Stories by Jason Snell

  • Twitter on the Mac: Do your job, or get out of the way

    Three years ago this month Twitter broke its covenant with the third-party developers who helped fuel its initial growth and create some of its most innovative features. The message was clear: Twitter was in charge of its own platform, and while other Twitter apps would be tolerated, it would only be in limited fashion and for a limited time.

  • The 5 biggest takeaways of Apple's Q3 2015 quarterly earnings

    Another quarter, another happy financial report from Apple. The company's third financial quarter is rarely the place where you expect to see records - but there was still a lot to be gleaned from the numbers, and from the following hour-long call with financial analysts.

  • First look at the OS X El Capitan public beta

    Apple announced OS X 10.11 El Capitan at its annual Worldwide Developer Conference, due to ship in the fall but with a public beta release to follow this summer. If you're just too excited about El Capitan to wait for fall, your chance to try out the next generation of OS X is coming this morning. Today, Apple will release the first El Capitan beta to users who have joined its public beta program.

  • Why compatibility isn't just a computer problem anymore

    Some people I know who dearly love their Sonos speaker systems were feeling nervous this week as Apple launched Apple Music. Would Sonos support Apple Music, and vice versa? Some tweets from Sonos and Apple made it clear that it would, and those Sonos-using friends gave a sigh of relief.

  • 6 reasons to get excited about OS X El Capitan

    I'm not feeling a lot of love for OS X El Capitan out there. That might not be surprising, given that it's firmly in the tradition of Mountain Lion and Snow Leopard–new-feature-light, speed-and-stability-focused OS X updates.

  • yARN: Maybe the Mac is a typewriter after all

    Some of my colleagues still type on keyboards designed by Apple in the 1980s. What I'm saying is, some people really care about keyboards. But whether or not you have opinions about keyboards, they're important tools to help us get written language into our digital devices.

  • Full review: iPhone 6 and 6 Plus - Bigger is in fact better (in the right hands)

    When Apple released the first iPhone, its 3.5-inch touchscreen seemed huge compared to the displays of other phones. Nonetheless, competitors responded with even larger screens, trying to find areas where they could provide clear alternatives to Apple hardware. Consumers responded positively, so the competition started making even bigger phones.

  • Comic-Con: iPads are mainstream, but there's still digital drama

    I've been reading comics on and off since I was a kid, and I went to college in San Diego, yet I never attended San Diego Comic-Con International until the release of the iPad. I was drawn by the impact that device would have on the comics industry, and sure enough, over the past five years there's been massive change.

  • Hands-on with OS X Yosemite: Safari slims down

    If there's a single app that defines the OS X experience, it's probably Safari. Not everyone uses it (many of my friends and family members prefer Chrome), but as the default browser it's the window on the Web for most Mac users. I've been using an early developer preview of Yosemite for the past few weeks, and it's clear that Safari is the stock Apple app that will change the most when users install OS X Yosemite upon its arrival this fall.