TV is universal search, which solves the fragmentation issue of finding a particular TV show without fiddling checking every possible service. This is still an app model, though. When the search finds the item, it takes you to the app. The Apple TV home screen is still a grid of apps. The same is true for the enhanced Spotlight on iOS 9. Not ditching the app model by any means, it patches in additional convenience in places where it breaks down.
Google’s Nexus line has long been a type of fan service — the phones themselves might even be just ads for Android — but the company seems to be aiming higher with its latest devices. Ads for the 5X have recently been spotted during major commercial blocks; people watching NFL action today probably got a look at the ad for the new Nexus 5X, which is manufactured by LG.
These ads are so bland and so boring. It’s thirty seconds of specs superimposed over rotating renders of the two phones. There’s no narration either — just a common pop soundtrack backing the video. When I read The Verge’s article, I thought there must have been a mistake with the embed. I haven’t seen something this terrible for a long time. They’ve turned a list of hardware details into a moving PowerPoint presentation. As you watch the bland scenes roll, particularly when the reversible USB-C port is highlighted as a headline feature, you can almost feel your brain getting bored and your eyes drifting away.
Apple today also introduced a new lineup of wireless accessories including the all-new Magic Keyboard™, Magic Mouse® 2 and Magic Trackpad® 2. The Magic devices have been redesigned to feel more comfortable than ever, and feature rechargeable batteries that completely eliminate the need for disposable batteries. The new Magic Trackpad 2 also brings Apple’s revolutionary Force Touch interface to the desktop, adding a new dimension to the iMac experience.
Apple seems to have grown out of the iDevice nomenclature, with new products and services instead using a new ‘Apple X’ branding, but it hasn’t stopped calling its Mac accessories Magic. In fact, they added a Magic device to their lineup: the Magic Keyboard, which used to be called the Apple Wireless Keyboard.
Yet, there’s no real magic in the new Magic Keyboard. It’s a redesign of the old keyboard with bigger keys and inbuilt batteries for charging. At least with the other two accessories, you can somewhat justify the name by focusing on the unusual-but-cool multitouch and pressure-sensitivity features. Magic feels dated and out of place but I suppose we should all just get used to Apple’s eccentric, inconsistent, approach to product names.
In terms of the hardware itself, bringing Force Touch to iMac is cool but its appeal is limited by flakey software system support. Force Touch integration on the Mac, even on El Capitan, is an afterthought. The Trackpad has far more value as a multitouch gesture input device than a Force Touch input, which means you aren’t really benefitting much over the previous model which coped with multitouch just fine. I’m more positive about the keyboard redesign. The keys are bigger, go edge-to-edge and use an improved scissor mechanism for precise typing. Apple managed to enhance the product’s appearance and usability without making it weigh more, so big thumbs up there.
I also like how everything has internal rechargeable batteries now, charged via a Lightning port. Managing your own set of rechargeables is such a hassle. A neat touch is that all three accessories will do wireless auto-pairing with a Mac the first time you plug them in using the cable, saving a setup step for many people.
An annoyance is that the Mouse cannot be used whilst it is being charged as the Lightning cable sticks out the bottom of the device, not the side. Apple will argue these accessories charge so fast it doesn’t matter but I think it’s still a pain.
Moreover, all three of these accessories are very pricey. $99 for a consumer keyboard is steep. I wouldn’t recommend buying them with your own money, but people who buy new iMacs get the nice bonus of getting the magic keyboard and mouse bundled into the box. The same cannot be said for the Magic Trackpad. It has to be bought on its own … and it costs a whopping $130.
For the first time, BBC Three will be offering live coverage of the League of Legends World Championships live from Wembley. Beginning on Thursday 15 October, action from all four days of the quarter finals will be available online.
Coverage will be hosted by Radio 1 DJ and avid gamer Dev Griffin. Julia Hardy will be interviewing players and fans in the arena with gaming casters Leigh ‘Deman’ Smith and James ‘Stress’ O’Leary offering their expert commentary.
Great to see esports get mainstream media support, especially when its regarding my personal favourite game. Smith used to cast the official Riot streams and is generally loved by the community, so it seems like BBC knows what it is doing.
Just a short while after the Pixar development team got their hands on the iPad Pro and praised the device’s palm rejection, Disney’s design team spent the day testing Apple’s latest tablet. Disney’s team of designers used the iPad Pro to sketch a variety of different characters from Disney classics, including Olaf from Frozen and Mickey Mouse.
The testing seemingly went well for Disney. “Let’s order a bunch,” product manager Paul Hildebrandt said at the end of a Periscope stream showcasing the device. In a separate Periscope stream, Disney animators Jeff Ranjo and Jeremy Spears used the iPad Pro to draw caricatures of each other.
The Periscope focused on the drawing but I think what sets the iPad Pro apart is that its not just a drawing tablet, with stylus support rivalling dedicated graphics hardware. The beauty of iPad Pro is that it can still do everything else an iPad can do — it’s a computer. I think the iPad Pro would be a pretty good product (cue the it’s just a big iPad jokes) even if it didn’t have any of the drawing or stylus features. For companies like Disney, they can justify buying them solely as creative tools. For others, it’s a multipurpose marvel.
