Week 50.24

Just 10 days to Christmas, and I finally got a sense of it happening through my first gift exchange and a couple of meetups. The first was with a few workplace alums, after one suggested to me that it would be nice if we all caught up (and so I ended up getting the job of organizing, which I bumbled through). It was nice after all, and I got to spend time with some people I hadn’t seen in years. The second was last night at a friend’s home that impressively decorated for the season, complete with a playlist of Christmas classics greeting us at the door. I think that was the moment it became real for me.

I brought my Leica D-Lux 7 out of hibernation this week for a few photos, mostly to put its aging battery to the test. It fits in my new Bellroy sling (the Ricoh GR III is still significantly smaller and lighter, albeit without a zoom lens), so I’m entertaining the thought of bringing it on our next holiday. Oh, that’s right. We’ve just booked a trip to Tokyo next year, wayyy behind the trend, but hopefully everyone’s had their fill of Japan by now and it’ll be less crowded when we get there. If I do need a spare battery, I’ll pick up the Panasonic equivalent model from Yodobashi Camera or something.

Another reason for the renewed interest was an update to the Leica FOTOS app (which connects to cameras) that came out this week. For the uninitiated, ‘Leica Looks’ are essentially a series of live filters that can be installed onto newer cameras. Owners of older models have been out of luck, but with this new update they can be retroactively applied in the app to any JPEG taken with a Leica camera. While trying it out, I discovered that photos I’ve been taking with the Leica LUX camera app also qualify as “taken with a Leica camera”, meaning you can apply these Looks to iPhone photos for free as well.

So far, I’ve been surprised by how well photos from its Micro Four-Thirds sensor have turned out, especially in daylight. Low light photos are quite smudgy/noisy if you elect to use an ISO value over 3200. I’m fortunate that Leica’s updated D-Lux 8 model this year was such a relative disappointment: a surface-level redesign of the camera’s body and UI without any improvements to the lens, sensor, or processor. It’s good news for me since an uncompelling update is money saved. Ignoring the PS5 I got in May, NOT upgrading stuff has been a bit of a theme this year. I don’t even covet Fuji’s X100VI camera one bit, maybe because it’s been so (artificially?) rare and overpriced.

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Our new broadband line was finally activated, and it’s resulted in a doubling of accessible bandwidth. In one speed test, I got over 1.1 Gbps (symmetrical) on my iPhone. At this point, our fleet of un-upgraded hardware is holding us back more than the network. In a couple of years, when every device in the house actually supports WiFi 7, I’ll upgrade the router and unlock the full 10Gbps that we currently have.

How little use am I making of this plentiful bandwidth? Well, listening to a lot of Apple Music Radio.

You probably missed this because it hardly made the headlines, but Apple Music doubled the number of their live, hosted radio stations from three to six. Apple Music Club, Chill, and Música Uno now join Apple Music 1, Hits, and Country. In a world where personalized, algorithmic stations/playlists are plentiful and pedestrian, I think these human-led stations are a wonderful zig to Spotify DJ’s zag.

Some of the best artists I’ve discovered this year were serendipitous encounters while listening to Zane Lowe, Rebecca Judd, Matt Wilkinson, or Dotty taking listeners through their latest picks on Apple Music 1. I think receiving and interacting with other people’s passion and opinions is a key part of the cultural experience of music, so these DJs play an important role that is growing ever smaller. It’s so good to see Apple Music expanding their Radio offering rather than shutting it down.

I used to have a Shortcut on my phone to launch Apple Music 1, but with these new stations it seemed time to build a quick launcher. Now, I can start live stations and my personalized stations from the Control Center, Today Screen, or even with the Action Button.

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iOS 18.2 came out of beta, with new Apple Intelligence features like Genmoji and Image Playground. They are okay for a bit of fun, but definitely won’t cause any artists or illustrators to become unemployed. It’s interesting to ask if they ever will, because Apple could certainly get the models there with time, even with fully on-device inference, so it’s just a question of intention. But I don’t think there are any brakes on this train and every company is onboard, they’ve just bought different tickets.