Bryan Chaffin

SwitchEasy has a new case for iPhone aimed particularly at Jet Black iPhone 7 owners who want to show off that Jet Black finish and have a case, too. The case is called Glass, and the back is made out of hardened glass (7H on the Mohs’ scale of hardness). The company says it has 90% optical transparency, and it was designed with a 1mm gap between the phone and the back of the Glass. That’s to minimize contact with the case to preserve that Jet Black finish. It has a retail price of $39.99.

Peter Cohen has penned a fabulous “History of Hard Drives” for BackBlaze. He walks us through the earliest days of mainframe-related storage to today’s SSDs, with lots of historic photos to illustrate the timeline. I love lore of all sorts—particularly computer-related lore—and I gobbled up this post. That said,  I don’t often link to company blog posts as a Cool Stuff Found, but Peter talks about his employer very little—the focus is the history. If you’re a nerd, it’s a great read.

Apple rolled out a new commercial for MacBook Pro with Touch Bar called Bulbs. The 1 minute, 37 second spot features flashes of some big (and small) inventions using exploding lightbulbs as a metaphor. In fact, MacBook Pro doesn’t appear until the final 10 seconds, accompanied by the tag line, “Introducing a tool for all the ideas to come.” We’re then shown a finger sliding back and forth on the Touch Bar to scrub through a video of another exploding lightbulb. The imagery is compelling, and seems likely to catch people’s attention, with the Apple message pounding home at the end. It’s one of my favorite spots in recent months.

Chuck Joiner interviewed me on MacVoices a few days ago, and the video went up today. According to him, we talked about Mac refreshes, Tim Cook as Apple CEO, and “touching things.” Now, to be honest, I don’t remember that last bit, but I’m sure it’s somehow Mac related. Right? In any event, it was a fun discussion, and I hope you enjoy it.

There’s an ambition product on Kickstarter called Mahri. It’s a case for iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus (with versions for iPhone 6/6s and 6 Plus/6s Plus). It features two Lightning ports for charging and using headphones. It also has a slim battery with an extra 100% capacity, and it will charge wirelessly. Which, really, seems like overkill with the two Lightning ports, but hey, let’s do it all! The two Lightning ports are handled through circuitry embedded in the case. Wireless charging is done through a Qi charger (not included). There’s a goofy (fun) video on the product page, as well as details about the product. The company is looking to raise $36,000 to manufacture this device—they’ve raised $3,000 in a couple of days with 35 days left to go. $100 funding options that net a case are still available as of this writing.

Remember that jetpack video I showed you a couple of months ago? The people who made that jetpack—JetPack Aviation—are running a contest where you could win a jetpack test flight. ? We aren’t involved in this contest, but come on, jetpack! The winner gets a test flight in Los Angeles with the JetPack Aviation JB-10, dinner with the founders, and $1,000 in travel vouchers. If you win, you gotta tell us all about it. Below is a video of some demo flights the company did in New York City.

Check this out: Apple has apparently added some intelligent storage management to the iOS update process. Mac Geek Gab listener Paul sent in this screenshot of his 16GB iPhone upgrading from iOS 10.1 to iOS 10.1.1. It’s a message telling him that he doesn’t have enough room to run the update. Once upon a time, he’d have been on his own to do something about that. But, iOS is offering to delete Excel from his iPhone, run the iOS update, and then reinstall Excel for him. All automatically. That is seriously cool. [Update: David Nelson pointed me to an article at MacRumors showing this feature was introduced in iOS 9. I missed it back then, and I’m guessing others did, too. One way or another, I like it.]