The lack of a holster or magnetic attachment for the Pencil is an annoying omission, though. The new Microsoft Surface got this bit right: the pen snaps onto the side of the tablet. Apple has left a gaping hole in the accessories market for an iPad Pro case with integrated stylus holder.
Understanding why people stop wearing Apple Watches should be critical for Apple. I can say that several things interrupted the bond that was developing between me and my Watch: a lack of Sport Band comfort (remedied by replacing it with a Milanese Loop), buggy/laggy watchOS software, and too few things to actually do with the Watch. Although those were all contributors, %(emphasis-hover)daily recharges and a lack of guaranteed waterproofing% have been bigger issues for me. I would like to wear the Watch when I shower and sleep, but as it is, I don’t feel comfortable doing either of those things.
I do not agree with Horwitz that the Sport band is uncomfortable, I use this band every day. I do want the Watch to be more waterproof. A big part of the Watch is fitness. Most fitness activities include water, whether that be showering or full-on swimming, so having the Watch be guaranteed to sustain these conditions would be fantastic. However, it’s difficult to do this across the board as the tolerances of waterproof products require different priorities in the design process.
Here’s what I think Apple should do. In future Apple Watch revisions, Apple should make even clearer distinctions between the Sport, Watch and Edition collections. As it stands today, they are basically the same product with different casing and default band choices. What I think they should do is give each collection distinguished identities. %(emphasis-hover)Give the Apple Watch Sport truly sporty features (like real waterproofing or using materials that are super-durable)% that would otherwise upset the beauty of the standard ‘Apple Watch’ model. Make the Apple Watch Sport the primary choice for fitness, even if that means sacrificing some of the fashion appeal of this collection. The other models can look the best.
I don’t think the Sport collection should be thought of as the cheap option. Obviously, it is for 2015 but adding such identity-defining features may make it more expensive. That’s fine as long as Apple keeps the $349 price point somehow, may be by making a cheaper Watch collection or adding a new collection entirely to fill that pricing gap.
Amazon.com Inc. is flexing its e-commerce muscles to gain an edge on competitors in the video-streaming market by ending the sale of devices from Google Inc. and Apple Inc. that aren’t easily compatible with Amazon’s video service.
The Seattle-based Web retailer sent an e-mail to its marketplace sellers that it will stop selling Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast. No new listings for the products will be allowed and posting of existing inventory will be removed Oct. 29, Amazon said. Amazon’s streaming service, called Prime Video, doesn’t run easily on its rival’s hardware.
Amazon has monopolistic power over this because set-top boxes aren’t a primary component of Amazon’s sales; it can turn away buyers of Apple TV and Chromecast without materially affecting its overall business sales numbers.
It’s perfectly logical for Amazon to only feature TV products that work with its services. This policy is clear-cut for the current-gen Apple TV — no Prime support, no sales. However, this reasoning does not really apply to the Chromecast. The Chromecast SDK is offered to anyone to implement and arguably is ‘easily compatible’ with Amazon Prime Video if Amazon developed the integration. This nuance doesn’t seem to have been addressed in the announcement email.
It’s also not clear whether this policy applies to the new Apple TV, where Amazon could make an app and get its content on the box. On this front, I suppose we’ll find out in October when the product launches.
Today I faced a long list of alarms on my iPhone, and decided that I wanted to clean them out. The typical iOS “Edit” interface puts a red “delete” button next to each item, and upon tapping it you must then confirm it by tapping the explicit word “delete” at the other end of the item. Suffice to say: for a list of any significant size, this is very tedious.
On a whim, I decided to give Siri a shot at simplifying the process. I long-pressed the home button, and uttered: “delete all my alarms.”
It works and is faster than repeatedly tapping Delete buttons on table view cells. It’s cool Siri does the job but its a bit of a hack. Most users don’t have the cognitive mental model to switch contexts from an app UI to a voice interface for the same task. This batch delete should be available in the visual app interface, probably represented by a Clear All button that only shows in Edit mode.
At a deeper level, the problem is rooted within the Clock app alarms. The app isn’t really built to support tens of alarms. And yet, the ultra-common real world use of the Clock app is to have a gazillion different alarms, most just minutes apart from each other.
There is a fear of missing an alarm — rather than use a Repeat, most people feel more comfortable in adding additional alarms as a safety blanket. The alarms have no semantic meaning in their own right, they don’t really deserve primary treatment and their own item in the list, they are just fallbacks for the first one in the chain. I think everyone knows someone who does this, or does it themselves. This is the underlying issue, how to design an Alarms app that doesn’t induce the repetitiveness. My mind ticks over on this problem every time I spot the symptoms in the wild. I haven’t figured it out and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Sometimes hiding behind a bad photo is a beautiful moment. These moments are elusive. They happen too fast to catch on video. You can’t catch them intentionally. The only possible way to catch them is… accidentally.
You can mock Live Photos for many reasons (it particularly sucks the video part is only 12 fps) but they do have value, sometimes. Most of the time, the accompanying motion will be nonsense, redundant or just uninteresting preshow. But sometimes, it will capture moments that don’t exist in the static image and you’ll love it. It is truly ‘hit and miss’. The downside is you have to leave Live Photos enabled constantly, sacrificing storage space on every snap that’s a miss, to make sure you save those hits when they happen.